Glimpses

by Lewis Shiner

  Sunday afternoon I put down my book and went upstairs. I loaded up a Beach Boys CD compilation called Made in the USA and punched track number ten, “Don’t Worry Baby.” Dude got up on my legs and butted my hand until I scratched him under the collar. “Don’t Worry Baby” is cowritten with Roger Christian, Brian’s car expert. I’d always lumped it with “Little Deuce Coupe” and “Shut Down” and all the other simpleminded songs full of racing buzzwords and secondhand Chuck Berry riffs.

  That afternoon it was a whole new song. Brian sings lead, which he didn’t do that often in the early days, and the longing in his voice is so raw and powerful I can’t believe I never heard it before. In the storyline of the song it’s his girlfriend who tells him not to worry, that everything would be okay. Listen to the song and you can hear just how badly Brian wanted to be told those words by somebody. A girlfriend would do, but I know what he really wanted. He wanted to hear it from his father. He never would. Murry would die in 1973 after holing up in his bedroom for years, at the same time that Brian was holed up in his own bedroom on the other side of town.

  I looked up and saw Elizabeth on the stairs. “Ray? Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  “What’s wrong? You’re crying.”

  I couldn’t explain. She stood next to me and I leaned my head against her leg. She ran one hand through my hair and petted Dude with the other. I could feel how uncomfortable she was, how she wanted to do the right thing if she could only figure it out. The right thing would have been to sit down and hold me. She would never let me do that for her and I knew she would never think to offer it. I couldn’t ask because then she would do it out of obligation. Obligation wasn’t enough. After a minute or so she squeezed my neck and went downstairs.

  That night, after Elizabeth was asleep, I tried Pet Sounds again. It wasn’t the same album I’d listened to just days ago. Suddenly I could see exactly what Brian wanted to do. It was like his feelings came straight out through the sound of his voice. No holding back, no second thoughts, no coyness, just up-front emotion.

  I went back to the early stuff and saw it had been there all along. When Brian sings about his heart coming all undone in “Surfer Girl,” or lets out that high, wordless moan at the end of “Dance, Dance, Dance,” it sails out over the melody, transcendent, joyous, and infinitely sad at the same time.

  Pet Sounds isn’t out on a domestic CD yet. I went out the next day and paid twenty bucks for a Japanese import. I listened to it twice, then I called Graham in L.A.

  “I want to do Smile,” I said.

  “Attaboy. I knew you’d come around. By the way, I got a couple of test pressings back on our last effort.”

  “How’s it sound?”

  “Fucking unbelievable. I’ve got my art director in on it now. Get this—we’re doing an embossed cover on the CD booklet. It’s a takeoff on the cover art inside Waiting for the Sun, with the gila monster, and we’re embossing the scales. It is just so bitchen.”

  “Great.” I couldn’t get excited about the Doors right then. It’s hard to describe. I’d been there, and now I was excited about something new. “You sound really good, Graham.”

  “I’m stoked about this. I’ve already let the word out a little. It’s going to be a monster.”

  The word “monster” hit me funny. “I hope not,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Nothing, man, don’t listen to me. There was some ugly shit going on in my head during all that. I’m not totally over it.”

  “Smile will fix you up. I guarantee it. Go have a beer or something.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Good idea.”

  Smile was going to be Brian’s humor album. The critics had called Pet Sounds gloomy, when all Brian really wanted was to give people some comfort. So he decided to pull out the stops. Everybody around him—and there were a lot of hangers-on—thought he was crazy when he talked about sounds having emotions. I don’t. The train and the barking dogs at the end of Pet Sounds are the loneliest things I’ve ever heard.

  During that fall and winter people thought all of Brian’s ideas were crazy. He went through with most of them anyway, and most of the time people came around. Even if it took years.

  For Smile he drove all over L.A. and out into the hills to tape sound effects. He had his dinner guests roll around on the floor and make animal noises, or play their dishes with their silverware. He couldn’t put into words what he wanted but he could play it, or tape it, and when he played it back it was there.

