I Am Brian Wilson

by Brian Wilson

  One day begins

  Another ends

  I live them all and back again

  Summer’s gone

  I’m gonna sit and watch the waves

  We laugh, we cry

  We live then die

  And dream about our yesterday

  Working as a group again wasn’t only about thinking through the past and dreaming about the future. It was business, which meant that it included every other part of record making. We had a cumbersome photo shoot out by the beach where we all had to roll up our pants so they wouldn’t get wet. I knew what they were going for, but I wish they wouldn’t have gone for it. It was a fright. Then we took the show on the road. We premiered on the Grammy Awards, singing “Good Vibrations.” I felt great about it. I wasn’t even that nervous that time. I sounded good to myself in the hall.

  We sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Surfer Girl” at Dodger Stadium at the beginning of April. And then we were off, on the real tour: Tucson, Grand Prairie, New Orleans, Atlanta, Raleigh. The tour lasted almost five months. We did seventy-two concerts. It was almost one a year for my age. We did two nights in New York. We did two nights in Chicago. And that was just the United States. We went all over the world after that: to Spain and Italy and Sweden and Norway, and then to Japan and Singapore and Hong Kong. We went to Australia, of course. We had to go to Australia. And then we finished up in England, playing two of the most famous venues in London: one night at the Royal Albert Hall and one night at Wembley Arena. Between those shows Melinda and I threw a dinner for the whole band and crew at an Italian place in London. We wanted to celebrate the whole thing and all the great feelings. Mike and Bruce Johnston didn’t come to that, which bummed me out.

  Every night we played some new songs and some old songs. We did right by them. We also did right by Carl and Dennis by including old footage of them on video and singing along with it. Carl got to sing “God Only Knows,” of course. Dennis got to sing “Forever,” from Sunflower. It almost made me cry when I heard the song from the stage, the same way my dad’s song “His Little Darling and You” made me cry back when I was in grade school. “Forever” was so beautiful. And even more than that, it was like a prediction. It was a song about going away from the people you love but keeping that love for them. Dennis wrote it more than ten years before he left, but it was almost like he knew what would happen. Singing that along with him was a real thrill.

  If every word I said

  Could make you laugh

  I’d talk forever (together my love)

  I ask the sky just what we had

  It shone forever (together my love)

  If the song I sing to you

  Could fill your heart with joy

  I’d sing forever (together my love my my my my)

  Forever

  I’ve been so happy loving you

  Let the love I have for you

  Live in your heart

  And beat forever (together my love)

  Forever

  Forever

  I’ve been so happy loving you

  Baby just let me sing it, my baby

  I wanna be singin’, my baby

  So I’m goin’ away

  But not forever

  Na na na na

  I gotta love you anyway

  Forever

  The tour wasn’t always easy. I had to be Johnny-on-the-spot. I had to get every cue and pay attention to things I hadn’t paid attention to in decades. And my back was getting worse and worse. Doctors gave me cortisone shots to ease the pain, and they worked a little bit. But easing it isn’t the same as making it go away. I had trouble walking, though fans may not have really noticed; I was at the piano bench the whole time anyway.

  But mostly I had the time of my life. Mostly I loved it. Everyone was together, singing songs we made when we were together, and that made me happy. That made me whole. I remember on one of the tour stops we had dinner. We were all there. Mike was there. If you closed your eyes you could almost forget the year. There were times that I wanted it to keep going forever, just like Dennis sang.

  That tour ended in a weird way. We had played all the dates we were supposed to, but we were doing such a great job that offers started coming in to extend the tour. I would have done it, but Mike didn’t want to do it. He went back to the way things were before, where he was touring with the Beach Boys name. He said he wanted to play smaller markets. And that was the end of the fiftieth reunion.

  It took me a long time to come down from that tour. I came down hard. I was thinking about everything we had started again. I thought we were having the time of our lives. And then I started realizing that it was probably really over this time. Summer was probably gone. And that’s sad. I would love to hear Mike sing some real rock and roll. It would be a big thrill. Maybe we’ll do “Chapel of Love” again one day. But maybe not.

