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

by Peter Ames Carlin

  In the end it took no fewer than three trips to LAX for Brian to board the airplane. Once the plane landed in Amsterdam, he snuck off without his ticket or passport and fell asleep in the duty-free lounge, touching off a brief panic for the greeters forced to wonder how their quarry could have vanished in midflight. They found him eventually, though, and once ensconced in Laren, a bucolic suburb of Amsterdam, Brian sank even deeper into anguish. Most days he avoided making the drive over to the studio in Baambrugge, choosing instead to sit in his house while peering out at the countryside, often dulling his senses with pot and glasses of hard apple cider. When Brian did drive off in his rented Mercedes, there was no telling where he might go or what condition he’d be in when he got back. One day he got so drunk that he wrapped the car around a telephone pole. The Mercedes was totaled, but Brian staggered out of the smoking wreckage without a scratch.

  “He seemed to be going through a bad time, but I was really too young to understand it,” elder daughter Carnie says. Still, Brian hadn’t vanished entirely from his family. During the mornings he would take four-year-old Carnie and younger sister Wendy to feed carrots and sugar cubes to the horses that lived in a field down the road. When Wendy, then not quite three years old, accidentally sunk her foot into a bath of scalding water, Brian scooped his shrieking daughter up in his arms and sprinted her off for treatment at the small hospital across the road, with his wife and older daughter fast on his heels. The image of her father taking immediate control of the situation would never leave Carnie’s memory. “I was running right behind him, thinking, ‘That’s my big, strong daddy carrying Wendy.’”

  Sometimes the last thing Carnie and Wendy would hear at night would be the sound of their parents, standing together in the doorway of their room, twining their voices around the verses of “Frere Jacques.” Once the girls were sleeping, Brian would descend again into his music room, to fall again into Randy Newman’s world of dancing bears, buffoonish tycoons, and the dreamy, small-town America that never quite existed. Eventually, Brian felt his muse beginning to come awake. “If I kept playing the Randy Newman record, I could still stay in that mood,” he said at the time. As Brian explored his feelings on the piano keyboard, the melodies that emerged seemed to trace the same tension between tenderness and violence, the innocence of youth and the inevitable corruption of age.

  Brian crafted a story that was both fantastical and entirely personal, centering on a young prince whose life is transformed by the music that comes to him, along with a wizardly Pied Piper, through his magic transistor radio. Named “Mt. Vernon and Fairway,” for the streets that met outside Mike Love’s childhood home, and where the cousins spent many evenings singing along with the radio in the front seat of Brian’s car, the piece became a parable about the role music played in Brian’s life. It was all there, from the magical way the music descends upon the prince, to the spell it allows him to cast over his brothers and sisters, to the capricious way his mother (in a bit of role reversal) snatches the radio away and hides it where she thinks he’ll never be able to find it. And yet the music and the magical spell it weaves never quite vanish. At the end of the story, he and his brothers and sisters can hear the joyous music playing in the wind that blows past their window.

  Brian composed several musical sections for the piece, including the yearning keyboard figure that served as an overture, a couple of keyboard/synthesizer vignettes to go along with the action sequences, and some intricate vocal arrangements that evoked the sound of the magical music. Somehow, the other guys didn’t get the gist of how the whole thing was going to fit together until most of the recording had been done, at which point news that Brian expected them to put a ten-minute-plus fairy tale about a prince and a magic radio on the new album came as something of a shock. “Nobody was ready for that. Nobody!” Brian told a reporter at the time. “I remember Carl said, ‘WHAT?’” Dismayed to have yet another one of his musical offerings slapped down, Brian retreated again to his house, where he soothed his hurt with apple cider, hashish, and Sail Away. Eventually, though, Carl, feeling guilty for his sharp reaction to his big brother’s project, presented a second alternative: Why not include the fairy tale as a special bonus EP that would be packaged with the album? This notion assuaged Brian’s feelings enough to draw him back into the studio, where he and Carl put the finishing touches on the music and Jack Rieley recorded the narration. Brian performed the role of the magical Pied Piper, whom he imbued with his looniest cartoon voice.

