I Am Brian Wilson

by Brian Wilson

  When Melinda told me I should think about doing some solo concerts for Imagination, I had all kinds of excuses. But every time I told her one, she had an answer. People only wanted to hear the old hits? No, they didn’t—the album was getting some great reviews. I was too old? No, I wasn’t—other rockers were still doing it even if they were older than me. I didn’t have a band? This stopped her short for a little while. Then one night we saw a group called the Wondermints in Hollywood. They played lots of Beach Boys songs in their show, and I liked what they did with them. They kept the spirit of the originals. The main guy in the Wondermints, Darian Sahanaja, seemed to understand the way my songs were built. That night, I told someone to go ask them if they wanted to be my band. The Wondermints loved the idea. We added in some other Chicago musicians we worked with when we were recording Imagination—especially Scott Bennett, who played guitar, keyboards, and vibes, and Paul Von Mertens, who played sax, harmonica, and organ—and all of a sudden I had a band.

  Playing with the new band was different than playing with the Beach Boys. Hearing my own backing band behind me, that was a trip. In the old days, I always felt like I was right in the middle of everything. With the new musicians, there was a little distance—not in a bad way, but they were behind me, helping me bring my songs to life. There wasn’t the same kind of ego and the same kind of infighting because we weren’t family in the same way. That made things a little less intimate, but maybe it also made them better. And then eventually we were family.

  We did a few dates with other people, including Jimmy Buffett, shows where we came out and played some hits. Our first real show was in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It was March 9, 1999—I remember the date because it had so many nines. I was on the floor of the dressing room. I wasn’t sure I could go out. All the nervous things were happening to me. My friend Ray Lawlor came backstage to see me. When he saw how I was feeling, he sat down in silence for a minute. Then he said my name. “Brian. You’ve already hit the home run. Now you just have to jog around the bases.” I went out and kicked ass that night, and the audience loved it.

  The next night in Chicago at the Rosemont Theatre, I didn’t have to sit on the floor backstage anymore. I went out and looked straight into the crowd. Jerry Weiss, a friend of mine who later took care of everything on the road, was there. David Leaf was there. Melinda was always there. I made sure to find out exactly where they were because they gave me confidence. And that night I had it.

  We toured around the Midwest for a little while: Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin. After a few weeks we had a barbecue at the house in St. Charles. It was great—so many hamburgers and hot dogs. I went downstairs into the studio with some friends and started playing “Marcella.” That’s a song that always made me happy because it had some of the rock and roll energy of the Rolling Stones. It’s an energy song. Then I did another medley of the oldest stuff I could think of at the moment; “Be My Baby” was in there, and also “Surfer Girl.”

  “Should we go back upstairs?” someone asked.

  “Why?” someone else said. “Let’s just stay down here. This is the life.”

  That made me think of “Busy Doin’ Nothin’.” It was a song from the late ’60s that I wrote about just hanging out. I sang it mostly by myself, which didn’t happen very much back then. Marilyn, my wife at the time, was on the song for a few seconds, but otherwise it was all me. It was a nice little song with a kind of bossa nova melody—sweet, light, with lots of nice places for my voice to go up into the corners of the song. I got through about half of the song there in the basement and then suddenly forgot the rest of it. “I can’t remember,” I said.

  “Come on,” someone said. Everyone must have thought I was joking. But I wasn’t joking. I didn’t remember the rest. I was tired.

  “I’m done here,” I said. I lifted my hands off the piano and went upstairs to take a shower. I brushed my teeth and hair. About a half hour later I went back downstairs in my bathrobe. I sat at the piano and it came back to me immediately. I called upstairs. “Hey,” I said. “Come here.” Some people came downstairs, and I played the whole song for them.

