by Brian Wilson
A few months after we fired my dad, he sent me a long letter. This was in May of 1965. It was eight pages, typed on the Sea of Tunes stationery. He wasn’t the kind of person to communicate like that, but when he did it, he really did it. It was a letter that summed up everything about him. He talked lots about the code of honor in our family: “First, I tried to teach all of you never to be greedy or dishonest with anyone and be generous with each other. Second, if anyone ever approached any of my children with pills, bennies or dope of any kind, to run away from them, not just walk away. Thirdly, you were all told that if anything ever happened to me that I hoped you would take care of your mother.”
The letter went on. He wanted me to know how important we were to him and how important it was for us to know that and give him credit. It even had an explanation for the hitting and the beating: “I can remember giving all three of my sons love in many forms and actually, when I was strict from time to time, it was because I felt it was my duty as a father to give you the security a punishment gives. As boys grow into the adolescent time of their life, their brain tells them when they have done something wrong, and, believe it or not, children are sometimes disappointed when they are not punished because their brain tells them right from wrong.”
He talked a little bit about his troubles with my mother and how they were falling out of love. She didn’t go against his authority, he said, but she had a “look of resentment.” He thought that she had given all her love to her sons and taken it away from him because of how she was raised. I don’t know. Maybe it was true. But he was very sad about it. “Maybe now you can begin to understand that the last seven years has been almost a living hell for me and although I have wanted to give up completely on two separate occasions, something told me to hang on and keep trying because I felt my sons were worth it.” I don’t know how I could have understood that in any way when I was twenty-three years old.
Most of the letter was about our business as a band, and how we were doing it all wrong. My dad said that rock and roll wouldn’t last. He was sure of it. “The way things are shaping up now, The Beach Boys cannot go on and on because cycles of music change as well as fads, like The Beatles, Presleys, etc.” But the reason wasn’t just that music changed. It was because I had changed. He told me that I had broken contracts with Sea of Tunes by giving songs to other groups, but mostly he criticized me for believing in myself. It was a group with all the Wilsons, he said, but I was making it all about me. “The fact that my sons’ singing your beautiful ballads and very catchy novelty songs can sustain you in this business over a longer period, and because you know this, you have used this extraordinary harmony talent and your great song writing ability as a tool towards your own ends. I mean specifically that when you found out that The Beach Boy image and success was on its way you began to listen to phonies who said that The Beach Boys needed you and that you didn’t need them (meaning your own brothers) . . . the fact that I was included as your guiding factor and manager didn’t mean much to you either, and if you don’t think this hurts to know that your son would abandon not only his brothers but his father as well, then you are completely mistaken.” The real punch came right after that. He always ended everything with an explanation point: “I cannot believe that such a beautiful young boy, who was kind, loving, received good grades in school and had so many versatile talents, could become so obsessed to prove that he was better than his father.”
My dad’s letter has become famous all on its own. I was talking to a guy once after a Beach Boys concert, and between the rest of the stuff that always happens—people bringing up rare pressings and asking me for autographs—we got on the matter of the letter. “It’s an extraordinary document,” the guy said. He had a faraway look in his eyes. I know what he meant. My father wasn’t even fifty at the time. He had put so much of his life into our group, which was his group, too. He was at a crossroads in his life where he didn’t know if the things he had built were making any sense. A few years later he put out a record called The Many Moods of Murry Wilson. It had four of his own songs and arrangements of some Beach Boys songs, including “The Warmth of the Sun.” But the letter was the place where he put the most of himself, for better and for worse. It was kind of his SMiLE, though I doubt he was smiling at all when he wrote it.
That letter hung over my head—or maybe in my head—for years. It was with me when I was doing Pet Sounds, when I failed to do SMiLE. It was with me when we did a bunch of albums in a row, knocked them out pretty quick and pretty basic, and where the other guys in the group came forward to contribute more songs. That was happening all over rock and roll. In the Beatles, George started to write more. In Creedence Clearwater Revival, John Fogerty let everyone else in the band write songs. With us, it was a chance to get back to being a rock and roll band. I still got plenty of songs on records and plenty of ideas. For Wild Honey, I tuned my piano slightly out, more like a twelve-string guitar, to get a more mellow sound. I got the idea to slightly detune from my piano tuner, and I loved what it did to the sound of the record. That album had such good energy, especially on the title song where Carl gave us another great vocal. That whole record had so much soul. We put a theremin on that one for old time’s sake. Mike got the album title from some actual wild honey that was out on the kitchen table. Eating healthy was good for our music. Wild Honey was one of the records that I made a point of going back and listening to after a while. It was after more than forty years. It kind of swept me away.
On the records after that, Friends and 20/20, the other guys were doing more writing, sometimes with me, sometimes on their own. I wrote lots with Al, especially on Friends, where we did “Wake the World,” “Be Here in the Mornin’,” and “Passing By.” Mike, who had met the Maharishi in 1967 and then gone to Rishikesh to study with him at the same time as the Beatles and Donovan, started writing about those kinds of things in songs like “Anna Lee, the Healer” and “Transcendental Meditation.” In general, it seemed like we were turning a corner into something more adult. We weren’t kids anymore. We didn’t have a dad around to tell us we were kids. There were marriages and kids and mind expansion.
