by Brian Wilson
But it went a little past one song, at least. “Surfin’” was moving along and people were asking us for a second song. I had written “Surfer Girl,” but it wasn’t time for that yet. It was a ballad. Mike and I had another fast song. We had written “Surfin’ Safari” and we went in and recorded it for Hite Morgan. At that point, because “Surfin’” was a hit, we knew we needed to sign to a bigger label. We looked for one. My dad looked with us. He brought us around to everyone. We sat in so many offices and heard Dad explain our kind of music to guys his age. They usually nodded slowly. Sometimes there were younger guys in the room who nodded more quickly. But when we left it wasn’t with a good feeling. We were rejected by labels like Dot and Liberty. Decca, who turned down the Beatles, turned us down also.
Eventually we met with a guy named Nick Venet from Capitol Records. Nick was a little older than me, but he had been around for a while. He had started off in jazz, working with people like Chet Baker and Stan Getz, and then came to Capitol, where he signed the Lettermen. They had a hit with “The Way You Look Tonight.” Nick understood harmonies and he understood song and he liked our sound. My dad arranged for him to take us onto the label. People say that my dad was pushy, and he sure was. But he had a sense of how songs got put together and how to fight to have songs heard. There are so many things that I wish wouldn’t have happened with my dad, but without him, nothing would have happened. That’s the thing about a foundation. You have to have it to build up from it.
Capitol liked “Surfin’ Safari” as our second song. But they said we needed to rerecord it. Whenever we made new songs, I would write and arrange them and Nick and my dad would produce them. Nick was the most pleasant guy, and I learned so much from him.
We started to work with other people, too. A friend of ours named David Marks, who used to come over to the house to sing, joined the band playing rhythm guitar, and another friend of ours named Gary Usher started working with us writing new songs. Gary’s uncle lived near us in Hawthorne and got to talking with my dad about music. Someone said that we had a band, and someone else said that Gary was a good musician and that he could also write lyrics. That was great for me, because I liked having someone who could take the things I was thinking and turn them into the right kinds of words.
Gary also had some production knowledge, even though he was only a few years older. He taught me how to open up my voice by putting track on top of track. The first Beach Boys song we tried that with was “Surfin’ U.S.A.” I went to Mike and told him what Gary told me, that you could sing on top of your own singing. We also did some songs where Gary was out in front, though they didn’t get released. One was called “One Way Road to Love.” We sang backup on that and we didn’t really mesh with Gary’s vocals—he had a kind of early-rock hiccupping thing going, a Buddy Holly sound. Another one was called “My Only Alibi.” We hung back on that with the backing vocals, and that made it better. Phil Spector taught me to put in everything, but other people taught me that sometimes what you didn’t include was as important as what you did include.
Why do you expect more than my love, dear
Why can’t you accept it as it is
I can only love you just so much, dear
Don’t you know that’s all that I can give?
Human
I’m only human
At some point along the way I ended up producing a song. What that meant was that I was the one telling people what to do, and that the song had my name on it. As a producer, I also said that I thought we needed to do the song at Western Recorders, which was a place Gary liked, instead of at Capitol’s own studio. I was proud of making decisions but also scared. If you made decisions, if you had control, then that meant you were responsible for what happened. That first song I produced was “Surfer Girl.” I had sung it so many times in my own head, and the group had sung it at Hite Morgan’s. But at Western it was different. The melody was sweet and had a little rise and fall like waves. The band back then was just the family—the extended family, with Carl playing guitar and Dennis drumming and me playing bass and David Marks also playing guitar. Some producers maybe went into the studio without ideas, but I was too nervous for that. I had everything worked out in my head before. It was the only way I could imagine getting from one place to the next. But to keep everyone moving forward I also tried to joke a little bit. I would say, “Take two” and then before anyone played a note say, “Take three.”
“Surfer Girl” was a song about love, or at least a song that wondered about love.
Little surfer, little one
Made my heart come all undone
Do you love me, do you surfer girl
Surfer girl, my little surfer girl
The guy in the song sounds like he hasn’t even talked to the surfer girl. He just watches her and thinks about her. That was me. I was kind of shy, and whenever I started talking to a girl she would end up talking to Dennis or Mike instead. They were slicker and more aggressive, and I sort of got moved off to the side to wonder if the girl ever liked me or was interested at all. I felt a little lonely at times, but I also knew that it made for good songs. Loneliness was something that everyone felt but that people were afraid to talk about. That was something I learned from the Four Freshmen. They always had an ache in their songs—not just in their voices but about the things they were singing.
The big early song everyone wants to point to as being about loneliness is “In My Room.” People say it’s about how I pulled back from the world. The funny thing is that it was a song Gary wrote with me and we all sang on it—me and Dennis and Carl and Mike and Al. Two people wrote a song about loneliness, and five people sang it. We worked out the harmonies over and over again until they had a certain sound. I didn’t think of it as sad, really. I wanted it to be beautiful. I think that came through. When Gary and I first wrote it, we were in Hawthorne playing outside. We were probably throwing a baseball back and forth and pretending we were the Yankees. Then we went home and thought of the idea for the song. It came together quick, maybe an hour to get the basics. My parents were coming in and out while we were working. My mom loved it. She told Gary that it was beautiful. Even my dad liked it. He was a tough critic, but he told Gary he did a good job.
