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

by Peter Ames Carlin

  Still, the performance made a lasting impact on Al Jardine, another Hawthorne High senior and aspiring musician who was watching from the audience. Al already knew Brian from the Cougar football team—he was a halfback whose career ended, as legend has it, thanks to a broken leg suffered on a broken play following a sloppy pitch-out from QB Brian Wilson. But this was the first time Al had glimpsed Brian’s prowess as a singer and arranger. “That was also the first time I ever saw Carl Wilson,” Al recalls. “This short, pudgy kid with a guitar who didn’t even look like a high school student. Later I found out he was Brian’s baby brother.” Another scion of a musical family from the Midwest (he was born in Lima, Ohio), Al played guitar and had already teamed up with his pals Gary Winfrey and Bob Barrow in a folk-inspired group he called the Tikis, then the Islanders. But Jardine remembered Brian’s group and figured that if he ever ran into him again, they should make a point of singing together.

  Brian continued to focus on his music, too. At school he took classes in composition and harmony, soaking up the basics of notation and orchestration even as he ignored his teachers’ admonitions to avoid the guttural sounds of rock ’n’ roll. Outside the classroom Brian took every opportunity to perform, harmonizing with his friends in the lunchroom, banging out boogie-woogie tunes for his friends at parties (though, as Bruce Griffin discovered, Brian took immediate and vocal exception if someone’s piano was out of tune), and turning casual after-school get-togethers into recitals of pop and gospel favorites. Now old enough to explore the local music scene, Brian led friends on expeditions to see local surf guitar phenom Dick Dale, and he made solitary pilgrimages to the resort hotels of Catalina Island to see the Four Freshmen.

  Eager to show off his ever-developing skills, Brian worked with his core group of singers—some combination of Hood, Griffin, Keith Lent, and Mike Love, with occasional assists from Carl—to polish a small repertoire of popular Kingston Trio and R & B tunes, with the now-mastered vocal gymnastics of the Freshmen’s “It’s a Blue World” serving as a romantic showstopper. As the summer shifted the focus of South Bay teen life away from the local schools and toward the beach, the group plied their tunes at the bigger beach parties and the regular talent shows held at the Hermosa Biltmore Hotel, whose airy, weatherworn ballroom catered to the younger set. “This was just fun for us; we never talked about doing it for a living,” Hood remembers. But that didn’t mean Brian and particularly his ambitious older cousin weren’t thinking more enterprising thoughts.

  In fact, Mike was even more desperate than Brian to turn their pop music avocation into a career. Years of indifferent effort in school had left him, after graduating from Dorsey High in the spring of 1959, with no prospects beyond the menial job he had at his father’s sheet metal company and a nighttime gig pumping gas at a nearby service station. Barely able to support himself, Mike’s resources were stretched beyond the breaking point when his girlfriend became pregnant in the fall of 1960. Word of the mishap—and Mike’s plan to sneak off to Tijuana for a quick abortion—leaked to her parents, who stormed up to the Loves’ house to demand Mike do right by their eighteen-year-old daughter. Milton and Glee agreed that Mike should do the honorable thing and marry her. But that didn’t mean Glee was going to abide anything about his behavior.

  Once the placated parents had driven away, Glee stormed up to her eldest son’s bedroom and set methodically to throwing his things out of the window. “I came home from school, and all his clothes were on the porch,” Maureen says. “She had thrown them out in a rage. It had always been tense with them, with his sneaking and lying and cheating. And pregnancy was just so shameful back then. I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, if we cross Mother, this is what happens?’ Stephen and I came in at the same time and saw what had happened, and I think it affected Stephen permanently. I can’t imagine how horrible it was for Mike.” These days, Mike just shrugs it off. “Yeah, she threw my stuff out of the window. It didn’t help the typewriter.” His girlfriend was a lovely girl, he says. They enjoyed each other’s company, and nature took its course. “There was a little trauma at first, but I understood why Mom was upset, so I wasn’t mad at her. I moved to a small apartment and it was fine. I kept working.”

