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

by Peter Ames Carlin

  Ten years after that, Brian called Robin Hood out of the blue. They hadn’t spoken in years, but suddenly the thirty-five-year-old Brian was talking like it was 1959. “He wanted to come and pick me up, and we’d call Carol Mountain and Carol Hess and a few others and get together. He was serious.” When Robin told him that several of his friends had long since scattered across the country, Brian was unperturbed. “He wanted to fly them in and have a party next week.” Brian forgot all about his party idea soon enough, but Robin never forgot his boyish excitement or, for that matter, his Sam Spade–like ability to track down his old pal’s number, no matter how often he moved. “I had other friends who could never find me. But Brian always could. It just blew me away.”

  Despite his lack of confidence with girls, Brian did date regularly, if casually, during his high school years. Irene Callahan (now Fernandez) recalls her junior prom date as being funny and sweet, meeting her after class to walk her to the lunchroom, cracking jokes and making silly observations about the other kids the whole way. Still, he could be shy and a trifle awkward. “I’d say he was more intense than the other kids,” she recalls. “He always seemed serious, even though we also had a lot of laughs.” He didn’t talk to Irene about music very much, which made it all the more surprising when they had left the prom to dance to Tony Bennett’s band at the Ambassador Hotel, and Brian, in a romantic mood, started singing along. “I’m sure other people could hear—it wasn’t soft! I was embarrassed at the time.”

  But like so many of his friends, Irene couldn’t imagine making sport of Brian for any reason. He was too nice, for one thing. “He was a sensitive person,” she says. Carol Mountain felt the same way. “He was such a gentle soul, and you could sense something wasn’t quite right,” she says. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that Brian gravitated toward other kids whose internal lives were more complicated than they let on in public. Hood, for example, was an epileptic whose neurological condition not only kept him from driving but also prompted occasional small fits of muttering that made other kids giggle uncomfortably. Brian moved immediately to protect his friend, coolly telling the other kids to back off and leave his pal alone. “He’s fine,” he’d snap. Ted Sprague, another jock who lettered in several sports, also used his letterman’s jacket as a shield, given a past that included an unmarried mother and years spent bouncing from city to city and house to house. “I never knew my father, so maybe I was accustomed to being hurt,” Sprague says now. Sensing that injury, Brian would invite Sprague to come to Sunday services at the Inglewood Covenant Church along with Audree and his brothers on Sunday, a weekly ritual he valued both for the emotional succor the sermons offered and the weekly respite from Murry, who had no interest in religion. Sprague, then a determined atheist, would have none of it. But the gesture made an impression on him, particularly in the years that Christianity became a central focus of his life.

  Church may have given Brian some sense of ease, but as with most teenagers hoping to find their own way, he found more reliable transcendence in the physical world and the simple joys of friendship. So when Ted Sprague would propose a late-afternoon workout by the water, Brian would go happily. He always loved to escape, particularly in the company of a friend who shared so many of the same frustrations and felt the same instinctive need to find a life that was larger and more meaningful than the one they knew.

  So they would drive west together to Hermosa Beach, leaving the car in the lot and walking down to the water’s edge. It was usually close to dusk, the sun already sinking beneath the horizon, and in the fading light the boys would blast off on what they called a training run but was actually a full-bore sprint down the hard, wet sand toward Hermosa Pier. Their tennis shoes slapping the sand, the water spraying up behind them, their thoughts were momentarily lost in the thunder of the waves, the rush of the wind, and the pounding of their hearts. “It was a spiritual thing,” Brian remembers. “Down there right on the water, with the sun going down, and we’d run so fast, it was amazing.”

  And yet, the real spiritual frontier for Brian—his most reliable place to escape, to discover himself and express his feelings—was the one he’d first glimpsed in the notes of “Rhapsody in Blue” when he was two years old. Brian had soon displayed glimmers of talent, particularly as a result of his high-pitched, powerful singing voice that made him an instant standout in the church choir. This ability didn’t always make him popular with his peers. Dennis long ago recalled seeing his big brother run home in tears after some schoolmates laughed about his girlish falsetto. Still, Brian learned volumes about the visceral power of music by watching his father throw all of his bearish weight into his own music. Even as he earned his living in the machinery business and reveled in his authoritative role as master of his wife and family, Murry Wilson still harbored his childhood dream of writing hit songs.

