I Am Brian Wilson

by Brian Wilson

  But it worked. I knew we had it the night we cut the vocal at RCA Victor. The guys and I looked at each other and we just knew: number one song. When I finished the final mix, everyone was stunned. “I just can’t believe this record,” Carl said. Or maybe it was Mike. It was both of them. It was all of them. They all said it. I couldn’t believe it either. My engineer was blown away. It was one of the greatest moments of my life. It’s hard to say that one song is the top floor of the building you’re trying to build. “California Girls” is near the top. “Caroline, No” is near the top. “The Warmth of the Sun” is near the top. They might be as high as anything else. But nothing’s higher than “Good Vibrations.” It gives people so much happiness and probably also will.

  Todd Rundgren did a version of it about ten years after we made it where he tried to re-create the song exactly, all the instruments and all the voices, and he did a great job. He came real close. For years, because I wasn’t touring, I couldn’t play it live. That was a loss. That was something missing. In 1999 when I started going back onstage with the Wondermints, one of the most fun things was to play “Good Vibrations.” We liked to stretch it out. At the Roxy, we made it last for more than six minutes. Any minute playing “Good Vibrations” is a minute that I feel spiritually whole. I hope that any minute hearing it is the same.

  CHAPTER 4

  Home

  You take my hand

  And you understand

  When I get in a bad mood

  You’re so good to me

  And I love it, love it

  —“You’re So Good to Me”

  In the ’80s I went down to the Martin Cadillac dealership at Pico and Bundy to get a car. Dr. Landy came with me, and two other guys came along also. If you asked him who they were, he would say they worked for me. But that wasn’t true. They worked for him. They were supposed to take care of me, but mostly they just watched me and reported back to him. So we all got in a car and drove over to the dealership to pick out another car.

  I didn’t know so much about cars. I knew what a 409 was because of the song Gary wrote with us, and I was hip to everything from customs to rails because of “Car Crazy Cutie,” but I couldn’t tell you exactly what a power shift in second was. Dennis knew more. He worked on cars when we were younger and raced them when we were older. He always had great sports cars like Stingrays. I had a few Corvettes also, but I can’t remember what years they were. As I got older, I kind of switched over to sedans. Still, I knew what kinds of sedans I liked, and there was one I liked right near the front of the showroom, a brown Seville. I was standing next to it, touching the hood, when someone came up behind me. I thought it was one of Dr. Landy’s guys, or maybe even Dr. Landy himself, but then I heard a woman’s voice.

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  “It’s nice,” I said.

  I turned to see the face that went with the voice. The saleslady was pretty, with long blond hair. She was wearing a skirt and my eyes went right to her legs. “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi.” Her voice was nice and bright. It was the voice of someone who was interested in whether I wanted to buy a car, but it also sounded like maybe it was the voice of someone who was interested in me. “Melinda,” she added, holding out her hand.

  “I’m Brian,” I said. Sometimes when I introduced myself people nodded quickly to show me they already knew who I was. That made me feel strange. Sometimes they pretended they didn’t know, which made me feel even stranger. Melinda just looked straight at me when I was introducing myself, stayed calm, didn’t do one thing or the other, and that made me feel normal.

  We talked for a little while about the car. I didn’t know exactly what to say. I was interested in buying the car, but I was just as interested in making the conversation with her last longer. I think I asked something about the seats and how comfortable they were even though I already knew the answer.

  As we were talking, she kept looking over at Dr. Landy. She was looking at the other guys, too, who came along with us. She didn’t say anything about them, but the way she looked at them made me feel like I wanted to talk to her. On the way upstairs, I started telling her about Dennis. He had died a few years before. “He was my brother,” I said. I think she knew who Dennis was because when girls knew about the Beach Boys, Dennis was usually the one they knew. We talked some more upstairs, and then Dr. Landy came by and told me it was time to go. I couldn’t leave without doing anything. I wrote a note on a card and left it on her desk. I put the only words on it that I could think of to describe how I was feeling: “Frightened, scared, lonely.”

