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

by Peter Ames Carlin

  Forty-five minutes later the Harbor Patrol discovered Dennis’s body on the floor of the harbor. An autopsy performed later revealed that his blood alcohol level was twice what the police would need to declare him legally drunk. A day later the surviving Beach Boys gathered before the press, looking sad, if not all that surprised. “We are not disbanding,” Carl declared, firmly. “We know Dennis would want us to continue in the spirit and tradition of the Beach Boys.”

  Which is precisely what they did without missing a beat. The group played its usual schedule of shows in 1984, including a triumphant return to the Washington Monument on the Fourth of July. Meanwhile, they had also started work on their first new album in five years and the first in eight years to feature the contributions of a healthy Brian Wilson. But fearing that even a clear-eyed Brian might not, at forty-two, have the right sensibility for the modern market, the group chose instead to hire Steve Levine, producer of the then-popular British band Culture Club, to steer their new project. It was, in many ways, a very odd pairing. Culture Club, fronted by the heavily made-up cross-dresser Boy George, performed mostly dance-friendly tunes played almost entirely on synthesizers and other electronic gear. And this was precisely the technique Levine brought to the Beach Boys. As Carl said when the album came out in 1985: “Almost everything on the record was programmed note-for-note, sound-for-sound, beat-by-beat, and then we wouldn’t hear it until we sent it through the computer,” he said. “The digital approach is so new, and it can be quite tedious until you learn it.”

  Not surprisingly, the record that emerged turned out to be an awkward, if occasionally engaging, blend of eras, styles, and cultures. Titled simply The Beach Boys and dedicated to “the memory of our beloved brother, cousin, and friend,” the record kicked off with a few bars of booming, straight-ahead drums: precisely the sort of boom-boom rhythm Dennis might have played. The brief intro (actually a digital program) led into Mike and Terry Melcher’s faux-1950s ballad “Getcha Back,” which was most notable for its multitiered harmonies and particularly the familiar falsetto wailing over the top. Carl’s R & B–inspired “It’s Gettin’ Late” made excellent use of Levine’s layered keyboards, while the youngest Wilson’s graceful love song “Where I Belong” featured full group harmonies that were richer than anything they had attempted in fifteen years. From there, however, the record suffers from all the usual conceptual flaws that mark the group’s post–Love You albums. “California Calling” strip-mined the memory of “Surfin’ USA” to predictably lame effect, stringing together references to surfing, boogie boarding, woody station wagons, and the expression “totally rad” with all the grace and passion of one of Levine’s computer programs. Conversely, many of the other songs tried too hard to echo the contemporary pop charts. Carl’s hard-rocking “Maybe I Don’t Know” got tangled in a generic hair-metal guitar solo, while “Passing Friend,” contributed by Boy George and Roy Hay, sounded just like the Culture Club outtake it was. Stevie Wonder’s “I Do Love You” came off a bit better, if only because it’s a much better song that combined its author’s musical chops (Stevie played all of the instruments himself) with Carl’s voice at its funkiest.

  Brian’s reinvigorated voice added a richness to the blend that had been missing for years. But his own songs sounded more like exercises than the product of inspiration, both in terms of their simple music and lyrics (composed in part by Landy) that had none of the goofy poetry Brian invested in even his most tossed-off songs. “I’m so lonely/Really, really so lonely/I wish that you’d come comfort me, oh yeah” was about as deep as it got. The one new original that did contain more than a trace of Brian’s musical and lyrical touch was the silly, modularly structured “Male Ego,” which was relegated to semi-existence as the “Getcha Back” flip side and as a bonus track on the CD.

  Released during the spring of 1985, The Beach Boys benefited from yet another wave of publicity pegged to a Brian comeback and the curiosity/sympathy that lingered from the Watt affair and Dennis’s death. “Getcha Back” jumped into the midtwenties on the singles charts, propelled in part by a video that earned light rotation on MTV, despite its portrayal of the group as cool security guards at a teenaged pool party and then as the groovy, ageless surfers they never really had been. The album stalled at number fifty-two, however, and soon the group was back to its primary occupation of finding new ways to repackage and sell off the shards of the pure, windswept horizon they had helped Brian bring to life two decades earlier. If they had ever felt moved by the beauty of what they had once created, if they had ever connected the quest for physical transcendence the songs described to the spiritual one that linked them to their ancestors and to the gleam in the eyes that sparkled beyond the footlights every night, it had clearly ceased to matter to them. For now the Beach Boys, like so many other middle-aged businessmen in Ronald Reagan’s go-go 1980s, were committed to making money.