  He’d sit at the piano in the evenings—sometimes alone, sometimes with a friend to bounce ideas off of—his thick fingers groping for new melodies, stringing them through the pretty, jazzy chords and danceable rhythms he heard coming from the radio. When Murry found something that tickled his ear, he would jump up and down with excitement, delighting in what he was sure would be a smash hit. Summoning Audree to the keyboard, he would painstakingly teach her to sing a harmony part, making sure she had the inflection just so, in order to emphasize the tune’s devil-may-care bounciness, the essential charm he knew would make it leap up the charts.

  Combining his musical talent with his business acumen, Murry would draw up some sheet music and take his latest tune to the small music publishers in Hollywood, hoping to get it out into the world where someone, somewhere, might hear its potential and record it. And he wasn’t entirely unsuccessful—Murry published several songs during the ’50s, all with eyebrow-raising titles like “Hide My Tears,” “His Little Darling,” and “Fiesta Day Polka.” But his biggest success by far was a novelty dance number called “Two-Step, Side-Step,” which was recorded by a group called the Bachelors in 1952 and became popular enough that Lawrence Welk performed it on his weekly radio show. The triumph of that moment—Murry was a huge Lawrence Welk fan—put a spring in his step for months.

  Along with all the other gratification it gave him, Murry’s success in music gave him some welcome bragging rights over his siblings and in-laws. “The Wilson brothers were always bickering,” recalls Maureen Love, whose mother, Emily (whom everyone called Glee), was Murry’s sister. “Some of them had wars over business deals or other money things.” But Glee, like her sister Mary, had also seen Murry protecting their mother against the upraised hand of Buddy. These memories endeared Murry to them for the rest of their lives. “She would never let anyone say shit about Murry,” remembers Stan Love, Maureen’s youngest brother. “She and Aunt Mary would throw your ass out of the room if you did that.” Indeed, if Glee Love had anything, it was an indelible memory, particularly when she felt wronged. Her father learned this the hard way, and so too would her oldest son.

  Married in 1938 to high school sweetheart Milton Love, who worked in his father’s thriving sheet metal business, Glee had her first child, Michael, in 1941. Maureen came two years later, followed by Stephen in 1947, Stanley in 1949, Stephanie in 1951, and Margie in 1960. The war years were particularly lucrative for the sheet metal business, and by the early ’50s Milton had done well enough to move his family into a spacious, Mediterranean-style home he’d had built in the elegant View Park neighborhood. “We always did nice, creative things, loading up the car with easels and paints and going out to Palos Verdes to paint barns,” Maureen says. “That was my mother’s influence; she was the creative one. We all had music lessons. And both of our parents were athletes, so we had plenty of sports, too.”

  Glee’s life in View Park granted her physical distance from the crowded, unhappy circumstances of her own childhood. But she remained a high-strung woman whose fears often prompted her to forbid her children from participating in even the most normal childhood activities.
“My mom came from a chaotic background, and I guess she overcompensated,” Maureen says. “We could barely walk down the sidewalk by ourselves. In fact, we used to have a joke that we’d have to be fifteen before we could cross the street alone.” Mike rolls his eyes when he remembers his mother’s rules. “She was more than protective,” he says. “She didn’t want me to join the Boy Scouts because she didn’t want me to fall off a cliff. And yeah, of course it bothered me.”

  As the oldest of six children, it was predictable that Mike bore the brunt of his parents’ rigid discipline. The fact that he was such an energetic and outgoing kid only made it more difficult for him. “He chose to sneak around a little and lie a little just to do the things he wanted to do,” Maureen recalls. “He rebelled and got into trouble, and so he had the reputation of being a liar and a sneak around our house. And my mother had a dark, kind of unforgiving side. And she and Mike just clashed.” As he got older, Mike learned to pursue feminine approval from girls his own age. “I remember him being so girl-crazy,” Maureen says. “Whenever my friends came over, he was always there, wanting to be around the girls. And he was charming and handsome, so he had fun.”

