I Am Brian Wilson

by Brian Wilson

  Those are all American singers or groups. I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with British singers and groups. I loved the Beatles. I loved the Stones. I loved the Who. If “London Calling” was on the radio, I wouldn’t shut it off. But there’s something special about American music that doesn’t try to imitate British music, American music that just tries to be itself. It’s like Van Dyke said about SMiLE. It’s music that doesn’t put its snout in the British trough.

  CHAPTER 9

  Time

  After it’s all been said

  The music spinning in our head

  Can’t forget the feeling of

  The magic of that summer love

  Ooh, I wanna take you there

  Do you wanna turn back the pages

  Memories in photographs

  The world is changed

  And yet the game is still the same

  —“Isn’t It Time”

  Over the years, I went to Australia as many times as I could. I went there with the Beach Boys in the ’60s and I loved it, and I still love it now. The place has a great vibe. Sydney is a great town. The people are surfers, so they get our music. The cab drivers are really nice. I brought the live version of Pet Sounds there, and over the years I have tried to go back whenever I can. When I was in Australia with my band for the live SMiLE tour in 2004, I checked into the InterContinental hotel, which overlooks Sydney Harbor, the Victoria Bridge, and the Sydney Opera House, my favorite concert hall in the whole universe. There is a really good lounge on the thirty-second floor of the hotel where you can order this dish called Hokkien noodles; I think I had it at least twice a day there. The harbor area has such a cool vibe. You can walk from the InterContinental down around the opera house, and then along this nice path with a park on one side and the harbor on the other. There are native Australians just hanging out playing didgeridoos, this long tube instrument that has this really deep one-note sound that resonates like a bass harmonica. It’s a great place to get your exercise in, and I walk it every day when we are in Sydney.

  One day I went to walk with Jeff Foskett, who was by that time my assistant on the road as well as being my right-hand man on the stage. Out a little farther from the opera house, there was a memorial plaza with tiles for the war dead. I was checking out all the names, thinking about the battles and the soldiers. All of a sudden, under my feet, I saw a tile for a guy named Ray Lawlor. I told Ray about it, and when he got to Sydney I walked him out there and showed him. We talked about how strange it was that people with your same name were born, got old, and died. It was strange, but it was the most normal thing in the world. Time happened.

  I’ve always known that about time, and I have always written about it. “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” was about that exactly. The Beach Boys recorded the song in the summer of 1964. I had just turned twenty-two. I was a single man about to be married. Our flight to Houston was still four months off. The band booked United Western Recorders for about a week and got the song done. There was lots of pressure on us because it was the next single after “I Get Around,” which was our first big hit. It had been number one on July 4 weekend. It must have gotten played at every barbecue.

  A month after that we headed back into the studio to make the follow-up. It was just the lean, mean main band—me and my brothers, along with Mike and Al. I had the instrumental track done, and then we started writing the lyrics. I did most of them and Mike did some, too. We were really trying hard to think about growing older. We were trying to imagine the things that would happen in the future, and whether we would recognize the people we became. When you stand in front of a mirror, you’re changing. It’s like a movie. But how fast are you changing? It goes back to another song.

  When I grow up to be a man

  Will I dig the same things that turn me on as a kid?

  Will I look back and say that I wish I hadn’t done what I did?

  Will I joke around and still dig those sounds

  When I grow up to be a man?

  It was a fun song to sing, and I think I did an okay job, though I think some of the same things about “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” that I do about “Let Him Run Wild.” My voice goes up and up until it sounds like it’s whining. It loses some of the sweetness it needs. During the song we started a countdown, or really a count-up. Between lines, the backing vocalists would call out ages, two at a time, starting with fourteen. They went up to the last chorus, and even past it—during the fadeout the backing vocals kept counting. They got all the way to thirty-one. I guess it was the oldest age we could think of then. Like I said, I was only twenty-two. That was so far in the future. Back then thirty was like some kind of magic number. You didn’t trust anyone over it. You couldn’t really imagine being it.

  When I did turn thirty-one, it was 1973. I was heading deep into depression and my drugs. Sometimes it felt like everyone was right, that it was an age near the end of your life. But so many things hadn’t even started. Dr. Landy hadn’t come to treat me for the first time. I hadn’t ended the marriage with Marilyn, or started the one with Melinda. I hadn’t recorded “Johnny Carson” or “Love and Mercy” or Lucky Old Sun. I had heard “Rhapsody in Blue” but I couldn’t have even imagined that someone would let me make my own version of it.

  Now it’s more than that many years past that. “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” keeps counting. I look younger than I did when I was younger, in some ways. In the ’80s my chin was looking bad, like a turkey gobbler, and Dr. Landy didn’t like that so I had a face-lift. I also got the bags under my eyes fixed. I kind of saw what he was doing, but then there were the facts. I wasn’t young anymore. I couldn’t get around the way I wanted to. I don’t think I could’ve thrown a baseball twenty feet. I look in the mirror now and I think about all the things that have happened. Mainly, one thing happened. I grew up to be a man.