  I wrote a number down

  But I lost it

  So I searched through my pocketbook

  I couldn’t find it

  So I sat and concentrated on the number

  And slowly it came to me

  So I dialed it

  It’s a real pretty tune. It was a song about forgetting and remembering what I forgot and then remembered. That seemed funny at first, but then it seemed sad. Life is so much about losing. These days losing a phone number is no big deal. You can find it anywhere on your phone. But back then it was more of a worry. Maybe you wouldn’t be able to call the girl or guy whose number it was. You thought for a second they might be gone forever. That’s how I felt about “Busy Doin’ Nothin’” when I lifted my hands from the piano and went upstairs. But it came back to me.

  Some things never come back. When I was a kid we had a dog named Chico. He was a Chihuahua. We let him play baseball with us, and he started to get good at it. He ran away from home. We didn’t know where he went. Then one day I was walking home from school with Dennis and we saw Chico lying in the gutter dead. We both broke down crying.

  Thirty years later I was sitting on a couch trying to think of a song when Dr. Landy came into the room. “I have something for you,” he said. He bent down and stood back up and there was a puppy on the floor. It was beige, and its eyes were happy but its tail wasn’t wagging. Maybe it was a little afraid. I got down on the floor right next to the puppy and hugged it. I named the dog Buddy. A few months later Dr. Landy wanted me to sit at the piano and write a new song, but I couldn’t. I just didn’t have one in my head or my heart. Dr. Landy went into the room, grabbed Buddy, and said he was taking him out of the house. Gloria told him not to, but he did. I sat on the couch and couldn’t stand back up. I couldn’t even speak. All I could do was cry, and that’s what I did.

  There’s another song on Imagination called “Cry”:

  A silly quarrel

  That’s what we had

  Then I heard you cryin’

  You broke my heart

  Broke it in two

  How could I have left you alone

  Like that to cry

  The song was one of the ones I worked on with Joe Thomas. It was about a fight I had with Melinda. We were in our backyard, lying in the sun by the swimming pool, and we started arguing. I told her that I was going to leave—not just the house, but her, the whole thing. I wasn’t really serious, but I wanted to see how much it bothered her. She started to cry, which almost never happened. I tried to make her feel better, but I still felt bad. Then I went right off and wrote a song. “Left you alone like that to cry” was a sad thing to sing. It was sad because of the idea of crying, and because of the idea of being left alone. I dedicated the record to Carl, who was gone. Dennis was gone. My dad was gone. My mom was gone. They were in me, still, to remember or to imagine. But I was the last Wilson.

  CHAPTER 3

  Foundation

  Well, back in time with just a rhythm and rhyme

  Gregorian chants were a real big thing

  They took that chant and added harmony

  It was a different sound

  But had the same meaning

  I know it took us a long while

  To go and find us a rock style

  I know that we can take it one more mile

  —“That Same Song”

  Many days I have the same routine. I wake up. I come downstairs to sit in my chair. I watch my family move around in the house. Some days I find my way back up to the piano. This house where I live now has a separate music room, though it’s upstairs rather than downstairs like in Illinois. In the house where I lived just before this one, the piano was right out in the middle of the living room. This way is better. I have a little more privacy. Everyone else in the house can hear that I’m playing, but they aren’t right there wa
tching me. Sometimes after I figure out a melody, I’ll bring it to Melinda. She’ll tell me if she likes it, and she’ll also tell me if she’s not sure she likes it.

  Those melodies I’m working with sometimes stick around for a while and become songs. Even if I have a title or some lyrics, I like to bring them to a collaborator to finish. But that first part of the process, the part where I’m at the piano just playing and listening to what I’m playing—that’s the way I discover new songs. What is a song, exactly? It’s something that starts as an idea and becomes more than that. It becomes physical and emotional and spiritual. It comes out into the world. It can soothe you when you’re feeling at your worst. It can make you happy when you’re sad.

  But if you spend your life trying to find songs, you realize pretty quickly that you’re not the first. People have been doing that as long as there have been people. And if there are periods in your life when you stop doing it—because something distracts you or makes you weak—you realize how important it is to jump right back into the game. Songs are out there all the time, but they can’t be made without people. You have to do your job and help songs come into existence.

