Nolan’s sprawling story, published in what was then the journal of record of American youth culture, only began with that glimpse at Brian’s quirky life. The first-ever unvarnished portrayal of the group’s past, the piece was a mosaic of ’60s-era sexual high jinks, memories of Manson, Smile legend, and a fractal portrait of the modern-day group as a six-piece ensemble of surprisingly sophisticated artists whose lead member just happened to be one of the greatest visionaries in pop music history, and maybe one of the strangest, too. “Yeah, he’s out there,” Carl confirmed with a laugh. “He’s a very highly evolved person. And he’s very sensitive at the same time, which can be confusing. Brian’s Brian, you know?”
From there Nolan’s story delved into the twists of Brian’s secret and not-so-secret life, from the murmurs about the true cause of his deafness, to a vivid recounting of his first nervous collapse in 1964, to the years of drug-tinged musical breakthroughs and career breakdowns. There were disturbing anecdotes about his relationship with his children. (“She’s not too bright, I’ll tell ya,” Brian said of three-year-old Carnie, going on to describe a series of her toddler-era sexual experiments he connected to things she had seen her parents doing. “It just goes to prove that if you don’t hide anything from kids, they’ll start doing things they normally wouldn’t do until much later,” he said, betraying no sense that this might not be a good thing.) And then there was Murry, perpetually intruding in order to take credit for the group’s sound, songs, and, indeed, their entire career. “See, the whole trade has given Brian credit for everything,” he grumbled. “I’m not beating myself on the back, but knowing them as a father, I knew their voices, right? And I’m musical, my wife is, we knew how to sing on key, and…”
On it went, exploring the murky currents of Brian’s psyche. “I was called in to do some singing on a song,” Van Dyke Parks reported of a recent session in the Bellagio recording studio, where he pitched in on the chorale that ended “A Day in the Life of a Tree.” “It worked out well. Of course I had to stumble out of the studio in pitch darkness. Brian turned out all the lights. Had to crawl out of there on the floor, clutching my wife…oh, it’s a power trip all right…”
And Murry was ever-present, if only because Murry would not leave. “Write this down,” he’d command. “You might want to put this in.” Which Nolan did, much to Murry’s pleasure—and his complete ignorance of how badly his bombast would go over with Nolan’s readers. “I lost my left eye in an industrial accident at Goodyear…but I’d like to add that it made me a better man. I tried harder, drove harder, and did the work of two men in the company and got more raises…. And it isn’t all talent—it’s guts and promotion and just keeping at it even when you make mistakes. You can’t be right all the time. But the ability to fight back, come back, and create again is America.”
Brian had heard that speech before, of course. And now he was hearing a whole new generation of voices yammering the same old story at him, twisting his arm for more songs, more arrangements, more albums, more hits. “Or else you’ll lose the house,” they’d tell him. “The cars will be gone, you’ll have nothing to eat…you’ll be out on the street, headed back to Hawthorne, you lazy fuck.” In Brian’s ears the chant had become a dull roar, the rumble of the Beach Boys machine gearing up to run right over him.
Whatever the case, after a half decade in rock ’n’ roll Siberia, the Beach Boys were back. The news was all over Rolling Stone—not just in the two-part cover profile, but also in the rave review that accompanied the release of Surf’s Up. It was in the increasingly large, increasingly packed concert halls. It was even on the Billboard charts, which would show Surf’s Up scaling all the way into the Top Thirty.
The only trouble was that Brian didn’t want to be back.
The decade hadn’t started that way. When Mike Love suffered a rather dramatic breakdown in February 1970 (spurred by some combination of overambitious fasting and what he liked to call his “tainted Wilson blood” and climaxing in a long, high-speed car chase through Hollywood as he attempted to evade cars driven by his father and brothers), Brian agreed to join the touring band for a handful of live shows in Seattle; Spokane; Vancouver, British Columbia; and Portland. The other guys were delighted to have Brian back on the road, of course, but they were also a bit anxious. Nearly three years since his last stage appearance and more than five years since his last full-fledged tour, it was hard for anyone to imagine Brian even making it to the airport on time, let alone forcing himself to step out into the lights and play music in front of thousands of people.