  And maybe this was exactly what America’s Band was supposed to be doing. After all, America’s entertainment industry never shied away from naked greed, either. The traveling circuses of the nineteenth century actually sold grifters the right to fleece their crowds, contracting with them just as they did with food and drink concessionaires. And though the popular entertainers of the twentieth century have historically presented themselves as transgressive types aligned with society’s downtrodden rank and file, their success has most often been determined by their relationships with the rich and powerful.

  So the Beach Boys took care of business, accepting a deal from Sunkist to record a revised version of “Good Vibrations” for a multimedia ad campaign promoting orange soda. They observed the group’s twenty-fifth anniversary with a concert on the beach in Hawaii, where guests including Ray Charles, Glen Campbell, Belinda Carlisle of the Go-Gos, and the Fabulous Thunderbirds played along on the greatest hits, with the Beach Boys providing (largely overdubbed in postproduction) backing harmonies. Taped by NBC, the show aired in the prime-time horse latitudes of mid-March, where it failed to make much of a splash. The group’s first single in 1986, Mike and Terry Melcher’s “Rock ’n’ Roll to the Rescue,” spoke both of “surfer girls” and “high school days,” while their next release turned out to be a far-too-faithful cover of the Mamas and Papas’ “California Dreamin’,” chosen both for its harmonic possibilities (which they barely bothered to explore) and the irresistible pull of the word “California” in its title. A year later the group hitched a ride on the hip-hop bandwagon by providing instrumental and vocal backing to the Fat Boys’ rap version of “Wipeout,” which was a minor hit in the summer of 1987.

  The short-term result was a series of medium-size hits that kept the group’s new music on the radio. But the longer-term result was that they had willingly made the final leap from serious artistry to self-parody. To watch the Beach Boys performing now—chauffeured across baseball infields in woody station wagons, performing on stages crowded with unironic surfboards, all of them dressed in clothes that had come to resemble an eccentric cross between high school letterman’s garb and geriatric leisure wear—was to see a group of musicians who no longer had any idea what their songs meant or why they were still so important to the people who came to hear them sung.

  When the group played a show following a minor league baseball game in Portland, Oregon, in August 1987, they worked with all the smooth detachment of men running an assembly line. Backstage before the show, Al chatted warmly with radio contest winners, showing them his guitars and urging them to hang around, grab a soda or some chips off of the banquet table, whatever. “You don’t have to go anywhere,” he said. Mike stood with his assistant, another balding man named Mike, and loosened up for the show by downing a procession of Heinekens, which he poured carefully into a tall soda cup between visits with admirers. Asked to pose for a picture, the self-proclaimed teetotaler would make sure to hide his beer behind his back. Bruce occupied himself with the matter of the Billboard charts, which just then were showing the progress of the “Wi
peout” single. Or that’s what he wanted to do, anyway, but now it turned out that his assistant had forgotten to bring the latest issue of Billboard, so everything they knew was a week old. Now Bruce, who wore a white shirt decorated with thick vertical stripes, much like the Beach Boys’ early ’60s getup, only multicolored, was visibly angry, shaking his head and reminding the woman that it was the one thing he’d asked her to do. How was it, again, that she’d forgotten to do it? She asked him if he wanted a Coke or some tea with honey, but he didn’t. What he wanted was the new Billboard, but it wasn’t here. Was it? No, she had to agree. It wasn’t.

  Carl came in later, looking tired and preoccupied, wanting only to loosen up for the show. But when cornered by a reporter wishing to request several obscurities, he shrugged off the whole subject with a worn-out sigh. “This is kind of the meat-and-potatoes crowd, you know?” he said, gesturing toward the rumble coming from the nearly filled stands outside. “They don’t have the patience for the quiet stuff or more than a new song or two. Maybe another time we’ll come back and play a smaller hall for the real fans.”