  My experience making Imagination with Joe Thomas wasn’t perfect. I wasn’t sure about some of the things he did on that record. Sometimes when I listened to it, I heard more of him on it than I heard of me. That was strange because it was my name on the cover. So why wasn’t I hearing myself in the music? I felt the way I had when I came in and the string overdubs were happening without me. I felt like my control was being taken from me.

  But the album was a great experience in other ways. It got me making music again. It got me back on the road. And in the summer of 2000, I released a live album of the Imagination tour. I recorded it at the Roxy in West Hollywood with my new band. The Roxy was a great place with lots of history. Lou Adler opened it back in the ’70s. I knew Lou from the old days. He managed Jan and Dean and produced Tapestry with Carole King, which is one of the great records of all time. The Roxy concert was an amazing experience all around. We played lots of old Beach Boys songs and even two new songs. One of the new songs was called “The First Time,” a love song that was also about personal peace.

  In the nighttime when it’s dark and cold

  I find peace of mind ’cause I have you to hold

  When we’re sound asleep

  And we’re breathing slow

  Angels up above

  And the devil below

  Performing “The First Time” for the first time in concert was a real experience. This was during those early years when the Wondermints first came to be my band and I was getting used to being onstage again. During those years it was especially hard for me. Sometimes my mind would wander or I would hear voices and blow a cue. Going back onstage to play “The First Time,” or really any song, was a learning experience. I had to learn everything all over again, from the ground up. Once during a show, right in the middle of “Caroline, No,” I completely spaced out. I just forgot every single word. I started yelling into the mic. “Stop, stop, everybody stop!” I said. “Let’s start at the top of the bridge.” The crowd loved seeing me take control like that, and I saw a big smile on Darian’s face. That gave me more confidence. Once in Japan we were doing “Barbara Ann” and I got so excited that I stood up from my keyboard, grabbed the mic, and walked around the stage singing my parts. During the instrumental break, I even flipped the mic behind my back and caught it with my other hand. All the guys in the band were laughing their asses off. When you feel better that way, you can do all of it better: play the old songs, bring in the new songs, connect with the band, connect with the crowd, connect with yourself.

  Once we were playing a concert in Baltimore, by the harbor. We were in the middle of “Sloop John B,” and when I looked out onto the stage, I saw Jerry Weiss in the audience with my daughter Daria on his shoulders. I kept on singing, but every time I looked out into the crowd, I saw Jerry with Daria. It was distracting the hell out of me. My mind was wandering anyway in those days, and I couldn’t deal with seeing Daria out there without Melinda. I decided I had to do something about it. Right in the middle of a verse, I yelled into the mic really loud. “Jerry Weiss,” I said. “Jerry Weiss. Bring my daughter back to her mother.” I went right back to singing, but I was the only one. The rest of the band was laughing. Since then, almost every time Jerry walks into the room during a sound check, one of the guys in the band leans into the mic and imitates me: “Jerry Weiss . . . Jerry Weiss.” Jeff Foskett started it, and now it’s usually Nicky Wonder who does it, sometimes Probyn Gregory, too. I love it. It makes everyone laugh—like it did the first time onstage, like the mic flip during “Barbara Ann”—and that makes me feel like one of the guys.

  Those early tours got me connected with the band, and also with everyone else. When you’re on the road, moving from place to place, you see people in each city: fans, musicians, friends of friends. And when we played in Los Angeles, it was even more special. I remember we had a date at the Wiltern Theatre early in that tour. It was like a reunion. Almost everyone I knew was there. I was so happy to see my daughters Carnie and Wendy at the show. That meant so much to me. They mean so much to me. David Anderle was there—he worked with me and Van Dyke and helped set up Brother Records for us in the early ’70s. And another David, my friend David Leaf, was also there helping me out, like he did on all tours in those days. David is originally from New York and is a huge New York Yankees fan, like me. After sound check, David and I watched the World Series with Ray Lawlor, who’s also a Yankees fan. It was the first game. I forget who the Yankees were playing, but I know they won.