But Brian was up and ready to go to the airport when the time came to leave, and though he suffered a small panic attack between the early and late shows in Seattle’s Opera House on February 28—muttering darkly that someone in the crowd was trying to kill him, then bolting out of the hall and sprinting partway up the face of nearby Queen Anne Hill before he calmed down—he was back in time for the start of the second show at 9:30. Introduced by the show’s emcee at the top of the show (“We have another surprise for you,” he declared, going on to explain Brian’s years-long retirement from the road before proclaiming that “tonight, for the first time in four years, Brian is with the group!” Gasps, cheers, even a few shrieks. “So let’s welcome Brian and the Beach Boys back to Seattle!”), Brian came out to a loud ovation, settling at a keyboard, where he played and sang for the entire forty-five-minute set of mostly recent hits and album cuts. The tape of the Seattle show is muddy, but even through the murk, it’s possible to hear Brian’s strong voice coming through the mix. And if he sounds a bit tentative on the bridge of “Surfer Girl,” he nails his falsetto at the end of the song, covers Mike’s bridge part on “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” (Bruce did the verses, as per the usual stage arrangement), and transforms “Help Me, Rhonda” by hitting the high notes from the rarely played single arrangement. He’s just as present on the then brand-new “Add Some Music to Your Day” and the climactic renditions of “Barbara Ann” and “Good Vibrations.” “I was scared for a few minutes in the first show; it had been awhile since I’d been in front of so many people,” Brian admitted on a radio interview during the ’70s. “But after it started to cook, I really got with it.”
But a more-hyped appearance with the group at the Whisky a Go-Go club in Los Angeles in November of that year didn’t go as smoothly. The band was supposed to play a four-night stand, but Brian bolted after a night and a half, citing an array of physical ills that seemed, in retrospect, to be symptomatic of a panic attack (“There were faces out there swimming at me, and I had to stop singing…I had trouble focusing on anything and my right ear was killing me,” he told Melody Maker).
The other Beach Boys still relied upon Brian’s name and reputation in order to stay in business. “If we call it Surf ’s Up, we can presell 150,000 copies,” Warner’s executive Van Dyke Parks had said of the group’s new release in Nolan’s Rolling Stone profile, and indeed, the album named for one of the most legendary Smile songs had sold better than any Beach Boys album since Pet Sounds. But they had clearly lost their faith in their erstwhile leader’s hit-making abilities, and Brian knew this. And though he couldn’t put his frustration into words, Brian made his feelings clear by vanishing into the haze of his own eccentricity.
Later the other Beach Boys would talk about this period as the start of Brian’s spiritual morass, a horrible time of emotional isolation and psychological desolation. But Brian’s other friends recall him being more or less compos mentis pretty much all of the time. “He was a good football player,” Dennis’s friend and collaborator Stanley Shapiro recalls. “And a hell of a good hitter on the baseball field. And he was one of the funniest guys in the world back then.” Crafty, too. Talking to Shapiro one day about shoes, they ended up agreeing that the most comfortable footwear either of them could recall were the ones they rented at bowling alleys. But where could a guy actually buy a pair of bowling shoes? Brian considered this quandary for a moment, then smiled. Maybe,
he said, they didn’t really need to buy a pair, per se. Ushering Shapiro into his Rolls-Royce, Brian piloted the limousine to a bowling alley in nearby Westwood, where he got a pair of shoes in his size and slapped down the usual ten-dollar deposit. Then he sat down, put on the shoes, walked out to his Rolls, and drove home. “And I thought that was hilarious,” Shapiro says.
What was less amusing to the Beach Boys was how Brian’s musical energies were focused on projects that had little to do with them. For a month or two he worked fitfully on a country album featuring longtime friend and Beach Boys concert promoter Fred Vail. Sessions for the album, named Cows to the Pasture, produced fifteen tracks, including C & W versions of “Kittens, Kids, and Kites,” “There’s Always Something There to Remind Me,” and “Only the Lonely.” Few were close to finished, however, and fewer still got far enough to include Vail’s vocals. “Brian was only semifocused on that one,” Vail says.
