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

by Peter Ames Carlin

  But Dennis had needs most adults didn’t have, and abilities, as well. He’d taught himself to play piano in the mid-1960s and then started composing songs whose plainspoken emotionalism and musical sophistication took nearly everyone by surprise. Just like his big brother’s, Dennis’s muse was inspired by desperation too overwhelming to confront head-on. So it was up to his fingers to find the chords and melodies that would trace the contours of his sorrows and hopes. “He was always writing. And he always wanted whomever he was with to be right next to him at the piano: ‘Listen to this!’” Barbara remembers. “But my sense was that he never knew how beautiful his music was.”

  Now a practicing psychotherapist, Barbara can look back on the father of her two sons and on the family he never quite emerged from with at least a measure of professional remove. To see them now, more than three decades after the fact, is to see a family whose members have, like so many families, grown too accustomed to their roles to allow one another to change. “Brian’s a genius, Carl’s an angel, and Dennis is that kind of bad boy/imp/jester. So how can you ever get what comes from you taken seriously when that’s your role?”

  Dennis admired Brian too much to begrudge his brother the lion’s share of the credit for creating and sustaining the Beach Boys. All he really wanted to achieve with his own music was a glimmer of respect from his father; and by early 1973, he had made some progress. The mutual disdain that divided Murry from his middle son during his adolescence and beyond had given way at first to tentative acceptance and then a real affection. The men would go fishing together when they could, and they found more common ground in the boxing matches on TV each Thursday night. “They’d be watching the fights together, talking on the phone while they both watched their own TVs,” Barbara recalls. “It was a way for them to connect. I always sensed a certain excitement in Dennis when they talked on the phone. And when we’d go over to Audree’s house in Whittier, which we did often, we always dropped by Murry’s place, too. Dennis longed for Murry’s approval. But my sense was that he never really got it.”

  Unconditional love had never come easily to Murry Wilson, and he was loath to dole it out as well. A heavyset man who kept the stresses of his life at bay by eating, drinking, and smoking with heedless abandon, Murry had grown an enormous belly in the last years of the ’60s, and the weight of his girth put more pressure on a heart that was already dangerously overtaxed. When he got excited or moved too quickly, Murry’s breath would come in gasps, his hands would shake, and he’d have to sit until his nervous system fell back into line. He’d come down with diverticulitis, a serious intestinal illness, in 1972, and the burden of this disease contributed to the fairly serious heart attack that felled Murry in the spring of 1973. Murry got out of the hospital a week or two later and seemed serious about changing his ways, but before he had time to get started, he suffered a sudden, massive heart attack on the morning of June 4. Audree was with him at the time and managed to call an ambulance within moments. But by the time the paramedics arrived, Murry was already dead. He was fifty-seven years old.

  For all the years they had tried to escape the iron grip of their old man, Brian, Dennis, and Carl were all, in their way, devastated by Murry’s death. Losing a family patriarch is never easy for anyone, but for boys who had spent their entire lives batted between the extremes of their father’s outsized love and abuse, the loss was even more overwhelming. Until that day, their entire lives had been defined by the gravitational force of their father’s stern authority. And though they had often struggled to stand on their own feet and move without feeling his weight upon their shoulders, he had also kept them connected to the earth.

  Dennis burst into tears when he got the call, then refused to attend the funeral. “I’m sure he was home playing the piano with one of his buddies,” Barbara says. “That’s what he always did in times like that. But it seemed to me that when Murry died, something in Dennis died. It took a real toll on him. And I think that was really when he started deteriorating.”

