I Am Brian Wilson

by Brian Wilson

  Other times it’s something else. Maybe it’s the voices in my head. Maybe it’s one of those days when they’re telling me terrible and scary things. If it’s one of those days, Melinda goes through the reality of that, too. “The voices have been saying they’re going to kill you for years,” she says, “and they haven’t done it yet. They’re not real, even if they seem real to you.” She’s right about that, too. On days when Melinda’s not here to talk to me, I try to remind myself of what she might say. I always remember to take a walk. That clears my head. I can usually get myself calm with a good walk.

  Today, in the chair, I’m in a pretty good place. Things don’t seem so heavy and nothing’s getting me down. There’s a special event coming up. There’s a screening of a movie. It’s called Love and Mercy, and it’s a movie about my life. Not my whole life; it doesn’t go as far as this chair or this book. It’s a movie about my life and my music and my struggles with mental illness, both in the ’60s and later on. The movie covers thousands of days. Some of them were good days. Some were great. And good days grew out of bad, which is one of the main points of this movie and my life—much of it is about the love story between me and Melinda, and how she got the ball rolling to get me out of the hellhole that Dr. Landy had created for me. Melinda and I had been working on the movie for years, off and on, trying to get one made that told as much of the truth as possible. It took almost twenty years to finally get it done. Can you believe it?

  The screening for the movie isn’t today. It’s soon. But today is a regular day. I’m going to get cleaned up, comb my hair, and go out for breakfast. There’s a stoplight on the way to the deli that stays red forever, almost nine minutes. Later I might go see my son Dylan play basketball. He’s eleven, and he’s a great little player. I used to see more of his games; it’s gotten harder since I had back surgery. Dylan also plays the drums a little bit. That helps him get tension off his chest. It might be a good idea for me to teach him piano.

  When I wake up in my house in 2015, I am happy to be here. When I woke up in my house more than two decades earlier, I wasn’t sure how I felt. The doctor had just gone out the door. The doctor was Eugene Landy. The patient was me. “I am leaving because I lost my license,” he said. “Bye, Brian.”

  I didn’t say anything. I was glad to see him go. His back, moving away from me, was like a tide going out. Dr. Landy’s leaving was my freedom. Through history there are stories about tyrants who control entire countries. Dr. Landy was a tyrant who controlled one person, and that person was me. He controlled where I went and what I did and who I saw and what I ate. He controlled it by spying on me. He controlled it by having other people spy on me. He controlled it by screaming at me. He controlled it by stuffing me full of drugs that confused me. If you help a person to get better by erasing that person, what kind of job have you done? I don’t know for sure, but he really did a job on me.

  Sometimes memories come back to me when I least expect them. Maybe that’s the only way it works when you’ve lived the life I’ve lived: starting a band with my brothers, my cousin, and my high school buddy that was managed by my father; watching my father become difficult and then impossible; watching myself become difficult and then impossible; watching women I loved come and go; watching children come into the world; watching my brothers get older; watching them pass out of the world. Some of those things shaped me. Others scarred me. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference. When I watched my father fly into a rage and take a swing at me, was that shaping or scarring? When I heard voices in my head and realized that they weren’t going to go away anytime soon, was that shaping or scarring?

  When I sit in the chair in my house, I try to watch everything. I have always been that way. I try to listen to everything also. I have always listened to sounds in the studio and sounds in the world, to the voices in my band and the voices in my head. I couldn’t stop myself from taking all those things in, but once they were in me, I couldn’t always handle them. That was one of the reasons I made music. Music is a beautiful thing. Songs help me with my pain, and they also move through the world and help other people, which helps me, too. I don’t know if that’s the whole story, but it’s part of it. The struggles I have faced—from the way my dad was, to the arguments in the band, to the mental health issues that have been around as long as I can remember—are all things I have tried to deal with in my own way. Have I stayed strong? I like to think so. But the only thing I know for sure is that I have stayed.