  Yet the episode still seems to trouble Milton Love. “It seemed harsh to me. But what the hell are you gonna do?” he says. “She was in charge; I wasn’t. That’s why I married her. I’m a wuss. And fortunately some wusses marry very domineering, active women. It worked out great for us. But I don’t think Michael has ever had the measure of love for his mother after that that all the other kids had.” But the familial rejection didn’t just come from his mother. Mike had taken some measure of security in his job at Love Sheet Metal, particularly after his child was born. But when his outside interests and particularly a suddenly burgeoning music career disrupted Mike’s attendance, Milton Love responded the only way he knew how. “I fired him, hell yeah. And he didn’t take it very well,” he says. “It’ll hurt anyone’s feelings, if you’re human at all, when you get fired. But he still speaks to me.”

  As it turned out, Milton’s anxiety about Mike’s absences stemmed from the overwhelming financial problems the company was having. Within months, Love Sheet Metal would collapse from a crushing debt, an event that swept the Loves from their custom-built Spanish home in an elegant neighborhood to a moribund house in a rough section of Inglewood bordering the Los Angeles airport. “It was a two-bedroom house with an enclosed patio area where Stanley and Steve slept, which was pretty cold in the wintertime,” Maureen remembers. “But we already had three of us in my bedroom, in this tiny little room. I remember Dad borrowed some money from my puny bank account. I can only imagine how horrible it must have been for him to come to the kids to see if they had any money.”

  Doubly humiliated and determined to reclaim the affirmation and love he’d enjoyed during his varsity track days at Dorsey High, Mike lobbied his cousin to follow the example of local up-and-comers Jan and Dean—a couple of college kids who recorded in their garage—and turn themselves into a pop act. Meanwhile, as Brian started first-year classes in music and psychology at El Camino Junior College, he finally ran into Al Jardine, who was still eager to sing with him and just as determined to chase a career in music. Meeting Hood and a few other friends in the school nurse’s office (where the echo was particularly sweet), the gang would sing their songs, debate the merits of the tunes already on the charts, and gab wistfully about how they might get there themselves. When Brian and Mike got together in the evenings, they’d continue the conversation. Guys all over L.A. were getting into rock ’n’ roll and making a fortune—what did those guys have that they didn’t? All they needed was something to sing about.

  If eighteen-year-old Brian wasn’t quite sure about what to do with his life, at least he had it in his mind to do something. Dennis, on the other hand, seemed determined to do as little as possible. The years of Murry’s unrelenting authority had turned him knotty and emotionally stilted—a restless, unfocused adolescent as prone to misbehavior as he was to a puppylike craving for affection. Always eager to ditch school, Dennis wandered frequently to the nearby beaches, where he had fallen in with the surfers who wandered from break to break in search of the day’s best waves. Drawn to the formless, bohemian life they led—and delighted to indulge in the booze, marijuana, and easygoing women they always seemed to have at hand—Dennis convinced Murry to spot him the money for a board, and soon he became a regular fixture among the itinerant beach bums of the South Bay beaches that stretched beneath central Los Angeles. Soon he’d come home bearing the scars and salt-blond hair of a habitual surfer, talking easily in their slang about how this new sport would quickly sweep across the entire West Coast. Dennis was so completely in the thrall of the surfing life in the summer of 1961 that when he heard his big brother musing about the challenge of finding something new to write a pop song about, he quickly blurted out a piece of advice: “You oughta write about surfing!” Why, he’d even wr
ite down a few of the coolest words and make a list of the best surfing spots, if that would help…

  It wasn’t the first time the idea had come up. Robin Hood recalls a parody version of “The Stroll” Brian wrote well before the summer of 1961 that traded out the Diamonds’ dance lyrics with surfer’s slang. But that was just a schoolboy gag composed for a laugh. This time around, Brian took the idea far more seriously. He called his cousin to set up a writing session, during which Brian pounded out an original Chuck Berry–style three-chord tune. Meanwhile, Mike—who also knew a thing or two about surfing—scratched out some words about life on the beach, starting with the morning surf report heard on the radio and ending with the late-night parties at which the surfers and their honeys cranked up the radio and kicked up clouds of sand doing the surfer stomp, because, as it turns out, It’s the latest dance craze! The chorus boiled everything down to a simple assertion that in two sharply composed lines elevated surfing from a mere sport into something closer to a belief system: “Surfin’ is the only life, the only way for me/So surf! Surf! With me!”

