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

by Peter Ames Carlin

  As Asher recalls, Brian’s mood could swing in a moment from bright-eyed and happy to bitterly depressed. He would spend hours avoiding work, sometimes leaping up from the piano to watch an episode of Flipper and bursting into tears when Sandy, the young boy, learned a touching lesson about life from his finny friend. And the songwriter’s childlike sensibilities extended to his sense of responsibility when it came to doing business. Once word got out that Asher was working with Brian, the lyricist was inundated with urgent calls from the Beach Boy’s lawyers, agents, and record label, all of them beseeching him to bring their latest bit of business to the attention of their key—yet entirely disinterested—client. “We’re just trying to send him some money!” Asher recalls one sad executive wailing.

  But Brian couldn’t have cared less, and his disinterest was, Asher suspects, encouraged by Murry, to whose office the lyricist was sent when it came time to negotiate a publishing deal for his work. “His father protected him in an odd way. He wanted Brian to be tough, but he also saw him as an annuity who should not get distracted. And I’ll tell ya, he was tough as nails when I went down to sign those contracts. I had a question, and he immediately said, ‘You don’t like ’em? Well, get the hell outta here! We’ll get someone else! My son’ll do anything I tell him to!’ Meanwhile he was waving this check for $7,500, which in 1966 seemed to me like a million dollars.” Asher signed the contract, of course, agreeing to take just a 25 percent cut of the publishing royalties, based on the assumption that Asher would have nothing to do with the music, while Brian would inevitably contribute to the lyrics. “Which was a screw,” Asher says. “Until you consider that I was a nothing who had never done shit, and I had a chance to write with a guy who had something like nine million-selling records in a row. Well, then it doesn’t seem so bad.”

  The hours at the piano ran smoothly, with Brian moving confidently to incorporate an entirely new vocabulary of melodic and structural ideas into his songs. They worked quickly, sometimes moving from a general idea and a few stray melodic fragments to an all-but-completed song in less than half an hour. “God Only Knows,” with its intricate pattern of melodic themes, harmonic counterpoint, and inverted bass patterns, emerged nearly complete in about twenty minutes. They hadn’t set out to write songs that fit together into a larger narrative, but the natural drift of their conversations led the songwriters toward a series of autobiographical tunes that began in innocence (“Wouldn’t It Be Nice”) and then mused on facets of romance ranging from forgiveness (“You Still Believe in Me”), to the power of nonverbal communication (“Don’t Talk [Put Your Head on My Shoulder]”), to love’s restorative power (“I’m Waiting for the Day”), to its permanence in an unstable world (“God Only Knows”). The characters take their first steps away from home (“That’s Not Me”), discuss philosophy (“Hang On to Your Ego,” later rewritten, slightly, into “I Know There’s an Answer”), and experience life’s disappointments (“Here Today”) and the sting of disillusionment (“I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times”). The album’s final ballad (“Caroline, No”) leaves the narrator alone and heartbroken, pondering the end of his romance as a train rumbles off into the distance.

  Asher didn’t write the lyrics to all of the songs and was surprised when Brian announced that the record—called Pet Sounds—was done after they had written eight songs. What he didn’t know was that Brian had dusted off one old song (“I’m Waiting…,” written with Mike Love in 1964), cowritten one (“Hang On to Your Ego”) with his assistant Terry Sachen, and recorded two instrumentals (“Let’s Go Away for a While” on the first side and “Pet Sounds” on the second). Also, Brian bowed to pressure from Capitol executives to include his stunning rearrangement of “Sloop John B.,” the old sea shanty he’d first sung after hearing the Kingston Trio’s hit in the ’50s and recorded—at Al Jardine’s suggestion—during the summer of 1965. To some critics, the inclusion of “Sloop” looms as the one serious error on Pet Sounds: While its striking combination of flutes, percussion, sparkling guitars, jangling bells, melodic bass line, and layered vocal harmonies (particularly the a cappella break that serves as the tune’s climax) fits easily with the rest of the album’s songs, the tale of nautical mishaps and drunken misdeeds diverges too wildly from each of the other, autobiographical tracks. But even if “Sloop” isn’t an original tune, even if it was recorded several months before the other Pet Sounds tracks, even if its inclusion was dictated by Capitol bean counters, it plays a distinct—and crucial—role in the album’s lyrical and musical arc.