  I’m thinking of a picture. It’s a picture of a picture, actually—me in the early ’70s, lying in bed, looking at the cover photo of the Beach Boys’ Sunflower album, which came out in 1970. The album’s photo of the band—of me; my brothers, Dennis and Carl; my cousin Mike Love; Al Jardine; and Bruce Johnston. It’s the whole band, but not just the band. My daughter Wendy is there, too. Mike’s kids Hayleigh and Christian are there. Carl’s son Jonah is there. Al’s son Matt is there.

  The photo was taken at Hidden Valley Ranch, which was Dean Martin’s place near Thousand Oaks. We were all out on the golf course, goofing around. Ricci Martin, Dean’s son, was the photographer. He was a cool guy, and good friends with my brother Carl. Eventually Carl produced an album for him called Beached. It was a really nice record. Dennis drummed on it. There’s a beautiful song on it that Carl wrote called “Everybody Knows My Name.”

  For the cover photo of Sunflower, we dressed mostly in red, white, and blue, and over the photograph there was a banner with the group’s name and then the title of the album in a rainbow. I was all in white: white shirt, white pants, white shoes. I was looking down, partly because Wendy was in my lap, wearing pink. I was in pretty good shape at that time. My weight was good. I look calm. Maybe not happy, but sitting right in the middle of everything. Sunflower was the first record the Beach Boys made for Brother/Reprise Records, after recording for Capitol Records for a decade.

  Photographs can be misleading, and the cover photo of Sunflower sure is. I was the center of the band in the photo, but by the time that record came out, I wasn’t at the center of the band anymore. Some people will say that I pulled away from the center. Some people will say that I was pushed away. Maybe it was a little bit of both. I’m not sure. What I’m sure of is that all the guys in the band had different ideas about what kind of music to release, how to go onstage and perform our songs, when we should repeat ourselves and when we should try new things. Because Sunflower was our first Reprise record, I wanted to go all the way with being new. I even had the idea that we should change the group’s name to the Beach, because we weren’t boys anymore. I told the rest of the guys that and they didn’t like the idea. They thought it would confuse the people who bought our records. We had careers to protect, which meant we had sales to protect.

  Not only wasn’t I completely in control of the group, but I wasn’t completely in control of myself. How do you know when a problem starts? Did it start in 1964 on an airplane to Houston, when I freaked out and decided that I couldn’t tour with the band anymore? Did it start in the ’40s when my father whacked me because he didn’t like how I was acting? Did it start in the ’70s with drugs or long before that with the beginnings of mental illness that no one knew how to handle? What did it matter when it started? What mattered was that for a while it wouldn’t end. I was scared at the time Sunflower came out. I felt like the band was slipping away from me. I felt like I was slipping away from myself. The time in my life when I had complete control and confidence in the studio was behind me, and I didn’t know what was ahead. I didn’t know how to get that control and confidence back. I once called it “ego death.” I didn’t know if anything would ever come back to life.

  I couldn’t have known that almost fifty years later I’d be in a mostly stable and happy place, still dealing with those things but having learned so much about how to do it. I also couldn’t have known that before things would get better, they would get worse. A few years after Sunflower it was much worse. I was worse.
My body was filled with drugs and alcohol, and my brain was filled with bad ideas. The bad ideas came from the rest of it and caused it, too. Back then, like I said, mental illness wasn’t treated in a straightforward way. People wouldn’t even admit that it existed. There was shame in saying what it was and strange ideas about how to deal with it. Back then, I wasn’t going anywhere most days, and when I was in the house I didn’t even move around much. I felt stuck because I was depressed, and that caused me to gain weight, and then I felt stuck because I had gained weight. I got up to over 300 pounds. I wasn’t going onstage with the group. I could write songs, but I did it less and less. I needed help desperately, and people close to me were desperate to get it for me.

