I Am Brian Wilson

by Brian Wilson

  If I’m not at home, I still try to walk. There are parks and beaches everywhere. In Maui once I came up a path and someone else was coming the other way. It was Magic Johnson. “Hi, Brian,” he said. I waved, saying, “Hey, Magic.” I kept walking. I had season tickets to the Lakers back then, so I knew I would see him again.

  When I came off the road at the end of 1964, I was sure I wouldn’t play any more shows. In fact, Hawaii was one of the rare places I went onstage with the band after that. We went there in 1967. A promoter had scheduled a pair of shows there that we were going to film, maybe for a live album. I didn’t want to travel. I hadn’t traveled since Houston. But the guys kept asking me to go and finally I said I would, but only if they would let me bring my Baldwin organ. I loved the sounds it got. That meant that Carl would have to play bass. Bruce didn’t want to take the trip. It was funny, in a way. He had gone out on the road instead of me, and now I was going out on the road instead of him.

  We did two shows in Hawaii like we were supposed to, but the record label didn’t think we sounded right. When we got back, we went up to Wally Heider Studios in San Francisco and tried to remake the whole live record in the studio, like with Beach Boys’ Party! That didn’t work, and we ended up scrapping the album.

  Off the road in ’64, I was happier in the studio. I was a little worried that I was letting the guys down or that I couldn’t live up to our reputation. I decided the only way to prove my decision wasn’t a mistake was to write the best songs and make the best music.

  It wasn’t easy at first. I was trying to get peace and quiet so I could think of new songs, but there were so many voices. Some of them were the voices of the band, trying to figure out what I was doing. My dad’s voice was in there, telling me I was weak. And then there were all the other voices, the ones that tell me that I’m worthless, that I should give up, that they’ll kill me.

  I have heard those voices for a long time, maybe fifty years now. They first came to me when I was twenty-two, after I took LSD. LSD was something that people told me made your mind larger, and that sounded interesting to me. I was interested in exploring ways of getting expanded. The first time I took it, I had to go hide in a bedroom, and I thought mostly about my parents and whether I should be afraid of them. I also started to play what became “California Girls” on the piano, that sound of the cowboy riding into town. I played it and played it until I heard other things inside of it. But about a week after that, the first voices started to pop up. They’d sound like a real person’s voice, a person different from me who I couldn’t control, but inside my own head. I didn’t know what to do with them.

  I stopped with the acid for about a year but then took it again when I was twenty-three. I’m not sure why I went back to it. Just young and stupid, I guess. Doctors have told me that the voices didn’t come from the acid, that they would have happened anyway, but I’m not sure. I didn’t have them before. When I was fourteen or fifteen I had anxiety spells. I would try to talk and fall into a stammer or stutter. I got locked up for a few seconds, frozen in place. That phase lasted about six months and it went away.

  The voices are different from that. They are frightening. There have been times when they came every day and other times when they left me alone. When I’m working on a record in the studio, they’re less likely to be there. Lots of the music I’ve made has been my way of trying to get rid of those voices. Other strategies didn’t really work. Alcohol didn’t work, and drugs didn’t work, and sleeping didn’t work, and never sleeping didn’t work. All those things worked for a little while, but they never worked long. Those are the voices that people call mental illness. What does that mean exactly? It’s part of my brain that doesn’t change, so what has to change is the way I deal with it. The voices won’t disappear, so I have to make sure that I don’t disappear because of them.

  What made it worse, at least early on, was that the voices in my head that were trying to do away with me were in a crowded space. They were in there with other voices that were trying to make something beautiful. Voices were the problem but also the answer. The answer was in harmony. That’s what I worked on after I came off the road in 1964. There was a period when I tried to make music that captured all those voices. One of the first songs we recorded then was “Do You Wanna Dance?,” a cover of an old Bobby Freeman song. Dennis sang lead vocals on it, and he did a great job—just straight-ahead rock and roll, with guitars and saxophones churning underneath. Then, around thirty seconds into the song, we got to the chorus and the whole thing just exploded. Al came in. Mike came in. Carl came in. I came in. We’re singing high. We’re singing low. We’re weaving around each other and through each other.

  Because that’s a dance song, people don’t think of it as a spiritual thing, but it is, because it’s harmony. Our harmonies were always a very spiritual sound, a very beautiful sound. You start with one voice and go a third up and a third up to an octave. All of it is serving this one main melody, and it’s really wonderful. It makes you feel so good, and that’s one of the main jobs of music. Any music that gets to your soul like that is soul music. And it helps to remind you that voices are beautiful instead of dark things that echo in your head. What’s strange with harmonies is that I can hear them very much when I’m in the studio but not very much outside. When I walk into the studio, music happens and the voices stop happening. It’s a kind of magic. I don’t know what kind. But it happens for me mostly in the studio.

