I Am Brian Wilson

by Brian Wilson

  Let yourself float

  Don’t carry that weight

  Never destroy

  When you can create

  Ready steady

  California

  I’m fillin’ up

  My lungs again

  And breathin’ life

  Around that time Mike Love was over to my house for dinner. He and I were the only family left from the original band. Mike was a great front man. He always had so much energy. But seeing Mike was hard sometimes. He and I had been through so much that I didn’t even like to think about it. We had been in court once in the ’90s when he sued over royalties from the early songs. I lost that case during a trying time in my life. We were back in court in 2005 when he had a problem with a free CD that was given away by a newspaper in the UK. Mike had a funny way of looking at things. He was always an aggressive person. He was the one who wanted to try to arm wrestle Dennis the day we were doing “Surfin’ Safari” even though it was obvious that Dennis was going to kick his ass. That was his choice, his thing.

  What I thought about when I thought about Mike was something that happened before the lawsuits. It was the day the Beach Boys got into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It was in 1988. I had finished the first solo record I made with Dr. Landy, which was going to come out later in the year. I made a short speech and talked about how much I loved “Be My Baby.” I said I hoped that we would be back in twenty-seven years to get inducted again. It’s funny, because that’s how much time has gone by again. So much time has passed. After I spoke, Carl talked about missing Dennis. At that point it was only five years since Dennis drowned and all the sadness about it was still so recent. Finally Mike gave his speech. He talked about how harmony was both a musical idea and an idea about love. He said something about how Paul was suing Ringo and Yoko and couldn’t be there, and that was a shame because it wasn’t harmony. But then he started to talk about other bands. He said that we were still rocking better than them. He said he would like to see them do what we were doing. He called out lots of other people, like the Beatles and the Stones and Billy Joel. He said that Mick Jagger was “chickenshit to get onstage with the Beach Boys.” Carl looked over at me during that speech and said, “We’re fucked.” I didn’t really feel that way, but I didn’t feel the way Mike felt either. I just felt embarrassed for us. Some people thought Mike was joking, but I didn’t know him to joke in that way. Bob Dylan came on later and he joked for sure. He said, “I want to thank Mike Love for not mentioning me.”

  The day Mike came to dinner and I was working on That Lucky Old Sun, we went out to the car. I had written a song called “Mexican Girl,” which is probably the best song ever written about a Mexican girl. I played it for Mike and asked him if he would want to work on the lyrics. “I could make it twenty-five percent better, but I don’t want to,” he said. “If we do anything, I want to start from scratch.” There were times that would have made me sad or angry, but in the car it only made me laugh a little. Mike was Mike. You can’t wallow in the mire.

  The songs kept coming. I even recorded a tribute to my dad. I had always loved his song “His Little Darling and You.” It was beautiful to me when I was a kid and stayed beautiful whenever I went back to it in my head. When I was doing Lucky Old Sun, I borrowed part of that melody, reworked it, and put it in a song called “Just Like Me and You.” That ended up as a bonus track on a version of the album. But it was one of the ways I was proving I wasn’t afraid of making new things that were also old things. I wasn’t afraid of the past. That was the thing about the sun. It had to do the same thing every day and make it feel new. The sun was good at that. It was one of the reasons it was so lucky.

  The album reached back into the past in other ways, too. In 2006, during the time I was writing it, I was in New York. It was a sunny day and I was walking down Broadway with a group of friends. Ray Lawlor was there, and David Leaf and Jerry Weiss. David and I were in town promoting the DVD he made about the SMiLE record, Beautiful Dreamer: Brian Wilson and the Story of SMiLE. Someone suggested lunch at Baldoria, this great Italian restaurant, and someone else agreed, and we were on our way when we saw the Brill Building across the street. It was right around the corner from the restaurant. David stopped to look. It was like he was standing outside a church. “Can you believe it?” he said. “Everyone was here: Leiber and Stoller, Goffin and King, Mann and Weil.”

