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

by Peter Ames Carlin

  And perhaps it was inevitable. In a year rent by public assassination, a bloody and controversial war, bitter protests on college campuses, and a racial divide that seemed only to grow more jagged as time went on, it’s impossible to imagine how a group of sweet-faced boyish utopians—who had finally ditched their striped shirts but still insisted on wearing matching white suits, set off with hokey psychedelic neckerchiefs that made them look like vaguely groovy ice cream salesmen—could capture anyone’s imagination. No, 1968 was the time for Jimi Hendrix’s psychedelic guitar frenzy, for the windmilling rage of the Who, for the Doors’ existentialist circus of horrors, and for the Rolling Stones, whose sympathy for the devil was rooted in the uncomfortable fact that He, so often, is We. Even the Beatles’ eyes darkened as the year went on, moving from the psychedelic ecstasies of Sgt. Pepper to the monochromatic gloom of The White Album and its vaguely ominous songs that skirted the edges of sex, hard drugs, suicide, and violent revolution.

  And even if the Beach Boys seemed determined to drift above the fray, no amount of cheerful harmony could keep the darkness around them from seeping into the sunny little world they continued to imagine in song. For Dennis, the chaos came to call one afternoon in the spring of 1968 when he picked up a couple of cute young hitchhikers and brought them back to his house on the western slope of Sunset Boulevard for what he hoped would be a quick three-way sexual liaison. Indeed, the two young women were more than happy to spend the afternoon rolling around naked with the hunky young drummer, and a good time was had by all. Later that evening, Dennis came home from a late-night recording session to discover that the girls had returned, only now they were accompanied by an entire flock of similarly freaked-out girls and the older man they called their guru: a dark-eyed, raven-haired drifter named Charlie Manson. Manson was even stranger and less clean than most people Dennis tended to hang around with. But he spoke of brotherhood and faith, knew where to get good drugs, and had such a hold over his flock of girls that when Charlie told them all to get naked, Dennis’s living room became a writhing mass of pink, lithesome, submissive flesh. And for Dennis Wilson, this was all the transcendence he could ever imagine.

  All Charlie asked for in return was a place for him and his family to live, food, drink, money, and access to everything else Dennis owned. Oh, and also a chance for Charlie to record some of his original music compositions, many of which elucidated his inimitable philosophies on life, love, and the inevitability of social conflict. And for Dennis, who had jumped from adolescence to wealth and fame without pausing to resolve the emotional toll of growing up in the shadow of Murry, the situation was just poisonous enough to feel right. Many young rock stars feel secretly (or not so secretly) guilty for their success, and Dennis experienced his guilt with the full-bodied enthusiasm he brought to his various indulgences. He was accustomed to giving away his money, cars, and clothes. Such sacrifices made him happy, so if he could satisfy both his conscience and his decadence in one mutually fulfilling relationship with Charlie Manson, that was fine by him, no matter how dirty and wild-eyed his permanent houseguest could be. “Fear is nothing but awareness, man,” Dennis told a reporter from Britain’s Rave magazine, going on to explain that he was quoting his friend, the Wizard, whom he described as being terribly wise and also, at times, quite scary. And he would grow even more so as the summer of Manson family fun went on.

  Dennis brought Charlie up to Brian’s house to record on several occasions, and the sessions produced everything from straight-ahead pop songs to more avant-garde tapes Mike Love described to a Rolling Stone reporter in 1971 as “…chanting, fucking, sucking, barking. It was a million laughs, believe me.” Nevertheless, Dennis remained convinced of his pal’s musical talent and took him to the Beverly Hills home of Terry Melcher up on Cielo Drive—the same house where Brian had asked Van Dyke Parks to help him write Smile a couple of summers earlier. The producer agreed to give Manson’s music a listen. He decided against pursuing the project, however, thereby eliciting Manson’s considerable rage. Manson never forgot where Melcher lived, either. And though the object of his hatred would soon move to another part of town, Manson’s fury stayed focused on that house on Cielo Drive.

