Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall & Redemption of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson

by Peter Ames Carlin

  CHAPTER 3

  They were away from Hawthorne. Away from school, away from work, away from their parents and the expectations of the past. Freed from the failures and resentments of their parents, beyond their punishments, insults, and abuses.

  Is that what they felt in the summer of 1962? We can only imagine now, looking at a picture of five young men perched on an old yellow pickup truck on a California beach. But what we know, looking at the cover of Surfin’ Safari, is that they are Beach Boys now, dressed up in matching blue Pendleton button-ups, white T-shirts, and worn khakis. They’re all barefoot as well, fingers pointing to the horizon as the two sitting on top of the truck grasp a single yellow-and-blue-striped surfboard.

  Let’s go surfin’ now

  Everybody’s learning how

  Come on and safari with me…

  The first song on the first side of their first album didn’t tell a literal truth about the lives of the young men singing it—no one save the drummer was ever likely to go surfing with anyone at any time under any circumstances—but there’s truth in the voices. It crackled through the guitars and drums, and in 1962 it spoke not just to kids in Los Angeles, but also in hundreds of far-flung, landlocked cities. None of those kids would ever know how it feels to be anglin’ at Laguna and Cerro Azul or kickin’ out in Doheny too. But when they listened to the Beach Boys and saw their faces on the album cover, they could feel the cool light of the morning and sense the thrill of paddling across black water into a mysterious horizon.

  In the first months of 1962, Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys lugged their guitars and drums to school assemblies and Saturday night hops, played for free at Saturday afternoon beach parties put on by radio stations, and sang again and again that surfin’ is the only life, the only way for me, trying to sing on key without screwing up the words, and all the while hoping that no one would laugh at their matching suits and schoolboy harmonies. Sometimes they’d be so scared that Dennis would thrash wildly on his drums, while Carl’s fingers found all the wrong notes on the neck of his guitar. Brian’s voice squeaked and shrilled, while Mike stood stiffly at his microphone, hands hanging dead at his side. Eventually, though, they relaxed and were able to stand in a spotlight and still feel like themselves. Still, by the end of the winter, “Surfin’” had faded from the charts; nothing else seemed to be happening; and it was far too easy to imagine that their ride was over. They’d captured their one moment, and it seemed like it had come and gone.

  But they weren’t about to give up. Brian was too absorbed in his music to think of anything else, and Mike didn’t have anything better to do, so they sat down to write another tune, figuring they might as well take another shot at the surf music crowd. They came up with “Surfin’ Safari” and were still working out the arrangement with the other guys in the Wilsons’ music room when another aspiring twenty-year-old musician named Gary Usher, in Hawthorne to visit his grandparents, happened down the street and heard the music. Attracted by the sounds, Usher knocked on the door to say hello. Brian sat at the organ while they talked, and twenty minutes later he and Usher had written “Lonely Sea,” a pensive ballad that gave the group’s standard maritime imagery a darker, even existential, cast. Usher was a car nut too, and his lectures about the superiority of Chevrolet’s 409 engine inspired another song. They got so excited by that one that they dragged Brian’s Wollensak out to the street (a couple of extension cords did the trick) to capture the sound of Usher roaring up and down 119th Street in his car. Unfortunately, it was well past midnight at the time, and the neighbors weren’t pleased.

  Murry, for once, wasn’t upset. The local success of “Surfin’” proved that Brian was onto something, and so even if he didn’t approve of the rock scene or understand the appeal of silly surfin’ tunes, he took out a mortgage on A.B.L.E. Machinery and pushed his boys onward, paying for studio time to record demos of Brian’s new songs. When Candix fell into bankruptcy—due partially to the steep capital demands that came along with having an unexpected hit single—Murry found an escape clause in the group’s contract and prepared to leverage his boys into a better deal. From there he got on the phone and talked his way into the Capitol Tower in Hollywood, ending up in the office of a junior A and R guy at Capitol Records named Nick Venet, who only had to get through the first verse and chorus of “Surfin’ Safari” to understand that he was listening to a hit song. The rumbling, roaring hot rod tune “409” hit him even harder, and by the end of the day, Murry and Brian walked out with a major label contract and another, even better shot at success.

