by Brian Wilson
But I got suspended from school
(Blew my cool)
I’m bugged at my ol’ man
And he doesn’t even know where it’s at
—“I’m Bugged at My Ol’ Man”
We were going to a Four Freshmen show. What a dream. It wasn’t the original Four Freshmen. It was the Four Freshmen the way they were in the twenty-first century: not young men anymore, not even older men performing the hits of their youth, but new members singing those great old songs. Bob Flanigan, one of the original members and the guy who really taught me to sing falsetto, was overseeing the whole operation, and the new Freshmen he hired were guys in their thirties and forties. I was in a car with Ray Lawlor and Jeff Foskett, and we were driving down to Newport Beach to see them sing.
When we got to the show, we sat down outside in folding chairs arranged around round tables. “I’ll have a margarita,” I said, “and double the alcohol.” Jeff looked at me funny. When the waiter left, Ray got up to go to the bathroom. I wondered if he was really going to the bathroom. When I ordered drinks, sometimes my friends would follow the waiter and try to fix the drink so it didn’t have any booze in it, or if I ordered a beer they would try to get the restaurant to bring me an O’Doul’s instead. But Ray didn’t go for the waiter, and I got my real drink. There was no need for anyone to worry anyway. I wasn’t in the mood to gulp it down and go for another one. I just sipped at it.
The Four Freshmen came out and started singing their hits. They did “Graduation Day” and “It’s a Blue World.” Midway through the first half of the show, one of the Freshmen held his hand up across his eyebrows like he was trying to find land from a ship. “I hear we have a special guy in the audience tonight,” he said. “We’ve made some good records, but he’s not a bad record producer himself.” Then he said my name and the whole audience applauded. I waved—not at the Freshman who had called my name or at anyone in particular, but at everyone.
I first heard the Freshmen on the radio in the late ’50s in Hawthorne. They were young voices back then, when I was even younger. When I paid close attention to their songs, they fell apart a little. I don’t mean that they broke down, only that when I really gave it my all, I could hear all the different voices that made up the one sound of the group. To hear them all, I had to go close to my radio and put my left ear almost right up against the speaker. It was my only good ear. When I made sense of all the parts and layers, I gave them to Dennis and Carl and Mike and whoever else was around.
“Graduation Day” is one of the songs I remember best. It was about leaving school and being sad to go, but always having happy memories of the place. For that one, a neighbor kid named John came and sang with us. It was a song I always loved and kept with me. When I got an honorary doctorate in music in 2003 from Northeastern University in Boston, I used that song again. The degree ceremony was early in the morning, and we were playing a show in Boston that night. The other honorary degrees went to Christine Todd Whitman, the former governor of New Jersey, and the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. I see him all the time on TV. I knew that the honorary doctors were supposed to give speeches, but speaking has never been my strong suit. During the event, Christine Todd Whitman spoke. Neil deGrasse Tyson spoke. They were both great—very inspirational. When it was my turn, I called out four guys from my band—Jeff Foskett, Nicky Wonder, Probyn Gregory, and Gary Griffin—and we did a five-part harmony version of “Graduation Day.” We got a huge ovation. Then I leaned into the mic and said, “Congratulations and drive home safely.”
It wasn’t until we got in the car that I spoke again. “Goddamn, guys,” I said. “Did you hear those harmonics?” I hope the kids at Northeastern got something from them. There’s so much to get. If you can hit them right, you have everything you need in the world, just for a moment. It’s a trip to not just remember that song but to remember all the acts that did a version of it: the Rover Boys, the Lennon Sisters, Bobby Pickett. They’re all from another time. Later, the Beach Boys sang a version of it as the B-side to “Be True to Your School.” In Newport Beach, when the Four Freshmen sang, “Sit there and count your fingers,” I almost stood up out of my chair. That was the beginning to “Little Girl Blue,” which is one of their best songs. Rodgers and Hart wrote it and almost every singer sang it: Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Nina Simone, Janis Joplin. Frank Sinatra sang it on Songs for Young Lovers, one of his best albums. But the way the Four Freshmen did it meant the most to me. There was just something magical about those voices working together, making a song that went straight to the heart of everyone listening. It’s one of the things that helped me write “Surfer Girl.” When my dad heard “Surfer Girl,” he told me to write more songs like it. It wasn’t that he didn’t think it was good enough. It was the opposite. He thought it was good enough, and he thought I needed to do more. So in a way, the Four Freshmen were responsible for it all.
