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

by Peter Ames Carlin

  If Brian craved emotional stability, the new Mrs. Wilson did her best to provide it. She gave him the time and space he needed to work and made his burgers, sandwiches, or steaks when he called for them. Although there was no evidence Marilyn was involved in drugs, she forgave him for his LSD trips and learned to turn a blind eye when he and his friends sparked up a joint in the house. The young couple settled into their first real home in 1965: a modern ranch house with panoramic views of Beverly Hills in one direction and Los Angeles in the other. The house had a formal entry with marble floors, a shag-carpeted L-shaped living room, a restaurant-caliber kitchen, and three spacious bedrooms arrayed around a small interior fountain. Like the house itself, the furnishings they chose reflected the couple’s appetite for the comforts of suburban affluence. Prints of Walter Keane’s sad-eyed children shared space with an inexpensive print of the Mona Lisa and a vaguely medieval tapestry with a dark bird embroidered on it. A heavy Spanish table with high-backed, velvet-covered chairs dominated the dining room, and the yard featured a new swimming pool, complete with a spiraling slide.

  Other features hinted at the young owner’s new interest in the counterculture. Lava lamps oozed in the living room, casting a dim glow across the wind chimes hanging in the corner. The wooden cigarette box on the glass coffee table didn’t hold tobacco, and the brownies that emerged from the kitchen sometimes came with more punch than the ones Mom used to make.

  In retrospect, Brian’s deepening interest in drugs would foreshadow the psychological catastrophes that would eventually overtake him. But at the time, drugs seemed more like a welcome escape from the considerable pressure of his status. “He’d become the superstar of the family; he obviously had the gift,” Mike Love’s younger brother Stan Love recalls. Then a star high school basketball player being wooed by college recruiters, Stan knew how it felt to live in the shadow of another family member and what it meant to carry the weight of other people’s expectations. But if athletes learn to thrive under such high-pressure circumstances, the always-sensitive Brian was unsettled by his family’s deference. Their expectations weighed on him too, nearly as much as Murry’s ongoing criticism. Mike did what he could to protect his cousin from his uncle’s abuse. “Murry was very obnoxious and abusive,” he recalls. “He constantly rode Brian, told him he didn’t know what he was doing, and then he’d come in with these corny ideas from another generation.” But the group’s most driven, market-conscious member came with his own expectations and requirements, and these would soon become as much a stumbling block for Brian as Murry could ever be.

  And yet in 1965, with his songs massing at the top of the charts, his productions wowing the most elite music insiders, and the Beach Boys industry raking in fistfuls of cash, Brian still had the power to shut people out. After the phone stopped ringing, after his friends had come and gone and the exuberance of the day had faded, Brian would sit at his piano and slip inside himself. Often it would be late, sometimes past midnight, and he’d be alone in the living room of his new hilltop house, peering down at the lights of Beverly Hills while his fingers searched the piano keys for the chords that seemed to describe his unsettled emotions. He’d lose himself in the music, playing little fragments (“feels,” he called them), experimenting with variations and voicings until something bigger began to take shape. While composing, Brian appeared strangely absent, as if he were functioning less as a conscious artist than as a kind of antenna, channeling signals no one else could see or hear. It seemed like he was thinking about nothing at all, really. But when his fingers fell across the keys into a chord progression and the rhythm of the changes would suggest a melody, it’s easy to imagine him hearing something else coming through the notes. Some shred of a memory from the past, say, a fantasy about a girl he had seen, or just the echo of a poisonous thought that had occurred to him that morning. (“Sometimes I have a weird way of showing my love…”)

