by Brian Wilson
Walking down the path of life
Feel His presence day and night
In me, with me all the time
His love comes to me so sublime
Warms me, heals me, wash my sins away
Shows me how to live my life each day
Every night, I will pray
I’ll be good every day
Make me strong, show the way
When I was a little child
I learned that prayer was so worthwhile
As I grow, I’m on my own
But I will never be alone
A bunch more songs poured out of me at that time, some of which I knew I had to put out as soon as I could, some of which I never released. We finished up the SMiLE 2004 tour in Auckland, New Zealand, and I remember getting back to the house in California and telling Melinda it was the best tour I had ever been on. I thanked her again for pushing me to do it. It was the best thing I could have done, no matter how much it scared me at the time.
Christmas 2004 was a good time. The holiday vibe around the house was great, and I was sure that nothing would get me down. But then I was watching the news on TV the day after Christmas and the announcer came on and said that there was a massive tsunami in Asia. A few hundred thousand people were killed or missing. My heart sank. So many people were hurting. And then it hit me more personally. For SMiLE, we toured and recorded with the Stockholm Strings and Horns, great players from Sweden. Markus Sundland, our cellist, went vacationing with his girlfriend, Sofi, in Phuket, Thailand. They were there when the tsunami hit. They were sitting by a pool, and when the wave hit they were swept away. Sofi got lucky and was taken up into a tree. She was there for three hours with both of her legs broken, but she lived. Markus was missing. We were all devastated. Melinda and I went on CNN with Larry King to publicize Markus being missing and to see if we could get some help in locating him. They found his body weeks later. We were all heartbroken. But even then I noticed a difference. I was sad, but I wasn’t so down that I couldn’t get back up. I was sad and able to use the things I was feeling to put emotions into my music. That was the way it was supposed to work.
CHAPTER 7
Sun
Catch a wave and you’re sittin’ on top of the world
—“Catch a Wave”
I never thought about topping SMiLE, not even after “Walking Down the Path of Life” got me pointed back in the right direction. It couldn’t be topped. But I started to have some sense of the right direction. In the beginning of 2005, Clive Davis contacted me to see if I would be interested in making a Christmas album. It made sense, in a way. The first spark of the second version of SMiLE came at that Christmas party when I sat down at the piano and started to play “Heroes and Villains.” And I loved Christmas albums. Phil Spector’s A Christmas Gift for You was one of the best albums ever, even if my piano playing didn’t make it onto “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.” And the Beach Boys’ Christmas album, the one from 1964, was one of my favorite projects, in a way, because we got to work with Dick Reynolds. That Christmas album was a split. Side one was originals I wrote, some with Mike, about the holidays. We wrote “Little Saint Nick,” which was a Christmas version of “Little Deuce Coupe.” We wrote “The Man with All the Toys,” which was a great song about Santa Claus that was like a postcard. It was just what someone would see if they happened to see Santa working in his workshop:
Someone found a lighted house
Late one night
And he saw through the window
A sight
A big man in a chair
And little tiny men everywhere
When I went back into the studio to do a new Christmas album in 2005, I rerecorded both of those songs. “The Man with All the Toys” felt different to sing now that I was older and bigger. I had some unfinished pieces of music that I gave to Bernie Taupin and Jimmy Webb to finish as holiday songs, and they did. Bernie took “Nobody Ever Did Me Like You Do,” the ballad I wrote for Melinda in New York, and put on some new lyrics; the song ended up being “What I Really Want for Christmas,” the title track. Bernie did a beautiful job, and it’s a beautiful holiday song. Jimmy’s song, “Christmasey,” was great, too. There are certain guys who can write lyrics like that, and I don’t know if there will be too many more of them. When you make something like the Christmas record, you can show the full range of what you know about production. Check out “On Christmas Day.” Listen to the dynamics and the way it builds. It’s got a great strong, slow-rock vibe. I did some traditional songs, too, though not “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.” I never did get to play piano on that song.
We recorded that album in April and then went back on the road for the summer. We were touring in Europe. We played a lot of great places, like the Glastonbury Festival. We went to Liverpool, where the Beatles were from, and sang their song “Tell Me Why” as a tribute to them—I hadn’t sung it since 1965, when we did a version on the Beach Boys’ Party! album. The next day we were flying from Liverpool to Ireland to play a few shows there. The airport in Liverpool was called John Lennon Airport. Can you imagine that? The flight from Liverpool to Dublin was a real trip. The entire plane was full of fans coming to see us play in Ireland. I was talking to everyone on the airplane sitting near me. People were singing the whole way. Someone called the plane Wilson Air and that stuck. I decided to cook up something special for the Irish fans, and the next night, in Cork, I taught the band the vocals for “Walking Down the Path of Life.” When we came out for the encore, instead of going to my keyboard at center stage, I went to Darian’s on the side. It was just me and the band doing vocals, and me standing up and playing keyboard with no other instruments. It came out great. That was the only time I debuted a new song that way. It was a spiritual feeling.
