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

by Peter Ames Carlin

  Perhaps Brian was able to enjoy the “Help Me, Rhonda” recording session, carried away on the propulsive bass and twanging lead guitar, followed by the explosive vocals on the chorus, Mike and Dennis harmonizing on the low end, while Carl and Al joined Brian’s wailing falsetto on the top. Their pure, young voices ring out in the studio tapes, as the recorded track echoes faintly from their headphones. “Help me Rhonda, yeah! Get her out of my heart!”

  But Murry, who pushed through the heavy studio door to address the boys face-to-face, still wasn’t satisfied. “All we’re asking for here is a little syncopation,” he says. But what he was really after was far more complicated: Only a few months earlier, Brian and the Beach Boys had, after months of private grumbling about his heavy-handed ways, fired the Wilson family patriarch from his management duties. “Because of the situation between father and son, you go nowhere,” Brian explained to a magazine writer at the time. “It was done more or less maturely. Finally, we decided he is better as a father than a manager.”

  Plainly, though, the managerial strategies Murry employed with his sole clients grew directly out of the relationship he’d always had with his sons. His love for the Beach Boys, in other words, was just as intense, the commitment just as strong. The need to dominate was just as overwhelming, the subconscious impulse to destroy just as inescapable. The boys’ connection to their father was just as paradoxical, especially when it came to Brian—the eldest and most talented of the boys, who was everything Murry wished he could have been. No matter how often his dad criticized his writing, tried to overrule his production decisions in the studio, or humiliated him in public, Brian couldn’t suppress his need for his father’s approval.

  Excited about his new arrangement for “Rhonda”—a song he first recorded in January with a simpler, less energetic arrangement—Brian invited his dad to watch him rerecord it. Maybe now that they had some distance from each other the old man would finally see that Brian did know what he was doing and learn to respect and love him for it. But Murry had his own internal needs and desires to tend.

  Back in the studio, Murry looms over Al, demanding that he read him the lyrics to “Rhonda,” then half-singing, half-scatting them back, emphasizing the syncopation he’s after. Brian glances up through the glass to the control room, which is crowded with guests including friends, music industry figures, and assorted hangers-on—all of whom are watching him lose control of his own session. Finally, he cuts his dad off.

  “He’s got it now. Don’t sing it with him; jeez, let him sing it once.”

  This show of authority only aggravates Murry, who seems instantly wounded.

  “You want me to leave, Brian?”

  “No!” Brian laughs uneasily. “I just want you to let him sing it!”

  “Mother and I can leave now, if you want.”

  “No, stay,” Brian insists. But when he invites his father to put on a pair of headphones so he can compare Al’s new vocal with the recorded version he’s trying to double-track, Murry thinks he is being insulted. “I can hear you here,” he says, gazing coolly at his half-deaf son. “My ears are good enough to hear.” The barb stings, and Brian’s cheeks go instantly red.

  “No! Get the phones on so you can hear the other voice!”

  Then Murry has his arm around Al, purring conspiratorially into his ear. “You’re too tense! Look, they have so many (hangers-on) here, you shouldn’t have it. But loosen up and just forget it. You’re doing a great job.” Al mutters his halfhearted assent, but Murry, who isn’t paying attention anyway, keeps going. “Look, I’m proud of you! You’ve got the lead, buddy, on their next single! Loosen up and sing from your heart. Right down here; that’s all you need. The rest is easy!”

  The evening spirals further out of control. When Al sings the song’s opening lines to Murry’s liking, the older man calls him a “genius,” mostly, it seems, to ridicule Brian, whose string of hits inspired some L.A. music industry figures to bestow the same weighty accolade upon him. A moment later Brian calls up through the glass to Loren Schwartz, a new friend who recently introduced him to marijuana. “Can you turn me on in there?” Brian asks, hiding his real query in what was then-unknown hipster slang. Schwartz shoots him a thumbs-up, and Brian sings happily to himself: “Rhonda, you look so fiiiiiine!” Then he calls for a break.

