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

by Peter Ames Carlin

  After years out of the spotlight, Brian (having an acupuncture treatment in ’76) focused on coming back. (Courtesy Stan Love)

  By the end of ’76, Brian was back with plenty of new songs to share. (Courtesy Stan Love)

  When they earned their star on Hollywood Boulevard, the mayor declared Beach Boys Day in Los Angeles. (Courtesy Peter Reum)

  By 1980, both Dennis (second from left) and Brian (third from right) were obviously losing control of their habits. (Courtesy Ed Roach)

  Above: His health restored again, Brian (performing with the group in ’84) was happy to share the spotlight with Dr. Landy. (Courtesy Stan Love)

  Left: Brian’s autobiography was meant to showcase his new health and independence. Instead, it did the opposite. (Courtesy Matt Marshall)

  Mr. and Mrs. Wilson smile for the camera at their wedding. (Courtesy Brian and Melinda Wilson)

  With Landy out of the picture, Brian (working on Orange Crate Art with Van Dyke and Lenny Waronker in ’95) got back to work. (Courtesy Van Dyke Parks)

  A notoriously reluctant performer, Brian shocked fans when he hit the road in ’99. (Courtesy Ross W. Hamilton)

  Back at work on Smile in 2003, Brian, Van Dyke, and Darian Sahanaja pause for a water break. (Courtesy Brian and Melinda Wilson)

  With Al Jardine and David Marks at the landmark dedication in Hawthorne, May 2005 (Courtesy Rich Sloan)

  Just away from a nonbeliever…Brian performs the completed Smile in 2005. (Courtesy Ross W. Hamilton)

  Still, no matter how ambivalent Brian might have felt about the new balance of power in the group, he also couldn’t help being swept up in the revived enthusiasm that the band felt as the new decade, a new recording contract, and a new beginning for their career came into view. Suddenly the failures of the last few years didn’t seem to matter anymore. Maybe they were still the Beach Boys in name, but they truly were beginning to act and feel like grown men, working hard together to steer their ship back to the glories they had every faith they could reclaim.

  All through the end of 1969 and into the first half of 1970, the music emanating from the studio in Brian’s house gave the group even more reason to feel confident. Each member of the band had a pile of songs to offer, including an album’s worth of songs Brian had either written alone or along with one or more of the other guys. By the end of spring, they had compiled a finished master for what they figured would be their first Reprise album, which they had decided to title Add Some Music, after a pop-folk tune Brian and Mike had written with friend Joe Knott, called “Add Some Music to Your Day.” That song in particular seemed like a perfect statement of purpose to lead off the band’s second decade, given the tune’s shared, round-robin style lead vocal, full background harmonies, and a plainspoken lyric describing the ways music weaves magic through so many of the crucial and humdrum moments of daily life. “You’ll hear it when you’re walkin’ by a neighbor’s home/You’ll hear it faintly in the distance when you’re on the phone,” they sang, and when the Reprise executives listened to the tape, they tapped their feet appreciatively, noting how the acoustic guitars sounded so post-Woodstock and how the Boys’ natural harmonic blend compared so favorably with the harmonies of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young and the Grateful Dead. But some of Brian’s other tunes—particularly his diary-like love song “Two Can Play” and the workingman’s tune “I Just Got My Pay”—were quirky at best and maybe just too weird, while Al’s “Susie Cincinnati” sounded too much like “The Little Old Lady from Pasadena” to be part of the band’s entry into the 1970s.

  So Ostin and his crew rejected the Beach Boys’ new album, telling the group to either come up with three or four stronger tracks or else risk losing their new contract. The group was furious, of course, but another dig through their pile of new material and another few days spent recording even newer songs, paved the way for the album Reprise was willing to release. They called the album Sunflower, and it featured on its cover a shot of six long-haired, distinctly adult Beach Boys sitting together on a grassy, sunlit hill surrounded by a flock of their own small children. And if that image took people by surprise, the music inside proved to be even more unexpected. Despite the fact that they were emerging from the darkest years of their commercial and personal lives, the group had produced a collection of songs that projected their utopian fantasies into a modern, adult context. The band’s individual voices were more distinct than ever, but the rainbow of personalities still folded together into a sound that was sweet, surprisingly sexy, and, as ever, musically inventive.