On that summer tour we did two nights in Rome. On our day off we went to Vatican City. We were downstairs in the catacombs where all the popes were buried. The guide told us about each tomb and the pope who was inside it. While he was talking, I slipped away. I wanted to sneak off to the tomb of John Paul II, who had died just a few months before. He was a good man. I wanted to look at where he was buried and think about that. As I was walking back to the tour, at least a dozen people came up and thanked me for my music. They weren’t all American. One couple was German. One woman was Japanese. There was an Australian family. They were from all over the world. I was still thinking about the pope and how everyone ends up the same eventually. All that’s different is what we leave behind.
Those thoughts stayed in my head. That alone was a sign that it was a good year. I had been in so many periods of darkness and confusion when I couldn’t hold on to my own thoughts. But toward the end of SMiLE my thoughts started to stay with me, and that continued on through 2005. I would go to sleep thinking about songs and wake up still thinking about them. They didn’t disappear. They just got a little fuller.
My new ideas also helped me to think about old ideas. That came from SMiLE, too. I had been back in the old tapes with Darian and Van Dyke, and that meant that I had to go back in time and figure out why I made certain choices. After SMiLE, lots of other old songs started to pop up in my mind. At some point I had worked on a version of “Proud Mary.” I love that song. I loved the original that John Fogerty did with Creedence Clearwater Revival, but I especially loved the version that Phil Spector did with Tina Turner. He took that cool rock and roll riff and just made it sound so big. I cut a version of it with Don Was where we had a big choir. It was a great version, but it never came out. I didn’t even know where the tape of those sessions was anymore. Almost ten years later I woke up thinking about it. I cut another version at Scott Bennett’s house. It was great. It had some pop. But I could hear that it wasn’t perfect, that the mix didn’t have enough left-hand synth bass on the second verse. I have to get Scott to remix that one of these days. It still bugs the hell out of me.
When I listened to that song or any other song, I started to hear those layers again.
When a song came on the radio, I saw it in my mind as a whole thing, and then in pieces, and then I saw the pieces come together.
One day the song “That Lucky Old Sun” popped into my head. It was an old song about how hard it is to work and be a man but how easy it is to just be the sun and stay in the sky all day. The song was written by Beasley Smith and Haven Gillespie, the same people who wrote “The Old Master Painter,” which we put a piece of on SMiLE. “That Lucky Old Sun” was a big hit for Frankie Laine in the late ’40s, and everyone else sang it, too. Sinatra did it great. When I was little and his version came out, there was another version on the radio by Louis Armstrong. That was the version I liked the most. In California in 2005, I heard his version in my head. I thought I knew where the melody went and where the harmonies went. I thought I remembered that Gordon Jenkins produced it. Gordon Jenkins was a great arranger who worked with Sinatra, too. He did Where Are You?, which was one of Sinatra’s great albums, in 1957, and that same year he did a Christmas album called A Jolly Christmas from Frank Sinatra. Sinatra didn’t sing many of the same Christmas songs that I did on my albums.
I wanted to make sure that Gordon Jenkins did that version of “That Lucky Old Sun” for Louis Armstrong, so I went down to Tower Records to buy it. While I was there, I spent longer than usual looking through all the records. I looked at jazz and I looked at country and I looked at lots of rock and roll. I even bought a CD of the original Pet Sounds. No one could believe that I didn’t already have one in my house. When I was driving home, I listened to it, which wasn’t something I liked to do. Listening to SMiLE again was one thing, because that was a way of finishing it. Listening to Pet Sounds was more difficult. We had re-created it onstage, which I liked, but the original album was all memories. I had to skip “God Only Knows.” It was too hard. It reminded me of Carl, and that reminded me of everything else.
After I got “That Lucky Old Sun,” I reworked it completely. I used the lyrics but rearranged the chords. No one had ever done a version of the song like that. And then there was another burst of ideas. Or maybe it was that the burst at the end of SMiLE never went away. Ideas were coming almost faster than I could get to the piano. During that time I called Ray every morning to sing him little bits of pieces I was working on. I called him at five o’clock in the morning every day—he was back in New York, so it was eight o’clock his time. I never called so that he would hear the phone ring at 7:58 or 8:01. It was always eight. I was in bed still, but I needed feedback before I started working for the day. I would sing him a melody or tell him an idea for lyrics. I didn’t want him to tell me that it was good if he didn’t think so. But mostly he thought so. He would tell me that they were great. Or if he thought they were even better than great he would say that. He came up with a code so he could say it quicker: WCW, which meant World-Class Wilson. I was writing lots of WCW.
Right around that time, Dr. Landy died. He had lung cancer and got pneumonia and wasn’t strong enough to fight it off. He had been living in Hawaii at the time. When I heard about it, I was shocked. There wasn’t any good way to react. Parts of me were sad. Parts of me were guilty. Parts of me were relieved. Overall, it really knocked me back a step. But being knocked back a step in 2006 was different from being knocked back a step in other years. There were times in my life when it would have sent me to my chair or to my bed. But in 2006 I was working, and I just gathered up the news and kept moving into more work.