  When the session resumes again, Brian is scolding Mike for shoving Schwartz out of the studio. Mike—who knows exactly what his cousin and his pal did during the break—shrugs it off, and Brian calls for a vocals-only rehearsal of the interlocking patterns that make up the chorus. During the rehearsal, their unadorned voices edge close to perfection, but the intercom crackles again and Murry cites various flaws that only his ears have absorbed.

  “Fellas, I have 3,000 words to say,” he sighs. “So you’re big stars. Let’s fight, huh? Let’s fight for success, okay? Let’s go.”

  Finally, Brian loses it: “Oh, SHIT!” he screams out at his father. “You’re embarrassing me now! SHUT UP!”

  Sensing his cousin’s distress, Mike steps in to offer reassurance. “Don’t, don’t worry about it.” But his soothing makes no impact, particularly when Murry, affecting a wounded tone, starts playing the martyr.

  “I’ll leave, Brian, if you’re gonna give me a bad time.”

  Brian, still upset: “Don’t talk so loud. That really gets me.”

  Murry, hostile again: “I don’t care if it does. Let’s go. You got any guts? Let’s see it. I don’t care how many people are here.”

  Brian shouts back at him resentfully: “I got one ear left, and your big, loud voice is killin’ it!”

  Murry returns to the studio, stalking up to confront Brian face-to-face. “When you guys get too much money, you start thinking you’re gonna make everything a hit,” he rants as his son—slightly stoned and struck by the lunacy of the moment—taunts him by tilting a microphone toward the older man’s lips. “Don’t insult me!” Murry snarls, swiping a paw at the microphone.

  “I just wanna make sure this is on tape,” Brian says.

  “You’re an ingrate when you do this. Come on, dear.” Murry gestures toward Audree, then turns back to Brian. “I’ll never help you guys mix another single.”

  But Murry can’t bring himself to leave, and as the conversation devolves, he mixes insults (“You’re going downhill!”) with affirmations (“I love you; your mother loves you”) in what amounts to a toxic cocktail of emotional manipulation. Still, Brian seems to shrug it all off, which enrages Murry even more. He turns again to his wife, who observes the entire scene in silence, as she always did whenever her husband lashed out at their children. “I’m sorry, dear,” he says, his voice taking on a pious tone. “We’ll never come to another recording session. The kid got a big success, and he thinks he owns the business. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, dear. I’m sorry.” Then he addresses Brian again. “I’ve protected you for twenty-two years now, but I can’t go on if you’re not going to listen to an intelligent man.”

  Brian whispers: “Okay.”

  Murry: “Chuck and I used to make one hit after another, in thirty minutes. You guys are taking five hours to do it.”

  “Times are changing,” Brian says flatly.

  “You guys think you have an image,” Murry retorts.

  “Times are changing,” Brian again responds.

  Murry: “Don’t ever forget.”

  “Times are changing,” Brian says, one last time.

  With that, Murry leaves. But he’d be back. And though many things in Brian’s life and career would change in the next few weeks and months, the tangled snarl of love, hate, need, and resentment he felt for his father would not. In fact, it would define him for a long time to come.

  That Brian would be tormented for years to come by his conflicted relationship with his father stands to reason. Murry, for his part, never came to terms with his father. Sitting in another recording studio a thousand miles and more than three decades removed from that caustic night
in Los Angeles, Brian still spoke of his father with the same mix of admiration, love, and fear.

  “In some ways I haven’t gotten beyond my dad,” he said matter-of-factly. “In some ways I was very afraid of my dad. In other ways I loved him because he knew where it was at. As we talk now, that’s the first time I’ve ever said it to myself. My dad blew my mind.”

  In a positive way?

  “Yeah. Yeah. Very positive way. So positive that it scared me to death. In my life, being scared has been probably the most driving force that I have. Because I’m so afraid of life and the people in it. I got to go through that.” And yet even this admission comes with a happy ending. “If you have a little bit of fear in you, you push harder, you know? You fight better and you get more successful. That’s what I did, anyway.” That sentiment may well be at the heart of every song Brian has ever written.

