I Am Brian Wilson

by Brian Wilson

  And things repeat. When Daria and Delanie were little girls, a few years after we adopted them, they started telling Melinda that they wanted a baby brother. She came to me and asked me about it. “That would be cool, to have a boy,” I said. We found a baby who was supposed to go to another family but their arrangement had fallen through. The day we were supposed to go the hospital, they called and said that the baby had failed his hearing test and would probably be deaf in one ear. On the way there, I told Melinda how strange it was for something like that to happen again. As it turned out, the baby could hear fine. He had water in his ear when he was tested. We named him Dylan. When we got him home, I held him for the first time and sang “Mr. Tambourine Man” to him. The name felt just right.

  The way my dad treated me was tough, and it made me tougher. I don’t know if I needed to be tougher, but that’s what happened. He made me work and he made me pay attention and he made me have good manners, but he had a funny way of doing it. Some people hear about what he did and call him a monster, and I guess that you could say that. He was scarier than anything in The Beach Girls and the Monster. But the way I grew up shaped me in many ways, not all good and not all bad. I don’t like making the discussion all about how terrible my dad was, even if that’s true. The way he brought me up made me more focused on getting certain things done. It wasn’t only that he had me work at his shop every weekend. It was that he encouraged me to get other jobs also. His idea was that if you weren’t working, you were lazy. My first real job was at a lumberyard. My job was to move around stacks of wood. I told the manager of the yard that my name was Lupe, or Loopy. I wasn’t thinking of Spanish names or English names necessarily. I was just thinking of a fake name, something funny. One afternoon I was working, but not quickly enough. “Hey, Loopy,” the boss yelled, “get your ass in gear and move that stack in the corner to the door.”

  “My name’s not Loopy,” I said. “It’s Brian.”

  “Well, Brian, Loopy, whatever the hell your name is, move that stack in the corner to the door.”

  I didn’t last long there. Later I worked at a jewelry store, sweeping up after it closed, and for a few winters I got hired at a Christmas tree lot. I was big enough to move the trees for people and I liked it more than lumber. Lots of the motivation to do that came from my dad. He thought that the world was there so you could work hard at things.

  When I was young, friends of mine loved my dad. He was nice to them. He would try to arm wrestle them. And they would have never heard me say a bad word about him. I was scared, to start with, and I was trying to be as nice as I could so my dad wouldn’t get mad at me. I was always asking him questions to try to make him happier. If I mowed the lawn, I’d say, “Do you like that I mowed the lawn?” I was so happy if he said yes. Or I would wash his car and ask him if he liked the job I did washing it. But that wasn’t always safe either. Sometimes he wouldn’t like the job I did mowing or washing, and then I’d wish I had never asked the question in the first place. My dad had lots of mood shifts. He was a Cancer, born in July. Cancers have lots of mood shifts. I couldn’t tell when they were coming, though, and even if I could, I’m not sure I knew what to do with most of the moods. He showed love through music, but the rest of the time there was mostly quiet that exploded into anger.

  Maybe the worst thing about my dad was how he dealt with my fear. He couldn’t deal with it. Whenever I got afraid, he would yell at me or slap me or call me a pussy. Lots of the grabbing and the shoving started because something made me nervous and I didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t stand to see me that way, and he did everything wrong to get me feeling differently. But then there were kinder moments. When we went to the Long Beach Pike roller coaster, I didn’t want to go on it. He told me not to be afraid, and though his voice wasn’t nice, it wasn’t mean either. It was straight as an arrow. I got on with him, and the damn thing went up so high. “Take a deep breath, Brian,” he said. “It’ll be okay.” I liked being told that things were okay, even though I didn’t always believe it.

  I’m not saying that the way he treated me was okay. I’m just saying that along with telling stories that show how bad it was, I want to tell other stories, too. The great Murry Wilson.

  Once when I was a teenager, my dad and I were sitting in the kitchen. My next-door neighbor, Michael, came by. “Hey, Brian!” he said.

  I put up a hand. “Michael!”

