Socialism is freedom. When I say this, I imagine that if I were a peasant of Chianti and you were a landowner, I’d look at you like this [skeptical and fearful look] because of my belief in socialism, in freedom. And this spirit has such deep roots in me that when I go to interview a person of power, the more this person has—would you believe me?—the more I intimidate him. And inevitably, this personal attitude of mine is transferred mentally and technically in the interview. So I undress them. I say: “Come on, come on, maybe you’re better than you look, or maybe you’re worse.”
This is interesting: I’ve noticed that when a person goes to interview someone, he often sees himself in a position of inferiority. It’s a nuance, it’s very subtle, it’s difficult to explain. And this feeling increases when this someone being interviewed is a person of power. If you’re observant, you can see the eyes tremble and something in the face and voice changing. That’s never happened to me. Never. I’m tense, I’m worried because it’s a boxing match. Oh ho! I’m climbing, I’m going into the ring. I’m nervous. My God, who’s going to win? But no inferiority complex, no fear of the person. When someone starts acting superior, then I become nasty.
In the preface to your book, you regret that no one had tape recorders during the time of Jesus, in order to “capture his voice, his ideas, his words.” Were you being hyperbolic or serious? And if serious, what would you have asked Jesus if you had had the chance to interview him?
I meant it seriously. For sure! Today we think and speak of Jesus as he’s been told to us. So now, after 2,000 years, I’d like to know how important he was at the time or find out how much he was built up. Of course, I reject the concept of Jesus as God, Christ/God. I don’t even pay attention to that for one second. But as a leader, was he that important? You know, he might very well have been a little Che Guevara.
And a deeply enlightened person.
He might have been, but not the only one. Because many of those people were crucified just as he was. We all make this fuss about him, but it would be like saying: “Jesus Christ has been executed by Franco!” What about the others? For Christ’s sake, how many people have been executed in Spain? La garotta! What about Paredez Manot, called Txiki—one of the five Basques who was executed in the fall of 1975 in the cemetery of Barcelona, in front of his brother Miguel. He’s the one who died singing, “Free, free the country of the Basques,” smiling all the time and singing, then waving goodbye to Miguel. And that was Txiki. But there were four others who were executed, and hundreds of others all these years. So I don’t know if Christ was that important later on.
One of the first things I would have asked him was: “Where have you been all those years, where have you been? Did you go to India?” Ooh-la-la! That would have been the first question. Then I would have asked if he really behaved chastely or if he had women, if he slept with women, if he went to bed with Mary Magdalene, if he loved her as a sister or as a woman. I would have asked that. And I would have loved to have found the grave of Jesus Christ—that would have been good reportage. And those who had stolen the corpse and reported he had flown to heaven: “Who told you to do that? For whom did you do that?”
That might have ended Christianity then and there.
It might have been a good thing.
I imagine that you’d have one question to ask the Virgin Mary.
[Laughing] Certainly one.
This is getting a bit sacrilegious.
Well, why be scared of that?
Don’t you think it’s possible that Jesus was an avatar?
Listen, I don’t know how much about Jesus is just the image created by Mark, Luke, Matthew and John. They were so damn intelligent, those four. And I’m afraid . . . listen, Jonathan, do you know how many times I make people more interesting than they are? So what if Mark or Matthew did the same thing with Christ, huh? What about if Jesus Christ was much less than Luke or John? I have no serious evidence, I have no tapes. . . .
You’d be the first person I’d chose to interview the first being we met from outer space.
And I would do it like a child. That’s the secret. . . . I’ll tell you something. During the first moon shot, there was a press conference just before the launch. There was a group of Very Important American Journalists there, and, thank God, there was also my dear friend Walter Cronkite among them. And Cronkite sent me a note—we were in the same room because the press was interviewing the astronauts via TV—asking me if I wanted to ask them a question. “Put a question to them? Thank you.” And I wrote down my little question—three words—and sent it to Cronkite.
The other questions went on and on . . . about the fuel and not the fuel, about the gas and the starter and the trajectory . . . I didn’t understand anything being said. You know, I wrote a book about the conquest of the moon and I still don’t know how and why a rocket goes up. I’m very proud of that. And I didn’t understand the questions of the journalists, who were extremely pompous. Everybody was pompous. And then Cronkite said: “I have a question here from Oriana Fallaci.” Pause. And he didn’t ask the question. (He was marvelous, he was a real actor.) Then, dramatically: “The question is: Are you scared?”
