I Am Brian Wilson

by Brian Wilson

  Pretty soon I’ll be blown away

  How long will the wind blow?

  How long will the wind blow?

  Ohhhh

  The lyrics go way down and then the “hey hey hey” picks them back up and then the lyrics go down again. Those are the waves, the raging sea. There’s a lyric that Van Dyke wrote on Orange Crate Art, in a song called “Palm Tree and Moon,” that has the same idea: “When a comet comes out to fall / Why on earth do we feel so small?”

  I was happy with the records I was starting to make again. They weren’t about people moving in all directions at once, like some of the Beach Boys records from the ’70s and ’80s. They were records by people who were all trying to do the same thing. But when I went out to talk about the documentary, I wasn’t comfortable. I didn’t like questions about why I had been away. I didn’t think I had been away. I had been right where I was all the time. Maybe my band moved away from me. Maybe audiences moved away. But I hadn’t gone much of anywhere, which was part of the problem. I was sure I needed to get started again, but I was also afraid to get started again. One of the hardest things was overcoming the fear that I would never make music the same way again—not that I wouldn’t know how, but that people wouldn’t let me. Around the same time I wrote some new songs with Tony Asher, who wrote many of the lyrics on what was probably the most famous Beach Boys record, Pet Sounds. In the ’90s, after not working with him for years, I got back together with Tony and we made some new songs. We weren’t sure when they would come out. I wasn’t sure if I was going to make a normal record. I wasn’t sure if I could.

  As it turned out, I couldn’t quite do it yet. We made a song called “This Isn’t Love” that came out without Tony’s lyrics on an instrumental album, and then with lyrics in a Flintstones movie, with Alan Cumming singing it. Later on I released it myself on a live record. Another song we wrote, “Everything I Need,” was really nice to make. I remember cutting the track for it and how comfortable it felt. Hal Blaine was there, drumming. Carol Kaye was there, playing bass. Tony Asher was there. I scored a cool vibe those few days in the studio, a real sense of the old days. When it came time a few years later for the song to go on an album—one by my daughters Carnie and Wendy, who were recording as the Wilsons—things changed. I was going to record and produce the album with them, using some of the new songs I had written with Tony. But the girls were young. They wanted a vibe and a feel that I couldn’t deliver. I got the idea I should just wish them good luck and bow out. And when I bowed out, things changed. Things changed with the songs I had written. There was a day when they were overdubbing strings. When I got there, the string players were already cutting. They weren’t using my arrangement. I had a twinge, remembering how it felt to have my music taken away from me. “I don’t want it to happen again,” I said. I wasn’t sure who was listening. I put my foot down, but I was unsteady on it.

  CHAPTER 2

  Family

  When I grow up to be a man

  Will I dig the same things that turn me on as a kid?

  Will I look back and say that I wish I hadn’t done what I did?

  Will I joke around and still dig those sounds

  When I grow up to be a man?

  —“When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)”

  Much of what I see from my chair on the first floor of my house is kids. Melinda and I have five of them. Daria, the oldest, will turn twenty in 2016. Our second daughter, Delanie, is two years younger. When we first adopted them back in the ’90s, it was a new family for me, but also a reminder of an old family. I had two little girls once before, Carnie and Wendy, back in the ’70s, two little angels who came into my life. They grew up into wonderful women, but once they were little girls. I remember looking at them and loving them so much. I also remember looking at them and wondering what family meant.

  After Daria and Delanie, Melinda and I adopted three more kids—Dylan, Dash, and Dakota. Late in my life, I got a big family. I see and hear it from my chair. Kids slam doors. Kids fight with each other or leave clothes heaped on furniture. Kids don’t do their homework on time. Kids go to games and the other kids go sit and watch and cheer them on. I sit there, mostly quiet, but I see all of it. My chair is the command center. Sometimes at night I’ll ask Melinda questions about something I’ve seen. “Why didn’t you make Dash pick up his jacket?” I’ll say. “Why didn’t you make him pick up his jacket?” she’ll say, laughing.

