by Brian Wilson
When I went to the house in St. Charles near Joe Thomas, there was no ocean. I missed it. I missed looking out at it. I had written so many songs that were inspired by the Pacific Ocean and the idea of the Pacific Ocean, and here I was two thousand miles from it. I know the miles because I asked someone to look it up. There was water, though, in St. Charles. We were right on the Fox River, and you could see it driving through town. The river was mostly pretty quiet. It was like a mirror. It didn’t send ideas out like the ocean.
The more I saw the river, the more I liked it, but the more it got me thinking about California. It was water just like the ocean. And thinking about California made me think about Holland, an album the Beach Boys made in 1972. That album was made in Holland, like its title said. The whole band went over there, all the Beach Boys, because Jack Rieley, a great guy and songwriter who was managing us at the time, saw that I was struggling in Los Angeles. I was exhausted from being separated from the group, from making music in the studio while they were out touring with it. There were problems with my weight. There were problems with cocaine. Jack wanted to give me a new start and new inspiration. We went over to Baambrugge to record. Rather than dig down seven feet and put in a new studio, we had a studio sent over from Los Angeles and rebuilt in a barn in the Netherlands.
I liked the place. I liked the food and the cobblestone streets. I liked the environment. But we were there half a year, and that was too long. We got homesick. What ended up happening is that we kept writing about California. I was smoking marijuana and listening to Randy Newman’s Sail Away album, which put me in a very spiritual mood and inspired me to write. I wrote Mount Vernon and Fairway, a ten-minute-long piece with six different sections. I named it that because I wanted Mike to think it was about him, and it was in a way. That was where his house was in Baldwin Hills when he was a kid.
My first concept of the piece, which I thought of as a fairy tale, was much more ambitious. The six sections would be linked by a fairy-tale theme, and I wanted to cut new arrangements of some of the songs we used to hear on our transistor radios in the late ’50s, like “A Casual Look.” They would be interspersed throughout. It would be a whole trip about the group. I even had my imitation of Mike’s dad in there, yelling at Mike’s brother, Stan. But when I ran it by Carl, he said, “What?” That shook me up and I backed off and stopped recording it. I am not sure to this day if he thought it was too creative or too ambitious or if he just didn’t like it. In the end, Carl was the one who ended up producing the whole fairy tale with the pieces I already had. We put it on as an extra for Holland, as an EP.
Mike and Al put together something they called the California Saga, which connected two songs, “California” and “Big Sur,” with a poem by Robinson Jeffers. I didn’t know much about Jeffers except that he had died a few months before we wrote “Surfin’ Safari.” But his poem “Beaks of Eagles” was great. It said some of the same things about people that I said in “’Til I Die,” that individual people can change but people overall never really change, that history is so much bigger than us all. And Al’s lead vocal on “The Beaks of Eagles” might be my all-time favorite Al lead ever. There are some great songs on that record. “Steamboat” kicks ass. I really like “Only with You” and “Funky Pretty,” too. It’s a damned good album no matter where or how we made it. The cover photo of the record has a picture of a canal that goes right through the middle of town.
If you look at the songs on Holland, it seems like we were writing and singing about a California we were remembering, but the truth is we were writing about a California we were imagining. When we were home in Los Angeles, at our own houses, we thought mostly about the things that were in front of us. When Jack took us away, we wrote more with our imagination. St. Charles wasn’t as far away from Los Angeles as Holland. Holland was 5,500 miles away. I had someone look that up, too. But it was still far enough away that I had to write with imagination rather than memory. That’s probably why I named that album I made with Joe Thomas Imagination.
