by Brian Wilson
Ten years later, after the Beach Boys were famous, I was back in Hawthorne and someone told me that Carol was home, too. “Oh,” I said, trying to sound cool. “Carol Mountain? I remember her, I think.” She was over at her mother’s house, the house where she grew up, and I went over and talked to her there. We had a great time trading stories about high school. That brought back lots of memories, memories of my own youth and her youth, and before I left I put my hand on her leg. It wasn’t completely innocent—it was still a great leg—but it was mostly innocent. Later that year I was on the road with the band, staying at a hotel somewhere, and I got a note from the front desk that there was a message waiting for me. It was a message from her husband. “If you ever touch my wife again, I’ll blow your head off!” it said. That never happened.
Then there was Judy Bowles. I met her at a Little League game. Her younger brothers were playing and maybe I had a cousin playing, too. Someone introduced us and I flipped for her because she was so pretty. I asked her if I could come to her house and see her there, and soon after that we started going together. That was the most fun I had with a girl up to that point. She liked sitting close to me, and there was nothing like the feeling of having her there. We sat in my car and played this game where we would name cars, not for their models but for their looks and personalities. We would say that one car seemed like an Oscar, or a Bill, or a Jimmy. It was so fun being with Judy, sitting in the car, naming things. And it wasn’t just with her either. I got along with her whole family. Judy had a brother, Jimmy, who was a surfer. He was always talking about the points and the spots where the great surfers wanted to go. I knew that I wanted to do a Chuck Berry—type song about surfing, and whenever Jimmy talked about surfing I liked the names of the places. I asked him for a list and used the places he gave me to make up the lyrics of “Surfin’ U.S.A.”: Santa Cruz and Trestle, Narrabeen, Doheny Way.
Judy and I dated for about a year, but other people started to come between us. They were people on my side. Once, Mike was dancing with her at the Rendezvous Ballroom in Balboa and I said, “Hey, that’s my girl you’re dancing with.” He split and Judy apologized. A little while later, she started digging Dennis. I don’t remember how I found out. Maybe he told me. Maybe Carl told me. Maybe I walked up on a conversation I wasn’t supposed to hear. I don’t think Judy told me herself. But that really hurt. It was heartbreak of all kinds. It was hard for me to feel real love after that, to trust that things with a girl were going to go along without going wrong. I got more into my music and myself and my own thoughts and backed away from other people for a little while.
And then soon my music brought me to other people. In the early ’60s the Beach Boys met a group called the Honeys. They were a singing group that started off a little later than we did. There were three sisters in the group—Diane, Marilyn, and Barbara Rovell—and they sometimes sang with their cousin, Ginger Blake. We met them at a nightclub called Pandora’s Box in Hollywood. It was early for us, after “Surfin’ Safari” and “409” but before “Surfin’ U.S.A.” I think maybe I had just written and recorded “County Fair.” Gary Usher knew Ginger and he told her about us, and Ginger told her cousins and we all ended up at Pandora’s Box. We were performing and after the show people came up to say hello. There were always some girls in the group. That time, the Honeys were in the group. They were cute girls and we had a connection through Gary and they asked us to come and sit with them. The girls were great. I was a little nervous, and I spilled hot chocolate on Marilyn’s blouse. Later that night we went backstage and my dad started yelling at us about some mistakes he noticed in the show. He didn’t usually yell in front of girls, and I think he half turned to them and half apologized and explained that he just wanted us to be better. The girls took it in stride. They were different from other girls we met after shows. It wasn’t like they were fans who wanted to look at us and wanted us to look at them. It was like they were in the same business and wanted to work together.
That turned out to be true. Soon after we met the Rovells, I brought them into the studio and recorded some songs for them, like “Shoot the Curl” and “Pray for Surf.” I liked the idea of having a girl version of the Beach Boys. They did the backup cheerleader voices on “Be True to Your School.” We did songs like “Marie” and “Rabbit’s Foot” that didn’t get released until they were collected for compilations much later. I was in the studio all the time, and I even wrote them a song called “Surfin’ Down the Swanee River,” which was a surf remake of the Stephen Foster song. His melodies were so clean, so American. I had hummed them my whole life, and it made sense to bring them into new music.
All the guys are sad and lonely
Because we like to roam
We’re surfin’ down that Swanee River
Searching for a surfer home
When we started spending time with the Rovell sisters, I fell in love with all of them a little bit. I liked Barbara because I always gravitated toward younger sisters—I was shy and it was easier for me to talk to her than to the others. I liked Diane because Diane liked me. Marilyn liked Carl at first, and I was still with Judy off and on, but then once Marilyn and I were out walking and we started kissing and soon enough we were dating.
I wanted to get married early. Everything was early. I was only twenty-two and Marilyn was only sixteen. But even though we were kids, I didn’t think about it that way. I thought of myself as someone who was growing up. I was making records. I was doing things that my dad had done and things that he had just wanted to do. I was the oldest in my family. And the next natural thing was to be a man. It was something that was drummed into my head anyway whenever I was scared: “Don’t be a baby . . . be a man.” Marriage was one way to do that. I sang about it in a song, “I’m So Young,” that was originally done by the Students. It was written by a guy named Prez Tyus Jr., but it was something I wish I could have written. Actually, it’s a song I could have written.
