Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall & Redemption of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson

by Peter Ames Carlin

  CHAPTER 2

  In Brian’s memory he’s still a toddler, maybe two years old, sitting on the floor and staring up into the empty air above him. Only the air isn’t really empty because it is full of music. He and his mother are at his grandmother’s house, and the record player is pumping George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” across the room and into the open, ecstatic ears of the child sitting open-mouthed on the floor.

  “Oh, I loved it,” he says in the spring of 2005. “Looking back now, I can see what I heard, even if I couldn’t express it in words back then. Listening to it now brings back some bad memories, because I had such a bad childhood. But good memories too, because I loved that song.”

  In his heavily ghostwritten (and deeply controversial) 1991 memoir, Brian wrote that “Rhapsody” contained “every emotion I’ve ever experienced.” Indeed, almost nothing in his life is without musical accompaniment. And to him, music is present and tangible, with all the dimension and significance of a lover.

  From the start, he seemed to feel things more intensely than other children. Tall and skinny, with dark blue eyes, the Wilson family’s prominent brow, and a shy, crooked smile, Brian’s emotions played vibrantly across his freckled face. And though Murry didn’t like to see his oldest boy cling to his mother quite so much, he did nothing to discourage Brian’s fascination with music. Murry first noticed his son’s skill just before Brian’s first birthday, when he was walking down the street on a warm summer day with the boy on his shoulders. To pass the time and keep the boy entertained, Murry started singing “When the Caissons Go Rolling Along,” only getting through a verse or two before the preverbal Brian was humming along, mimicking his father’s voice in a note-perfect rendition of the song’s melody. “He was very clever and quick,” Murry said in an interview much later. “I just fell in love with him.”

  But love was a complicated thing in the Wilson family, particularly between fathers and sons. And though middle brother Dennis had the tough exterior Brian lacked (“He just kissed it all off,” one friend recalls), and baby brother Carl followed his mother’s example by watching the hysteria from as far away as possible, the boys all came to understand that the whims, moods, and expectations of their pugnacious father would define the texture of their lives until they left his home. Indeed, Murry was determined to be as present in their lives as his father had been absent in his. He also needed them to conform to certain ideals he had formed and to follow his orders with rigid precision. First and foremost, he expected them to be tough. “You think the world owes you a living?” he’d demand. “You think the world is going to be fair? You’ve got to get in there and kick ass!” To emphasize the point, he’d give his boys a shove or maybe a slap. And if Murry’s motivational talks could be jarring, they were far less brutal than his punishments. Confronted by a son who had neglected one of his chores or, worse yet, had violated a direct paternal order, Murry’s temper could erupt in the worst possible ways. He screamed and roared. “I’m the boss, goddammit!” He slapped their blushing cheeks and whipped them with a leather belt. He taunted them in front of their friends, making loud points about their Little League errors, the grass cuttings they failed to rake, even the slovenly way they sat in the shade while eating Popsicles with their friends. And if none of that seemed to achieve the desired effect, Murry had more quiet, if vicious, ways of getting the job done.

  Later, when the boys were young adults, as famous for their gothic personal lives as they were for their music, they told murky, often contradictory tales of their past that raised as many questions as answers. Did Murry once force a grade school–aged Brian to defecate on a plate in order to punish some small misdeed? Did he force tomato-hating Dennis to eat them nonstop until he vomited? Did he beat Brian with a two-by-four when he found the grade-schooler had unleashed a neighbor’s puppy while playing with him? Did he attempt some twisted form of character building by plucking out his artificial eye and forcing his sons to sit nose to nose with him, peering into the jagged maw of his blood-red socket? Carl, perpetually quiet and nonconfrontational, never confirmed or denied anything. Dennis, on the other hand, was abrupt: “We had a shitty childhood,” he declared in 1976, three years after Murry’s death. “Our dad used to whale on us.”

  Brian, always the most vulnerable of the brothers, never seemed to come to terms with what had happened. “He was like our coach,” Brian said of his father in 1998. “He scared me so much I actually got scared into making good records.”

