by Brian Wilson
The most rewarding thing about the whole experience was to see what people took away from the movie, mainly the idea that mental illness should be handled in a humane and straightforward way. It’s a struggle like any struggle. It’s something I’ve had to carry around most of my life, and something that really kept me off balance until I learned how to get my head around it—and to have people around me who helped me do that. So many people wrote us or called to say that the movie helped them deal with similar problems in their own life, with family or friends.
One of the people who wrote was Michelle Obama. She helped set up a partnership between the movie and the Campaign to Change Direction, an organization that encourages people to see mental illness differently. I have met other presidents and First Ladies. I have played for queens. But I’m not sure that I have ever been prouder than when we made that arrangement with Campaign to Change Direction. I mean, I always knew that my music was inspirational. I could always look out into a crowd and see people dancing to “California Girls.” But I didn’t always feel the same way about my life. There were times that I worried about it, that I felt it was shameful, that I felt I couldn’t be honest about the things I was thinking or the voices I was hearing. Making the movie was a challenge because it was an honest self-portrait, and when people responded to it the way they did, it made me proud of my life also. To be told that other people could learn from it and get stronger was even better.
CHAPTER 10
Today
So hard to answer future’s riddle
When ahead is seeming so far behind
So hard to laugh a childlike giggle
When the tears start to torture my mind
So hard to shed the life of before
To let my soul automatically soar
But I hit hard at the battle that’s confronting me, yeah
Knock down all the roadblocks a-stumbling me
Throw off all the shackles that are binding me down
—“Long Promised Road”
I didn’t write “Long Promised Road.” Carl did, with Jack Rieley, for Surf’s Up. It was the first song Carl really wrote for the band, and I loved the message of it. We put it out as a single and “’Til I Die” was on the B-side. The song was about the kinds of things that Carl was feeling, and they were also the things that I felt all the time. It was hard to feel happy and light when there were sad things in my head. It was hard to feel free when I was tied down. But the only choice was to try. When I woke up in 1971, or in 1975, or in 1995, or in 2015, I had pressures on me. Did feeling those pressures make me stronger? Did the times when I felt bound help me soar? I struggled through so many things and slowly, over time, found things that helped me. I found love. I found a support network. I found the right doctors and the right medications. But in my struggle, I had to pass through the wrong things. I made mistakes with people I loved, and people I loved made mistakes with me. I can’t believe that some of them are gone. Carl is one of those who are gone, but his songs live on. And I keep going because of them and because of songs like theirs. I hit hard at the battle that’s confronting me.
When I was watching Love and Mercy on the big screen, I thought about the small screen, too. I thought about Mike Douglas, the talk show host. I was on his show in the mid-’70s, right around the time of 15 Big Ones. That was kind of a famous interview because he asked me about my meditation mantra, which was supposed to be a secret, and I told him it was “eye-neh-mah.” At a different part of that interview, Mike Douglas was asking about how I kept going through all of it: through the drugs, through the lawsuits, through the bad feelings that came up between me and the people closest to me. I had an answer ready. “My name is Wilson,” I said. “Maybe that’s where I got the will.” My career, off and on, had taken a beating. My body had taken a beating. My brains at times took a beating. But I tried to keep my spirit going. I was a survivor. I tried to survive every day. Lots of that came from my dad. People might say that he was one of the things I had to survive, but he also helped me figure out how to do it. He taught me how to be tough. He showed me a way to be the kind of person who has to forge ahead. Whenever I’ve been told to stop—by someone who thought they had power over me, by something that happened around me, by the voices I heard in my own head—I kept going.
I kept going, and I keep going. I have an idea for another album. It’s an album about time and music. It would be all the songs that inspired me through the years, rearranged and sung the way they sound to me. It’s in the early stages still, but I have started to pick out the artists. I want to do Buddy Holly. I want to do “A Beautiful Morning” by the Rascals. I’m definitely going to do “Be My Baby,” with all instruments doubled: two pianos, two guitars, two basses, plus horns and drums. Oh, and “Tenderly” by Rosemary Clooney. I can’t leave that off. That’s the song that taught me to sing.
And I like to think about people I might want to work with. I’ve worked with so many. I think about writing a song with Paul McCartney. I am not sure if he would really want to. I was thinking about Barry Gibb, too. I really admire the guy. He is like King Kong. He and I could probably work something up together. We met at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame back in 1997. I presented them for their induction. They sang “To Love Somebody.” Before the show Barry came down to meet me and he just sat in the room. I heard later that he was nervous. I was nervous, too.
Today or tomorrow or the next day I’ll have some breakfast and take a walk and watch Wheel of Fortune and then check in on the score of the Yankees game. The season is just starting. I might go to my son Dylan’s basketball game. I’ll work on songs. There’s one, “Loop de Loop (Flip Flop Flyin’ in an Aeroplane),” that’s about an airplane. I cut a demo for it back in the late ’60s but I haven’t finished it the way I want.