  I was hungry, but I needed to stand there for a while with him to soak up the vibe. I didn’t say much, just tried to get the magic of the place. Eventually we remembered how hungry we were and headed to our lunch. I scored a margarita, with double the alcohol, but I didn’t drain it. I just sipped a little to get calm and enjoy myself. We started talking about New York and songwriting and the city’s past. Some of the guys were native New Yorkers and they told me about the first time they ever heard Dion or Frankie Lymon or the Del-Vikings, and I told them my version of the story, which happened in California.

  After about twenty minutes, I noticed that Ray was staring across the room, looking at a table of two women. “Hey, Bri,” he said, “isn’t that woman with her back to us over there a dead ringer for Carole King?”

  “She does look like Carole King,” I said, “because it is Carole King.” Everyone at the table laughed. They got my joke, that it would have been funny to see her right after walking by the Brill Building. I sipped more of my margarita until I had to go to the bathroom. “Gotta go take a piss,” I said to all the guys, though none of them had asked.

  I went to the men’s room, opened the door, and the first person I saw was Barry Mann. Now I thought I was dreaming, maybe. Pass the Brill Building, walk to lunch, imagine you see Carole King, and then see Barry Mann? He cowrote so many great songs with his wife, Cynthia Weil. “Uptown” and “We Gotta Get out of This Place” and “I’m Gonna Be Strong.” I said hi to Barry and took him to the table to meet the guys. I asked him if he wanted to sit with us. “I’d love to,” he said, “but I’m sitting over there with Carole.” There was a silence at the table, which I guess he thought meant he had to explain. “Carole King,” he said. “And Cynthia.”

  “Cynthia Weil?” I said. I was still thinking of all the songs they wrote together. I don’t know which one was in my head by that point. Maybe “He’s Sure the Boy I Love” or “Walking in the Rain.”

  Barry laughed. “Walk over there with me.”

  I crossed the dining room with Barry. The two women were bent over their plates. “Look who I found in the men’s room,” Barry said.

  Carole looked up and started to shriek with surprise. She got up and kissed me on the cheek. “What on earth are you doing here?” she said.

  “Having some pasta with my friends.”

  “I cannot believe this,” Cynthia said.

  I went back to the guys in a great mood. “Can you believe running into Barry Mann in a goddamned men’s room in New York?” I said. “I’ll be goddamned. We’re in the room with three of the greatest songwriters ever.”

  “Don’t you mean four?” David said, which was nice, but I was still in disbelief. I told the other guys that we had to do something for them. One of my favorite songs that Barry and Cynthia ever wrote was “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling.” They wrote it with Phil Spector, and it was a huge hit for the Righteous Brothers in 1964, the year that everything happened. Right there at the table I worked out a little arrangement of “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” just the first verse, that had a part for me, a part for Ray, a part for David, and a part for Jerry. Then we went over and performed it for their table. We did well enough with the serenade that they couldn’t stop smiling, and neither could we.

  New York is the only place in the world where things like that happen. A few years later I was in town for a concert and Ray brought some pizzas to the gig. They were amazing. Sometimes good pizza just can’t be beat. When I was getting ready to fly back home a few days later, I asked him if we could go to that exact pizza place. Ray told the dr
iver and we went to the place, New Park Pizza in Howard Beach. When we walked in I went right to the counter and ordered a large pizza. The pizza came out of the oven, and I picked up the biggest slice and bit into it. It was hot, but it was great. “This is the best goddamn pizza I have ever had,” I said, because it was. I flew back home, thinking about it the whole way. A few days later I was still thinking about it. I called Ray. “Hey,” I said. Remember that pizza we had?”

  “I remember,” he said.

  “Can you FedEx me a pie?” He laughed but I didn’t, and I guess that’s how he knew I wasn’t joking. So he went there and I guess they taught him how to pack it up and freeze it and it came the very next day.