  Brian also avoided his father’s funeral that spring, flying instead to New York City with sister-in-law Diane Rovell in tow, ostensibly to promote Spring’s new single, “Shyin’ Away.” But he was so detached from reality that he created less buzz about the record than confusion—and real alarm—about the state of his own sanity. Pete Fornatale, the WNEW-FM disc jockey whose Carnegie Hall introduction in February 1971 had launched the Beach Boys’ renaissance with youth culture, greeted the prospect of a live, on-air interview with the band’s reclusive visionary as a rare opportunity to meet one of his most treasured idols. When Brian finally appeared, led into the station’s midtown studios by a couple of friends, Fornatale could feel his hands trembling with excitement. “I was really nervous, really wanting him to do well,” he says. “Then I asked him what he was doing in New York City, and he said he was here to do the Ed Sullivan show, which had been cancelled two years earlier. He was either spaced out and weird or totally overhyped, saying things with the wrong inflection. I remember that when his handlers took him out of the studio, I walked down to the bathroom and threw up. It was that upsetting.”

  Was Brian really losing his grasp on reality, or was he signaling a new stage in his own retreat from the demands of adulthood? Certainly, his manner of thinking made him more ethereal than the average thirty-one-year-old husband and father. A decade of rock stardom and the riches and power that followed allowed (even encouraged) even more detachment from the humdrum existence that signified maturity to most everyone else. But most Baby Boomers weren’t prepared to resign their claim to youth or their nagging sense that the New Frontier they had supposedly inherited had gone terribly awry. The grand call to national duty John F. Kennedy made in his inaugural speech had been subverted by war, assassinations, riots, and Watergate.

  The sad distance between the early ’70s and the early ’60s was crystallized in George Lucas’s movie American Graffiti, a bittersweet portrait of one night in the lives of a few high school–aged kids from suburban Southern California, circa 1962. The elegiac mood of the film was emphasized by a sound track that dug deeply into the hit songs of the era, starting with Bill Haley’s catalytic “Rock Around the Clock,” through an array of doo-wop and early rock ’n’ roll hits, to “Surfin’ Safari,” the song that had lifted the Beach Boys to national prominence that very spring. And though Lucas readily acknowledged the three-year gap between the setting of his movie and the release of “All Summer Long” in 1965, he nevertheless staged his movie’s climax, in which its various characters fan out to meet the future the world has in store for them, to the chiming harmonies of the song that cautioned repeatedly, “Won’t be long ’til summertime is through…”

  But even given the vivid descriptions of early ’60s California youth culture that sparkle in the Beach Boys’ earliest songs, the narrative and emotional complexity lurking just beneath their surface—the darkness that sparks their narrators’ utopian ambitions—sounded just as vital in the early-to-mid 1970s. To old fans, it served as a bracing reminder of the musical and emotional wallop Brian’s songs had. To younger listeners, the two Beach Boys songs included on American Graffiti were simply eye-opening. Who knew young men could sing like that? And why did their song about the joys of summer vacation end up sounding so joyous and so sad at the same time?

  Meanwhile, the touring Beach Boys continued to draw larger, increasingly enthusiastic audiences to their shows in Europe and in the United States. Two years since they had committed themselves to playing longer, more varied shows, the stage band—which had expanded to include not just Blondie and Ricky but also a small handful of seasoned backing musicians—had become a crackerjack performance unit, as capable of pulling off a full-blown rocker (such as Mike’s favorite new cover song, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”) as they were of handling the tonal twists of “Good Vibrations” or the intricate harmonic shifts of “God Only Knows.” The bulk of their sets was stocked with material from 1966 and beyond, with a health
y portion of originals from Sunflower, Surf’s Up, and Carl and the Passions. Most often the only car and surf songs they would play would come in the encores, usually accompanied by one of Mike’s wry jokes about “oldies but moldies.” The Beach Boys in Concert album from 1973 (drawn from shows in 1972 and 1973) captured the band at its early ’70s peak, finding connections between the new and the old (“Sail On, Sailor” into “Sloop John B.”), showcasing Brian’s most challenging Pet Sounds vocal arrangements (“You Still Believe in Me”), transforming old album tracks into standouts (Carl’s gospel-like take on “Let the Wind Blow”), and injecting the encores (“Surfin’ USA,” “Fun, Fun, Fun”) with a rollicking energy that edged toward the anarchic.

