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

by Peter Ames Carlin

  Changing the group’s image hardly seemed like a sensible option to the Capitol execs or, for that matter, to the four Beach Boys, the parents, the wives, and the employees who depended on Brian’s mainstream pop sensibility for their livelihoods. Brian was welcome to harbor as many artistic pretensions as he liked, but the moment the commercial momentum began to lag, he would have to get back to business. “See, I’m into success,” Mike says. “I’m talking about a three-minute pop single here. And if you’re going to make a single, why not make it a hit?”

  Clearly, the group’s disconnect from the cultural avant-garde was not all Capitol’s doing or even entirely a product of the group’s own commercial motivations. Bear in mind that the Beach Boys themselves were still college-aged, only none of them had been to college, nor (with the possible exception of Brian) had they shown much discernible interest in what you might call the world of ideas. Listen to them reminiscing with Capitol publicist Earl Leaf, who accompanied them on a late 1964 European tour, in the “Bull Session with the Big Daddy” filler track tagged on the end of The Beach Boys Today (especially on the longer, uncut version found on bootlegs), and you hear tales of the world’s cultural capitals told by kids whose primary interest was drinking beer and trying to pick up women without benefit of speaking their native tongues. (Mike Love ended up spending a night in a German jail on that tour, either because he tried to intervene in a violent domestic squabble or because he got into a fight with a pimp whose hooker he tried to bed. The former version comes from Mike, the latter from Leaf, who uncorked it for Rolling Stone in 1971.) The released version of “Big Daddy” includes Brian’s assertion that despite everything the band experienced on their international tours, “the only thing that sticks in my mind is the bread.” The one anecdote involving a work of art revolves around Brian’s impulsive decision to plant a kiss on the lips of a statue of a naked woman on the streets of Paris, which once again brought the Beach Boys to the attention of local law officers. And here’s Brian’s analysis of an evening at the theater: “I can take good entertainment. But when it comes to that French burlesque? Let me out. I just can’t take it.”

  This makes the humanities students among us slap our foreheads and moan with sorrow. But what were you expecting? All the Beach Boys were products of the blue-collar suburbs of Los Angeles’s industrial South Bay. To grow up in Hawthorne was to view the world, and particularly the more elegant corners of L.A., where people were prone to wax on about higher culture but all too often looked down on working-class communities, as a collection of bad guys and loud braggarts more than happy to explain why their school is great and yours doesn’t measure up. Being true to your school means something to teenagers; being true to your social and economic class means just as much to their parents.

  Of course, that didn’t mean the suddenly rich Beach Boys family wasn’t going to enjoy their newfound fortune, sometimes in astonishingly unsubtle ways. Once Murry’s take from Brian’s publishing fortune started rolling in, the old man had the once-humble ranch house on West 119th Street rebuilt into a meandering, if ill-designed, testament to his own financial ascendance. Then he promptly moved out to a swank hillside address in Whittier, twenty miles away. All the band members bought their own houses and fleets of cars, motorcycles, and other expensive toys. Fred Vail still recalls one morning during a 1964 concert tour when he met Al Jardine for breakfast in the hotel lobby and found the young guitarist and pharmacy school dropout dressed inexplicably in a full suit and tie, scanning that morning’s Wall Street Journal. “I still don’t know what he was thinking,” Vail says now.

  Brian enjoyed his new money, too, buying himself a flashy green Cadillac, good clothes, and regular haircuts at Jay Sebring’s Beverly Hills salon. But that didn’t mean he wanted to think about it all that much. For example, one day in 1965, one of his accountants paid a visit to him in the recording studio to talk finances, investments, and the like. “Brian kept saying, ‘Would you please leave me alone? I’m trying to listen to the playback!’” recalls Hal Blaine, who sounds as put out by the briefcase-wielding accountant as Brian was forty years before. “But the guy kept saying, ‘Look, you’ve got all this money stacking up in Sea of Tunes (the name Brian and Murry had given their song publishing company), and if you don’t do something with it, they’re gonna take it away!’ Finally, Brian said, ‘I don’t care! Do what you want!’ The suit guy wrote out a check right there, and Brian didn’t even look; he just signed it and handed it back. I looked, though, and I swear it was for something like $500,000.”