I don’t think I really reacted, in some ways, and maybe I didn’t even understand what it meant until years later when I read an interview with John Fogerty. John used to live down the street from me and Melinda; we would see him out jogging and sometimes at the deli. In the interview, John was talking about how he felt when Saul Zaentz died. Zaentz was the owner of Fantasy Records, and he took all of John’s songs away from him after Creedence Clearwater Revival ended. They were tied up in so many lawsuits. John said that if you had asked him when he was younger how he would react when Saul Zaentz died, he would have said that he would go to the funeral and stand on the grave and dance up and down. But when it actually happened, he just looked at his wife and shrugged. Time passed. Things meant less or they meant different things.
That’s sort of how I felt in a world without Landy. At first I mostly called people. I called my daughters and my friends. I called some people who had known me when I was with Dr. Landy. It was weird to give them the news about him. I was still around and he was gone, and I was the one who was strong enough to say so. And then I just sat in a room and thought. I thought about the first time I ever met Dr. Landy and how desperate I was back then to get control of my life, of any part of it. He helped me do that. But he went too far. He went too far in every direction.
People sometimes ask me if Dr. Landy was a father figure, if he did the kinds of things that my dad did. I don’t think he was. Both of them liked to put themselves in charge of me and tell me what was best for me. But my dad loved me. He loved all of us. Helping us with the band benefitted him. He got profits. But he wasn’t only interested in the profit. Dr. Landy seemed at some point like he was only interested in the profit, in getting his name on my songs and taking credit and taking money and getting his name on my legal papers. Landy might have helped me a little bit, might have helped so that I didn’t sink lower and maybe even out of sight, but it was far outweighed by all the horrible things he did. Nine years of bullshit, remember. Also, I was partly my dad. I could sense things in me that were things in him. That didn’t happen with Dr. Landy, not even when he died. I only thought about the things in me that were different from the things in him. When my dad died in 1973, it really knocked me down. When Dr. Landy died in 2006, I heard the news and sat and thought about it for a while, and then I got back to work.
The songs kept coming, in pieces and sometimes whole. I talked to Scott Bennett about them almost every day, and we were often at his house recording. On the way over, we used to listen to Pet Sounds in the car, especially “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder).” That was my Valium. I wasn’t always up for listening to old songs, but that summer I really felt the connection. “That Lucky Old Sun” became a kind of beginning for the songs, and they moved out in all directions from there. I was excited about the new songs. I wanted to release them the way they were, but the band felt differently. Scott and Mark Linett and Jeff Foskett thought they needed to be rerecorded. Melinda agreed. Everyone agreed, really. They kept saying their opinion and eventually I decided they were right. I decided to turn them all into one album.
But when I laid out the songs, I didn’t always see how they were related to each other. Some of them were about memory and how it repeated in you, how echoes either brought you back things you had heard earlier or let you hear things differently. Some of them were about California. One was about Mexico. A few were love songs. Sometimes it’s okay to leave songs on their own. Sometimes you want to tie them together. That’s the real meaning of an album, going way back—people collected songs in a kind of book. I wanted the songs to be their own book. The only person I thought could do that was Van Dyke. We were both still humming a little bit from SMiLE, and when we spoke about the new songs, I asked him to write some narration over theme music I was composing. I thought it would tie the whole project together.
The album came into focus that way. We started with “That Lucky Old Sun,” the actual song, though not a full version of it. That became the title song. It was an album about suns moving across the sky all day, but also rising and setting. The whole thing would be like a day, and it would make you think of other days. That would let us make an album that was about memory and echoes. After “That Lucky Old Sun,” the next song was “Morning Beat,” which I wrote about a typical day of mine, and then I spoke a section of Van Dyke’s narration that we called “Room with a View”:
Just now I was thinkin’ ’bout another perfect day
Wishing it would come again your way
Down below, a sparkled
city scatters by the bay
Tells you your suspicions are at play
One by one, a carpet of star-spangled cities sleep
Like so many dancing diamonds with a beat
Each of them are home with walls of stories they could tell
Meet the crack of dawn
A freeway starts to roll
An owl hoots it’s last good-bye to a coyote on patrol
Each day keeps me guessin’
Will you take what I’m confessing?
Will you find the heartbeat in LA?
What was the heartbeat in LA? Partly it was old Beach Boys songs. Scott and I decided that it was okay to be nostalgic sometimes. I had been making music for almost fifty years. There must have been some songs or ideas that I could go back to and look at again. We wrote “Forever She’ll Be My Surfer Girl” as a love song not to a girl but to the actual song. There’s a line in the lyrics, “Sweet voices right from heaven / Radio seven,” partly because “Surfer Girl” went to number seven in Billboard and partly because the BBC has Radio 2, and I liked the sound of Radio 7.
“Oxygen to the Brain” was an especially great song for me. It was about getting through challenges, no matter how difficult they seemed. When I sang it, I thought about all the times I refused to give up, all the times I had pain and doubt but decided instead to make music. That meant that I was thinking about every day. That’s the thing about mental illness. It’s a struggle every single day, so you have to invent ways of getting through it. You have to come out the other end with the right parts of you still in place. That’s what that song was about, learning to do that: