Ultimately, Brian’s public suffering had transformed him from a musical figure into a cultural one. Like the mythical railway man John Henry, he had invested so much of his heart, soul, and God-given talent into his work that it had risen up and consumed him. And while this was obviously tragic, it was hard to miss the romance in the story. For having given himself entirely to the laying of the rails, the dead man’s voice rumbled and sang in every passing train.
The Beach Boys, meanwhile, continued moving from city to city with all the cool precision of the evening express. Their feelings for and expectations of their erstwhile leader weren’t always clear. But it’s compelling to note that back during the legal battle to eject Landy, Mike had been interviewed on A Current Affair, where he mostly reiterated the boilerplate issues of psychological abuse and financial misdeeds that made up the heart of the case. And as the reporter nudged him back to the emotional heart of the story—the sorrow of having a family member allegedly kidnapped and brainwashed by a manipulative malefactor—Mike fell so thoroughly into the moment that his sharp blue eyes glistened and his voice pitched higher with emotion. “I just want to see my cousin,” he wailed. “I want to write hits with my cousin!”
Mike’s emotion seemed genuine. But his choice of words was revealing. For while there is no reason to doubt that Mike and the rest of the extended Wilson/ Beach Boys family loved Brian as any family loves one of its members, it’s easy to suspect that the same behavioral eccentricity and emotional trauma that had made Brian famous had rendered him virtually unknowable to his relatives. As a result, they had also come to think of him less as a member of the family than as a key executive in the family industry. Because even when the guy wasn’t writing hits, he was usually at the center of some kind of media frenzy that enhanced the value of the business. Whether he deserved it or not—and the other Beach Boys clearly believed that Brian had absorbed an outsize portion of credit for their success—the media, and thus the world, saw him as the center of it all. And as much as that aggravated the other Beach Boys, they also knew they could profit immensely by embracing it. And if Brian was unwilling to hug back (or incapable of doing so) in quite the way they had hoped, well, there were other ways to profit from the Brian Wilson machine.
Mike had taken particular interest in his cousin’s lawsuit against A&M’s publishing company. And when Brian took home a $10 million settlement in 1992, Mike got in on the celebration by filing a $3 million lawsuit claiming that he had been uncredited for work on seventy-nine of the songs in question. And if some of Mike’s claims were legit—Brian never debated that Mike had written the lyrics to “California Girls,” though he also didn’t do anything to get his cousin’s name on the popular song’s royalty statement—others seemed slightly less convincing. For instance, Mike’s claim for credit on “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” pivoted off of his studio improvisation of a single couplet (“Good night, baby/Sleep tight, baby”) at the very end of the song. Perhaps anticipating that this wasn’t a very strong case for cowriter status, Mike also asserted he had helped write or at least edit other lyrics on the song. This news surprised Tony Asher to no end, if only because Mike and the group had been in Japan when he and Brian had written the Pet Sounds songs. How could the absent Mike have been pitching in on songwriting sessions at the same time? As Tony recalls, the lawyer representing Mike focused on the occasional trips to the bathroom Brian had made during those afternoons. Wasn’t it possible, he proposed, that he had secretly been dialing Mike in Japan to get his advice? “[That argument] was so absurd I didn’t know how to answer,” Tony says.
That same October Mike also filed a defamation lawsuit against Brian, claiming that his autobiography had not only demeaned his professional abilities but also referred to him as “a violent, sex-crazed maniac,” a description of his character that struck Mike as something less than accurate. And he wasn’t the only Beach Boy looking to vent some rage about Wouldn’t It Be Nice. In the fall of 1994, the entire group (in the guise of Brother Records, Inc.), plus Carl and the boys’ mother, Audree, filed multimillion-dollar lawsuits against Brian, Landy, and Todd Gold, seeking to assuage their own wounded feelings, reputations, and careers.