  Brian found other ways to revel in his achievements. By the end of 1964, he was one of the most successful, influential young musicians in Los Angeles, which not so coincidentally made him a highly sought-after companion for other rock stars, actors, and the hip, young industry types they liked to hang around with. Despite, or perhaps because of, the anti-intellectualism pervading his family and band, Brian became particularly entranced by the sharp young aesthetes just beginning to collect into a distinct Hollywood demimonde. These were rich kids. Most had gone to college, and all of them could talk for hours about poetry, music, politics, and religion. One of the most prominent, in his own back-channel way, was Loren Schwartz, a twenty-seven-year-old former child actor, UCLA theater grad, and current William Morris agent, who hosted regular get-togethers in the small but finely appointed apartment he shared with his wife in West Hollywood. “I had a Gertrude Stein–style salon,” Schwartz says. “I had the best pot and the happening musicians. (Stephen) Stills was there. (David) Crosby was my best friend at the time. Jim McGuinn was just forming the Byrds. Tony Asher, my best pal in college, introduced me to Brian Wilson at Western studios one day, and he and I hooked up.”

  Affable and garrulous, full of stories about his many travels and his readings of philosophy and world religions, Schwartz served as a kind of Hollywood Henry Higgins to Brian’s Eliza Doolittle, introducing him to all of his hippest friends and turning him on to the works of Kahlil Gibran and Hermann Hesse. “Brian was a big, goofy kid,” says Schwartz (now known, for complicated reasons involving Subud numerology and a desire to assimilate into non-Jewish culture, as Lorren Daro). “Supremely talented. And not an ounce of guile or malice in him. He was a beautiful spirit. What a dazzling guy.” Brian became a regular at Schwartz’s apartment, diving happily into the social whirl and substances Schwartz always kept at hand. “I gave him his first joint,” Schwartz says with an unsettling cackle. “Murry Wilson wanted to have me killed.”

  Indeed, Brian’s drug use would eventually be blamed for much of his subsequent emotional and psychiatric ills. As a result, some consider Schwartz to be a truly dark figure, but, unsurprisingly, he sees things differently. Despite Brian’s contention in his (since-disowned) 1991 autobiography that Schwartz pressured him to try marijuana, Schwartz insists that he actually fended off Brian’s drug curiosity for months on end. “I feared messing with that febrile mind of his. But…he said, ‘If you don’t smoke me up, believe me, it’s being offered all the time.’ So I gave him his first joint.”

  Schwartz’s proposed timeline—he says it took a year for him to pass Brian a joint, then another year to be convinced that his friend was ready for LSD—doesn’t quite pencil out, since Brian recalls writing “California Girls,” which was recorded in April 1965, while tripping on acid. Nevertheless, Schwartz’s recollections of Brian’s early drug experiences remain astonishingly vivid. “He had Disney visions of music staffs flowing through the air. A real Fantasia thing, while we were driving to a concert in Sacramento.” Unsurprisingly, Brian’s first acid trip was even more powerful. “So one night Brian took it. One hundred and twenty-five mics of pure Owsley. He had the full-on ego death. It was a beautiful thing.” But it was not without its painful moments. As Schwartz told David Leaf in his documentary, Beautiful Dreamer, Brian was so terrified by the hallucinations he experienced that he ran into the apartment’s bedroom, slammed the door, and collapsed trembling in bed, tucking his
head beneath the pillows. He remained there for an hour or two, then burst back into the living room, his mood restored. “He said, ‘Well, that’s enough of that!’” Schwartz told Leaf’s camera.

  It was all far, far too much for the new Mrs. Brian Wilson. Just sixteen and even less worldly than her twenty-two-year-old husband, Marilyn was terrified by his new appetite for drugs, which seemed to make him even more distant and spacey than usual. At one point she moved out of their new apartment, telling him to choose between her and Schwartz. “And he chose me,” Schwartz says. “But she came back.”