  Despite Jardine’s claims that he introduced Brian to the song (which Brian has repeated, though there are tapes of him singing the song with friends while in high school), “Sloop” serves both as a biographical touchstone and as a metaphorical expression of his own feelings of displacement and isolation. The yearning for home in the chorus (“I want to go home/let me go home/why won’t they let me go home?”) expands on “That’s Not Me,” while the final line (revised by Brian to the vaguely druggy exclamation “this is the worst TRIP I’ve ever been on”) foreshadows the hipster vocabulary that informs “I Know There’s an Answer.” But even more significant than “Sloop’s” lyrical message is its musical arrangement. If Pet Sounds reflects the content of its creator’s heart, soul, and imagination, then his dramatic re-envisioning of “Sloop” serves as an object lesson about his artistic process.

  “This is one of the wonderful things about this art form,” Brian said in 1966, when he was working on Pet Sounds. “It can draw out so much emotion, and it can channel it into notes of music in cadence…Music is genuine and healthy, and the stimulation I get from molding it and from adding dynamics is like nothing on earth.” In this context, Brian’s euphoric arrangement of “Sloop” becomes just as intimate as “In My Room” and just as confessional as “Don’t Worry, Baby.” On one hand he’s showing off, displaying how his singular talents have grown and matured—that adventurous bass line; that lovely, arcing harmony—but on a deeper level he’s expressing his spirituality, revealing how the divine in him—his singular musical ability—refracts loneliness, fear, and sorrow into melody, harmony, and sparkling musicianship. “One day I’ll write songs people pray to,” he told Rolling Stones producer Andrew Loog Oldham in 1965—and he wasn’t kidding.

  At the same time that Brian told a reporter that all music starts with religion, he told his old friend Bruce Griffin that pop music would inevitably become more spiritual in the coming years. “I simply believe in the power of the spirit and in the manifestation of this in the goodness of people,” he said. And to Brian, whose experiments with marijuana and LSD had given him a visceral sense of sacred experience, music was an expression of spirituality. It was his own new world, his city on a hill, his western frontier. “When I was making Pet Sounds, I did have a dream about a halo over my head, but people couldn’t see it,” he said in a 1996 interview. “God was right there with me. I could see—I could feel that feeling in my head, in my brain.” To bring that same feeling into the studio, Brian would start recording sessions by praying for light and guidance in making the record.

  Thus, his sparkling “Sloop” was an affirmation of hope, and as such, the tune is less a digression from the central theme of Pet Sounds than a pivot point. Because even while Brian and Tony Asher were writing a melancholy-to-desolate story about romantic disappointment and disillusionment, the music Brian created to accompany it was so rich in melody and thick with harmonies—so elegantly arranged and so inventively orchestrated—that the overall sound of this dispiriting song cycle was nothing less than ecstatic.

  The recording sessions began in mid-January 1966, about a month after Asher started working with Brian and just as the rest of the Beach Boys were flying to Japan to start a tour of the Far East. Working exclusively with Hal Blaine and his gang of crack studio players, Brian ran the sessions with easygoing authority. Unlike Spector, who started each session by presenting each musician with detailed arrangements with meticulous,
scripted touches, Brian preferred to start the musicians with rough chord charts. “He’d play the songs for us (on the piano), let us run it down once, and then he’d tell us what he wanted: a higher guitar, more guitar, give me some timpani there, or something! And we’d try it,” Blaine recalls. Often, Brian would sing what he wanted, establishing both the melody he was after and the texture of how it should sound.

