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

by Peter Ames Carlin

  The group also put down basic tracks for Dennis’s lovely environmental ballad “River Song” (which would appear later on his 1977 solo album) and a song of Mike’s called “Our Life, Our Love, Our Land.” But the sessions fell apart after a couple of weeks, and the group went back to Los Angeles hoping Brian might feel more comfortable and willing to work in his usual stomping grounds. They tried again a month later, working this time in the group’s new recording studio (Marilyn had finally put her foot down and reclaimed the Bellagio studio as family territory) on Fifth Street in Santa Monica. Here, more time was spent on the doomed “Battle Hymn” before Brian turned his attention to an original (and somewhat odd) Christmas song he’d written with Steve Kalinich called “Child of Winter,” which came out sounding like a shorter, holiday-themed version of “Mt. Vernon and Fairway.” Brian hoped to get “Child” out as a single for the holidays, but by the time Warner’s actually got the record out into stores, Christmas was only a week away and the season of holiday cheer was essentially finished, as was the song’s commercial potential. A Beach Boys take on “Here Comes Santa Claus” stayed in the can, while attempts at Brian’s other new originals, a ballad he’d written with Carl called “Good Timin’” and a summery rocker Mike had written lyrics for called “It’s OK,” were tentative at best.

  The tapes went back on the shelf and the group went back on the road, opening its 1975 schedule with a sold-out show at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. They spent the rest of the winter and spring playing increasingly oldies-focused shows in the nation’s basketball arenas and college football stadiums, then in May set out on a much-hyped twelve-city tour as coheadliner with Chicago. The so-called “Beachago” shows were particularly successful, thanks in part to the fact that the bands actually collaborated onstage, with the Chicago members adding punch (and horns) to “Darlin’,” “California Girls,” “Fun, Fun, Fun,” and “Surf’s Up” while the Beach Boys added vocals to “Feelin’ Stronger Every Day,” “Saturday in the Park,” and “Wishing You Were Here” (the last of which had featured Carl, Dennis, and Al on its recorded version).

  Though Chicago had been the nation’s most popular rock band for most of the decade, most critics agreed that the Beach Boys’ litany of decade-old hits blew the younger band off the stage. “There was an outpouring of emotion from the audience that surprised even the most regular attendees of Capitol Center concerts,” the rock critic for the Washington Post wrote after a show in D.C. “There was a feeling in the air, pure, innocent, and without the false hipness that is standard at most rock shows, and even the Beach Boys themselves were amazed.” The feeling followed the group across the Atlantic Ocean when they played at a daylong concert at Wembley Stadium headlined by the world’s then-reigning king of rock ’n’ roll, Elton John. “Unfortunately for Elton…the Beach Boys had stolen the show hours beforehand as they played their marvelous surfing songs under the blazing sunshine,” according to Melody Maker magazine.

  On the road, they were scaling peaks of public and critical acclaim that had seemed beyond reach even when their songs were brand-new. But if the Beach Boys were expecting to find their leader at home with a whole new collection of classics ready to record, they were in for a grim surprise. Because even as his old songs were bringing that old utopian spirit to a new generation of fans, Brian had gone farther down the rabbit hole. He gave up on regular bathing and grew his fingernails until they curved from his hands like talons. The hair he’d once kept immaculately styled became a greasy veil that hung to his shoulders. He smoked constantly and ate with a ravenous appetite that made his weight balloon more than 100 pounds in less than two years. As Carnie remembers, her father began most of his days with a dozen eggs and an entire loaf of bread. And to watch Brian eat his dinner was to see a man trying desperately to fill an internal void that must have felt bottomless. “He’d take his fork to his salad and he’d be like—bang! bang! bang!—spearing up as much as he could at one time,” Carnie recalls. “Then he’d shove the whole thing into his mouth, close his eyes, and chew so fast, so intensely, he’d grab the table and grip it when he chewed. He’d eat his entire steak in like two bites. And he’d be done and at the piano by the time the rest of us sat down to eat.”

