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

by Peter Ames Carlin

  Murry first became interested in Christian when he tuned into the dj’s nine-to-midnight show on the popular rock station KFWB-AM and heard him analyzing the Beach Boys’ latest single, “409.” “I said it’s a great song about a poor car!” Christian recalled in a 1976 interview with Martin Grove. “I was explaining the lyrics about four-speed, dual quad, positraction because somebody had called up and said he couldn’t understand what they were singing.” Murry put a call into the station, and when it turned out that Christian kept a journal of car-based writings and poems, he got the disc jockey’s number and said his eldest son would be calling. A few nights later, Brian drove up to Hollywood to meet Christian after his show ended, and they went together to eat hot fudge sundaes and flip through the journal of car writings the disc jockey had been keeping. Brian’s eyes kept coming back to a few lines Christian had written about a street race between a Corvette and a Dodge 413. “It happened on the street where the road is wide/Two cool sharks standing side by side…” Soon Brian had a tune running through his mind, and before long he had an entire song, titled “Shut Down,” for the Beach Boys to record at their next session. Better yet, he had another collaborator to help him focus and harness his overwhelming musical energy.

  Most often they met just after midnight, when Christian’s radio show ended. Often they’d go back to the same café for sundaes, talking first about the latest songs Christian had been playing on the air and what directions they might open up for Brian to explore with the Beach Boys. Then they’d break out Christian’s notebook and either flip around in search of a likely phrase or two or try to come up with a poetic way to express something they’d already been talking about. Other times, Christian would come in with a completed lyric. “I’d try to come up with a story lyric, and I’d also have a rough idea for a melody, which Brian would promptly dismiss,” Christian told Grove. “Sometimes he would improve on a lyric…just phrasing them so they’d sing a little better.” And though it was Christian’s expertise with automotive jargon that endeared him to Murry and then Brian, he also proved to have an excellent sense of narrative, filling racing tales such as “Little Deuce Coupe” and “Spirit of America” with vivid feelings of confidence, doubt, and excitement.

  Nearly two decades older than Brian, a family man with a far more adult perspective on the world, Christian also became a reliable friend and mentor for the young musician. He listened to Brian’s rants about his father and confessions of his own stage fright and romantic insecurities, using both of those themes as the inspiration for “Don’t Worry, Baby,” in which talk of an impending drag race all but vanishes beneath the seething anxiety of its performance-phobic narrator, which seems to have very little to do with the drag race the narrator claims to be concerned about. The earlier verses contrasted the narrator’s lust for his girl—“She makes me come alive”—with his fears regarding the power of his car: “I guess I should have kept my mouth shut when I started to brag about my car…” But while his lover keeps telling him not to worry, her reassurances lead to the sexual encounter in the final verse and the intriguing reversal in the transitive verb that describes it. She’s making love to him, which implies a sexual assertiveness (if not quite aggressiveness) that the narrator won’t, or can’t, claim for himself.

  Romantic love never came easily to Brian. His relationship with Judy Bowles waxed and waned throughout 1962 and 1963, ending when he presented her with an engagement ring, which she refused to accept. Heartbroken, he found himself increasingly drawn to Marilyn Rovell, a fourteen-year-old high school student and singer he had met a year earlier when she came with her big sister Diane—two-thirds of a Ronettes-like group they would come to call the Honeys, after the “honeys” described in the first verse of “Surfin’ Safari”—to see the Beach Boys perform at Pandora’s Box, a teen club on Sunset Boulevard. Brian had spilled a cup of cocoa on Marilyn earlier in the evening, but if that was intended as a seduction, it didn’t work: Marilyn’s first crush was on Carl, who was much closer to her own age. The Rovells returned to see several of the group’s shows, and the whole gang soon became friends.