  “Say that again,” my dad said. I did. And he slapped me hard across the face and said, “Don’t ever yell again at anybody.” I was crying, not just because it hurt so much but because it was so surprising. It happened again and again and again. At some point it wasn’t surprising. When he didn’t put his hands on us, he tried to scare us in other ways. He would take out his glass eye and make us look into the space where the eye used to be.

  When someone scares you so often, gentleness is its own kind of shock. Once in high school I was doing my homework and I couldn’t understand some part of it. I got mad and read it again, but I still didn’t understand. Finally I threw the book as hard as I could against the kitchen wall. My dad came in and stared at the book on the floor. “What are you doing?” he said. “Did you throw that book?”

  I was sure that he was going to come after me. “I did it,” I said. “I just couldn’t figure out that question.” He didn’t get the usual mad look on his face. He cooled down and talked to me about how it was important not to get too frustrated in school.

  Sometimes I provoked my dad. Once I took a shit on a plate and brought it to my dad. “Here’s your lunch,” I said. He was sitting down with his pipe in his mouth. He didn’t even stand up. “Get in the bathroom,” he said. Then he came in there and whipped the hell out of me. That one I may have deserved, but I was bringing the plate to him because of the times I didn’t deserve.

  There were hundreds of those times, at least. And it didn’t just happen to me. When I was seventeen, our cat had a litter of kittens. I think there were seven or eight of them in a box out in the garage. Dennis came out to see them. He bent down over them and decided that he wanted one of them. “I’m going to pick up this one,” he said. All of a sudden my dad was there in the garage. It’s like he just appeared behind Dennis. “Get your hands off of that kitten,” he said.

  “Shut up,” Dennis said. He was the only one who ever said those kinds of things to my dad.

  My dad stepped toward Dennis. “I’m going to knock your block off if you don’t put that kitten down,” he said.

  Dennis didn’t put the kitten down. Instead, he took a swing at my dad. He tried to knock his block off. The two of them got into a fistfight, right there over the kitten box, and our next-door neighbor heard the noise and came over to the garage and broke it up. We ended up giving away most of the kittens.

  Another time Dennis was reading a girlie magazine and my mother caught him. “Your dad’s not going to like this,” she said.

  Dennis didn’t even look up at her. “Get outta here,” he said.

  When my dad came in he marched over to Dennis and took the magazine and ripped it in half. “That’s it,” he said. “No more magazine.”

  Dennis didn’t say anything about the magazine, but he wasn’t exactly silent about it. A little after that he left the refrigerator door open. My mom saw it and came for him. “Dennis,” she said. “Shut the door. You’re letting the cold out.” When she got to the word out, she slipped on a grape someone had dropped on the floor and flipped right onto her ass. Dennis started laughing so hard that we all started laughing. My mom didn’t think it was anywhere near as funny.

  In a situation like the one in our house, kids have to decide how to deal with things. Do they show anger? Do they hide it? Do they talk? Do they escape? Carl was a pretty quiet person. He was always pretty gentle. Dennis went the other direction. He fought all the time: against my dad, against my mom, against whoever. He was fighting for a kind of fairness and justice some of the time, but other times he was just fighting. The da
y we were writing “Surfin’ Safari,” Dennis wanted to arm wrestle. I went to the table and set up and he sat across from me. I did the best I could, but he kicked my ass in record time. Mike was watching and he wanted a shot at Dennis. Dennis kicked his ass, too. Carl tried after that and he couldn’t stand a chance.

  Dennis’s life is a whole book by itself. It wouldn’t be a happy book all the time. He loved the outdoors and he loved cars and always had beautiful girls around him, and he could really sing when he wanted to, though he didn’t always want to. I remember that in 1980 I was living in Pacific Palisades, in a house called Green Tree, and Dennis would come over. I was into drug stuff at the time, cocaine and whatever else, but he was even more into it. He brought coke and alcohol. I tried to party with him, but it was hard to keep up and felt like a terrible time.

