by Brian Wilson
I was spending most of my time at the Bel Air house, with Marilyn and the kids. I remember once a young guy came up to the house. He had met Dennis at a show and Dennis gave him my number and address and told him to come see me. I didn’t know that, but I knew that one day there was a ring at the doorbell and I opened up. “Hi!” I said.
The guy had a kind of surprised expression on his face. Maybe I didn’t look the way he expected. My hair was longer than it was on the Holland album, my beard was bigger, and I was heavier. Most of the extra weight was in my gut, and that’s where the guy was looking. “Hi, Brian,” the guy said. “You don’t know me, but I wanted to come and meet you. I got your address from your brother Dennis in New York.”
“In New York? What was he doing there?”
“He was playing a Beach Boys concert.”
“Oh,” I said. “Come on in.” We went to the music room. I asked him why he’d come to see me, and he said that he wanted to thank me for all the music I’d made. He said that the songs had helped him through some hard times. “You really want to see me?” I said. “Are you sure you don’t want to see John Lennon or Harry Nilsson? I’m all washed up.”
The guy laughed. He must have thought I was joking. But I wasn’t joking. I didn’t know where things were heading. I didn’t want to think about it. As far as I was concerned, the California Saga was the best thing on the record we had just finished.
I stayed sitting at the piano and played the guy some songs I was working on: “Just an Imitation,” “Spark in the Dark,” “Shortenin’ Bread,” “I’m into Something Good,” “Ding Dang.” I must have played about a dozen songs. Then I got impatient. That happened all the time. I didn’t like what I was doing and I wanted to do something else. “Hey,” I said. “Let’s go over to my friend Danny Hutton’s house.” We jumped in the guy’s car.
First, I decided we needed to make a pit stop, so we went to the first liquor store we passed. I wanted something sweet for a buzz. There was a chocolate liqueur that I drank all the time in Holland called Vandermint, and I went through the place looking for it. It was up on a top shelf and I scored it. I was tall enough to reach. I opened the bottle right there in the store and took a few chugs. “Well,” I said to the guy, “I guess we bought it.” He started to laugh. “Hey,” I said. “Do you have any money?” He stopped laughing and gave me a twenty-dollar bill.
At Danny Hutton’s house in Laurel Canyon, there was a party going on. Danny always had a party going on back then. There were girls and drugs and everything. I went straight to his records, found the 45s, and started pulling them one by one. The Four Tops. “Nope,” I said. Ray Stevens. “Nope.” Rare Earth. “Nope.” I didn’t stop until I found the one I wanted, and then I held it up so everyone could see it. “I knew Danny would have this one,” I said. It was “Be My Baby,” sung by the Ronettes, written and produced by Phil Spector. I put it on the turntable.
The opening of that record, the thumping drums, sent me back a decade, to the fall of 1963. This was before the Kennedy assassination, before “The Warmth of the Sun.” I was driving down the street listening to the radio and the DJ came on and announced a new song. It was “Be My Baby” and it just knocked me out. I think I said something out loud, even though I was the only one in the car. I said, “What in the heck?” and then I pulled over to the side of the road and listened to the rest of the record so I could hear the chorus again. I tried to figure out how all the instruments were working.
Before Spector, people recorded all the instruments separately. They got great piano, great guitar, and great bass. But he thought of the song as one giant instrument. It was huge. Size was so important to him, how big everything sounded. And he had the best drums I ever heard. The song was on the radio, which meant that it was coming to me from far away, but it was also right there with me in the car. It reminded me of the BB gun I had when I was young, which was the strangest thing. There was a bean field to the east of our house, and one day there was a guy sitting out there on a motorcycle. When I fired the BB gun, the guy just fell off his motorcycle. I thought maybe it was because I had hit him with the BB. It could have been a coincidence, but I thought about it in that way, that I had affected this guy in the bean field. That’s how great music worked, too. You were out in a bean field and something hit you when you were least expecting it and knocked you off your motorcycle.
In Danny’s house that day, when I put “Be My Baby” on the record player, I couldn’t stop listening to the intro. Those drums were so huge the way that Phil Spector did them. I played the beginning ten times until everyone in the room told me to stop, and then I played it ten more times.
In the meantime our old label, Capitol, had put out Endless Summer, a double album with all our early hits that was named after the famous surf movie. Endless Summer, the album, came out in 1974 and started selling like crazy, and that made Capitol put out a second set of hits, Spirit of America. Both of them had cool illustrated covers. Endless Summer had all our faces. Spirit of America had Mickey Mouse and a baseball glove and a girl lying down with the Playboy bunny logo on her underwear.
Al and Mike noticed how well the two Capitol albums were doing—there was no way not to notice. They figured it was a sign we should capitalize on people’s love for our old music. Our record label, Brother Records, temporarily got the rights back to our old songs and put out a compilation of our own, Good Vibrations, on Reprise. That sold pretty well but not as well as the Capitol records. But Al and Mike weren’t just interested in rereleases. They wanted to make more music like “I Get Around” or “The Warmth of the Sun.” There were other ideas in the room, too. I rejoined the group with ideas similar to what the guys in California Music were doing. I wanted to do covers only of old songs, to make a record about the records that I loved. Dennis and Carl wanted to keep going forward and making new music like what we were making on Holland. They didn’t want to go back to the ’60s, or the ’50s either.