  Back at the Fillmore East, the oldies earned as many hoots as cheers. But once American Graffiti became a hit, the older songs began to spur near-hysterical ovations. As the concert hall crowds that once greeted “Surf’s Up” with standing ovations swelled into arena-size crowds, the enthusiasm for the band’s more recent songs began to fade. They’d cheer for the surging rhythm of “Sail On, Sailor” and clap along to the countrified stomp of Al Jardine’s “California.” But when the encores came and “Good Vibrations” led into “I Get Around” or “California Girls,” well, that was an invitation to pandemonium.

  Picking up on the new surge of interest building around the band that had once been their most popular domestic product line, the executives at Capitol began to wonder if they were missing something important. Almost the entire Beach Boys catalogue had been out of print since the group left the label in 1969, and as the surge of American Graffiti mania spurred demand for the Beach Boys’ early hits, it was obvious this would have to change. Drawing on the pre–Pet Sounds albums they still owned, the Capitol execs pulled together a twenty-song, double-album retrospective that featured the group’s biggest hits (“Surfin’ Safari” to “California Girls”) and a handful of standout album tracks (“Let Him Run Wild,” “Girl, Don’t Tell Me”) before ending with “All Summer Long.” And if the label couldn’t be bothered to find the right versions of “Rhonda” (they used the harmonica-led Beach Boys Today version rather than the more energetic hit single arrangement) and “Be True to Your School” (again, they overlooked the familiar single arrangement for the more static album cut), and even if they substituted their own phony stereo mixes over Brian’s original mono, the Capitol execs made a few brilliant moves when it came to packaging. Listening to a canny suggestion from Mike, they rejected a predictable Greatest Hits of the Beach Boys title for the more evocative Endless Summer.

  Even more crucial was the gatefold cover that included not a single photo of the band. Instead, the entire expanse was taken up with a colorful, cartoonlike painting that presented the Beach Boys as six long-haired, mostly bearded heads set in scenes at a lushly overgrown beach. Two seem to hover in the midst of a distant wave; another peers through the vegetation. The only one who seems to have a body wears a straw boater hat and sells balloons near a hot dog stand. Another reads a dog-eared copy of the comic book Sgt. Rock; and the last guy, blond, sun-kissed, and reminiscent of Dennis, gazes out through the racing stripes of a surfboard jabbed into the sand. Their individual features all but unrecognizable, the heads are impassive, less like pop stars than coastline oracles.

  Unencumbered by any visual signifiers, the music on Endless Summer broke free of its early ’60s trappings. For youngsters who hadn’t heard it before, the spell it wove proved unexpectedly stirring. Divided into four vaguely thematic sides (side one is set on the beach; side two starts at school then zooms off onto the highway until the start of side three, when the album settles into a double-sided collection of ballads to girls real and imagined that ends with “All Summer Long”), the twenty songs contained none of the anger or irony that had dominated popular music ever since “Like a Rolling Stone” blasted across the mid-1960s. Endless Summer, on the other hand, presented starkly emotional tales of hope, risk, and loss, sung in plain language by young men whose clear, sweet voices were entirely free of cynicism or affect. “Be true to your school, now/ And let your colors fly!” they sang, exhibiting such belief in the American community that it seemed to come from an entirely different planet than virtually every rock ’n’ roll song recorded since 1965. Consider, for instance, the striking contrast between “Be True to Your School” and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s “Almost Cut My Hair,” in which David Crosby declared that even in the midst of Nixon-era repression, he was going to let his “freak flag” flutter proudly in the breeze.

  This sort of antiestablishment stance was a central part of the youth culture catechism in the early ’70s, picking up even more momentum as Nixon’s administration crumbled beneath the weight of its own desperate lawlessness in 1973 and 1974. And though a growing percentage of the population had come to yearn for the President’s impeachment and conviction for his role in the Watergate break-in and subsequent cover-up schemes, such large-scale bitterness proved ultimately exhausting. Americans may not be fools all of the time, as Abe Lincoln pointed out, but even wised-up citizens yearn to feel good about their country and its leaders. That was hard to come by in the inflation-squeezed, war-blasted, gas-panicked, president-loathing early ’70s, a fact that almost certainly enhanced the sound of those decade-old Beach Boys hits.

