Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall & Redemption of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson Read online

  CATCH A WAVE THE RISE, FALL & REDEMPTION OF THE BEACH BOYS’ BRIAN WILSON

  PETER AMES CARLIN

  To Anna Carlin,

  Teddy Carlin,

  and Max Carlin

  © 2006 by Peter Ames Carlin

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any other information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher.

  Song credits are listed at the end of this book before Index.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Carlin, Peter Ames.

  Catch a wave: the rise, fall, and redemption of the Beach Boys’ Brian

  Wilson / Peter Ames Carlin.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN: 978-1-59486-320-2

  1. Wilson, Brian, date 2. Rock musicians—United States Biography. 3. Beach Boys. I. Title.

  ML420.W5525C37 2006

  782.42166092—dc22 2006004928

  Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers

  CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  CREDITS

  INDEX

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I owe my first thanks to my brother, Greg, who came home with a copy of Endless Summer in the summer of 1974 and made me listen to it. My wife, Sarah Carlin Ames, makes everything else possible.

  Many other friends and colleagues have provided invaluable support, advice, and scoldings through the years. I am particularly indebted to Tad and Trudy Ames, Greg Narver, Mike Thompson, Geoff Kloske, Tom Fields-Meyer, and Dan Conaway. Thanks also to Lanny Jones, Cutler Durkee, Jamie Katz, Peter Castro, Bill Plummer, and Carey Winfrey from my days at People. My bosses at the Oregonian—Fred Stickel, Sandy Rowe, and Peter Bhatia—gave me the time to do the bulk of this work. I also owe various debts to Barry Johnson, Karen G. Brooks, and JoLene Krawczak.

  My editor, Pete Fornatale Jr., did a terrific job honing the manuscript and making it smarter and better. My agent, Simon Lipskar, is as smart, dedicated, and stubborn an advocate as any writer could hope to meet. I owe him—and his colleagues Daniel Lazar and Nikki Furrer—loads of gratitude. I also appreciate the editorial guidance of Fred Allen at American Heritage and Fletcher Roberts at the New York Times. Thanks also to Dave Walker, Geoff Edgers, Tad Ames, Barry Johnson, Jamie Katz, and Peter Reum for reading and responding to early drafts of these chapters.

  I owe a massive debt to David Leaf, first for writing The Beach Boys and the California Myth and helping me understand the depth and wonder of Brian’s work when I was still in high school. More recently he has been an invaluable friend, advisor, and cautionary voice. Jean Sievers kicked open doors and smoothed the road throughout this process. Van Dyke and Sally Parks have been more than generous with their time, friendship, and hospitality. Thanks also to Van Dyke for allowing me to quote the lyrics from “High Coin” (Van Dyke Parks/admin. by Bug Music). Peter Reum shared his experiences with and insights into Brian Wilson for hours on end and transformed my understanding along the way. Alan Boyd was tremendously helpful and patient, no matter how often I called him at odd hours. The Reverend Bob Hanes proved his coaching mettle yet again, making all the right connections at all the right times. Thanks to Neal Skok for his thoughts and generosity. A big thanks to Probyn Gregory for all of his insights—musical, cultural, and otherwise. Thanks also to the Beach Boys’ manager, Elliott Lott. And big, big thanks also to Ross W. Hamilton for all of his help with the photos.