In the summer of 1968, we released “Do It Again.” I was playing around with Mike, playing some chords, and slowed it down a little bit and started to get a melody. He started writing lyrics and we got the thing done. It was probably the best slow rock song we ever did. I had this idea for the intro where our engineer, Steve Desper—the great Steve Desper—rigged up a kind of defibrillator thing to the drums so that each hit vibrated at like a thousand beats per second. There’s never been an intro like it. It’s mixed back in the mix of the main body of the song. It was a strange song, or was about something strange. At that time, we were already nostalgic. I felt like we were already so far past surf music that we could turn and look back at it. We put “Do It Again” on 20/20, which was named that because it was our twentieth record, if you counted greatest hits, but it was also because of hindsight. I made a joke about it on one of the inside photos, where I hid behind an eye examination chart. The cover photo for that record is really nice and colorful. The Boys are all standing up except for Al.
“Time to Get Alone” was one of my favorite songs from that record. It was like a grown-up version of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” where the guy who’s singing doesn’t have to imagine what it’s like to be alone with a girl. He can just invite her to go with him:
And now we know it’s
Time to get alone
To get alone
And just be together
We’ll only be together
I wrote that song for my friend Danny Hutton’s band, which was called Redwood at the time. We laid down tracks and everything. Danny had this piano he played through a busted speaker and it came out sounding like a stretched-out guitar. But then Mike decided he didn’t like the idea that I was writing for Danny. I was in the studio working and he came by with Carl and Dennis and started asking questions about “Time
to Get Alone.” It wasn’t just one question. It was a bunch of questions, one after the other, as a way of telling me he thought it was wrong of me to go outside the group. Mike did all the talking; Dennis and Carl just stood there with their heads down. They couldn’t look me in the eye. Mike really put the screws on me. I had to take the song away from them, along with another song I had cut a track for called “Darlin’.” Danny and Redwood went on to be Three Dog Night. They did fine without those two songs. They had more than twenty Top Forty singles and sold something like forty million records. And Carl did a great job singing “Time to Get Alone” when we released it on 20/20. He even got a producer credit. I don’t know if Mike was proud or ashamed of what he had done in taking the song back from Redwood, but he reminded me of how my dad had acted a few years before with “Surf City.”
And the real Murry Wilson didn’t go away completely. He was my dad, after all. He was the dad of all of us. We were making records without him, but we were carrying on in the same tradition. He came back in 1968 to sing on “Be Here in the Mornin’,” on the Friends album. He gave us some of the lower notes. And then in 1969 he and I wrote a song together. He was watching Joey Bishop’s television show, and just as Joey Bishop was going to a commercial, he said, “We’re going to break away for a minute.” That put an idea in my dad’s head. He wanted to write a song called “Break Away.” He came over to my house on Bellagio and we knocked it out in a half hour. He called himself Reggie Dunbar on that record for some reason. We put it out as a single. I thought it came out great, but it didn’t do very well. The B-side was a song that Dennis wrote with Gregg Jakobson called “Celebrate the News.” It was a song about being optimistic because things were looking up after a long time down.
Hello
My luck was so bad
I thought I used up all the luck I had
Every time I thought I’d get it on
Someone put me on
There’s been a change
Beautiful and strange
My life’s gone through a change
Somehow I know (somehow I know)
Bad luck’s in the past
All good things here at last
So now we’ll grow
As it turned out, things weren’t looking up. Soon after “Break Away” and “Celebrate the News” came out, we had a break with Capitol. We had been with them almost from the start, right after Candix. The Four Freshmen had been with them. Frank Sinatra had been with them. The label had been our home. But at the end of the ’60s, it was just a house. And it was a house that wasn’t standing up straight. They weren’t paying us the way we thought was fair. There was lots of money that seemed to disappear between the time people spent it on records and the time it came to pay us. In the spring of 1969, right after 20/20 came out, we sued Capitol for unpaid royalties. That messed up contract negotiations. In June, when our contract with them ended, they deleted our back catalog, which meant that we weren’t earning any more money on it. It got ugly for a little while there.
In November, my dad sold Sea of Tunes. He got $700,000 for it, which seemed to him like lots of money. Plus, he believed we were washed up. “Break Away” hadn’t done well. The Capitol situation was a wreck. The other guys couldn’t believe it. No one could believe it. He had taken the only thing that we knew would last, our songs, and sold it off like he was running a garage sale. I was scared of my dad lots of the time and angry at him lots of the time, but that was one of the only times that I was just disappointed. He made the wrong business decision for the wrong reasons, and he created a bad situation that would last for years.
