by Brian Wilson
That’s the album we started, a way of collecting poetry and sounds and myths and making a perfect thing from them. I was trying to create a spiritual vibe and love for the listener. It was partly about forgetting the ego, which is the reason all the letters are capitalized except for the lowercase i. I was trying to put my arms around everything that music could do, which was everything. “Heroes and Villains” is probably the best song in the whole project, and one of the best songs we ever made. There’s such a genius in Van Dyke’s lyrics, especially “Heroes and villains / Just see what you’ve done.” It has such perfect rhythm in the words. It pushes itself forward. That’s my favorite song from that set most of the time, but there are other great ones, too. Once someone told me that someone they had met said that “Surf’s Up” was important and really great. “Oh,” I said. “Who?” My head was turned when they said the name so I didn’t really hear. “Say it again,” I said and turned my head the right way. The person who thought it was great was Leonard Bernstein. Can you even imagine?
That album came during the sandbox time. The sandbox is sort of a famous thing. I wanted to have a different way of writing, so I brought a sandbox into the living room and set it up around the piano. In a way it didn’t seem like that big a deal. It was an environment that helped bring in ideas. One of the first songs Van Dyke and I made there was “Wonderful,” which almost felt like a classical piece with lyrics put over the top. I was completely locked in and focused. I knew exactly how the vocals should sound, the way they’re laid over each other like blankets on a bed. “Cabinessence” was another sandbox song, and another America song. Van Dyke wanted to write something about the railroads and how they brought people out to the prairie so they could start farms, homes on the range. And I had an idea for a big whirlwind of voices, just every voice you could imagine. Maybe they were the voices of people from the past. There’s banjo in there to make it sound like the America of the past. I tried to think about what it was like to go out into a completely unsettled place. And “Surf’s Up” is so beautiful. It really is a rhapsody, with all the key changes and tempo shifts. At times it seems like it’s just wandering, but it’s wandering in an amazing way. Van Dyke’s lyrics in that song are great, too:
Hung velvet overtaken me
Dim chandelier awaken me
To a song dissolved in the dawn
People say they’re too complicated or they don’t mean anything, but that’s the thing about poetry. It’s ideas, and it makes you have ideas when you listen to it. For those kinds of lyrics, I never asked Van Dyke what they meant. I sang their meaning the way it seemed to me.
Sometimes we started working on songs and they didn’t get very far past instrumentals with no lyrics or at most a few fragments of lyrics. “Look” was like that. “Child Is Father to the Man” was like that. It was based on something written by Karl Menninger, a psychiatrist who had interesting theories about mental health and mental illness, and how people develop, and when doctors should try to help and when they should keep their distance. He was one of the founders of the Menninger Clinic in Kansas. Someone, maybe Van Dyke, also told me there was a similar idea in a poem by Wordsworth.
Poets and writers sometimes gave me great ideas. One of my favorite books was The Four Loves by C. S. Lewis. It was a great way of looking at all the different ways people express love: romantic love, friendship, charity, and sex. All of them are so important. They’re all things I have used in my life. Charity is especially interesting as an idea because it’s so simple. You share what you have with people who need it, and maybe when you need something, someone will share with you. What could be more pure than that? If I see a bum on the street, I will give him whatever cash I have on me, though I always tell him not to spend it on booze. If a guy asks me for a quarter, I’ll give him a twenty. My daughter Daria says she remembers going to McDonald’s with me once and I gave a homeless guy a hundred dollars. I don’t remember that, but it’s possible. I also play charity shows whenever I can. I should write a song about that, you know? I haven’t managed to do it yet. But I did write a song, “Child Is Father to the Man,” about the Menninger book. That was something.
