Brian Wilson “felt really bad” about “missed opportunity” of not working on The Beach Boys’ ‘Kokomo’

Brian Wilson‘s former lawyer has said that the late musician “felt really bad” about not working on The Beach Boys‘ ‘Kokomo’ after his doctor prevented him from participating.

• READ MORE: Brian Wilson, 1942-2025: culture-defining innovator who represented pop music’s awakening

Wilson died in June from respiratory arrest at the age of 82. A year prior to his death, his family revealed that he was suffering from dementia, and he was placed in a conservatorship in May that year.

It wasn’t the first time he had been placed under a conservatorship, with his family filing a suit in 1991 to separate him from controversial psychologist Eugene Landy, who they said exerted “undue influence” over his life, music and finances.

Now, Wilson’s former lawyer John Mason has spoken about how Landy convinced the musician not to participate in ‘Kokomo’, the Beach Boys track from the 1988 film Cocktail.

“Mike [Love] and Carl [Wilson] came into my office and said to Brian, ‘Hey, we have the opportunity to write a song for this movie, Cocktail‘,” he told Fox News Digital.

“’It’s going to be starring Tom Cruise. It’s really great. We’d love you to join us. And Brian was really excited. He said, ‘Oh, I’d love to do that.’ But later in the evening, Brian called and said, ‘I shouldn’t do that. Dr. Landy said I shouldn’t do that.

“Well, that turned out to be ‘Kokomo,’ the biggest hit the Beach Boys had had probably forever. And Brian felt really badly about not working on ‘Kokomo.’”

“When he heard it, and when I heard it, we went, ‘Oh my gosh, was that a missed opportunity?’” Mason said.

Mason went on to say that Landy refused to let Wilson participate unless he, too, was listed as a writer on the song. The band refused and went on to write ‘Kokomo’ without Wilson’s input, which Mason says Wilson lived to regret. “Brian is truly a giant teddy bear and genius who regrets bad decisions and lives for better ones,” he said.

Landy first began working with Wilson between 1975 and 1976 when the musician entered his intensive 24-hour therapy program in an attempt to improve his declining health from drug use, and again between 1982 and 1992.

The doctor’s methods were controversial, with him demanding complete control over Wilson’s affairs in order to rehabilitate him. A conservatorship case was eventually triggered by the redrafting of Wilson’s will in 1989, in which Landy was named as chief beneficiary, standing to inherit up to 70 per cent of his estate.

Mason admitting there were some “good” elements of his treatment in that “he motivated Brian to become a participant in his own life”, but added: “The bad part was that, as time went by and years went by, Dr. Landy expected more and more to replace Brian in the Beach Boys… Brian wasn’t allowed to do anything without a Landy handler being with him.”

“Brian was in a weak mental state,” he continued. “Brian often said to me, as sad as it sounds … ‘I fried my brain. I took too many drugs.’ Brian couldn’t get up in the morning without somebody getting him up. He couldn’t eat healthily without somebody giving him something healthy to eat.”

By 1992, the Superior Court of Santa Monica ruled that Landy must remove himself from Wilson’s life, and appointed an independent conservator with “specific and limited powers over the artist’s affairs”.

The group later recorded a Spanish-language version of ‘Kokomo’ with participation from Brian.

The surviving members of The Beach Boys paid their respects to Wilson in a joint message, saying that he “was the soul of our sound”. Other tributes have come from the likes of Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, Bob Dylan, Ringo Starr, Ronnie Wood, Nancy Sinatra, Sting, Biffy Clyro and many more from the music world and beyond.

In the wake of Wilson’s death, fans started sharing footage of his final-ever live performance from 2022.

Elsewhere, Love revealed that he and Wilson sang together in the weeks before his death, while Al Jardine has accused Love, his former bandmate, of “megalomania problems” for his speech at Wilson’s funeral.

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