When we went looking for a label, we ended up following Frank Sinatra, sort of. He had been with Capitol until 1960, but he wanted more control of his music. He tried to buy Verve records but ended up starting his own label, Reprise, with Warner Brothers. That’s where we ended up, Reprise. We set up our own label, Brother Records, inside the big label—they were Warner Brothers and we were the Wilson brothers, so it made sense in both directions. David Anderle helped run it. He was one of the only guys back then who understood the trip we were on and the right direction for us to go. We brought on other artists we trusted and knew had the same vision, like Danny Hutton. And we got down to making our own music. The first record we made for Warner was Sunflower, the record with the cover photo taken at Hidden Valley. We worked with Steve Desper, a genius engineer. He’s the one who put all that organ high up in the mix and really helped give that record its sound. On “Add Some Music to Your Day,” Mike sang a great lead vocal. We recorded in my house in Bel Air, the Bellagio house, in the den. The room was meant to be.
Sunflower was an important record for us because it was the first for Warner, and also because of Jack Rieley. Jack was a radio DJ and record man I met right after Sunflower. I liked him and he understood where the band was going, so we hired him as our manager. Jack did a lot of good for the Beach Boys, helped to get us moving that year when we were kind of stuck. He was a really great lyricist; he worked on the lyrics for songs like “Long Promised Road,” “Marcella,” and “You Need a Mess of Help to Stand Alone.” And Jack had a great narrating voice. A little later, on Holland, we used him to do the narration on Mount Vernon and Fairway (A Fairy Tale).
Jack had lots of ideas to add to our ideas. When I first met him, we were talking about “Surf’s Up,” a song I had started that I couldn’t finish producing. He encouraged me to make a whole record around it. Jack also came up with a kind of new direction for the band. He thought that the Beach Boys shouldn’t be so cut off from the world. I knew what he meant. The mid-’60s were all about exploring inside yourself, figuring out peace and love and then bringing that to society. That’s what I was trying to do with songs like “Good Vibrations.” But in the late ’60s and early ’70s, lots of bands started to write songs that were more political, songs about Vietnam or Nixon or Kent State. Mike wrote a song called “Student Demonstration Time,” which was a remake of Leiber and Stoller’s “Riot in Cell Block No. 9” with new lyrics about all the college kids who were trying to make a difference. It was kind of the same idea as “Surfin’ U.S.A.”—take a rock and roll song we loved, put in some lyrics about a new scene, and make a new song.
But mostly we decided to be political in different ways. Our concerns were more about the earth and what people were doing to it. The cover image for Surf’s Up was an illustration based on a famous American Indian sculpture called End of the Trail. Surf’s Up was a warning that there was a kind of crisis. If people didn’t treat the earth with love and respect, we might be near the end. Al and Mike wrote “Don’t Go Near the Water,” which was a kind of anti-surf message. It told people that if they couldn’t treat the ocean with respect, they shouldn’t use it for recreation. The big new song that I wrote for Surf’s Up was also about the environment. It was called “A Day in the Life of a Tree,” and that’s basically what it was: a tree thinking out loud (or thinking silently but singing out loud) about all the bad things that were happening to it. In the back of my mind, I might have been thinking of the tree in Rosemary Clooney’s “Tenderly.” Jack Rieley and I talked about the idea of the song and then he wrote lyrics:
Feel the wind burn through my skin
The pain, the air is killing me
For years my limbs stretched to the sky
A nest for birds to sit and sing
But now my branches suffer
And my leaves don’t bear the glow
They did so long ago
One day I was full of life
My sap was rich and I was strong
From seed to tree I grew so tall
Through wind and rain I could not fall
But now my branches suffer
And my leaves don’t offer
Poetry to men of song
Trees like me weren’t meant to live
If all this world can give
Pollution and slow death
Oh Lord, I lay me down
&
nbsp; No life’s left to be found
There’s nothing left for me
I wasn’t sure who was going to sing the lead vocal on that one. I tried to do it, but it wasn’t working out. I didn’t sound right. I thought Jack would be perfect for it. He understood the lyrics perfectly because he had written them. Plus, I wanted the lead to sound like a dying tree, and if that’s what you’re going for, Jack Rieley’s your man. But he had never sung on a Beach Boys record before, and there was no good way to ask him. So I came up with a plan where we told Jack I’d be putting the lead vocal in while he listened in the studio. I tried once. I tried again. Then I got angry and frustrated. I came out of the booth and told him I didn’t understand the way the song could work. “I’m confused,” I said. “I don’t know what this means anymore.”
“You know,” he said, “you’re just tired.”
“I’m not tired,” I said. “I’m tapped out on this song. I need you to give me a guide vocal.”
Jack came in and did a few takes, and then I came out and thanked him for singing lead on it. He didn’t understand at first. Carl and I had to explain to him what we did. “A Day in the Life of a Tree” is a big song because it’s about how people treat the earth, but it’s also a small song because it’s about how one living thing can feel stripped down and wrong for the world. In a way it’s not so different from “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times.”