  Just about the same time Brian and Mike were pounding out their tune, aspiring folkie Al Jardine was following Murry’s advice and looking in on Hite and Dorinda Morgan at their offices on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. The mom-and-pop song publishers had bought a few of the elder Wilson’s tunes, and they always had an eye out for interesting new acts. Jardine’s folk trio hadn’t impressed them very much—they were so much like every other folk group already out there, for one thing. But they liked his sharp voice and assertive spirit, so when he returned in late August in the company of Brian, Carl, Dennis, and Mike, they agreed to listen to the new group’s arrangements of popular rock and pop tunes. Once again, the Morgans liked the singing, but, as before, they were looking for something a bit more original. Didn’t these kids have anything new to offer? Some new fad all their friends were talking about that had yet to end up in a pop song? “How about surfing?” Dennis chimed in. Before long he was on a tear, going on about how huge the sport was becoming and how everyone listened to the surf report in the morning and planned their days according to the size and location of the best waves. Sensing the Morgans’ piqued interest, he ended with the capper: “Brian already has a song called ‘Surfin”! We could practice it for you and come back!”

  The Morgans took them up on the offer, and eager to get going, the boys returned to Hawthorne. Happily, Murry and Audree had already planned to spend Labor Day weekend in Mexico City with some friends, leaving their sons with a refrigerator stocked with food and a pile of cash to use in case of emergency. When that didn’t prove to be enough to rent the microphone, amp, and stand-up bass they needed, Al took Brian, Carl, Dennis, and Mike over to his parents’ house to appeal directly to his mother, Virginia. “We had to sing the song for her,” Al recalls. “We had to show her what we were all about. So we were sitting on the living room floor in a little circle—we didn’t have enough chairs, I think, which is kinda quaint. But she liked ‘Surfin’,’ and she really liked ‘Our Hearts Were Full of Spring.’ That was the one we always pulled out when we needed to knock someone out.” Virginia Jardine dug into her purse and found $300 (“Probably a month’s salary,” he says), and then Al took Brian to the music store on Hawthorne Boulevard, where he knew they could rent a stand-up bass, and they were in business.

  The five boys spent the next two days in the Wilsons’ music room working out the kinks in the lyrics, structure, and harmonies of “Surfin’” and were in fact still hard at it when the elder Wilsons returned from Mexico, surprising the five boys in midrehearsal.

  Murry was furious, flying into a rage the moment he figured out how his sons had used his emergency money. “Just listen, Dad! Listen!” Brian cried, peeling himself from the living room wall Murry had hurled him against. The boys picked up the instruments, Brian gave a quick count-in, and they started singing: “Surfin’ is the only life, the only way for me…” The old man’s beefy red face went slack. He listened. He nodded. When it was over, his mood had shifted considerably. “I remember him being excited,” Al says. “He was impressed with our performance, and he saw a lot of potential there.” The tune, Murry decreed, was rude and crude, not nearly as sophisticated as the sort of stuff he did…but maybe that’s what sells now. “You could record that,” he concluded.

  At this point the rehearsals turned serious. And now that Murry had declared himself the group’s manager, his first point of order was to declare the group a family business. “Everyone else will screw you over,” he reasoned. Which meant Brian’s bandmates would include Carl, obviously, and Mike. Dennis could be in too, despite his previous disinterest in singing (or doing anything) seriously, because he was family and because—as Audree pointed out—the song had been his idea. Brian’s regular singing partners from high school need not apply. Same deal for neighborhood pal David Marks, even though he played a decent guitar and had been a regular in the Wilson music room for years. So strict was Murry’s family-only edict, in fact, that even Alan Jardine was dealt out of the band just after the seminal Labor Day weekend get-together. The break was so short-lived that Al didn’t know about it until the spring of 2005. “I got kicked out of the band, and I didn’t even know it!” he marveled. “Thanks, Uncle Murry!” But Brian (who confirmed the whole story) soon convinced his father that Al was too strong a singer and musician to live without. “He lost that battle,” Brian says ruefully. But it’s intriguing to note how the roots of the group’s decades-long struggles for power and control predate all but its first semiofficial rehearsal.