He spent more time on his collaborations with Stephen Kalinich, a gentle-natured poet and musician signed to the fledgling Brother Records back in 1967. Kalinich’s career had never quite taken off, but he had contributed lyrics to both of Dennis Wilson’s Friends songs, and he had orbited on the periphery of the Beach Boys’ scene ever since. Brian had grown to love Kalinich’s romantic poems, and as he shrank from the demands and indignities of pop music, he focused increasingly on his work with the poet, recording two full albums (A World of Peace and America, I Know You) in the early ’70s that combined Kalinich’s recitations with Brian’s original music and backing vocals. “He’d do stuff combining music, percussion, with poems he’d recorded off the phone, or whatever,” Kalinich recalls. “Adding in people singing stuff or weird sitar tracks. He was working on all this weird stuff with me, poems with strange backing music.” The resulting tracks are quite striking, particularly “Lonely Boy,” a vaguely Renaissance-inspired verse that Brian set to minstrel-like nylon-string guitars, percussion, and his own falsetto. A longer version of the “Be Still” poem Dennis used on Friends begins with a staged conversation in which Brian recalls the older song (“We had that on an album, right?”) and then asks Kalinich to recite the longer version with his new, seemingly improvised keyboard accompaniment.
The poetry albums never came out, either because Brian lost interest in the project, lost his emotional bearings, or lost the support of his bandmates, who didn’t want to invest their resources in a project that didn’t seem to fit anyone’s conception of a commercial enterprise. Still, Kalinich says, more than three decades later, Brian speaks enthusiastically about the work they did together. “Just the other day at breakfast, he sang the whole ‘Lonely Man’ thing for me: his part and mine. So how damaged was he back then, really?”
Some nights it was difficult to tell. When Paul and Linda McCartney came over to the Bellagio house one night, the party began cheerfully enough, with the usual array of friends, band members, and hangers-on gathering in the living room for beers, joints, and conversation. Always less than loquacious in social events he didn’t feel completely in control of, Brian began fiddling with an empty fishbowl, peering through the glass at first, then flipping it upside-down and lowering its wide mouth over his head until it rested on his shoulders, like a deep-sea diver’s helmet. This earned a laugh, so he began to clown around, stalking around the room like an astronaut or a robot. Only Brian couldn’t see very well through the glass, and he collided with something hard enough to crack the fishbowl wide open, fracturing it into several pieces. And though Brian wasn’t injured by the broken glass, the accident shattered his mood. Blushing bright red, he ran out of the living room, bounded up the stairs, and locked himself into his room, where he remained for the rest of the evening. When McCartney came knocking, asking his friend to come on down and hang out a bit more, Brian refused to answer. All McCartney could hear coming through the heavy wooden door was the gentle, heartbreaking sound of a deeply embarrassed young man snuffling softly to himself.
That same year, Brian’s childhood neighbor, Mary Lou Van Antwerp, called out of the blue to say hi and see what her old friend was up to. She and Marilyn got to chatting, and soon Mary Lou, her husband, and their young kids were invited up to the Bellagio house for a big reunion dinner. At first the evening was relaxed and fun, with all the kids playing on the floor, Audree reminiscing about old times on West 119th Street, and Marilyn and Terry Melcher enjoying all the family legends. Then Brian came downstairs to say hello. “He had a beard and his hair was long and he was heavy,” recalls Mary Lou. “As a kid, he was the skinniest thing you’ve ever seen. We never thought he would gain any weight. Now he seemed spacey and preoccupied, playing the piano and talking and not making much sense. He was just mumbling, really. And finally Audree told him, ‘Brian, you’re so fucked up!’ He just walked out of the room, and the kids went right on playing.”
What Brian did when he left the room wasn’t clear. But the strangest thing about the whole evening, as Mary Lou recalls it, was how normal it all seemed to the people in the living room. No matter how detached from reality Brian seemed to become, their response was less sympathetic than confused and, it’s hard not to conclude, resentful.
In retrospect, it’s easy to see the family’s flaws in their almost willful ignorance of his incipient psychiatric ills. But that ignores their own cultural and psychological foundations. Coming from a blue-collar culture that defined itself in terms of willpower and resilience (Don’t back down from that wave!), the eccentricities and emotional disconnection of one underperforming young man felt less like a reason for sympathy than for a good, therapeutic ass-kicking.
Whether Brian’s flights of weirdness and his deepening detachment from the world inhabited by his father, his band, and the rest of his family were the result of a flaw in his character, misfiring brain chemistry, promiscuous drug use, or a deliberate, well-honed strategy intended to keep certain people away was never clear. What is clear, however, is that Brian often had plenty of energy and enthusiasm for those aspects of his life that had nothing to do with the Beach Boys. “Even in those years when he was supposedly in seclusion, Brian came downstairs all the time, this great big guy in a bathrobe,” Stanley Shapiro says. “And we went places. Brian and I used to get into his Mercedes and drive over to the Radiant Radish, or we’d go to Redondo Beach and hang out with his high school pals, or go look for Carol Mountain. Brian was as normal to me as anyone else.”