  Maybe a week later I went back to pick up the car. Dr. Landy wasn’t with me that time, just the bodyguards watching me. Melinda and I didn’t talk much. But I talked about her to Dr. Landy, and about a week after that he called and asked her if she would be interested in going to a concert with me. He really meant “with us,” but she said yes.

  We went to see the Moody Blues at the Universal Amphitheatre. The Moody Blues had been around almost as long as the Beach Boys and they were still going strong, which was great. They had just put out the song “Your Wildest Dream,” which was a big hit, and they were playing a bunch of shows in LA. I remembered playing at the Universal in 1983. Dennis wasn’t with us. He had been put out of the band for a while. He was drinking more and more. I remember some shows that spring where he looked gray and baggy. He wasn’t completely there, or maybe he wanted to be anywhere else. That was a time when people were put out of the band all the time. The year before that, the guys had put me out of the band for a while. I was drinking more and more. There were plenty of shows when I wasn’t completely there. Around the time of that Beach Boys show at the Universal Amphitheatre, Dr. Landy came back. The guys in the group thought that it was the only way to keep me from disappearing completely. That show in 1983 was strange. We missed Dennis. We missed his drumming. We missed his vibe. I missed my brother.

  The Moody Blues playing at the Universal was the same band that had been around since the ’60s, but also different. Justin Hayward was there, and Graeme Edge and Ray Thomas and John Lodge, but some people were missing and some people were new. The Beach Boys had to do that all the time. When I came off the road after the airplane flight to Houston in 1964, the guys plugged in Glen and then Bruce. When Dennis hurt his hand in the early ’70s and couldn’t play, Carl plugged in Ricky Fataar and Blondie Chaplin. We had a kind of agreement about situations like that. Whoever was left agreed that the person who was missing wasn’t really missing, or that the person who was there in place of that person was trying their best to be a replacement. The Moody Blues were doing that at the Universal, just like the Beach Boys did hundreds of times, but it made me think of our Universal show and how hard it was to pretend that Dennis wasn’t missing. That night we were there back in 1983, we played a cover of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” because just a few years before he had been killed. John was missing and he wasn’t coming back. That made a hopeful song sad. We also played “Heaven,” a song from a solo album Carl released in 1981, just a few months after John Lennon died. It’s a beautiful, soulful pop song.

  It’s like I’m sailing on the ocean

  Every time I see your eyes

  You could be the wind that keeps me floating

  I could be in heaven for all I know

  Heaven’s a place for me to go

  No one ever could have told me how

  No one ever could have told me how

  Heaven could be here on earth

  Carl wrote most of the songs on his album with Myrna Smith, who had been in the Sweet Inspirations, backing up Elvis Presley. Elvis was missing, too. He wasn’t coming back. I met him once in a studio. He was down the hall. I heard that he liked karate and I did some moves, but he didn’t seem impressed. About a month after our show at the Universal, Dennis died. He was in and out of hospitals for drinking. He didn’t want to stop drinking, or maybe he wanted to but couldn’t. He was at Marina del Rey, dr
inking all day, and then he went swimming because he got the idea that he wanted to find some things he had thrown into the water a year before. He drowned, and he wasn’t even forty. He was missing. He wasn’t coming back.

  I didn’t speak about any of those things to Melinda when we were seeing the Moody Blues show. We went backstage and I said hi to the guys, which let us get away from Dr. Landy for a minute. After the show we went to dinner at the Polo Lounge. Dr. Landy didn’t come, but he sent all the bodyguards. When the bill came, it was more than two hundred dollars. “Wow!” I said. Melinda told me later that it didn’t seem like very much for the number of people with us, but it seemed like a big number to me. That’s how disconnected I was from financial reality. Two hundred dollars!