  But that raises one of the most disturbing aspects of Brian’s relationship with Murry: He blames his father for delivering the blow to his head that destroyed almost all of the hearing in his right ear. It’s not something he always acknowledges in public. In fact, Brian has denied the story in recent years, echoing his mother, who could never decide if the real culprit was another boy in the neighborhood or a congenital nerve defect. Still, mid-1960s collaborator Tony Asher recalls Brian telling him about losing his hearing after Murry hit him. Brian’s recollection of his dad’s role in his deafness faded to uncertainty for his 1991 autobiography, then hardened into doubt by the start of the twenty-first century. “I remember my dad whacking me in the ear when I was six,” he said recently, letting the memory stand only for a few seconds before adding another thought: “But I was born deaf.”

  But he nonetheless seems to have spent years convinced that his partial deafness—a crushing blow to a man who would spend his life manipulating sound textures but could never hear music in stereo—was a direct result of the beatings he got from his father, the same man who nurtured his love of music, who bought him an organ and a stereo whose sonic complexity he would never truly comprehend.

  And yet, he knew that music was the best, most reliable way to win his father’s love, or at least a respite from his rage. So when the brothers were lying in their beds at night, Brian would lead Dennis and Carl in a three-part rendition of the old hymn “Come Down from Your Ivory Tower,” or perhaps “Good News,” knowing that the sound of their voices could draw their father to their doorway, where he’d listen silently, eyes glistening with the love that the emotionally scarred man could never quite express.

  “In some ways I haven’t gotten beyond my dad,” Brian said with a tired shrug. He was in his midfifties then, almost exactly the age Murry was when he died in 1973. “I was so afraid of my dad and the way he talked to me that something got inside of me and I just started making great records. My relationship with him was very unique.” But as a sensitive schoolboy whose world began and ended with his family’s home, the street where they lived, and the school around the corner, Brian (and his brothers) just wanted to seem like all the other kids in the neighborhood—and that’s precisely how the Wilson boys appeared. Like all the other grade-schoolers on West 119th Street, they spent their early years tossing balls from yard to yard, racing their bikes up the smooth, clean street, and running in and out of one another’s houses. “We all just hung out together, all the kids on the block,” recalls Mary Lou Manrikus (now Van Antwerp), who grew up down the street. “None of our mothers worked, so they all watched over us kids.”

  Brian—who had matured into a lithe and muscular adolescent—was a baseball nut who loved the New York Yankees, worshipped Mickey Mantle, and could throw a ball farther than anyone else on the block. Baby brother Carl was pudgy and quiet, but he was also one of those kids who always seemed older than his years, even in kindergarten. Dennis, on the other hand, was a freckle-faced terror, skipping school to look for frogs in the nearby swamps, climbing the Manrikuses’ fragile apricot tree even after Mr. Manrikus had repeatedly ordered him to stop, and greeting a new kid on their block by taunting and throwing garbage at him from across the street. “He wasn’t too menacing,” says David Marks, the new neighbor who would become a family friend and eventually join forces with the Wilsons. “We actually hit it off pretty quickly.”

  The neighbor kids got on just as easily with Audree, whose motherly nature was emphasize
d by the fluffy white apron she usually wore. Like most neighborhood moms, Audree focused entirely on domestic affairs: wiping the boys’ noses, mopping the kitchen floor, dusting the shelves, and getting dinner on the table by 6:00 p.m. A short, plump woman with a twinkle in her eye, she presented a striking contrast to her husband, whose gruff demeanor made him a fearsome presence on West 119th Street. “Everyone thought he was mean,” says Mary Lou Manrikus, maybe the only neighborhood kid who wasn’t afraid of him. “The other kids would send me down to get Brian because Murry was always so grumpy.” And as David Marks remembers, even Murry’s more playful moments with the neighborhood kids tended to be oddly aggressive. “He liked to give all of us the Vulcan nerve pinch and bring us to our knees. And he’d be making this sinister laugh while he did it.” At this, Marks laughs ruefully. “Good, clean fun, right?”

