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

by Peter Ames Carlin

  When the spotlight went off and the crowds went home, they were still content to be kids. Carl was sixteen years old in the fall of 1963, Dennis was all of eighteen, Brian and Al were just past their twenty-first birthdays, and Mike was the grand old man at twenty-two. As a result, inspiration for new songs was as close as the neighborhood kids Brian would see in the parking lot of Foster’s Freeze, the hot rods cruising Hawthorne Boulevard, and the lights and noise of the football field at Hawthorne High. So, with one foot still planted in his old neighborhood and the other in the Hollywood pop music scene, Brian’s songs absorbed the textures of teen life in the South Bay and reflected them as a universal teenaged daydream. But given the anxiety that seemed to hover so perpetually over their own lives, even their fantasy version of Southern California teen life was something other than easygoing. “Be True to Your School,” “In the Parkin’ Lot,” and “Pom Pom Play Girl” transformed the halls, playing fields, and parking lots of public schools into settings for conflict and romance that played out with operatic passion. “Drive-In” got right down to the most cinematic aspects of the automotive theater experience, complete with tips on how to sneak in without paying admission, a cornucopia of junk food, and a few knowing jokes about what really takes place out there in the dark, climaxing (as it were) with a cryptic reminder about the importance of birth control: “If you say you watched the movie, you’re a couple of liars/And remember, only you can prevent forest fires…”

  But even sex in the backseat took a backseat to the life-altering possibilities looming down the road. “409” had been first out of the gate, but a swarm of glossy, souped-up vehicles soon followed, from “Little Deuce Coupe” (“She’s got a competition clutch with a four on the floor/and she purrs like a kitten ’til the lake pipes roar”), to the fuel-injected Corvette Stingray that stars in “Shut Down” (“My pressure plate’s burnin’, that machine’s too much!”), to the hand-built super-car in “Custom Machine” (“Well, with Naugahyde bucket seats in front and back/ Everything is chrome man, even my jack”).

  All that detailed automotive erotica—much like the surf slang on the beach—gave a ground-level perspective into the experiences of the characters who described their lives in these terms. But for the mass of listeners who didn’t know jack about cars, it became a kind of poetry, the cars doubling as vehicles of transcendence. Again, the destination (or finish line, in this case) was far less important than the journey itself. And for listeners from every regional, cultural, and socioeconomic background, the little emotional dramas hidden within the words and harmonies gave Brian’s songs an emotional impact that went far beyond the typical pop song of the era.

  Bruce Springsteen would explore the same highways a decade later, albeit with a far more sophisticated sense of its metaphorical significance. Indeed, Springsteen’s cars are never just cars. They’re “suicide machines” steered by “broken heroes on a last-chance power drive.” They’re deliciously pink Cadillacs whose female owners left tire tracks in the Garden of Eden. The stark “Racing in the Streets” begins with its narrator’s loving description of his car’s 396, fuelie heads, and the Hurst on the floor, and the boast that all comers would be, inevitably, shut down. None of this would be out of place in, say, “Shut Down,” but this journey doesn’t end until Springsteen steps back to describe the existential emptiness of the “promised land,” then sets out for a beach where he and his baby can cleanse themselves of their sins.

  The Beach Boys, on the other hand, sang cheerily of starting a car club so they can all get matching jackets to wear when they cruise in other towns. It’s easy to sneer at the Hawthorne boys’ gleeful plans to “set a meet, get a sponsor and collect some dues/And you can bet we’ll wear our jackets wherever we cruise!” Yet consider the depth of feeling those jackets represent. Ponder the sense of liberation that animates the triumphant boast of ownership in “Little Deuce Coupe” (“There’s one more thing: I got the pink slip, Daddy,” ) and marvel at “I Get Around” and its lightning journey from frustration (“I’m gettin’ bugged drivin’ up and down the same old strip” ) to promise (“My buddies and me are gettin’ real well known” ) to deliverance (“I’m a real cool head/I’m makin’ real good bread” ). Listen closely: “I Get Around” is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, tricked out in metal flake paint and mag wheels.