  Released on June 24, Endless Summer climbed quickly into Billboard ’s Top Ten, where it stayed throughout the summer. Two months after Nixon resigned the presidency, the album hit Billboard ’s number one spot. It would stay on the charts for an astonishing 155 weeks, selling more than 3,000,000 copies, catapulting the Beach Boys from their summer spot as openers on the Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young reunion tour to selling out basketball arenas as headliners. Rolling Stone made the group’s comeback official by declaring the Beach Boys 1974’s Band of the Year, which was particularly striking given that they hadn’t released any new music during the previous twelve months. But it was the power of their live shows that elevated the Beach Boys above the rest of the American rock ’n’ roll scene. Even if their songs weren’t new (by the end of 1974 the pre–Pet Sounds songs would take up half of their set, and the balance would continue to shift in the oldies’ favor as the months went on), even if their vocabulary was tied to a consumerist lifestyle that struck some as archaic or even regressive, the spirit at their core—that mosaic of fear, hope, and ambition—was timeless.

  Endless Summer was just the beginning. In 1975, the Beach Boys climbed back to the fore of the concert circuit, pushed ever higher by the success of Spirit of America, a second Capitol retrospective that climbed into Billboard ’s Top Ten that summer, shadowed by the year-old Endless Summer, which bounced back into the Top Twenty for a summer-long stay. Warner’s tried to get in on the action with The Good Vibrations Best of the Beach Boys, a single-disc collection of the group’s most popular late ’60s and early ’70s singles. But the commercial dominance of the band’s early ’60s catalogue put the group’s current label in an awkward position. They’d invested so much time and energy into rebuilding the Beach Boys into a hot-selling rock band, and that’s precisely what they had become…for Capitol.

  Unsurprisingly, Warner Brothers wanted some new product from their suddenly white-hot band, preferably from the hand of Brian Wilson. Unfortunately, the band was in turmoil again. Blondie Chaplin had left a year earlier, pushed out when he ran afoul of the group’s business manager, Steve Love (Mike’s brother, who joined the organization full-time after earning an MBA from the University of Southern California in 1971). Ricky Fataar stuck around for another year, but left in the fall of 1974, when he was offered a chance to join a new group being formed by Joe Walsh. On the plus side, the group had developed a relationship with James William Guercio, a musician-turned-manager who had steered the jazz-rock group Chicago to the top of the music industry, while also producing the group’s multiplatinum albums. Guercio was a huge Beach Boys fan, and when Dennis told him the group needed a bass player to replace Blondie
onstage, he packed up his instrument and hit the road eagerly. Soon Guercio began to advise the group on career decisions, proving so smart and sensible that they tapped him to be their new manager. When the group ended their summer tour in September 1974, Guercio sent them up to his Caribou Ranch studios nestled in the mountains of Nederland, Colorado.

  Not much came of the sessions. While every member had been writing new songs, they all came expecting to focus on whatever music Brian had to offer, and what he had was, at best, quirky. Many sessions were devoted to his re-envisioning of the inspirational Civil War hymn “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” But Brian’s arrangement of the song, which included electric guitar, drums, chirping synthesizers, and a rudimentary banjo line, was set at such a breakneck pace that Mike could barely spit the words out fast enough to keep up, let alone draw out the real emotion in the piece. The group had far more fun jamming on an early version of Brian’s “Ding Dang,” which in this rendition was a funky rock ’n’ roll song with blazing guitar from Carl, in-the-pocket drums from Dennis, and full group vocals chanting a rudimentary but instantly memorable chorus of: “Alley-oop—fuck her! Big tits!”