  While Brian continued to emulate Spector’s use of large ensembles (often with multiple percussionists and musicians doubling, tripling, or quadrupling one another’s parts on drums, bass, keyboards, and guitars), he also expanded his use of exotic instruments, or traditional instruments played or recorded in unlikely ways. The chiming introduction to “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” for instance, is a slack-tuned electric guitar patched directly into the studio’s board, with heavy reverb creating the echoing, distant sound. The rhythm section on the verses is dominated by accordions, with reeds and strings swelling on the bridge. “You Still Believe in Me” begins with the ghostly sound of Tony Asher leaning inside a piano to pluck the strings with paper clips, while Brian played the keyboard. The rest of the track (again, recorded as “In My Childhood”) evokes the sounds of youth with harpsichords, a harp, finger cymbals, clarinets, and, to seal the nostalgic mood, a bicycle horn and bell. The relatively hard-rocking “I’m Waiting for the Day” features flutes, a viola that doubles the lead vocal line on the verses, and, in an even more off-kilter move, a string interlude that departs entirely from the song’s established rhythm and melodic theme. The lyrical, elegantly constructed love song “God Only Knows” features a similarly unexpected interlude—a burst of horns, percussion, and strings playing staccato block chords whose downward motion contrasts the upward-floating chords in the rest of the piece.

  Elsewhere, Brian leans heavily on the guttural huffing of a bass harmonica—used at times instead of a real bass—banjos, ukuleles, organs, guiros, slide guitars, vibraphones, harpsichords, tack pianos, and mandolins, often set against entire sections of string and horn players, and percussionists fitted out with everything from timpani to the empty Sparklett’s water jug that echoes throughout “Caroline, No.” But the most striking innovation comes on “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times,” which incorporates the eerie wail of a theremin, an electronic instrument familiar from the futuristic horror movies of the ’50s and early ’60s. Brian had first seen the instrument at the home of one of his parents’ friends when he was a boy, and the ghostly shriek it made (generated by using your hand to interrupt a flow of air that moves across the surface of the instrument) both intrigued and terrified him. “I was scared to death of that sound,” Brian said. “It sounded like one of those horrible scary movies—weird trip, weird facial expressions—almost sexual.”

  The precise steps Brian takes from “horrible scary movies” to “weird facial expressions” to “almost sexual” may be best left to the imagination. But no matter what was playing across the inner recesses of his mind, Brian was thoroughly in control during his recording sessions, directing the musicians with easygoing authority, guiding everything from the notes they played to their proximity to the microphones to the feelings their playing seemed to express. The musicians called back their own ideas—one studio player suggesting the brilliant idea that the instrumental break in “God Only Knows” should be played staccato. (“Everyone helped arrange, as far as I’m concerned,” Hal Blaine says.) As long as he was in the studio, the erratic, emotionally wrought Brian seemed like nothing more than a bad rumor. Instead, he was focused, smart, and remarkably good company. He quoted bits from Del Close and John Brent’s beatnik comedy album, How to Speak Hip, captured for posterity when calling to start a take of “Hang On to Your Ego.” “Here we go, zoo-be-wah!” he says excitedly. “Just relax, me and this other cat are gonna straighten you guys out, and then we’ll get to know world peace!” There is a brief, puzzled silence, during which Brian learns that no one else in the room had even heard of Close and Brent’s 1959 album, and you can almost feel his embarrassment as he tries to explain what the hell he’s talking about. “Oh, it’s funny…. It was cut in ’59. It’s a very funny album.”

  Later, in the midst of recording “Caroline, No,” one of the most emotionally devastating songs in his entire catalogue, Brian sounds cheerful to the point of giddiness. “A little faster; I want it like this!” he calls at one point, going on to establish the rhythm by snapping his fingers and singing with maximum syncopation, “All the way, like that, we’ll get a record and…”

  Most of the basic tracks were finished by February 9, when the rest of the Beach Boys—now back from Asia and ready to record—began overdubbing their vocals, at which point the atmosphere took a definite turn. Tony Asher, for one, got the distinct feeling that his lyrics were not being greeted with open arms. “All those guys in the band, certainly Al, Dennis, and Mike, were constantly saying, ‘What the fuck do these words mean?’ or ‘This isn’t our kind of shit!’” he remembers. “Brian had comebacks, though. He’d say, ‘Oh, you guys can’t hack this,’ or ‘You can’t remember your fucking parts.’ But I remember thinking that those were tense sessions. And I remember thinking, ‘Being here isn’t good for my mental health.’”