  The Beach Boys Today!—the mid-1965 album produced in the months leading up to and following Brian’s marriage—devoted an entire side to his more introspective ballads, but it can’t help fretting on its more rocking side, either. “Good to My Baby,” for instance, presents one oddly defensive man’s arguments against unnamed critics. “All they know is from what they’ve seen,” he grumbles, adding quickly: “But when I get her alone you know we’re happy as a couple can be.” “Don’t Hurt My Little Sister” recounts Diane Rovell’s pointed advice from the early (and surreptitious) days of Brian and Marilyn’s affair, only with an uncomfortable fraternal ardor: “Why don’t you love her like her big brother?” The first iteration of “Help Me Ronda” follows quickly, minus the “h” in Rhonda and the more lively musical and vocal arrangement of the song’s better-known incarnation. The song’s emotional desperation remains, however, and is echoed on the album’s flip side, which leads off with “Please Let Me Wonder” and its delicately rendered pleas that the narrator’s girl not confess her romantic misdeeds: “Please let me wonder if I’ve been the one you love…” A cover of the teen love ballad “I’m So Young” eases the mood briefly, but then come the battling couple of “Kiss Me, Baby” (“Kiss a little bit/Fight a little bit…”), the anguished self-indictment in “She Knows Me Too Well” (“I always expect her to know what I’m thinking of…”), and then, finally, the happy-ending-as-hall-of-mirrors “In the Back of My Mind.”

  Though the next album—the cranked-out-for-the-season Summer Days (and Summer Nights!)—spends much of its time riding the roller-coaster (“Let’s take our car and do amusement parks USA!”) or flirting happily with out-of-town girls (“The L.A. boys all heard the noise/about the girl from New York City!”), and Brian sounds thrilled with love in “You’re So Good to Me,” he also seems thoroughly surprised to be feeling that way. “I know your eyes are not on the guys when we’re apart/You’re so true to me/How come you are?” The narrator of the “Ticket to Ride”–like “Girl Don’t Tell Me” has no such luck: “I bet you went out every night during ol’ school time/But this time I’m not gonna count on you.”

  And all of this pales compared to the high-pitched tension of “Let Him Run Wild,” whose layers of chiming vibes, guitars, interlocking percussion, and grumbling saxophones support a taut falsetto from Brian. “When I saw you walk with him tears filled my eyes/And when I heard you talk with him I couldn’t stand his lies,” he wails. Brian would subsequently disown the song (whose lyrics he wrote himself, rather than collaborating with Mike Love, who had come to be his most consistent lyricist), complaining that his vocal on the track was far too shrill. “I sounded like a little girl,” he said. Others wondered if the song—allegedly inspired by his father’s extramarital affairs—reminded him of a painful moment in his past that he didn’t care to relive. But it’s also intriguing to note that the narrator in the song, at long last, is actually taking aggressive action to win the girl: “Before he makes you over/I’m gonna take you over…”

  Of course, Brian may have only been using the song as a subtle way to tell off his father. If so, “Let Him Run Wild” finds a companion piece in “I’m Bugged at My Old Man,” a tossed-off piano blues number he sings with his brothers. One of the weirdest pieces of humor to ever turn up on anyone’s album, the song—with Brian on piano and singing lead in a purposefully overwrought high tenor—describes a grouchy father who responds to minor adolescent infractions with an escalating series of outrageous punishments. By the end of the tune, Dad has confiscated the lad’s surfboard and radio, cut off his hair, and locked him in his room with only bread crumbs and a glass of water for nourishment. “I’m bugged at my old man,” Brian concludes, breaking into an Elvis-like sneer: “An’ he doesn’t even know where it’s at!” The fact that Murry and Audree had separated—moving into separate, if close by, homes in Whittier, only heightened Brian’s simmering fury toward his father. Just as Murry had once stood to protect his mother from his father, now Brian was following that same impulse in his own way: in song.

  By now, of co
urse, Brian had his own house, a wife to cook him whatever he wanted to eat, and more than enough radios, record players, and high-tech recording equipment to keep him entertained. And when he turned on the radio, the chances were good that he’d hear one of his own songs blaring out of its speakers. To his friends and followers, Brian seemed capable of anything. “He was absolutely on top of the world,” says Danny Hutton, then an aspiring musician producing tunes for the sound tracks of The Flintstones and other Hanna-Barbera cartoons. “Compare it to the hottest acts now, only times ten. The Beatles had that dominance, and so did Dylan. But none of those guys could do everything—write, arrange, sing, and produce—on the level Brian could. Brian had it all, and he knew he was good. When Brian was around, he was the authority. He was in control.”

  Borne up by his success, fueled by a limitless supply of drugs, food, books, and new, powerful friends, and pushed forward by his ambition and insecurities, Brian ventured further into his own musical imagination. Murry had urged him to trim the grand orchestral prelude to “California Girls” (“Simplify, son! Simplify!” he’d pleaded), but Brian would have none of it. Instead, he only grew more adventurous.