There are other, newer songs, too. I sometimes have ideas one by one. Sometimes they come in bunches. But I also spend time thinking about my old songs. In 2016 I’m thinking about Pet Sounds. My band and I are playing the whole record. We performed first in Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, and now we’re in the United States. The biggest show will be at the Hollywood Bowl. It might not be the biggest crowd, but it’s the most significant show. The Beach Boys played there almost yearly in the early ’60s. We were there in 1963, in 1964. The band played there in the summer of 1966 on a big bill that also included the Lovin’ Spoonful, Chad and Jeremy, Percy Sledge, Love, and the Byrds. I wasn’t onstage then. I wasn’t playing shows. I was at home, thinking about the songs I had just written. Those songs were Pet Sounds. That 1966 show happened about a month after we released the album.
This year’s show will be a fiftieth birthday for both the show and the album. Fifty years. Some days it seems like just a few months ago I was back at Western, United, Gold Star, and Columbia, cutting the tracks. Other days it seems like it’s an eternity away. Fifty years.
I can’t remember so much about my own fiftieth birthday. It was around the time Dr. Landy was leaving. That was a new birth in a way. Maybe I should have started counting at zero all over again. I can remember the fiftieth birthday of the Beach Boys. That’s a recent memory. And now the album that people think is our greatest is turning fifty also. My band is different now. Al Jardine tours with me, and we’re still rocking, along with his son Matt, who sings all my high parts from the ’60s. He does a great job. And Blondie Chaplin, who played with the Beach Boys back in the early ’70s, is in our band also. He went from the Beach Boys to the Rolling Stones and stayed with them for ten years. Can you imagine that? Blondie brings a great energy to the band. He walks all over the stage with his guitar with a kind of Keith Richards vibe.
I love Pet Sounds. The melodies on that record are so beautiful. The arrangements and experiments are so cool. We did amazing things then, and they’re still amazing when we return to them. Music has always been the light in dark times. It’s my number one thing, and Pet Sounds is the number one record. The last word of the album is no but the album
is a big yes. And that’s what I want to keep working toward, whether it’s with old music or new music, old collaborators or new ones. That’s what I want to work toward with love and with mercy: the big yes.
And this big yes will happen right here at home. Melinda will be there with all the kids. Sometimes when we play in LA, we let my son Dylan help out delivering water backstage. They give him his own walkie-talkie and a code name, Wizard. The first time he did it, he was a little disappointed that he had to turn in his walkie-talkie at the end of the night. I am in my tour bus now, with Wizard and the rest of the family, and we’re heading toward the Hollywood Bowl from my house. Glenn, our bus driver, is taking everyone tonight. I am in the captain’s chair in the front, thinking it all through. Melinda, Gloria, and the kids are on the couches. Everyone is talking. Everyone is happy. It’s a family trip in every sense. When I first started touring with this band back in the winter of 1999, Daria was just an infant. Delanie, Dylan, Dash, and Dakota Rose weren’t even born yet. Now they’re all so big. They remind me of a song I once wrote, “Little Children”: “Little children, they’re marching along.” They’re not all grown up yet, but Daria and Delanie are getting there. Dylan, Dash, and Dakota Rose will join them soon. Time flies by.
We get off Mulholland Drive and make a right on Coldwater Canyon Drive. We go down the hill until we hit Sunset Boulevard and make a left. We pass the Whisky, where I played with the Boys a few nights in 1970, and the Roxy, where we cut my live album in 2000. Then we pass some of the studios where I spent so much of my life and created so much music. Ocean Way is back to its original name, United. It’s on our right. If I look to my left, I can see the Capitol Tower, where we started out, where we rose to fame, where they told me they didn’t think Pet Sounds was heading down the right path. But here we are, fifty years later, playing it live at the Bowl. I can see some planes overhead. They’re coming from the Los Angeles airport, where I sat at the gate at Christmastime 1964 and waited to go to Houston. I didn’t know what would happen to me on that flight. I didn’t know where it would lead. And maybe those planes can see Hawthorne, where my house used to be, where my brothers and I, up in our bedroom, began to sing.
There’s so much of the city going out in all directions, in time and in space. I would never live anywhere but here. It’s my whole life. And then we’re hanging a left—passing the huge Hollywood Bowl sign that says TONIGHT, BRIAN WILSON, PET SOUNDS 2016, SOLD OUT—and climbing up the hill to the backstage area.
The Bowl is still empty, but my head is starting to fill with thoughts of the show, you know? My routine starts. It starts with questions. What if the audience doesn’t like the show? What if they don’t like my music? Suppose the goddamn voices start coming at me while I am onstage? I go through this every time. But then I start thinking through who will be in the audience. It’s almost everyone I know. It’s Melinda and the kids. It’s Gloria. It’s Carnie and Wendy, too. It’s Jean Sievers. It’s all my friends. This is the biggest concert of the tour, and the guys and I are ready.