I went backstage at intermission to say hello to the Four Freshmen. I told them how I first heard them on a demonstration record at a department store. It wasn’t those Four Freshmen, of course, but I liked pretending. It was a kind of time machine. I was in my sixties, and I was seeing the singers I loved when I was in my teens, but they were the same age they were back then. One of the singers—I think it was Bob Ferreira, who sang bass—came up to me. “Will you sing with us?” he asked.
I froze. “Uh,” I said. I wasn’t ready to go onstage. I wasn’t as nervous about it as I once was, but I needed to prepare. I had a ritual.
He noticed the look on my face. “No, no,” he said. “Just back here in the dressing room.”
“Oh, right,” I said. “I knew that.”
He laughed. My entire body relaxed. We did “Their Hearts Were Full of Spring.” It was an amazing feeling. It’s a beautifully sad love story about a boy and a girl who become husband and wife. Even death can’t put an end to their love:
Then one day they died
And their graves were side by side
On a hill where robins sing
And they say violets
Grow there the whole year round
For their hearts were full of spring
The Beach Boys recorded that song, too. We did it on Little Deuce Coupe, though Mike changed the lyrics so they were about James Dean and how he died in a car crash. We renamed it “A Young Man Is Gone.” It was a cautionary tale on a hot-rod album.
I told everyone about “A Young Man Is Gone” in the car on the way back from Newport Beach, and then went through everything I remembered about James Dean. He was trying to get to Salinas for a car race, and he decided to drive up from LA to put some miles on his new Porsche. Near Paso Robles, a Ford Tudor made a bad turn and got trapped in the middle of the intersection. James Dean smashed into the side of the Ford, broke his neck, and died. It was a terrible story, but it was part of American history.
Dean died in 1955, which was the same year I got my hands on Four Freshmen and 5 Trombones, the first album I ever bought. It had two beautiful Gershwin songs on it, “Somebody Loves Me” and “Love Is Here to Stay.” I remember the cover so well. The bells of the trombones were pointed outward and it made the cover look like Olympic rings, except that there were two on the top and three on the bottom. The Freshmen were shrunken down tiny and standing on one of the trombones’ slide. It was like a better version of 15 Big Ones. That Four Freshmen album was on Capitol Records, just like we were later.
I was so jazzed from seeing the Four Freshmen and thinking about how things started and ended and connected in between that at one point I turned to everyone in the car and said, “That was the best day I had in my life.” I had to say it out loud because I meant it so much.
That Four Freshmen concert in Newport Beach made me happy, but the more I thought about it, the more I felt sad, too, because thinking about my childhood in Hawthorne made me think about my dad. Thinking about my dad was the big can of worms. I started young and I got older, but he stayed one of the most importan
t people in my life, in good ways and bad. He could be generous and guide me toward great things, but he could also be brutal and belittle me and sometimes even make me regret that I was alive. I learned all those things when I was too young to understand them. Maybe they are the kinds of things that you’re never supposed to understand.
I had seen the Four Freshmen with my dad, too, when I was young. One day I was coming downstairs and my dad was getting his coat and his hat. “Come with me,” he said, but he didn’t say where we were going until we were in the car driving away from the house. “It’s a Four Freshmen concert,” he said. I was real nervous. I didn’t know what it would be like to see them singing live. Would they make the same music I knew from the radio? Would it be different? Would it be disappointing?