  If Stephen Foster projected his utopian fantasies onto southern plantations, and Brian transferred his earliest yearnings onto the beaches and highways of California, the real vehicle and destination of his journey for salvation was the music itself. The more time he spent in his room, the deeper he allowed himself to fall into his emotions, the more vibrant and unrestrained his music became.

  The only band that even seemed to be close to matching Brian’s groundbreaking style was the Beatles, who Brian had come to regard with a combination of respect, admiration, and good-natured competition. Hearing the American version of Rubber Soul and the sheer quality of songs such as “Girl,” “Norwegian Wood,” and “I’m Looking Through You,” along with the shared sensibility that united them all (enhanced, ironically enough, by the Capitol Records executives who hoped to capitalize on the ongoing folk rock boom by trading out the electrified “Drive My Car,” “If I Needed Someone,” and “Nowhere Man” for the acoustic “I’ve Just Seen a Face” and “It’s Only Love,” both of which were left off of the American release of Help) knocked Brian back a step. Like the vast majority of pop albums, every Beach Boys record contained a few filler tracks—tossed-off instrumentals, random cover songs, even a few comedy bits stitched together from studio patter. But Rubber Soul raised the stakes. All the songs were originals (a feat the Beatles had achieved before) for one thing, but even more impressive, none of them sounded like the sort of make-work tracks that tended to fill in the middle slots of the sides. “A whole album with all good stuff!” Brian marveled. And now he knew what he had to do next. As David Leaf writes in his 1978 biography, Brian brought the news to his wife in an urgent rush of excitement. “Marilyn, I’m gonna make the greatest album!” he declared. “The greatest rock album ever made!”

  He went back to his piano, where he could disappear into himself and transform his anxieties and inspiration into music that went beyond anything he’d ever done before. Beyond anything anyone had ever done before. Emotional music; religious music, even. “It all starts with religion,” he said in one 1966 interview that went on to connect his sense of faith with the way he could transform his feelings into beautiful sounds. “A lot of the songs are the results of emotional experiences, sadness and pain…. I find it possible to spill melodies, beautiful melodies, in moments of great despair. This is one of the wonderful things about this art form.”

  But if Brian had one weakness as a songwriter, he felt, it was expressing his feelings verbally. And though his songs almost always revolved around his feelings and ideas, he most often depended upon collaborators to transform his simply stated notions into lyrics. Better yet, Brian’s collaborators served as a sounding board, not just for his musical ideas, but for all the other whims and fancies that caromed through his mind. And the more he began to think about this new album, the more Brian understood that he would need a new partner to help write the new songs. Someone who was articulate and sensitive, who had nothing to do with his family or any previous Beach Boys record. Talking one day with Loren Schwartz, Brian was reminded of Tony Asher, a youngish advertising executive he’d seen at the evening parties in his friend’s Hollywood apartment. Interestingly, Asher—who wrote jingles for the Carson-Scott advertising agency (including spots for Mattel and Gallo wine) and often recorded them at Western Recorders—had actually introduced Brian to Loren back in January 1963.

  “He was my best friend at Santa Monica High School,” Schwartz says. “His mother was Laura LaPlante, a famous silent film actress, and his dad, Irving Asher, was a big movie executive. They lived in a big mansion on Maple Drive, with a real English butler. He played good piano, was a student of modern jazz and arranging, and was very clever with words.” Indeed, Asher was an urbane, well-to-do bachelor who was well read and preferred jazz to rock. But if Asher didn’t buy rock records for his collection, he listened to it on the radio and had long since come to appreciate the complexity and power of the Beach Boys’ singles. “When a new song of theirs came on the radio, I’d think, ‘Goddammit, they did it again!’” Asher recalls. “I had great respect and admiration for them and for Brian, but I didn’t own any of their albums. I was buying Bill Evans albums.”