  I wrote “That Same Song” for an album called 15 Big Ones, though it wasn’t called that originally. This was back in the mid-’70s, and I had spent some time away from the Beach Boys. I was always either coming back into the group or drifting away from them. It was like a tide. I came back because it was my family. It was where I felt comfortable. But it was hard to be there when I wasn’t able to get my ideas heard the way I wanted, and in those times the whole thing started to make less sense to me. Plus, there were drugs and there were problems with the way I was seeing things. There was destruction all around me.

  Sometimes when I stepped away from the Beach Boys, I got into my own head more than I wanted to. Sometimes I managed to find another place to land. In the mid-’70s I started working more with a group of guys I knew. Bruce Johnston, who had replaced me in the Beach Boys when I stopped touring, had recently left the band, and he was thinking up a new project with Terry Melcher. They were collaborating with Gary Usher, who had written some of the early Beach Boys songs with me, and a guy named Curt Boettcher, who had come out from Wisconsin and made some nice records with a bunch of different bands. Dean Torrence, from Jan and Dean, was also there. All of the guys were trying to make new songs that were actually old songs. They loved the rock and roll we grew up with, and they wanted to make it new again with everything they had learned about making music in their other groups.

  There were lots of names for that group. I was thinking about names all the time back then. A few years earlier I had worked on an album with Marilyn and her sister Diane. I made the record with a guy named David Sandler. We called that group Spring, but that ended up confusing people for some reason, and everywhere outside of the United States they were called American Spring, which seemed even more confusing. The Pendletones had become the Beach Boys when we weren’t even looking, and that new name did well for us. It was easy to remember and put an idea in people’s minds of what they were about to hear. The group with Bruce and Terry and the rest called themselves the Legendary Masked Surfers, which was kind of a Lone Ranger name. A few songs came out with that name, but it didn’t stick. They ended up calling themselves California Music, because all the guys had ideas about California music, and they were different from other people’s ideas—different from the singer-songwriters like Jackson Browne, different from groups like Fleetwo
od Mac, different from people like Van Dyke. They had their own sense of rock and roll, of harmony and vibe and tempo.

  California Music never really got off the ground. The group made some records according to the original idea. I actually produced a version of “Why Do Fools Fall in Love,” the Frankie Lymon song, that included a little spoken-word snippet that was a nod to the Beatles’ “Get Back.” They did a version of “Jamaica Farewell,” a calypso song that everyone knew from the Harry Belafonte album. Everyone had that record, the one with the red background where he was wearing a green shirt. It looked like one of his hands was coming right out of the cover photo. I helped out with some other songs, but I wasn’t in the best shape. I felt unsure as a producer because I felt unsure as a person. But I tried.

  During the time Terry and Bruce were doing California Music, they had a company called Equinox Records. I signed a contract with them, even though the Beach Boys were still with Reprise Records. No one was happy about my deal with Equinox, and everyone started to lean on me to go back to the Beach Boys. Marilyn did lots of leaning. She thought it was wrong of me to turn away from the group. She had seen lots of times when I’d drifted, but she thought that I was drifting too far, and that I didn’t have a life preserver. The drugs and the problems in my mind were dragging me down. It was right around then that she brought in Dr. Landy for the first time, and I ended up going back to the Beach Boys. First time, same song.

  It was a strange time to rejoin the Beach Boys. The group was on Reprise, but it had been a while since we had released a record. The last record was Holland, which the label didn’t like. They weren’t even going to release it until we added a song that could be a hit. The song we ended up adding was “Sail On Sailor,” which I wrote with a record producer and singer named Ray Kennedy, and with Van Dyke. I don’t mean that I wrote it with both of them. There were two separate times. I wrote it once around 1970 or 1971 with Ray and Danny Hutton, because I thought it would be a good song for Three Dog Night. But we didn’t finish it. It got too complicated. Then a few years later, when Reprise didn’t like Holland, Van Dyke came over and played me something he had, and I worked on that with him. All of it together became “Sail On Sailor.” That went on Holland and became one of our biggest hits in the early ’70s. But we hadn’t given Reprise anything since Holland, and I wasn’t sure where things were headed.