by Lewis Shiner
Mike gave Anderle a look. It said Anderle was not family and his contribution was not desired. Back to Brian. “Capitol won’t like it any better than I do. I’ll fucking guarantee it. You can’t put any of this shit on the radio.” He sighed, tried to look reasonable. “Look, I’m the one out front that has to sell this to an audience. I know what those kids want to hear. I know it because I’m actually out there, day after day, while you’re cooped up here with your dope and your weird ideas. The kids love those old songs, cars and girls and surfing and good times. Nobody else can give that to them the way we can. Haven’t you got anything for them? Another ‘Good Vibrations,’ even?”
Brian flipped the hair out of his eyes. He looked like a school kid in the principal’s office: scared, hurt, defiant. “I guess not.”
Mike got up. “I guess not,” he repeated. He started out the door.
“Hey, Mike,” Dennis said.
Mike turned around.
Dennis held up his middle finger. “Fuck you, man.”
Mike started for him. Al Jardine jumped up and grabbed him around the waist. It slowed him down long enough for Bruce Johnston to step in and help. “Come on, man,” Al said. “Leave it.”
I looked at Anderle. His head rested in his right hand, fatigue and despair all over his face.
It was just me and Brian in the swimming pool at midnight. Everybody else was afraid to talk to him. I was a little worried myself. I’d seen him pout but I hadn’t had the full-fledged temper tantrum yet.
It turned out he got calm as soon as he was in the water. “It was just like you told me it would be,” he said. “Like, word for word.”
“I didn’t want to see this happen.”
“I know. I know.” Brian held up his right hand. It was shaking. “I’m really scared, man. You’re from the future, right? In the future there is no Smile album, because of all the shit that went down tonight.”
“Yeah, basically.”
I could see him struggle with the ideas. “So what you want is for me to change the future, which has to mean that you don’t like it the way it is. If I change the future, then what happens? Anything could happen. Anything. Nuclear war. The end of the world. I might die. Or Carl, or Dennis.”
I didn’t say that Dennis was already doomed. He would drown in the Marina Del Rey harbor, December 1983, seventeen years away. “You have to take that chance.”
“You’re saying make the album anyway. Not a Beach Boys album, a Brian Wilson album.”
“Like ‘Caroline, No.’ You put that out as a Brian Wilson record.”
“Yeah, and it died. I’m scared, man. You’re telling me to give up my family.”
“You don’t have to give up Carl and Dennis. They love you. I think they’ll stick with you.”
“Even if it breaks up the band?”
“It wouldn’t have to. The band can go on without you. Carl can produce. They can use outside songwriters. They’ll manage.”
“IdontknowIdontknowIdontknowIdontknowIdontknow.” He leaned forward and fell face first into the water, arms straight against his sides. The force of it took him down a foot or so, then he floated back to the surface and just lay there.
“Brian?” He wasn’t moving. I knew he was only kidding around but that image, the body facedown in the water, burned holes in my guts. “Brian?” I grabbed his arm and yanked it hard.
He pulled his head up and shook the water out of his hair. “Easy, man, I was just fooling.”
I went over to lean against the side of the pool. “It’s…my father drowned. That’s how he died.”
“Hey, man, I’m really sorry.”
“It’s okay. It’s not your fault. It’s not anybody’s fault.” I thought about that for a second, then I said, “That’s not true. It’s our fathers’ faults. They’ve got us both fucked up. This whole thing tonight, this is about your father, not about the Beach Boys.”
Brian looked at me.
“Your father has you convinced that nothing you do will ever be good enough. So when Mike tells you Smile is no good, you believe him. You’re afraid to leave the band because the band is all the family you’ve got. It would be like leaving your father. You have to get out from under that. You have to believe in your own talent.”
“That whole ‘Brian is a genius’ thing? That’s hard to live up to, you know? You start asking yourself, everything you do, is this up to snuff? Is this genius-level work, here? I don’t know if I can handle that.”