Marilyn and I went to her parents and sat down with them on couches. I loved her parents. They were wonderful people. If I was over there and I was hungry, her mom would invite me into the kitchen for food. Her father talked with me about the band and what I wanted to do with it, and he was never mean or short with me. He had daughters in the same business, and he didn’t take any of it lightly. There’s one story people told me that I didn’t see myself: Once Dennis was over there and he was boasting about how much money we were making, and he took a dollar bill out of his wallet and ripped it up in front of Marilyn’s dad. Her dad made a pained face. It hurt him to think that someone could be so stupid with money. Dennis was just a kid and he was just acting out, but Marilyn’s dad didn’t like to see wastefulness. He was a good man.
Marilyn and I went to her parents and told them we wanted to have a sit-down. When everyone was sitting we explained that we wanted to get married. I don’t know if I was bracing for someone to stand up and yell at me or for her mother to burst into tears, but none of that happened. They were in favor. For a few months we lived with her parents, and then we went to an apartment of our own, on Hollywood Boulevard. Near there, on Sunset and Vine, I had my own office. What was more grown-up than that?
At first Marilyn and I were like any young couple. We went to movies and went out to eat and drove around. But we weren’t like any other young couple because it was 1964. It was the year of everything. We got married in December, and then a few days after that I got on the plane for Houston. Sometimes I think about that year and I wonder how it could have all ended in a breakdown, and other times I think about that year and I wonder if there was any other way it could have gone. There was just so much happening.
We went on our honeymoon at the beginning of 1965. I was sitting around, looking at the water or closing my eyes out on the beach, and a whole song came to me. It was “Girl Don’t Tell Me.” I didn’t have any way to get it down. I didn’t have a pen. I didn’t have a guitar. I didn’t have a piano. But I just heard the whole thing up the
re, from start to finish, and I remembered it well enough to go later and write down the lyrics on a piece of paper. It was a real trip to write a song that way. I thought it would keep happening like that. It never did again.
Marriage was tough, and I was young and not very good at it. I spent too much time with other girls. I tried to make it up to Marilyn by writing more songs for her. I wrote “All Summer Long,” where I made a joke about that first meeting at Pandora’s Box and spilling hot chocolate on her. I changed things around a little. I changed the hot chocolate to Coke because it fit the lyrics better, and I changed it so that she spilled it on herself because that seemed funnier.
Another song I wrote about the situation was “Don’t Hurt My Little Sister,” which is one of my favorites from Beach Boys Today! It was written in 1964 or so, and I gave it to Phil Spector to use with the Ronettes, and I watched him produce his track for that. It was amazing. Phil said things to his musicians that I learned to say to mine. If he said, “The guitar isn’t coming through right,” I would go back to Western and say, “Hey, guys, wait a second, I need more guitar.” He didn’t end up using the song the way I wrote it. He changed the title and the lyrics and turned it into a Blossoms song called “Things Are Changing.” Our version was more about me and the Rovells. I wrote it from the perspective of one of them telling me not to treat another one of them badly.
You know she digs you and thinks you’re a real groovy guy
But yet I’m not sure that I feel the same
Well, we both know that you’ve been making her cry
I hope you don’t think it’s some kind of game
I might have thought it was some kind of game. I was so young. That’s not an excuse. I was unsure of myself. I didn’t understand why I was getting any of the rewards I was getting, or the fame, or the attention. I just wanted someone close to me who I could trust. I wanted a feeling of home to balance the feeling that everything was starting to be a stage or a store.
In the ’80s, before Dr. Landy came back, everything was a stage or a store. Everything was a way to sell things I had already made or to stand up in front of people and feel uncomfortable. I couldn’t deal well with any of it. When I went onstage with the Beach Boys, I would just smoke cigarettes or sit on the edge of the stage and laugh. One of the other things I did back then was think about “Don’t Hurt My Little Sister” all the time. Maybe it’s because it was a song about protection and I felt scared that no one was protecting me. Between songs I would break into the bass line from “Don’t Hurt My Little Sister.” It didn’t matter what the songs were before and after. We’d finish “In My Room” and you’d hear the bass playing that riff. Then we’d go back, play “Sloop John B,” and when that faded out you’d hear the bass from “Don’t Hurt My Little Sister” again. I was just playing that riff over and over. I needed to come back to it. I needed it to come back to me.
I wasn’t in love often. I thought about girls, but if they didn’t think about me, how was that love? Other people were in love. When friends would tell me that they were seeing a new girl, I would ask them if they really were in love. That was important to me. It seemed like a real thing. Were they in love? Did something happen inside them that made them feel closer to that other person and closer to themselves? It’s why I wrote so many love songs, because it’s a real thing.