  Capitol records insisted that he put “Good Vibrations” on the album to help sales. They weren’t happy with Pet Sounds, despite the fact that it eventually cracked the top ten and sold half a million copies, despite the fact that they’d torpedoed it when they released a Best Of compilation within two months of it. They didn’t like the hundreds of hours of expensive studio time he was burning with no visible result. “Good Vibrations” alone took seven months and sixty studio hours and ten thousand dollars to record.

  The second single was going to be “Heroes and Villains” and it too started to take forever. In fact it didn’t get released until July of 1967, after Brian had clearly given up on Smile, and when it came out it was a pale, three-and-a-half minute shadow of the seven-minute musical comedy it had, according to witnesses, once been. Or maybe “Vegetables” would have been the second single. When the Beach Boys didn’t release it a band called Laughing Gravy did, using Brian’s backing tracks.

  The rest of the album would have been slices of Western Americana (like “Cabinessence” and “Surf’s Up” and “Heroes and Villains”), silliness (laughing horns in “George Fell Into His French Horn”), pure harmony (“Our Prayer”), and maybe a love song or two (“Wonderful”). There was a recurring theme, the “bicycle rider” theme, that shows up in “Heroes and Villains” where they sing “come and see what you’ve done” in barbershop-quartet style. A Four Elements Suite was supposed to consist of “Vegetables” (Earth), “Wind Chimes” (Air), “Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow” (Fire), and “Love To Say Da-Da” (Water). The whole record would be intercut with sound effects and even spoken comedy.

  All six months before Sgt. Pepper.

  I couldn’t talk to Elizabeth about it. She was bored by things that I found unbelievably fascinating, like the way Brian used a bicycle bell as an instrument on “You Still Believe in Me.” As soon as she sensed this was to do with the other weirdness, the “Long and Winding Road” and the Doors weirdness, she got a panicked look in her eye and froze up. Afterwards she reacted to the very mention of Brian like it was a physical blow.

  She stopped drinking once she decided to get pregnant, and now we don’t even have that to do together. Once the sex part was over I took to spending my nights in the workshop, reading and listening to the Beach Boys, coming to bed after she was already asleep. So maybe it’s as much me as it is her.

  All the while Smile has been getting under my skin. It says something that an album that was never released, that’s never been heard except in distorted fragments, has inspired so much passion over more than twenty years. There is at least one full-length book about nothing but Smile, there are four different bootleg versions, there are fanzines and an entire underground network of disciples who watch Brian’s every step.

  On the last Monday in January I got a FedEx from Graham. Inside was a copy of Celebration of the Lizard, the cover black and ominous, with an embossed pink-and-gold gila monster looking over its shoulder at me. I took it upstairs and put it on. It sounded timeless, no fattened bass or big drum sound, clean and eerie and violent. I couldn’t listen all the way through. I went downstairs and cleaned up the kitchen and let it play on without me. The Doors were then, I thought. This is now.

  I was still downstairs when Elizabeth came home. She didn’t even yell hello, just went to the liquor cabinet and poured herself a stiff shot of vodka while Dude rubbed against her legs.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi.” She turned
on the TV, flopped on the couch, and took a big hit of the vodka.

  “You okay?” I said.

  “Fine.”

  I stood there for a minute. For some reason Elizabeth always thinks she can convince me she’s not in a bad mood, when every twitch of her muscles screams it. “Something happen at school?”

  “No. Why?”

  “You look a little tired, that’s all.”

  “Thanks.”

  I started up the stairs.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m getting my period and I’m a little cranky.”

  I came back and sat down next to her. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “It’s just a period. It’s no big deal.”

  Sometimes I wish she would break down, smash the furniture, yell and blubber and completely lose it. “Okay,” I said. “So it’s no big deal.”

  She nodded, staring at the TV like it was about to tell her the secret of life. I went upstairs and listened to Pet Sounds on the headphones.