  If the other Beach Boys didn’t know what to make of Brian’s loopy fairy tale, they were nevertheless pursuing many of the same questions in their own songs, albeit in the broader terms of culture and politics. Halfway across the planet, the record they produced—Holland—turned out to be almost entirely about California. But ten years after “Surfin’ Safari,” they had come to develop a more sophisticated understanding of the cultural currents that led their families to the Gold Coast and about the cultural and environmental undertow created in the stampede west. Dennis and Jack Rieley wrote “Steamboat,” a dreamlike journey back to the mythic heart of Mark Twain’s America, borne by the insistent chug of an actual steam engine, hurtling keyboard glissandos, and a wonderfully bluesy slide guitar break; while Carl, also working with Rieley, came up with “The Trader,” a two-part exploration of Manifest Destiny as seen through the eyes of the conquering and the conquered.

  Not all of the songs revolved around cultural themes, though. For instance, “Only with You” was another look into the romantic heart (and melodic inventiveness) of Dennis Wilson, only without Daryl Dragon’s keening strings and horns and with a delicately understated lyric from Mike. “Funky Pretty,” an eccentric rocker from Brian, Mike, and the omnipresent Rieley, climaxed in a whirring storm of synthesizers, guitars, percussion, and more interlocking vocal parts than one ear can track. Blondie, Ricky, and Mike produced the anthemic “We Got Love” and the brooding “Leavin’ This Town.” But the most ambitious work on the album was Al and Mike’s “California Saga,” a musical triptych that presented their home state’s story in terms drawn from a chain of regional bards that included Walt Whitman, John Steinbeck, the great naturalist poet Robinson Jeffers, Country Joe McDonald, and, of course, Brian Wilson.

  “California Saga” began with Mike’s solo composition “Big Sur,” an acoustic evocation of life in rustic Northern California. This segued into Al’s “The Beaks of Eagles,” which contrasted spoken verses from Robinson Jeffers’s poem of the same name with Jardine’s sung verses, expanding upon the poet’s description of nature’s resilience (“…Lenin has lived and Jehovah died while the mother eagle/Hunts her same ills, crying the same beautiful and lonely cry…” ) with original vignettes about the frontiersmen’s struggles to settle the wilderness. The piece climaxed with Al’s “California,” a kind of “I Get Around” for the back-to-the-land era. As sung by Mike, with all the charismatic surfer-boy enthusiasm he brought to the group’s earlier work, the song sounds like an invocation for the utopian world the Beach Boys had been pursuing for more than a decade:

  And the people there in the open air, one big family

  Yeah, the people there love to sing and share their newfound liberty.

  A decade later, the search for the place where the kids are hip only begins where the highway ends. But the driving impulse—and the joyous music that springs from its description—remains the same. That the group could pivot from that moment of revelation right into Carl’s “The Trader” and its clear-eyed acknowledgment of the awful price extracted from the natives in the white man’s pursuit of paradise only lends the entire “California Saga” more depth. And, amazingly, they achieved that feat almost entirely without the magical ear of Brian Wilson—reaching creative heights that would have been unthinkable only two years earlier.

  Still, when the group returned home, the master tape they presented Warner Brothers earned them another fishy stare and yet another variation on the age-old pop music demand: Where�
�s the single? The real problem, as it emerged, was “We Got Love,” the Blondie/Ricky–dominated tune that flew the furthest from the Beach Boys’ usual terrain. Granted, the studio outtake has only a glimmer of the explosive sound apparent in the band’s live renditions, such as the one included on In Concert, the album that would follow in 1973. But what the execs really wanted, of course, was a brilliant new Brian Wilson song, and preferably one that wasn’t part of a ten-minute fairy tale. Unfortunately, Brian had no evident interest in writing that kind of song—not for the Beach Boys, at any rate. That’s how it seemed until Van Dyke Parks, still working his day job as a mixed-media exec for Warner Brothers records, showed up in the office of Warner’s executive David Berson with a cassette tape of a song he helped Brian write a few months earlier. On a whim, Van Dyke had shown up at Brian’s door, bearing a prototype Walkman tape recorder and almost no patience for Brian’s usual dilly-dallying.