If the group was united in their pursuit of Brian’s riches in the courts, they were growing much less harmonious in virtually every other way. A simmering personality clash between Mike and Al first erupted into open warfare in 1990 when Mike enlisted Carl in an effort to oust the group’s founding rhythm guitarist from the lineup. The dustup was resolved fairly quickly, though the conflict would continue to fester throughout the decade. And the absence of group cohesion could be heard quite clearly on what passed for the group’s next album, Summer in Paradise, which was produced by Mike and Terry Melcher. Recorded with only the most fleeting help from Carl and Al and no contribution from Brian, the album was most notable for its absence of new ideas. A pointless cover of the group’s first single, “Surfin’,” led things off, while even the new Love/Melcher originals were built largely from musical or lyrical references to the group’s earlier hits (e.g., one couplet in the album’s title track found a way to name-check “Help Me, Rhonda,” “Barbara Ann,” “Fun, Fun, Fun,” and the term “America’s Band,” all in the space of twenty-four words). Celebrity fan and occasional touring drummer John Stamos (best known for his role as Uncle Jesse on the TV sitcom Full House) was allowed to cover Dennis’s “Forever,” which now came with the heavily processed sound of modern easy listening. But even the lite-metal guitars on Dennis’s once-understated ballad weren’t quite as painful as Mike’s “Summer of Love,” which climaxed, so to speak, in a hail of yucky sexual references (Mike in Senor Suave mode, crooning about the joys of doing “it” in disparate, summery venues, including a beach and a swimming pool) that seem designed to excite the wrath of the same Parents Music Resource Center Mike had once supported. The music failed to gain any interest from the record industry, forcing the group to release it on their own Brother label with independent distribution. The few reviews that were printed were scathing, and only a scattering of the CDs was sold.
The group fared better in 1993 with Good Vibrations, a five-CD box set that gathered virtually all of their singles with loads of the stronger album tracks, a few lesser-known B-sides, demos, live tracks, and nonhits from the ’70s and ’80s and a generous helping of outtakes from throughout their thirty-year-plus history. The entire collection was well reviewed, but the real attention-getter was the thirty-minute stretch of Smile music that dominated the set’s second disc. Starting with the previously released “Good Vibrations” single and “Our Prayer,” the album headed for deeper waters with an alternate version of “Heroes and Villains” that had surfaced as a bonus track on a CD reissue in 1990. Apart from the 20/20 version of “Cabinessence,” the other Smile stuff was completely unheard: nearly seven minutes of discarded instrumental and vocal sections from “Heroes and Villains”; then the original, fully orchestrated versions of “Wonderful” and “Wind Chimes”; followed by a brief fire engine–style intro to yet another version of “Heroes and Villains.” Next came “Do You Dig Worms,” with its mysterious references to Plymouth Rock, Native American chants, and Hawaii; then the original, sound effects–laden “Vegetables”; followed by “I Love to Say Da Da,” which had been intended to be the water segment of the Elements Suite. The Smile pieces concluded with Brian’s studio demo of “Surf’s Up,” performed solo at the piano. Not every critic was wowed. “What one mostly hears in the Smile music is an unfocused, confounding sifting of ideas,” Billy Altman wrote in the New York Times. But others pronounced themselves flabbergasted. “…The music is mystic, mad, wild, and gentle, quite unlike anything anyone, including Wilson, had ever tried in pop music before,” wrote Time’s Jay Cocks, concluding: “The songs seem random at first, off-beam and crazy, but they haunt.”
The burst of acclaim for the rarities on the box set even inspired the touring Beach Boys to shake up their usual act. That fall they mounted a
theater tour that stretched their set to nearly 150 minutes, including a twelve-song set that highlighted exquisite performances of such ambitious songs as “Wonderful” (in its original Smile arrangement), “All This Is That,” “Add Some Music to Your Day,” and “Caroline, No,” most of which hadn’t been heard onstage for twenty years. Again, reviews veered toward the ecstatic. But the flirtation with the more esoteric corners of their catalogue didn’t last beyond that stretch of relatively intimate shows. When they got back to their usual schedule of casinos, state fairs, and baseball games in 1994, the all-hits-all-the-time format was back, too.
