by Brian Wilson
I went outside wearing just pants, and usually inside I didn’t have a shirt either. That was not a good time. I was 270 pounds. I didn’t always remember to shower. I stayed in bed or roamed the halls of the house like a ghost. The only place I could settle down and feel like I wasn’t coming apart was at the piano.
I loved Marilyn but it wasn’t working at all. She had been with me since the beginning. It was so important to have her because she was one of the only people who helped me get through anything with my father or my brothers or the band or the voices or the drugs. But things were whirling around me. It was all happening a thousand miles an hour and I was afraid to even step off. You can’t step off of something going that fast.
Carnie was singing at her grade school graduation. I had my short soldier hair then. She was in a play about a circus, and in her part she worked with a magician and sang a song. I couldn’t believe how she sang. It was beautiful, and I knew singing. That was a nice feeling. That made me proud.
Another time Marilyn and I went to Disneyland. I love Disneyland. It’s one of my favorite places. We watched the fireworks. We came home and brought candy for the kids. They were scared because there was an earthquake, just a little one. We sat in our bed and ate candy.
Things got worse. I was at home or out in the driveway without a shirt. I was deep inside drinking and drugs and almost never with the group. The voices were still coming, and I was having a harder time doing things that would quiet them down. Then Dr. Landy came for the first time, and for a little while I got better. I was back with the group starting right around the Bicentennial, and we were making the kinds of records I wanted. One of the best of those was Love You, in 1977. I was able to use the studio again the way I used it with Pet Sounds, and I wrote some songs that were about how I felt in my thirties, the same way that Pet Sounds was about how I felt in my twenties. I wanted to make a record to help everyone around me feel better. We picked up an old song called “Good Time” that Al and I did back around the time of Sunflower. “Good Time” was just what it said it was, a light song about spending time with girlfriends:
My girlfriend Betty, she’s always ready
To help me in any way
She’ll do my cookin’
She’s always lookin’
For ways she can make my day
And when I’m lookin’ at her
The sound of pitter-patter
On rainy days like today
Could get you feelin’ warmer
And you know what-a that can lead to
Maybe it won’t last but what do we care
My baby and I just want a good time
Might go up in smoke now but what do we care
My baby and I just want a good time
“Good Time” was originally on the album Marilyn did with her sister, in the group we called Spring, but with all the names of girlfriends changed to boyfriends: Betty was Eddie instead, and then later there was a girl named Penny that we had to change to a guy named O’Ryan. “Ding Dang” was another song brought in from an older session. It’s one of my favorite songs ever, even though it’s less than a minute long. It makes the whole album for me. I wrote that with Roger McGuinn. I was at his house, talking to him, and I said we should write a song together. We started with a simple line: “I love a girl, I love her so madly / I treat her so fine but she treats me so badly.” Later on I wrote the “Ding Dang” part. The keyboard riff has been stuck in my head for years. I love it so much. When a riff is that great, there’s a bigger song that stretches out on both sides of the song on the record. The “Ding Dang” on the album is only like a snapshot of a larger idea.
Lots of that record is great party music: “Mona,” “Honkin’ Down the Highway.” There’s a beautiful ballad called “The Night Was So Young.” We sang great harmonies on that. “Johnny Carson,” which Mike sang with Carl, was a very intimate tune. I tried to depict the mood of watching The Tonight Show, and also how hard it was to be an entertainer year after year.
When guests are boring he fills up the slack
Johnny Carson
The network makes him break his back
Johnny Carson
Ed McMahon comes on and says, “Here’s Johnny”
Every night at eleven thirty he’s so funny
Don’t you think he’s such a natural guy
The way he’s kept it up could make you cry
People thought it was a strange way to use music, to write a song like that, but I was using everything I had learned. That album has lots of sounds. I love the way the vocals leapfrog each other during the “Don’t you think he’s such a natural guy” line. Marilyn and I did a duet on “Let’s Put Our Hearts Together,” which was a really sweet song about marriage. One thing on that album was the synthesizer bass lines. I did all the bass lines for the record with an ARP and a Moog synthesizer. A song like “I’ll Bet He’s Nice,” which is about a guy telling a girl that he doesn’t want to hear about her new guy and how great he is, could have easily been on The Beach Boys Today! but it would have sounded completely different. The way it is on Love You, it’s an amazing machine bass sound that just pulls the whole song into it. It’s like an undertow. Those were some of the best bass lines I ever wrote.
