Brian Wilson bio

Brian Douglas Wilson (born June 20, 1942 in Hawthorne, California), is an American pop musician, best known as the lead songwriter, bassist, and lead singer of the American rock band The Beach Boys. Wilson was also the band's main producer, composer, and arranger. He is widely considered one of the most significant and innovative musicians and composers of 20th century popular music. Wilson showed an early talent for music and quickly developed into a skilled singer, songwriter, arranger, and musician. He was driven into music at a young age by his abusive father, Murry Wilson. He is 96% deaf in his right ear, and yet while Wilson now maintains it originated at birth (he has been told that when he was a child, he leaned to the left to hear), it was previously widely reported that it was Wilson's own father who was responsible, causing the deafness in an early beating of the younger Wilson. Early influences included The Four Freshmen and Chuck Berry, among others. Wilson admired Phil Spector, considering him both a mentor and rival. Wilson was a perfectionist in the studio, and often upset the other members of the Beach Boys with this incessant drive for perfection. Though one of the first users of an eight-channel multitrack tape recorder, he shunned stereophonic sound, preferring (as Spector did) to work in monaural - not because of his partial deafness, but because he believed stereo gave an incomplete "sound picture" if the listener wasn't directly between the speakers.

Source: Wikipedia