His legal woes notwithstanding, the post-Landy Brian seemed more centered and happy than he’d been in years. He had a good circle of friends (including Beach Boys and the California Myth author David Leaf, who had become particularly close to Brian during the recording of his 1988 solo album) to keep him company. Even more importantly, he finally had consistent, competent psychiatric care. His new doctors learned quickly that Brian had never been schizophrenic, as Landy had asserted (and medicated him for) during the ’80s. Instead, Brian was mildly manic-depressive with a schizo-affective disorder that presented itself in the form of those disembodied voices Brian had been hearing for so long. New medication helped keep them at bay most of the time, and the more stable and productive his life became, the less likely he was to be derailed by their appearances. Now on a much more moderate diet of medication, Brian began to shed the more troubling symptoms of tardive dyskinesia, and his good days soon came to outnumber the bad ones.
Still, he remained as spaced-out as any creative person, and when he was crossing Pico Boulevard in West Los Angeles one morning, Brian had to jump fast to avoid an oncoming car he hadn’t noticed. Just another day in the life of Brian Wilson, until the driver stopped to make sure he was okay, and the unrolling window revealed Melinda Ledbetter, the woman he’d dated for a time in the ’80s. Soon they were dating even more seriously than they had done before. “It was a really cute, all-American courtship,” says Andy Paley. “They’d go out to dinner and go to the movies, and sometimes they’d have spats, like all couples. But we double-dated a lot, going skiing for the weekend or over to Vegas. Brian had his doubts, like everyone does: ‘Oh, I don’t know if I can sustain a relationship,’ that sort of thing. Mostly it was great.” Indeed, the couple was married on February 19, 1995, a day Brian chose because it was also his first wife’s birthday, which meant his anniversary would be easy to remember.
Meanwhile, Brian’s daughters, Carnie and Wendy, had teamed with their childhood friend Chynna Phillips (John’s daughter) to form the pop trio Wilson-Phillips. The group’s first album sold four million copies, propelled by a handful of hit singles, many of them cowritten by the girls themselves. The trio broke up a few years later, but Carnie and Wendy continued as a duet. In the mid-1990s, they asked their father to join with them on an album of new songs. The work continued on and off for a while, and Brian’s initial vision of making the album a sequel of sorts to Pet Sounds (including a couple of new songs he’d written with Tony Asher) didn’t come together. But the joint project allowed the girls, and particularly Carnie, a chance to reconnect with their father. That opportunity proved just as fruitful—perhaps even more—than the sessions themselves.
Brian’s renewed collaboration with Andy Paley also reached for new heights. Getting together to write or record most days, they worked quickly to put together basic tracks for an album’s worth of songs Brian kept talking about in terms of the Beach Boys. “He’d be arranging their voices in his head, saying, ‘Okay, this is Mike, and here’s Carl, and Al and Bruce, and this is me up here,’” Paley says. And if Brian’s new songs bore none of the stamps that had come to define latter-day Beach Boys songs—no references to beaches or surf, no self-conscious attempts to seem younger than the singers’ actual years—they did reflect more of Brian’s musical, emotional, and intellectual interests than any series of songs he’d recorded since The Beach Boys Love You. Ranging from full-blown rockers to delicate ballads, the basic tracks—some nearly finished, others with spare arrangements and scratch vocals—set a new standard for Brian’s solo work.
The lushly romantic “Gettin’ In Over My Head” built its verses on suspended chords that underscored the uncertainty of a narrator who, in typical Brian fashion, is so swept up in love that “it’s scarin’ me right out of my mind.” “Slightly American Music” retold the nation’s history as a surreal parade of presidents, Indian chiefs, and military generals, all of them marching side-by-side with George Gershwin, Fats Domino, and Phil Spector. The rhythmically complex “Chain Reaction” and rollicking, bare-bones “I’m Broke” rocked as hard as anything Brian had written. “You’re Still a Mystery” was another wondrously melodic ballad about the gray areas of romance, while “It’s Not Easy Being Me” revisited “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times” terrain, only with youthful disillusionment replaced by twenty years of bitter experience. “The same fears haunt me endlessly/It’s not easy bein’ me…” wailed the chorus. Still, redemption is just around the corner—literally—in the jazzy shuffle “Marketplace,” which described the corner market as a soul-affirming cornucopia of flavors, cultures, and experiences. “The world’s a zoo, what can we do?/But try some, buy some,” he sings.