We do our preconcert circle up, and everyone says how much they love the music and how lucky they are to bring it to the audience. “We’ll give a great show tonight,” I say. “We have to. We’ll kick ass out there.” Then I’m backstage, asking myself questions, answering them again, imagining my way forward into the first notes of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and that cannon of a drum beat, as big as anything Phil Spector ever recorded. There are so many people who are no longer here: friends, parents, brothers. I love them and I miss them. But I am here. I am here for them. I am here for myself. I am here today. I push myself up out of the chair and head for the stage.
Discography
Beach Boys
Surfin’ Safari (1962)
Surfin’ Safari
County Fair
Ten Little Indians
Chug-A-Lug
Little Girl (You’re My Miss America)
409
Surfin’
Heads You Win, Tails I Lose
Summertime Blues
Cuckoo Clock
Moon Dawg
The Shift
Surfin’ U.S.A. (1963)
Surfin’ U.S.A.
Farmer’s Daughter
Misirlou
Stoked
Lonely Sea
Shut Down
Noble Surfer
Honky Tonk
Lana
Surf Jam
Let’s Go Trippin’
Finders Keepers
Surfer Girl (1963)
Surfer Girl
Catch a Wave
The Surfer Moon
South Bay Surfer
The Rocking Surfer
Little Deuce Coupe
In My Room
Hawaii
Surfer’s Rule
Our Car Club
Your Summer Dream
Boogie Woodie
Little Deuce Coupe (1963)
Little Deuce Coupe
Ballad of Ole’ Betsy
Be True to Your School
Car Crazy Cutie
Cherry, Cherry Coupe
409
Shut Down
Spirit of America
Our Car Club
No-Go Showboat
A Young Man Is Gone
Custom Machine
Shut Down Volume 2 (1964)
Fun, Fun, Fun
Don’t Worry Baby
In the Parkin’ Lot
“Cassius” Love vs. “Sonny” Wilson
The Warmth of the Sun
This Car of Mine
Why Do Fools Fall in Love
Pom, Pom Play Girl
Keep an Eye on Summer
Shut Down, Part II
Louie, Louie
Denny’s Drums
All Summer Long (1964)
I Get Around
All Summer Long
Hushabye
Little Honda
We’ll Run Away
Carl’s Big Chance
Wendy
Do You Remember?
Girls on the Beach
Drive-In
Our Favorite Recording Sessions
Don’t Back Down
Beach Boys Concert (1964)
Fun, Fun, Fun
The Little Old Lady from Pasadena
Little Deuce Coupe
Long, Tall Texan
In My Room
Monster Mash
Let’s Go Trippin’
Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow
The Wanderer
Hawaii
Graduation Day
I Get Around
Johnny B. Goode
The Beach Boys’ Christmas Album (1964)
Little Saint Nick
The Man with All the Toys
Santa’s Beard
Merry Christmas, Baby
Christmas Day
Frosty the Snowman
We Three Kings of Orient Are
Blue Christmas
Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town
White Christmas
I’ll Be Home for Christmas
Auld Lang Syne
The Beach Boys Today! (1965)
Do You Wanna Dance?
Good to My Baby
Don’t Hurt My Little Sister
When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)
Help Me, Ronda
Dance, Dance, Dance
Please Let Me Wonder
I’m So Young
Kiss Me, Baby
She Knows Me Too Well
In The Back of My Mind
Bull Session with the “Big Daddy”
Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) (1965)
The Girl from New York City
Amusement Parks U.S.A.
Then I Kissed Her
Salt Lake City
Girl Don’t Tell Me
Help Me, Rhonda
California Girls
Let Him Run Wild
You’re So Good to Me
Summer Means New Love
And Your Dream Comes True
Beach Boys’ Party! (1965)
Hully Gully
I Should Have Known Better
Tell Me Why
Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow
Mountain of Love
You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away
Devoted to You
Alley Oop
There’s No Other (Like My Baby)
I Get Around / Little Deuce Coupe
The Times They Are A-Changin’
Barbara Ann
Pet Sounds (1966)
Wouldn’t It Be Nice
You Still Believe in Me
That’s Not Me
Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)
I’m Waiting for the Day
Let’s Go Away for Awhile
Sloop John B
God Only Knows
I Know There’s an Answer
Here Today
I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times
Pet Sounds
Caroline, No
Smiley Smile (1967)
Heroes and Villains
Vegetables
Fall Breaks and Back to Winter
She’s Goin’ Bald
Little Pad
Good Vibrations
With Me Tonight
Wind Chimes
Gettin’ Hungry
Wonderful
Whistle In
Wild Honey (1967)
Wild Honey
Aren’t You Glad
I Was Made to Love Her
Country Air
A Thing or Two
Darlin’
I’d Love Just Once to See You
Here Comes the Night
Let the Wind Blow
How She Boogalooed It
Mama Says
Friends (1968)
Meant for You
Friends
Wake the World
