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

by Peter Ames Carlin

  Mike and Carl took the master tapes of the two songs for the Beach Boys’ new album. Once they had put their own vocals on Brian’s prerecorded tracks, they released “Darlin’” as a single, scoring themselves a top twenty hit. This last development stung, Hutton admits. “But if I were Mike, I would have done the same thing. It’s like, Brian’s our producer, he’s our writer; (these other, unknown guys) are in the only studio we record in, and he wants to finish an album with them? Mike’s like…get out! And everyone says shit about Mike, but if I were him, I would have said the same thing.”

  Still, Mike and Carl’s latest intervention in his artistic decisions did nothing to enhance Brian’s creative momentum or his sense of well-being. And Brian’s chagrin would only grow more pronounced when the other Beach Boys vetoed his decision to sign Hutton’s band to the Beach Boys’ own Brother Records. Instead, Redwood signed a contract with ABC Records, where they changed their name to Three Dog Night and soon launched a run of hit singles and albums that by the early ’70s would make them one of the top-selling rock groups in the world.

  Despite, or perhaps because of, what he perceived as these ongoing affronts to his creativity, Brian’s work in the last months of 1967 and the first half of 1968 at times edged back toward the fragile optimism that had always animated his best work. But just as his own creative horizons had receded, so too did Brian’s vision of the western paradise. His psyche battered by its most recent journey into the wilderness, now Brian (often writing with the assistance of Mike and sometimes combinations of other bandmates) looked for transcendence in the textures of the natural world and the simple, homey life unfolding beneath its bowers. The Wild Honey album, recorded largely at Brian’s house just after the Smiley Smile sessions had ended, added a driving rhythm-and-blues edge to the homegrown sound. This was particularly true on the theremin-laced title track (also featuring a screaming Carl Wilson lead vocal) and the purloined single “Darlin’,” with its ascending horn lines and propulsive chorus harmonies. Both singles are vibrant and energetic, but it’s the quieter, unassuming songs that reach for an entirely new aesthetic. “Country Air” describes a sunrise across the hills of rural America with a simple bass-piano-and-drums backing for a lyric that begins with a hummed verse (solo Mike) and then a richly harmonized chorus—“Get a breath of that country air/breathe the beauty of it everywhere”—that repeats several times with different concluding lines: “Get a look at that clear blue sky” the first time around; “Mother Nature, she fills my eye” the second; “Rise up early the day won’t let you sleep” on the final repetition, with Carl stretching out the last word into a falsetto swoop that harmonizes, amazingly, with the sound of a crowing rooster. Recorded in a single three-hour session in mid-November, “Country Air” is both rustic and shimmering, the restraint of its instrumentation and block harmonies perfectly underscoring the simple perfection of nature.

  Similarly, the sly love song “I’d Love Just Once to See You” begins with its narrator (Brian) poking around the kitchen to the tune of a strummed acoustic guitar and lightly tapped percussion: “I drink a little of this and eat a little that/ and poke my head out the door,” he talk/sings, before going on to wash the dishes, rinse the sink, and hum a little song to himself, musing on his absent beloved. Indeed, all this domestic activity is merely foreplay to a sexual proposition—“I’d love just once to see you…in the nude”—so disarmingly forthright that the chiming guitars and blossoming harmonies that fill the song’s final twenty seconds sound just as sweet and fulfilling as a moment of spontaneous lovemaking.

  “Let the Wind Blow” bridges the gap between the pleasures of nature and romance (although Mike’s arch lyrics create a stumbling block that isn’t truly overcome until Carl’s magnificent, gospel-like performance on the 1973 In Concert album), and the idea is expanded upon in the harmony-filled, harpsichordled waltz “Time to Get Alone” (first recorded in late 1967, then fiddled with in the succeeding months and released in 1969), in which one couple’s romantic journey is reflected in a series of natural images, first as a speeding toboggan ride down a mountainside (the journey echoed in the chorus’s descending chords) and, in the moments they spend, “Lying down on our backs looking at the stars/ looking down through the valley so deep and wide.” The point is that as a loving couple, they are poised at the absolute center of nature, as perfectly interwoven as the voices weaving behind them.