  Invited to visit the girls at their parents’ house in the largely Jewish neighborhood off Fairfax Avenue where they had grown up, Brian hit it off immediately with Irving Rovell, a sheet-metal worker whose nature was as gentle as Murry’s was harsh. Irving’s wife May was every bit as sweet, and when Brian started coming over regularly, she made a point of welcoming the young pop star with a homemade meal, no matter the time. Sometimes Brian would show up so late that May would just invite him to stay in a guest room rather than driving all the way back to his apartment. Those nights eventually came to outnumber the nights he actually did make it home, and then Brian seemed to be living at the Rovells’, serving as a virtual big brother for Diane, Marilyn, and their thirteen-year-old sister, Barbara. Brian began to see the Rovell girls with different eyes. His first crush was on Diane, the more moody and independent of the sisters, but Marilyn had an uncomplicated sweetness that also appealed to him. They became lovers—seemingly with the knowledge and permission of Irving and May, who were sleeping under the same roof at the time. The Rovells’ kindness, along with their daughter’s loving infatuation, would become increasingly important to Brian as the months passed.

  When it came to his music, Brian was always in control. Working on “Surfin’ USA” on January 31, 1963, he figured out that double-tracking the vocals—recording them twice, the singers matching their previous performance as closely as possible, and then superimposing the tapes into one track—would give the harmonies a fullness and brightness that made them leap out of the speakers. He repeated the trick on the single’s B-side, “Shut Down” (recorded on the same day), and vocal double-tracking would become a Beach Boys trademark. So too would his vocal arrangements, elaborate structures of melody and counterpoint that washed across the tracks.

  One after another, the Beach Boys’ singles scaled the upper reaches of the Billboard charts. “Surfer Girl” climbed to number seven; “Be True to Your School” went to number six; “Little Deuce Coupe” got to number fifteen. Each new hit increased the band’s drawing power on the road. Then they met teenaged concert promoter Fred Vail in Sacramento in the spring of 1963. The ambitious youngster—who at one point hired the group to play a fundraiser for the senior class prom (tellingly, his percentage of the gate was more than what the group earned for headlining the show)—saw a rich opportunity. Obviously, the William Morris Agency didn’t know what they had in the group, so Vail proposed that Murry bring him on as an in-house promoter, helping the group stage their own shows in cities their agent hadn’t thought to open for them yet. Murry agreed, and soon Vail booked the group into dozens of markets. Most of the shows were triumphs for the increasingly confident band. “This was the greatest era. Before alcohol and drugs, before divorces and paternity suits,” Vail recalls. “They were all healthy, all full of youthful optimism. Every show was an event, and they loved the way they went over with the kids.”

  Brian, just past his twenty-first birthday, reveled in his new authority as a hit-maker. He rented office space on a high floor of the Sunset-Vine tower in Hollywood and set up what amounted to a private workroom and clubhouse. Fred Vail, who visited often with various group-related contracts, schedules, and papers, recalls a utilitarian space with a little reception area with a couple of disused chairs. An interior door led into a tiny hallway, past a coffeemaker and supply closet to Brian’s actual office. Small and mostly undecorated (in Vail’s memory it doesn’t even have a window, though Brian has described a sweeping view of Hollywood), the office had a leather armchair, a coffee table that held a telephone, and, against a far wall, an upright piano. “It was just a getaway for Brian,” Vail says. “I came in once and he was working on this song—I’d done dozens of shows with him at this point—and Brian says, ‘You know the parts; you do Carl’s part.’ He’s making some notes, and I said, ‘What’s this song? It’s great!’ He said, �
�Well, I’m gonna call it “Fun, Fun, Fun.”’”

  Brian had taken over the production duties for the group’s third album, Surfer Girl (released in September 1963), and the difference could be heard immediately. The title track, a delicate ballad that was actually the first song he had ever written (musing on Carol Mountain and the melody of “When You Wish upon a Star” while driving down Hawthorne Boulevard), simplified the Four Freshmen harmony, adding a striking emotional directness. “Little Deuce Coupe,” the group’s first great car song, ran like a hand-built speedster, with its bluesy melody playing out across a loping honky-tonk rhythm. “Catch a Wave” added harp glissandos and the rinse cycle of chords on the chorus. The goofball surfin’ travelogue “Hawaii” (“I’ve heard about all those purty girls/With the grass skirts down to their knees”) transcended its own sophomoric credulity with three tiers of interlocking harmony and a soaring falsetto line. Those advancements paled in comparison to “I Get Around” (a single from the spring of 1964, also released on All Summer Long in July), with its jarring rhythmic shifts, fuzz guitar, off-kilter organ riffs, and Brian’s own wailing falsetto coming together to kick the tune into overdrive.