  Despite Marilyn’s best efforts, Brian’s appetite for pot no longer began and ended at Schwartz’s door. Bumping into his old Hawthorne pal Bruce Griffin at Pickwick Books on Hollywood Boulevard, where his former singing partner now worked, Brian swept him up into his new secret life. “We’d drive all around Hollywood looking for pot,” Griffin recalls. Once they located their quarry, they’d get stoned in Brian’s new green Cadillac and then drive around the city, looking at the lights, listening to the radio, and talking. Comforted by his old friend, Brian opened up and told Griffin about his visits with the psychiatrist he had just started seeing and about the guilt he felt for his ongoing crush on his wife’s older sister, Diane. And as ever, Brian talked about music. “I was with him the first time he ever heard ‘Ticket to Ride’ on the radio,” Griffin says. “And I asked him what he thought of John Lennon. He said, ‘Well, he knows what he’s doing.’ Another time he told me music was going to get spiritual. I guess he saw ‘Good Vibrations’ as their spiritual piece. But a lot of stuff they did was kind of spiritual.”

  As Brian continued to write and record through the first months of 1965, his work took on the ecstatic feeling of the Fantasia-like staff of music he imagined floating in his druggy daydreams. For a time it seemed like anything was possible. “California Girls,” intended to be a sunny anthem for the summer of ’65, could begin with an orchestral prelude as spare and stirring as anything by Aaron Copland. “The Little Girl I Once Knew,” a single recorded later that fall, would combine a calliope-like organ with spoken-word segments and, far more daringly, four-beat pauses that had no precedent in rock music. Taking Al Jardine’s advice to dust off the old Kingston Trio high school sing-along favorite “Sloop John B.,” Brian transformed the simple folk tune into an epic construction of guitars, percussion, bells, flutes, a wild bass line, and a vocal arrangement that erupts into full flower for a breathtaking a cappella break.

  Recorded in the summer of 1965, the instrumental track for “Sloop John B.” sat on Brian’s shelf for a few months while he figured out his next big move. To buy time from Capitol—which still expected the Beach Boys to produce original albums to greet every new season—he cranked out Beach Boys Party! The album was a simulated house party/jam session that actually was the product of several highly scripted, studio musician–assisted sessions at Western Recorders. A collection of old favorites, Beatles songs, and takeoffs on their own hits, Party sold every bit as well as the group’s last fully realized album, Summer Days (and Summer Nights!). The Capitol execs released Party’s giggly, acoustic rendition of “Barbara Ann” as a single that winter, and it became a number two hit, much to Brian’s chagrin. Such simple, kid-friendly stuff was light-years behind him now. As he’d told his father a few months earlier—and as Al Jardine would warble in the brief Bob Dylan tribute Brian put on the second side of Party—times were changing.

  CHAPTER 5

  The feelings of panic first gripped him the moment the airplane lifted off the runway at Los Angeles International Airport. Brian was thinking about Marilyn, pondering the way his fifteen-year-old girlfriend had been looking at Mike in the moments before the cousins, along with the rest of the Beach Boys, had set out for their latest tour of Australia. It was the fall of 1964, and Brian was only weeks from his first nervous breakdown. But as the airplane glided over the Pacific Ocean, all Brian could think about was his growing suspicion that he was about to lose Marilyn. Increasingly frantic, Brian had sent a frantic telegraph from the airplane’s cockpit. PLEASE WAIT FOR MY CALL, it read. I LOVE YOU, BRIAN. He called her the moment they touched down and pleaded with her to marry him. The couple had a civil ceremony on December 7 and settled down together in his apartment on Hollywood Boulevard.

  Finally, Brian could claim the independence—and the stable, loving partner—he had sought for so long. And yet very little in his music projects a sense of happily ever after. This comes into particularly sharp focus on “In the Back of My Mind” from mid-1965. Written and recorded just after the start of his marriage, the song’s narrator speaks to us from the bosom of domesticity. He feels blessed, he begins expansively, describing a world comfortable enough for a man to “cling” to. And already, we’re stumbling: Cling? That’s an odd choice of words, isn’t it? Indeed, and it is actually what this song is about, as the next lines make clear: “So happy at times that I break down in tears/In the back of my mind I still have my fears.”

  Sung solo by Dennis in a conversational croon, the song begins in a supper-club arrangement of strings, horns, and bells. The big band swells with the first verse’s penultimate line but recedes instantly as the next line (“I still have my fears” ) kicks the oboes and violins into a worried minor chord. The next two verses describe the same joy and fear in slightly different terms, but the real crux of the song comes in the bridge, a strangely rushed, unmelodic digression that tumbles toward a climactic verse that identifies the source of the darkness in this seemingly sunny relationship as the singer’s own doubts that it can last: “What’ll I do if I lose her?/It’ll always be in the back of my mind.” This feeling is only emphasized by the song’s brief instrumental coda, which, like the overture to “California Girls,” swells toward the symphonic. Only this time the strings, horns, and bells are played out of synch, each instrument meandering alone into the descending silence.