When I think about writing songs about love, I think about the ones I wrote for Marilyn and also about the ones I wrote for Melinda. I think about the ones I wrote for girls along the way, either in my own life or in other people’s lives. But one of the songs I think about isn’t about any specific person. It’s about love in general. It’s on Sunflower, which came out in 1970, and it’s a song called “This Whole World.” That song came from deep down in me, from the feeling I had that the whole world should be about love. When I wrote that song I wanted to capture that idea. I produced that record. I taught Carl the lead and the other guys the background vocal, especially the meditation part at the end: “Om dot dit it.” I cut it at home. It was a house in Bel Air, where I was living at the time, that felt comfortable enough that it started to feel like a home. That song worked so well. The background singing is an amazing kind of trip, and Carl hits that last note amazingly. He’s great on “Darlin’” and he’s great on “God Only Knows.” But “This Whole World” is another one of my favorite Carl leads. And there’s one lyric that gets me every single time:
When girls get mad at boys and go
Many times they’re just putting on a show
But when they leave, you wait alone
For years I didn’t understand that, but when I met Melinda, I understood again.
When I said yes to Melinda and we decided to get married, we made a new home. We moved from where I was living to a house on Ferrari Street. It had a great jukebox, loaded up as nicely as the one my dad had in Hawthorne when I was a kid. When Melinda came into my life, lots of pets came with her, too. She had two dogs and three cats and a bird. One thing about the dogs is that we always had more than one. I watched how they acted around each other. They had their own partnerships. That was something I needed, and I never knew how much I needed it until I didn’t have it. I needed it in my life and I needed it in my music.
Melinda and I got married at a chapel in Palos Verdes. I picked as the date February 6, because it was Marilyn’s birthday. That way, I figured, I would never forget the date. Melinda agreed. Between the time we picked the date and the actual wedding, we went up to Sundance, the film festival in Utah, for the premiere of the Don Was documentary. Then we came back and got married. There were about one hundred fifty people at the wedding. There were only supposed to be about a hundred, but people kept coming, which was a little surprising for a Monday night in February. My brother Carl was my best man. Afterward, we went to the Hotel Bel-Air for music and food and danced and had a good time.
When Melinda and I were first married, we fought often. We were already used to each other, but there was still a difference between dating and actually being married. It was hard to figure out how to bring her into my life, even though she was already there. At first I didn’t like the fighting. I didn’t understand it. Maybe I was afraid that she wouldn’t listen to me, the way that people hadn’t listened to me in the band. But she didn’t do that. She didn’t back down and she didn’t try to take over. She stayed in there and tried to explain what she meant. She was patient, but she kept pushing toward her point. We fought all the time until I realized that maybe it wasn’t even fighting. Maybe it was that she was trying to show me she cared enough to tell me the truth. That was a new feeling for me—I wasn’t being told what I wanted to hear while I was worked behind my back. I wasn’t being bullied or betrayed. I was being talked to by a partner. And so was she. It’s like we had each other’s back. That had never happened to me before, not like that. I’d never trusted someone else enough to share my true feelings without worrying they might leave.
Cigarettes are a good example. I was smoking all the time back then. Dr. Landy wouldn’t let me smoke when he was around, and by the time he left I really missed it. I missed it so much that I started again. I smoked when I was at the piano. I smoked when I was watching TV. Smoking is what made me run into Melinda again out on Pico. But Melinda didn’t like the cigarettes at all. “They smell terrible,” she said. “Not to mention that you have trouble with your weight. Add those two together and it’s no good.” Or she’d start her argument with my weight and then go to the way the cigarettes smelled. She put the patch on me and that did it. I haven’t smoked since.
Now I really hate the smell of cigarettes. I can smell them a mile away. The smell sticks to your clothes and follows you around. I remember one night at Royal Festival Hall in London, on one of the tours, we were getting on an elevator and someone got on who smelled like a whole pack of cigarettes, or maybe even a whole cigarette store. “Who the hell has been smoking?” I yelled. The guy jumped off before the elevator door closed. I gues
s he was embarrassed, you know?
Melinda also pushed me to exercise, to keep walking, to do stretches and other things so that my bad back wouldn’t flare up as often. There have been periods with her when I was healthier and periods when I was less healthy, but the main thing that happened is I learned how to think about it in a different way. It worked better for me than the Radiant Radish had, the health food store I ran in 1969.
Melinda was also good with my mother. We would go visit her when she was older. She died just before Carl died. Before that we would go visit her. We would bring the kids over to her house when they were little. There was a grand piano in the place and I would sit down and play it while Melinda talked to my mother. When I got up it was time to go.
Maybe most importantly, Melinda helped give me my solo career. I had made those records with Dr. Landy, but that was almost impossible. He was yelling at me all the time. He humiliated me. He used music as a weapon against me. Melinda didn’t do that. She was patient, but she kept talking about it whenever she had a chance, and slowly I started to see how much I needed my songs near me. And it wasn’t just about the records. She helped me get my mind ready for concerts and tours. Without her, I might have still been the last surviving Wilson, but I wouldn’t have been completely alive.
I have sometimes come back from tours and gone right into the house and told her to sit down with me. Then I tell her how happy it makes me to be out onstage now. I don’t always say the other part, which is that it wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t been there for me. Listening to her was one of the best decisions I ever made.
CHAPTER 5
Fathers and Sons
I’d listen to my radio
But he took it and he’s using it in his own room
(Now it’s gone)
I wish I could do some homework