Even though Brian Wilson grew up only five miles from the Pacific Ocean, he rarely went to the beach. He’d felt scared by the size of the ocean on his first visit. Being light-skinned, he also feared sunburns. He tried surfing, but got hit on the head by his board and decided once was enough.

And yet, in songs like “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” “California Girls” and “Good Vibrations,” Wilson did as much as anyone to depict Los Angeles and California as a land of bikinis and warm, honey-colored sunsets. The songs he wrote about the West Coast, he said in “I Am Brian Wilson: A Memoir,” were “more about the idea of going in the ocean than they were about actually going in the ocean.” Wilson didn’t like waves, but realized how they could serve as a metaphor for life.

Wilson, whose death at 82 was announced by his family on Wednesday, was as closely associated with Los Angeles as anyone in music history. In 1988, The Los Angeles Times polled a passel of industry veterans and asked them to name the greatest L.A. band of all time; the Beach Boys came in second. (The Doors won, a dubious choice.) When Randy Newman wanted to mock the city in “I Love L.A.,” his covertly acerbic 1983 hit, he shouted, with almost-convincing enthusiasm, “Turn up the Beach Boys!”

Wilson’s fantasia of California — a Zion where everyone wore huarache sandals and drove deuce coupes — thrilled millions of people worldwide and aligned with a period in the state’s growth. Between 1962 and 1970, the Beach Boys’ heyday, the population of California increased by three million people. Wilson couldn’t claim credit for the boom, but no tourism board or corporate recruiter could design a better pitch. The songs were specific and local, but also universal. How else to explain “Surfin’ Safari” topping the singles chart in Sweden?

When they recorded their first 45, “Surfin’,” the local record label Candix suggested the band change its name from the Pendletones to the Beach Boys, to emphasize the surf theme. Dennis, the outgoing, often reckless Wilson brother, surfed regularly in South Bay, and told Brian it was a popular and emerging trend. The first single was successful, so Brian stuck with the theme. The beach was their brand. Four early Beach Boys singles and every one of their first three albums had the word surf in their titles.