  Dennis also wandered into Manson’s sights by taking one of his songs, “Cease to Exist,” smoothing down its bluesy edges, and recording it with the Beach Boys as “Never Learn Not to Love.” Reportedly, Manson had written the song specifically for the group, imagining that his vision of love as a soul-consuming act of submission would make them feel better about themselves. “Cease to exist, come and say you love me…Submission is a gift/Go on, give it to your brother,” Manson sang in his demo recording of the tune. And he’s neither a terrible singer nor a bad songwriter, which may explain Dennis’s interest in the guy. (Though at this point merely acknowledging this makes me feel like taking a hot, hot shower.) Dennis ended up revising the song’s words, then removed Manson’s name from the song’s credit line, an affront Manson used to justify prying several more months’ worth of goods and services from his rich friend.

  Dennis eventually grew tired of Manson’s parasitic ways, even if he had to move out of his Sunset Boulevard house in order to get the Wizard and family out of his life. Still, Manson’s demands on Dennis would continue. And when they weren’t satisfied soon enough, he or his minions would make threats, not just on Dennis’s life, but also on that of his young stepson, Scott. The fear-slash-awareness would only deepen in the next weeks and months and not just because the Beach Boys, who put “Never Learn Not to Love” on the B-side of their next single, launched Manson’s words and music onto the lower reaches of the Billboard charts. Soon the darkness of the age would seem to close in from every direction at the same time.

  Up at Bellagio Road, Brian’s eyes had taken on a curious glimmer. Sometimes this resulted from his long bouts with cocaine, which had come to join speed, grass, and the occasional dose of psychedelics on his menu of favored drugs. But such chemical indulgences offered only temporary relief from the demons that chattered away inside his ears. Some days their voices would overwhelm him so much that it was all Brian could do to lie in bed all day with the blankets pulled up to his chin, too depressed to climb to his feet and join in the work downstairs. “I feel like jumping out of the window,” he confessed to Danny Hutton one day when his friend managed to get through the door and talk things over for a little while. “That was when the real decline started,” Hutton recalls.

  When Brian did get out of bed, his behavior grew increasingly strange and obsessive. He recorded dozens of versions of “Ol’ Man River,” from the Jerome Kern musical Showboat, constantly finding new combinations of chords, instruments, and voices to alter the feel of the old Broadway standard. “He was always working on it,” Stephen Desper remembers. “I definitely recorded that song a lot of times.” The guys eventually tired of that, though, and one day Mike announced that he’d had it, thank you very much, and now they were done wasting their time and money on Brian’s “Ol’ Man River” experiments. Brian left the studio with his eyes stinging. (And he still remembers how angry it made him: “Mike was really cocky about that one,” he complains with a sour smile. “I remember that much about it.”)

  But even that obsession couldn’t rival Brian’s passion for Phil Spector’s thunderous “Be My Baby,” which he kept on the jukebox in his living room and would, when the mood struck him, listen to for hours at a time. One time, in the midst of a “Be My Baby” period, Brian had Desper make a tape loop consisting only of the song’s chorus—the point at which all of the instruments and voices come together in the biggest blast of echo-heavy sound—and put it on the big ultra-hi-fidelity tape recorder in his home recording studio. It was an involved project, with much precise razoring of tape and then the elaborate threading of the twenty-five-foot loop around the room, placing chairs and tables at precise points in order to maintain the appropriate tension on the tape as it spun from and then back to the heads of the player. Then Brian
put the speakers in the echo chamber, turned the lights out, and sat on the floor. Desper turned on the loop, made sure it was working properly, and then went out to run some errands, leaving Brian to the booming clamor of the Ronettes and Spector’s wall of sound. “I must have been gone for about four hours,” Desper says. “And when I came back, he was still listening to that loop over and over and over, in some kind of a trance. I opened the door and of course he was squinting, because he’d been in the dark the whole time. But he wasn’t asleep, and when I said, ‘Uh, are you sure you want to hear more?’ he instantly said he did: ‘Close the door!’ Then he listened for another hour before getting up and asking me to turn it off.”