Imagination was the first record I had made in ten years, the first real one. I had done Orange Crate Art with Van Dyke, and I had done I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times with Don Was, but this was different, a real record with a title and just my name—an actual Brian Wilson solo record. I don’t know what gave me the courage. Maybe time did, maybe waiting did, maybe medication did, maybe Melinda did. I also had a visit from George Martin. He was in Los Angeles for a documentary, and he came by the studio and we listened to “God Only Knows.” He remixed parts of it right then and there, and I was just amazed at how much better he made it sound. I told him he scored a better mix than I did on the original. It was a lesson from a brilliant man and producer. I loved what he did with the Beatles. I loved what he did with “God Only Knows” in the studio in 1997. And I loved him as a person. We got along great. When he passed away in March 2016, I was really broken up. He was one of the true greats, you know?
When Joe and I started Imagination, we had a routine down. I would wake up at ten thirty or eleven and call Joe, and he would walk over from his house next door. We would do a few hours in the studio, and then we would take a break for lunch. I did mostly the same thing for lunch every day—I ordered whitefish from a place called ZaZa. I loved the whitefish from that place. Then I would nap and relax and watch TV and Joe would go golfing. When he came back, we would all go out to dinner at a place called Mill Race Inn, which was about fifteen minutes away in Geneva. Then we would come back to my house, meaning the studio, and work for a few more hours. The record got made that way. Most weekends, though, we went home to Los Angeles.
At times it felt like a new family was growing there in St. Charles: me and Melinda and the kids, Joe and Chris and their kids. It felt like an extended family stretched over two houses. But it was also different from anything I had ever done. When I went to Holland, I went with the Beach Boys. That was my old family, stretched over two countries. I knew all the strange and great and sometimes less great ways that we worked together. I knew which songs of mine Mike would pull back from, and when I would have to fix up someone else’s songs by building a little piece of music to put between two other pieces: a bridge to get over a canal.
In St. Charles the record was being made mostly by two of us, and it was the first time I’d had that kind of working relationship. I had written songs with people before. I had worked on lyrics with people. But when I worked with people in the old days, whether it was Tony Asher or Van Dyke Parks, I mostly made the songs and then worked with them to get the lyrics right. When I made songs with Andy Paley, he helped out by playing great and keeping track of all the ideas we were having, and I have had other people in my life I felt so lucky to work with, from Jeff Foskett to Darian Sahanaja to Scott Bennett to Paul Von Mertens. If people make great music their whole life, they have to be smart about knowing it’s at least partly because of the people working with them. Music starts in your mind, but it ends up always being a collaboration. There are too many sounds happening all at once for it to be only one person.
With Joe, the creative relationship was a little different. He would say that he was going to take a basic track that we had cut and get it into shape, which usually meant adding instruments. Then I would add the vocals. I loved singing into a microphone. The microphones there were Telefunken, and they got a good clear sound. But that also meant I had to share some things I wasn’t used to sharing. Joe brought a certain vibe to the record. He knew that the people buying my records were getting older, and he wanted a record their ears would like. I wasn’t always sure about the direction but Joe was, and that was how things went on that project. There’s a lyric on “Your Imagination,” “I miss the way I used to call the shots around here.” I don’t think I wrote that lyric. Joe did. But sometimes I felt it.
The way I used to call the shots around here:
Up in the bedroom in Hawthorne when I was a kid, we all started to sing. When I was ten or eleven, I went th
rough a phase where I tried out some instruments. My dad encouraged it. I learned both the ukulele and the accordion. They were small instruments that were easy to have in a house where three kids shared a bedroom. I even played some shows for kids in school before I got sick of it. That was it for those instruments mostly.
When I got a little older, I switched over to piano and started picking out the melodies of songs I heard on the radio. I picked out the melody to “Tenderly” and played along with myself while I sang it. I learned to listen and sing, and then I learned how to teach others to listen and sing. Dennis and Carl and I had a little trio going, and I started bringing songs to the group. I brought songs by the Chordettes and the Hi-Lo’s and Nat King Cole. I brought “Ivory Tower,” which was a hit for Cathy Carr and Gale Storm when I was fourteen or so: “Come down from your ivory tower / Let love come into your heart.” And I brought so many songs by the Four Freshmen, who started out as a barbershop quartet in Indiana and designed more and more sophisticated ways for their voices play off each other. I tried to understand the way their voices were working, to take their songs apart like they were clocks and then rebuild them for me and Dennis and Carl. I’d listen to them until I understood the main melody and the harmony vocals above and below it. Then I would teach the harmony parts to my brothers. For three years we sang those songs and songs like them.