  He didn’t sound convinced. And why should he? When the Beach Boys climbed out of their woody wagons half an hour later and fell into the opening chords of “California Girls,” the stadium went up like a rocket. They danced, they cheered, they sang along. The beach balls bounced, the couples hugged, and the kids ran up and down the aisle, pretending they were surfing down the concrete stairs.

  But how long could that last? Mike had already started to fret about the group’s advancing age—and the effect that might have on their aggregate sex appeal—when, just a few months after the Portland show, the group got a call from an administrator at University of Nevada at Las Vegas. They were about to play a casino show at Caesar’s, and so the athletic department was wondering: Might the group be willing to invite the school’s cheerleaders onstage to dance when they played “Be True to Your School” at Caesar’s Palace? Well, Mike always liked having young girls around, and the closer the better. The cheerleaders were duly invited, and they put on quite a show up there, jumping and wriggling and pom-poming for all they were worth. All of which led Mike to a revelation: They ought to hire their own troupe of cheerleaders to dance onstage every night! Bruce agreed instantly, though Carl thought it was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard, and Al nearly went ballistic when he realized that now they could never change the set list because that would screw up the girls’ wardrobe changes. But Mike was determined, and so they spent the entire summer and then a few subsequent tours playing and singing some of the rock era’s most influential songs amid a throng of young women, all beaming and jumping and waving pompoms like each night was the big game and the dorky, middle-aged Beach Boys were about to be crowned homecoming kings.

  The group did have an award coming, as it turned out, and it was a big one. Now twenty-five years past their first recording, they had become eligible for induction into the new but already influential Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame. And it was a measure of the ongoing acclaim for Brian’s best work that they—along with the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Supremes—were afforded the honor the first time they were eligible to be nominated. The black-tie ceremony, held in late January 1988 at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in midtown Manhattan, also featured appearances by Mick Jagger, who inducted the Beatles (represented by George Harrison and Ringo Starr); Bruce Springsteen, celebrating the work of Dylan; and Elton John, who was slated to bring up the Beach Boys. So even if Paul McCartney skipped the party to protest some ongoing intra-Beatle feud and Diana Ross turned her nose up at appearing on the same stage with her former partners, the crowd that did turn up at the Waldorf’s ballroom (which also included Paul Simon, Billy Joel, Neil Young, John Fogerty, and Little Richard) represented the very heart of the Western world’s popular music in the second half of the twentieth century. It was a wonderful if occasionally bittersweet night, and the vibrations were even better than good, right up through Elton John’s introduction and the standing ovation that greeted Brian, Carl, Al, and Mike as they walked up onto the stage.

  Perhaps Mike had been enjoying the champagne. Maybe he hadn’t slept well the night before. At any rate, there was a weird glint in his eyes, and the moment Brian finished his scripted speech and Mike had a clear shot at the microphone, his anger boiled over in public once again. After a brief salute to the inductees who had died, Mike tossed a jibe at the absent McCartney, wondering pointedly how a lawsuit could keep someone away from such a lovely evening. “Now, that’s a bummer ’cause we’re talkin’ about harmony in the world!” he said. The small ripple of applause that elicited only fired him up all the more, and then he was lashing out at Diana Ross, which led him to boast about how the Beach Boys still played 180 dates a year. “I’d like to see the MOPTOPS match that!” he roared. “I’d like to see MICK JAGGER get out on the stage and do ‘I Get Around’ versus ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ ANY DAY NOW!” By now the crowd was tittering uncomfortably, and a few hisses snaked up from the tables. And still he went on, complaining that people were going to say he was crazy. “Well, they been sayin’ that for years! Ain’t nothin’ new about that!” Meanwhile, the other Beach Boys had begun to look increasingly uneasy, alternately blinking at each other and gazing down at the tips of their shoes. “It was kind of a blank moment,” Jardine says. “Like, whoa! Where’s this coming from?” But Mike was still rolling, trying to make some point about how we’re all one world, and now we need to do something beautiful with all the talent here. But somehow he still couldn’t shake the impulse to taunt: “I’d like to see some people KICK OUT THE JAMS!” he yelled. “I challenge The Boss to get up onstage and jam!”