  After that, Joe Thomas helped arrange a joint tour for me and Jeff Beck. Jeff is a virtuoso guitarist and has been for a half century; he was inspired by Cliff Gallup, the guitarist for Gene Vincent, but he took things so much further. Jeff has always been able to do amazing things. He puts so many notes into each bar. I love the complexity he brings to his music. But our tour was very difficult. It had a strange vibe from the start, and it never evened out. Jeff’s guitar sound, for some reason, was annoying to me. There were too many times that set lists changed or energy shifted. I never got firm footing. We worked on a few tracks in the studio with Jeff, but they didn’t get finished the way I wanted them to. They weren’t up to standard. We didn’t use them. As hard as that tour was, I got through it. I gave myself a nickname that helped me realize every hard part was just a corner to turn: Brian Willpower Wilson. It reminded me that the only way to go was forward. And I did get to play “Danny Boy” onstage with Jeff. What a beautiful song.

  And then it was 2014, which was another fifty-year anniversary—not fifty years since the band started but fifty years since 1964, the year of everything. I thought about the way 1964 started, with so much promise. I thought about how much work we did: the albums, the shows, the interviews, the rehearsals. It seems like we fit ten years into that year. And then I thought about the way it ended, on that flight to Houston. It was always that cycle: always doubts, but always making sure that I got past those doubts. Any time in my life I thought the bad feelings or the harmful voices had gone away completely, they came back. But as Melinda taught me, any time they came back, they went away. I had to keep going, whether it was fifty years or fifty-two or more. I didn’t know anything else to do. Brian Willpower Wilson.

  And then I bounced back from that period of exhaustion. I bounced back into the studio. I was working with Joe Thomas again after That’s Why God Made the Radio. We decided that I would sing with younger singers, mostly women. I wrote new songs that sounded like old songs, and I put some young voices on them. Zooey Deschanel was good to work with. She had a real sweet voice. Kacey Musgraves moved right into the song she did, “Guess You Had to Be There.” It took her only three takes. And she did something nice when she sang, a kind of gliding. That’s a sound I always liked. You don’t need to get down in the weeds of a song. Sometimes you let it move smoothly under you.

  When I had fourteen songs, I decided that was an album. I called the record No Pier Pressure, partly because of the cover art, which was based on a picture of the Santa Monica Pier that my daughter Daria took. It was also a little bit of a pun. I wanted to think about being free of the pressure to go back to the idea of the Beach Boys or people’s ideas of rock and roll.

  But I didn’t just sing with young female singers. I also sang with some of the old guys. Al Jardine was on there. It was great to sing with him again. It brought me back to the good sound we used to have. Al’s best-known vocals in the old days were “Then I Kissed Her” and “Help Me, Rhonda,” but my favorite was the singing he did on Holland, on “The Beaks of Eagles.” There’s a lyric that’s just beautiful: “In dawn’s new light
a man might venture.” I sang a song called “Whatever Happened” with Al and his son Matt, and another one called “Sail Away” with Blondie Chaplin. Blondie had been with the band back around Holland and Carl and the Passions—So Tough, where he sang songs like “Here She Comes” and “Hold On Dear Brother.” Al and Blondie sounded incredible on No Pier Pressure. Voices get older but they keep their spirit.

  When it came time for the last song, I knew what I would call it. I called it “The Last Song.” Like with “When You Wish Upon a Star” on the Disney record, like with “Summer’s Gone” on That’s Why God Made the Radio, I wasn’t sure if it would really be the last song, but there was a greater chance each time I made a record. Lana Del Rey was supposed to sing it, and she started, but something happened and she wasn’t able to come back and finish her vocals. The funny thing about “The Last Song” is that it wasn’t really a song about things finishing up as it was about things continuing:

  Don’t let go

  There’s still time for us so let’s take it slow

  I wish that I could give you so much more

  Far away

  And maybe we’ll be coming back someday

  Together in the end

  To sing with you again

  “The Last Song” ended with a sad line that was also true: “There’s never enough time for the ones that you love.” When I sang that, I thought about everyone. I thought about the ones who were gone and the ones who will be here when I am gone. I thought about Carl and Dennis. I thought about my mom and my dad. I thought about Wendy and Carnie and Marilyn. I thought about Melinda, Daria, Delanie, Dylan, Dash, and Dakota Rose. I thought of everyone, and I wondered if everyone ever thought of me.