  I picked one of Barry and Cynthia’s songs that day in Baldoria, but Carole wrote a million great ones, too. One of my favorites was “I’m into Something Good.” It also came from 1964. She wrote it and gave it to a girl named Earl-Jean, which is a strange name for a girl, though she did a great job with it. Some people knew her version, but most knew the version Herman’s Hermits did later that year. They went to number one with it on the British charts in September, just a few weeks before we performed “I Get Around” on The Ed Sullivan Show. It really was the year that everything happened. “I’m into Something Good” is such a happy song. It’s the kind of thing you can hum all day. I redid it a little bit back in the early ’70s. I had ideas about how it might be arranged differently. In my head I heard slightly different backing vocals and piano parts, and this breakdown around the two-minute mark. It was the same song but not exactly the same. I played my version for some friends and even scheduled a recording session to cut it. About a half hour before we were supposed to record, I cancelled the session. I’m sure the musicians were mad, but I just thought that maybe I shouldn’t do it. There was something about the arrangement that wasn’t quite right, or maybe it was something about the room. Then I forgot all about it. Maybe thirty years later Ray was visiting me and he mentioned it. It all came right back to me. “In the key of A,” I said. I went to the piano and played the beginning.

  That was a time when I was remembering lots of songs. When we were doing Lucky Old Sun I decided to go back into the studio with it. I called Ray to come out. Why not? He was my memory on it. He couldn’t come out right away. I think it was a Wednesday. But he said he could be in LA by Friday. Ray flew in, we went into the music room, and I started playing. The version I had was mostly just me on the keyboards and then singing the lead over the track.

  When I listened back, it was missing something. “You know what?” I said to Ray. “It would be great on the track to have Carole King singing backup. Do you think we could make that happen?”

  “Of course,” Ray said. “Call her up.”

  I didn’t think I could. It seemed like too much. So Ray did it. He called David Leaf, who gave him the number of Lorna Guess, Carole’s manager, who was also married to Carole’s guitar player, Rudy Guess. Then Ray called Lorna, and Lorna told Ray that Carole was working on a book and had just gotten to a part where she was talking about how she always wanted to work with me. Ray said that was great because I had an idea for a song. They worked it out and Carole flew in from Idaho. I guess Ray gave her directions to the house.

  Ray kept saying that Carole was coming in a hybrid. I wasn’t sure what that was. Finally this tiny green thing drove up and Ray went down to meet her. He brought her up, along with Lorna and Rudy. I couldn’t stop myself from smiling. I was so happy to see Carole. I don’t know if she thought it would be a normal studio. It wasn’t. It was the music room again, with me and Scott Bennett and a computer. That was a great way for me to work. Scott was so fast and on top of things. But I wondered if Carole would mind. She didn’t. “I’m ready,” she said, and she started humming “I’m into Something Good.” You couldn’t help humming that song.

  But I had another idea that I’d thought of between when I invited her and when she came. It’s like I said, ideas were coming at me all the time then. “Wait,” I said. “Listen to this.” I had a song called “Good Kind of Love” that I wanted to use on Lucky Old Sun. It was another happy song about finding the right person in your life and how it helps you deal with things you might keep secret without that person. First, it talks about what the girl is feeling.

  Imagine when she’s sleeping

  And all the dreams she’s keeping

  She keeps them in a jar

  And not too far from her heart

  Later on there’s a part that sounds like it could have been from one of Carole’s old songs, or mine: “Run to him, run to him, right to his arms.” In fact, when I wrote it I was thinking about Carole, which is why I wanted her to sing it.

  Carole didn’t know the song, so I taught it to her. We went back and forth in the room. I sang a part and she sang a part. Bedroom singing, teaching people their parts. It was like what happened fifty years before in Hawthorne. Carole said she loved the song. She said it was better than “I’m into Something Good,” which wasn’t true. Then we started the recording. When she started on the verses, she came in a little bit wrong. “Carole,” I said, “you are flatting, but I really like your dress.” I wanted her to sing it right, but I also wanted to make her laugh. Near the end of the session, Carole was nervous that she was going to miss one of the high C notes, but she hit it perfectly, and when she did she went around the room slapping people’s hands.