  Hardly anyone knew what to make of Murry. As a businessman, he prided himself on his strict code of ethics, believing that every handshake and verbal agreement should be just as binding as a signed contract. When the Manrikus family moved onto the block, Murry was the first neighbor to knock on their door and offer his help. He referred to his wife as Mrs. Wilson, and even when money was tight, he made sure she and their kids wore nice clothes, ate good food, and lived in a comfortable home. When business was good, Murry brought home lavish gifts: the best new go-karts and BB guns for the boys and a professional-quality organ so he and Audree could play duets in the music room. But as the boys got older and their friends became mature enough to understand the signs of emotional turmoil, Murry developed an even darker reputation in their circle. “He was bad news,” says Ted Sprague, a friend of Brian’s who spent countless hours in the Wilson home. “Never a word of encouragement. He taunted the boys mercilessly, and it never ended. It was just a relentless barrage when Murry was around.” By the time Brian got to Hawthorne High School in the fall of 1956, he’d built a reputation on the Little League ballpark with his cannon arm and extraordinary speed. Tall, handsome, witty, and sweet-natured, he moved easily with the other athletes, the pretty girls, and the other class leaders who recognized and respected his understated charisma. Unlike the athletes who strutted around campus using their muscles and varsity jackets to woo girls and intimidate weaker boys, Brian impressed friends and parents alike with his warmth and easygoing inclusiveness. “He’s always been a group person, always loved having a lot of people around,” says Bruce Griffin, a friend of Brian’s despite being a year behind him in school. “And he was the quarterback in any group, always telling people what to do.”

  Rich Sloan, a classmate who played sports and hung out with Brian throughout high school, both enjoyed and took advantage of his friend’s appetite for practical jokes. Although Brian loved nothing more than to spoof friends and strangers alike—staging fake fistfights at school, leaning out of his car and dumping a milk carton of oatmeal on Hawthorne Boulevard while pretending to vomit, organizing his pals to affect limps onstage at their high school graduation—he didn’t seem to mind being the butt of the jokes, either. It’s a good thing too, because Sloan can recall half a dozen gags that ended with Brian being drenched with ice water, splashed with invisible ink, and even peed on (!), the latter stunt taking place in the Hawthorne High locker-room showers while Brian was feigning grievous injury on the shower-room floor. “Brian was fun-loving,” Sloan says. “He didn’t care if he was the butt of a joke or part of it. People laughed and had a good time when he was around.”

  And yet some of Brian’s friends could sense something unsettled, and a bit unsettling, behind his crooked smile and high-pitched guffaws. Bruce Griffin, who became a singing partner and regular confidant, recalls Brian “always snorting and laughing at jokes other people just didn’t get.” Keith Lent, who joined in on a lot of the same harmony sessions, remembers his friend’s nervous habit of hitching up his pants—a habit Sloan believes he picked up on the football field thanks to his skinny hips and perpetually oversize hip pads—when something made him anxious. And though music was deeply (and increasingly) important to Brian, news that he would spend his senior year of high school riding the bench with the fifth-stringers sent the young quarterback into an emotional tailspin, prompting him to quit the team on the spot. “He could throw the ball a long ways, probably farther than anyone else, but Brian was flaky on the field and couldn’t hit the guy he was throwing at,” Griffin says. A large group of teammates tried to talk the struggling quarterback out of quitting football, but he had already made up his mind to join the cross-country team instead. “That was the first time I’d ever seen him get so emotional about something,” Griffin says. “I really didn’t know what was going on.”