  What begins to emerge in this period—which extends into 1968’s Friends with songs such as “Wake the World,” then on through “Cool, Cool Water” and another bird song, “At My Window”—is an awe for the natural world that echoes ideals that found their first voice with the transcendentalists of the mid-nineteenth century. For like Thoreau at Walden Pond, Brian and, to an extent, the other Beach Boys created a vision of life in which beauty (interpreted perhaps as the presence of God or a connection to the sacred) becomes most vivid in the absence of the usual clamor of life. Dennis Wilson, working with a poet friend named Steve Kalinich, produced two elegantly understated songs for the Friends album in 1968 (his first original Beach Boy songs, if you ignore the space-filling solo, “Denny’s Drums,” on Shut Down, Volume 2) that pose variations on the same theme. “Be Still,” with Dennis singing alone over the accompaniment of a single organ, sounds like a Unitarian hymn describing the sacred essence of life and the human potential to interact with God. “You know you know you are/Be still and know you are,” it begins. “Little Bird” strikes a more fanciful pose, with both its more realized production (courtesy of Brian, who also contributed the song’s bridge, uncredited) and its vision of a natural world that provides both physical and spiritual sustenance. The birds provide music, the trees bear fruit, even an unsuccessful day of fishing has its reward: “A trout in a shiny brook/Gave a worm another look/And told me not to worry about my life.”

  And though this lyrical pose often put the group’s music at odds with the reality of their own lives, it’s the same contradiction that lurked beneath the Beach Boys when they were nonsurfers who just happened to be the nation’s most successful purveyors of songs about surfing. What also remained consistent was the yearning that fired their dreams. For even if they couldn’t quite attain the simple happiness they described, there was nothing phony about the desperation that animated their fantasies. Once again, the distinctly American texture of their visions emerged not from a conscious effort (surely they had no sense how closely the imagery in their songs resembled Walden) but from the reality of their experience and their tangled internal lives.

  Naturally, the most striking examples in the group’s surge of transcendentalist pop are both songs composed entirely by Brian. “Busy Doin’ Nothin’” appeared on Friends as a breezy bossa nova–style song (richly orchestrated with clarinets, nylon-string guitars, and a loping acoustic bass) that describes what seems to be a typical day for a young, semiretired rock musician who, as the title implies, is not terribly busy. “I had to fix a lot of things this morning, ’cause they were so scrambled,” Brian sings in the first verse, his relaxed delivery growing even more placid as he eases into the next line, describing the stillness that comes with the setting sun and cooling breeze. Brian invites a friend to visit, giving explicit (and reputedly quite accurate, if you lived where his friend did) directions to his house on Bellagio Road. “Drive for a couple miles,” he begins:

  You’ll see a sign and turn left for a couple blocks

  Next is mine, you’ll turn left on a little road, it’s a bumpy one.

  The second verse climaxes with Brian’s decision to call another friend. Only he lost the slip of paper he scribbled her number on, which introduces the conflict that drives the second half of the song. Once again, transcendence comes most readily in an absence of effort. Brian thinks about the number for a while, summons it in his memory, and then dials. Once again, all is right in the world—except it turns out his friend isn’t home to answer. Again Brian eases into a solution that is so simple it would be absu
rd to mention, were it not for the ecstatic tone he brings to describing it: “So I hung up the telephone…sharpened up a pencil and/Wrote a letter to my friend.” The clarinets rise up to herald this revelation, swooping and diving like a flock of birds through the trees while crickets chitter (drumsticks skittering across the hi-hat cymbal) and the dog lopes amiably in the brush (the stand-up bass solo). And none of these things matter, except for the fact that these tiny moments make up the essential fabric of existence, and this elegant recognition of their innate beauty is a small triumph not just in the career of Brian Wilson, but in the entire scope of popular music.

