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

by Peter Ames Carlin

  The medical board’s investigation ended in the spring of 1989 when Landy finally agreed to surrender his license to practice psychology. Still, that had no effect on his relationship with Brian (with whom Landy was vacationing in Hawaii on the day he resigned his license) because, as they had both asserted during the interviews accompanying the release of Brian Wilson a year earlier, Landy had ceased being Brian’s therapist of record back in 1987. Now they were creative and business partners, the cofounders of a company they called Brains and Genius, in whose Pico Boulevard headquarters work continued apace. They had hired Mark Linett to build a studio in their offices, where they had started working on Brian’s second solo album. Brian’s long-delayed tell-all autobiography was shifting into higher gear. Meanwhile, they also launched a $100 million civil suit against A&M’s music publishing arm, Irving Music, alleging an array of crimes and abuses in the original 1969 deal Murry had struck when selling the rights to Brian’s many hits.

  What all of these projects had in common was the way they girded Landy’s connections to Brian. The album, titled Sweet Insanity, was being coproduced by Landy, this time without the interference of the Sire hotshots who had shepherded Brian’s first solo album. Landy also cowrote virtually all of the songs, pushing Brian to try his hand at rapping in a song called “Smart Girls” (“My name is Brian and I’m the man/I write hit songs with a wave of my hand…”) and to sing about his current travails with a therapist’s keen analytical eye, as in “Thank You (Brian)”: “They’re not happy, ’cause I’m different/More creative, independent/Ah-ouuu.” Brian seeps through every so often, usually in an unexpected twist of melody or a sudden burst of unrestrained, propulsive rhythm. But Landy’s sense of instrumentation was every bit as lyrical as his way with words, which may explain the album’s flatly undifferentiated, synth-driven sound. And also why Sire’s executives found it to be unreleasable.

  Nevertheless, Sweet Insanity was celebrated richly in the pages of Brian’s autobiography (now titled Wouldn’t It Be Nice) being written with the help of People magazine correspondent Todd Gold. Here Brian would examine his entire life through the lens Landy had provided, with an emphasis on Murry’s wickedness, the other Beach Boys’ stupidity and greed, and the heroic ministrations of the therapist who helped Brian regain his sanity and artistry. And if much of the material in the book happened to reinforce the assertions made in the $100 million lawsuit and/or refute the accusations made by the California Board of Medical Quality Assurance, well, so much the better.

  But Brains and Genius wasn’t the only office keeping busy. Stan flew down to Los Angeles in May 1990 to file a petition asking the California courts to supplant Landy’s control by appointing him Brian’s legal conservator. A crowd of reporters came to cover the filing, and they weren’t disappointed when Stan’s press conference was interrupted by the sudden entrance of Brian Wilson, who stalked angrily to the podium to dismiss everything his cousin had just told them. “I think [the charges] are outrageous…out of the ballpark!” Brian declared, his hands trembling as he read from a statement scrawled on a dog-eared piece of notebook paper. “I feel great and my life is back on track. I see who I want to see and I am in charge of my own life.”

  Whether Brian had penned those words or even agreed with their sentiments is debatable. For even though Brian had craved the authority and structure Landy provided and truly did credit him with instilling the self-discipline that had saved his life, the sad fact was that Brian was no longer in a position to comprehend how he felt about much of anything. For one thing, Landy had moved to cut off virtually all of the people with whom Brian had a personal connection that the psychologist couldn’t control. Melinda Ledbetter, who had been seeing Brian on and off for three years, had seen her access to Brian suddenly and inexplicably cut off in late 1989. And when circumstances required Brian to have face-to-face contact with old friends or family members, they often came away dismayed to discover that he could no longer remember some longtime friends and would often lapse into incoherence or even fall asleep in midconversation. Brian had also taken on some disturbing facial tics, which were often accompanied by shaking hands and a visible trembling in his legs.