I also love the cover of that record. It was really colorful. The overall mood was trying to celebrate good things even if they were surrounded by problems. I tried to carry that mood into the shows we did for that record. It was fun to go out behind a record that I really believed in, but it was tense. Sometimes I was hoarse. Sometimes the other guys were—Dennis came out for an encore in Philadelphia to sing “You Are So Beautiful,” which people know mostly from the Joe Cocker version but don’t know that Dennis helped write. And sometimes there were backstage blowups. Mike was getting on my nerves at that time. He always had a slightly different idea about who we needed to be as a band. He wanted to be at the center, and he had the energy to do it. Sometime during that tour, I socked him. He didn’t like what I was wearing. It was a blue-and-silver pleated cape, like an Elvis thing. Mike told me I looked silly and I just started slugging him. I was really hitting. Stan Love, Mike’s brother, and a guy named Rocky Pamplin, who went with us on the road as bodyguards, pulled me off him. Mike didn’t hit me back. If he did, he would have knocked me unconscious. Instead, I remember a strange feeling of waiting for something that never happened. Lots of that tour was that feeling.
It wasn’t just the band. On “Good Time” there was a lyric that could have been about the band or also could have been about my marriage to Marilyn: “Maybe it won’t last but what do we care / My baby and I just want a good time.” Well, I was only partly right. It didn’t last, and I did care. When I was in the mental hospital in San Diego, I called Marilyn and asked for a divorce. She said yes. I didn’t know what else to do. Things were either whirling even faster or they were just stopped still in the air around me. There was more of my life to live. I had to meet Melinda. I had to get back in the studio and onstage. But I didn’t know any of that yet. I was floating on the sea for a while there.
In 1978 I went back to a mental hospital in San Diego. Some people said mental facility. It wasn’t the first time. I had been to one back in the late ’60s. I don’t remember much about the time in San Diego. It was the same time as my divorce from Marilyn. One of the nurses there was a girl name Carolyn, a black woman, and when I got discharged I asked her if she would come work for me and take care of me. We ended up going together for a few years. I was living first in a rented house on Sunset and then in Pacific Palisades. My head wasn’t on straight at all and I would sometimes say stupid things to her. Once I got impatient and said, “Get your black ass in there and make me lunch.” I apologized immediately but I didn’t feel right about it. She split pretty soon and it was mostly because of me. I’m sorry about it even today. Carolyn, no.
I didn’t feel right about her or myself or anything. Dr. Landy was gone and things got worse, and then he came b
ack and things got better for a little while. Then they got worse again. He took the Green Tree house where I’d been living and had me rent another house on Latigo Shore Drive in Malibu. In that house, he had me on lots of medications. I wasn’t sure I needed all of them, but some of the ones I was taking prevented me from saying anything about the other ones. I used to lie in bed and make noises to calm myself down. Someone came in and asked me what was wrong. Maybe it was Gloria. Was she there by that time? Whoever it was didn’t get an answer. She went to open the curtains and I told her not to. I had it in my head that someone was coming to kill me. I heard noises coming. She listened with me and said it was just the ocean. But it didn’t sound like the ocean to me. Sometimes the noises and the voices made me angry and I started punching the wall. I punched it hard enough to bleed. I got a stud.
