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

by Peter Ames Carlin

  If you happened to be in eighth grade that year, if you had dug Endless Summer enough to pick up a magazine or two that featured the Beach Boys on the cover, and if what you had read about the brilliant, troubled life of Brian Wilson had touched something profound in your own adolescent consciousness, the prospect of seeing it all come together right in front of you was almost too exciting to endure.

  When the day finally arrived, overcast and damp as per usual in the Pacific Northwest during the holidays, my friend Tommy and I ditched sixth period together and hopped a bus for downtown. Once the bus crested Capitol Hill and shifted down for its descent into the city, we became silly with glee.

  “I bet we go backstage. I bet you get to talk to Brian,” Tommy said. Then he thought some more, no doubt considering the hours he’d spent playing his own set of just-purchased drums along with his copy of Endless Summer, imagining himself as the muscular, roguish, sandy-haired guy who held down the backbeat on the songs.

  “I bet we meet Dennis.”

  All of which would be way too dumb to remember, let alone include in these pages, were it not for what happened less than five minutes after Tommy uttered those starstruck words. Because when the bus pulled into its stop on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Pine Street, and when we jumped down the stairs and began our walk to the monorail that would carry us directly to the Seattle Center, nearly the first person we saw strolling down the sidewalk in our direction was, in fact, Dennis Wilson.

  “Peter, ohmigod, look!”

  Tommy saw him first, snatching my arm and hissing into my ear. I assumed he was bullshitting me—turning his teenybopper fantasy into a practical joke—until I looked up and saw him for myself: the shoulder-length brown hair, the full beard, the sun-weathered cheeks. He wore one of those wraparound Mexican sweaters over a pair of jeans, and he had one woolly arm draped over the shoulder of a petite blonde I recognized from the magazines as Karen Lamm, his new, ex-model wife.

  “Holy shit. What do we do?”

  “Fuck if I know.”

  Well, I knew. Even as Tommy shrank back into the crowd (struck by a case of adolescent nerves he would regret from that moment on), I walked up to the guy, and in a voice squeezed about an octave above its normal pitch, I spoke to him.

  “You’re not, uh, Dennis Wilson…are you?”

  “Yup.”

  He cocked an eyebrow in my direction while Karen Lamm looked down and smiled proudly, seeing what had to be a familiar sidewalk scene playing out one more time.

  “Wow. Wow. I’m, uh, I’m going to the show tonight!”

  “Hey, right on. I hope you have a good time.”

  I handed him my ticket envelope and the stub of a pencil, which he used to scrawl a signature. He gave them back, then held out his hand for a farewell shake. At which point the passage of time slowed; the ambient noise of cars, buses, and jackhammers faded; and I entered a Zen moment of adulation. With that gesture Dennis was literally pulling me into a live version of the Beach Boys fantasy I had concocted in my adolescent mind. Sex, adventure, friendship, sensitivity, and rock ’n’ roll…that’s what I heard in those songs, that’s what I wanted to make my own someday. As Dennis let go of my hand, rested his other hand on the shoulder of his achingly beautiful wife, and ambled off around the corner, I knew it was all real.

  Later that night when the lights dimmed and the five Beach Boys stood before us on a stage decorated with palm trees and a life-size sailboat, the opening bars of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” spurred an ovation that seemed to shake the Coliseum’s concrete floor. People danced and screamed, their fingertips raking the smoky air. The band—Brian in a silk, body-length bathrobe; Carl in a white jumpsuit; Mike shirtless beneath a spangled gold vest; Al looking casual in white pants, blazer, and slouch cap; Dennis sitting behind a set of clear plastic drums—played two ecstatic sets, mixing a small handful of newer songs like “Feel Flows,” “Sail On, Sailor,” and “All This Is That” with a grand array of hits that sounded just as fresh and fun as they did on Endless Summer. It all sounded so beautiful I barely noticed how stiffly Brian sat at his piano and how awkwardly he stalked to center stage to take a bow. I had no way of knowing that the joyous music they made, even the gorgeous harmony that came when they leaned into their microphones and sang, described a vision of life they were in the process of abandoning and that soon even the memories would mean nothing to them.

