by Brian Wilson
Al Jardine played with me. He was a back. During one game, I called for a pitchout. I told him I was going to pitch to the left. But I got mixed up and looked right. Al was standing out there all on his own and three guys hit him, high and low, and his leg just snapped. I had to hear about that for years. “You know, Brian,” Al would say, and I knew what was coming next: “You’re responsible for my broken leg.” He tried to make a joke about it, tried to be sarcastic, but it has come up too many times over the years for me to think he doesn’t still hold a little bit of a grudge. And then I got hit myself. During practice one afternoon I got knocked on my back and the corners of my vision started to fade. I felt like everything was going black. It scared me half to death. I went right up to the coach and told him I wanted to quit the team. “Fine,” he said. “Go to the showers.” That was the end of my football career. Back to music.
Time jumps around. One day you’re hearing a song on the radio. The day after that you’re bringing other guys into your family’s house so you can complete the puzzle and make records of your own. My dad helped push us toward being a real singing group. He thought it was a great idea for me to bang around on the piano until I had a song of my own.
Time jumps around so much that it’s hard to remember exactly what happened. Plus, it’s been written about so many times that it’s almost like a story someone else is telling me instead of a piece of my own life. I was noodling around at the piano. Dennis came home and told us that all the guys were getting into surfing. Dennis was the real surfer of the group. He thought that if we wrote a song about it, it would be cool, and we might be cool along with it. I started fooling around and singing just that one word, surfin’, trying to make a song out of it. Mike was around that day, and he added in some bass notes, bom-bom-dit-dit-dit. I added some more chords. Mike added words. I cooked up harmonies. If you look at a recipe, those are the ingredients of a song.
Surfin’ is the only life
The only way for me
Now surf, surf with me
We fooled around with the song. We sang it a bunch of times and wrote more words for it and took out some of the words we had already written. We practiced harmonies until they sounded right to us, and then changed a few notes around to make the sound more exciting or unexpected. It was just a family thing then. It was playing for the family, and playing in the family. It was the fall of 1961 and I’m not sure that any of us thought it would go much further than that.
But we tried. The first step was to get a name for the group. You couldn’t have a record if your group didn’t have a name. We tried a bunch of names, like Carl and the Passions and Kenny and the Cadets. Eventually we ended up naming ourselves the Pendletones. I don’t remember whose idea it was, maybe Mike’s, but it came from the same place as the song. It was part of the package. Pendletones was a name about the way surfers dressed—plaid Pendleton shirts over white T-shirts and khaki pants. Real surfers put a layer of Vaseline under the shirts to keep warm, but we weren’t real surfers. We were real singers.
My parents went to Mexico on vacation and left us money to take care of ourselves. Instead, we went and rented instruments and rehearsed “Surfin’.” When they got home and found out, my dad was really pissed at what we had done. He threw me up against the wall. But when he heard what we had cooked up with the song, he calmed down. He thought we sounded pretty good. He was proud of us, even, and that made us so happy that we decided to do more with our music. Dad knew a music guy named Hite Morgan who had an office on Melrose Avenue, and he piled us into Hite’s office and we sang “The John B. Sails,” a folk song that Al knew. Hite Morgan liked what he heard. He said so and Dad kind of smiled, not a full smile but enough of one for me to tell that he was really happy that Hite Morgan liked us. But Hite Morgan wasn’t sure about the song. He told us we needed a song of our own. Someone piped up—I think it was Dennis—and said we did have our own song. I had to speak then and say it wasn’t finished. “Well, come back when you finish it,” Hite said.
That’s what we did. We went into Hite’s studio and that was our first real recording session. We worked on “Surfin’” all day. I wanted it to sound a certain way, and I kept everyone there with my questions. I didn’t like the way that people’s voices were falling in the mix. I wanted to rethink it. After a bunch of takes, my dad wasn’t sure what we were doing was working. He said something about how we were kids—and it’s true. We were. He thought he had a better idea of how to make it sound the right way, how to bring the guitar up, how to make sure all the voices could be heard. He said he wanted to produce the session, and we let him.