And that was just the beginning. Brian got so heated up about a New Orleans–style stomper called “Soul Searchin’” that he followed his collaborator all the way to London (where Paley was doing some production work on another record) just so they could keep working on the song in the hotel. Brian also spent hours working on variations of John Fogerty’s “Proud Mary,” with at least one version combining guitars, organ, synthesizer, horns, steel drums, a Jew’s harp, and a choirlike chorus that teased out the tune’s innate funk until its final chorus sounded like Sunday morning at the Double Rock Baptist Church. “Desert Drive” built on the propulsive sax riff from “Salt Lake City,” and “Frankie Avalon” declared so much wide-eyed enthusiasm for the ’50s-era teen idol that it’s half naive, half crazy, and almost entirely adorable.
At the same time he was writing and recording with Paley, Brian was working with Don Was on his documentary, filming interviews and preparing to perform live versions of ten of his classic Beach Boys songs with a handpicked band of Was’s favorite session pros. And if that weren’t enough, Brian had also agreed to sing virtually all of the parts on Van Dyke Parks’s new album Orange Crate Art, an affectionate exploration of California history. Which isn’t to say that Brian was always the most reliable or enthusiastic collaborator. He refused to do Was’s film at first, mostly because he didn’t like the songs the producer had chosen for him to perform at its conclusion. But he changed his mind eventually and grew comfortable enough with Was to enjoy the sessions. Similarly, Brian dragged his feet into Van Dyke’s first session, interrupting the start of his first take to ask an excruciatingly simple question: “Wait a minute. What am I even doing here?” Van Dyke hit the talk button without missing a beat. “You’re here because I can’t stand the sound of my own voice!” Brian thought about that for a second, nodded his head, and stepped up to the microphone. “Well, that makes sense. Okay, take one!”
Released in early 1995, the Don Was movie, I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times, proved a remarkably probing documentary, combing home movies, vintage performances, contemporary interviews, and expert testimony from a galaxy of unlikely witnesses (ranging from Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore to Linda Ronstadt) to describe Brian’s life and the significance of his work. Brian’s filmed musical performances might have been rough in places, but as Was noted, the cracks in his voice told a story, too. Orange Crate Art emerged later in the year, earning solid praise for Van Dyke’s elegant, lyrical songs and Brian’s richly layered vocals.
Warner Brothers’ advertisements for Orange Crate Art made rich use of the Smile legend that linked the new album’s pair of creators. And it was hardly surprising that Brian and Van Dyke’s renewed collabor
ation would lead to hopeful speculation about the likelihood that the fabled album would finally be released. Indeed, the success of the Good Vibrations box set had inspired Capitol to turn engineer Mark Linett and others loose in the tape archive, with an eye toward compiling the Smile tapes into another multi-CD set. Don Was played Brian one of Todd Rundgren’s interactive music CD-ROMs and suggested that he release it that way—pull together a few hours’ worth of session tapes and let the listeners “finish” the album themselves. Brian evinced enthusiasm to Was (“He’s into it,” the producer assured the New York Times), but when questioned by reporter Neill Strauss, the always-mercurial musician made a sour face and dismissed the entire album. Smile, he said, was “too weird” to contemplate.
Instead, Brian turned his attention to creating new music with the Beach Boys. Brian and Mike, fresh from the resolution of Mike’s copyright lawsuit, teamed up briefly in early 1995 to revise a Wilson/Paley song, “Dancin’ the Night Away,” into “Baywatch Nights,” which the Beach Boys intended to record for the sound track to the popular lifeguard show. The song was never finished (though the group appeared on the show, frolicking in the surf with Brian and then miming a performance without him), but the group nevertheless prepared to start working on a new album with their old leader at the helm. Andy Paley, for one, was astonished. “I learned early on that it’s a bad idea to make any kind of plans with Brian, if only because he’s had his plans shattered so many times.” Nevertheless, Mike and the other guys seemed genuinely eager. Don Was had signed on to produce the sessions and had already sifted through the pile of demos Brian and Paley had provided, pulling out “Soul Searchin’” as a potential single. “Don was excited about the new stuff,” Paley recalls. “We had meetings and everything was getting rolling.”
Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall & Redemption of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson Page 39