  In the fall of 1975, Stephen Love, who had recently replaced James Guercio as the group’s manager, had concluded that the group had no choice: They had to get Brian back to work. Almost three years had passed since Holland had been released, and in that time the blockbuster sales of Endless Summer and its follow-up, Spirit of America, had only increased the pressure coming from Warner Brothers. The Beach Boys needed a new album soon, and it had to be good. More accurately, it had to be great, and everyone knew where great Beach Boys songs came from. Unfortunately, they also knew that the most vital man in their operation wanted nothing more than to be free of it as soon as possible and forever. Obviously, that would never do.

  “Brian wanted to be left alone, but there was too much at stake,” Stephen Love says. “If you’ve got an oil well, you don’t want it to wander off and become someone else’s oil well. There was always this sense that Brian could hit another home run, and so [the other Beach Boys] wanted to keep him on their team. They had a large appetite for what might be.”

  As Stephen knew, the other Beach Boys and the staff of Warner Brothers records weren’t the only people craving new Beach Boys songs from Brian Wilson. All of those newly minted fans were surely eager to hear what truly modern Beach Boys music would sound like. Then there were the executives from the nation’s other entertainment companies, all of whom had noted the success of Endless Summer, knowing full well that the group’s deal with Warner Brothers would soon expire. So, Stephen Love decreed, the Beach Boys would indeed get their resident genius back in the driver’s seat, and once he was there, they would throw open the studio doors and tell everyone who would listen that he was there. “The ‘Brian Is Back!’ idea was the perfect hook to get a new record contract,” Stephen Love says. “Maybe it would have been more accurate to say, ‘We think and hope Brian’s on his way back!’ But that’s not gonna cut it for a professional [media] campaign.”

  It was, however, certainly more accurate, because once the tracksuit-clad, stringy-haired, thickly bearded Brian tiptoed back into the studio and sheepishly counted off the intro to his new arrangement of Fats Domino’s “Blueberry Hill,” it became quickly apparent that something had changed. The man who once had the most precise ear in all of the hottest recording studios in Hollywood no longer had the energy or desire to get anything right. “They were the fastest sessions ever,” recalls Earle Mankey, the engineer who ran the board at most of the dates at Brother Studios. “The room would be full of musicians, all the old guys from the past, and there would be some acoustic basses and open mikes. I can listen back into the mix now and hear guys talking to each other and tuning up on the takes that ended up on the records. But at the end of the song Brian would say, ‘That sounded great, guys!’ and head for the door.” A large part of the problem, Mankey continues, was that Brian was still terrified to be around people he didn’t know. “He was scared to come into the studio, scared to talk to people. I don’t think he was scared during the sessions—that might have been the most comfortable part of it, since he was so familiar with that process. I had the sense that Brian would have liked to have been into it. But he was too scared.”

  And once Brian felt comfortable enough with Mankey to sit and shoot the breeze for a while, the things the red-eyed, blank-faced musician said didn’t bode well for his supposed return to glory. “He kept saying, ‘Where’s the fire? There’s just no fire anymore. I can’t get the fire to do this stuff!’ It didn’t matter to him anymore. He just didn’t have the desire to get it done.”

  Obviously, the motivations that had kick-started Brian’s ther
apy—getting him back to work ASAP—and his actual therapeutic needs were at cross purposes. What he needed was the time and space to recognize and confront the profound psychological problems that had afflicted him, to varying degrees, since his boyhood. What he got instead was all the creative responsibility he had spent most of a decade trying to avoid, plus the burden of a vast publicity campaign that would lean as heavily on his personal problems as the music itself would upon his talents. And if that wasn’t enough to overwhelm his fragile circuits, Brian also had to weather the fairly obvious distrust and resentment of his bandmates. “They really had mixed feelings about [Brian’s comeback] because they knew it would frustrate their own designs for their own music,” Stephen Love recalls. “But they probably liked it economically, because they knew it was going to get them a bigger record deal.”