  Mike’s pursuit of fun didn’t end at the schoolhouse door. As a grade-schooler, he often got in trouble for reading his own books at his desk while the teacher was holding a lesson at the front of the room. Mike made a habit of ignoring homework assignments, and by the time he got to high school, he was far more interested in the track team than anything that was going on in the classrooms. One of his fondest memories, in fact, is the day he used a high-jump move to escape a boring social studies lecture. “The teacher’s back was turned, and I did a western roll out of the window,” Mike says with a laugh. “I had a good time in high school. And we always loved singing, too. Singing those Everly Brothers songs with Brian and other guys. We always loved it.”

  As it had been for the earlier generations of Wilsons, music had become a bonding agent for Glee, Murry, and their families. It helped Murry get beyond his resentment of Milton Love’s financial success—which Milton was rarely too shy to put on display. And when Glee threw the family’s annual Christmas party, which always climaxed with the guests going out on a long caroling expedition around the View Park streets, the Wilsons were always there. In fact, the Loves’ Christmas parties were peak moments in the year for Brian and his brothers, rare occasions when their family seemed connected to something larger, happier, and more prosperous than the lives they knew. When the group divided into generations, Brian, Dennis, and Carl would join the Love kids to sing the latest tunes by Chuck Berry or Elvis Presley. Brian came naturally to the fore, sitting at the piano and showing his cousins and brothers exactly how to combine their voices and instruments in order to capture the sound they heard on the radio. “He was so kindhearted, talented, and cute,” Maureen remembers. “When Brian came over, he’d barely say hi, just go right to the piano. He’d start banging out songs, give Mike his bass part, give my mom an alto part, and we’d all sing together, harmonizing. Those are some of my favorite memories.”

  Brian was always most comfortable when he was in the middle of a song. When he wasn’t playing music himself, Brian loved to listen to the radio, just then turning electric with the sounds of Bill Haley, Chuck Berry, and Elvis Presley. Mike turned him on to rhythm and blues, particularly the street corner harmonies of the Drifters and the other doo-wop singing groups. But as catalytic as the propulsive beat of “Rock Around the Clock” and stinging guitar of “Johnny B. Goode” might have been, it was the sound of four dorky guys in sweaters that changed the course of Brian’s life.

  The group was the Four Freshmen, a clean-cut vocal quartet that sang old-fashioned jazz-pop tunes with intricately arranged four-part vocal harmonies. Hearing those lithe voices swell and slide through the sambalike “Day by Day” on the car radio one afternoon in the mid-1950s, Brian was awestruck. He cajoled Audree into taking him to a record store, where he took one of their albums—The Four Freshmen and the Five Trombones—and listened to the whole thing. The record mesmerized Brian, and talking about it later, he speaks in near-religious terms, describing his soul opening up, the music entering him and carrying him to another sphere of consciousness. “It brings a feeling of love inside of me,” he says. “It does. It really does. That feeling of harmony.” Soon he had all the group’s records, listening to them over and over again as he sat hunched over the piano, his fingers searching for the combination of notes and countermelodies that would unlock the secret harmonies in each song. When he could play the chords on the piano, Brian would call in Audree and Carl and arrange their voices to echo the Freshmen. Eventually Murry and Audree bought Brian a portable Wollensak tape recorder, which he could use to record and analyze his work.

  Falling deeper under the music’s spell, Brian became increasingly intrigued by the possibilities of recorded sound. Tapes that survive from the era reveal his earliest vocal arrangements and also his first attempts to use recording technology as a way to double or triple the power of two or three voices. He also captured a tantalizing array of ordinary moments in the Wilson home, including Dennis as a rusty-voiced fourteen-year-old, begging his big brother for a chance to recite a pretend commercial for Ipana toothpaste. “Just a little bit!” he pleads, only to be rebuffed by a taunting Brian. “Ladies and gentlemen, I know you can’t hear me. I hope you can’t hear me. But I just wanna say that Dennis is a prick!” Dennis yowls in protest—“Come on, Brian!”—but Brian is on a tear, turning his attention to chubby baby brother Carl. “Tell me, Carl, how’d you get all that flab?” he says, answering himself in a whiny version of his brother’s feathery preadolescent voice: “Well, it’s fun to lay on your ass all day!”