Daytime was better. The drapes were usually closed, but I could sense the light and I knew that it was there. I heard voices during the daytime, too, but they were gentler. Gloria came and sat with me. I’m sure it was Gloria. I tried to tell her what the voices were saying. They were telling me bad things about myself. Sometimes they told me to do things I knew I shouldn’t do. Sometimes she would say that she heard voices, too. The voices she said she heard were telling me that I needed to rest. I don’t know if she really heard them. But I was tired and I couldn’t tell if there was light behind the drapes and I listened to her voices. I know Gloria was there because once Dr. Landy was trying to get my attention by grabbing my chin and squeezing. Gloria told him that it wasn’t right to do that, and then Dr. Landy said that he was going to call immigration. I told him not to do that.
At the worst of it, I didn’t have any energy. I forgot to brush my teeth. Sometimes I couldn’t make it to the bathroom at all. It’s nothing I remember very well. It was like being drunk all the time but worse. It was just like being in dark clouds.
So many things happened, but I can’t easily put them in order. Once I was in the Malibu emergency room getting a weigh-in and this guy walked up to me. He had curly hair and was on the short side. “Are you Brian Wilson?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Hi,” he said. “I’m Bob Dylan.” He was there because he had broken his thumb. We talked a little bit about nothing. I was a big fan of his lyrics, of course. “Like a Rolling Stone” was one of the best songs, you know? And “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” and so many more. What a songwriter! I invited him over to my house for lunch the next day.
That was a longer conversation. We just talked and talked about music. We talked about old songs we remembered, songs before rock and roll. We talked about ideas we had. Nice guy. He added vocals to a song I was working on around that time called “The Spirit of Rock and Roll.”
But that was a rare bright spot. Most of the time that house in Latigo Shore was bad. It was bad for eating. It was bad for sleeping. It was bad for thinking. And it was bad for playing music. Once I was in the Jacuzzi relaxing and Dr. Landy came storming right at me. “Get your clothes on,” he said. He led me by the back of the neck down to the music room in the basement. We were in there for five or six hours. He kept asking me to make songs. But I didn’t have any songs in me. I didn’t have any voices in me, good or bad. There was no echo, only emptiness. Dr. Landy had no patience for the emptiness he had helped to make. He screamed at me. When my dad used to scream at me, the words were sharp. When Dr. Landy screamed, the words were flat. They didn’t sound like anything. I was numb to them. He bent down and put his face right next to mine, but I hardly heard a thing. He threw papers and threw pens and finally he left. Another day he put a sheet with music notation on the piano and asked me to play it. The music was simple. I could have played it. But I was so tired that I just wanted to go to bed. Dr. Landy wouldn’t let me go. “Do it,” he said. He screamed again, again without an exclamation point.
The worst part of all of was that I ended up disappointed in myself. Maybe I could have written a song. Maybe I should have played the music. In my life before Dr. Landy, in my life before the drugs that brought Dr. Landy, I knew how to deal with disappointments. When I was young, Phil Spector called me in to watch him produce a song for his Christmas record. We had met after I heard “Be My Baby” on the radio and drove over to tell him how much it meant to me. The Christmas song was “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.” He was using so many session musicians, an entire orchestra almost. Hal Blaine was there, and Leon Russell and Tommy Tedesco—all the guys who later played with the Beach Boys. Phil Spector asked me if I wanted to play piano. I couldn’t believe it. That was exactly what I wanted. “Just one thing,” he said. “Play it hard.” I played it as hard as I could. I really leaned on the keys.
Fifteen minutes later, Phil Spector came back into the studio. I was so excited. I stood up when I saw him coming. “Brian,” he said. “I don’t think I’m going to need you on this one.” I was disappointed, but I was cool about it. That was the business. You didn’t cry over spilled milk. And we ended up cutting our own version of the song the next year, on our own Christmas record. I didn’t play piano on that one either. It was Gene DiNovi, a great jazz pianist who played with almost everyone, from Dizzy Gillespie to Anita O’Day to Artie Shaw.