  In a more immediate way, “I Get Around” also told the story of Brian’s triumph with the Beach Boys. As usual with Brian’s compositions, the feelings come out most evocatively in the music itself, which in this case involves a modular structure, interlocking harmonic lines that build toward Brian’s own wordless falsetto swoops. All of which snapped together to express the astonishing excitement he felt at being able not only to build a career in Hollywood (which was, of course, a long way from his old strip in Hawthorne) but also to succeed so magnificently, becoming famous and relatively wealthy at the same unbelievable clip. Indeed, when the Beach Boys toured from town to town, the evenings would end with Murry and Fred Vail lugging paper shopping bags stuffed with cash back to their dressing room, where they would count the proceeds, lock it all down, and prepare to deposit it at the bank at the start of business hours the next morning. “They were kings of the world,” Vail remembers. “Sold out houses everywhere they went. In ’63 the only competition they had anywhere was the Four Seasons, and they were mostly on the East Coast. The Beach Boys had no rivals in the West.”

  Still, no matter how big they got, Murry was there to make sure they kept their shirts tucked in, their pants neatly pressed, their hair trimmed and combed, and their attitudes appropriately humble. To enforce the rules, Murry set up a system of fines, docking each member $100 for each stray “shit” or “fuck” and even more when they missed bed check or showed up late for rehearsal or a flight. Their dad-turned-manager’s heavy-handed authority was fast growing wearisome for the guys, particularly now that they had become accustomed to the influence their growing fame and wealth gave them with everyone else they encountered. What they didn’t understand, however, was how Murry’s determination to keep their feet on the ground also kept them rooted in the lives they’d had before they’d become famous. This grounding came through loud and clear in their songs, which were set most often in the same public schools, libraries, hamburger stands, and city beaches where the vast majority of working-to-middle-class kids found love, heartbreak, and meaning.

  As in our fantasies of America, what matters about a person in a Beach Boys song has nothing to do with who he or she is and everything to do with the strength of his or her ambition and the things he or she chooses to do with it. The essential activities are freely available to all comers. This same message plays out across all cultural and racial lines in “Surfin’ USA,” and it’s just as vivid in “The Girls on the Beach,” where, as they repeat in the chorus, the young lovelies are “all within reach.” That promise—extended in the warm, jazzy harmonies Brian cribbed from the Four Freshmen, who found them in the big band arrangements of Stan Kenton and Duke Ellington—had as much to do with social opportunity as sex.

  Certainly, there is eroticism in “The Girls on the Beach,” both in the lyrics and in the voices themselves, which fall, climb, and tangle languidly through a series of augmented chords with a loving intimacy that communicates all the passion simmering beneath the words. But also consider the underlying needs and desires that compel such dreaminess. In John Steinbeck’s Depression-era novel The Grapes of Wrath, it’s economic desperation that compels Ma Joad to insist, despite all evidence to the contrary, that California would be a real-life Eden. “An’ fruit ever’place, an’ people just bein’ in the nicest place,” she tells her skeptical son on the eve of their journey west. Tom Joad is less convinced, however, and indeed, they soon find themselves living in the same sort of hobo camp that Edith Wilson and family spent their first weeks residing in on the beach at Cardiff-on-the-Sea. And for the Wilsons, at least, the memory of that descent into poverty would be powerful
enough to motivate and torment for decades.

  The first real cloud over the Beach Boys’ success, Fred Vail recalls, scudded onto the horizon the day the Beatles’ jet touched down in New York in February 1964. And if the onset of Beatlemania was jarring enough to every other American pop musician, it was doubly so for the Beach Boys. And not just because they had been the nation’s most popular rock group through the end of 1963. What made it all even more ticklish was that the Beatles were also signed to Capitol Records. And the moment the Liverpudlians came to these shores, the same executives who had until recently been in love with the Beach Boys were swooning for the moptops. “The Beach Boys had been it for two years, but now people thought the Beatles were the future,” Vail says. “And loyalties ran thin at Capitol. Now they didn’t have to cater to Murry and the Beach Boys, and so they didn’t.”