  The Capitol execs tapped “409” as the A-side of a new Beach Boys single, figuring that “Surfin’ Safari” would appeal only to the beachside crowd that had bought “Surfin’.” But once the disc jockeys in Phoenix heard the B-side, they flipped the record over and put it in heavy rotation. The New York jocks did the same, and when their listeners caught on, the rest of the nation followed suit. By the end of the summer, “Surfin’ Safari” had climbed all the way into the Top Fifteen of Billboard’s singles chart.

  So maybe surfing music wasn’t just a regional fad after all. Riding high on “Surfin’ Safari’s” coast-to-coast popularity, the group set to work on their first full-length album, compiling the A- and B-sides of the first two singles with a couple of covers (including Eddie Cochrane’s hit “Summertime Blues”), an instrumental or two, and a handful of new Brian Wilson originals. As performed by the road-tested band, the songs on the album they called Surfin’ Safari make for a fairly standard collection of mainstream rock ’n’ roll, set against a distinctly suburban backdrop of county fairs, drive-ins, and California beaches. And yet there’s something plaintive and weird about it, too: “County Fair,” for instance, turns a standard evening on the local midway into a failed test of manhood that ends with our hero losing his girl to a muscle-bound jerk who can actually ring the Test-Your-Strength bell. “I don’t need you anymore, loser!” the girl’s voice calls out across the guitars as the song fades. “Cuckoo Clock” tells another tale of romantic frustration, set this time in a suburban living room decorated with a cuckoo clock that tends to erupt just when the teenaged swain is making his move. Brian’s falsetto approximates the bird’s cries of Cuc-koo! Cuc-koo! in the chorus, reputedly mimicking an actual mynah bird Murry kept in his family’s living room during the Wilson boys’ teenage years.

  Surfin’ Safari also included the band’s third single, “Ten Little Indians,” a rocked-up take on the nursery rhyme that owes more than a little to “Running Bear,” Johnny Preston’s chart-topping Native American novelty tune from 1960 (which Brian liked enough to cover during sessions in 1976). But that attempt to look backward at the Old West barely dented the top fifty at the end of 1962. Though that commercial backslide caused no small amount of consternation for Murry and the rest of the group, Brian had already hatched an idea for a new surfing song that excited him even more than “Surfin’ Safari.” It all began when he heard the first verse of Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen” and started thinking about how the song’s quick references to cities across the country—Boston, Pittsburgh, San Francisco—transformed the tale of an imaginary teenybopper into a national rallying cry. In one sense, the civic name-checks were almost entirely gratuitous. But then again, they made the story universal, as if the exploits of these characters could happen—were happening—everywhere at the same time. So if you could make one teenager represent teens all across the nation, why couldn’t one sport become an emblem for fun everywhere? Equipped with a list of surfing terms and locations from a young surfer named Jimmy Bowles—the baby brother of his new girlfriend, Judy Bowles—Brian set to work in the family music room, pounding out the chords on Murry’s upright piano as he coalesced the strands of surf, St. Louis R & B, and western utopianism into a call to arms that transformed surfing from a physical act with strict geographic limitations into a metaphorical one available to anyone, anywhere, at any time.

  As every multiculti note of “
Surfin’ USA” implied, having a beach at your doorstep wasn’t what mattered. Surfing itself was a veneer, a modern pastime laid across the same longing that had called all American adventurers out into the frontier. The song’s chorus pushed the point home, riding Brian’s rocketing falsetto toward the song’s climax. Everybody, in their own hearts, can go surfing—“Surfin’ USA.”

  By now even the Capitol Records execs were starting to believe it. Released at the start of spring 1963, “Surfin’ USA” catapulted up the Billboard charts, claiming the number three slot. Disc jockey enthusiasm for “Shut Down,” the drag race anthem on the flip side, sent that song into the top twenty-five, and by the time school let out for summer, the Beach Boys were the most popular band in the United States of America.