We had long discussions about the best direction—endless discussions, you could say. And Dr. Landy was in lots of them. He was trying to get me into shape, but he thought that also meant getting the group into shape and putting himself in the middle of the way we talked to each other. He dragged us through some real marathon conversations. I remember one that lasted six hours, without a break. Everyone said what they thought, and also said they heard what everyone else was saying, and then said they thought it was important for everyone to be heard. Even though I was the only one officially with Dr. Landy, lots of the guys had gotten into similar things, gurus or meditation or special diets. Mike had been into it for years, since the late ’60s, and it had been in his songs.
We talked so much that I decided we should call the album Group Therapy. That was the name of a band Ray Kennedy was in back in the ’60s, and that might have been in the back of my mind, but mainly I thought of it because it summed up everything that was happening at the time. It summed up the arguments over creative direction, and the difficulty of me coming back to the group, and the arrival of Dr. Landy. But the band didn’t go for it. I guess they thought it showed people too much of what we were going through. We renamed the album 15 Big Ones, because we had been making music for fifteen years and there were fifteen songs on the record. I didn’t like the cover for that album very much. It was an Olympic year so they made an Olympic cover, with five rings and the guys from the group inside them. It ended up looking like a game show, Hollywood Squares or something. I’m in the top middle ring, which is white on the album cover but black in the Olympics logo.
I loved the version of “That Same Song.” Marilyn sang the high part on it because it was out of my range. She has a great voice. But those moments were rare. That album was a compromise. No one was really in control. You need control in life. You need self-control, and you need control over ideas. The reason for control is that it lets one idea happen instead of two or more ideas that don’t happen. That’s why you have a control room in a recordin
g studio or a TV studio. But control isn’t all good. It can make harmony, but it can also lead to hurt feelings from the people who aren’t in control. That can happen with husbands and wives. That can happen with parents and children. That can happen with doctors and patients.
A lack of control leads to other problems. When 15 Big Ones came out, the record company made a big deal that I was on it. They had a big campaign with a “Brian’s Back!” slogan, and they had a TV special for us where we sang “That Same Song” with a gospel choir and did a comedy sketch with the Blues Brothers. Well, they weren’t the Blues Brothers in that sketch. They were the guys from the Blues Brothers and they played cops who came and got me out of my room and made me go outside and surf. It was kind of a kick. Belushi and Aykroyd—funny guys.
But I was really thinking about the album, and how the ghost of that original album I wanted to make, the old rock and roll record, was there underneath everything else. And the parts of the record that were great in so many ways. Carl was out of sight on “Palisades Park.” It’s one of my top five Beach Boys vocals. He nailed it. I always heard one lyric, “the girl I sat beside was awful cute,” as “the girl I sat beside was . . . aw, fuck you.” It makes no sense in the song, but that’s how I heard it. The great original was by Freddy Cannon, who also did “Tallahassee Lassie,” but Carl knocked it completely out of the park. For “Just Once in My Life,” he and I sang together and I played the synthesizers and piano. We had a great time singing. With that and “Chapel of Love,” I had laryngitis. I wasn’t using my normal voice. It was an assumed voice. I had to make it up to get through all the singing. For me, it’s basically a laryngitis album.
It’s also a Phil Spector album. Many of the songs on 15 Big Ones are songs he did first. As a producer, Phil did the originals of “Just Once in My Life” and “Chapel of Love.” His version of that, with the Dixie Cups, was on top of the charts when the Beach Boys first charted in 1964. There was even a song of his that almost no one knew, “Talk to Me.”
Phil Spector is one of the main reasons I wanted to make 15 Big Ones a record about old rock and roll, because he’s one of the main reasons I wanted to make rock and roll. His records meant everything to me when I was learning how to become a producer. If albums are all about control, he was the ultimate in control. I knew about voices, or at least knew something about them, from pretty early on. I listened to harmony groups and figured out how all the voices came together. I worked with lots of other producers when I was young, and lots of them taught me things—tricks with vocals or instruments, how to double track or where to place a microphone—but I think I learned the most from listening to Phil Spector’s records. I always say he’s the one who taught me how to produce records.
Hearing “Be My Baby” in my car was the first lesson. A few days after that, I drove over to the studio in Ventura where Phil Spector was working. I went in to meet him. He knew about the Beach Boys because “Surfin’ U.S.A.” had been a big hit and everyone was talking about board shorts and huaraches. I told him that I had heard “Be My Baby” and it was fantastic. We talked about other songs. “Then He Kissed Me” was just a few months old. He told me he was just starting on a Christmas album, which was exciting for me to hear. But “Be My Baby” stayed so important to me.