  Recently I was watching the news, like I do every day. It’s news at four, then Wheel of Fortune, then Jeopardy! One of the stories on the news was about how anxiety and creativity are linked. There was some big study at a university, and the doctors who did the study said that anxiety and creativity are sort of the same thing: both of them are about dealing less with what’s in front of you and more with what’s in your head. Listening to what’s in your head, especially when you’re a person with anxiety, leads to negative emotions. But they’re also a form of imagination. If you can worry about problems when there aren’t problems around, then you can also think of stories or songs when there aren’t stories or songs around. You can make things go from not existing to existing.

  I thought about that news report after I turned off the TV. So what if my brain gets worried before I go out onstage, wondering if the audience will like me? Maybe that’s because it’s the same brain that thinks of new melodies. So what if my brain gets worried before it gets on an airplane? Maybe that’s because it’s the same brain that can put instruments and voices together. When we were getting ready to go to London to do the concert that became the Pet Sounds Live album, I was nervous. I don’t like planes. But these days, being on the plane isn’t the worst part. The worst part is thinking about them before I get on them. I didn’t sleep the whole night before we were flying. Jerry Weiss, who takes care of everything for me when we’re on the road, asked me what I think about when a plane is taking off. I think, “Don’t blow up . . . don’t blow up . . . don’t blow up.” I hear myself saying it inside my head, and in a weird way I’m happy to hear it. I need to hear that voice, not to silence the other voices but to try to make some kind of harmony with them. Learning to let all those voices work together is what let me make records like “Do You Wanna Dance?” or “Help Me, Ronda.”

  Or Pet Sounds. I thought about Pet Sounds at my birthday party at Mulholland Grill, because I was thinking about “You Still Believe in Me” when I was looking at Melinda, and also because the live record had just come out. But the truth is that I think about it often. It’s one of the records people ask about the most.

  It’s hard to say exactly when the sound of Pet Sounds started. It was something that was coming for a while. Maybe it started when I first heard “Be My Baby” on the radio and I began to understand how you could make emotions through sound. Maybe it started when I began to understand more about soul singers like Dionne Warwick and Aretha Franklin and how they could make you feel amazing things with small vocal gest
ures. Maybe it started on the second side of The Beach Boys Today! when I started to make softer and slower songs that weren’t exactly love ballads but instead were snapshots of how I was feeling as I grew up. It was probably all those things put together. But it started to change what I was doing.

  The first song on that album is “Please Let Me Wonder,” which I cut at ten o’clock at night at Western. I was starting to sing more about what people were thinking and dreaming about when they were in love, and how sometimes it was about what they didn’t have more than what they had. “Kiss Me, Baby” was one of the last songs we recorded in 1964, though we did the vocals early the next year. It’s about romance, but really it’s about a fight and maybe even a breakup; the romance is just imagined. “She Knows Me Too Well” had a great whiny falsetto sound, much better than “Let Him Run Wild.” I would call myself a versatile singer. I can sing sweet with emotion, but I can also do other kinds of vocals. It’s a cool message, too, one of those lyrics about a guy who is insecure and is able to say so in the song:

  I get so jealous of the other guy

  And then I’m not happy ‘til I make her break down and cry

  When I look at other girls it must kill her inside

  But it’d be another story if she looked at the guys

  But she knows me

  She knows me too well

  Knows me so well

  That she can tell

  I really love her

  She knows me too well

  And “In the Back of My Mind” grew out of a song that already existed; the seed of the melody was the Skyliners’ “Since I Don’t Have You,” a beautiful ballad from the late ’50s. That must have been echoing in my head somewhere, and I wrote a new song about a guy who wasn’t able to be honest about everything that scared him.

  I’m blessed with everything

  A world to which a man can cling

  So happy times when I break out in tears

  In the back of my mind I still have my fears

  That was one of the most honest lines I ever wrote: “In the back of my mind I still have my fears.” I’ve never been afraid to admit fear. But I didn’t sing that line. I had Dennis do it because he never really had a chance to sing very much. I thought his vocal was great.

  The quieter and sadder songs on the record were good, but the fast songs were great, too. “Dance, Dance, Dance” was fantastic. We cut that in Memphis, and when we got back to LA we did it again in a second version that I preferred. Carl wrote the guitar intro for that one. The record ended with “Bull Session with the ‘Big Daddy.’” People say it’s a spoken-word track, but it’s not really a track at all. It’s tape from an interview we did with Earl Leaf, a famous photographer who wasn’t related to my friend David Leaf. We put it on the end of the album to show the way we were in the studio when we weren’t making music. We ordered burgers with French fries and pickles. Al wasn’t there but Marilyn was. The part I remember best from that is when Earl asks about a show we did in Paris. The guys were talking about whether they played well or not, and whether they made any mistakes. “I still haven’t made a mistake in my whole career,” I said, and Dennis said, “Brian, we keep waiting for you to make a mistake.” Back then I was young and I said things out of confidence, but I was right to say it. I was strict with the guys if they got their harmonies wrong. I was searching for a sound that I wanted to get, and I knew how to get it. I tried never to be mean about it, but I also didn’t want to relax too much and let that sound get away.