  We went on a second date to a movie and then on a third date to a Johnny Mathis concert. Before the Johnny Mathis concert, I told Gloria that I had a date. She was so happy for me. “That’s great,” she said. But she asked lots of questions, too. Did I like Melinda? Did she like me? Was she pretty? Had she ever been married before? How did she feel about Dr. Landy? I answered whatever questions I could, but lots of them I couldn’t answer and I just stayed quiet. Gloria eventually stopped asking questions and just told me that if Melinda liked me, then Gloria would like Melinda.

  For a while we were seeing each other as much as we could. Melinda lived in Santa Monica and there was this place we’d go for bagels and whitefish. I liked taking our bagels to a table and then sitting and talking. Her voice was just as nice as it was at the car dealership. Plus it was fun to be with a woman again, just sitting there. I hadn’t had a girlfriend of any kind in a long time. I told her things that I needed to tell someone. I told her I was having a hard time with Dr. Landy. She told me he had been into the dealership a few weeks before I had, and he had been loud and demanding. He made it seem like he was so important, but he was also so sloppy, walking around in sweatpants. “That’s him,” I said.

  She laughed for a second, and then she didn’t laugh. She told me he had tried to make sure she didn’t get any business from him, that he’d come back to the dealership and said he was going to buy his car through a phone service. What he didn’t know was that she also worked for the phone service, so she got the sale anyway. She also told me he watched me too much and too closely. I told her he had me on lots of medications and there were times I wasn’t even sure what the next pill was because of all the pills before it. She said I needed to be careful, or that someone needed to be careful for me.

  I also told her about the voices that would come into my head and threaten to hurt me or kill me. It was such a relief to be able to talk to someone about them, and she seemed to know exactly what to say. She said the thing I have already mentioned, that I had been hearing them for twenty-five years and I had never been killed. I nodded when she said that. She was right. When the voices came back, I thought about what she said, and that helped me to think about them differently.

  Other times Melinda and I went to the horse track, either to Hollywood Park or Santa Anita. I think one of the bodyguards liked betting on horses. They would give me a little bit of money to play on races, and once I even won three hundred dollars. This is all bunched together. It wasn’t just one time at the bagel place in Santa Monica or a few times at the horse track. In real life it was weeks, and it was months, and it was starting to be years.

  Melinda became so important to me. I thought about her whenever I thought about anything. Things didn’t seem real to me unless I told them to her. When she wasn’t around, I didn’t know what to do. What I did mostly was sit in the house and try to live through the hard parts of my life. I remember once Melinda came to pick me up and I was talking to Dr. Landy on the phone. It was tilted so she could hear how loud he was yelling at me, and later she said I had a look on my face like I was trapped. That’s a good way to put it.

  We had more bagel conversations and more dates in the evening, and she came to my place more or I went to her place more. Dr. Landy didn’t like the idea of Melinda. He said she was calling the house too much. He said she was a distraction. Around that time, Dr. Landy decided he wanted me to focus on making music. He wanted to make music with me. He had this idea that he and I were a team, both personally and professionally. He even started a company with me called Brains and Genius, which was a joke about our names. “We’re partners,” he said, but his idea of the word was completely different from mine. My idea of the word was someone like Melinda, who listened to me when I talked and said things back to me that seemed they were designed to get me feeling stronger. Dr. Landy didn’t like listening to me, and even though he had gotten me stronger back in 1976, by that time in the ’80s he was only making me more afraid.

  Partners. What it meant to him was that we needed to make an album. He was obsessed with us making an album. Or maybe that’s not quite true. He was obsessed with me making an album when he told me to. “You have to work,” he said. That made sense. I needed to work. Work kept me calm. Work let me push aside some of my bad ideas of the world and put good ideas in their place. I remembered working on other things. I remembered being pleasantly high at the piano, banging out some chords and trying to sing Tony Asher’s lyrics and Mike coming by and singing the beginning of what would end up being “Good Vibrations.” That was a great memory. I remembered driving from my house to the office on the day that Kennedy died and writing “The Warmth of the Sun.” That was a memory that fit into my other memories about how work kept me calm.