  On his quieter, more lyrical songs, Brian crafted melodies that looped and soared, often visiting several keys on their journey from verse to chorus to bridge and back again. The melancholy ballad “The Warmth of the Sun,” written in late 1963, had a midverse modulation from the key of C major to E-flat that would shock the ear had Brian not found a melody that stayed rooted in the song’s initial key, even as the chords beneath it meander from one to the next.

  Hal Blaine, for years the most prominent session drummer in all of Los Angeles, says it took a few months before anyone in his circuit of elite musicians began to notice the records the Beach Boys were making. “Brian was just a child, really, and we were seasoned studio musicians who played with everyone. Nobody was knocked out by surf music. Nobody imagined they were gonna be one of the biggest groups ever. But then we began to realize that the music—well, it was just incredible.”

  Brian was just as floored by the songs Phil Spector was making. He first noticed the young songwriter/producer (who graduated from University High School, the same West L.A. institution that produced Jan and Dean and future utility Beach Boy Bruce Johnston two years before Brian left Hawthorne High) when he hit the top of the Billboard charts with “To Know Him Is to Love Him” as part of the Teddy Bears in 1958. But Spector stepped back from the spotlight just after that, choosing instead to focus on writing and producing for a stable of singers he would cultivate and discard as needed. Brian’s own attempts to build a stable of outside artists had, thus far, failed to generate any hits. But that disappointment did nothing to quell Brian’s ambition. And if anything, it made his admiration of Spector even more intense, particularly in 1961 and 1962, when he noticed how the young producer was beginning to use the recording studio as an instrument unto itself.

  It was the sound that did it for Brian: the thundering drums; the zooming bass; the rattling, jingling percussion; and the cavernous echo that both amplified and unified it all into a monolithic roar. Writers started calling it the “Wall of Sound,” but to Brian that description barely did Spector justice. To him, it was a natural wonder. When the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” came out, the song became a kind of spiritual touchstone. Brian would put the single on his record player and turn it up until those echoing drums made the windows rattle in their frames. Then he’d stand facing the speakers, his eyes squeezed shut, feeling the notes beating against his face, pushing against his chest, and wrapping around him. The sound was so immense he felt he could climb inside it and vanish, just as he had fallen into the spiraling melody of “Rhapsody in Blue” as a toddler and the interlocking harmony of the Four Freshmen as a teenager. Even forty years later, Brian’s eyes widen and his jaw drops open at the memory of Spector’s classic sides. “That awesome sound,” he says. “I loved those records. ‘Zip a Dee Doo Dah,’ ‘The Boy I’m Going to Marry,’ ‘Wait ’til My Bobby Gets Home.’ Loved them. Loved them.”

  Loved them so much, in fact, that Brian made a point of working in the same Hollywood recording studios—Western Recorders, Gold Star, Columbia—where Spector preferred to work. Brian became a fixture at Spector’s sessions, observing his idol construct his famous sonic wall brick by brick. “He’d just sit there quietly in the corner. We had no idea who he was,” recalls Blaine, who coordinated the core group of session musicians Spector preferred to use, which eventually came to be known as the Wrecking Crew. Spector’s vast sound required multiple drummers and percussionists, two bassists, two or three keyboard players, and up to a half dozen guitarists, plus entire sections of horns and strings. Brian would look on eagerly, watching how the maestro voiced the parts, how he arranged the players around the studio, where he set up the microphones, how he set the levels on the board.

  Determined to incorporate Spector’s sound into the Beach Boys’ records, Brian started calling in more and more of Spector’s crew to supplement his own sessions. At first he’d just bring in a couple of players to enhance his band’s own workmanlike licks. Blaine, in particular, sat in regularly for Dennis on the drums, which didn’t bother the middle Wilson brother in the least. (“Are you kidding?” Blaine says. “He’d rather be riding his motorbike or surfing.”) On “Fun, Fun, Fun,” Brian put a subtle but vital automotive roar into the tune by doubling the rhythm guitar chords with a line of baritone saxophones. A cover of “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?”—recorded a few days later—was even more explicitly Spector-esque, its sound thick with echoing vocals, multiple layers of percussion, and a full saxophone section. And though Spector rejected Brian’s custom-written “Don’t Worry, Baby” as a follow-up to “Be My Baby,” Brian took the song back and recorded it for the Shut Down, Volume 2 album as a virtual homage, complete with Spector’s heavy drum intro and a fat echo on the vocals.