  The seeds for much of what was to come can be heard in a rehearsal taped on Brian’s Wollensak sometime in early September 1961, between the Labor Day weekend get-together and the group’s first recording session with the Morgans on the fifteenth. The session begins with a few random noises—Brian checking the levels, dropping something (“awww shit”), and then doing a brief count-in to the song. Then Mike leans into his bass part—“bom, bom, dip-duh-dip-duh-dip”—soon to be joined by the others in a shaky, off-kilter major seventh triad chant of “surfin’, surfin’.” They’re raw at first, their voices still seeking their place in the blend. But all those nights of singing in bed gave the brothers an easy vocal rapport, and it doesn’t take long for their voices to fall in line. After a few minutes Audree walks in the door with a friend and her junior high–aged son, who gapes at what he sees unfolding before him.

  “You guys wrote that song by yourself?” he asks in a voice thick with adolescent incredulity. “You think it’ll make good?”

  At that point they could only hope—and bicker about who really wrote the lyrics to the song they had already credited to just Brian and Mike, because as Dennis bitterly pointed out, “We all wrote a tremendous amount of words!” Mike didn’t deny it (“yeah, we did”), but he didn’t entertain the subject either. “We shouldn’t even sweat it, ’cause it’s gonna be a big flop the way we’re goin’ now!” (Indeed, songwriting credits were a lawsuit for another day.) Brian cut off the debate, asking, “Look, who’s boss? Me! Now, sing out naturally. Don’t hold back! Step back if you come in too strong.”

  The singing gets tighter on the tape, the background chorus snapping together into a sharply defined chord. Brian cut off the next attempt, offended by the absence of excitement in the backing oohs and aahs. “Sing out regularly; stand with your hands on your hips and you’ll get a lot more breathing,” he instructs. All these intricacies bored hyperactive Dennis, who not only made a point of burping into the microphone but also decided to make some mysterious off-mike display that prompted Brian to howl angrily—“Aw, DON’T! Dennis! Please don’t!”—before losing his patience and threatening to dump his middle brother from the group altogether. “I’m not kidding! I’ll get Alan Jardine!”

  “I get the hiccups and you kick me out?” Dennis protests, his feelings wounded.

  “You get the hiccups, and you don’t sing the words, and you geek us out!” Mike says
in a voice less aggrieved than that of the still-seething Brian, who obviously has had enough of his brother’s antics.

  “As soon as you start screwin’ up or laughing, we’ll pull the goddamn mike out and we’ll quit. You got it? As soon as you start laughing, we’ll pull the mike out!”

  Brian then signals Carl, who starts strumming his guitar, and Mike gets back into the Bop-bop-dip-duh-dips. The four of them huddle up to the microphone again, and their voices together spin their tale about life on the beach and the challenge of the waves.

  Not long after that, they performed the song in the recording studio, along with “Luau,” a vaguely “Tequila”-like Hawaiian-themed party song composed by the Morgans’ son Bruce, as a B-side. The song was released on December 8 on the local Candix label, credited not to the Pendletones (the band name they’d chosen as a tip of the hat to the Pendleton wool shirts favored by surfers) but to the Beach Boys (a more commercial name for a surfing band, according to the label). But whatever disappointment this last-second change caused gave way instantly to the thrill of hearing their voices echoing from cars and beach parties all over Los Angeles. This in turn was dwarfed by the even larger thrill of seeing “Surfin’” rise to the number two slot on the local charts and, thanks to sales of 50,000 units in the southlands, the number seventy-five spot on Billboard ’s national charts.

  Now it was happening for real. Brian dropped out of El Camino and begged Murry to help the group strengthen their foothold in the local music business. They played a few tentative shows that winter and girded to climb even higher. They didn’t know where they were going, exactly. But they were moving, and that was the important thing.