When we were done, Hite Morgan said he was going to make it into a record. He went off somewhere. We didn’t know where. It turns out he went to a guy named Herb Newman who owned a label named Candix Records. It wasn’t until the crates were unpacked that we saw the label had changed our name from the Pendletones to the Beach Boys. A guy at the label named Russ Regan didn’t like our name. He changed it. We were in my car the first time we heard the song on the radio. There were three or four songs by local bands and listeners had to pick their favorite. We went crazy. I ran up and down the street yelling. Carl felt sick from excitement. There’s no feeling like being a new band and hearing yourself on the radio, except maybe when that band is your family. The story has been told a thousand times by a thousand different people, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen exactly that way.
When I was a kid, I made music with my family. As I got a little older, I made music with other people who were part of our inner circle. By the time I was in my forties, I was making music with lots of people. My musical family was constantly growing, and every new person I worked with taught me something. I hope I taught them, too. Families can be the strangest, most wonderful things.
During the Imagination sessions we took a trip down to the Florida Keys to write a song with Jimmy Buffett. “You know, Brian,” Joe said on the plane. “We’re going to be close to Kokomo.”
“Really?” I said. “Kokomo” was a song the Beach Boys did without me. My cousin Mike wrote it with a few friends of the band, all great music guys. One was John Phillips, from the Mamas and the Papas. One was Scott McKenzie, who wrote “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair).” And then there was Terry Melcher, whose mom was Doris Day and who worked with so many people back in the ’60s like the Byrds and the Rising Sons. The Beach Boys had known Terry forever. He had been in a group with Bruce Johnston, the Rip Chords, before Bruce joined our group.
Terry was also the guy in the middle of the situation with my brother Dennis and Charles Manson. Dennis, who knew two of the girls in Manson’s group because he had picked them up hitchhiking, introduced Manson to Terry and tried to get the two of them together on a music or film project. It didn’t work out well. Terry and Manson didn’t get the right ideas about each other and they stopped being friends. A little after that, Terry moved out of the house on Cielo Drive where he was living with Candice Bergen and Mark Lindsay, the lead singer from Paul Revere and the Raiders. And a little after that, Manson came to the house. He wasn’t let in because Terry wasn’t there anymore. The people who were there were Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate. The Manson people came back one more time and killed Sharon Tate and four other people. For years people tried to figure out if the Manson family was looking for Terry or if it didn’t make any difference to them who was in the house. Families can be the strangest, most horrible things.
It’s weird that “Kokomo” has anything dark in its past because it’s such a light song. It’s a feel-good party song. When Mike and John and Scott and Terry finished writing it, they told me they were going into the studio to cut it, but they told me too late. I couldn’t make it to the session. Mike and Carl sang lead. Bruce Johnston and Al Jardine sang backup. It was a huge hit. I think it went to number one. The first time I heard it on the radio, I loved it, though I didn’t even know it was the Beach Boys. When someone told me who was singing, I
couldn’t believe it. It had such a cool sound and such great harmonies, and the lyrics were nice and relaxing.
When Joe told me that Jimmy Buffett’s place was near Kokomo, I got excited. “Can we go there?” I asked.
“Sure,” Joe said.
“That’s cool.” I mentioned it to someone else on the plane, one of the musicians, and he looked at me strangely. I turned back around and Joe was laughing. “What’s the joke?” I asked.
“Kokomo’s not real,” Joe said.
“What do you mean?”
“It doesn’t exist.”
Now everyone was laughing, and I started laughing, too. I wasn’t against jokes. I played jokes all the time when I was a kid. Once my friend Rich came over to the house. My mom was sitting in the music room and I introduced them to each other. Then I said to my mom, “Rich thinks you’re fat and need to go to Vic Tanny’s.” That was a gym. Rich looked like someone punched him in the stomach. But my mom didn’t mind. “I know my son,” she said, laughing. After that, Rich and I went into the kitchen and played a game with a funnel. You put a penny on your forehead and then leaned forward and tried to drop it in the funnel. I missed once or twice. Rich told me to lean back to get a better angle. When I did he poured a glass of water into the funnel. It got the front of my pants all wet. I was so mad. I threw the funnel down on the ground.