  According to several published descriptions of the tape Van Dyke made (which he swears he turned over to the Warner’s establishment in 1972 and hasn’t seen since), it begins with Brian, sitting with Van Dyke on the piano bench in his home studio on Bellagio Road, begging his friend to “hypnotize me and make me believe I’m not crazy.”

  “Cut the shit, Brian,” Van Dyke responds evenly. “You’re a songwriter. That’s what you do, and I want you to sit down and write a song for me.”

  “Convince me I’m not crazy,” Brian says.

  “Cut the shit, Brian, and play the tune.”

  Once again, Brian surrenders to the inevitable.

  “What’s the tune called?”

  “‘Sail On, Sailor.’”

  And then he begins to play, a rollicking G chord capturing the insistent rhythm of a steamer plowing across heavy seas.

  Fill your sails with fortitude

  and ride her stormy waves

  You’ve got to sail on, sail on, sailor.

  They had first written the song in 1971, and Brian had been tinkering with it ever since, airing it out at Danny Hutton’s house. “He said, ‘Hey, who’s got lyrics?’ and everyone fucking ran over there,” Hutton recalls. Eventually, Tandyn Almer threw in a few verses, with an assist from pop poet Ray Kennedy. Van Dyke kept the cassette of the original song to himself for a few months, but he dug it out when he heard about the Warner executives rejecting Holland, presenting it to David Berson as the one obvious solution to everyone’s problems. Berson listened, and once he heard the song play out, he agreed: If the Beach Boys would agree to put “Sail On, Sailor” on Holland, the album could come out as scheduled.

  Back in Los Angeles late that fall, the group set to work recording the song—which by then had been altered, yet again, with a new set of Jack Rieley lyrics. Brian refused to attend the recording sessions, but he did listen in on the telephone for a while and, as Ricky Fataar recalled in interviews at the time, suggested a guitar part that echoed the rhythm of an “SOS” Morse code distress call, while also fitting perfectly with the song’s chugging beat and Blondie’s fiery lead vocal. The group used the song as the album’s opening cut, and though it flopped as a lead-off single that winter (rising only to Billboard’s number seventy-nine spot), it climbed into the Top Fifty when it was rereleased two years later. Holland fared a bit better than Carl and the Passions, reaching the mid-thirties on the Billboard album charts. Even more encouraging, however, were the reviews, particularly the rave that ran in the pages of Rolling Stone: “Like the finest Beach Boys work, Holland makes me consistently smile,” Jim Miller wrote. “They now play what might as well be described simply as Beach Boys music…Holland offers that music at its most satisfying.” The reviews in England were just as laudatory: “I expect more from the Beach Boys than from anyone else,” Richard Williams wrote in the New Musical Express. “Holland has the goods.”

  As the reviews made clear, the Beach Boys of early 1973 sounded like a rock ’n’ roll group that had, at long last, found its way into maturity. Better still, they had done it without losing touch with the utopian spirit that had always guided them. By the winter of 1973, as the war in Vietnam ground on and Richard Nixon prepared to place his right hand on a Bible and swear once again to uphold the Constitution of the United States, the search for a place where the kids are hip took on even greater urgency. It wouldn’t be long before the group’s harmonized voices would once again seem to give melody to the nation’s deepest frustrations and fondest hopes. But for all the Beach Boys would gain in the next few years, none of it could compare with what had already been lost and what they would be willing to sell off along the way.

  CHAPTER 11

  The one thing that never changed was Murry. He never stopped caring and never stopped pushing. He never stopped believing that he’d taught them everything they knew, given them everything he had, and he expected to be heeded. Though he had made mistakes, he demanded respect, not just for himself, but also for the United States, too. “It’s one of those success stories that can happen in America,” he said to Rolling Stone’s David Felton in the early ’70s. “And it isn’t all talent…They’re just Americans; they’re like any one of you. Got it? Got the message?”