  It’s nice to think of Brian in this way, meandering alone through his mansion with a song on his lips and nothing—and yet everything—on his mind. For in “Busy Doin’ Nothin’,” he is the eccentric genius of dreams, entirely weird, but happily and productively so, nursing whatever psychic wounds he might carry in the balm of his own brilliance. But as in the early, heroic songs, the darkness that fuels his need for ecstatic vision is never far from the edges of his dreamed life. Another journal-style song recorded a few weeks later, the lazy waltz “I Went to Sleep,” describes the events of a similarly leisurely day with a more detached tone. The narrator (Brian again, at the crest of a block of harmonies) wanders into the park, goes home and listens to the radio, goes back to the park and watches a bird flying past. But rather than reveling in what he experiences—let alone interacting with it—he responds by falling asleep. The signal moment seems to come in the second verse, when Brian turns on the radio and feels completely disconnected from what he hears: “Some group was playing a musical song/It wasn’t too long/And I went to sleep.”

  That Brian is growing increasingly interested in numbing his senses becomes all the more clear in “Sail Plane Song,” cowritten with Carl and recorded days after “I Went to Sleep” in the spring of 1968 (though not released until 1998’s Endless Harmony compilation). Here, Brian leaps onto a metaphorical airplane that, given the oddly circular chord pattern (played on piano and organ, with electric guitar and rudimentary drums keeping time) and remote sound of his vocal, is fueled by something more psychedelic than diesel jet fuel. “Have you ever been on an airplane?/Up above the clouds there’s no rain,” he sings, neatly explaining why a person in pain might feel inclined to get high via any available means. And indeed, the journey he goes on to relate is both vividly described and entirely disconnected from reality, from his visit to the ocean to the skyward climb that ends when he turns off the engine and, instead of falling through the clouds, sails straight to the sun.

  By this time, all the other Beach Boys had long since explored their own fondness for altered consciousness. They had all smoked pot to one extent or another (although Bruce Johnston generally preferred to keep his feet on terra firma, as did Al and Mike), while Carl dallied with an array of substances and the perpetually ravenous Dennis gobbled up whatever came within his reach. For Mike, the first reasonable path to the netherworld appeared courtesy of Dennis, of all people, in the last days of 1967, when the drummer came across the Maharishi, the Indian-born guru of Transcendental Meditation who had captured the interest of the Beatles during the summer of 1967. Impressed by the little Indian man’s charismatic holiness during their meeting in Paris, Dennis summoned the rest of the group from London so they too could learn the joys of meditation. Mike, who yearned to explore his consciousness without surrendering control over reality, was struck immediately. An avowed materialist, Mike was even more intrigued when the guru told him that his pursuit of spirituality needn’t require him to divest of all, or even any, of the exquisite accoutrements of his celebrity lifestyle. “That sounded pretty good to me,” Mike said at the time. Now convinced that he had truly found the path to spiritual enlightenment meant for him, Mike jumped into TM with both feet, signing up immediately for an extended seminar to be held at the Maharishi’s personal compound in Rishikesh, India. There his classmates would include all of the Beatles, accompanied by their wives and entourage, plus the British folksinger Donovan Leitch, American actress Mia Farrow, her sister Prudence, and a scattering of other spiritual seekers.