  The first glimmers of the story began to appear that winter, as word leaked that Brian was back in the recording studio producing the new Beach Boys album, or perhaps as many as three. “It’s very possible that one will be an all-oldies album. We’ve wanted to do that for a long time, and Brian’s into it,” Dennis told Timothy White, then a staffer at Crawdaddy magazine. “The other two could take the form of a double album of all-new material that stretches from hard rock ’n’ roll to these wordless vocals we’ve been doing that sound like the Vienna Boys Choir.” Dennis went on to describe a dozen or so new originals penned by all the members of the band—his “10,000 Years” and “Rainbow”; Mike’s “Glow, Crescent, Glow,” “Lisa,” and “Everyone’s in Love with You”; Al’s “Gold Rush”; and Brian’s “Ding Dang,” “Transcendental Meditation,” and, most enticingly, “California Feeling,” the ballad he’d written with Stephen Kalinich. It all sounded very ambitious and terribly alluring, and by the time spring began to tilt toward summer, a veritable army of reporters had already marched in, notebooks in hand, to cover the magic and wonder of the fabled Brian Wilson’s return to active duty.

  What they discovered was a band that was far less unified than they had been led to believe. Dennis and Carl had already been to enough sessions to figure out that Brian wasn’t creating music that would stand up to Holland, let alone the classic stuff from the ’60s. And now that Endless Summer had thrust all the old hits back into the public consciousness, how could they put out a record that so obviously wasn’t even trying to live up to that standard? “Carl was dragging his feet, saying, ‘This is a shitty record. This isn’t anywhere near as good as it should be,’” Stephen Love says. “But the hard truth is that you don’t have forever to tinker around with this stuff. The pressing demands of business sometimes interfere with artistic indulgence. Business-wise you want to get the goddamn album out when things are gelling. Commerce and art, man, that’s a tough thing.”

  And for the Beach Boys in 1976, it was becoming extremely clear which of those two demands was going to take precedence—they already had the publicity campaign plotted out to the minute. And it all fit together so perfectly! Brian’s comeback, the new album, the group’s fifteenth anniversary—and the fact that this celebration of America’s biggest rock band was taking place precisely as the nation’s bicentennial celebration reached its own hysterical climax on July 4 was merely a bonus. By then the album’s first single, “Rock ’n’ Roll Music,” was already flying up the charts toward the top five. The album itself—a fifteen-song set called 15 Big Ones—was twenty-four hours from being released. NBC had already sent the white-hot creative team behind Saturday Night Live (that year’s hippest new show) to helm the prime-time special already slated to air in August. An army of writers from virtually all of the nation’s leading publications had already marched in, ready to unleash an even bigger publicity binge. Did it even matter that the stories that popped up to promote it weren’t quite as cheery as their “Brian Is Back!” headlines?

  Apparently not, because virtually every rendition made excellent use of the riptide flowing just beneath the glimmering surface of the Beach Boys’ latest wave. “I’m not going out on the road like some broken-down rock star!” Mike had sniffed to Newsweek, contrasting his own stage-ready physique with the more humble condition of a certain comeback kid. Dennis and Carl, meanwhile, couldn’t stop griping about the slapdash way Brian had gone about recording and compiling the tunes that ended up on the new album. “It was a great mistake to put Brian back in control,” Dennis grumbled. “I hated to give [the fans] this.” Brian himself proved a less-than-dependable interview, particularly when the subject was his own personal and musical renaissance. That same Newsweek story, published the week 15 Big Ones came out, described his “blank” demeanor and “shaking hands.” “We’re going to do another ‘Good Vibrations’ next time. Another masterpiece,” he said, by way of optimism.

  Seemingly unwilling to get in the way of the redemptive narrative, most critics gave 15 Big Ones gentle treatment. Even the Newsweek piece dropped its gimlet eye long enough to term the album “fascinating…[with] a curiously unshakable unity.” True enough, Brian’s arrangement of “Blueberry Hill” began with an intriguing dual-saxophone figure that built slowly from the first verse into a full arrangement with horns, bells, guitars, percussion, and thundering drums. Brian built a Spectorian roar almost entirely out of synthesizers and other keyboards in a moving cover of the master’s “For Once in My Life,” while the album’s opening track, the hit revision of Chuck Berry’s “Rock ’n’ Roll Music,” used fuzz-heavy guitars, a prominent walking bass line, organ, and dramatic pauses to carve out a distinct, if imperfect, take on a well-worn classic. “A Casual Look” boasted a nice a cappella intro and punchy horns throughout the tune, but that spark of vocal originality was an exception. The group vocals on the rest of the album are most striking for how simple—and sometimes close to inaudible—they are.