  Spector, a neurotic control freak with well-documented problems regarding impulse control (he was charged with murder in 2003 after an actress was found shot to death inside his mansion), seemed less than delighted by his acolyte’s affections. In fact, he took perverse pleasure in insulting Brian as often and as publicly as possible. For instance, when Brian submitted “Don’t Hurt My Little Sister” to the Ronettes, Spector rewrote the tune from top to bottom, ultimately tossing Brian and Mike’s lyrics in order to use them as a throwaway jingle called “Things Are Changing (for the Better).” Spector invited Brian to play piano on the session, but then he tossed the younger musician out of the studio for what he called his substandard playing.

  The abuse did nothing to cool Brian’s ardor. In later years, his awe for Spector would seem detached from the relative merits of their work. “I never considered us to be anything but just a messenger of his music,” Brian said in 1998. He also spoke of Spector when the topic turned to potential collaborators. “I once thought I wanted to work with Phil Spector, but then I thought, ‘No, I would be too scared to be around the guy.’ Blows that all to hell.” He thought for a moment, then shrugged. “I would like to be produced by Spector. That is something that I have as a fantasy of mine, although I’m not really sure what I’m saying or what I’m up to or what that means. But I think it would be a real adventure—a music adventure—to work with him.”

  That said, once he mastered Spector’s technique in the first weeks of 1964, it was Brian Wilson who quickly went on to become the far more innovative and adventurous composer and producer. By mid-1964 (at which point the Beatles had only just moved past the simple guitar, bass, drums, and occasional piano they started out with in Liverpool), Brian had come up with “When I Grow Up (to Be a Man),” which featured a harpsichord as its lead instrument and a wheezing harmonica for rhythmic texture. A cover of Bobby Freeman’s “Do You Wanna Dance?” had all of Spector’s instrumental grandeur but added a spectacular vocal arrangement in the chorus that all but drowned out the stampeding timpani. Other tracks from the era featur
ed vibes, celestes, marimbas, and an array of wind instruments (clarinets, oboes, and the huffing bass harmonica were particular favorites).

  Once they’d played on a few of Brian’s sessions, Hal Blaine and the rest of the session pros were awestruck by the chief Beach Boy’s abilities. “We all studied in conservatories; we were trained musicians,” he says. “We thought it was a fluke at first, but then we realized Brian was writing these incredible songs. This was not just a young kid writing about high school and surfing.” And word of Brian’s achievements had spread far beyond L.A.’s recording studios. “Brian was way advanced of what anybody was doing at that point, and I think the Beatles recognized that,” Graham Nash recalled to music producer/filmmaker Don Was in the mid-1990s, thinking back to his days as a member of the British pop band the Hollies. David Crosby, Nash’s future bandmate in Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, remembers reaching the same conclusion during his days with the Byrds. “I thought, ‘I give up; I’ll never be able to do that,’” he told Was during the same interview. “Brian was the most highly regarded musician in America, hands down.”

  One night when “Fun, Fun, Fun” was near the top of its arc on Billboard’s singles charts, Fred Vail joined Brian and Al as they capped a night on the road by catching the Kingston Trio’s midnight performance at the Sands casino in Las Vegas. Nearing the end of their set, the Trio’s Nick Reynolds took a moment to point out the pair of famous musicians sitting near the lip of the stage. “I’d like to introduce you to the band who owns the world now,” he declared, pointing the spotlight toward Brian and Al. “This is the Beach Boys.” The two Beach Boys nearly levitated off of their seats, Vail remembers, both for the excitement of being recognized by one of their heroes and also because they knew that what he’d just told the crowd, no matter how overstated it seemed, was very close to the truth.