Particularly in Hollywood, where a significant percentage of the moneyed, young entertainment figures of the early ’70s had happily embraced cocaine. “Everyone was naive about it,” says Danny Hutton, who then lived in a Laurel Canyon home whose most popular feature was the black-windowed party room on the lower level, where luminaries from every creative discipline would hang out, chat, listen to music, and, almost invariably, blow through the gleaming mountain of cocaine that usually rose from the coffee table in the center of the room.
Brian and Danny hung out regularly, and they usually weren’t alone. “Everyone hung out there,” Hutton says. “Harry Nilsson, John Lennon, Ringo Starr, Keith Moon. Elton John threw a surprise party for me at my house. And I had brought him over to the Bellagio house when he was just starting out. That was one of those great moments, when I told Brian, ‘You gotta hear this guy!’ So he said, ‘Okay, play me something!’ Elton started playing a tune and got about halfway into the first verse when Brian said, ‘Okay, great. What else you got?’ So Elton started another tune and again, once Brian got the gist, he’s like: ‘Okay, it’s good! What’s next!’ And Elton wasn’t used to it, and he was slowly getting frazzled.” When louche punk rocker Iggy Pop showed up to party, he was at first entranced by Brian’s charisma and fell happily into one of the complicated, multipart sing-alongs of “Shortenin’ Bread” Brian loved to lead. What Iggy didn’t know was that once a coked-up Brian got started with “Shortenin’ Bread,” he could go on for literally hours on end. And he still showed no sign of quitting when Iggy—who wore glitter makeup and slash
ed his own flesh with broken glass in the midst of his performances—backed out of the room and turned to Hutton, proclaiming: “I gotta get out of here, man. This guy is nuts!”
Tales of Brian’s indulgences and eccentricities, along with his growing reputation as a commercial has-been, had spread like a bad odor around Hollywood. In fact, when Stanley Shapiro got Brian involved in rewriting the lyrics of his old Beach Boys songs (a project Murry initiated to sweeten the publishing deal he’d cut with A&M in 1969), the company brass was closer to furious than overjoyed. The whole story is pretty strange, not least for the fact that Brian (or any songwriter) would agree to participate in a wholesale rewriting of his or her works—particularly those works that had just been sold off by his father against his own most fervent wishes. To Brian, however, the opportunity to revise his own songs felt more like a way to reclaim his musical legacy from the family that had taken so much from him. So when he heard about Shapiro’s plan, he jumped at it and even tapped his friend Tandyn Almer (a fellow drug enthusiast and Hollywood weirdo who earned showbiz spurs by writing the Association’s smash hit “Along Comes Mary”) to help. Focusing first on the Friends album, the trio worked together for a month or two, even composing original lyrics for Brian’s airy instrumental “Passing By.” (“I met you on the avenue/and stopped to say hello to you/and then realized I was just passing by…”) When they finished something to their mutual satisfaction, they’d record a demo version of the song, usually with Brian playing piano and singing lead over Almer and Shapiro’s backing vocals.
After a few weeks of work, Shapiro took his stack of tapes over to A&M. At first, the execs were thrilled, not just by the songs’ new lyrics, but also by the musicians playing them. “They were like: ‘Wow, this is great! Who are those voices?’ I said, ‘Well, it’s Tandyn Almer,’ and they didn’t like that at all.” Almer, it seemed, had already worked for A&M and been fired for being, in official terms, “a disturbance” on the company’s lot. But, Shapiro continues, they were even angrier to hear that the main presence on the tape was none other than Brian Wilson. “They said, ‘What? Brian Wilson! There’s no way we’re gonna do work with Brian Wilson. He’s crazy, number one. And if we accept anything with him, he’ll be down at this lot putting up circus tents!’ I was so pissed off, I quit on the spot.” Shapiro took the tapes back to Brian, whom he found playing the piano at Almer’s cluttered house, and set the only record of their work next to him on the piano bench. “And I have no idea what happened to any of it. It was never heard from again.”
Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall & Redemption of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson Page 24