  After Dennis died, people used to ask me all the time what I thought about his solo record, Pacific Ocean Blue. I have said that I never heard it, that I won’t listen to it, that it’s too many sad memories and too much for me. That’s sort of true, but not really. I know the music on it. I was around for much of the time in the mid-’70s when Dennis was cutting the record. I loved what he was doing. My favorite song that he ever made was on it. I don’t know for sure what he ended up calling it, but there was a part that went “No more lonely nights / I’ll never make the headlines.” Is it called “You and I”? I love that cut. But I haven’t ever put the record on and listened through it the way I have with other records, or the way that other people have with that record. If I want to know what Dennis’s soul sounded like, I can just remember the songs—“What’s Wrong,” “Dreamer,” “Farewell My Friend,” “End of the Show.” They tell the whole story of how sad and beautiful his life was, how the beauty tried to grow but the sadness kept it in the dark.

  Kids who get hit don’t just turn into one thing. They turn into all kinds of things. Dennis turned into one thing and Carl turned into another thing and I turned into a third thing. We had something in common, of course. We had my dad. And that meant that we all had to deal with it, though we all had our own ways of dealing with it. I kept lots of what I felt inside, but sometimes it came out. It came out on Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!), in a song I wrote called “I’m Bugged at My Ol’ Man.” It’s a song that critics writing about the record didn’t like very much. I remember Carl reading me one review where the writer said the song wasn’t complicated enough. But I wasn’t trying to be complicated. I was trying to say that my dad was bugging me. My brothers sang along with me, but I sang lead. On the back of the record, where we listed who sang and played on all the songs, the vocals for “I’m Bugged at My Ol’ Man” were credited to “Too embarrassed.” That’s how direct it was.

  As I get older and older, I am more and more like my mother. I don’t think I am like my dad. In my twenties I was like my dad. I was tough in the studio, but then I slowly got off of it. Now I am more like my mom. I am more loving than I used to be.

  The story of my dad is the big can of worms because it’s connected to everything else. He wasn’t only the great Murry Wilson, songwriter for Lawrence Welk and Bonnie Lou. He was also the main force behind the early years of the band. He brought us from the garage to the Pendletones to the Beach Boys. We were just kids. We were his kids. In a way I was ambitious. I loved singing and then a little later I loved writing songs. But we might not have gone forward the way we did without my dad. When we started out, he produced all our records. He was tough. He used to come into recording sessions and yell. He would say, “Surge!” for more guitar. “Punch that guitar!” he would say, or “Put life in that guitar!” He was the one who kept things sharp and demanded more energy.

  I think of the things he said always with exclamation points. Even if he wasn’t yelling, his tone was like that. He wanted us to work all the time, and nothing we did was every really good enough. He would set up our amps and scream at us to do more. I was a hard worker, but Mike and Dennis could be goofy. We were all kids and there’s no reason to blame them, but they didn’t always want to work hard.

  But we grew up. We thought we grew up more than we actually did, but it was happening at some speed. I was learning things from my dad, and I was also learning things from everybody else. I started to understand songs better than him. I could see where the things he was saying in the studio made sense, but also I could see where other things made no sense. You didn’t always have to punch up that guitar. Sometimes you could get a bigger sound with other instruments, or you could add a harmony in an unexpected place, or you could work with silence before you worked with noise. When we got to “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” I went to talk to him. I told him that we didn’t need him to produce our records anymore. “You think you can do it?” he said. “You can’t.” He wasn’t mean about it, even. He just thought I couldn’t do it.

  I went off with the band and we cut “Surfin’ U.S.A.” with Nick Venet. Without my dad there, Nick and I talked about how to make it sound brighter and bigger. We thickened up the harmonies. It made sense to me to do a wall of voices. It was partly something I heard on Phil Spector’s records and partly something I heard in my own head, in my one ear, where all the sounds flattened down to one layer. When we were done with the song, I brought it back to my dad. I wasn’t sure what would happen. Maybe he would be proud of me. Maybe he would take a swing at me. Maybe he would say nothing and just stare at me angrily until I left the room. But what happened surprised me. He listened, tapping his fingers, and then he looked up. “Good record!” he said.