The concert was great. It was like the concert when I was older, except that I was different. I didn’t know what to listen for yet, but I was more amazed by what I was seeing. Afterward, my dad got us backstage. I don’t know how. I don’t think he knew anyone special. He just asked where the stage door was and then acted like we were supposed to be there. He walked right up to the Four Freshmen and introduced himself. “Hi,” he said. “I’m Murry Wilson. This is my son, Brian. He loves your music.” He didn’t push me forward or anything. He just kind of stepped to the side and swept his arm over my head to show me to the Freshmen. They were so gracious. They thanked us for liking them and coming out to see their show. I couldn’t talk. I was locked into a kind of smile.
I said that the Four Freshmen show in Newport Beach was like a time machine. It wasn’t really a time machine. If it was, I would have gone back to the earlier Four Freshmen show and thought less about how I felt and tried to notice more about how my dad felt. It must have been a big meeting for him, too. My dad had a company that sold lathes, but he also loved music. Just like I sang with my brothers, he sang with my mother. He played piano and she played organ. When he was on the piano he was always in a good mood. That’s why we loved watching them sing and play together.
My father didn’t only play other people’s songs. He also wrote songs of his own. My dad didn’t do it until he already had kids and a job. He was in his thirties by then, and he liked the kind of music that was popular around Los Angeles: big band music that grown-ups listened to when they went out to nightclubs. He imagined his songs finding their way into the hands of bandleaders like Tommy Dorsey or Stan Kenton. They were good songs, too. There was one that went, “When a bee loses his queen bee / His days are numbered / It’s true.” One of his melodies was so beautiful, for a song called “His Little Darling and You.” Sometimes in school I would think about it and get tears in my eyes. People ask what made it a good song. He did. My dad did.
Most of his songs were love songs, but he wrote faster songs also. He had one called “Two-Step Side-Step” that was a dance song:
Two-step side-step
Two-step side-step
Throw my girl away
At the dance last Saturday night
He loved that song. He wanted the world to hear it. He worked all the channels that any songwriter would. He called people on the phone and sent letters in the mail and talked to people at parties. At one point someone got his song through to Lawrence Welk, and word came back that they were going to play it on the show. When he announced it to the family, I burst into tears. I was so touched that his work had paid off. It was something he wanted so much, and it was happening. We all sat down and watched the show. It was in the middle of dinner and we stopped eating and went to the television in the living room.
Lawrence Welk came on. I could hardly breathe. I was ten years old and I knew I was about to hear my dad’s name on the television. “We’re going to have a band now play a song by Murry Wilson,” Lawrence Welk said. “It’s called ‘Two-Step Side-Step.’” My dad was beaming. He smoked a pipe and usually wore his glasses, partly because when he was younger he had worked at Goodyear and there was an accident and he lost his left eye. He had a glass one. He was also losing his hair from pretty early on. Because of all that he always looked older, like a dad, but for a second he looked younger. “How ’bout that?” he said. He couldn’t stop smiling. “The great Murry Wilson.” The song ended, but it wasn’t the end of the song. A man named Johnnie Lee Wills did a country version of it a few years later, and then a woman named Bonnie Lou did a rockabilly version. This was in the 1950s, long before there was any Beach Boys or even Pendletones, and we already had a songwriter in the house.
The great Murry Wilson. Lots of things have been written about my dad and the way he treated me and my brothers. Lots of them are true. Some of them are dirty lies. But even the things that are true aren’t always what they seem. I have said how hard it is for me to talk about my dad, and that’s partly because I want to get it right. He’s not here to explain himself. He’s been gone for decades. My mom’s gone, too. Carl’s gone and Dennis is gone. I’m the only one from that Hawthorne house left in the world. And because of that, I want to try to do the best to explain my dad. Explaining doesn’t just mean telling stories or remembering things he did and said. Explaining also means understanding. I have to try to understand him.