Well, after discussing it with Aldrin and Collins, Neil Armstrong was elected to take the walk. “Well,” he hesitated, “you know, the adrenaline goes up.” “Ah, bullshit. Say you’re scared!” I yelled out loud to everybody in the press room. “Who cares about the adrenaline? Tell me, tell me, fear, fear! Walter, ask them about fear!”
And that was the question of the child. If you asked my youngest sister to put a question to the astronauts, she’d say: “Are you afraid of going to the moon?” Of course. That’s what she’d want to know.
BRIAN WILSON
by David Felton
November 4, 1976
Right now there’s the new album, ‘15 Big Ones,’ the tour [Wilson’s first with the Beach Boys in five years] and the TV special. Why all this burst of energy at this time?
I can only consider how my energy has bursted. I have refrained from sexual experience. I’m trying out this yoga—I read a book. It showed how if you repress sexual desire, not your kundalini but a similar type of energy is released when you don’t have sex. It’s been a couple months now I haven’t had any sex. That’s just a personal answer.
Very personal, I’d say.
Yes. Also because it was spring. To tell you the very truth, it was springtime. It’s just like they always say, in spring you start hopping, and we started hopping a little before the first of spring—we got our album and stuff.
This is the first spring in a long time, though.
Yeah, right. Well, we started hopping a few springs ago but we really hadn’t been serious about it like we were this time.
Maybe it was the combination of spring and the sexual repression.
Yes, I think that that was probably it.
Do you find it difficult to get into writing?
Yeah. Lately I have found it difficult as heck to finish a song. It’s a funny thing. Probably not much of a song left in me, you know, if any, because I’ve written so many, some 250 songs or 300 or whatever it is. And it just doesn’t seem as vast [yawn], the creativity doesn’t seem as vast. That’s why we did a lot of oldies but goodies this time on our album. That got us going, as a matter of fact.
I haven’t yet heard this album. Are you going into some new areas?
Not that I can think of. The only areas would be into Transcendental Meditation, using that as a base. We believe in it, so [yawn] we feel it’s our responsibility, partially, to carry the Maharishi message into the world. Which I think is a great message. I think the meditation is a great thing.
You’ve just recently become more involved in that yourself, haven’t you?
Yeah. I meditate and I also think about meditation. Which is funny. I think about Maharishi, about just the idea of meditating. It gives me something.
Do you think that might help you write more?
Oh, yeah, I think that’s gonna be the answer. As it progresses, I think that I’m going to gather more peace of mind, I’ll be able to gather my thoughts a little easier. I won’t be as jangled in the nerves. I think it’s going to aid in my creativity.
This difficulty in writing songs—would you describe it as a writing block?
Well, I have a writing block right now. Even today I started to sit down to write a song, and there was a block there. God knows what that is. Unless it’s supposed to be there. I mean, it’s not something you just kick away and say, “Come on, let’s go, let’s get a song writ.” If the block is there, it’s there.
Another thing, too, is that I used to write on pills. I used to take uppers and write, and I used to like that effect. In fact, I’d like to take uppers now and write because they give me, you know, a certain lift and a certain outlook. And it’s not an unnatural thing. I mean the pill might be unnatural and the energy, but the song itself doesn’t turn out unnatural on the uppers. The creativity flows through.
Well, why don’t you do that?
I’m thinking of asking the doctor if I can go back to those, yeah.
But you believe writers really do run out of material.
I believe that writers run out of material, I really do. I believe very strongly in the fact that when the natural time is up, writers actually do run out of material [yawn]. To me it’s black and white. When there’s a song there’s a song, when there’s not there’s not. Of course you run out, maybe not indefinitely, but everybody runs out of some material that writes for a while. And it’s a very frightening experience. It’s an awesome thing to think, “Oh my God, the only thing that’s ever supplied me with any success or made us money, I’m running out of.” So right there there’s an insecurity that sets in. This is why I’m going through these different experiments, sexually and all, to see what can happen, to see if there’s anything waiting in there that I haven’t found.
Is there much else you could do if you didn’t write songs?
No, not really. I’m not cut out to do very much at all.
Why don’t we talk a bit about “Good Vibrations”?
That would be a good place to begin. “Good Vibrations” took six months to make. We recorded the very first part of it at Gold Star Recording Studio, then we took it to a place called Western, then we went to Sunset Sound, then we went to Columbia.