  At the end of November of 1966 the Beach Boys returned from their European tour and listened to what Brian had done on Smile. Mike Love hated it. He called a meeting with Van Dyke Parks, who wrote the lyrics, and demanded to know what the songs meant. What did all this bizarre Americana and obscure wordplay have to do with the Beach Boys? Van Dyke quit.

  Brian, meanwhile, was already freaked. Fires broke out all over Los Angeles after he recorded “Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow,” including one across the street from the studio. Brian thought it was his fault, and supposedly tried to burn the tapes. He got obsessive about the moral content of his work, about the kind of vibes it put out. He meant to record a new “Fire” segment based on the idea of a candle rather than a raging inferno. He never got around to it.

  There were so many songs. A couple of dozen, anyway, most no more than fragments. Before he could finish one he would have another idea and lay down the basic tracks for it. Then Mike Love stepped in to throw his disapproval around. Capitol wanted an album right away, only not this album, and suddenly it was June of 1967 and Sgt. Pepper was on the stands. Why break up the band, the only family he had left since he and Murry weren’t talking, just so he could come in second to the Beatles again?

  That was the end of Smile. Brian threw together a neutered version of “Heroes and Villains” so Capitol could have a single. He’d left the house on Laurel Way in April, moving to a mansion in Bel Air with its own recording studio. He took two weeks out of the summer to whip out a replacement album called Smiley Smile where he let the other guys play their own instruments and sing whatever they wanted. He took his name off as producer. He gave up.

  It was the start of a long, slow, downhill slide. It was the beginning of the end of the Beach Boys.

  Elizabeth and I made another try in February. I cut back on the booze, ate a lot of seafood, took her temperature, and fucked her enthusiastically when the thermometer told me to. I didn’t care anymore. If she got pregnant I would deal with it. I guess deep down I didn’t think it would happen.

  I’d been at work on Smile for a month and hadn’t tried to get anything on tape. I was intimidated. Brian’s vision was too overwhelming, too much to get into my head at one time.

  I called Graham.

  “Don’t feel like the Lone Ranger,” he said. “When the Beach Boys signed with Reprise in 1970, Smile was part of the deal. Carl even announced it for seventy-two. It never happened. Capitol said they would put it out last year, when Brian did his solo album. It all sounds so easy in theory, the tapes are all there, only once you start to wade through them, all the different bits and pieces and outtakes and miles and miles of tape, everybody just gets…dragged…down.”

  “I don’t think that’s it. I can’t, I mean, I don’t think this album was meant to be.”

  “Ray, you’ve come to me with some crazy-sounding ideas. Most people would say this whole thing has been crazy. But this ‘meant to be’ shit is the first totally crazy thing you’ve said. It’s like some fifties movie with giant insects. ‘General, there are some things man was not meant to know.’”

  “Look at it from Brian’s point of view. It’s a no-win situation. There’s no way Mike Love and Capitol Records could live with what Brian wanted to do. So he has to choose between his music and his family. If he was the kind of guy who could blow off his family, he wouldn’t be the kind of guy that could make Smile.”

  “Don’t be so sure. I heard Brian kept working on the tapes for years after Smiley Smile came out. Just for himself. He could have finished it.”

  “He was too close to it. He needed somebody there with enough perspective to keep him on track. And there wasn’t anybody. Even David Anderle thought most of the stuff he did was crazy. Until he heard it played back.”

  “Come out here. We’ll drive around, we’ll talk about it.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why not? Is this a money thing? I told you I don’t care about money.”

  “No, it’s just…personal stuff.” I hadn’t talked to my mother in a week. Elizabeth was now officially one day late. I’d turned down a couple of referrals from old customers, which really hurt. I felt like I’d broken a trust, like my obsession with a nonexistent album from 1966 was keeping people from having any music at all.

  “I’ll think about it,” I told Graham. “I promise.”

  That was Monday. Wednesday afternoon, three days late, Elizabeth got her period. She acted like there was nothing to talk about.