  The first side kicked off with Dennis’s “Slip On Through,” a tuneful, rhythmically complex rocker that featured densely layered vocals and a blazingly passionate chorus—“Come on, won’t you let me be/By your side, for now and eternity/Cause I love you, baby I do”—that would inspire the most powerful lead vocal the drummer would ever commit to tape. Brian’s “This Whole World” came next, a guitar-driven whirlwind of harmonies, chants, and chiming bells that was both deliciously melodic and dauntingly complicated, its melody spinning through half a dozen keys in less than two minutes. Meanwhile, Brian’s lyric skipped merrily down the line separating the childlike from the transparently naive. “Late at night I think about the love of this whole world,” it began, going on to revel in the universal joys and sorrows of romance before concluding with a verse of wordless oohs and a final reprise of the opening verse sung over a backing chant that was part doo-wop and part Eastern mysticism: “Om-bop-didit, om-bop-didit.”

  “Add Some Music to Your Day” (the album’s first single) came next, followed by Dennis’s second tune, an R & B rave-up called “Got to Know the Woman,” complete with Ike-and-Tina-style backing vocals from the Honeys and a strutting lyric so silly that Dennis even cracked himself up in the third verse (“Come on!/Come on, come on and do the chicken!” caused him to finally lose it), and his joy was too infectious to resist. Bruce’s airy ballads, “Deirdre” and “Tears in the Morning,” tethered themselves to enough real emotion to avoid floating off in the breeze, while Brian and Mike’s dreamlike love song “All I Wanna Do” used synthesizers, a rotating organ speaker, and pillows of reverb beneath its drifting banners of harmony.

  Dennis’s tender “Forever” served as the high point of the album’s second side, but Brian, Carl, and Al’s gorgeously layered “Our Sweet Love” comes close on its heels. Al and Brian’s “At My Window” was an oddly lovely paean to the birds in Brian’s backyard. The album concluded with “Cool, Cool Water,” an eccentric, three-stage tune that had been gestating in various forms since the last days of Smile. The brief chant in the middle was another Smile fragment, a leftover from the “I Love to Say Da Da” section of the projected “Elements” suite. Meanwhile, the ambient sounds of water that bubble and froth beneath the music were another Smile holdover, in concept at least, since capturing them required Desper to spend three days lugging his gear to the streams, rivers, and beaches near Santa Barbara. The final section featured Brian and Mike in a call-and-response that echoed the evangelical enthusiasm of their earliest surfing songs, only in the service of a far simpler kind of reverie:

  When I’m thirsty and I reach for a glass—Cool, cool water tastes like such a gas,

  When I’m just too hot to move—Cool, cool water is such a groove…

  Delivered to the label during the first weeks of 1970, “Add Some Music to Your Day” inspired so much excitement in the promotions office at Reprise that its sales reps convinced retailers to take more copies of the Beach Boys’ first Reprise single than they’d ever done from a label artist. But radio disc jockeys still couldn’t be convinced to actually play the song, so it stalled in the mid-sixties of Billboard’s singles list. The band and label maintained their high hopes through the spring, however, though these dimmed somewhat when Dennis’s breathtaking “Slip On Through” missed the charts altogether in June. And though both American and British critics lavished praise upon the record (one British writer compared Sunflow
er to Sgt. Pepper), the album stiffed everywhere, getting no higher than the thirties on the British chart that fall and stalling at number 126 on the Billboard list. After all that work, creative excitement, and tingling sense of commercial potential, Sunflower turned out to be the worst-selling album of the Beach Boys’ career to date.

  Maybe Brian had been right about changing the band’s name, after all. In the wake of Woodstock, with the country divided bitterly by age, race, and a bloody war that struck so many citizens as being as distant from the nation’s democratic purposes as it was from the homeland itself, the very idea of the Beach Boys seemed embarrassing. Even if the actual Beach Boys had grown up too, even if their old music had never been quite as simple as it might have seemed, the intensity of their audience’s youthful affections in the early sixties had become the same force that transformed the group into relics. The Great Society promised by the sixties had collapsed, and now the pop music that once gave voice to its hopes had become the soundtrack to an entire nation’s naïveté. Sure, “Good Vibrations” had been revolutionary in its time. But at the dawn of the 1970s, that kind of glossy, dream-filled progressivism was lost in the prevailing currents of frustration and moral outrage.