  Do I look back and say that I wish I hadn’t done some of the things I did? Of course. I wish I hadn’t done drugs. It messed things up. I wish I had spent more time or a different kind of time with Carnie and Wendy. Do I dig the same things I did when I was a kid? I love the radio. I try to walk every day. One thing I find as I get older is that sometimes you can try new things by trying things so old that they become new again. A few years ago Melinda and the kids and I went to a place in Laguna Beach. You stay up on the cliffs, but you can walk down and get to the ocean. I was watching the kids play and I decided to go in the water myself. I hadn’t been in the ocean for forty years. It was so great that I couldn’t get out. It was early afternoon and then late afternoon and I still wanted to stay there. For forty years I kept away from the ocean, but then I went back in. “I can’t believe I haven’t done this in so long,” I said.

  For almost twenty years I kept away from the band. The Beach Boys hadn’t worked together, really, since the late ’90s. We did that country record with Joe Thomas, Stars and Stripes, and then we kind of stopped. There were always reissues and repackaging of old albums, almost every year, and they got thicker and fancier. Usually there was a sun somewhere on the cover. Most of them were the same songs rearranged, though at the end of 2011 Capitol put out a set that was a much bigger deal: The SMiLE Sessions. It was a huge box with nine discs that collected everything I did in 1966 and 1967. It was amazing to see it all there in one place. I can’t believe I did all that work. How did I? There was so much music, so many ideas, so many sections. No wonder I lost my way. When I think about the project, in whatever form, what gets me most is our vocals. They’re so spiritual. I think they are the best vocals the Beach Boys ever sang, and definitely they’re the most creative. To me, The SMiLE Sessions is a great box set, but I like the version we cut in 2004. That was when the album was finally finished. That was when the story was finally completed. That’s when the weight was finally lifted. But the box set is great, too.

  While all those records were coming out, I saw some of the guys some of the time. But we were getting older, and everyone was livin
g life. Time kept happening. There was always a “Beach Boys” out on the road somewhere, but I didn’t have anything to do with it in most of those years. Mike had the name. He got hold of it during the time I wasn’t touring and he held on to it. In a way, that was okay with me, although I didn’t know what it meant for there to be a Beach Boys without me or Dennis or Carl. I guess they were going around and singing songs that people loved, which was nice for the people who got to hear them. I was doing the same with my band.

  One Thanksgiving I went up to Mike’s house near Reno. We took a walk together. We talked about life and also about records. We could always talk about old records, ours and other people’s. That always made us happy. Mike was telling me about songs that he still wanted to sing. “I want to do a version of ‘Chapel Of Love,’” he said. It was the number one song before we got to number one with “I Get Around.” We had done it on 15 Big Ones. I sang that one. I guess Mike wanted to sing a version himself.

  “Okay,” I said. “We’ll do it.” But we never did it. Then in 2011, near the end of the year, someone called my office and said that 2012 was the fiftieth anniversary of the Beach Boys, if you counted the Surfin’ Safari record as the beginning. If you counted the “Surfin’” song as the beginning, the fiftieth was 2011. And if you counted my teaching “Ivory Tower” to my brothers as the beginning, the fiftieth was 1998. But 2012 was a good enough year to call the fiftieth. People at record companies wanted to see if I would think about getting back together with Mike and Al and Bruce and put out a new album and tour around to celebrate.

  At first I didn’t like the idea. I thought it was too much trouble. The main problem with a reunion was always going to be whether or not I could handle Mike. I knew a fiftieth anniversary would be the same deal. Lots of the onstage energy of the band comes from Mike. He’s the best at that. But Mike is also a stubborn guy who spends lots of time having strong ideas about his own ego. We spent too much time going to court. In the ’90s he got angry about how Tony Asher and Van Dyke Parks were credited on early records, and he asked for some credit back. Now on Wild Honey he’s credited on every song, even “Mama Says,” even though that part comes from what Van Dyke wrote for “Vega-Tables” on SMiLE. And then in 2005 there was a lawsuit over the CD that came out in England. That one made me more mad and confused because I didn’t understand it at all. It seemed to be about ego. That stuff was getting to me, and I hadn’t even agreed to the tour yet. But then I talked to Melinda and I talked to some friends and I decided that there were more reasons to bury the hatchet than to take it out again.

  The closer the tour got, the more I started thinking about old stories. In 1964 we were playing a show in Seattle and Mike was being his usual self, talking out to the crowd, getting everyone excited. There were lots of microphones set up onstage and he grabbed one with one hand and another with his other hand. He looked funny, stretched out like that between them, and he started making a weird noise to go along with it. We were laughing like crazy. After a minute or so, Al Jardine got concerned. “Hey,” he said, “I think something might be wrong.” Al went over and kicked one of the microphones out of Mike’s hand. And Mike said, “My arms!” They were all purple. He had almost been electrocuted. Another time, in the middle of a concert, Dennis threw a spare drumstick at Mike and it hit him in the back. Mike covered up the microphone and said, “Dennis, meet me offstage.” They went to the side and had a fistfight, right in the middle of the concert. Dennis won. Mike should have known that. But Mike didn’t learn when he challenged Dennis to arm wrestling during “Surfin’ Safari,” and he didn’t learn when he called Dennis offstage. After the fight, they came back and finished the show.