I got mad pretty often. Once I hit the wall in the kitchen. It was a good thing I didn’t get the stud. But with the funnel, I wasn’t that angry for long, and when I thought about it I wasn’t sure I was angry at all. Other pranks I did to make people feel better. One of my cousins, Sherry Ann, got hurt. She banged her head bad. She was in St. Vincent’s Hospital, and I went up to see her and wrapped my head in toilet paper so I looked like a mummy. I wasn’t really a mummy, but I wanted her to think just for a second that I was so that she wouldn’t think about her own head and how it hurt. It was an escape.
That’s how I felt about Kokomo. It didn’t matter to me if it was a real place or a fake place. Even a fake place, if it’s made up of real ideas, can be real for a second. The song we ended up writing with Jimmy Buffett, “South American,” proves it. It was a kind of fantasy about fame and attention. The guy in the song has lunch with Cameron Diaz. But there’s also an escape:
Got a letter from a long-lost cousin of mine
Who owns a little piece of heaven in the Argentine
It’s a different planet, it’s a different place
He calls it out of this world without traveling to space
During Imagination Carl started dying. He was barely fifty, but he was sick with lung cancer. Carl had smoked since we were kids, which people never believed; he had such a pure singing voice that it didn’t sound like he had ever touched a cigarette. That summer the Beach Boys were out touring without me. Carl was too sick to stand for most of the concerts. He sat on a stool.
I wasn’t following the progress of the disease too carefully. We didn’t have a very close relationship toward the end, and that was hard. Whatever was happening with the Beach Boys at that point, we were brothers. We had started out listening to the radio in our room, and we had been through forty years of being together in the same band. Carl had helped get Dr. Landy to leave the second time, and I was grateful for that. Through 1997, our mom was in bad shape. We were a little closer for a little while, Carl and I, but his health was failing, too. It’s hard to talk about the way people’s health goes. It’s the life going out of them in a way that’s very hard to understand.
The last time I saw Carl was at his house off Benedict Canyon. Carl hadn’t met Daria yet. He kept saying that he didn’t want to meet her until he was better because he didn’t want to scare her. We got a call from Gina, Carl’s wife, that she wanted to have a small Super Bowl party and that Carl finally wanted to meet Daria, who was a little more than a year old then. When we got there, Gina met us. “Carl’s sleeping,” she said. Lots of family was there at that party. Gina’s mom was there. Carl’s son Jonah was there. We sat with everyone, and then about an hour later Gina went back to get Carl and wheeled him out into the living room in a wheelchair. He was very sick. His skin was so yellow. Except for his beard he had hardly any hair. The fucking chemotherapy had really done a number on him. Up until then, Daria had been afraid of anyone with a beard. Beards made her cry. But when Carl reached for her, she put her arms out and went right to him. She rested her head on his shoulder. We all got the idea that it would be her first and last visit with her uncle Carl. Before we left, Carl said he was looking forward to coming to Chicago to sing with me on my new record. When Melinda and I got back in the car, we looked at each other, and both of us had tears in our eyes.
A few weeks later we were back in St. Charles, working on the record. It was our anniversary, so I took Melinda into Chicago for dinner at Morton’s. We had a great night, really meaningful and happy after the sadness of seeing Carl slipping away, and we went back to the St. Charles house. As soon as we got home, Joe came rushing over. “I have some bad news,” he said. We knew and we didn’t know. “I am very sorry to tell you this,” Joe said, “but Carl just died.”