  When he rolled out of bed in the afternoon or early evening, Brian would make a beeline to his jukebox and punch up “Be My Baby,” listening to the song—or sometimes just the first verse and chorus—over and over again, as if he could absorb some vital energy from the sound of its thundering echo. When he tired of that, he’d settle at the piano to play another in his endless renditions of “Rhapsody in Blue” or the boogie-woogie piano riff from “Ding Dang.” When he could no longer sit still, Brian might spend hours wandering aimlessly around the house, entering and leaving each room as if he were searching for something so important he couldn’t bring himself to speak its name. There were days he’d spend alone in his new bedroom—far from the rest of the family in the chauffeur’s quarters above the garage—listening to the radio and obliterating his thoughts with whatever combination of cocaine, speed, and pot he had stashed away. Back at the piano, he’d start playing the same songs again, and if Carnie or Wendy happened to sit down to listen, Brian would beg for a back rub. “I’ll pay ya a nickel if you scratch my back!” he’d plead. “He just loved to be touched,” Carnie says.

  Marilyn, a young mother still in her midtwenties, would try to make her daughters understand why their father was so different from the dads they met at their friends’ houses. “Mom would say, ‘Your father’s not like other dads. He’ll never be able to be a father like your friends have. But he has this gift, and no one will ever be able to take that away.’”

  At some point in 1974 he worked with Stephen Kalinich to write “California Feelin’,” a lyrical paean to the beauty of the state’s coastline. Melodic and yearning, the song seemed a perfect fit for the Beach Boys, and Brian even got Marilyn to drive him down to Western Studios to record a demo with his old engineer, Chuck Britz, manning the board. Brian threw himself into his performance, too, his voice soaring and falling through the octaves with all the power and grace he could muster. But near the end of the tune, Brian started goofing on the lyric, taking on the cheesy, overexcited croon of a Vegas balladeer. As the song thundered to a bogus, self-mocking climax, Brian jumped up from the piano and called out one last instruction to Britz: “Toss that one, Chuck.” And then he was gone again.

  Brian felt less constrained when it came to projects he knew would have nothing to do with the Beach Boys. In the first months of 1975, he signed a deal with Equinox Records—run by Terry Melcher and ex–Beach Boy Bruce Johnston—to produce singles for the start-up label. Brian worked with Melcher to coproduce, play, and sing background vocals on covers of “Why Do Fools Fall in Love” (the Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers tune he had first covered for the Beach Boys in the early ’60s) and “Jamaica Farewell,” both of which were credited to the band California Music, a loose-knit group that included Melcher, Johnston, Gary Usher, Curt Becher, and a few other members of L.A.’s music scene. But the songs went nowhere, and when the Beach Boys got wind of Brian’s solo project and the stream of cash it provided for his increasingly troublesome drug habit, they put an end to the deal. “Marilyn had me come in as the heavy,” Stephen Love remembers. “We were under contract to Warner Brothers, and we couldn’t have him going out on a tangent. If he was going to be productive, it’s gotta be for the Beach Boys.” But, Stephen continues, Brian was dead set against doing that. “He said to me, ‘Don’t try to reach me! Don’t try to get to me!’ He was so upset Marilyn didn’t want [the Equinox deal] to happen.”

  Later that spring Brian got a call from Johnny Rivers, who told him he was putting the finishing touches on a cover of “Help Me, Rhonda.” Would Brian like to come down to the studio and record the falsetto part of the background vocals? Brian came down the next night, Marilyn in tow, put the headphones on his ears, and knocked out the sky-high part in a
single take, just like he’d done ten years earlier.

  But such bursts of activity were marked exceptions as he grew almost willfully detached from reality. By the fall of 1975, Brian’s intake of food, alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs—now including occasional flirtations with heroin—had grown so frenzied that Marilyn began to talk openly about either divorcing him, putting him into a mental institution, or both. Meanwhile, the other Beach Boys had started to question the group’s practice of giving Brian a full share of their touring income. After all, they had reached that deal back in 1965, when Brian was still writing and producing music for the group full-time. As of late 1975, it had been more than three years since he had made a serious attempt to record anything for the band. Why should they cut him in on such a large portion of their annual income when their onetime producer and visionary was spending all of his time—and their money—snorting coke and eating steaks at home? Rousing himself from his fog, Brian responded angrily to the band’s threat when Stephen Love brought the news up to the Bellagio house. “[Brian] said, ‘Well, don’t play my songs then!’ But anyone can play anything, as long as they pay the performance fees, so that wasn’t gonna happen.” The deeper motivation, Stephen continues, was really to get the group’s erstwhile leader to get back to work. “If you’ve got a lot of dough rolling in and you just want to hang out, why change anything? He needed to be dislodged from his comfortable place. And Brian has a very precise inner sense of how much money he has.”