  If the sound of Pet Sounds didn’t start on The Beach Boys Today!, maybe it was on Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!). Even though that record had big hits like “California Girls,” they were hits that were pushing us further in the direction I wanted to go. The song had an orchestral lead-in, and the main beat sounded like a cowboy and his horse walking into town but was borrowed from Bach. It was an opening, and I went through it. The other big hit was “Help Me, Rhonda,” which was a remake of “Help Me, Ronda” that we did faster and with slightly different lyrics. It was also just a better feel. The whole year after the flight to Houston, I kept thinking about what kinds of songs I should be making, and whether there were any limits to how a pop song could sound. I couldn’t really think of any limits.

  I knew I had to explore that sound more. I had to go further in that direction, bring more orchestration and different kinds of arrangements into our music. One of the first songs we tried after that was “The Little Girl I Once Knew.” It was like a sequel to “California Girls.” The first two notes of the intro are Chinese tones. I sang harmony with Carl on that record. It was one of our best, but it didn’t sell at all. And when records didn’t sell at all, record companies started to put pressure on us. They wanted more music fast. I didn’t have more music fast. I was exploring. That wasn’t good enough for Capitol. The holidays were coming up, and they requested an album they could sell at the holidays. Maybe “requested” is the wrong way to say it. They expected one. I wasn’t ready with any new material yet, so we put out an album called Beach Boys’ Party! It was recorded to sound like it was live, but we cut it in the studio and sang mostly covers: we did the Rivingtons’ “Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow,” the Everly Brothers’ “Devoted to You,” and Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’.”

  There was one big hit from that record that everyone knows, an old doo-wop song by the Regents called “Barbara Ann.” It was pretty simple, and we tore through it. Dean Torrence sang with us. It almost got to number one on the charts. Lots of people know that song because of what happened later, in the ’70s, when the ayatollah in Iran took American hostages and people started to make parodies of “Barbara Ann” called “Bomb Iran.” But in 1965 it wasn’t that kind of party. The whole record was just for fun, a way of getting a new Beach Boys record into stores. I got to sing “There’s No Other (Like My Baby),” a Phil Spector song he did with the Crystals. And then we did two Beatles songs, “Tell Me Why” and “I Should Have Known Better.” Just after we released the party record, the Beatles put out Rubber Soul. It came just at the right time. I was right in the middle of the next big thing.

  The next big thing, at least at first, was an old song. It was a Bahamian folk ballad called “The John B. Sails.” Al recommended the song. He was a folk guy from way back, and he always loved the Kingston Trio’s recording of the song. He kept saying that we should do our own version of it. I wasn’t sure because I didn’t know that much about folk music, but Al kept saying he knew it could work as a Beach Boys song. To show me, he sat and played it on the piano. When he did that, then I heard how I could make the song work, and I got excited. I worked for a day and then called Al to come back and listen to what I cut. He loved it. It wasn’t just that, though. Sometimes you love something because it’s familiar. Sometimes you love it because it reminds you of something else you loved. That’s what I would have expected. But I watched him while he was listening to it, and I could tell from the way he looked that he loved it in a different way. He loved it the way you love something new, like a girl you have just talked to for the first time. I knew that we were going in a new direction. The song deserved its own title. The original folk song was called “The John B. Sails,” and the Kingston Trio version was called “The Wreck of the John B.” We changed the title again, to “Sloop John B,” which was the same name as a version Dick Dale had done. We weren’t completely past our surf roots.

  When we recorded it, we went to Western with Chuck Britz, and I tried to match the arrangement I had in my head with all the studio players, who were the same people as usual, Hal Blaine and Carol Kaye and Billy Strange playing a twelve-string and the rest. We double tracked the bass. We had a glockenspiel. We had flutes, more than one. I don’t remember exactly how many takes we had to go through to get it right, but I know it was more than ten, because that’s where I lost count. When we put it out as a single, I held my breath a little bit. It was the first song in a while that I knew was going into uncharted territ
ory, but I didn’t want that to mean it would miss the chart. It didn’t. It was the fastest-selling single we had ever put out. It sold a half million copies in its first two weeks, went to number three in the United States, and did even better around the world. It went to number one on three different continents: Europe (Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland), Africa (South Africa), and Asia (New Zealand).

  The song’s success meant that I could keep going and keep exploring. It meant that the other voices that doubted me—in the group and at the record label and inside my own head—quieted down for a little bit. I was writing songs as fast as I could. Some of them came easy. Some came hard. I was doing the lyrics with Tony Asher, who I was introduced to by a guy named Loren Schwartz. Loren was the same guy who introduced me to marijuana and LSD, which gave me some ideas, and also to Tony Asher, who gave me more. Tony was working in advertising and he was interested in music, and I just went on my gut instinct that Tony would be a great lyricist. It was complete vibe and instinct. I liked the way he talked. The rest of the band was in and out of Los Angeles; they went to tour Japan in January, the Midwest in February and March, Texas in April. When they came home between tour stops, they put down their vocal tracks. It was a new way of working, and it was better in some ways but worse in others.