  Even if they didn’t really surf themselves, living in Hawthorne put Brian and company in close contact with the kind of surf rats who, like Dennis once did, projected their entire lives into the currents of beach life. So even if it wasn’t their lives, exactly, it was happening all around them. Thus, “Surfin’ Safari,” like “Surfin’,” captured the rhythms of Los Angeles beach life, from the early morning surf reports on KFWB-AM to the late-night dance parties on the sand. And the band’s subsequent songs described the scene in even more detail, from the huarache sandals to the “bushy bushy” blond hairstyle the surfers preferred, the calluses (surfer’s knots) they developed from the hours spent paddling through the waves, and the woody station wagons that were big enough to carry pals and their boards to whichever secret, locals-only cove had the best break that day.

  Like the members of all-exclusive, self-selecting subcultures, the surfers developed a language that was distinctive to the point of being incomprehensible. In the course of ordinary affairs, surfers spoke of going on safaris. They flirted with honeys and turned their noses up at hodads. On the water, they angled and kicked out, walked the nose and shot the pier. To catch a big one—the true purpose of any surfer boy—was to be the Number One Man. To fail meant risking the pain and humiliation of body whop.

  This was cutting edge to the vast majority of the world in 1962, and surf culture would only become more prevalent as the boards themselves became lighter, cheaper, and more widely available around the coastal towns of both the West and East Coasts. Still, the literal act of surfing was far less important to the (nonsurfing) Beach Boys than the feelings evoked in the journey to the waves: the friendships, the sense of liberation, the [mere] pursuit of inspiration. “It’s a genuine fact that the surfers rule!” they sang, but not because anyone’s ability to ride the waves on a board mattered to them. On the contrary—it was the journey that mattered. “Don’t be afraid to try the greatest sport around!” they chimed. “Catch a wave and you’re sittin’ on top of the world.”

  The idea seduced young Americans all over the country, which seems surprising until you realize how familiar a notion it was. This same kind of hardy American story had been written a thousand times before, set on whaling ships, on rafts floating down the Mississippi, or on the backs of horses galloping into the untamed frontier. “It was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and decent the old widow was in all her ways; and so when I couldn’t stand it no longer I lit out,” Huckleberry Finn declared in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain’s epochal 1885 novel. And no matter how much the world would change in the intervening years, young Americans kept yearning to light out for uncharted territory. The paths changed to suit the times—Herman Melville’s whaling ship gave way in turn to Twain’s river raft, Hemingway’s grand adventures, Kerouac’s highway, Elvis’s southern-fried sexiness, and the lysergic meanderings of the Grateful Dead. But the impulse to break free from buttoned-down society remained precisely the same.

  Granted, the Beach Boys of the early ’60s, resplendent in their matching striped shirts, neat haircuts, rigorously structured harmonies, and consuming fascination for food, girls, and cars—the faster the better, on all accounts—may not seem like cultural revolutionaries. Indeed, while Mark Twain consciously used the journey down the Mississippi and Huck’s relationship with the escaped slave Jim to work through America’s seemingly intractable problems of racism and cultural divide, the Beach Boys’ songs don’t ask their characters to confront serious hardship or make any sort of moral choice. They are utopians, after all, determined to describe and celebrate the laid-back, sun-splashed, middle-class world of ease their fathers and grandfathers had envisioned on their slow journey west. Now the journey was over; paradise platted out, subdivided, and built; its clean, wide streets teeming with tall, blond, athletic guys and the blue-eyed cheerleaders who admired them.

  Nevertheless, the group, and particularly Brian, confronted their own challenges on the road to the horizon. Al Jardine bailed from the group at the end of the school year in 1962, heading off to Michigan to pursue a pharmacy degree at Ferris University in Grand Rapids. The group tapped Carl’s guitar-playing pal David Marks to take Al’s place, but he was young and obnoxious and spent most of his time aggravating Murry. “I was kind of a cocky kid,” David says. “But he was always turning my amp down, putting treble on it, telling me to smile. Just kind of cramping my style.” The mood became even more tense in the recording studio. “There were constant arguments over what sound to put on the instruments,” David continues. “Murry wanted to produce, and he didn’t trust the fact that Brian was perfectly capable of doing it himself. But I have to admit that if Murry hadn’t been so adamant about that twangy, tinny guitar sound, those early records would never have sounded like that. Our guitar sound was really his doing.”