  Friends came to the house to have dinner with me and Melinda: Jerry and Lois Weiss and Ray and some others. We ate early and then got ready to go. “We’re leaving the house at six thirty,” I said. And then I said it again, as a question: “Six thirty?”

  Jerry was used to that from the road. He was used to me asking about the time over and over again. “Right,” he said. “About fifteen minutes.” But it was thirteen minutes.

  We were going to see Love and Mercy, the movie about my life. It wasn’t the first time someone had tried to make a movie like that. Dr. Landy had tried to get something started where William Hurt played me and Richard Dreyfuss played Dr. Landy. Then there was Grace of My Heart, which was really more a movie about Carole King’s life, or someone like her. There was a character played by Matt Dillon who was someone like me. I wrote “Gettin’ in Over My Head” for it and sent it to them, though they didn’t end up using it. Then Don Was did the documentary about me, I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times, and after we were done he told me that he thought there was more story there. He brought around a guy named Marvin Worth, a producer who had done a bunch of movies, including Lenny, the movie about Lenny Bruce that starred Dustin Hoffman.

  Marvin decided that he wanted to do a movie of my life. We talked about it, and he had someone write a script, but then he passed away. The movie got shuffled around, moved from person to person, and eventually Marvin’s wife took over and brought Rob Reiner to meet with us. Rob Reiner really wanted to make the movie, but he wasn’t sure how to do it. It was like his SMiLE, almost; all the things that it could be started to overwhelm him. The movie went away for a while. No one was really thinking about it. In the meantime there was a TV movie called The Beach Boys: An American Family that Melinda didn’t even let me see. She told me that it didn’t show how I really was, or how I had ever really been. She said the movie made me seem unaware when, if anything, I was too aware, that it made me seem insensitive when, if anything, I was too sensitive. And since I was too sensitive, she said, there was no real reason to show it to me. That was what Melinda did then and what she always does. In the twenty years we’ve been married, she looks out for me and makes sure that certain things that might hurt me or ruin my mood don’t get through. The actor John Stamos, who is a huge Beach Boys fan and was involved in that movie, even apologized to Melinda for how I ended up looking.

  A few years after the TV movie aired, Warner Brothers got the feature film project to a guy named Bill Pohlad, who had produced movies like Brokeback Mountain and Into the Wild. Bill was really interested in getting the project moving again, though he wanted to have someone write a new script. Melinda and I were completely on board. We thought it was a chance to be honest about everything that had happened in my life. Bill hired a writer named Oren Moverman, and as Oren worked on the script, he and Bill started to talk about directors. Oren thought Bill would be the best director for it, even though he had never directed. “You should do it,” Oren said. Bill said he couldn’t imagine really doing it. One day Bill called and asked us what we thought about him directing. I was so happy. I knew he was the right guy for it. He just had the right ideas, and even though he loved the music I made, he wasn’t such an obsessive fan that he was afraid to make the movie his own.

  The movie was built as a two-track story. It was about two periods in my life, mostly: the time before and including Pet Sounds in the ’60s, and the time with Dr. Landy in the ’80s. Paul Dano played me when I was young. John Cusack played me when I was older. Elizabeth Banks played Melinda. Paul Giamatti played Dr. Landy. The movie went back and forth between those two periods and tried to show how lots of the other problems in my life, especially drugs and alcohol, were connected to mental illness. That was the story underneath everything. It was the story underneath the movie, like it’s the story underneath this book, because it’s the story underneath my life. I wanted to tell it as fully as possible.