We were trying so many things. You can say looking back that it was too many, but that wasn’t my concern at the time. I just wanted to reach for the highest heights, and sometimes it was too far over everyone’s head, including my own. There was a song called “The Elements: Fire” that started as a piece about Mrs. O’Leary’s cow, who supposedly kicked over a lantern and started the Great Chicago Fire back in the 1870s. History was funny that way. The idea that one little accident could wipe out a whole city was fascinating. For the recording session, I asked people to come into the studio wearing fire hats. I had a bucket with burning wood so the studio would smell like smoke. What I really wanted to do was record the pops and creaks of the wood while it was burning. But as it turned out, that song never made it. A few days after the recording session, a building near the studio burned down. Two days after that, another building burned. I don’t know if there were more fires or if I was suddenly just noticing them, but it made me uncomfortable. I put the masters away. There are stories that I even tried to burn the tapes, but either that’s not true or I don’t remember it. I don’t think I would have done that. I did sometimes have superstitious habits. During “Time to Get Alone” a few years later, I started worrying that the pollution in LA was messing with my lungs, so I arranged for an oxygen tank to be brought to the studio. But burning things would have been going too far.
The way that “The Elements: Fire” came apart, that’s how the whole thing came apart. There was a line at the end of “Cabinessence” that Van Dyke wrote: “Over and over / The crow cries, uncover the cornfield / Over and over / The thresher and plover, the wheatfield.” Mike sang it over and over, like it said. But he had no idea what it meant, and he didn’t think that Van Dyke could explain it either. I didn’t know what it meant, but I knew that it meant something. Maybe it was just me, but I found it hard to explain anything to Mike, and I wasn’t sure who should be explaining anything to anyone anyway.
And then there was the whole thing with Carl and his draft status. He didn’t want to go to Vietnam so he didn’t report to the draft board. They said he was a draft dodger, and the problem got worse and worse when he refused to do the things they asked of him. He wouldn’t do community service or anything. He had money so he could hire a lawyer, and they fought it out over the years. But it was more trouble at a time when I was trying to bring all the pieces of SMiLE together. It was like putting together a jigsaw puzzle on a wall instead of a tabletop. It kept falling.
I couldn’t tell you the exact day I stepped away. It was almost fifty years ago. But at some point I knew SMiLE was done—or rather, that I was done with SMiLE. It was too much pressure from all sides: from Capitol, from my brothers, from Mike, from my dad, but most of all from myself. We were late in our delivery to Capitol. “Heroes and Villains” was supposed to be the follow-up single to “Good Vibrations.” The label wanted it by Christmas, but it wasn’t ready. Nothing was ready. Van Dyke had already split the scene, and there were still holes in the lyrics of other tracks. No one could do them like Van Dyke, which meant that no one could do them at all. I tried but they were too sophisticated. I couldn’t come close. And with no lyrics, we had no way to do our vocals. The rest of it was just chaos. I didn’t know which fragment went with “Cabinessence” or “Do You Like Worms?” I didn’t know how to finish “Surf’s Up.” It was all over the place. It was too rhapsodic.
And the voices were everywhere. I heard Phil Spector’s voice, talking to me about whether I could do something as complicated as his records. I heard my dad’s voice: “What’s the matter, buddy? No guts? Too scared to finish it? Can’t do it, can you? I told you that this so-called masterpiece of yours was going nowhere.” And I heard the other voices, the ones that wanted to do me harm. We’re coming for you, Brian. I heard them more and more. The band ne
eded to move forward, to grow. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it the way I wanted to, and then I couldn’t do it at all. I just chucked it.
SMiLE eventually had a happy ending. But it was a long eventually. For years it wasn’t happy at all. When I couldn’t finish it, I went into a period where the bad things seemed to happen more and more. There were more fights with the rest of the band and more drugs and more voices in my head. When I think of that period, I think more about Pet Sounds than about SMiLE, and I think about “Caroline, No,” which was sort of about Marilyn, but, as time went on, sort of also about me. It was a song that was a story about how you can lose yourself and worry that you will never get yourself back. I know Tony didn’t write it that way, but sometimes I needed it to be that way to help explain things.
Years turned into other years that were the same year. When the band left Capitol for Reprise, when we went to Holland, when my dad died, when I went off to try to do the group California Music—those years, that year, got worse and worse. It got darker and darker, with more voices, more drinking, and more drugs.