  The group’s first extended concert tour through the Midwest was an exhausting chain of state fairs and small-town VFW halls, with the entire group, plus Murry, riding together in one station wagon. And though Mike and Brian were in their twenties and the rest of the guys in their late teens, Murry rode herd over them like a Boy Scout leader, rigidly enforcing the rules he’d established to keep the boys polite, disciplined, and out of trouble. Already pushed to the brink by the responsibilities of writing and recording and never an eager public performer, Brian’s hatred of touring with his father in tow was only too obvious. He’d kept in touch with Al Jardine through the year, and he called him back to take his place for the group’s summer tour in 1963. “It must have been a pressure cooker for him,” Al says. “One can only imagine what his relationship with his dad must have been like, what it’s like to have a dad trying to mold your entire existence.”

  After Murry managed to convince the Capitol executives to give up full control over the producer’s chair, Brian—already the Beach Boys’ chief songwriter, arranger, and co–lead singer—took on unprecedented authority over his band’s musical output. “He was obsessed with it,” David Marks recalls. “Brian was writing songs with people off the street in front of his house, disc jockeys, anyone. He had so much stuff flowing through him at once he could hardly handle it.” Most often Brian used his collaborators to detail his fantasies of the wide-open world beyond the borders of the life his father had delineated for him. But he also wrote songs that were far more personal, revealing hints about the real life that inspired him to write such dreamy portraits of the far horizon.

  “In My Room,” written with Gary Usher just after Brian’s twenty-first birthday, described his emotional escape in terms of the bedroom he’d once shared with his brothers. There, with the door shut and their father off in his own corner of the house, Brian had been free to be himself: listening to the Four Freshmen, obsessing over his latest crush, taping himself and his brothers as they sang. “Do my dreaming, and my scheming…” It could be the story of any teenager’s inner life. But more than anything, “In My Room” described Brian’s emotional interaction with music, which had always been his most private place, sometimes the only thing he had that felt truly safe. The significance he attaches to both the memory of his childhood respite and the one he carries with him into adulthood could be heard in the
hymnlike meter of “In My Room” and its spare, elegant vocal arrangement. Though Brian and the group would perform the song with typical fresh-faced ease, armed with their immaculately white Fender guitars and their matching striped shirts, the implications of what waited outside his bedroom door (“Now it’s dark and I’m alone…”) rang just as clear as the angelic falsetto that wards it off in the song’s last refrain, a repetition of the title: “In my rooooooom!”

  The escape and release Brian found in music inspired him to work nearly nonstop. He wrote and recorded not just for the Beach Boys, but also for an array of other bands ranging from established hit-makers like Jan and Dean (who rode “Surf City” to the very top of the Billboard charts just before “Surfin’ USA” broke through) to friends like Bob Norberg, his roommate, who recorded with a girlfriend under the name Bob and Sheri, and a group called Rachel and the Revolvers. But even if the tunes he wrote for other acts (such as “Number One,” “The Beginning of the End,” and “After the Game”) were fairly standard early ’60s pop fare, light on musical innovation and heavy on teenaged melodrama, Brian’s outside interests struck Murry as a betrayal. Usher’s obvious contempt for Murry’s musical ideas only made things worse, and so the Wilson patriarch maneuvered his son’s collaborator out of the picture, nitpicking him over song credits and haranguing him about the quality of his work until Usher had finally had enough. If Brian was frustrated by his father’s intervention into his creative life, he didn’t have the courage to defy his father to his face. And when Murry told Brian he might want him to write some tunes with Roger Christian, a popular Los Angeles disc jockey whom Murry had met, Brian did precisely that. As it turned out, that wasn’t a bad match, either.