  At least they didn’t intend to. But Murry was too stalwart an advocate to be ignored for long. He made a point of visiting the Capitol Tower in person, most often without calling in advance, in order to twist executive arms until they snapped forth with more and better support for the Beach Boys. And to make sure his boys fulfilled their end of the deal, Murry cracked the whip extra hard in the recording sessions, questioning Brian’s arrangement, engineer Chuck Britz’s mix, or the way the boys oohed behind the lead vocal. “You’re not going ‘ooh,’ Carl, you’re going ‘uuuuuuunh,’” he snapped at one session. “Let’s fight for success, okay?”

  Certainly, Murry had fought for them. He’d mortgaged his company to finance their first records and tours, and when the band seemed to be taking off, he gave up his own career in order to devote himself to its success. Along the way he’d made a lot of good decisions: He helped Brian set up his own publishing company so he would always have control over his songs and then forced the Capitol Records executives to give Brian complete authority over the group’s music. Murry also realized that no matter how good a record was, it still needed the enthusiasm of the nation’s disc jockeys, record distributors, and shop owners to sell it. So he mounted a charm offensive aimed at all of the industry’s local and regional power brokers, constantly paying personal visits to their offices, shaking their hands, and sending handpicked presents (bought in bulk, of course) to cement their friendship. And if the rack-jobbers and program directors did treat him like a friend, well, Murry craved that kind of attention, too. He even had his own promotional photos taken, handing them out—hand-signed “Murry ‘Dad’ Wilson”—to whomever would accept one. He’d come a long way from that tent on the beach at Cardiff-by-the-Sea, and he wanted his kids to know it.

  Murry meant to inspire his kids. He’d spent his entire life repeating the same lectures about the importance of having a dream, of working hard to make it real, of never giving up. But Murry’s glorious words came with the gloomy subtext of his own life: from the dismal failure his father had been, to Murry’s own sputtering career in industry, to his desperate attempts to maintain control over his growing sons. Taught to believe they could achieve anything they could imagine and raised to understand exactly how brutal the consequences of failure could be, the younger Wilsons grew up splayed between hope and fear. “Kick ass! Kick ass!” their father liked to roar at them. And they already knew whose ass would be kicked if he began to suspect they weren’t getting the message.

  So even if Brian never liked touring, he was out there leading the band from show to show, keeping them sharp and focused at night, even as he spent his days working on new songs for their next single, the next B-side, the next album, and the album after that. Once they got back to Los Angeles, he had to get back to the studio to arrange and produce the new material, finding new sounds to fill his increasingly intricate tracks while also teaching the complex vocal arrangements to an often preoccupied and sometimes downright uncooperative group. If they couldn’t get it right after eight hours or so, Brian would stay late and sing all the parts himself. The competition posed by the Beatles—whose music thrilled Brian just as much as it had everyone else with ears—made the pressure on him even more intense. Now he just worked harder, beating back his fears with more complex songs, Phil Spector–sized productions and vocal arrangements that looped, climbed, and soared above the instruments. When it worked, the sound was enough to sweep everything else away. But that meant making it bigger and better. Always, he knew, bigger and better.

  The last surf song Brian wrote in the ’60s was recorded in April, the month that began with the Beatles claiming each of the top five songs on Billboard’s Hot 100. Brian worked with Mike on the lyrics, calling it “Don’t Back Down,” set on a beach bracketed by killer waves that pop up “like a ton of lead” and heartless women who “dig the way the guys get all wiped out.” “You’ve gotta be a little nuts/But show ’em man, who’s got guts,” Brian wailed during the choruses. Did he realize he was echoing his father’s lectures about fighting for success? Perhaps not, but what seems clear is that, at least in some respects, the California paradise he’d imagined was already fading before his eyes. But now that Brian’s talents had proven powerful enough to allow him and his family to finally complete their journey across the continent, they had nowhere else to go. “Kick ass! Kick ass!” Murry kept commanding. So Brian paddled out into the darkness, alone, humming a song to himself.