The drugs started like they started for lots of people: sort of innocent, not very intense, because they were around, because they were part of what it meant to be a creative person in the ’60s. I first started smoking pot in late 1964. It was great that first time. I had a glass of water and I couldn’t believe it. The water tasted so good, you know? And it made me less nervous, which was always my biggest problem. The first song I wrote when I was smoking was “Please Let Me Wonder.” I got stoned on pot, went to the piano, and I wrote that song in a half hour. Lots of the songs from that period worked that way: “She Knows Me Too Well,” “Let Him Run Wild.” Pot locked me in with my piano, and that gave me more ideas about what it could do. I also heard how instruments sounded when you put them together. If you put the piano and guitar together, it was almost another instrument. The bass and drums were a third thing, not just two things that were going at the same time. I got freed up to think outside of what pop songs were.
Other drugs had different effects. Acid was something else, like I said, because it put voices in my head. That was a bad drug. I’m sorry I did it. I liked Seconals, downers—they were a relax pill. Cocaine came along in the late ’60s, maybe 1969. When I wrote “Sail On Sailor,” there was coke around. I also cowrote, with Al and Mike, “He Come Down,” which sounded like it was about the end of a drug trip but was really more of a gospel thing. That was for Carl and the Passions—So Tough. I love that tune. Mike’s lead is so soulful. Spirituality was the other side of drugs back then, or maybe it was its own kind of drug, in a way. So many people who didn’t like to be in the world the way it was looked for other ways to deal with it. Mike got deep into meditation. He took me to meet the Maharishi, who was a great spiritual master. His speaking voice was very gentle and kind of high-pitched. I started meditating, and it worked great for about a year. It really calmed me down. Then it stopped working. At some point I was so nervous that I couldn’t even relax enough to meditate. That sent me back to drugs.
The drugs weren’t something that I liked for themselves. They were ways of dealing with the fact that my head wasn’t right. But they didn’t solve a thing. With the drugs, in fact, came every other kind of problem. Bad days turned into bad months and then bad years. The music stopped almost completely. Or the music went on without me. During bad years, I hid in my apartment or my house, wherever I happened to be living at the time. I was out of the light, and mostly the light was out of me. Sometimes I had to go to hospitals for a little while, to relax and think—or to relax and not think. It was hard at those hospitals. They were unfamiliar places. The lighting was different than what I was used to, and the sounds were different and I had a hard time sleeping. I stayed up most nights. One of the times I went, in the late ’60s, I was there in bed, trying to get to sleep, and I heard a noise at the door. I turned and there was a guy there with a huge hard-on. I looked away from it, up to the guy’s face, and it looked just like Tonto! I mean the actual Tonto from the TV Lone Ranger show, Jay Silverheels. I wasn’t sure that it was him. He had everything but his horse, Scout. “Are you Tonto?” I said. The guy didn’t say anything. He just stared at me. Then he turned and left the doorway.
The thing about being in a hospital is that you’re stuck in the same room. You see the same door. If you’re at home working, you see the same few doors: the doors of your house, the doors of the studio. If you’re at home not working, you see even fewer doors. You see your bedroom door and maybe the door to your music room. Eventually you only see your bedroom door, and then it’s like another kind of hospital. You have only four walls and whatever you say echoes off them. It’s an echo chamber, but the sounds in it aren’t music. They’re more like the bad voices.
In the ’70s I was home all the time. But what I did when I was home wasn’t necessarily what you were supposed to do when you were home. A father is supposed to come home and ask his kids about their day. Most of the time I didn’t come home. I was already home. And when I went out and came home, I didn’t ask anyone about their day. I was taking speed or doing coke or coming through the door drunk with a cigarette in my hand. I would hug the kids. How did I not get them with the cigarette?
We lived in a house on Bellagio with so much glass. We had a dining room table that got covered with glass. We had stained glass in one of the rooms, a big pattern with a butterfly or a bee. There’s a piece of it on the cover of Wild Honey. We had these big refrigerators that were all glass. Glass was transparent, so I could see what was happening on the other side of it. It was clear when my head was not. Once I painted the house purple, but Marilyn didn’t like it and I had to put it back to its regular color, a kind of cream.