  When there’s a big deal, Melinda will tell me that she needs my help. I know what she means. She means that it’s time for me to talk to the kids. When those times come, I’ll call them down and give them a little lecture. I’m stern. I never get mad or mean. But the kids know to listen. They know that if I’m talking to them about something, it’s important. I remember once a few years ago, when Daria came home from boarding school for Christmas break she left her suitcases out in front of the house. Not in the front hallway but outside on the lawn. It was driving Melinda crazy. She said something about it to Daria the second day and the third day, too, but the suitcases were still out there. “Brian,” she finally said. “You have to do something about this.” I did everything about it. I called Daria down to the first floor. Sometimes when I call her it’s to ask her a question or have her score me some carbohydrates from the refrigerator, but this time I said her name loud enough that there was no confusion. I told her to bring the suitcases inside. I said it real clear. The suitcases came in.

  After I did Orange Crate Art with Van Dyke and I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times with Don Was, I started to get the idea of making my own record, for real. I was still working on some stuff with Andy Paley. We still had songs like “Desert Drive” and “Gettin’ in Over My Head,” and we had more songs, too, like “Chain Reaction of Love” and “Soul Searchin’.” There were record companies sending out good signals about signing me. The Beach Boys had just made a country record in Nashville with stars like Toby Keith and Lorrie Morgan and Willie Nelson. We took our old songs and performed them as duets with the country singers. Lorrie Morgan did “Don’t Worry Baby.” Toby Keith did “Be True to Your School.” It was a weird deal because there were so many moving parts to that record, and only some of them were me. The record was listed as being produced by me, but I can’t remember being as hands-on as I would’ve liked. I mostly coproduced. The one track I worked hard on was “The Warmth of the Sun,” with Willie Nelson. What a great voice he has, and what a thrill it was to work with him. I think I produced the hell out of that track. The record came out; unfortunately it didn’t do very well.

  The coproducer on that album was Joe Thomas. Joe was a big guy with a good tan and his hair brushed back. He had been a professional wrestler at some point when he was young. With his muscles and his hair, Joe looked like he should have been from LA or maybe Miami, but he wasn’t. He was from the Chicago area. Eventually we started spending time there, too. How that happened was almost funny. Even though the country record did not score so well on the charts, I started to work with Joe. He was around, and he seemed interested in helping me make new music. Joe and I were hanging out and we decided to build our own studio. We had been recording in a place called River North in Chicago that was really popular. I think it was the biggest studio in the city. I went there to work with him on some new tracks. We mostly weren’t using the songs I made with Andy Paley. We were writing new songs, and that was fun. Melinda became friends with Joe’s wife, Chris, and one day Chris asked Melinda to go with her to look at a new house they were thinking of buying. It was in a city called St. Charles, which is about an hour away from Chicago. Right next door to the house Chris picked, there was another house for sale. “Let’s take it,” Melinda said to me.

  At first I wasn’t sure what she meant. She told me that it was the right size for us and the kids, and it had a basement that looked like a perfect place for a recording studio. We’d keep the Los Angeles house, obviously, but when we went to Chicago we could be near Joe and Chris, both for fun a
nd to have an easy way to work. We bought the house and started to put in the studio. It wasn’t easy. We dug the basement down an extra six or seven feet and put in three recording rooms and a mixing room. I made sure the walls were covered with fabric for sound control. If you talk to enough musicians, you always hear stories about creating perfect environments. Musicians have ideas about what will give them the best sounds on record. Guys at Columbia Records’ studio on Seventh Avenue in New York used to hang microphones from the top of the stairwell, ten floors up, and use the whole stairwell for reverb. I wasn’t trying for ten floors, but I wanted to have a space in St. Charles that worked for music. That was one of my requirements if we were going to get that house.