  Perhaps Mike Love’s feelings had been hurt because Brian had ditched him, yet again, for another lyricist. Maybe he had grown so accustomed to seeing the audiences go wild for the songs about hot rods, surfboards, and beach bunnies that this new batch of more mature songs sounded like the musical equivalent of bankruptcy, which just a few years ago had all but sent his family to the poor house. What’s clear is that the lyrics Brian’s friend Terry Sachen had written for “Hang On to Your Ego,” rich with pop psychology phrases and a kind of hipster finger-wagging, sent Mike over the edge. First he mocked the lyrics for what he perceived as their intellectual pretensions, using Al Jardine’s flailing attempts to cut a lead vocal to air out his derision. “Oh, it’s hilarious,” he sneered at an increasingly flustered Brian. Later, Mike said he had picked up on drug references in the song—acidheads, including Loren Schwartz, referred to “ego death” as a vital part of a successful LSD trip.

  Asher’s lyrics, with their candid expressions of vulnerability and sadness, struck Mike as “nauseating” and “offensive.” Brian’s intricately wrought instrumental tracks also inspired Mike’s derision, so much so that he was still snorting about them five years later (according to a source in David Leaf’s book), when he referred to the entire Pet Sounds album as “Brian’s ego music.” What really seemed to bother him, Asher observed, was that Brian’s new music abandoned the standard Beach Boy vocabulary of fun to the third power. The lyricist still recalls hearing Brian complain about Mike instructing him, in no uncertain terms: “Don’t fuck with the formula.” But he was too late. Brian had already lost interest in the beach and the wonders of hot rods. But just to keep the peace in the Beach Boys, he did allow Mike to take a run at the lyrics of “Ego,” ultimately changing the chorus (and title) to the more direct “I Know There’s an Answer.”

  That wasn’t the only interference Brian would encounter on the road to finishing Pet Sounds. While he chose to release “Caroline, No” as a single under his own name—a move that struck terror into the hearts of his bandmates, as it turned out—the final recording had been sped up a whole tone, at Murry Wilson’s insistence, in order to make Brian’s voice sound younger. Still, Brian continued to work on the album into the spring, alternating the relatively smooth instrumental sessions with more contentious vocal sessions with the other Beach Boys. Determined to achieve a vocal perfection to match the quality of the instrumental tracks, Brian drove them through take after tortuous take, his one good ear locked tight on the sound, tone, and feeling of each singer. When they couldn’t meet Brian’s rigid specifications, he’d dismiss the group, wipe their vocals from the tape, and rerecord all the parts himself, as on “I’m Waiting for the Day” and “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times.”

  The final vocal
overdubbing session took place on April 13, and Brian did a final mix at the Capitol Records studio in the company’s Hollywood tower three days later. That night he took an acetate of the finished recording home to Marilyn and brought her into their bedroom to listen to it. “He prepared a moment,” she recalled to Rolling Stone in 1976. “And he goes, ‘Okay, are you ready?’ But he was really serious—that was his soul in there, you know? And we just lay there alone all night, you know, on the bed and just listened and cried and did a whole thing. It was really, really heavy. We both cried.” Speaking to David Leaf twenty years later, she remembered another detail: “He said he was scared nobody would like it.”

  Brian’s fear seemed to become reality a few days later when he and Mike took the acetate back to the Capitol tower to preview the new work for the label’s executives. And though the company’s leading British band—the Beatles—was selling mountains of vinyl with their experimental records, the Capitol brass received the new Beach Boys disc with something less than complete enthusiasm. Nick Venet, the man who had signed the group to the label nearly five years earlier, summed it up like this: “I thought Brian was screwing up. He was no longer looking to make records; he was looking for attention from the business. He was trying to torment his father with songs his father couldn’t relate to and melody structures his father couldn’t understand.”