  Some observers concluded that he had suffered a stroke or was showing the latter-day side effects of the mountains of cocaine and rivers of alcohol he had ingested in the 1970s and early 1980s. But when Brian made a surprise appearance at a Beach Boys’ fan convention in the summer of 1990, it didn’t take long for Peter Reum, a longtime fan who happened to work as a therapist in Colorado, to realize something else. Reum had met and spoken to Brian on several occasions during the previous fifteen years, and so he knew that the man standing before him in San Diego had changed in distressing ways. Given his professional training, Reum suspected that Brian’s twitching, waxen face, and palsied hands pointed to tardive dyskinesia, a neurological condition that develops in patients whose systems have become saturated with psychotropic medications, like the ones Brian had been taking in quantity ever since Landy had taken over his life in 1983.

  Reum’s suspicions were heightened by the many acquaintances who had seen Landy and his helpers dispensing pills to Brian. When Michael Vosse—Brian’s aide-de-camp during the headiest days of Smile—came to visit the Malibu house, their two-hour conversation was interrupted three times by assistants bearing pills. “They said something about allergies, but his speech was slurred and his eyes were fucked up,” Vosse recalls. “I was surprised he didn’t nod out.” When one of the Surf Nazis (as they had all come to be known) accidentally left the medicine bag in the recording studio during the recording of Brian Wilson in 1987, a couple of the engineers couldn’t resist taking a peek inside. What they found resembled a portable doctor’s office, Mark Linett says. “It looked like every pharmaceutical on the face of the earth.”

  Those stories and the many others that confirmed and expanded upon the dizzying quantity of drugs that had been prescribed to control what Landy often described as paranoid schizophrenia mixed with manic-depression added up to what Reum feared was a potentially dire situation. If Brian continued to ingest drugs at the current rate, his system would grow so overloaded that he would deteriorate into “a drooling, palsied mental patient,” as Reum puts it. And by that point, the damage to his nervous system would be irreversible, leading to physical degeneration that would escalate steadily until, in the not-so-distant future, it would stop his heart once and for all. Reum called David Leaf, the Beach Boys biographer who had somehow managed to maintain his friendship with Brian throughout Landy’s regime. Leaf had known Reum through Beach Boys circles for several years, and he relayed Reum’s information to Carl, who realized that the time had come for him to get involved.

  And yet Landy continued to fight off the charges. In the spring of 1991, he agreed to separate himself from Brian for ninety days in hopes of proving claims that the musician was every bit as independent as they claimed. Still, the separation agreement apparently didn’t cover Landy’s assistants, who continued to guide Brian’s daily activities as per the program that had been established by Landy. When called to account for the millions of dollars he had been paid by Brian over the last eight years, Landy pointed out that the $35,000 he had billed Brian for professional services each month through 1986 had also paid the salaries of the many assistants who worked for him. Asked about the 1984 deal he had negotiated to take 25 percent of whatever money Brian earned for writing and producing new songs, Landy told the Los Angeles Times that because the musician was so damaged at the time, “…they never expected Brian to produce (or) to write anything again.” Once it became obvious that Brian would become a productive musician again, Landy incorporated them both as co-owners of Brains and Genius. At the same time, Brian also paid Landy an annual $300,000 for giving him career advice, which came on top of the annual $150,000 the Beach Boys’ partnership (Brother Records Inc., or BRI) paid him for serving as Brian’s representative at their corporate meetings. Nevertheless, Landy sai
d he was as surprised as anyone to learn that a 1989 revision of Brian’s will had named him the primary beneficiary, inheriting as much as 70 percent of his ex-client’s fortune.

  Landy also insisted he had nothing to do with the writing of Brian’s autobiography. But when Wouldn’t It Be Nice was published in October 1991, the words on its pages sounded nothing like the voice of its supposed author. In some places this seemed to be because the stories being related had been lifted nearly word for word from earlier biographies, only with the pronouns changed to reflect Brian’s first-person perspective. In other sections the narrative read like depositions for their various court cases, while others ripped the Beach Boys for various personal and professional shortcomings (“I was unsettled by the Beach Boys’ ragged musicianship,” Brian notes after sharing the stage with them in one late ’80s concert). Some of the assertions were merely mean-spirited. Others, such as the observation that the touring Beach Boys had by the late ’80s forgotten how to sing “Their Hearts Were Full of Spring,” were demonstrably false. But the book became particularly fantastical whenever Landy entered the picture. In these pages, the notoriously tempestuous psychologist is always the coolest head in the room, dispensing philosophical wisdom as easily as he whips off lyrics so brilliant that the so-called pros—Waronker, Titelman, Paley, you know who you are—can only clench their fists with impotent fury. The book ends with Brian in tears, asking the departing Landy why, if he’s in such great shape, and so productive, and happier than ever, why did they have to part?