So it took quite a while. There’s a story behind this record that I tell everybody. My mother used to tell me about vibrations. I didn’t really understand too much of what that meant when I was just a boy. It scared me, the word “vibrations.” To think that invisible feelings, invisible vibrations existed, scared me to death. But she told about dogs that would bark at people and then not bark at others, that a dog would pick up vibrations from these people that you can’t see, but you can feel. And the same existed with people.
And so it came to pass that we talked about good vibrations. We went ahead and experimented with the song and the idea, and we decided that on the one hand you could say, “I love the colorful clothes she wears and the way the sunlight plays upon her hair. I hear the sound of a gentle word on the wind that lifts her perfume through the air.” Those are sensual things. And then you go, “I’m pickin’ up good vibrations,” which is a contrast against all the sensual—there’s what you call the extrasensory perception which we have. And this is what we’re really talking about.
But you also set out to do something new musically. Why this particular song?
Because we wanted to explain that concept, plus we wanted to do something that was R&B but had a taste of modern, avant-garde R&B to it. “Good Vibrations” was advanced rhythm & blues music.
You took a risk.
Oh yeah, we took a great risk. As a matter of fact, I didn’t think it was going to make it because of its complexity, but apparently people accepted it very well. They felt that it had a naturalness to it, it flowed. It was a little pocket symphony.
How come you used four different studios?
Because we wanted to experiment with combining studio sounds. Every studio has its own marked sound. Using the four different studios had a lot to do with the way the final record sounded.
Did everybody support what you were trying to do?
No, not everybody. There was a lot of “oh, you can’t do this, that’s too modern” or “that’s going to be too long a record.” I said no, it’s not going to be too long a record, it’s going to be just right.
Who resisted you? Your manager? The record company?
No, people in the group, but I can’t tell ya who. We just had resisting ideas. They didn’t quite understand what this jumping from studio to studio was all about. And they couldn’t conceive of the record as I did. I saw the record as a totality piece.
Do you remember the time you realized you finally had it?
I remember the time that we had it. It was at Columbia. I remember I had it right in the sack. I could just feel it when I dubbed it down, made the final mix from the 16-track down to mono. It was a feeling of power, it was a rush. A feeling of exaltation. Artistic beauty. It was everything.
Do you remember saying anything?
I remember saying, “Oh, my God. Sit back and listen to this!”
At that time did you feel it was your most important song? Did you think in terms like that—reaching a new plateau in music?
Yes, I felt that it was a plateau. First of all, it felt very arty and it sounded arty. Second of all, it was the first utilization of a cello in rock & roll music to that extent—using it as an up-front instrument, as a rock instrument.
Not to mention the theremin.
It was also the first use of a theremin in rock & roll.
By the time you did “Good Vibrations” you had matured your artistic concept far beyond the sort of thing you were doing, say, in “Surfin’ .” Was there any particular time period when you realized that you now were totally into creating music on your own terms?
Yes. Pet Sounds would be that period when I figured that I was into my own . . . via the Phil Spector approach. Now, the Phil Spector approach is utilizing many instruments to combine for a single form or a single sound. Like combining clarinets, trombones and saxophones to give you a certain sound, rather than hearing that arrangement as “oh, those are piccolos, oh, those are trombones.”
How much was Spector an influence on you, artistically and competitively?
Well, I didn’t feel I was competing as much as I was emulating, emulating the greatness of his style in my music. We have a high degree of art in our group. We’ve come to regard Phil Spector as the greatest, the most avant-garde producer in the business.
Yet he’s not really a composer of songs.
Well, I’m a firm believer that he wrote those songs and gave the others credit. In order to produce them the way he did, he had to write them.
Mike Love mentioned the time you composed “The Warmth of the Sun” within hours of the John F. Kennedy assassination and how it illustrated that even during a very negative time you could come up with a very positive feeling.
Yeah, it’s a strange thing, but I think we were always spiritually minded and we wrote music to give strength to people. I always feel holy when it comes to recording. Even during “Surfer Girl,” even then I felt a bit spiritual.
What’s the nature of your spiritual outlook today? Does it present you with a kind of attitude toward the world?
No, not really. I’m not as aware of the world as I could be.
Is that necessarily a bad thing?
Yeah, because I think if I became more aware, I could structure my lyrics to be a little more in tune with people.
Are you working on that process right now?
Yes, I’m working on that right now, I’m working with people who I know know where it’s at. Like Van Dyke Parks—he’s a guy who’s a link to where it’s at for me. He keeps me very current on what’s happening.
The Rolling Stone interviews Page 14