He had the spoiled, whiny kid look on his face again. I saw then that it was just another way for him to hide. “Cut the shit, Brian,” I said, while part of me stood back thinking, you just told Brian Wilson to what? “You know what I’m saying. You know how important Smile is. You can’t just let it die.”
“I’m cold,” Brian said. “I want to go inside.”
“Fine. Let’s go for a ride. I’ll tell you about the future.”
Brian drove the XKE over the hills into the San Fernando Valley. The Valley reminds me of central Arizona, where I spent third through sixth grade playing in brush-covered hills like these. The moon was out, and a few of the brighter stars.
“They’ll close POP inside two years,” I told Brian, remembering the stuff from Graham’s scrapbook. “Then they won’t have the money to knock it down. Winos and junkies will move in. There’ll be a fire. The place turns into a public eyesore. It’s 1974 before they ever tear it down.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“They don’t make many records anymore. Everything is either cassettes or these new things called compact discs, or CDs. They’re about this big around and you play them on a kind of computer. It’s perfect reproduction. In 1989 Capitol will finally release their entire Beach Boys catalog on CD. They’re making a really big deal out of Pet Sounds, your masterpiece. Because after that the Beach Boys went to shit. There’s some okay albums and the occasional good song, mostly a lot of aimless crap. No more masterpieces. Not ever. Because you decided to go with your family instead of your music and you knew it was wrong, and knowing it was wrong made you crazy and you couldn’t work at all anymore.
“In 1989 there’s a kind of sexually contagious cancer called AIDS. That was the last straw for free love. All the rest of the stuff that seemed like a good idea in the sixties, like feeding the world and loving your brothers and sisters, has gone out the window because it costs too much money. We got out of Vietnam but we still have wars because they’re good for the economy. Money is all anybody cares about. There’s a revolution happening in Eastern Europe, not over idealism but because people there think it will get them cars and TV sets and the good life. For twenty years kids have been listening to this music they call heavy metal, this real ponderous stuff with lots of distorted guitars and posturing and black leather and lyrics about death.”
Brian pulled over to the curb. I didn’t look at him. I was on a roll. “There’s a hole in the ozone layer that lets in ultraviolet radiation. You can’t lie in the sun unprotected anymore without getting skin cancer. Oil tankers are spilling oil all over the world’s beaches anyway, and nobody stops them because we don’t want to give up our cars. Which create so much pollution that the carbon dioxide in the air is holding in heat, turning the whole planet into a greenhouse. The polar ice caps are starting to melt—”
“Stop it,” Brian said.
I finally looked over at him. He was crying now, not some put-on, spoiled child act, really crying, in complete silence, tears running down his face.
“Why are you doing this to me? What do you want from me?”
“The album, Brian. I want you to make the goddamned album.”
He woke me at eleven the next morning. “Capitol Records just called. Somebody at Billboard told them ‘Good Vibrations’ will be number one tomorrow.”
“Congratulations,” I said sleepily.
“So what are you waiting for? Get up, get dressed. The studio’s booked, I’ve got eve
rybody on their way. Let’s go.”
He stood there, shifting his not inconsiderable weight from foot to foot while I dressed and brushed my teeth. He was humming something I’d never heard before.
The driver was waiting with the Rolls to take us down to Western Studios. “What should I do today?” Brian asked me.
“It has to be your album, not mine.”
“I don’t know what I want. I’ve got feels for a bunch of things I haven’t done much with.” “Feels” were what Brian called his basic musical ideas for songs, scraps of melody or chord progressions. “There’s ‘Look,’ ‘You’re Welcome,’ ‘I Ran,’ ‘I Don’t Know’…”
“What was that you were whistling this morning?”
“‘I’m in Great Shape.’”
I tried not to show any reaction. It’s a song that’s listed on the album jackets that Capitol printed for Smile; otherwise there’s no remaining evidence of it. I hadn’t even heard of the titles of the other songs he’d just rattled off at me.