  I didn’t sleep much that night. Songs from Smile were playing through my head, and at the same time I couldn’t stop thinking about Elizabeth, sleeping quietly away with her back to me. For a minute I felt like I was in the Alta Cienega Motel again, dressed in black leathers and roaring drunk. I wanted to throw her out of the room and smash the furniture to bits. Instead I went upstairs and booked a morning flight to L.A.

  I guess my chest had been tight for weeks. I never noticed the pressure until it was gone. It happened after I changed planes at DFW, the first time the flight attendant mentioned our arrival time at LAX. Graham was at the gate to meet me and I felt this huge grin spread across my face.

  We had a beer right there at the airport, at ten in the morning, then picked up a couple of six-packs for the road. Graham had an address for the Wilson family home in Hawthorne, 3701 West 119th Street. I’d seen a picture of it in one of my books: dark-wood siding, an evergreen shrub by the front door, a lawn of that fine-bladed California grass, three brothers standing arm in arm and squinting into the sun.

  Hawthorne is virtually in the flight path of the airport. The land there is totally flat, and things have gone downhill since Brian’s day. It’s mostly poor Chicano now, the houses that aren’t boarded-up and covered with graffiti.

  119th Street stops and starts again and turns into 119th Place. We drove around for about fifteen minutes and couldn’t find the house. The street curved where it shouldn’t, before we could get to 3701, and on our third pass I noticed the asphalt looked brand-new where the street went funny. Graham got out his Thomas Bros. guide and we looked at page fifty-seven. The Century Freeway, Interstate 105, was a dotted line across the block where we sat.

  “That’s it, then,” Graham said, pointing. On the other side of the curving street was a chain-link fence and raw yellow earth. “Brian’s house would have been…right where that bulldozer is.” He handed me a fresh beer. “That’s L.A. for you. In a nutshell.”

  He got back on the San Diego Freeway, headed north toward Beverly Hills. It was not quite noon and traffic was light. Missing Brian’s house seemed trivial compared to the fact that it was March 2 and spring had arrived. I could smell orange blossoms, jasmine, and honeysuckle, even from the freeway. The sky was the same blue as shallow ocean water over a sandy bottom. The sun made everything glisten and at the same time the air was so cool and sweet I wanted to put it in a glass and drink it down.

  “God, I love it here,” I said.

  “It’s the negative ions.
They make people want to let go. That’s one theory, anyway. California’s always been this way, even in the nineteenth century, all the nut cults ended up out here. The rest of the country thought California was crazy even then.”

  “I wonder if Brian’s music would have been the same if he’d lived somewhere else.”

  “No way. He might never have made music at all.”

  “It’s like you can really see the American Dream from here. It’s so close you can almost touch it. But not quite. You just get that glimpse of it, and then it’s gone again. I never heard anybody else show that sadness inside the dream before.”

  “They tell me this is nothing compared to the early sixties, back when Brian was first writing. Orange groves and open spaces, still plenty of money and water to go around. Disneyland when it was new, and Pacific Ocean Park. You ever heard of POP?” I shook my head. “It’s kind of an obsession of mine. I always wanted to write a book about it. Used to be just down the coast from the pier at Santa Monica, like a little Disneyland. All kinds of corny rides and concessions and like that. It closed at the end of the sixties but people still talk about it. It pisses me off that I never got to see it. It was so perfectly California. Just this cornball innocence. When it went under, everybody said it was the end of an era. And I guess they were right.”

  We got off on Sunset and crawled through the residential district of Beverly Hills. The houses on Sunset are big enough, but they’re crowded together on tiny lots and hidden behind high walls. We took a left on Beverly Drive and headed uphill. I noticed that the street is lined with alternating fat and skinny palm trees. Each cross street seems to have its own distinctive tree—ponderosa pines, scrub oaks. It’s screwy but very California that you can find your way home by remembering the right sequence of trees along the side of the road. Laurel Way has ficus: no bark, no protection from the world. Just like Brian.