Years later I went to see Phil Spector at United Western Recorders. It was in the mid-’90s, and he was producing Celine Dion for a big comeback record that never ended up happening. Phil sometimes had bowling parties, and he sometimes invited me. Melinda and I were going to go and then I crapped out. Phil never invited me again. And then years after that, I was playing at B. B. King’s in New York and songwriter Ellie Greenwich came backstage to see me. I hugged her. “Every single day I wake up and thank you,” I said. She looked confused. “You know,” I said, “for writing ‘Be My Baby’ for me.” That’s how I felt—that it was just for me. There have been other songs that hit me almost as hard: “Rock Around the Clock,” “Keep A-Knockin’,” “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” “Hey Girl.” But it’s hard to re-create the feeling of first hearing “Be My Baby.”
When you think songs are just for you, you pay special attention to them, and then you grow from them. It’s like a building going up. You have a foundation, and then you keep adding stories until you look down and you’re so far from the ground that you don’t know how you got up there. That’s how it’s always been for me.
When I was first interested in music, I took a class in high school with a guy named Fred Morgan. He was an interesting teacher. He taught us that music was a contrast, pale parts versus emotional parts, and that not all the instruments in a song had to go in the same direction. He failed me in the class because I didn’t know how to write classical music, but he got me thinking about some of the different ways music can work. Later on I ran into him at a high school reunion. “You failed my class, but you scored big in music,” he said. My own ideas were just beginning, but I knew I was on the right track when I heard myself playing the boogie-woogie Uncle Charlie taught me.
A little later I learned how to write manuscript music from a friend of my dad’s named Dean Brownell. He taught me how to really notate: to get down quarter notes, half notes, eighth notes. Around that time my dad got me a tape recorder, a Capitol, and it did this thing called ping-pong where you could record many voices and mix them down to a single track. I tried to record a Four Freshmen song on that by having my mom, dad, Dennis, and Carl sing on the tape recorder with me. The song was called “It’s a Blue World”: “It’s a blue world without you / It’s a through world for me.” We all sang together and it was beautiful.
After the Freshmen, I heard bits and pieces of melody in my head, but I couldn’t focus on anything concrete. It was like watching goldfish swim around. They dart one way and you see a little flash of orange, but you don’t really know whether they’re coming or going. But then one afternoon I was in my car and I thought of a piece that grew into a longer piece. It started out with me humming a Disney song, “When You Wish Upon a Star,” which Dion and the Belmonts sang. Their record was red like the Harry Belafonte album with “Jamaica Farewell.” I started humming that, but it changed in my head. It combined with other songs I knew, like the Four Freshmen’s “Little Girl Blue,” and eventually it didn’t sound like anything I had heard before. It sounded like maybe it was my own. I wrote part of it in my head in my car, and then I finished it when I got back to the house. That song ended up being “Surfer Girl.” It was a slow ballad. The harmonies I heard in it were sort of like the harmonies I heard from the Four Freshmen, but they were only a foundation. I built something on top of that foundation, and it was sort of my own house. We recorded it at Hite Morgan’s, but that version never got released. I mean, much later it did, on a big box set, but it wasn’t released on a real record. The one that everyone knows was recorded later. Still, even then, I had done it. I had written a song and the group had recorded it.
It’s been more than fifty years now, and I wonder all the time about what let me think I could write something of my own, that I could build something on top of the foundation I got from other singers and groups. What made me think I could have my own songs? There must have been something deep inside me, another kind of foundation. Part of it came from my dad, who also loved music and who also wrote songs. Part of it came from all the people around me who loved music and wrote songs. Al wrote songs. Mike hummed things he heard and tried to make them into something. But there was something deep down in there that wasn’t in other people.
In lots of interviews people have asked me what I would have been if I’d been born in a different time. I think I would have been a classical composer. But not like Mozart, Beethoven, or Tchaikovsky. I would have been like Bach, using counterpoint, layering things. Of all the composers, he’s the one who makes the most sense to me. Switched-On Bach, the Walter Carlos record, was one of the most electrifying albums I ever heard. When I first heard it, which was right around the time
we were finishing Friends, it turned me on so much that I can’t even explain it. It was so intricate and so clear at the same time.
I didn’t grow up in a time of classical music, though. I grew up in a time of pop music. And “Surfer Girl” was the first real song I wrote. It didn’t come out for a while, though. In fact, it didn’t come out until our third album. It had just come out when I met Phil Spector. I don’t remember if he mentioned it. It seems like the kind of thing I should remember but I don’t. I just know that hearing “Be My Baby” on the car radio made me feel so alive. And what it did to my brain and the sounds that were in there was like a rebirth. It was a leap forward.
Those early years were all leaps forward.
When we put out “Surfin’” as our first single on Candix, I didn’t know where things were headed. We were all running around in the street thrilled to hear it, but maybe it wouldn’t be any more than that. Maybe we would be older and working in different jobs and call each other on the phone and remember that time when it came on the radio and we ran around in the street. People in rock and roll have long careers now, but the whole thing was pretty new back then. Would it last a year? Would it last two years? I remember my dad talking about our hits and saying it was hard to imagine it going much past that.