Not being able to play piano on “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” was bad news and a disappointment, but it didn’t depress me. But other times I would be in the middle of a perfectly good day, with no bad news for miles around, and I would get depressed. I would go to bed and wouldn’t get out for days. Sometimes it was simple depression, and sometimes it was other things, too—the voices in my head, or the sense that the world wasn’t spinning right. It felt like a big cloud moved over me after I junked SMiLE.
Even when we moved past it, I wasn’t okay with things. The idea of the record kept weighing me down. I could feel it on me whenever I started to get too far into hope and possibility. I would write a really cool tune, start the recording process, call the guys in, then suddenly lose interest and walk away from whatever I was doing. I started making up excuses like I didn’t feel good or I had a sore throat, anything I could come up with to avoid confronting my own work. I was afraid of failing, afraid my dad was right, afraid I couldn’t live up to the example that Phil Spector set for me. It was the depression creeping up on me that would eventually go over me completely, take away my spirit, and paralyze me for so many years.
I was in bed in the early ’70s. We recorded at my house, but for most of the morning I’d stay in bed. Then I would come downstairs and one of the guys from the band or an engineer would pull their head up and squint at me. “What’s the matter with you?” they would say. I wouldn’t know exactly. “I just feel down,” I’d say. I would work for a while and then go back upstairs. It was just a matter of steps. Back upstairs I would try to hear what they were doing, and sometimes someone would call up to me and say they needed me again. That’s how “Marcella” worked. I was mostly done with the production and I ran out of gas, so I left. A while later I heard them calling up to me. They wanted my voice. I went down and finished up the song. Once or twice I asked the guys to forgive me when I couldn’t be there, though I wasn’t sure why I was asking for forgiveness for something I wasn’t doing on purpose. Depression was something that went over me like a kind of tide. I can hear it in some of the music I made back then. Mike started saying that even the happy songs sounded sad.
Later on my mom told me that when my dad was upset about something—like when we fired him as the manager of the band—he got depressed and stayed in his bed for days. That wasn’t something I knew at the time. It’s strange to think about it, because maybe everything gets handed down through the blood. My dad drank, maybe because his dad did. That was what people did back then. They tried to make life better so it wouldn’t get worse. How they tried were just guesses, and sometimes they were wrong guesses. They were stabs in the dark.
I was listening to the radio once and they were interviewing some jazz p
roducer. He was talking about how Miles Davis once watched a movie that he had been asked to write a soundtrack for. It had a plot twist. One of the characters wasn’t who she was supposed to be, or maybe someone was dreaming and woke up in the middle. Anyway, he had a specific thing that he said about the movie afterward: “It’s got a wrinkle in it, don’t it?” I never saw the movie he was talking about. I don’t know that much about jazz. I don’t even know that much about Miles Davis. But what he said is true about life and every part of it. It’s got a wrinkle in it, don’t it?
When we put SMiLE away, Capitol was still on us for a next record. The record that came out of it, Smiley Smile, was a different kind of thing completely. The story has been told so often about me completely bailing out from the Beach Boys after I junked SMiLE and just cutting out to my room, but no way is that true at all. It’s total bullshit. Smiley Smile is the first and best piece of evidence. My instinct told me it was time to get the other guys involved in some of the production work. I leaned on Carl for most of it. He had been working with me in the booth here and there, especially during the Beach Boys’ Party! sessions, so it felt like he had it in the pocket.
For starters, we pared down some of the tracks I did for SMiLE and recut them ourselves, without the Wrecking Crew guys. We used only a few pieces: the backing track from “Heroes and Villains” came along with us, and also the end of “Vega-Tables.” We took “Good Vibrations,” which was already a huge hit and needed an album to be on. But other than that, it was all new. We went back into the home studio in Bel Air and cut the album in a month and a half, June and July 1967. The studio wasn’t quite ready yet. I had set it up to make demos. So to get certain effects, we had to do so many different things. We recorded vocals in the swimming pool. We recorded them in the shower. We got incredible effects with nothing fancy at all. We did them ourselves, without the Wrecking Crew guys. That was amazing. I would like to do that again, something kind of modest, without really rambunctious instrumental tracks.