Brian Wilson Childhood Home — Hawthorne, California

Brian Wilson grew up at 3701 West 119th Street in Hawthorne, a working-class suburb south of Los Angeles, in a household dominated by his father Murry — a frustrated songwriter who pushed his three sons relentlessly and was physically abusive. The garage of the Hawthorne house was where Brian, Dennis, and Carl Wilson began making music with cousin Mike Love and neighbour Al Jardine in 1961. Their mother drove them to gigs; their father eventually became their manager before being fired. The tensions of that house — the violence, the musical ambition, the warped encouragement — run through everything Brian Wilson ever made.

The Beach Boys' early records celebrated the California teenage dream that Hawthorne represented: cars, girls, surf, sun. By Pet Sounds (1966), Wilson was at home in the Bel Air house he had purchased with his royalties, working obsessively in the studio while the rest of the band toured, building something more complex and more personal than any of it. Pet Sounds responded to Rubber Soul and prompted Sergeant Pepper; Smile, the abandoned follow-up, haunted Wilson for forty years before he finally completed it in 2004.

The Hawthorne childhood home was demolished in the 1980s when the 105 freeway was built through the neighbourhood. A historical marker has been placed at the site acknowledging the Beach Boys' origins. The intersection of West 119th Street and Kornblum Avenue is the closest surviving geography to the house.