  A few months earlier, Brian thought that getting his dad away from the group’s management would make everything easier. But nothing got easier. The fact that Murry wasn’t physically present did nothing to remove his expectations or the relentless schedule of writing, recording, and performing enforced by the group’s various contracts. Finally, just before Christmas, Brian had had enough. Flying to Houston for a show on December 23—the start of a two-week mini-tour—he began to weep, then wail. “I told Al Jardine I was going to crack up at any minute,” Brian said at the time. Soon he was lying in the aisle, screaming into a pillow he had pushed up against his face. “I let myself go emotionally,” Brian told Teen Beat magazine a little later. At first Brian said he wouldn’t get out of the airplane when they landed. But he did, and he cooled down enough that afternoon to play that night’s show at Houston’s Music Hall. But Brian woke up the next morning with a terrible knot in his stomach. He flew back to L.A., arranging first to have session guitarist Glen Campbell fly out to fill in for him at that night’s show in the Sam Houston Coliseum.

  Back in Los Angeles that night, Brian was met by Audree—he’d decreed that she, and not Murry, meet him at the airport—and had her drive him to his family’s now-empty home on West 119th Street. They walked the rooms together for a while, talking about the life they’d had there and where it had led them. After a while they got back in Audree’s car and drove back to Los Angeles and the future that waited for them there. Brian never set foot in the house again. When the other Beach Boys returned to Los Angeles in January, he called them together to announce that he would no longer be touring with the band. He’d already skipped several tours (“Brian absolutely hated the road from the very beginning,” David Marks recalls), and so the news shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise. Nevertheless, Brian’s perhaps fanciful recollection of the meeting (during which, he said, Al Jardine broke out in stomach cramps, Dennis threatened to hit someone with an ashtray, and Mike burst into tears and said there was no reason for the group to go on) became an oft-told tale in the band’s story.

  Campbell toured with the band for a few months, but he had his own career to nurture, so he left in the spring. The group replaced him with Bruce Johnston, a graduate of University High School, the same West L.A. high school that produced Jan and Dean, among others. Already a figure in the local music scene as half of Bruce and Terry (with Doris Day’s son Terry Melcher), Bruce was young, talented, and extremely ambitious. He could sing Brian’s falsettos onstage and shared enough of his features—the thick brown hair and baby face—that some fans didn’t realize he wasn’t Brian, which Bruce didn’t mind at all. He reveled in the screams and the acclaim—and set out immediately to make himself indispensable to the group.

  After the boys fired Murry, he had taken to his bed. He could barely summon the will to get out of his pajamas at first, but it was only a few weeks before he was up and nearly back to his grumbly, cantankerous self. Still, Carl could see that his father needed something to keep himself busy. And when Murry’s youngest son met a group of ambitious young musicians at the Hollywood Professional School (he had transferred once the Beach Boys really took off) who called themselves the Renegades, he gave them his dad’s number down in Hawthorne and suggested they give him a call. “I think Carl saw it as an opportunity to get Murry off of their backs,” says Rick Henn, the group’s drummer and main composer. “He could see his dad was grieving, and he really needed something to do. So that’s where we came in.”

  Murry called the group down to Hawthorne and had them set up in the same family room where the Beach Boys had gotten their start. The new group played for him for hours—twelve or fifteen, according to Henn’s memory—and finally he took his pipe out of his mouth and nodded. “I think you boys are ready to have some success,” he decreed, much to the group’s delight. “We knew this cat was our shot. He’d had this huge success with the Beach Boys, and we’d had a couple of singles fail,” Henn says. “We were malleable.” Indeed, they let Murry arrange their vocals and produce their albums in Brian’s early ’60s style. They even let him change their name to the Sunrays and dress them in the same striped shirts the Beach Boys had made famous. “He’d say, ‘I did it with my sons; now I’m gonna do it with these guys. I love my sons with all my heart, but these guys need my help. They’re my new Suns!’” Henn remembers.