Later on with the Beach Boys, I had to learn that not everyone understood everything at the same time. Sometimes I would explain a song and Mike would take longer to understand what I was saying. The same thing happened when I was a kid. When I taught my brothers harmony parts, Carl got it right away, and he got it beautifully. He was our main man for vocals. Dennis took longer. I had to be patient with him. He had other things going on—different friends, different sports. He sang with us sometimes in our bedroom. But he didn’t like when we would try to tape our singing, and he wasn’t as interested in sitting at the piano with me. Carl was always on tape and at the piano. He was also the one who turned us on to R&B. We used to lay awake at night and listen to stations like KFVD and KGFJ. There was one show called Huntin’ with Hunter where the DJ was a guy named Hunter Hancock. He had come to LA from Texas in the ’40s, and he was one of the first white DJs to play R&B. Carl loved the records he would play: Johnny Otis, the Penguins. We had never heard anything like it. They were just as sophisticated as the Four Freshmen but different. We tried to imitate those harmonies also.
When I was twelve or so, I really got into that music along with the vocal groups, and I kept going on the piano. My uncle Charlie taught me to play the boogie-woogie like it was done on those Johnny Otis records. There were other players I learned about also, like Ivory Joe Hunter and Pinetop Perkins. I went to my piano all the time and did it. I ended up calling that kind of playing Uncle Charlie’s Boogie. When you look at a recipe, it lists ingredients before it tells you how to cook them. Those were my ingredients: beautiful songs by singers like Rosemary Clooney, vocal harmonies from groups like the Four Freshmen, and the boogie-woogie. Those are the sounds that started moving around in my mind.
We lived about two miles from Hawthorne Municipal Airport, and all day long there was nothing but airplane noise. I didn’t really like airplanes, even then. My mom’s dad, who was also named Carl, flew planes. We had Carls in every generation. My grandfather Carl was in the Shriners and always smoked a cigar and had a sword in a case with rubies all over it. He also had a pilot’s license and learned to fly small planes all around Los Angeles. When I was ten or eleven, he took me up with him. I was excited but very scared. “Don’t worry, Brian,” he said. “It’s okay.” It was comforting to hear him say that, even though I decided I didn’t want to keep flying with him. Planes were a problem even if you weren’t up in them. The noise got in the way of our singing. We had to shut the windows to keep it out.
But when we got to a certain point in practice where we thought we had a nice version of “Ivory Tower,” we would call my parents in and sing for them. My dad was interested not just in music but in how it was recorded, so he would buy us recording equipment sometimes, and we started putting our songs down on tape.
Music was starting to be everything, but it was still all about family. I was singing with my brothers. I was learning piano from Uncle Charlie. I was getting my ideas down on tape machines my dad was bringing home.
And there was more family around, too. My dad’s brother Wendell and his wife, Billie, lived near enough that we would visit there often. They had two kids, Wendy and Mike (both are names that came up over and over again in the extended Wilson family), who were about the same age as me and my brothers, and when we were there, we played checkers or Monopoly with them. Wendell collected strange things and always had surprises. His house was the first place I ever saw a theremin. I was fascinated with it. I knew you could make music with human voices or pianos—and, I guess, with ukuleles and accordions—but the idea you could invent new musical instruments was something I had never thought about.