  I also need to thank everyone who entertained my questions and shared the contents of their memories. They include Rich Sloan, Robin Hood, Mary Lou Van Antwerp, Ted Sprague, Irene Fernandez, Bruce Griffin, Keith Lent, Carol Mountain, Paula Springer, Stanley Love, Stephen Love, Maureen Love, Milton Love, Fred Vail, Lorren Daro (formerly Loren Schwartz), Tony Asher, Danny Hutton, Michael Vosse, Mark Linett, Stephen W. Desper, Hal Blaine, Carol Kaye, Jules Siegel, Frank Holmes, Stephen Kalinich, Stanley Shapiro, Gregg Jakobson, Annie Wilson, Barbara Wilson, Carnie Wilson, Trish Campo, Rick Henn, Pete Fornatale Sr., David Sandler, Earle Mankey, Billy Hinsche, Andy Paley, Joe Thomas, Jeffrey Foskett, Darian Sahanaja, and Probyn Gregory. I am particularly grateful to Melinda Wilson for all of her help, and to the surviving Beach Boys—Mike Love, Alan Jardine, and David Marks—for their time and recollections. Bruce Johnston wouldn’t quite sit for a formal interview, but he did chat for a while and sent along a few revealing e-mails. I feel very fortunate that happenstance allowed me to meet and speak, albeit briefly, to both Carl Wilson and Dennis Wilson.

  Finally, I want to thank Brian Wilson for his time and patience over the last few years—but mostly for his music. Ultimately, that’s all that matters.

  PROLOGUE

  The people in flight from the terror behind—strange things happen to them, some bitterly cruel and some so beautiful that the faith is refired forever.

  John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

  Brian Wilson is sitting in a little room somewhere deep in the recesses of the Austin Convention Center, staring intently at the green linoleum floor. His face is blank; his mouth, a thin, unmoving line. His biographer-turned-friend-turned-advisor-and-documentarian, David Leaf, sits nearby, next to Van Dyke Parks, the musician/arranger/songwriter whose career has been inextricably bound to Brian’s for nearly four decades, though they’ve rarely seen each other most of that time. David and Van Dyke are chatting mildly—about restaurants, friends in common, their plans for the weekend. But the man who brought them together is silent, examining the universe beneath the toes of his black suede Merrell shoes.

  Soon the three of them, along with a couple of music journalists, will sit on a stage in front of a jammed conference room to discuss Smile, the album Brian and Van Dyke wrote and recorded most of in 1966 and 1967. At the time—just when the Beach Boys’ early stream of surf/car/girl-focused songs had given way to Brian’s ambitious song cycle Pet Sounds and the smash pop-art single “Good Vibrations”—Smile was envisioned as a panoramic commentary on America’s tangled past, ambivalent cultural inheritance, and spiritual future. Simultaneously nostalgic, sad, dreamy, and psychedelic, the songs struck those who heard them as a whole new kind of American pop music. Some observers called it the harbinger of a new era in pop culture.

  Then something happened. Exactly what that something was—static from the other Beach Boys, interference from Capitol Records, the corrosive effect of drugs, Brian’s own neurological problems, or some combination of the above—has never been resolved. But the aftermath was all too clear. Brian gave up on his musical ambitions and spent most of the next four decades adrift. The Beach Boys faded from the scene, only to return as a kind of perpetual motion nostalgia machine. And Smile became a folk legend: a metaphor for everything that had gone wrong with Brian, the Beach Boys, and the nation whose dreams and ideals they had once transformed into shimmering waves of harmony. End of story
.

  Except the story wouldn’t end. Even as the years turned the Beach Boys small and dispirited, the passage of time seemed only to enhance Smile. Hundreds of thousands of words came to be written about its creation and demise, including a science fiction novel whose hero goes back in time and helps Brian finish his masterpiece. Televised biopics and theatrical documentaries told the group’s story in various shades of personal, creative, and cultural melodrama. But all came to focus on Brian’s dramatic rise and crushing fall, and this story always pivoted off the lost glories of Smile, what it was, what it could have been, why it never came to be. Eventually Smile, in all of its glorious absence, became something else altogether. And that is why we’re here today.

  David Leaf wants to get something going. “So Van Dyke,” he says, his eyes gazing past the short, stocky man in the foreground to the taller one sitting just past him, “did you ever think you’d be here at South-by-Southwest talking about how you finally finished Smile?”