  To help guide Brian’s transition back to the land of the living, Stephen appointed his brother Stanley—then at the end of a five-year career as a journeyman forward in the National Basketball Association—to serve as a full-time bodyguard, assistant, and minder. Stanley’s first task, he recalls, was to sweep the property for Brian’s drug stashes, particularly the daily drop-off made by a service-oriented dealer who used the family’s curbside mailbox. Slowly gaining his charge’s trust, Stanley worked to reacclimate him to day-to-day life, convincing Brian to bathe regularly, wear clothes during the day, cut back on his many indulgences, and even get some exercise.

  At first, however, Brian refused to even consider the prospect of getting back to work with the Beach Boys. That changed when Marilyn called in the band’s lawyers and accountants to explain the obligations he had taken on with the Warner Brothers contract and to make sure he understood that if he didn’t get back to work writing and/or producing 70 percent of the Beach Boys’ product, the label would sue him and take his house. Marilyn would leave with the girls, and he’d be out on the street, alone and hungry. Brian, she knew, hated to even think about the prospect of being homeless and hungry, but they’d keep on yelling at him, beating Brian down until he lay curled in the fetal position.

  Other times he’d try to get away, literally crawling out of the room in an attempt to escape his tormentors. “They thought the tough treatment would scare him, that they could hammer him into shape. What they didn’t realize was that he didn’t like them anymore,” Stanley says. “He’d write letters saying, ‘Don’t talk to me anymore. I’m withdrawing from the Beach Boys.’ But they wouldn’t pay attention and would just keep coming back.”

  Eventually Brian began to resign himself to the inevitable. “He decided to not fight it,” Stanley says. “I talked him into having a sports mentality: This is what I do, this is the situation, so I’m going to fight my way through this and be a real competitor.”

  Called back into the NBA by the Atlanta Hawks that fall, Stanley left the Wilson house just in time to make room for the next stage in Brian’s return to civilization. Hearing of a psychologist named Eugene Landy who specialized in treating the lifestyle dysfunctions of powerful showbiz personalities, Marilyn made an appointment and told him all about her problems with Brian. How could he seem so crazy and yet snap so suddenly into clear-eyed sanity? Why wouldn’t he conform to anything like traditional social mores? And how could she stop him from eating, drinking, and drugging himself to death? Landy, a thin-faced man with long sideburns and thick-thatched hair, smiled and nodded. He’d heard all this before. “Right, I’ve treated a tremendous number of people in show business,” he confirmed to Rolling Stone’s David Felton a few months later. (He specifically mentioned the notoriously boozy actor Richard Harris and had also been credited with treating the likes of Alice Cooper, Rod Steiger, and Gig Young.)

  “For some reason I seem to be able to relate to them,” Landy told Felton. “I think I have a nice reputation that says I’m unorthodox by orthodox standards, but basically unique by unorthodox standards.” Felton pulled his string again, proposing to Landy that he was “a pretty heavy-duty Hollywood shrink.” Again, Landy agreed, with maximum glee: “I’m outrageously expensive.”

  And all the more so when it came to Brian, who, Landy decreed, would require round-the-clock therapy for at least two years. The team of therapists—which included a psychiatrist, a physician, a nutritionist, and strong-armed minders—would help Brian become a resocialized, detoxified, superproductive artist and citizen. Better still, Landy could do all of it without ever acknowledging anything like serious psychiatric problems.

  His initial diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia had proven all wrong, Landy told Rolling Stone. “Brian was suffering from being scared,” he said. “He was not able to deal with frightened, or even have a response to frightened, and therefore lived in the area of fantasy…He’s in the process of returning from fantasy every day more and more.”