  “Why is Carl doing this to me?” I asked. “Why? Why the fuck is he doing it?”

  “Why?” Gene said in a voice that was soft and calm, a voice that was in sharp contrast to my anguish. “I think it’s because Carl’s been jealous of your talent and fame all of his life…and because your brother hates me more than he loves or cares about you.”

  The Superior Court of Santa Monica disagreed. Presented with evidence detailing Landy’s many conflicting roles in Brian’s life, the court ordered Landy to remove himself from the musician’s life. All financial and personal ties would be dissolved, and if Landy even attempted to contact Brian, he would be fined or sent to jail. Stan Love had already agreed to stay in Oregon, leaving Brian’s affairs in the hands of a conservator, Jerome S. Billet.

  The ruling came down on February 3, 1992. The next morning the phone rang at Andy Paley’s house. When he picked it up, he heard the familiar sound of Brian’s voice. “I can do anything I want to now,” he said cheerfully. “Let’s make some music.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Don Was tells the tale with the passion of the converted.

  It was the fall of 1989, and he was dug into a recording studio in Los Angeles, producing an album for the Knack, the neo-power pop band that enjoyed a brief, exciting moment of fame in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Was has an encyclopedic knowledge of popular music, with an expertise ranging from jazz to country to hard rock to the grittiest Detroit rhythm and blues. He had heard all of the Beach Boys’ hits and knew enough about Brian’s more adventurous works to understand that there was something going on that went beyond “Surfin’ USA” and even “Good Vibrations.”

  But Was hadn’t imagined how far it went until the guys in the Knack put on their bootleg of the Smile sessions. “Like a musical burning bush, these tapes awakened me to a higher conscious in record making,” Was would eventually write. “I was amazed that one, single human could dream up this unprecedented and radically advanced approach to rock ’n’ roll.” When Was got a chance to see the latter-day Brian play his own songs, his knowledge of the man’s struggle only deepened his sense of the music. “I hear the weary voice of a man who’s been hurled through the emotional wringer, and yet one can plainly discern the youthful sweetness, optimism, and goodness that characterize Brian’s soul. It’s that very dichotomy that makes him one of the most enigmatic and endearing characters of these times.”

  And so inspiring that Was temporarily abandoned his musical pursuits in order to produce and direct a documentary about Brian’s life. The film, I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times, would go on to win rave reviews and film festival awards. But it wasn’t the first time the paradoxes of Brian’s life and music had inspired someone to alter the course of their life and career. In 1971 a young Beach Boys fan from New Rochelle, New York, named David Leaf came away from Tom Nolan’s Rolling Stone profile with a fascination for Brian Wilson that grew even more intense during his years at George Washington University. When he graduated in 1975, he packed up his belongings and moved straight to Los Angeles. “I had this idea I was going to write a book about Brian Wilson,” he recalls. Leaf started a Beach Boys fanzine he called Pet Sounds, and sure enough, it led to a publishing contract to write The Beach Boys and the California Myth, a biography that told Brian’s story in near-Shakespearean terms of innocence, hope, greed, and brutality. “I came to California to test the myth, to meet the Beach Boys, looking for symbols,” Leaf wrote in his introduction to the 1978 book. “It wasn’t long before my journey went too far. My journalistic investigations and excavations discovered more human suffering than I really wanted to know.”