  Meanwhile, Marilyn had given birth to the couple’s first daughter, Carnie. But while Brian loved his daughter as any father would, his own childhood weighed so heavily on him that he refused to take responsibility for raising his own child. “He once told me, ‘Marilyn, I want you to discipline the kids. I’ll do it wrong,’” Marilyn told Rolling Stone’s David Felton in 1976. “He backed out of it totally.” Having an infant in the house is consuming enough for any parent, let alone one who knows she can’t trust her spouse to help keep the baby comfortable and safe. And when Brian’s behavior seemed so detached from reality that Marilyn began to fear for his safety, the family realized something had to be done. Though the facts are still sketchy (and hitherto unreported), several sources confirm that Brian, perhaps of his own volition, was committed for treatment at a mental hospital for a period of time in 1968.

  “It was all very privately discussed,” Desper says. “The sessions went on at the house without him. I just remember that it was a big relief, particularly for Carl. The feeling was that they’d finally admitted to [the problem], and now they were doing the right thing: ‘Now he’s gonna get some help.’” What that help might have entailed—Electroshock? Stiff doses of lithium or other antipsychotic drugs? Intensive talk therapy?—remains a mystery. But Brian couldn’t have been in the hospital very long, judging by the pace of his work with the rest of the group in the studio; and the long-term salutary effects of his stay in the hospital are difficult to determine.

  But whenever Brian was available and ready to work, the other band members would gladly drop whatever they were doing and do whatever they could to extract whatever musical gems their erstwhile visionary felt like scattering across the studio. “Do It Again,” a nostalgic beach song with a funky backbeat that Brian cowrote with Mike at the latter’s instigation, recaptured the joie de vivre of days gone by well enough to climb into the American top twenty (it hit the top of the charts across the sea in the United Kingdom). Pushed by Al to move back toward folk music, Brian produced an inventive cover of Leadbelly’s “Cottonfields” that combined banjo, electric piano, Dobro, a horn section, and a thrumming electric bass line into a modern vision connecting the West Coast of the late twentieth century to the Louisiana fields of Stephen Foster’s imagination. Al would eventually recut the song with a less imaginative, pedal steel–dominated arrangement, and his version would be a moderate hit in England. The musical quest for roots continued with Carl’s cover of Phil Spector’s “I Can Hear Music.” Brian didn’t participate in any of those sessions, but the song’s thunderous sound revealed exactly how closely Carl had observed his older brother’s production techniques. Bruce and Carl took a run at Ersel Hickey’s “Bluebirds Over the Mountain,” freshening up the rockabilly tune with marimbas and (less explicably) shrieking lead guitar riffs played by sideman Ed Carter. Brian experimented with a cover of Burt Bacharach’s recent hit for Dionne Warwick, “Walk On By,” and continued to fuss with “Ol’ Man River,” recording at least one version as a medley with Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks at Home.” He didn’t get around to recording the vocals on Foster’s tune, but its faux-nostalgic sentiment—the yearning for an idealized family home that never quite existed—struck a chord for a man still reeling from the dire circumstances of his own youth. Meanwhile, Murry seemed determined to make himself just as present in the lives of his grown sons as he had been when they were still living in his home.

  It had been four years since the group had dismissed Murry Wilson as their manager. Most recently he had been keeping himself busy producing his own album of original jazz-pop instrumentals, “The Many Moods of Murry Wilson,” released by Capitol (and paid for from the reserves in one of the Beach Boys’ royalty accounts) in October 1967. The record didn’t exactly launch a new music career for Murry. But he still owned 50 percent of Sea of Tunes, the company that owned the rights to Brian’s songs. Given this authority and the fact that Brian, Dennis, and Carl could never really fire him as their father, Murry continued attending Beach Boy recording sessions on a regular basis. “Word would filter in, ‘Oh, shit, Murry’s here!’ Brian would tense up, and then there’d be this mad dash to hide all the pot,” Desper says. “Then Murry would come bursting in and everyone would say, ‘Oh, hi Dad! How’s it going? You can help us out!’ But right before that they’d have said: ‘Oh, fuck! Now we’ve lost two hours.’”