  Van Dyke smiles broadly. “It has been a wild ride,” he declaims in his storybook Mississippi drawl. “And I do need to thank Brian for the opportunity to take it with him.”

  Both men look over at Brian, wondering if he’s going to toss in his own observation, perhaps priming the pump for the onstage discussion they’re about to have. But Brian is still gazing down at his toes, his face stony and empty. The two magazine writers on the panel—Alan Light from Tracks and Jason Fine from Rolling Stone—come in, but this only makes Brian seem more disconsolate. He shakes hands. He says hi. But he doesn’t even try to smile, and when the festival organizers come to shepherd the gang upstairs to the stage, Brian moves with the dark resignation of a man headed for the gallows.

  Upstairs the room is crowded, buzzing with excitement. The ovation begins the moment Alan Light steps onto the stage, then grows more intense when Van Dyke steps into the light. The crowd jumps to its feet when Brian emerges, but he either doesn’t see this or doesn’t care to acknowledge it. Instead he moves robotically to his seat, sits, and stares stone-faced into the darkness beyond the footlights. The applause continues, now mixed with cheers, and finally the taut cast of his face loosens. He mouths a silent thank-you, and then, finally, his lips slip into a small, shy smile.

  Light, serving as the event’s moderator, leads off with some background on Smile’s history. Then he throws the session open to questions, and the first one comes instantly, from a man whose eyes glisten as he addresses the stage. “Brian, I just want to thank you,” he says. “Your music has saved my life so many times…”

  Brian nods. “You’re welcome.”

  “I just want to ask, why did you decide to finish Smile now, after all this time?”

  This is the key question, of course. You could write a book about it.

  The room is silent, waiting to hear what combination of internal and external phenomena has led this man—so often described as a genius, just as often dismissed as a burnout or pitied as the victim of untold spiritual and physical torment—to make this unexpected leap back into the creative fires.

  “Well, I knew people liked watching TV,” he begins. Brian is talking out of the side of his mouth, both because he’s nearly deaf in one ear and because this is what he does when he’s extremely nervous. “And, uh, Smile moves really quickly, right? So I figured people could hear it now.”

  This is puzzling. But another hand shoots up, and another man stands to ask Brian about his decision to perform “Heroes and Villains” at a tribute concert in 2001. “Heroes” is one of Smile’s key songs, and Brian had refused to play it in public for more than 35 years. Was he frightened to take it on again—particularly on a show that would be broadcast on national TV?

  “Oh, it took me about half an hour to prepare for it,” Brian says, shrugging. “But then it was great.”

  “Oh. Well.” The man sounds a bit deflated. “It meant a lot to me. Thanks for doing it. And for bringing Smile back to life.”

  “Oh, sure. Thank you,” Brian says.

  Someone asks Van Dyke about how it felt the day Brian called to ask him to help him finish their long-lost masterwork.

  “You must be talking about November 16, 2003,” he says. “Obviously, the day means nothing to me.”

  This gets a laugh, and the glimmer of feeling behind his words prompts Light to ask Brian about the recording of “Fire,” the cacophonous instrumental piece that represented both the heights of his creative daring and the start of his emotional devolution. How did he get such a vivid, scary sound out of the drums, cello, violins, fuzz bass, guitars, and theremin? Did he really think the music had sparked a rash of fires in downtown Los Angeles? And did this inspire his decision to not finish Smile at all? Brian listens and nods—and once again refuses to provide an answer. Instead, he retells the story of how he had an assistant build a fire in a bucket so the studio musicians could smell smoke while they played. They all wore plastic fire hats, too. And the song came out great, he adds. “But then we junked it.” He shrugs. Light seems pained. But he smiles at Brian and nods. “Great. Thanks.”