  Once I knew I had made a good record, I knew that I could make more. When we were doing “I Get Around” in early 1964, my dad came down to the studio. He wanted us to turn up the guitar and turn up the bass. Surge! I didn’t want him there. I knew how things should sound. We argued about it, and that time I reached my limit. “Get out of here!” I said. I shoved him and he went sprawling backward. He didn’t fall down, but he lost his balance. He didn’t come back at me with fists or even angry words. He just left. I didn’t see him for a while after that. The other guys and I talked it over and decided that he couldn’t manage or produce us anymore. It wasn’t just about the sound of the records. They weren’t always happy with him on the business side either. We were playing these frat parties for maybe a hundred dollars. My dad said that we needed experience, but Dennis and Carl thought he was selling us short.

  All of us got together and wrote him a letter. It wasn’t easy at all, but I kept reminding myself that there was no other way for things to go. Anything else would have been backward, and you can’t go backward because you might get stuck there. We handed the letter to him at the next recording session. Even after all these years, I don’t remember what song we were recording. I was so nervous. “What is this?” he said. He looked surprised. His pipe was still in his mouth.

  “Read it,” I said, but we told him what it said anyway. He wasn’t cut off from the Beach Boys completely—he was still in charge of our publishing company, Sea of Tunes—but he was relieved of management duties. That was right around the same time I freaked out on the plane to Houston and decided I was going to stay in the garden apartment and think of more songs. That was right around the time I got married to Marilyn. That was right around the time we recorded four records. That was right around the year of everything.

  When I came off the road, my dad argued with me about it. He told me that I was being weak and letting things get to me. The only way I could convince him was to talk about the group’s success. I told him that if I stopped touring, it wasn’t going to hurt the Beach Boys, and that it might even help. “I just want to write some more songs for those guys,” I said. That stopped him. “Okay,” he agreed. “That’s a good decision.”

  One of the first songs I wrote in the garden apartment was “Help Me, Ronda,” later remade as “Help Me, Rhonda.” I wrote the bass line before I wrote the song. Once I had that bass line I kept it in my head and started fooling around with it on the piano.
I thought I’d try C-sharp. So I started playing around with my left hand in C-sharp. Then I wrote the chorus and then I did the melody. There’s always some mystery when I try to remember how I wrote back then. My God, how the fuck could I have written all those songs? I couldn’t do that nowadays if I tried to. Even if I get the feeling that I want to, I don’t get the same inspiration. Back then it was a little bit of mystery and a little bit of magic.

  My dad came by the studio with my mom while we were recording the song. At that point, the two of them were having some trouble in their marriage. It wasn’t a big surprise. My mom saw the way my dad acted, and she was a loving person. She loved him, but she loved her kids also. Still, they came down to the studio together. Thinking about that day is like thinking about the Four Freshmen concert. I remember how I felt but I have no idea how my dad felt. It was probably embarrassing for him to see how we were doing without him. He talked constantly while we were recording. He tried to convince me that we still needed him to guide us. “The Beach Boys are going downhill,” he said. “You have to sing harder,” he said, “like you care.” “I’m a genius, too, Brian,” he said. Brains and Genius.

  The tape of the session still exists. You can hear it all. When I hear how I answered him, it’s a little amazing to me. I wasn’t happy. I had to take off my headphones and talk to him. “We would like to perform in an atmosphere of calmness, Dad,” I said. I said something else also, over and over again: “Times are changing.” It was never easy to have him around, but it wasn’t easy to be without him either.

  Once we were coming back from San Diego. I was driving and my dad was on me the whole time. “Slow down,” he said. “Slow down.” It really freaked me out. It was making me nervous to drive, and it was worse with him on me all the time. Another time he came to the studio to tell us about a band he was managing called the Sunrays. The lead singer was a friend of Carl’s, a guy named Rick. My dad brought their record in for me to hear. It was called “I Live for the Sun.” The chorus was originally “Run, run, run, run” but the song was rewritten and it got changed to “Sun, sun, sun, sun.” That made it make sense with the title and made it more of a surf song. But it was also so weird for my dad to be bringing in a song he was working on with all those suns in it when he had all those sons who weren’t working with him anymore.