  And though his sons had been hugely successful recording stars for years, Murry couldn’t resist the temptation to exert his authority over whatever was going on, as Desper recalls: “He fancied himself the creator of the Beach Boys, and by rights, as their father, creator, and first backer, he’d take over. Brian found it difficult to stand up to him, so Murry would tell everyone what to do. He’d tell them to sing higher, tell them to sing something again, or point out the obvious stuff like, ‘Okay, here’s the count!’ He just couldn’t take his hand off the talkback mike.” Murry was just as forceful with Desper, who usually found himself sitting right in front of where Murry liked to stand. “He’d put his hand on my shoulder and dig his nails into my shoulder, yelling, ‘Surge! Surge here!’ And he’d leave these marks in my skin—I mean, it hurt.” The sessions could be bruising (literally, for Desper), but then Murry would make a grand gesture to smooth things over. “He’d ridicule me, then give me a lighter or something as if that would justify it all. He could be a very generous man. But he was just a kind of ornery fart.”

  Like a lot of men who came of age during the Depression and World War II, Murry had taken a few knocks in his life, and he emerged from the experience convinced that the best way to avoid more of the same was to swing first and take what he had coming to him before anyone else could grab it first. And once Murry figured out that his primary capital had come in the form of the three sons he loved so intensely, loosening his grip on them made no sense whatsoever. As far as he could see, he was just continuing his lifelong commitment to protect them, particularly against the weaknesses they still weren’t mature enough to realize they had. “I’ve protected you for twenty-two years,” Murry had railed during that notorious “Help Me, Rhonda” recording session four years earlier. “But I can’t go on if you’re not going to listen to an intelligent man. Against, against so many people who are trying to hurt you…”

  And as the 1960s drew to a close, the sun-washed optimism the Beach Boys had once given voice to seemed to have been subsumed by the darkness that had always hovered on its fringes. What emerged was a nation that had splintered along every imaginable social fault line: black against white, young against old, rich against poor, students against their universities, women against men, humans against Mother Earth. You say you want a revolution? That’s exactly what was going on in 1969, and every day it didn’t erupt into bloody, hellish violence was kind of surprising. Then in late July of that year, the Los Angeles police got that call up to the house on Cielo Drive that Terry Melcher had recently moved away from, and what they found—apparently intended for Melcher by its mastermind—was so gruesome it seemed like that nightmare of violent revolution was becoming real.

  The facts have been reported so often and so vividly it seems pointless to go into it all again. Suffice it to say that Sharon Tate, the pregnant wife of Roman Polanski, along with an array of friends and houseguests, had been murdered in
the bloodiest, most heartless way imaginable. To make things even more lurid and awful, the murderers had scrawled vaguely revolutionary slogans—two drawn from the titles of recent Beatles songs—on the walls with their victims’ blood. A prosperous, middle-aged couple who lived nearby, the LaBiancas, were murdered under similarly hellish circumstances the next night. And paranoia in Los Angeles, and everywhere else, ratcheted up to alarming heights. But nowhere more than in the heart of Dennis Wilson, Terry Melcher, and the various friends and associates who had come to know something about Manson’s revolutionary fantasies in the last few months. Manson turned up at Dennis’s door a day or two after the killings, looking even wilder than usual (“I been to the moon,” he explained when asked what he’d been up to). Dennis gave him all the money he had on him that night, but not nearly the $1,500 Manson had asked for, which aggravated him to no end. And Manson was even angrier when he returned a week or so later to find that Dennis was up in Canada with the Beach Boys. That time Manson left something for Dennis: a .45-caliber bullet.

  Dennis, Melcher, and their friends had whispered their suspicions all fall. But it took until mid-November for the authorities to build enough of a case to arrest Manson and his family for the murders. And once the identity of the killers became known, it seemed clear to some people—particularly President Richard M. Nixon, recently elected on a strict law-and-order platform—that the murderers were hippie freaks bent on destroying society. Surely this was just another facet of the drug-fueled decadence that had first stirred in the Monterey fog in 1967, then burst into full, hideous bloom out of the primordial muck of Woodstock, New York, right when Manson was up to his hideous business in Beverly Hills. But the collision of his hippielike cult with Sharon Tate’s new Hollywood crowd, Dennis and Melcher’s L.A. rock scene, the LaBiancas’ staid, upper-middle-class home, and then the many ambitions of L.A. prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi (who would leverage an entire second career out of his work on the Manson case) took in a much wider swath of American culture.