  Finally, Paul Shaffer signaled the band to kick into “Good Vibrations,” and the crowd was up on its feet again, this time cheering the fact that Mike, finally, was finished talking. Instantly, Mike’s speech became a recurring joke for everyone else to play off of. Walking offstage, Elton John switched into diva mode, demanding in a mock-petulant voice: “Why didn’t he fucking mention me?” Dazed and horrified, Al walked up to where George Harrison and Ringo Starr were sitting. “I said, ‘Geez, guys, I really want to apologize for that speech. My partner’s not feeling well.’ Then Ringo put his head on my shoulder and said, ‘It’s okay, we love you guys.’ George’s classic remark was, ‘I guess Mike didn’t listen to the Maharishi, did he?’ Then he put his head on my shoulder too, and it was really quite sweet.” When Dylan got up to accept his award a little later, he lobbed a gentle barb back at the Beach Boys’ perpetually seething singer. “I’d like to thank Mike Love for not mentioning me,” he said, smiling puckishly. “Peace, love, and harmony are important, indeed. But so is forgiveness.”

  Ironically, Dylan’s admonition echoed the feelings contained at the heart of many of the same songs the Beach Boys had just been honored for creating. And though there was something sad about how far they had drifted from the central spirit of their music, the mere presence of Brian Wilson—looking fit and relatively clear-eyed, no less—hinted that even now, in the wake of so much sorrow, self-abuse, death, and soul-killing commercialization, it was still possible to find a little love and mercy.

  CHAPTER 15

  By the time The Beach Boys was released in the spring of 1985, two things were beginning to become clear: Eugene Landy had saved Brian Wilson’s life. And having done that, he was in the process of making it a mess.

  Only two years past the day he had been shipped to Hawaii in near-fatal condition—his body swollen beyond recognition, his lungs choked with chemicals, his heart struggling to keep up, his eyes pinwheeling with drugs and unrestrained craziness—Brian stood tall, trim, and healthy. He would run six miles in the morning, lift weights, and then cool off with herbal tea and a restrained, healthy breakfast. After that he’d go willingly to his piano to work on songs that gave him evident pleasure. In the evenings he’d get dressed up and hit the town, taking in concerts, showing his face at the right events. Sometimes he even
played music in public, albeit at small charitable events; and even though you could see anxiety in his eyes, the clear, youthful tone of his voice made it obvious that the forty-two-year-old Brian Wilson wasn’t just alive…he was thriving.

  Or that’s how it seemed until you noticed whom he was with. Because someone was always there, and whoever that someone was, they were always watching him. Sometimes it was Dr. Landy, Brian’s smaller, rangier, hard-eyed doppelgänger, the guy who was always running up a little too fast to shake hands, looking up at you a bit too intensely, demanding too much information. Other times it was one, or more often two, of Landy’s helpers: that weird crew of silent watchers who were constantly taking notes, unless they were running their little pocket-recorders, which they would do until they started pointing their video cameras around. What they were looking for and why they needed to capture every stray moment of Brian’s social interaction was a mystery.

  The closer you got, the weirder it became. When Timothy White went to Brian’s new Malibu house to talk about The Beach Boys that winter, he discovered a reborn man whose new lease on life seemed to come with some deed restrictions. The 24/7 minders, for one thing. And then, as Brian showed him, the beepers they all had to wear in order to be within a heartbeat of Landy at all times. “I have a sudden sense of airlessness in the room, as if the oxygen is being sucked out,” he wrote, describing the moment Brian showed him the beeper. “And then I’m filled with an odd sadness.”

  And for Brian, perhaps, it was also a feeling of déjà vu. He had long since come to learn how it felt to be the subject of someone’s proprietary sense of discipline. Murry had steered him until his early twenties, when a brief window of near-total independence was slammed shut by the other Beach Boys, along with their various owners, managers, and agents. No amount of wanting to leave the band had given Brian the courage to actually do it in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Instead, he allowed them to pull him all the way back in during the mid-1970s. It took a painfully slow, excruciatingly public march toward death for the Beach Boys to finally leave Brian alone in the early 1980s, and then they had turned over the keys to Landy, who said he had no intention of sticking around for more than a couple of years, even as he was adding his name to Brian’s financial and professional documents.