  Murry got the group a contract with a small Capitol Records subsidiary (Tower Records), then wrote and produced the Sunrays’ first two singles, “Car Party” and “Outta Gas,” at the same studio where Brian worked, using the same engineer (Chuck Britz) and drummer (Hal Blaine) his son preferred. The tunes both turned out to be small hits, and the next single, “I Live for the Sun,” did a little better, thanks in part to Murry being in his full-on sales mode, calling all of his old radio contacts, schmoozing all of the rack-jobbers, distributing his bulk-purchased perfume and jewelry to anyone who might be able to do the band some good.

  Murry made sure the Sunrays got invited to open some shows for the Beach Boys that summer, but by then no one in the established group was happy to see another band, especially one managed by their father, following their musical and stylistic footsteps so closely. The fact that the Sunrays had actually made it onto the national charts only made things more tense, Henn notes. The guys ran hot and cold with them, Henn says, and even when they seemed friendly, well, you could never really be sure. “I was in Hollywood with my girlfriend one day, and Dennis pulled up in his car and yelled, ‘Hey, Rick! How you doin’, man?’ I remember thinking, ‘Whoa! He’s not pissed off!’” On the contrary, Dennis invited Rick and his friend up to his house, where he gave the seventeen-year-old high schoolers some drinks and shot the breeze for a while. Henn left feeling delighted with the encounter, but that changed the next morning when he got a call from an enraged Murry. “Son, I think I’m gonna have to drop you,” he growled. “You’re up in Hollywood with the phonies, drinking and going around town. I think we’re through.” Now Henn laughs at the memory. “Dennis set me up so he could burn me with his dad. That was weird.”

  Murry ended up forgiving Henn. But even as the Sunrays settled in to make a new album and try to leverage their success into something bigger and better, Henn couldn’t help suspecting that the old man’s real motivations sprang from relationships that had nothing to do with his band. This became particularly clear when Murry insisted that the group follow their string of upbeat singles with a slow, romantic ballad called “Still.” The song itself wasn’t as much of a problem as the fact that their previous songs had been so upbeat and fun. “Still,” on the other hand, was a two-hankie weeper, whose chorus sulked mistily about a long-lost love who had broken the singer’s heart, leaving him to worship her from afar. Says Henn, “I really think Murry wanted to talk to his kids through the radio while they toured the country. We knew the flip side should be the single, but he really insisted we do that one. And it killed our career.” True enough, the Sunrays would never have another hit.

  Brian Wilson, on the other hand, was determined to move his group, or at least himself, toward a fresh musical vision. A
ctually, the music had already been changing—it had never stopped changing—which was a large part of the reason why Brian’s musical peers held him in such high regard. But the Beach Boys’ public image hadn’t matured along with his music. So even as Bob Dylan infused rock with a seething political consciousness and literary sensibility, as the Beatles expanded their musical and intellectual horizons in every conceivable direction, and as the Rolling Stones reveled in their own subversive decadence—and all three blazed trails for the politically/socially/intellectually aware groups that would soon transform youth culture entirely—the Beach Boys kept their hair barbered and their striped shirts neatly pressed. Capitol continued to bill them as “America’s Top Surfin’ Group!” Their TV appearances still took place on sets dressed with surfboards, beach balls, and chicks doing the twist in candy-colored bikinis. And when the summer sales season neared, everyone still expected Brian to crank out another batch of ready-made tunes set on the beaches, highways, and backseats he’d long since lost interest in describing.

  Still, it was extremely difficult for Brian to resist the pressure to build on his greatest hits by repeating them over and over again. Ever since he’d been a child, music had been his joy; but now it was an industry, and a wildly lucrative one at that. Indeed, the Beach Boys’ march across the record charts had gone uninterrupted (almost) since “Surfin’ Safari” hit the top fifteen in 1962. Apart from Surfin’ Safari, which snuck into the top twenty-five, every Beach Boys album between 1963 and 1966 reached the top ten, and most camped out in the top five for weeks at a time. Beach Boys Concert, recorded over two nights in 1964 in Sacramento (and subsequently enhanced with studio overdubs), hit number one at the height of the Christmas shopping season that year. It was an astonishing run by anyone’s estimation, all but unbelievable in an era dominated by stars whose hit-making days were measured in months and sometimes weeks.