  For Mike, the two weeks in Rishikesh would become a highlight of his life, both for the spiritual education he received and also for the glittering company he kept while he was there. For years he would describe how Paul McCartney came to him one afternoon, acoustic guitar in hand, singing the first verses of “Back to the USSR” and explaining how it was inspired by all those Chuck Berry and Beach Boys songs about traveling and girls. And as Mike always loved to point out, he had right at that moment told Paul exactly how he should write the bridge of the song, talking about how the girls in this place were so hot and the girls in that place were so cool…like “California Girls,” geddit? And yes, Paul got it, all the way from the Moscow girls to the one named Georgia, so perpetually on his mi-mi-mi-mi-mind. The Beatles’ recollections of Mike were just as vivid, even if most of them seemed to revolve around the way he had come equipped with crates of batteries, film, and other Western staples he was willing to sell to other campers for a premium. “He reminded me of a dealer,” McCartney told his biographer, Barry Miles. “I think he might even have had booze in there. ‘Hey man, come to Mr. Love!’…All in all it was good fun.” And yet by the time it was all over, the musicians would come away with radically different opinions on the Maharishi himself; while the Beatles denounced their ex-guru in word and song, Mike would spend the rest of his days as a committed practitioner and tireless evangelist for the cause. But if TM can be viewed as a healthier alternative to drugs, Mike’s passion for his guru would soon become just as damaging to the group’s private fortunes and public reputation as their drug use.

  Back in the United States in mid-March, Mike joined in the Friends sessions for a couple of weeks, then set out with the rest of the group on a self-financed tour of the American Southeast that began, as coincidence would have it, just two days before the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee. The murder of the nation’s most prominent civil rights activist sparked riots in some cities and gun-enforced martial order in many cities hoping to avoid the same plight. Naturally, the always tense urban areas of the Jim Crow South—most of which the Beach Boys had been booked to play in the next few days—instantly became the epicenter of the nation’s racial tension. Most of the shows were cancelled, and the ones that weren’t drew only light crowds, including one show that according to the group’s then-manager Nick Grillo (speaking to Steven Gaines) drew a total of twenty-five fans. “Devastating,” Grillo told Gaines. “A fucking nightmare.”

  A month later the group set out on the road again, this time in a glossy package tour (“The Most Exciting Event of the Decade!” according to the promotional posters) with the Maharishi, who would open the show with lectures on the magic and wonder of Transcendental Meditation. As concocted by savvy spiritualist Mike, the tour would be a brilliant method to both spread the word about TM via their own mainstream popularity and simultaneously enhance their coolness factor thanks to their public association with the world’s most prominent Indian mystic. The only problem was that the Beach Boys’ fans were not only dwindling in number but also uniquely impatient when it came to sitting through long, generally unintelligible lectures on Eastern spirituality. As the guru sat cross-legged on the flower-bedecked stage explaining the utility of mantras and chakras and the like, the kids would bellow for “409” and “California Girls,” thereby ruining the vibe entirely and prompting gales of high-pitched giggles from the ever-buoyant Maharishi. And once the Beach Boys did take the stage, they found themselves belting out their no-longer-quite-so-fresh hits to acres of empty seats.

  Once at the absolute center of the American rock ’n’ roll scene, the Beach Boys of 1968 found themselves woefully out of step with the mood and rhythm of the nation’s popular culture. Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner had anticipated this development as early as late 1967, when he wrote an editorial for
his increasingly important youth culture journal castigating the Beach Boys and Brian Wilson for what he perceived as their artistic pretensions and overall phoniness. The performing group, Wenner wrote, was “totally disappointing,” while all that Smile-era talk about Brian’s genius was little more than a “promotional shuck” that had mesmerized the songwriter into a kind of creative paralysis. “The Beach Boys are just one prominent example of a group that has gotten hung up in trying to catch the Beatles. It’s a pointless pursuit,” Wenner concluded.

  The fact that the Beatles themselves considered Brian to be not just a worthy rival but also an inspiring one didn’t seem to matter. Nor had the fact that his post-Smile work had dialed back the group’s ambitions considerably. And though Wild Honey (and its single, “Darlin’”) made respectable showings in the low twenties of the Billboard sales charts during the winter of ’67/’68, the public antipathy for the Beach Boys grew stronger as they muddled into the spring and summer. The lovely Friends album, released at the start of the summer, stalled at number 126 on the Billboard charts, while the title track missed the top forty by a long shot, peaking at an anemic number 47.