  Griffin also wondered about Brian’s impromptu visits: He’d routinely pop over unannounced, sometimes after ten o’clock in the evening, eager to sing a new song or talk about the latest twist in the school social scene. In search of privacy, they’d end up sitting in the front seat of Brian’s ’57 Ford, singing rock ’n’ roll songs or talking about friends, girls, and sports until past midnight. Brian was always fascinated with the romantic and social entanglements of his peers, Griffin recalls, and loved nothing more than to come knocking with some scrap of back-channel information about his friend’s latest flame: whose car she was seen riding in, whom she danced with at another party. Sometimes Griffin would get annoyed at Brian’s eagerness to trash his girlfriends. “I asked him, what kind of friend likes to deliver bad news all of the time? He was shocked because friends were very important to him, and he couldn’t see himself being disloyal.” A decade later, Brian would recall those evenings in the title track of the Beach Boys album Friends. “You told me when my girl was untrue/I loaned you money when the funds weren’t too cool…”

  Robin Hood, a close friend since seventh grade, had also grown used to Brian’s late-night visits. Brian also made a point of dropping by his friend’s house on holidays, including Christmas, Thanksgiving, and the Fourth of July—in other words, the major holidays families tend to spend together. Hood’s father was particularly patient with Brian because he heard so many stories about Murry from a friend who worked for the senior Wilson at A.B.L.E. Machinery. Robin can’t remember if his father ever told him exactly what he’d heard, “but when Brian would leave, my dad would shake his head and say, ‘That poor kid,’” Hood recalls. Eventually, Bruce Griffin reached the same conclusion: “I realized he just needed to get away from home and whatever was happening there,” he says.

  Most of Brian’s quirks seemed harmless enough. Unlike most Hawthorne kids, he rarely enjoyed going to the beach to swim or sit in the sun. When he did join the gang at the shore, he was likely to show up in his jeans and T-shirt, mostly because his fair skin burned so easily in the strong California sun. He was an absentminded driver, usually far too fixated on the radio dial to have a reliable sense of the traffic around him or the lines on the highway. (Brian once told an old classmate that it took him five tries to get his driver’s license. “Big surprise!” she remembers thinking.) Whimsical and absentminded off the road as well, Brian would forget all about earlier commitments—say, meeting a friend for miniature golf—if some other opportunity caught his fancy in the interim. Not that he was consciously abandoning one friend for another, Sloan says. “His attention span was limited. And when he got excited about something, that was it.” Similarly, when he got embroiled in a project—particularly if it involved music—Brian would work obsessively for hours, so thoroughly losing track of time that he’d call for his friends well after midnight.

  And though Brian was a varsity athlete, a decent student, and popular, his friends sensed his vulnerability. He was desperately insecure around girls, particularly the ones he knew other people found attractive and charismatic. Chief among these was Carol Mountain, a witty, dark-haired cheerleader Brian adored. “That was a big-time crush,” Sprague recalls. And though they never kissed or even went out on a casual date, Hood remembers Carol as Brian’s “first true love.” H
e would speak about her obsessively, praising her lovely skin and long, dark hair and fantasizing about the series of events that would lead to her accepting his invitation to go out. The only person who didn’t seem to know about Brian’s crush, it seems, was Carol herself. “I really had no idea until twenty-five years later,” she says. And yet she does remember how easily Brian spoke to her in Spanish class, how quick he was to help her remember homework assignments, and how eager he was to play boogie-woogie piano at her house when the gang came over for a party. “He was just a really nice guy,” she says. “Someone you kind of wanted to protect.”

  Brian continued to mythologize his unattainable crush into adulthood, eventually projecting her into the role of surfer girl, a sweet girl he’d want to marry so “we wouldn’t have to wait so long,” and, as his perspective darkened, into a mature woman so hardened by life she had traded her silky locks for a shorter, more severe look. “Where did your long hair go?” he imagined asking, concluding, “Carol, I know.” (“Pet Sounds” lyricist Tony Asher rewrote Brian’s reverie, leading to the lyric “Caroline, No.”) Indeed, the feelings that led to the creation of Brian’s 1966 album seemed to reawaken Brian’s affection for Carol. They were both married by then, but she began to receive phone calls from her old classmate, sometimes at odd hours. “He didn’t sound drugged or anything, but it was very strange,” she says. “He’d call at 3:00 a.m. and want to talk about music. I was such a nerd I’d say, ‘What? Who?’ and have him talk to my husband. But it was nothing inappropriate. It was just a strange thing he was going through, calling and connecting. We treated him with respect. We didn’t get angry. And he didn’t talk long.”