  Leaf’s detailed portrait of the Smile sessions and the weirdness that surrounded them inspired a new generation of music-minded kids who were just then coming of age. One of his readers in the Mount Washington section of Northeast Los Angeles was a high schooler named Darian Sahanaja, whose interest in the Beach Boys began with Endless Summer, the first album he’d ever bought, in 1974. Sometimes the Led Zeppelin/Rolling Stones–obsessed neighborhood kids would beat him up for liking the Beach Boys, but Sahanaja didn’t care. He taught himself to play Beach Boys songs on the piano and later silk-screened himself a T-shirt based on the original Smile cover art. He was still wearing it a few years later when he was introduced to Probyn Gregory, another musician and Beach Boys fan. They became friends and later musical collaborators, eventually finding a network of similarly Brian-fixated friends and acquaintances. One of these turned out to be another native Angeleno named Domenic Priore, whose dedication to Brian’s music had led him to collect a vast library of bootleg session tapes. When it turned out that both Probyn and Darian had their own Smile bootlegs too, the threesome got together for a marathon listening session. They spent more than twelve hours in the same little room that day, rolling the tapes in different sequences in search of the melodic and thematic connections that linked them into the whole Brian and Van Dyke had intended to create. “It got so intense in there, we didn’t even want to go out to get food,” Probyn recalls. They ordered in two meals, not leaving their little room until late in the evening.

  Priore followed Leaf’s example a few years later by starting his own fanzine called The Dumb Angel Gazette. This too led to a book, Look! Listen! Vibrate! Smile!, which consisted entirely of writings about Smile. Much of the text was actually photocopied pages from period magazines, newspapers, and industry advertisements. But taken with the original essays by Priore and friends, LLVS presented the lost album as nothing less than a missing keystone in the development of twentieth-century popular culture. “It is only the fault of bad business that we were not fortunate enough to hear this stuff at the time of its creation,” Priore wrote in his introduction. “Most of US know that Brian Wilson was on the ball and way ahead of the rest of the music world at the time when it was reaching its peak. (It’s been all downhill since then, face the FACTS!)”

  And it wasn’t just the high school kids and superfans going out of their way to celebrate Brian’s vision. Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham had produced his group’s multiplatinum 1979 album Tusk with an ear tuned to Brian’s quirkiest sonic experiments, then included a lovely, stripped-down cover of “Farmer’s Daughter” (recorded during a preconcert sound check) on Fleetwood Mac’s 1980 live album. In 1981 the former Eagle Don Henley wrote a Pet Sounds sound-alike tune, “Love Rules,” for his contribution to the sound track of the hit comedy Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Some of
the most popular bands of the 1980s and 1990s would record their own homages—R.E.M., Bruce Springsteen, Barenaked Ladies, the Jayhawks, Wilco, the list goes on and on. But none would write about Brian as perceptively as John Cale, the former bass/viola player for the late ’60s New York demimonde favorites the Velvet Underground, whose song “Mr. Wilson” celebrated the dreaminess in Brian’s music even as it acknowledged the horrors of his life. Even from as far away as Wales, the beauty and honesty of those old Beach Boys songs had always rung true. And no matter what happened, Cale sang, he couldn’t believe it was all still real and always would be.

  Cale wrote “Mr. Wilson” in 1974, years before hype, circumstance, and critical hindsight would expand Brian’s myth to the epic dimensions it would later take. But the Welshman had already identified one of the most important elements in Brian’s legend: his inability and/or unwillingness to make new music. For the silence that had come to define Smile, along with the obviously halfhearted sound so much of his latter-day music had taken on, had enhanced the meaning of the music that had come before. “I guess I just wasn’t made for these times,” he had declared on Pet Sounds, and the song had become the overture for a decades-long saga that would be, in its way, just as influential as Pet Sounds had been. The decades he spent lost in the wilderness, the years he spent sitting glumly onstage like the world’s saddest performing bear, presented a dark vision that made the utopian dreams in his music all the more poignant. Now you knew how dangerous those waves had really been and how close the darkness looming just beyond the frame of “Good Vibrations” really was. Better yet, you could listen to Pet Sounds and hear Brian’s sad wail as the voice of your own wounded inner self. His suffering became your own, only larger and more beautiful.