  There are houses and there are homes. Burt Bacharach wrote a song about the difference between the two. A house is a building. A home is a feeling. With the dug-out basement and the fabric on the walls, St. Charles was a nice house, but it was never really a home. It was a house away from home. I grew up in a home in Hawthorne, California. It’s not there anymore. When the Century Freeway came through in the ’80s, the place got torn down. Eventually politicians put up a monument there about the birth of the Beach Boys. A monument is nice, I guess. But it’s even less than a house, which is less than a home.

  The home was at 3701 West 119th Street. I grew up there with my brothers, Dennis and Carl. It seems weird to say that. It seems obvious. But there was nothing obvious about it at the time. The same way that Carnie and Wendy came into a family in the ’70s and Daria and Delanie came into a family in the ’90s, I came into a family in the ’40s. My parents had me first, in the summer of 1942. Dennis came along two and a half years later, at the end of 1944, and then Carl two years after that, at the end of 1946. Every new boy that came along had to go into the same bedroom with me. There just wasn’t any more room than that.

  One house, three kids, two parents: my father, Murry, and my mother, Audree. My mother was gentle, kind, and loving. She was nice to me whenever I needed it. If I was hiding under the sheets on a school day, she would call my name and tell me it was time to wake up. A few minutes later she would call me again. She always spoke kindly. Later on I wrote about the way she used to wake me up in a song called “Oxygen to the Brain.” The opening line of that song, “Open up, open up, open your eyes . . . / It’s time to rise,” that was my mom in the mornings. One of the first things I remember is her putting me in my crib. I don’t have a picture of it in my head, not really. If it were a picture, I would be remembering from outside myself. I remember it from inside myself, just the feeling of it, hands lowering you down but a face staying above you to protect you. For a while I was the only kid and she favored me. When Dennis and Carl came along, she spread out her love. No one can ever say that she didn’t try to love all her kids the same. But I think Carl probably ended up the favorite. He was the baby, and in some ways he was the easiest to love.

  Mostly my mom worked. She didn’t go to a job, but being at home was the hardest job in the world. She cleaned up after us and did lots of laundry. Dennis got dirty all the time, rolling around on the ground. He was a wrestler in school—and in the rest of his life, too. If you walked by Dennis on a normal day, just tried to go past him to get to the other side of a room, there was a good chance that you’d end up involved in a wrestling match. My mom was also in charge of food. She didn’t have to go far to buy the groceries. There was a market only a few minutes down the street. She cooked all the time, and cooked well: porterhouse, roast beef, roast chicken. Back then there was no such thing as a vegetarian, not really. Meat was how you knew you were eating a good, full meal. People still remembered the war and the idea that all the good living could be taken away from them, so meat was America. The roast beef she made was my favorite thing, and it came with my other favorite thing, mashed potatoes. Food made the house smell great. Between meals there were snacks and treats. One of the things I remember is this sweet vanilla condensed milk, Eagle Brand. My mom would boil it until it turned brown and tasted like caramel. That was a great dessert.

  My mom also drove us where we needed to go, because my dad was at work. Every morning she would make us brush our teeth and comb our hair. “Now get dressed,” she would say gently—the big thing back then was pink-and-black socks and trucker boots. Then she would drive us to school. In the afternoons and on weekends, she took us to the beach and to relatives’ houses. She turned us on to games around the house, like Monopoly. We used to love playing Monopoly, all the boys.

  Mom didn’t discipline us much, except to warn us that our dad might. If we were doing something bad, she would stand back a little bit and put up a finger. “You’d better watch out,” she’d say, “or your dad is going to get you.” She was right about that. My dad was different from my mom. If he wanted us to wake up, he would stand in the door of the bedroom and say, “Hey! Get up!” Even when he was speaking softly, his voice wasn’t soft.

  My dad worked in a company that sold lathes, but he loved music. It was something that was as important to him as his job, and then more important. He was the one who steered me and my brothers toward singing and playing, and who made it easy for it to be more than a hobby. He converted the garage into a music room—he didn’t dig seven feet beneath it and put fabric on the walls for sound quality, but he made a music room for Hawthorne the way I made a music room for the place in St. Charles. He sang with my mom when we were little and then tried to get the whole family to sing together. He even wrote songs himself, and not as a total amateur. He had some songs that did something in the world.