  And so the doctor came. My wife at the time, Marilyn, called for him. It was right around the United States Bicentennial and everything was red, white, and blue like the Sunflower album cover. It felt like Independence Day all year. But Dr. Landy didn’t believe in independence. He wanted me to get the weight off and develop healthier habits, and the way he decided to do that was to put himself in the middle of everything in my life. He called it twenty-four-hour therapy. There weren’t any more hours in the day. When friends came to see me, Dr. Landy interviewed them to make sure they passed his inspection. When I was allowed to see friends, it was never on my own. Dr. Landy always sent someone to monitor me, sometimes more than one guy. He wanted to make sure that the people weren’t bringing me drugs or anything else unhealthy.

  It would be a lie to say that he didn’t get results. He took the 300 pounds and brought them down to about 185, which is the weight I should have been. I was a football quarterback in high school and that was what I weighed back then. I hadn’t appeared with the band onstage in about a decade, except for a few shows—I did a pair in Hawaii in 1967, one at the Whisky in LA in 1970, and a few shows in Seattle a little after that. But mostly I just couldn’t get on the stage. In 1976, after a few months with Landy, I managed to come on for a few songs in Oakland and then did a whole night in Anaheim for a show being taped for TV. I only sang lead on one song, “Back Home,” which was coming out on an album we were just about to release, 15 Big Ones. That was the message: back home.

  Dr. Landy’s stay with me was pretty brief in 1976. He got some results, but then he went too far. He was getting too involved, and then I found out what he was charging. I confronted him about it. I was pretty angry. No one was happy to be talking. I threw a punch and he threw one back and that was the end of it—that time, at least.

  Things were better when he left. We put out some pretty good records, not only 15 Big Ones but also Love You in 1977. But then there were bad years again. The worst of them, 1978, was one of the worst years of my life. I went into a mental hospital in San Diego and then called Marilyn and asked for a divorce. I couldn’t control my thoughts and I couldn’t control my body. It wasn’t the first time I had felt like that, but in some ways it was the worst because of what I did to deal with it. I drank Bali Hai wine and did cocaine and smoked cigarettes and my weight went higher than ever; at one point I tipped the scales at 311 pounds.

  There were so many costs. One of them was the music. Record labels kept asking us for new albums. Maybe “asking” is a polite word. They expected them, and didn’t expect anything but yes for an answer. So we ended up making records, but they were records that showed how the band was being pulled in many different directions at once, albums like M.I.U. Album in 1978, L.A. (Light Album) in 1979, and Keepin’ the Summer Alive in 1980. Most fans of the band don’t like those records. Some fans don’t even know about them. There are only a few songs on those records that I like when I think about them, like “Good Timin’” and “Goin’ On,” but mostly they aren’t worth thinking about too hard. I didn’t do much on those albums. I wasn’t in any shape to do much. The same was true onstage. In March of 1979, a day or so after I got out of the mental hospital, I flew into New York for a concert at Radio City Music Hall. I was about as unprepared as possible in every way. I lasted for one song, “California Girls,” and then split to the side of the stage. On one tour I was playing bass, and I spent almost the entire concert back there perched on an amp. The amount of singing shrank and shrank until it was just the middle eight of “Surfer Girl” (“We could ride the surf together”), the first verse of “Sloop John B,” and not much more than that.

  There’s one show I remember from 1982. It was at the Westbury Music Theatre in New York, and there was a stage that circled around like a lazy Susan. We were playing “Do It Again” and all of a sudden I started laughing. I couldn’t stop. I had cigarettes on top of the piano and I managed to grab them. We took intermission, and then I came back and perched on the corner of the stage as it rotated and I smoked. I was laughing, but nothing was funny. I was coughing, and I couldn’t come up for air. A few weeks later I was given a letter that told me I was out of money and fired from the band. The first part wasn’t true. The second part was, in a way. Everyone’s patience for the Bali Hai and the drugs and the cigarettes and the giggling had come to an end.