  Of the original songs on the disc, Brian and Mike’s “Had to Phone Ya” featured a full, clarinet-led instrumental arrangement and group harmonies that passed the lead vocal from member to member. The fun-in-the-summertime rocker “It’s OK” had the joie de vivre and wailing chorus (“Gotta go to it, gotta go through it, gotta get with it”) of a classic car song, while “Back Home” (which had been curing in Brian’s woodshed since 1963) had a throbbing bass, bouncing organ riffs, and a spirited vocal from Brian. Even more intriguing was “That Same Song,” a whimsical history of world music that came close to sparking the gospel fire it set out to ignite.

  But again, the vocals are mixed too low, too sloppily performed, or, in so many cases, arranged in such a slapdash manner that they sound like a bad imitation of Brian’s joyous sound. Even more distressing was the tone of Brian’s voice. Once the owner of a powerful but tender falsetto that could soar and swoop above even the most thunderous track, Brian now sang in a baritone croak. When the melody pushed him higher, his voice shattered into a squawk that was, as often as not, dismayingly off-pitch. It would have been bad enough from any professional singer, but to hear the man who had once revised the limits of rock ’n’ roll harmony sing in that raw-throated croak sounded like a self-immolating gesture.

  Brian’s first wave of performances felt more like a strange kind of public execution: death by mass adoration. Starting with a vocal-free appearance at a pretour festival stop in Oakland on July 3, he made a more full return at the tour opener in Anaheim two nights later, shuffling to center stage to waggle his fingertips at the fans holding up a hand-lettered “Welcome Back, Brian” banner, then taking a mumbled stab at the solo in the middle of “Surfer Girl.” And though his robotic movements and wide-eyed expression broadcast nothing short of barely controlled terror, the performances were heralded as triumphant.

  Selections from the Anaheim show served as the centerpiece in the NBC special, which aired August 5 under the title “It’s OK.” As produced by Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels, the hour-long show jumped from stage shots to band interviews to weird production bits designed to reveal something about the members’ personalities. Here was Al Jardine at
his hillside manse in rustic Big Sur, fending off a hostile goat long enough to describe his rural lifestyle like some kind of latter-day Thoreau (“It’s not something everyone can do. Some of us are cut out for it; some of us have to live in cities”) between dips in his hot tub and onstage performances of “Help Me, Rhonda.” Carl Wilson motored coolly through Beverly Hills in a vintage Mercedes convertible; Dennis Wilson served enthusiastically as a judge at a local beauty contest; Mike Love did loop-de-loops as a passenger in a stunt plane. But mostly it was Brian Wilson: talking about his problems while lying in bed; performing a ragged, humorless “I’m Bugged at My Old Man” with Dennis and Carl on background vocals; looking grim while being feted by family, friends, and Paul McCartney at his own thirty-fourth birthday party. Most famously, Brian was rousted from bed by Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi, playing state cops determined to make the famed nonsurfer ride the waves, even if it meant shoving him into the water in his bathrobe. Brian was bowled over by the force of the waves, sputtering for air and holding onto his surfboard for dear life.

  The show was celebrated roundly as a masterstroke for Brian and the group. But all that excitement—the silly skits, the up-close-and-personal confessions, the ecstatic performances of the oldies, et al—only distracted from the hour’s one real moment of transcendence, when Brian and the rest of the group performed “That Same Song” with the help of the Baptist Double Rock gospel choir. Standing alone at a microphone placed just behind the pianist, facing up toward the thirty-piece chorus, Brian began his lead vocal as tentatively as ever. But once he hit the first chorus, the choir’s voices echoing his own (“I know!—I KNOW!/It took us a long time to go—TO GO!/And build us a rock style…”), an electric current seemed to pulse through him. He started to move, punching the air and slapping his hands together on the beat.