  Brian recorded himself and Keith Lent practicing a Spanish dialogue that focuses largely on ordering food and arguing about the price of a used car, then recorded himself complaining bitterly about the Wollensak’s occasional breakdowns. “I think we are recording. I now think the goddamn fuckin’ recorder is fixed,” he says in a voice taut with anger. This outburst ends the moment he sees his temper pushing the needles into the red zone. “I’m not too pissed off or anything,” he adds hastily. “It’s just that I’m sorta wimped.”

  Mostly, Brian was impatient to get back to his music, where he could always attract a crowd, and they would always expect him to be the quarterback. As the Wollensak tapes reveal, Brian liked nothing more than to gather his friends around the piano. He leads spirited, if ragged, sing-alongs of “Sloop John B.” and the hymn “Good News,” the music often breaking down into self-conscious giggles, flirtatious asides, or both, between the girls and guys gathered around the piano. Later, with just the boys, Brian sings lead on endless takes of the jokey “Bermuda Shorts,” taking it seriously enough to snort angrily when the final take falls apart: “What the hell!” Given the authority music gave him among his high school friends, Brian made singing an increasingly public part of his persona. At lunch he’d grab a few friends and sit in the corner of the cafeteria, leading them in schoolboy ditties such as the aforementioned “Bermuda Shorts,” “Larry, Larry, Dingleberry,” or the latest Kingston Trio tune. Most often he’d harmonize with Keith Lent, Robin Hood, and a few other friends from the senior class. But if Brian tended to find his singing partners among the set of popular jocks he socialized with, friendship and status mattered less to him than singing on key. So when a short, stocky underclassman named Bruce Griffin stepped up out of the crowd and added his voice to the mix, Brian smiled, nodded, and beckoned him into the inner circle. “That was the democratizing aspect of music,” Griffin says now. “You could just walk up and sing, and they’d accept you if you could harmonize. Then Brian kind of adopted me.”

  By the start of his senior year, Brian was ready to make his music even more public. When Carol Hess, a popular girl in his social set, ran for commissioner of the student government, Brian worked with Keith Lent to adapt “Hully Gully” into a campaign song, which they perfor
med with Robin Hood and Bruce Griffin at an all-school assembly: “We need a new commissioner, and what is her name?/Carol, Carol Hess/Ask the student body and they’ll tell you the same/ Carol, Carol Hess/She’s ready and she’s willing and she’s able, too/Seniors vote for Carol, Juniors vote for Carol/Sophomores and freshmen, too…”

  The tune earned an ovation from their fellow students, encouraging Brian to sign up to sing for the multigenerational crowd that would flock to the fall arts program held in the evening in the Hawthorne High auditorium. Signing up Hood, Griffin, and his cousin Mike as partners, Brian worked up renditions of Dion and the Belmonts’ “To Spend One Night with You” and, far more ambitiously, the Four Freshmen’s “It’s a Blue World,” a jazz song with long stretches of unaccompanied harmonies, the voices sliding from one augmented minor chord to the next. Figuring “Blue World” would allow him to show off his arranging skills, Brian pushed his friends to master the hairpin turns of the convoluted song. The challenge proved too steep for Hood, who abandoned the group at the last minute (“I can’t sing!” he wailed, piteously), thus impelling Brian to rename his group Carl and the Passions in order to convince less-than-eager younger brother Carl to step in. Unfortunately, Hood’s anxiety was well placed. The group stumbled so badly in those first bars of “Blue World” that the audience actually laughed.

  As focused as Brian was on the performance, the laughter coming from the auditorium didn’t seem to register in his mind. But when he and Lent took a moment to help another student’s mom change a flat in the school parking lot and the best she could say about his performance was, “Well, at least you tried,” Brian’s face reddened and his jaw fell open. “He took it so seriously, he was really crushed,” Lent recalls. And no matter how much acclaim his music would gain in the next few decades, the echo of those laughs continued to haunt him.