  Of course, the rock ’n’ roll audience had all but ignored the Beach Boys’ post–“Good Vibrations” work, and the songs that had connected in the previous two years (“Do It Again,” for instance) had looked backwards for inspiration. But the Beach Boys’ own conservatism on stage—particularly in their dress and rigidly constructed, hastily performed greatest hits shows—had also served to isolate them from current tastes. They had changed in recent months, to be sure. Sunflower proved that to the small handful of people who actually bought it. But now they had to get everyone else’s attention too, and doing that was obviously going to take even more work than they had once imagined.

  The process began with a call from Van Dyke Parks, who in the early fall of 1970 was serving on the board of the Big Sur Folk Festival, a days-long music festival being put together by Joan Baez. An annual event set in the same fairgrounds that hosted the catalytic Monterey Pop festival three years earlier, the 1970 edition of the Big Sur festival would feature Baez, Country Joe McDonald, Kris Kristofferson, a very young Linda Ronstadt, and several other artists. But another act or two backed out with only a few weeks to go, and with a sudden need to bolster the bill, Van Dyke proposed the Beach Boys. If his fellow organizers raised their eyebrows at the suggestion, they also didn’t balk. The Beach Boys nearly did, however—reportedly because Mike Love feared aligning his band with radical leftists and/or full-blown communists, such as, he had always figured, Joan Baez. But memories of the last Monterey-based festival they had spurned—and the audience-building opportunities they had lost along with it—made them think better of refusing. The group accepted the offer, and four weeks later, they played back-to-back sets that opened with “Sloop John B.” and included latter-day gems such as “Country Air,” “Vegetables,” and “Wake the World” before climaxing with a crystalline “Good Vibrations.” Absent any songs about surfing or cars (the only pre–Pet Sounds song was “California Girls”), this down-home version of the Beach Boys, with their newly thick beards, shaggy hair, and fringed clothing, struck the surprised crowd as an entirely different band. Rolling Stone’s Jan Wenner, finally putting his seal of approval on the band he had dismissed three years earlier, wrote that the Beach Boys were “…the group that went right to the genesis of California music.”

  Determined to solidify their reputation in the post-Woodstock world, the group hired a new publicist, a former public radio newsman named Jack Rieley, who convinced them to make the leap into the ’70s by playing longer, more varied shows, including regular appearances at benefit shows for antiwar and pro-environment causes. Rieley also urged the group to become explicitly political in the songs they wrote. That’s what the band Chicago did, after all, girding their jazz-pop albums with quasirevolutionary slogans and ambient sounds of riots that gave them a kind of credibility they might not have achieved on the strength of “Saturday in the Park” alone. Now they were one of the biggest bands in the nation.

  Rieley knew how to speak the Beach Boys’ language. True enough, he was a bit of a huckster, at one point going so far as to claim that he had won a Pulitzer Prize for his work in NBC’s Puerto Rico bureau. This was despite the fact that NBC doesn’t have a news bureau in Puerto Rico, which Rieley apparently didn’t know because he had never worked for NBC, and he had never been told that broadcasters aren’t eligible for Pulitzer Prizes. But what are a couple of elaborate lies between people whose common pursuit is gaining some momentum? Soon Rieley displaced Nick Grillo as the group’s manager, and as 1971 dawned, he told his new charges to roll up their sleeves and prepare to face a brighter, more prosperous future.

  Rieley’s prediction began to come true almost immediately, thanks to the work of three New York City music-industry neophytes who decided they’d like to see the Beach Boys perform at Carnegie Hall. First they’d hoped to produce two shows with the group, but the pace of ticket sales made them settle for one show on February 24. And though they came within eighteen tickets of selling out that show, the affair was still bare-bones enough that the producers couldn’t afford to hire an opening act. Instead, they implored their headliners to come up with enough material to fill the entire night. Fortunately, the group agreed to take on that challenge. And from the moment WNEW-FM’s star disc jockey Pete Fornatale walked onstage to introduce the band (holding a surfboard, much to the band’s initial horror), the concert became a triumph.