  This goes on for 45 awkward minutes. Throughout, two things are obvious: the depth of the audience’s feeling for Brian and his music; and Brian’s near-total unwillingness to acknowledge, let alone engage, that feeling. What it comes down to is this: The people who love him the most need Brian to be something that he is no longer able or willing to be. The journey was too difficult, the price too steep. He shed that skin a long time ago, and he has no intention of looking back. Which may be one reason he engenders the passion he can no longer abide.

  Brian Wilson’s music became a part of the American cultural fiber not just because it was innovative and instantly memorable or even because it was so often set in a dreamland of open space and windswept horizons. It’s the desperation that inspired those visions—the darkness that ignited the flight to freedom—that tugs at people’s hearts. Like all of Brian’s best work, Smile tells the American story in those same visceral terms: innocence, pain, flight, joy, corruption, desolation, redemption. It’s in the music. It’s in the story behind the music. It’s in the sorrow that haunts Brian’s eyes even when he’s smiling.

  This feels important, like something that should be talked about and understood, particularly while Brian is still alive, still able to put his thoughts into words. Only that’s not where he likes to put his thoughts. It’s the sound that matters to him. The feelings, the emotions, the vibrations, are all in the sound.

  Eating lunch in Los Angeles a few weeks later, he addresses the same questions. Only now Brian is in a good mood, feeling the sun warming his back and sharing a piece of cheesecake with a friend and a writer he has come to know a little bit. He speaks easily and illustrates his thoughts with occasional bursts of song—a line of melody; a rhythm pounded out on the tabletop.

  “Sometimes I think I sing too sarcastically. Like I get worried I can’t sing sweet anymore, so I sing it rough.” He’s talking about Smile again, contemplating the dozens of times he’ll perform the once-lost work for audiences during his summer tour. “I worry about that all the time, like I’m losing the sweetness in my soul or something. But then I hear myself singing sweetly and I think, Hey! Listen to me! A sweet sound, all full of love!”

  He laughs and shakes his head.

  “Listen to me! Just listen!”

  CHAPTER 1

  It’s eighty degrees and sunny in Hawthorne this afternoon, with a gentle breeze brushing against the trees and a sky so perfectly and deeply blue that it seems like a dream. And it would be just another spring day in the Southland, were it not also the day the Beach Boys will be elevated into the official annals of California state history. The ceremony is taking place right here, at the out-of-the-way intersection of West 119th and Kornblum streets, where Murry and Audree Wilson once raised their sons Brian, Dennis, and Carl. Now the spot is marked by California Historical Landmark #1041, a ten-foot structure that is at this moment draped by a large white cloth.r />
  “When the wintry winds start blowing, and the snow is starting to fall…”

  That’s Al Jolson singing, his voice echoing from the speakers on the stage that has been set up near the hidden monument. Several rows of chairs line the front of the stage, many of them filled with the wives, ex-wives, widows, children, friends, and compatriots of the Wilsons and their bandmates. A row of journalists—cameras, microphones, notebooks, dangling credentials—comes next, and behind them stands a thick crowd of onlookers. Fans, mostly, some from as far away as Australia. Many wear souvenir T-shirts from long-ago concerts and albums, the faces on them young and sweet, redolent of another time. Their presence here today pays tribute both to the younger musicians pictured on their chests and the younger fans they were when they plunked down the five or ten or fifteen bucks at the merch stand and pulled the shirts over their heads. Perhaps this is why the atmosphere is so hushed, the mood such a strange mix of ebullience and melancholy.

  “California, here I come!…”

  Then, from off in the corner closest to the VIP section, the crowd starts to cheer. Brian Wilson has appeared, steered gently by his wife and a few friends to his seat near the front of the stage. He is a large man with broad shoulders, a prominent belly, and a weathered face that is neither friendly nor hostile, but almost entirely impassive. Voices from the crowd call his name, but Brian doesn’t look up. He seems detached from the world around him. Or maybe just lost in his own memories of a life touched by so much fortune—good, bad, and horrendous—that he seems less like a living, breathing person than a personification of every dream and nightmare borne upon the westward tide.