Time jumps from the fall of 1961, when we heard “Surfin’” on the radio, to the summer of 1963, when we heard “Surfer Girl.” It jumps from 1958, when I was in my bedroom with my brothers teaching them “Ivory Tower,” to 1965, when we were all over the radio.
Time jumps and sometimes time lands. It really landed in 1964. That seemed like more than one year. We played more than a hundred shows, all over the world, and recorded all or parts of four albums. We had our first number one hit with “I Get Around” in May, over “My Boy Lollipop.” The flip side of “I Get Around” might be one of the best songs I ever wrote, “Don’t Worry Baby.” I wrote it with Phil Spector in mind. I thought it could be the follow-up to “Be My Baby” for Ronnie Spector, but Phil Spector didn’t go for it. That year, it didn’t matter. It was Beatlemania and it was Motownmania, but it was also us-mania. We were one of the biggest things going. And then we were one of the biggest things gone: the year ended with my freak-out on the plane to Houston. That shook everything down to its foundation. It turned out what we were building the whole year went up too fast, and it toppled.
But all year, we built. We started 1964 with Shut Down Volume 2, an album that we started recording on New Year’s Day. The name was a little strange—maybe a little more than strange. We hadn’t recorded a Shut Down Volume 1. We had a song called “Shut Down” that had been on our album Little Deuce Coupe, and when Capitol released a compilation of hit songs in 1963, they included that song and even named the record after it. It was enough of a hit that people thought it made sense to name our next album Shut Down Volume 2. Did it make sense? We had a title song on there, but it wasn’t really anything like “Shut Down.” It was an instrumental that Carl wrote. Carl also sang his first lead on �
�Pom, Pom Play Girl.”
When we were making “Surfin’” or “Surfer Girl,” we still played like we were a real band. We had my piano and bass and Carl and David Marks on guitar and Dennis drumming. But for Shut Down Volume 2, we had started to be a real thing, both in California and in the country, and that meant that when we went into the studio to record, we got to play with older studio musicians. The ones we used were the best in LA. You could play them a song once and they would play it right back to you, and add in their own ideas along with yours. Later on, people called them the Wrecking Crew, but at the time I don’t think people called them that. But they called them all the time. They worked with Phil Spector, which was one of the reasons I knew about them, and they worked with Jan and Dean on “Surf City.” That was a song I wrote, or started writing but didn’t finish, and Jan and Dean finished it up. It was a huge hit for them, the first surf song to go to number one.
It was a little weird that another group had a number one with my song. My dad wasn’t happy about it at all, but I didn’t mind. I thought it was cool that there was a sound starting to happen, a sound that had started with “Surfin’.” It was like a little family of songs. It was melodies I was making and lyrics that other people were adding and sounds that arrangers and players were making. The guys who would later be called the Wrecking Crew were on “Surf City.” Hal Blaine drummed, and so did Earl Palmer. Billy Strange, who arranged the record, liked to have two drummers, and so did Jan. It made it bigger, closer to the huge sound that Phil Spector was getting.
I especially didn’t mind Jan and Dean having a number one hit with “Surf City” because it taught record companies that it made sense to spend money on groups like us. It’s another kind of foundation, a business foundation: when you see that there are lots of people going to a store to buy things, you add another floor to the store. At that time there were actually two families of songs that were close cousins: surf songs and hot-rod songs. Surf songs were about going to the ocean and getting sun and catching waves and looking at girls. Hot-rod songs were about getting in the car with your buddies and driving around with the top down and getting burgers and looking at girls. Our car songs were written with Gary Usher and sometimes with a guy named Roger Christian, who wrote “Little Deuce Coupe,” “Shut Down,” and “Car Crazy Cutie”:
Well, my steady little doll is a real live beauty
And everybody knows she’s a car crazy cutie
She’s hip to everything, man, from customs to rails
And axle grease imbedded ‘neath her fingernails
Wo yeah (Run a-run a doo ron ron)
Wo oh oh oh (Wo run a-run a doo ron ron)
Oh oh oh now cutie (Wo run a-run a doo ron ron)
Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh (Wo run a-run a doo ron ron)
That was on the Little Deuce Coupe album, too. Those are the songs that got people to think we were into car culture, and I guess we were, through them.
Even though “Shut Down” and the Capitol compilation album were part of the hot-rod thing, most of the songs on our Shut Down Volume 2 album weren’t. “Fun, Fun, Fun” was, and it was a big hit. But other songs were love songs, like “The Warmth of the Sun” or “Keep an Eye on Summer.” Thirty-five years after we did Shut Down Volume 2, I rerecorded “Keep an Eye on Summer” for Imagination. Remaking a song is strange, especially when it’s a song you did when you were young. You try to remember the things about it that made you happy the first time so you can get some of those feelings into your singing. Otherwise it’s just new technology and new musicians doing the same song. Another thing about a remake is that you’re aiming at a target. The second “Keep an Eye on Summer,” even if it had different ideas from Joe Thomas or me, was still trying to get parts of the original. The original was the bull’s-eye.