  If anyone had come expecting to see a group of neatly combed, striped-shirt-wearing, collegiate guys, they would have been shocked by the casually dressed men who came out to play. Mike, whose blond locks trailed to his shoulders, sported a foot-long golden beard. Carl and Al were similarly shaggy and bearded, while Dennis had a mane of hair and even baby-faced Bruce had a mustache and thick sideburns. The music they played was just as surprising. Stretching out to fill the two-hour program, the group dove deep into their modern catalogue, including two of Dennis’s new songs, five Pet Sounds cuts, a few Sunflower songs, and a few quirky covers including Mike’s favorite old R & B song, “Riot in Cell Block #9,” and an ironic take on Merle Haggard’s antihippie anthem, “Okie from Muskogee.”

  Reviews of the Carnegie Hall concert verged on the rapturous, but the group made an even bigger impact on New York and all of hippie culture a few months later when they paid a surprise visit to the Fillmore East. The moment came on April 27, three nights into the Grateful Dead’s five-day stand at the city’s rock epicenter. Six songs into the band’s second set, lead guitarist Jerry Garcia leaned into his microphone and made the announcement: “We got another famous California group here,” he said, his eyes sparkling mischievously beneath his wire-framed specs. This in itself wasn’t a surprise to the Fillmore crowd, given the loose-knit cooperative vibe that bonded all of the San Francisco bands in those days. Was the Airplane in town? Quicksilver? The Burritos? Well, not exactly, as the crowd learned when Garcia finished his sentence: “It’s the Beach Boys!”

  On one level it made no sense whatsoever. The Dead, after all, were the very embodiment of the hippie counterculture: snaggletoothed, glitter-eyed weirdos whose acid-drenched anarchism was the antithesis of the Beach Boys’ clean-cut image. And how could the Beach Boys’ intricately structured pop even exist in the same cosmos as the Dead’s musical journeys into the far corners of “Dark Star” and beyond? Still, Workingman’s Dead and especially American Beauty had been full of traditionalist country tunes and harmony-packed pop numbers. You could almost hear the Beach Boys singing the Dead’s “Attics of My Life,” just as you could imagine Garcia and Robert Hunter writing a trippy frontier tune like “Heroes and Villains.”

  So if Garcia’s announcement prompted a quick chorus of surprised hoots, this soon turned into applause and then a full cheering ovation when Mike, Carl, Dennis, Al, and Bruce bounc
ed out onto the stage. After a few minutes of head-scratching and guitar tuning, the two bands launched into a ragged cover of Lieber and Stoller’s “Searchin’,” with the Dead’s designated bluesman Ron “Pigpen” McKernan belting the lead over the Beach Boys’ stacked harmonies. Pigpen got a little lost in the last verse or two, but the vibe felt right, and the bands slid easily into “Riot in Cell Block #9,” with Mike taking the lead on his old favorite while also making siren noises on his Moog-built theremin. Then the Dead left the stage to their guests, who kicked off their solo slot with “Good Vibrations,” then a self-consciously ironic “I Get Around.” (“How about a car song?” Bruce whooped. “Take ya back to your adolescence,” Mike said, dryly.) They called the Dead back to the stage for “Help Me, Rhonda,” which the Beach Boys had rearranged for the occasion into a “Truckin’”-style shuffle. “We tried to kind of just make an arrangement as if it were written now!” Bruce explained. The new rhythm, though, only made the tune sound lugubrious, and though Garcia gamely added a few riffs into the mix, he sounded mostly puzzled by the song and ended up meandering aimlessly around his guitar’s neck. At which point it was easy to wonder if the Beach Boys might be tripping over their own desire to win over the Fillmore crowd.

  Already, Mike and Bruce’s stage patter had betrayed some of their anxiety. Bruce in particular couldn’t open his mouth without either apologizing (“I hope it’s worth the wait!” during a tuning break), sounding out of touch (“I hope this’ll be a good boogie”), or seeming just downright daffy (“We’re glad there is something called the Grateful Dead, believe me, ’cause they’re all RIGHT!”). But none of that sounded quite as desperate as Mike’s attempt to curry favor with the freaks during the sing-along portion of “Good Vibrations” by recounting the time they had sung the song on a tour bus with the Buffalo Springfield, “all stoned and drunk and it sounded great.” Hey, groovy, man. Or maybe not, because that’s pretty much when you could hear at least one guy in the audience bellowing, “Bring back the Grateful Dead!”