  This time it was the Beach Boys who called Dr. Landy. It was a group decision, except for Dennis. I don’t think they knew what else to do. At first Landy took me right to Hawaii. When we were there, he started me on an exercise regime, no more drugs, no nothing. I had to kick it all. It took me about a week, but I did it. That week cleaned me up, but it was hard. I was rolling around in bed. I was screaming, clutching at the sheets. I never felt so fucked up.

  When Dr. Landy came back, he had the same idea as the first time around, which was that the people near me were part of the problem. That meant that everyone had to go. Caroline, my girlfriend at the time, was one of the people who had to go, even though she was doing nothing wrong. It was sad. But soon I was pumped so full of what Dr. Landy was giving me that my memories of her just faded away.

  The first time through, Dr. Landy had succeeded a little bit. His method was never perfect, but it gave me relief. The second time through, there was no relief. Relief would have been a kind of freedom, and he didn’t believe in freedom. He gave me more and more pills and called them vitamins. He sent girls to keep me company. He played games with me where he put his hand on my leg to see if I had feelings for anyone. He had barbecues at my house, but instead of inviting my friends or family, he invited his family and other doctors. He made big plans, like going back to Hawaii and then to London, but then the plans disappeared without explanation. He let me have a margarita every once in a while. He screamed so loud it made me cry.

  Sometimes I worked up the courage to confront Dr. Landy just a little bit. “Gene,” I would say, “why are you here?” He wouldn’t answer me. Instead he would ask a question back: “Did you eat at the wrong time?” or “Why aren’t you clean?” I didn’t know why I wasn’t. There was food on my clothes. I wasn’t cutting my nails regularly, and no one else was either. I couldn’t focus because of the medication, but I also didn’t want to focus because I was ashamed and afraid. So many days during that time were just a waiting game from sunrise to sunset, to the moment they would end. I must have run into old friends or talked to people in my family who thought they weren’t getting any real part of me, and they were right.

  Gene didn’t want any other people around me. He wanted me to depend on him for everything. His methods could be violent. Sometimes that reminded me of my dad, which seemed wrong. It was wrong for him to feel like a father when he was worse in every way. He was angrier. He was more unfair. I had no idea if there was any love to go along with the anger. With dads, you struggle to get independent. You push against them and sometimes they push back. With Gene, it seemed like he never wanted me to push. He hired a woman named Gloria Ramos to make me food. Gene told me about Gloria before she came. He told me that she was working for him. He told me that she was going to cook for me and buy some groceries. There had been another woman before her named Deirdre, but she didn’t stay long.

  I wasn’t sure about Gloria at fir
st because she was working for Gene. That made me afraid. But I watched her and decided that she wasn’t like his other people.

  Gloria didn’t speak much English, but I spoke a little Spanish so I could talk to her. There was a song called “¿Cuando Calienta el Sol?,” which means “How hot is the sun?” I would sing that and also play some piano for her. For a while, she was my only friend. I loved eating frozen yogurt but Gene wouldn’t let me, so Gloria would order it for herself and share it with me. Other times she watched TV with me, and still other times I didn’t feel like watching TV so I asked her to close the drapes and blinds and just leave me there in the dark. She wouldn’t do it. She said she had to leave the door open. I wanted it closed for lots of reasons. I told her one: mosquitos could get in, and they could make you sick. She told me that they had medicine for that kind of thing, but I didn’t know if medicine would work.

  Sometimes I would explain the whole picture to her, as a way of explaining it to myself. I would tell her that I was famous because of the Beach Boys, and that I had made things that people loved, and that I was worried I wouldn’t be able to do that anymore. She would say that no one cared about that. Not in a bad way. She wasn’t saying that people didn’t like my music. She was saying that no one cared about that when they weren’t around me, and that being a healthy person was just as important. That made me cry. She asked me what I wanted her to do and I just didn’t know. I wanted her to stay because I felt safe.