  Brian, Dennis, and Carl certainly did. Even as grown-ups, with years of success behind them, their own families to raise, and all the privileges of wealth and the obligations of adulthood, they never really got beyond the shadow their father’s expectations had cast across their lives. Murry always told his friends that he was proud of his boys, but maybe it was more difficult for him to deliver that message to their faces. He didn’t want them to lose their edge. Better to keep ’em on their toes and make sure they know what they’re fighting for.

  But Brian had already spent too much of his life trying to sing himself free of the emotional calamity his family had become. His music made him a success, but it had only made everything worse, turning his most intimate feelings into cash cows that were judged, manipulated, and exploited by everyone around him. If he’d used his music to escape his father, the empire it had created had, ironically enough, transformed everyone around him into a legion of Murrys. No matter where he went, Brian could hear variations of his father’s insults. Nobody wants to hear this airy-fairy crap! Dust yourself off and write another hit! Ya gotta fight for success! All he wanted was to escape, but they would never let him go. The Beach Boys wanted—demanded—his songs, but then they rejected or rewrote whatever he gave them. They wanted his ears but not his head, let alone his heart.

  So screw it. He’d slam his hands down on the keys, spin around on the bench, and dash out to the car, tearing out of the driveway and heading down the hill to Sunset Boulevard before making his way to Danny Hutton’s place in Laurel Canyon, where the music played all night and the blacked-out windows kept out the light of day.

  Not that Brian was the only Wilson struggling to adjust to the rigors and responsibilities of adulthood. Long known as the most coolheaded and reliable of the Wilson brothers, Carl had served as the band’s onstage leader ever since Brian started skipping shows in 1963. Brian’s baby brother had taken up even more of the burden in recent years, not just in concert, but also in the layered songwriting and production techniques he had developed. Carl had his own indulgences, to be sure. But the lessons of childhood had affected him as well, turning the quietest of the Wilson boys into the Beach Boys’ pillar of common sense. Brian might seem nuts, Dennis might be raving drunk, Mike might snarl about cash flow, and Al might be somewhere out to lunch, but Carl would always be on top of the situation, his soft brown eyes placid and still behind his thick beard. What he didn’t mention was that his back was killing him, the weight of responsibility grinding his vertebrae together until he could no longer bear the pain of standing on his feet. Sometimes Carl’s spinal problems got so bad that he had to be carried from room to room in a chair. But it had fallen to him to hold the band together, and so he would, even while he raised his own boys and sustained a marriage pulled apart by the pressures of the road and the
work-all-night, sleep-all-day rhythms of the professional rock ’n’ roller.

  All the Wilson boys heard their father’s voice in their ears at night, but Dennis had always bucked the hardest against his reins. As a teenager, he’d escaped to the beach and the family of surfers he’d found there. That taste of freedom had led, ironically, right back to the bosom of his family when he became a part of the Beach Boys. But at least life as a rock ’n’ roll star had allowed him to soak up the unquestioning, unconditional love he never felt at home. Into that internal void went the spotlights, cheers, girls, and entourage.

  No matter where he was or what he was doing, Dennis always made sure to have enough drugs and booze to keep his restless body pain free and wired for sound. “There was never enough to fill him,” Dennis’s second wife, Barbara, recalls. “No matter how good-looking he was, no matter how successful, it didn’t penetrate. There was a huge emptiness, a pain that he carried inside.”

  Dennis met Barbara Charen in 1969. He was sitting with Stanley Shapiro at the Hamburger Hamlet restaurant in Westwood when he noticed the petite redhead carrying bacon cheeseburgers and mugs of beer to the UCLA students at her tables. Struck as much by her intelligence and wit as he was by her physical beauty, Dennis became a regular at that burger joint, eventually working up the courage to ask the pretty waitress out on a date. From there they struck up a friendship, then a romance—he would meet her after every shift, usually in the most absurd way imaginable. For a week or two he made a point of showing up every night in a different car—borrowing them from his brothers, Mike, and Al, everyone he knew. Another night he tried to run into the restaurant at full speed, sprinting so fast that he didn’t notice the glass doors were shut until he bounced off of them, landing in a dazed heap on the sidewalk. “These were things you don’t see most adults doing,” Barbara says with a smile.