It really broke me up. Carl was a nice kid. He never got in trouble. He was the peacemaker in the family and certainly the peacemaker in the band. He was the most spiritual person I knew. One of the reasons I wanted him to sing certain songs, especially “God Only Knows,” was that he could put such innocent and natural feeling into things. Singers can practice hitting notes. They can learn about styles by listening to jazz vocalists or singers from other countries. But just to go out there and sing a song in a simple way that makes everyone who hears it feel something deeply, that can’t be practiced or even learned. You have to be born with it. Carl was born with it. And when Carl died, that thing he was born with died with him also. Hearing about his death was one of the roughest trips I had to go through. I didn’t understand it at all. Carl was gone. He went somewhere, but I didn’t know where.
A few months after Carl died, Frank Sinatra died also. I never met him, but I felt so connected to him. He did lots of his great records for Capitol, just like we did. I always loved his voice, and during rough times I put him on when I was trying to sleep. I heard that B. B. King used to do the same thing, and it made sense; there was something so soothing about the way he could find the sad part of a song. My daughter Carnie even wanted to do an album of his songs with me. I felt strange about it, so I didn’t do it. I’ll never be Frank Sinatra.
Once I was backstage before a show and I was very nervous. I’m always nervous before a show. I never know how an audience is going to respond to it. Someone there at the show had known someone else who worked with Sinatra, who knew that Sinatra threw up before every concert. I loved hearing that, not because I liked to think of Sinatra sick but because I couldn’t believe that someone as cool as he was had the same problems I had. I wrote a song for him once called “Still I Dream of It.” He didn’t say yes to the song, and that bothered me. It was a beautiful song about loneliness and hope:
Still I dream of it
Of that happy day
When I can say I’ve fallen in love
And it haunts me so
Like a dream that’s
Somehow linked to all the stars above
The song ended up on an album named Adult/Child, which was filled with those kinds of songs. It was a Beach Boys album that never came out. I made it in 1977 during a period that was pretty interesting for the group, even though it was a hard period. Adult/Child had arrangements by Dick Reynolds, who worked with us on The Beach Boys’ Christmas Album back in 1964, the same year he worked with Sinatra himself. I wanted to make a record with a similar feel as the records by classic vocalists like Sinatra, so I called in Dick Reynolds to help us out. Other guys in the group didn’t like the idea. Mike couldn’t believe it. When he heard the demos he just shook his head and stared at me. The record label wasn’t sure about the album either. Often the record labels agreed with
the other guys in the group. The album never came out, though I ended up putting the demo of “Still I Dream of It” on the soundtrack for the Don Was documentary we made in 1995.
Adult/Child was Dr. Landy’s title. He meant that there were always two parts of a personality, always an adult who wants to be in charge and a child who wants to be cared for, always an adult who thinks he knows the rules and a child who is learning and testing the rules. I also thought about it in terms of family. I thought about my dad and me, and all the things he did that were good and bad, all the things that I can talk about easily and all the things I can’t talk about at all.
In December 1963 the Beach Boys released “Little Saint Nick,” our first Christmas record. A month after that, Frank Sinatra started working on an album called America, I Hear You Singing, which was the one Dick Reynolds helped arrange. It was an album of hopeful, patriotic songs done in duet with Bing Crosby; they recorded it in response to the Kennedy assassination, which had happened back in November. The day of the assassination, I was at home, playing around on the piano and relaxing. When the shooting happened, everyone knew instantly. It was all over the TV and on every kind of news. I called Mike and he asked me if I wanted to write a song about it. I said sure. It seemed like something we had to think about, and songs were the way I thought about things. We drove over to my office and in a half hour we had “The Warmth of the Sun.” We didn’t think of it as a big song. It was a personal response. But it got bigger over time because of the history linked to it.
I’m scared of lots of things, and I can say for sure that going onstage after Imagination was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Playing live with the band wasn’t something I liked very much, even in the old days. When I watch myself on Ed Sullivan or the T.A.M.I. Show, I can remember how uncomfortable it felt. Many of my worst memories are from being nervous up there, and many others are from the things I did to keep myself from being nervous up there. Some of the drinking was because of that. Some of the drugs were because of that. Some of the voices in my head I heard just before I went onstage, and they didn’t have anything good to say about me.