  It was an odd diagnosis, but not nearly as curious as the fact that licensed practitioner Landy was discussing it, along with many other intimate aspects of Brian’s internal life, in the pages of a national magazine. But Landy, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1934, had always been an eager promoter. Still unable to read when he dropped out of school in the sixth grade, he’d been hustling since before he’d started to shave. From there his autobiography, as described to various writers over the years, seems like a combination of Horatio Alger, Carl Jung, and Alan Freed, featuring stints in local radio, the music business, the movie industry, and then as the personal manager to a school-aged jazz guitarist named George Benson. In the ’60s he turned his attention to federal do-good agencies such as the Peace Corps, VISTA, and the Job Corps before enrolling in Los Angeles State College, from which he graduated in 1964 with a degree in psychology. Landy collected a master’s degree and a PhD from the University of Oklahoma and then moved back to California in the early ’70s and set up a practice that specialized in treating young people. He published a book, The Underground Dictionary, that helped straights to identify and understand hippie slang such as “kick stick” (marijuana joint) and “split beaver” (use your imagination). By the mid-1970s, the hustler-turned-psychologist had discovered an excellent way to combine his professional interests by focusing his practice on the treatment of Hollywood’s most disconsolate stars and emperors, particularly those whose wealth and power invited the use of vast quantities of mood-altering substances.

  “When I first met Dr. Landy, I knew I’d met someone who could play Brian’s game,” Marilyn told Rolling Stone. Landy’s first step was to introduce himself into his patient’s imagination, making regular visits to the Bellagio house to speak with Marilyn behind closed doors. Brian grew curious about his wife’s visitor and eventually demanded to speak with Landy himself, declaring, “Something’s wrong with me. I need help.” From that point Landy moved his team in and took control of Brian’s life. Friends known to use drugs were told to keep their distance. Brian was placed on a strict diet (Landy padlocked the family’s refrigerator to keep him honest) and marched off for a daily regimen of jogging and weight lifting. Brian also had to satisfy requirements for songwriting and, eventually, recording. If Brian even thought about balking at these decrees, Landy would swoop in quickly to lay down the law. When Brian didn’t want to get out of bed, Landy would drench him with water. When he claimed to be too nauseous to stay at a dinner party, Landy would command him to vomit on[to] the
table. “I had to be crazier than Brian,” Landy liked to say.

  As the new year began, Landy’s scheme seemed to be working. Brian got back into the habit of climbing out of bed in the morning, and once the effects of dieting and exercise began to manifest themselves, he showed real pride in his progress. When sessions for a new Beach Boys album began in early January, he not only showed up in the studio but also agreed to run the sessions, some of which included the same ace musicians he used on the Beach Boys’ classic records from the mid-1960s. At first the plan was to record an album’s worth of cover songs—’50s classics, mostly—to give Brian a chance to get his sea legs back. Once that was done, he’d move quickly into an album of new originals and, as the other Beach Boys would tell the world repeatedly, “really stretch out and blow some minds.”

  By the summer of 1976, the news would be everywhere: in the pages of Time and Newsweek, on the covers of People, Rolling Stone, Crawdaddy, and New West, all over the arts sections of the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and every major newspaper in between. The idea that won their attention, summarized so deftly by Stephen Love as he dreamed up the PR campaign that winter, came down to one three-word headline: Brian Is Back.

  CHAPTER 12

  It was the afternoon of December 18, 1976, and the Beach Boys were in Seattle, poised to play the second of two sold-out shows at the 12,000-seat Seattle Center Coliseum. Coming at the end of a year in which they had appeared in all of the leading national magazines, starred in their own network TV special, and seen their new album and single soar immediately to the upper reaches of the Billboard charts, the group’s Seattle shows had touched off a small furor around the misty shores of Puget Sound. Then one day a news flash on the radio upped the voltage even more: “Great news for Beach Boys fans!” a KJR-AM disc jockey cried out. “Word from L.A. is that Brian Wilson will be appearing with the band when they come to town next week!”