  As the movie went along, Bill wanted to involve me in the music, but I didn’t want to get too much into it. Atticus Ross was doing the score, and he was weaving together pieces of old songs. But Bill kept asking. He said he wanted one love song for Melinda. I eventually did it to please him. The best way for me to approach it was to think of it as just another song, with a purpose and a deadline. I wrote one song called “Whatever Happened” that Bill wasn’t sure about, and then another song called “One Kind of Love.” That one Bill really liked, and he took it for the movie. When it came time for the final version, he had a hard time figuring out where to put it. I thought maybe it should play over the end credits, but he wanted “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” for that spot and he wouldn’t budge. It ended up going into a scene where Melinda and I were driving. It came out of the car radio.

  So friends came for dinner. I don’t remember what we ate that night. Then we all went to see the movie at a theater in Hollywood. My daughter Wendy was there, too. It wasn’t the official Hollywood premiere—that was later, and all the actors came to that, along with my daughter Carnie. But it was the first time I saw the whole movie, and I was really proud.

  The movie wasn’t easy to watch. It was about the bad parts of my life as much as the good parts. The worst were the scenes with Dr. Landy, when he would yell at me. There were a couple of moments when some of what was onscreen was so intense that Melinda had to put her hand on my leg. But I watched the whole thing straight through. There were exciting scenes about creating Pet Sounds and also some softer scenes that showed how I was struggling with mental illness even back then. I liked one quiet scene especially, a scene where Paul Dano, playing the younger version of me, leaves the studio and goes to the parking lot to smoke a cigarette. Hal Blaine is out there, too, and he and I have a conversation about making things, and how it’s not easy but it’s worth it, and how talent has to be nurtured and protected. I liked that scene because it reminded me of one of the reasons I kept going all those years. I kept going to protect my love for music, and eventually I found people who could help protect me also.

  Afterward the theater was quiet. Slowly people started talking. Wendy was saying that there was so much she didn’t know about the Landy years. “I had no idea,” she said.

  Finally Melinda turned to me. “Are you okay with it?” she asked.

  �
�I’m fine,” I said. “Living it was so much worse.”

  The final scene in the movie showed me and Melinda holding hands, looking at the empty lot in Hawthorne where my house used to be. That was a way to finish the movie, but it wasn’t how the real story ended. It ended with me marrying Melinda and being with her and being happy that I was with her. It ended with adopting kids and making more records. It ended with meeting friends at my house and agreeing to go see the movie. And then it ended with me walking out of the theater, still going, still there. I was proud of what the movie showed. It didn’t try to pretend that I was a different kind of person, either better or worse. It didn’t look away from mental illness, but it also didn’t make me into a cartoon nut who went into his bedroom for years while his bandmates traveled around the world making music.

  Having the real story out there was very appealing to me, because it did a job that was hard for me to do in conversations or interviews. I wasn’t usually the kind of guy who would make a big deal about correcting a misunderstanding. If someone got the wrong idea about me, I might agree with the wrong story just to get out of the conversation. But the movie put it all out there. It was honest about everything I went through, and how I survived it. And for me, that was the other main point. Survival was the other main point. Finding ways to make it through was the point. If my life helped people get to the point where they could have that thought, too, that made the movie valuable.

  When people started saying that the movie was good and might get some awards, I was excited that “One Kind of Love” might get awards, too. When it got a Golden Globe nomination, I was excited to see what would happen with the Oscars. What happened was disappointing. As it turned out, the song wasn’t eligible for an Oscar nomination. The Academy had strict rules about what songs were eligible. Either a song had to be shown over the first end titles or it had to be in the body of the movie for at least forty seconds, in a way that moved the movie along from scene to scene. I was disappointed because without those rules the song seemed like it would be a shoo-in for a nomination. But we got to go to the Golden Globes, and that was really fun. We lost to “Writing’s on the Wall,” the song that Sam Smith did for the James Bond movie Spectre. That was funny in a way because fifty years before, the instrumental title song for Pet Sounds was originally written as a James Bond theme. It was called “Run James Run.” That was the one where the percussion was Richie Frost playing on two empty Coca-Cola cans. There was no percussion like that on “Writing’s on the Wall.”