  “Okay,” I said. “We’re done.” I started to leave and turned around to say good-bye.

  Carole stared at me. “What about ‘I’m into Something Good’?” she said. “I came out from Idaho.”

  We did that for a while, too. It went so well. The two songs with Carole ended up on the special edition of the album with the song I wrote from my dad’s song.

  I loved working with Carole. She was a real pro. Back in the ’90s, just after Dr. Landy left, in the years when Melinda and I would drive around and listen to the radio, there was a movie called Grace of My Heart. It was about a singer and songwriter like Carole, a fictional version, and it had a character in it who was a singer and songwriter like me, a fictional version. The movie showed how the Brill Building sound came together, and then the character like Carole went out to California, where she met the character like me and learned all about the music on the West Coast. California Music. There were things about the movie that I liked and things that didn’t make sense to me, but one thing that it made me think about was how long we had been making records. We had been through so much, in our lives and in our music. When I was around Carole, or Barry Mann, we didn’t even have to talk about it, really. We knew how much we all knew. I remember once I met Chuck Berry on an airplane. “Hey, how are you?” he said and then turned the other way.

  When I was around younger singers, it was harder for me. I didn’t know what they thought about what I had done, and I didn’t know what they wanted me to think about what they had done. Sometimes they weren’t even that young, but they were young to me. I was at the Ivor Novello Awards once and a young guy came up to me. “Brian, Brian,” he said.

  “Hey, man,” I said, “can you score me a Diet Coke?”

  It was Bono. I didn’t know him that well.

  Another time Don Henley came backstage and brought his copy of Pet Sounds. I think it was the original record he’d had since he was a kid. I knew the Eagles, of course. If the Beach Boys were California in the ’60s, the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac were California in the ’70s. Don Henley sat down next to me and started telling me everything about his history with Beach Boys music. He said that we inspired him so much when he was growing up, even though he was in Texas at the time and not in California. He told me that he listened to the harmonies of the group but also to the way we put songs together. Then he asked me to sign the record. I took a Sharpie from the table in the dressing room. There are always Sharpies around for signing things. I wrote on his record, “To Don: thanks for all the great songs. Brian Wilson.” Don was so grateful. It was almo
st like he couldn’t talk. He turned to leave. “Hey, Don,” I said. “Wait a second.” I took the record back, crossed out “great,” and wrote “good.” Some people would have been mad, but Don just looked at it and laughed. Another time Melinda and I were at the beach in Santa Monica and Don came up to say hello. “Hey, man,” I said, “your hair’s really been through some changes.” Don laughed at that the same way he laughed at the album.

  The songs I did with Carole ended up on the same special edition of Lucky Old Sun that had the song I remade from my dad’s song. But every edition of the Lucky Old Sun album was special. It was just a great time when I was able to make music that was old and new at the same time. One afternoon we were working on “Midnight’s Another Day.” That was a song about feeling down and depressed, and how sometimes the only way to deal with those feelings is to wait them out until you feel good again. It was the kind of song that was easy to sing when I was feeling good again.

  Lost in the dark

  No shades of gray

  Until I found

  Midnight’s another day

  Swept away in a braying storm

  Chapters missing, pages torn

  Waited too long to feel the warmth

  I had to chase the sun

  The song was sounding strange to me. I liked the arrangement, but it was missing a certain sound. I could hear it in my head, but I couldn’t hear it on the record. I kept slowing down the sessions and starting them and then finally I realized what it was: a small foot-pump organ. Scott and I hopped into the Mercedes and drove over to Studio Instrument Rentals, a place off Sunset owned by Jan Berry’s brother Ken. The Berrys had a third brother, Bruce, who is mentioned in Neil Young’s song “Tonight’s the Night.” I always liked Neil—talk about pleasant. When we got to SIR, it was full, but all the people working in the place knew me. They brought out a small organ and set it up right in the store for me to test out. I sat down and started pumping the thing with my feet, checking out how it sounded. It sounded great. “This works,” I said to Ray.