  But Dr. Landy’s idea of work was different. It had no calm in it, and it had no kindness in it. It had no love in it. His idea was locking me in the music room and screaming in my face and telling me to make songs even when I was exhausted and filled with pills that were making me more exhausted. When I missed Melinda, he would scream louder. To distract me from her, he started bringing other girls around to spend time with me. I didn’t like it. They didn’t dress nicely, didn’t dress in a way that made me happy. I didn’t let myself spend a night with any of them. But the pills kept coming in bunches. They made me so tired. Sometimes when Melinda would come to take me out I would get into her car and just lie down in the front seat with my head in her lap. I was so tired. I didn’t have any energy and I didn’t know where to find it.

  I’m not sure how I got through it all and made the record. I remember too many days sitting in the music room not sure how I was going to get to the next note or the next word. I did it, though. In 1988 I released an album. It was my first official solo album, even though Pet Sounds came together like a solo record and there were later songs like “Busy Doin’ Nothin’” that were basically just me. The record was called Brian Wilson and the cover was a picture of me. It came out on Sire, which was part of Warner Brothers. Andy Paley was a big part of how that record happened. Before the record, I put out a single I wrote with Gary Usher, “Let’s Go to Heaven in My Car.” It was on the soundtrack to one of the Police Academy movies. It didn’t do well. Soon after that I did an event at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame honoring Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. I sang “On Broadway” completely solo. Andy liked my performance and so did Seymour Stein, who was Andy’s boss at Sire Records. Andy talked to Seymour and they signed me.

  I liked that record even though I didn’t like the circumstances of making it. It had some really great songs on it. One of them, “Walkin’ the Line,” was written with Gary. I had started working with him again and remembered an old bass line that I never could figure out how to use. Music is like that sometimes, a drawer with pieces of things in it. There are days when you go in the drawer and it all looks like junk, and then there are other days when you go in the drawer and you find the exact right thing you need. I went into the drawer and found the bass line, and then Gary and I made a song around it. It was a happy song, but it was also a worried song in a way: you are walking the line because you’re afraid to fall off the line. Another song, “Melt Away,” was also about worry, but it was about how to get rid of wo
rry.

  I wonder why nothin’ ever seems to go my way

  But every time I see you

  I get that same old feelin’

  And my blues just melt away, melt away

  The world can get you down, but there are people who lift that burden off your shoulders. Melinda was one of those people for me. She made my blues just melt away. My friend, the writer David Leaf, told me that when Andy Paley played the song for him, he knew it would be his favorite song on the record. There was a song on there called “Let It Shine” that Jeff Lynne wrote with me, and a song called “There’s So Many” that had beautiful harmonies, more than a dozen voices on there in layers. The record ended with a big multipart song named “Rio Grande.” The idea for that came from Lenny Waronker, who was president of Warner Brothers, the big label that owned Sire. Lenny thought that any album I made should have that kind of song, with lots of sections and lots of shifts between them, like SMiLE. I wasn’t sure about it at first. It wasn’t the kind of song I was thinking about. But it happened.

  The song that has lasted the longest from that record is “Love and Mercy.” It ended up being the name of the movie about me, and it also ended up being a message I carried with me all the time. Like lots of other songs, it grew out of a song I was playing at the piano. I was sitting there with a bottle of champagne, kind of buzzed, thinking of a song by Bacharach and David, “What the World Needs Now Is Love.” I don’t know if I took musical cues from it or message cues, but I wanted to write a song about what the world needed. It needed love and mercy. My world at that time needed love and mercy. I wrote the whole thing in about forty-five minutes, and I knew right away it was a special song, a very spiritual song. It kept me going through the time that Dr. Landy was trying to keep me away from friends, away from health, away from Melinda.