  But there were other parts of his personality that were as bad as his love for music was good. There were days with my dad that I wish never happened, and not just a few of them. They added up to months or even years, and they had a big effect on almost everything that came later—every friendship, every decision I made about people, probably even every decision people made about me. I said before that there are parts of my life that are hard to talk about. Lots of the things that happened with my dad are in that category. It’s not that I can’t talk about them. It’s just that I don’t want to talk about them before I talk about other things, because it’s easy to misunderstand them, even for me. The things with my dad happened almost from the beginning, but I’ll talk about them later. They happened later, too, but I don’t want to talk about them now, at the beginning.

  What was life in Hawthorne like? It was like life. I didn’t know anything else. My brothers and I went to school. We hung out in the house. Other kids from the neighborhood dropped by to hang out in our garage, or we went to their yards and played. We weren’t rich, but I never felt like we needed money. We got plenty of presents for Christmas. I got a Babe Ruth watch one year. Another year I got a train. My dad, always looking for ways to bring music into the house, bought us a Wurlitzer jukebox and stocked it with records by Les Paul and Mary Ford, Perry Como, Rosemary Clooney.

  Rosemary Clooney was the first singer I remember hearing. She wasn’t the first singer I heard, but she was the first one I remember really hearing in an important way. She had a song, “Tenderly,” that came out when I was about ten years old. Listening to it was like a dream. There were these strings that came in at the beginning, and then a whole orchestra, though it was done so subtly. I think it was Percy Faith who was in charge of her orchestra. But the real star of “Tenderly” was Rosemary Clooney. She just came sweeping in with everything, and her phrasing was perfect: when she said the evening breeze caressed the trees, you could see the trees moving. You could understand why she was singing about them, and how she was like a tree herself. I hadn’t really heard a song like that before. I feel like I learned to sing from that song. I used to sing it to myself on the way to school, or when I was up in my room. My brothers sometimes told me not to sing and that it was annoying, but mostly they seemed to like it.

  The other big member of the family was the television set. Maybe that’s true for all kids who were my age. The TV came to us aro
und 1950, when I was eight years old. At first we watched whatever was on, all in black and white. There was wrestling and roller derby and game shows, and there were also kids’ shows, like Time For Beany. That was a show that aired in Los Angeles about Beany, who was a boy, and his sidekick, Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent. It was a great show.

  California had great weather most of the time, so when we weren’t listening to records or watching TV, we explored our neighborhood. There was a tunnel that ran from one side of the town to another. Kids said it was a storm drain, but I wasn’t really sure what that meant. One afternoon my brother Dennis and my cousin Steve Korthoff told me to come with them and walk in the storm drain. It was fun to walk in the tunnel for a little while, and then it was less fun, and then it wasn’t fun at all. I started to get a headache. I didn’t like being underground that way. I kept saying, “I’m going back.” Steve and Dennis tried to convince me not to go. I was the oldest so I felt like I should be the leader, but I couldn’t be a leader if they wouldn’t follow me. I turned and went home, and on the way I slipped and cut my hand on some glass. Dennis and Steve kept walking, got bored themselves, and climbed up out of a manhole cover.

  You wouldn’t think this, but I almost never went to the beach as a kid, even though it was only a few miles away. The first time I ever went to the ocean I couldn’t believe it. My dad took us, and I was so scared at the size of the ocean. Also, I had light skin that burned easily and I didn’t like squinting against the sun for hours. Once I went with my friend Rich Sloan and I kept my jeans on so the sun couldn’t get to me. And there was barely any surfing either. I tried once and got conked on the head with the board. So Los Angeles and California were more about the idea of going in the ocean than they were about actually going in the ocean. I liked to look at it, though. It was sort of like a piece of music: each of the waves was moving around by itself, but they were also moving together.