  Don’t back down from that wave!

  CHAPTER 4

  As the session gets rolling, Murry Wilson radiates warmth toward his sons, his nephew, and their bandmate, all of whom are recording vocals for what they hope will be the next Beach Boys hit.

  “You’ve got a wonderful tune here,” he calls down through the control room’s intercom microphone. “Al, loosen up a little more, say ‘Rhonda’ a little more soft and sexy. Carl, ‘ooh’ better, and we got it. Dennis, don’t flat anymore, and we got it.”

  They start another take but get only a few bars into it before a stray note clatters in Brian’s ear. “Stop it!” he calls up to engineer Chuck Britz, who cuts off the tape. The singers chat amiably for a few moments, working out the kinks in what is, after all, a complicated construction of interlocking vocal lines. After a minute or two, they prepare to start up again.

  “Brian, have the guys loosen up,” Murry punches in again, his rumbling baritone echoing off the studio walls. “You’ve got a beautiful tune here! Loosen up here. You’re so tight, fellas, I can’t believe it.”

  But the more Murry urges the boys to relax, the tenser the mood becomes. Not that anyone seems able to acknowledge what the problem is, beyond a cryptic complaint, delivered off-mike, about “ten cooks out there messin’ things up.” A moment later, Brian turns to Alan Jardine, manning the lead singer’s mike, with a new edge to his voice. “Try to syncopate it, Al,” he says. “Try.”

  Another take falls apart, and when the intercom crackles, Murry’s voice is back again, even louder than before. “Bear with me,” he rumbles. “Brian asked me to relax and come down, which is why I got drunk.” Hearing this, Brian cuts in quickly. “You’re not drunk,” he says, gloomily.

  Actually, Murry does sound a little tanked. He’s too loud, for one thing, and his tongue can’t quite wrap around all of his S’s. Even so, he manipulates his quarry expertly, using one hand to stroke their egos and the other to slap their faces. “Loosen up and sing from your heart!” he says. “You got any guts? Let’s hear it.”

  This is the sound of the Beach Boys recording “Help Me, Rhonda” on February 24, 1965. The tracking tape, which documents nearly forty minutes of the evening session, including the takes, rehearsals, and studio chatter, is an astonishing document that reveals why the song they’re singing—destined to be the group’s second number one single and one of the most beloved songs of their entire career—is both an infectious sing-along and also a tale of heartbreak whose exuberant chorus pivots on a plaintive cry for help. “Help me get her out of my heart!” They sing in perfect harmony, again and again, as Murry scowls down from the control room. Brian doesn’t need to have his father
in the room to feel the tug of his expectations or the weight of his disapproval. No matter how many hit songs Brian had written, no matter how sophisticated his music had become or how respected his studio work, there was always more to do. More records to make, more albums to fill, more shows to play. Brian had married his sixteen-year-old sweetheart, Marilyn, and her steady warmth had provided some comfort in the twenty-two-year-old’s life. But it also made things more complicated, as he had to provide not just for his young wife, but also for his brothers, his parents, and a growing number of employees, compatriots, and contracted entities.

  Naturally, Murry made sure his eldest son knew how much he owed all of them, particularly when Brian’s attention seemed to wander. “Don’t go Hollywood phony on me, baby,” he’d say scornfully. “You’ve gotta fight for success.”

  Two months earlier, the pressure had finally overwhelmed Brian, as the increasingly chunky musician suffered a vicious anxiety attack during a flight to a show in Houston. “I can’t take it anymore,” he had wailed, his shrieks muffled only by the pillow he’d pressed to his face. It was a terrible episode—a nervous breakdown, according to his bandmates, but at least it convinced them to allow Brian, at long last, to step back from his touring obligations. Now he was free to focus his complete attention on the one thing that really mattered to him—writing and recording music. Now that they had to compete with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan, recording new music was terribly important to all of them. “I foresee a beautiful future for us as a group,” Brian told the others, and they all believed it.