During those years, between making albums, many strange things happened. Sometimes they probably seemed funny to other people. I remember one warm day when I went outside wearing only pants. It didn’t seem like I needed more clothes. Carnie was coming home from school on the bus. I was waiting for her. When I saw the bus, I stepped out in front of it, waving my arms. The driver opened the door. Kids were making noise and he quieted them. “Do you have a cigarette?” I said.
In that house, we had a top-of-the-line stereo with big speakers. I tried to play all the music that was coming out of California. I played the Carpenters. I played the Eagles. I played Fleetwood Mac. I played the Beatles, too, and the Stones, and ELO. I made sure to play “Be My Baby” every single day. The stereo was one of my instruments.
The clock was not. The day had certain times for things, but they weren’t necessarily my times. Meals happened without me. Kids went to school and came back and I might still be in a bathrobe up in the bedroom or downstairs sitting at the piano, still in the bathrobe.
We had visitors. Paul McCartney would come over with Linda and Mary and Stella. Paul was dressed cool then, too. He was in all white leather with these red shoes. The kids went outside to play, and Paul and I sat down at the piano and we sang together. I think we sang “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean.” Sonny and Cher would come over and bring Chastity. John Phillips from the Mamas and the Papas was around, too. We played basketball. Elton John hung out with us sometimes. When Carnie was six, she invited him to her birthday party. He couldn’t come but he sent her back a note with a teddy bear. And once Shaun Cassidy dropped by. The girls really liked that. They screamed and screamed and screamed. Now and again I got out into the world. I ran into Michael Jackson briefly at a party—very nice guy, very pleasant. I met Stevie Wonder a few times, but it was hard for me to get a feel for the kind of guy he was.
We had more visitors. Rich Sloan, my old buddy from Hawthorne, came by. Once we went to Westwood for lunch and I asked him to buy me some cigarettes. I smoked two of them as fast as I could before we got back to the house.
There was so much glass in the house, but the walls between the rooms weren’t glass. You couldn’t see through them, which was good. There were so many bedrooms in the house.
I wasn’t a good husband. Sometimes there were other girls around.
I wasn’t much of a father, but I could be a good father at times. The backyard had a pool and there was an upper level with a pond. We had koi in there. Wendy fell in. Marilyn saw and started yelling and I ran. I didn’t usually run, but I ran that time. I got my hand down in there and got her with one arm and rescued her.
I spanked the kids sometimes. I found cigarettes once in Carnie’s room, maybe a bottle of something. I spanked her and then I was really upset over what I had done. I was crying so hard. But I made them laugh, too. I remember taking them to Farrell’s Ice Cream. Someone ordered the Zoo, which had thirty scoops and weighed something like six pounds. On the menu it said that it served between one and fifteen. I’m sure it was a joke, but I decided to take it seriously for a second. I decided that it served one. I asked them for the serving spoon from the kitchen and tried to eat the whole thing.
Those years are blurred from drinking and drugs, and they’re blurred because of how fast they went by. Once I came home and before I was even inside the door I threw up. Once I started sneaking drinks again with medicine and I fell and hit my head. That scared me. I stopped for a little while. I let my hair grow longer so it covered up the bump and the scrape. A little while later I went back to short hair. I cut it myself. I mean I started to cut it myself, but it was uneven and I went from one side to the other, making it shorter and shorter. I got a haircut that was right down to the head. People said I looked like a soldier. Where did my long hair go? How did I lose that happy glow? It was so sad to watch a sweet thing die.
Even at the worst of it, I tried to get to my kids with music. I tried to create a link with them. I taught them songs on the piano. I taught them “California Girls” and “Sloop John B.” They would ask me how many songs I wrote. I didn’t know. I said hundreds. If they asked me to make up a new one, I would, though it would be about a dog or cigarettes or the weather.