It was completely different when we took songs in for the first time. When we showed up at the studio with a song I had written, there wasn’t any bull’s-eye yet. We were firing arrow after arrow. There wasn’t any foundation yet. We were pouring concrete. When I try to think of an example of how that worked, I think about the crazy year of 1964, and I think about one of the most important songs from that crazy year, “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man).” We did that song in early August, and it was out by the end of the month. That’s how fast everything went back then. The building was going up overnight.
We did that song at Western, too, in room three, which was the best. We did almost forty takes over six days. Can you believe that, forty takes? You can hear me counting each one out. Sometimes we got as far as a few bass notes from Al Jardine before it fell apart. Sometimes we got through my first piano part. We didn’t even get to the vocals for a while, but when we did, those gave me fits, too. I wanted it to sound like an update of the Four Freshmen, but my voice sounded too thin. People tell me you can find those tapes sometimes circulating around, with names like “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man) (2nd vocal overdub take 14).” It’s exhausting to look at, and to think of how far we went in search of the perfect thing. We didn’t know we were making history. But that’s what we were making.
Sometimes, even when I worked as hard as I could, I didn’t line up with the rest of the band. Sometime during that crazy year, I wrote a song with Russ Titelman called “Guess I’m Dumb.” It took a while to get it right because I was trying something more adult. I was trying to score a Burt Bacharach vibe. I think we did twenty-three takes of that one. When I was finished, no one from the band wanted to sing it. The message was okay, but maybe it was just the idea of being dumb. Glen Campbell had been singing my parts in concerts so I gave it to him.
The way I act don’t seem like me
I’m not on top like I used to be
I’ll give in when I know I should be strong
I still give in even though I know it’s wrong
I guess I’m dumb but I don’t care
It’s a sad song, and also one that was easy to think about when I was in charge of the band. Later on, when I didn’t run the band as much, it was difficult for me to listen to. The Beach Boys never recorded it, but Glen played it in concert for most of his career.
There are so many songs from that period they seem like one big song. We’re singing that same song. All year long I picked things up and tried to make them into songs. Usually I didn’t even have time to really look at what I was picking up. In summer 1964 we put out All Summer Long. There is a real maturing of our sound on that record. There’s a start-stop cadence on “I Get Around” with a driving bass. Nobody had done a record like that before. There’s a great instrumental break on the title song, all these subtle shifts that then feed back into a really stellar group harmony. In “Little Honda” I used a fuzz-tone bass. Carl thought it sounded like shit, but I knew it would be great. Our last real surf-type song, “Girls on the Beach,” is on that record. Dennis does a nice job on the bridge, and our harmonies are just out of sight. That whole album is a turning point for me and for the band—or maybe it makes more sense to say it’s a turning point for how I understood how to write for the band.
After that we rolled right into our Christmas album, and after that I got on the plane to go to Houston. Houston and everything that came after it was a change, definitely, because after that I started to use the studio differently. I tried to take the things I had learned from Phil Spector and use more instruments whenever I could. I doubled up on basses and tripled up on keyboards. That made everything sound bigger and deeper. I was able to do more ballads and give them their own feel. The Beach Boys Today!, which came out in early 1965, was made both before and after Houston. It was the first time I could do songs like “Please Let Me Wonder” that had all this space in them. I was also smoking a little bit of pot then, and that changed the way I heard arrangements.
Chuck Britz was our engineer on those records. He liked the way I worked, to have ideas coming in and then add more ideas, and put everything in place right away. He wasn’t the kind of person to linger in the studio and
wait for inspiration. I remember him telling Mike that he needed to stay focused. “You can’t screw around because I gotta go in a half hour,” he’d say. And he meant it, too. If Mike didn’t listen, Chuck would just split.
But that was also the beginning of control issues. Capitol didn’t get the hits they wanted from The Beach Boys Today! The songs were great. Everyone thought so. “Do You Wanna Dance?” and “Dance, Dance, Dance” were successful. But they weren’t successful the way Capitol imagined. They imagined a situation where the tower of hits would just keep going higher and higher. After The Beach Boys Today!, they put pressure on us to bring them big sales. If it’s what they wanted, it’s what I wanted to give them. The next record, Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!), was probably our best rock and roll album. It had “Help Me, Rhonda,” a song Al sang lead on that was a remake of a song from The Beach Boys Today! It went to number one. That was one of the hits that Capitol wanted. There was another big hit on that album, but I don’t remember what it was at the moment. Oh, I remember: “California Girls.” I was just joking. How could I forget “California Girls”? It’s one of my favorite songs of anything we ever did. It’s our anthem song. If you ask people to name one Beach Boys song, that’s probably the one they’ll name.
The idea of “California Girls” is that there’s this guy who thinks about girls all the time, so much that he starts to imagine all kinds. But there’s only one kind he really wants, and that’s the kind that’s right there at home. The music started off like those old cowboy movies, when the hero’s riding slowly into town, bum-ba-dee-dah. I was playing that at the piano after an acid trip. I played it until I almost couldn’t hear what I was playing, and then I saw the melody hovering over the piano part.