  “In the Back of My Mind” is an unsettling love song, to say the least. But love was never a comfortable thing in the songs Brian wrote for the Beach Boys, even back in their sunniest days. “Wendy, Wendy, what went wrong?/We went together for so long,” they wail in one song. “When I watched you walk with him tears filled my eyes,” Brian cried in another. “You didn’t answer my letter so I figured it was all just a lie,” Carl states matter-of-factly in still another. More and more: “She let another guy come between us and it shattered our plans/I cried when she said, ‘I don’t feel the same way.’” The deeper the lovers look into one another’s eyes, the more distant they seem to become. “Can’t remember what we fought about…but I remember when we thought it out/We both had a broken heart.”

  And yet from a distance the Beach Boys describe women with giddy, schoolboy ardor. In the wispy light of dawn, a girl appears on the beach. “I have seen you on the shore, standing near the ocean’s roar/Do you love me, do you, surfer girl?” On the highway, another zooms by, a smile lighting her face and the wind blowing her long hair like a golden banner. “She walks looks and drives like an ace, now/And she’ll have fun, fun, fun til her daddy takes her T-bird away…” Stepping back even further, the women become cultural icons, personifying the finest attributes of every region, from the stylish East Coast to the cornpone South, the unassuming Midwest, and the warmhearted North, where a girl’s kiss warms the coldest day. “I wish they all could be California girls!” the Beach Boys cry, their exaltation heralded with symphonic grandeur, then carried forth in a parade of marching percussion, ballpark organ, and pirouetting rounds of harmony. “Girls! Girls! Girls! Yeah, I dig the girls! Girls! Girls! Girls!”

  In their adulation for and anxiety about women, the Beach Boys are cut from the same cloth as Stephen Foster, the legendary nineteenth-century songwriter. In Foster’s “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair,” Jeanie is a vision of loveliness “borne like a vapor in the soft summer air…radiant in gladness, warm with winning guile.” In “Gentle Annie,” Foster rhapsodizes, “We have roamed and loved ’mid the
bowers/When thy downy cheeks were in bloom.” “Nelly Was a Lady” describes a woman whose beauty is such that when she rose “Seem’d like the light of day was dawning/Just ’ fore the sun began to rise.” What these lovelies have in common and what they share with a dozen or more romantic ideals celebrated by Foster is one thing: They’re dead. Jeanie is so vaporous, we learn, because “Her smiles have vanished and her sweet songs flown,” while Gentle Annie’s “spirit did depart.” The subject of “Nelly Was a Lady,” notice, is described in the past tense, and Foster’s lyrics include the line “Last night when Nelly was a sleeping/Death came a-knockin’ at the door.”

  They are birds of a feather, these pop songwriters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Brian himself mentioned it to David Leaf in 2004, smiling shyly over the piano keys as he played the first bars of “Beautiful Dreamer” and noted how the first letters in the first verse of the song, “Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me,” are also his own initials. “That’s me!” he declared to Leaf’s camera. “Beautiful dreamer, wake…Brian Douglas Wilson!” That revelation served as both the point of entry and title for Beautiful Dreamer, Leaf’s two-hour documentary about Smile. And indeed, like the twentieth-century water-phobe who wrote indelible songs about surfing, the Pittsburgh-raised Foster was a stranger to the southern plantations that inspired his muse and built his reputation. But the nineteenth-century boy who grew up moving from house to house put all of his own childhood yearning into his idyllic portraits of the antebellum South, just as he would project his own mourning for his dead sister (and later his mother) into those vaporous dead women.

  “The love of my life, she left me one day/I cried when she said ‘I don’t feel the same way,’” Brian sang in “The Warmth of the Sun,” one of the saddest, most beautiful songs he ever wrote with Mike. They’d started writing the song a day or two before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but they were still working on it on November 22, and the devastation of the president’s death seeped into the song’s final verse, which reaches out of the gloom for a bittersweet sense of hope: “Our love’s like the warmth of the sun/It won’t ever die.”