My dad’s love for music was a gift he gave to all of us Wilson kids, but there were other gifts, too. My dad got me lots of things. He got me clothes. He got me cars. He got me presents every single Christmas. My dad also took things away, by being rough and demanding. He asked for so much from you and kept asking when you thought you had given him everything you could. He sold lathes and drills that he imported from England, and he used to take us to work with him on the weekends to clean the machinery. His company was called ABLE, which stood for Always Better Lasting Equipment. I didn’t like being dragged to ABLE to work on the weekend. I wanted to go play football or baseball or hang out at the house, but most Saturdays my dad would stand up after breakfast in a way that made me see where I was headed for the day. That began when I was just barely a teenager, when he started his company, and went on for years. It taught me two things at once, which was to understand how to do hard work and also to like time to myself to sit around and be busy doing nothing. Lots of things about my dad are like that, two things at once, two opposite things.
When I was barely a teenager, I was afraid of my dad. He yelled at me all the time and it made me nervous. He was not only a tough guy but also rough. He was rough with all of us, me and my brothers—he grabbed us by the arms and shoved us and hit us with hands that were sometimes open and sometimes even closed. When I went to school I would think everyone was my dad. It was a little trick I played to keep myself in line. Then one afternoon I went home and cried and decided that I wasn’t going to be afraid of my dad anymore. I didn’t tell anyone else. I’m not even sure I said anything to Dennis or Carl, about being afraid or not being afraid. That’s not how things went back then in Hawthorne. Everyone thought it was better to keep those kinds of things inside.
My dad was violent. He was cruel. What makes people that way? Maybe he was rough because he had a rough life. When my dad came to California from Kansas with his dad, my granddad, they were real poor, to the point that they had to live on a beach in a tent. That was in San Diego. My mom might have told me that. I didn’t hear it from my dad. He thought it was better to keep those kinds of things inside, too. Buddy, my dad’s dad, was a hard guy to get to know, especially when I was a kid, but as I have gotten older I see that he had some of the same personality I have, and some of the same hard time with it. He loved music and he was good at it. He sometimes drank too much. He had trouble with his moods. One thing that makes us different is the way we deal with anger. I always kept it inside, or if I did let it out I kicked a can or punched a wall. I was usually lucky enough not to get the stud. But Buddy wasn’t always very nice to my dad. There was a story that once my dad did something that made his dad angry, and Buddy swung a lead pipe at the side of my dad’s head. His ear was hanging off. They rushed him to the doctor and eventually it was oka
y again.
I wasn’t there for that, obviously. It happened long before I was born. But things repeat, and they repeat in strange ways. When I was out playing in my neighborhood, between my house and another, a kid hit me in the head with a lead pipe. His name was Seymour, I think, either his first or his last. The feeling was just shock at first, but the next day I realized that I couldn’t hear as well out of my right ear. I told my mom and she took me to the doctor, who examined me and said that the eighth nerve in my head was severed. I say that my right ear’s completely deaf, though doctors are more specific. Some say 98 percent and some say 95 percent.
The ear affected me deeply for the rest of my life. When I was a kid, whenever my mom would talk to me I would turn the left side of my head toward her. It was like I was tuning a radio station. It also affected the way I spoke. I couldn’t hear myself out of the right side, so I started to push the speaking over to the other side of my mouth. It made me look lopsided, like I was coming from the dentist with one side numbed out from novocaine. In old films of the Beach Boys performing, there are some cases where the crooked mouth is very pronounced. I’ve seen film of Munich in 1964 where it almost looks like I had a stroke. Over the years I have learned to give people instructions when they first come speak to me: move to the left side or, if you have to be on the right, lean around.
But the ear helps to create the music, too. When I make music I make mono music. I can only hear out of one side, which means that it’s already mixed down. That one ear is doing all the work. Maybe limits help you to focus, in a way. Beethoven was deaf, of course. Bill Haley was blind in one eye. Maybe that’s not the same thing. I know I have learned to work with my ears the way they are, and I think I hear fully with whatever partial hearing I have. I don’t go around collecting things that people say about me, but there is one I like. It’s from Bob Dylan, and it’s one of the nicest compliments, and one of the funniest. “That ear—I mean, Jesus,” he said, “he’s got to will that to the Smithsonian.” I might.