“Okay,” Brian said. “I’ve got basics for it somewhere, but who cares? We’ll do it fresh.”
The Wrecking Crew was already in Studio 3, Brian’s favorite. Marilyn’s sister Diane, who did the hiring and the booking, met us in the hall wearing a short knit dress, her dark hair tied back in pigtails with orange yarn. “We’ve got everybody here,” she said.
She reached out to fuss with a loose thread on Brian’s sweater. It was a wifely, almost a motherly, thing to do.
We went in. There were maybe a dozen people already packed into a studio that could barely hold all of their equipment. Most of them seemed to have cigarettes lit. I recognized Hal Blaine, one of my all time heroes, and Tommy Tedesco who would go on to write a lot of guitar columns in the eighties. Blaine was the first drummer I learned to identify by ear, back when I was in high school. I saw his trap set in the corner and I have to say it made my heart beat a little fast.
They were all happy to see Brian. It was sincere, not like the boss had just walked in. Within ten minutes he had them all in their places and learning the song. He would either sing them their parts or play them on the piano. Tommy Tedesco had a tough time with the guitar part, shaking his head, even when he finally got it the way Brian wanted it.
“Brian, that sounds like shit,” he said.
“Trust me, you’ll see.”
They did a take. Sitting there in the studio the balance of the instruments was all wrong and I could hear too many overtones on the drums. But the playback sounded wonderful, all but the guitar.
“Did you hear that, Brian?” Tedesco said.
“Perfect,” Brian said.
“It sounds like shit.”
“Trust me,” Brian said.
It’s like he had on a Walkman and was trying to get the band to play along with what he heard. He knew where every note was supposed to go without writing anything down. He could sing what any given instrument was supposed to play at any given part of the song without having to think about it. While the tape was running he conducted with both hands, as if he could sculpt the music while it hung in the air.
I can’t remember ever being happier in my life than I was there, watching Hal Blaine and listening to the rest of the band play a brand-new Brian Wilson song. Everything Blaine did was surgically precise: timing, tonality, dynamics, everything. The whole time he was making goofy faces or had a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth.
Brian got a take he was happy with and went immediately into overdubs. Tedesco was still unhappy about the guitar part. They laid down the overdubs and played it back while Brian sang the melody he’d been whistling that morning. Suddenly the guitar part was perfect, inevitable. Nothing else could possibly have worked.
“See?” Brian said to Tedesco, who had his hands in the air, shaking his head and grinning. “See?” You couldn’t miss the energy that sparked through Brian’s entire body. It was bigger than he was. He put a rough mix of “I’m in Great Shape” on acetate and sent the Wrecking Crew home. I helped carry a couple of Blaine’s tom cases and got to shake his hand. I thought Brian would be ready to go too. Instead he sat at the piano and recorded a beautiful solo piano part that almost sounded like New Age music, or Brian Eno. When it was done he told me it was the “Air” section of the Elements suite.
“What about ‘Wind Chimes’?”
“How’d you know about that?”
“Everybody thought that was supposed to be ‘Air.’”
He seemed to look through me for a minute, like he could see all those people in the future looking back at him. “No, man, ‘Wind Chimes’ is like its own song.”
At two in the morning, in the back of the Rolls, he smoked a huge ball of hash to celebrate. He was still bubbling over with excitement. “I feel good about this,” he said. “I can feel it coming together. The mixes Mike heard were still rough, it wasn’t polished like ‘Good Vibrations’ was in the end.”
He was back to the band, fighting to keep his hopes alive. I didn’t have the heart to knock him down. “Maybe you should go ahead and get some finished mixes,” I said carefully, “with all the vocals on there. Use Dennis and Carl if you want, but get everything completely done. Then if Mike wants to get involved you can always record him over the parts you have. Right?”
“Right,” Brian said. “Yeah, okay.”
“Listen, do we have to go straight home?”
“No, man, where do you want to go?”