  Perhaps that’s why Brian—who often made his most important decisions based on gut reactions—knew that Asher was exactly the guy he was looking for. He called him at the office one day in December 1965, explaining that he had an album to make and needed a new sound for the lyrics. “He said, ‘I want this to be completely different…. I don’t want to write with anyone I’ve written with before,’” Asher remembers. Once Asher was confident the voice on the other end was indeed the head Beach Boy and not a friend prank-calling him from down the hall, he accepted the collaboration offer on the spot. “Aside from the prestige, aside from the fact that the guy is like one of my idols,” Asher told David Leaf in 1978, “that was like someone saying, ‘How would you like $25,000?’” Securing a three-week leave of absence from his bosses at Carson-Scott, Asher packed up some yellow legal pads and pencils and drove up to Brian’s house in Beverly Hills to begin his unexpected, exciting task.

  The first assignment was atypical, as it turns out. After showing Asher around his house, Brian took him into his small music room, where he played him an acetate of a finished track he’d recorded for an echoing, circular song titled “In My Childhood.” Brian already had a set of lyrics that fit with the tune’s sweet, vaguely melancholy sound and quirky textural effects (a bicycle horn and bell). But he didn’t like his lyrics anymore and wanted to adapt the tune to another concept. What he had in mind for the new album, Asher recalls, had nothing to do with the Beatles or any kind of rock ’n’ roll. “Brian had defined it as wanting to write something closer to classical American love songs, like Cole Porter or Rodgers and Hammerstein,” he says. Brian asked Asher what his favorite songs were, and when it turned out the Beach Boy hadn’t even heard of the romantic jazz ballad “Stella by Starlight,” Asher sat at the piano and played it for him. “He was totally blown away. He hadn’t heard it before, and he loved it.”

  Brian, in turn, dubbed a tape copy of “In My Childhood” and sent Asher home to write new words. Asher came back the next day with the lyrics to “You Still Believe in Me” sketched out on his yellow legal pad. For reasons he can’t quite remember, Asher felt no doubt that Brian would approve of what he had done. “Ordinarily I’m not that self-confident,” he says. “But I guess I’d already learned that he was insecure, too, and he didn’t know what he wanted, either.” But Brian knew he liked the new words, and so from that moment, their collaboration began in earnest. Most days, Asher would get to Brian’s house at about 10:00 a.m., only to wait for his partner to roust himself from bed and get something to eat. That could take anywhere from one to three hours, during which they’d start chatting about whatever was
on their minds. “We’d have like a two-or three-hour conversation that set a mood,” Asher explains. “We’d ramble on about whatever: girls we had dated, relationships we’d had, heartbreak, and so on. And then we’d write within that mood. He’d play the piano for a while, and I’d sit with my yellow legal pad sketching out lyrics, and we’d be ignoring each other. Then we’d get together, tinkering with each other’s work.”

  The idea of young love—particularly the kind that resembled the intense crush he’d once had on Carol Mountain during high school—seemed to obsess Brian. “Those times when you’re young and you’d jump off a bridge for a girl, but then ten days later you’d be thinking the same thing about someone else,” Asher says. “We were thinking about back when you’re just beginning to understand what love is, acknowledging that it’s immature but still universal.” Brian clearly fed off of the emotional intensity he recalled from those early relationships, which may be why he didn’t seem to recognize their inherent immaturity or, for that matter, what his fascination for them said about the state of his grown-up relationship with Marilyn. As Asher recalls: “He was constantly looking at teenage girls. Which wasn’t like a forty-seven-year-old looking at teenagers [Brian was twenty-three]. But he thought they were all the most beautiful girls in the world. And he was married at the time, so it was fairly obvious he was confused about love.”

  Indeed, when Brian wasn’t rhapsodizing about the random young women he encountered in drive-in restaurants or on the street, he was fantasizing about his own sister-in-law. “He’d stop in the middle of writing a song or a conversation or whatever and start going on about Diane, about how innocent, sweet, and beautiful she was. I’d be thinking, ‘Huh! Your wife’s in the next room, and you’re talking about her sister!’” Other times, he would flash back to Carol Mountain, to the point of tracking his classmate down to her new home, where he would telephone or even appear at odd hours, desperate to re-experience the thrill she gave him in high school. But Mountain, like Brian, was married, setting out on a life that had very little to do with the one she had lived in Hawthorne. This became the subject of another long conversation with Asher, and by the time they were done, they had written “Caroline, No,” the desolate ballad that would conclude the album.