My dad’s sister Emily, who everyone called Glee, married a guy named Ed Love, who was in charge of a sheet-metal company. They had money because of that, more than us, and six kids. The oldest was Mike—another Mike. This Mike, Mike Love, was very friendly and very funny, and he made me laugh. I really liked him. We hit it off real well, and soon enough he was almost a fourth brother. When I was fourteen, the two families went Christmas caroling together; we sang “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” and “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” As soon as Mike and I could drive, we started driving over to each other’s houses to hang out. Hanging out meant watching TV sometimes, or it meant talking about school or girls, but it also meant singing—the same way I taught harmonies to Dennis and Carl, I taught them to Mike and his sister Maureen. We also did Everly Brothers songs. I loved “Dream.” They were the best duet singers I ever heard. I don’t even know how they did what they did.
I remember back in the winter of 1963 when the reservoir up at Baldwin Hills gave out and a big flood knocked down hundreds of houses. People drowned, too. I took Carl in the car and we drove over there. The cops were standing at the head of the street. “You can’t come in here,” one cop said.
“But my cousin lives up there,” I said. Carl, in the passenger seat, nodded and tried to look worried. They waved us through. The funny thing is that I don’t even know if they lived in Baldwin Hills anymore. I think they had moved to View Park. But I wanted to see what happened with the flood.
As time went on Mike did more than carol with us. He became part of the whole Wilson music project. We started singing up in the bedroom and then went to the garage to sing and play some more. Mike played the saxophone, sort of. He played, but he wasn’t really a player the way some guys were. But Mike could sing. He had a deeper and rougher voice that worked really nicely with the rest of us. When you build up harmonies, lots of it is teaching people parts, but some of it is listening to the sounds they’re already making and building something out of that. Later on we added in one more singer and player, Al Jardine, who was a guy from the neighborhood who played guitar with a band called the Islanders and was deep into folk music. Al was also in a band called the Tikis back then, and he had already been making songs, sort of; in junior high he recorded a version of a Longfellow poem called “The Wreck of the Hesperus” with some of his own music, and also wrote a song called “Steam from the Washing Machine.” That was more of a teen song. And Al could also play stand-up bass.
As a kid I was a real athlete. My dad took me to a park near the house and showed me how to hit a baseball with a bat. He held the bat in his right hand, floated the ball up there with his left hand, and then swung the bat. It went whap! and the ball flew as far as I could see. Then he made us do it. Of all my brothers, I was the best. I was the oldest, but I was also the best. Carl wasn’t much of an athlete. He didn’t take to it. Dennis was a good athlete, but he was more into things like wrestling. At team sports, I was the best. In baseball I could run the b
ases in seventeen seconds, go all the way around. And I had a great arm, a Willie Mays arm. I was a lefty, and I could bring the ball all the way in from center field to the catcher. When I was seventeen, I thought I would be a major league baseball player. Then I got into the music business, and it got into me. I think it probably worked out for the best. My high school uniform is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. It has the grass stains. They never washed out.
It was a big time for California baseball back then. We got our first team in the mid-’50s, the Dodgers, who came from Brooklyn. I wasn’t really a Dodgers fan. I was a Yankees fan. I played center field myself and wanted to play center field for the Yankees, though Mickey Mantle already had that job. I also loved the Red Sox—they had Ted Williams and Johnny Pesky and Dom DiMaggio, Joe DiMaggio’s brother. There was a third DiMaggio, Vince, who was also a center fielder. They were a brother act, too. I remember listening to Buddy Blattner doing the game of the week on ABC. I remember listening to baseball on the radio and sometimes switching over to hear music. Andy Williams came on all the time, singing his early hits like “Canadian Sunset” and “Butterfly.”
I had a great arm, but that was about as far as it went. Even though I could smack the ball far when I threw it up in the air the way my dad showed me, I batted under .200 in games. I think it was .169. I couldn’t hit a curveball for shit. I had only one home run. Can you believe that? I also played football. That’s what kids did in California. I started playing as a junior in high school and lasted about a year. I was the quarterback, and I was pretty good at it. I could see the field and time it so the ball got out to the receivers. I could also really throw. Once I was with some friends and we had a contest to see who could throw the farthest. I put it up in the air, and someone down the way measured where it landed and said it went sixty-five yards. I guess I had the arm.