I had the driver take us to Santa Monica. We took Sunset all the way, and I watched out the right-hand window as we passed the block with the Whiskey a Go Go, the London Fog, and Hamburger Hamlet. The Doors had just moved up to the Whiskey and their name was there on the marquee, second to the Buffalo Springfield. The show was over and kids were pouring out onto the already crowded Strip. I saw somebody out of the corner of my eye, on the roof of a car on Clark Street, screaming at the moon. It looked like Morrison, but I’ll never know for sure.
I rolled down the window, smelling history in the air, and it smelled like dope and buckskin, incense and perfume. The Strip was drawing disaffected kids, runaways and musicians, dealers and groupies by the thousands, the way San Francisco’s Haight would draw them the next summer. The sidewalks were literally teeming. For the last month there had been riots every weekend over a 10 P.M. curfew that was designed to keep the kids away and let developers take over the Strip. The focus was a coffee house called Pandora’s Box, and the cops had been brought in by the busload, swinging nightsticks and firing tear gas. We’d already passed Pandora’s Box back at Crescent Heights, closed and on its way to becoming a traffic island.
It was the start of something. The riots sparked Stephen Stills to write “For What It’s Worth” and within a month it would be on the radio. Like the song said, the battle lines were drawn now, with the cops and developers and store owners on one side, the Free Press and the musicians and the kids on the other. The cops would back off and the curfew would end and the riots would die down, but from now on everyone knew this was war.
I wanted to shout at them to cool out, to love each other, not to let the lizard-things inside them run wild. Then I thought, maybe Smile will do that. Maybe Brian has already done it for me.
We wound our way through the foothills to Santa Monica. I got out on Ocean Avenue near the spot where, in twenty-two years and a few months, I would puke my guts out. The thing that had made me sick, the part of me that wanted to curl up with strange starlets on somebody else’s couch, was calmer now.
Brian and I sat in the damp grass. There were a couple of proto-hippies out as well, a girl with long ironed hair and a boy with bangs and glasses and a black turtleneck sweater.
“It’s really going to happen, isn’t it?” I said.
“The album?” Brian seemed blissful. “Yeah. I guess it was kind of floundering there. Maybe I needed a kick in the ass. Now I know I can get a tape to Capitol for Christmas. With that tape at stake, man, I bet they settle that law
suit on the spot.”
Not if they don’t like the tape, I thought. I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t happier. Brian was going to finish Smile and I was there to see it. Hell, it would be due to me. Maybe it actually would change the world. Maybe, if and when I ever got back to 1989, the world would be a better place. Maybe Elizabeth and I would be in love the way we were at first. Maybe Alex and I never broke up.
I was blindsided by a sudden rush of emotion. I lay on my back and crushed blades of grass between my fingertips. Waves of change ran out from me in all directions, shifting the universe, and I was suddenly terrified. I didn’t want to be responsible. If Elizabeth had never existed, if I had Alex back, would it make any difference?
“You doing okay, man?” Brian asked.
“Sure,” I said. My throat was closed up and it was all I could get out.
“Listen, I was thinking. Are you tired?”
“No.” He didn’t seem to hear anything wrong with my voice. I opened my eyes wide and let the night air burn into them. Brian was carried away with the heat of his creation. I loved him anyway. I remembered his hand on my shoulder outside the party, bringing me back.
“Maybe we could like get a burger or something and go back to the studio. I’m really in the mood to work. I could do some vocals, do some mixes. What do you think?”
Say yes, I told myself. I got up on my elbows and nodded. “Great,”
I said.
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Allergies,” I said. “Let’s go.”
In the car I told Brian the joke about the guy who gets a flat tire in front of the insane asylum. While he’s changing the tire, see, all the lug nuts roll away and fall into the storm drain. So the guy is standing there, trying to figure out what to do, when one of the inmates leans over the fence and says, “Why don’t you take one lug off each of the other wheels and use them to hold the spare on till you can get to a garage?”
So the guy says, “Wow, that’s really a great idea, I mean, for a guy who’s, well, you know…”