  I couldn’t remember everything. There was too much of everything to remember. But I liked the memories that came back to me. I liked thinking of them. They took my mind off other things, like my back. I had back pain on and off for years, but then it was on all the time, worse than ever. In the months before the tour, I was having real trouble getting around. I had to hunch over when I walked, and sometimes I felt numb spots in my hands. One evening Melinda and I were meeting Ray for dinner and I couldn’t really climb out of the car.

  “You okay?” Ray asked.

  “They say it might be Parkinson’s,” I said.

  Ray was shocked but not too shocked. He was quiet and walked behind me to look at how I was moving. When we were sitting down and eating, he didn’t say anything for a while. “Look,” he finally said. “If that’s what it is, that’s not the worst thing in the world. Nobody dies from Parkinson’s. It’s not like you’re twenty years old. People usually die of something else while they still have Parkinson’s.”

  I nodded but I wasn’t really listening, mostly because the doctors hadn’t really said that it might be Parkinson’s. I was just testing out the idea. I wanted to hear someone tell me that things would be okay, like my dad did on the Long Beach Pike roller coaster. It turned out that it wasn’t Parkinson’s at all, which I knew. I was sort of testing my friend and testing out the worst possible news in my own head. The real news was better, but not much better. It was spinal stenosis, which Carl also had. It was terrible.

  But it wasn’t going to keep me from the tour. No way. Getting the Beach Boys back together was a big deal, organized by Joe Thomas and the entertainment lawyer John Branca. It was a big deal for me, but it was also a big deal logistically. There were papers to draw up. There were contracts to sign. There were promoters and lawyers and record labels that had to figure out what they would do when we were out there singing and playing our songs. As plans were coming together, I had to keep the news quiet. It was a big secret. When I was with friends who weren’t in the band, I couldn’t say anything. Instead we talked about the weather or about a great steak I might have tried at a restaurant.

  One day a friend was visiting the house and just came right out and said something. “I heard you guys are doing a tour,” he said.

  I sighed. “I’m glad you know about it because I was running out of lies,” I said.

  After the preparing, the actual reunion was pretty straightforward. We met up at Capitol, all the guys, and recorded a version of “Do It Again.” The song was already nostalgic when we recorded it in 1969, so it made sense to do “Do It Again” again. It wasn’t just me and Mike and Al and Bruce. David Marks was there, too. He hadn’t played rhythm guitar with us since the early ’60s. The whole process of recording was a great feeling. You couldn’t pretend that time hadn’t happened. But the music brought everyone back. You couldn’t sing an old melody and not go back there a little bit.

  The reunion was also sad in some ways. Being back with the band made me miss my brothers. When we started, it was a family band, and I was the only part of the family left. We had never made a record without Carl, and we had only made a few without Dennis. I even missed my dad in some ways. I thought about the old songs and how he would stand there and tell us we were doing them wrong. Surge! At the time it wasn’t something I liked at all, but over time you had more memories and less time to think about them.

  Over a month or so we made a record, That’s Why God Made the Radio. That was a kind of reunion all by itself. Joe Thomas came back and worked on it. It wasn’t exactly the same as making a solo record. We had to find material that was right for everyone to sing. Joe and I still had a few songs we worked on around the time of Imagination that I didn’t think were right for me to do as a solo artist. We got those and finished them. The title track was one of them. We had a piece of a song and Mike finished it up and turned it into “Spring Vacation.” His new lyrics were great. They made the song at least 25 percent better. I wrote some songs like “The Private Life of Bill and Sue” and “Beaches in Mind.” The album we ended up with was a good record, though it was different in spirit than any record we ever would have made before. That was partly because of the technology. We put the record together on Pro Tools, which is the modern way of doing things, instead of going into a studio wi
th dozens of musicians.

  I sometimes read in interviews that Mike wants to go into a room with me and write new material for the Beach Boys. But it’s just not done that way anymore. That’s a ’70s idea. At this point, we go with the new way. I write lots in the studio. It’s a real musical environment. That record started with “Strange World” and moved through other songs, like “From There to Back Again” and “Pacific Coast Highway.” The last song on the album was “Summer’s Gone.” It was a beautiful melody. It was also one of those songs that people thought was a farewell, like “When You Wish Upon a Star.” It was definitely nostalgic, but anything we made in 2012 would have been nostalgic. We were looking backward. That’s how seasons went. When I sang it, I was thinking of Carl and Dennis and my dad, but it was like “Caroline, No” also, because I was thinking about younger versions of myself:

  Summer’s gone

  Summer’s gone away

  Gone away

  With yesterday

  Old friends have gone

  They’ve gone their separate ways

  Our dreams hold on

  For those who still have more to say

  Summer’s gone

  Gone like yesterday

  The nights grow cold

  It’s time to go

  I’m thinking maybe I’ll just stay

  Another summer gone

  Summer’s gone

  It’s finally sinking in