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

by Peter Ames Carlin

  The Capitol sales team was even less enthusiastic, leading to at least one high-placed conversation about shelving Pet Sounds altogether and releasing a greatest hits album instead—usually an indication that a band’s hit-making career was nearing its end. Fortunately for Brian, calmer heads prevailed, and Pet Sounds was scheduled for a mid-May release. Titled by Mike (or perhaps Carl, depending on whom you ask), the album came in a sleeve dominated by a large photo of the group—dressed for a California’s winter day in coats and sweaters—feeding apple slices to goats, an odd illustration for any nonagrarian project but weirder still coming from a rock group who ordinarily posed around sunlit beaches or gleaming hot rods. (“There was a weird vibe on that record,” Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore noted in Don Was’s 1995 documentary. “I would look at the cover of Pet Sounds and think…these guys with these sheep. I mean, what’s going on here?”) A green band across the top announced the album, along with the names of all the album tracks, while a montage of black-and-white photos on the rear cover was divided between shots of the touring group onstage, posing for publicity shots in Japan while wearing samurai outfits (perhaps an even worse design idea than the goat shot), and a couple of sober shots of Brian, one at home and the other leaning out of the window of his car.

  Early reviews in the United States ranged from sour to confused to tentatively positive, while sales, as predicted and perhaps influenced by the Capitol sales staff, were also relatively underwhelming. Ultimately, Pet Sounds spent thirty-nine weeks on the Billboard album chart, peaking at number eleven. And though it included three top ten singles (the number three hit “Sloop John B.” and the double-A-side “God Only Knows”/“Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” which rose to number eight), the album’s sales of 500,000 units didn’t compare to the chain of million-sellers that had preceded it. Of course, the greatest hits album Capitol released less than two months after Pet Sounds came out went gold almost immediately, catapulting to Billboard’s number eight slot and then staying on the charts for a full year and a half. “That really hurt him badly,” Marilyn Wilson told Rolling Stone. “He couldn’t understand it. It was like, why put your heart and soul into something?”

  But Brian couldn’t have been that surprised; he all but predicted the demise of Pet Sounds in “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times” when he sang, “Every time I get the inspiration to go change things around/No one wants to help me look for places where new things might be found….” Indeed, it wouldn’t be very long before the song’s lyrics—particularly the plaintive question, “What can I do when my fair-weather friends cop out?”—would seem to describe everything that had gone wrong in his life and career.

  Maybe that’s what inspired him to write the song. Maybe that’s why, when he played it at home just before taking it into the studio, he imagined the song as a climax of sorts. It was an intricate construction of layered percussion, a Fender bass pirouetting above a bass harmonica, a harpsichord sharing space with a banjo that adds texture to the smooth clarinets blowing above the tack piano that honky-tonks through a chorus made up of four contrasting vocal lines that eventually make way for the queer wail of the theremin, repeating the song’s central melodic motif in each chorus, then takes an entire verse leading into the song’s conclusion, a round of “I guess I just wasn’t made for these times” sung over a thick bed of falsetto “ooohs” while the drums bang out the beat and the bass marches double-time into the fade.

  “Sometimes I feel very sad/Sometimes I feel very sad…”

  Whatever the case, the music that Brian’s sorrow inspired is nothing short of triumphant. While he describes his confusion, owns up to his failures, and more or less acknowledges his coming defeat, he can’t help transforming his concession into an exaltation. To hear Brian explore new heights of beauty and possibility in pop music while simultaneously declaring the all-but-inevitable end of his creative journey was to experience the defining contradiction at the source of his music. Pet Sounds was meant to be a tragedy about the end of youth and the inevitable fraying of beauty, and its tragic hero is the sad-eyed young man peering shyly over the piano keys on the album’s back cover.

  CHAPTER 6

  Brian had sensed their presence for years. The demons had always been there, chattering softly just beyond the edge of his vision, poking at his dead ear, threatening him, making him dizzy. But he didn’t have to listen. Being with friends, keeping his hands and mind busy, made everything better. As ever, music was the real key. It brought people to him, for one thing. More importantly, it could drown the demons out even when he was alone. No wonder he had made music the center of his world, riding those childhood ecstasies to “Rhapsody in Blue” into the countless hundreds of teenaged hours wandering the intricate, swirling harmonies of the Four Freshmen, which led him straight to the soul-cleansing power of Phil Spector’s productions. And by then he’d already made that world his own, adapting everything he’d learned from his heroes to build a sanctuary he could hide in forever.

  But now he could hear the whispers beginning to infiltrate that world. The Capitol Records brass had already signaled the limits of their corporate patience, and once Pet Sounds faltered on the Billboard charts, the rest of the Beach Boys had more or less put him on notice: Forget the bullshit and get back to making hits. Everyone had mortgages to pay, wives and ex-wives to support, investments to keep afloat, offices to rent, and employees who needed to be paid. He listened and nodded, but he knew he couldn’t confront those obligations on their own terms. Instead Brian looked to make music that was even more adventurous, still trusting in its power, and became determined to build a new sanctuary even bigger, louder, and more grandiose than the last one. All he needed to do was to keep moving, keep working, to fill the studio with more musicians playing bigger, more elaborate songs.

  When Pet Sounds got to England (about a month following its Stateside release), the leading lights of mid-1960s hipness greeted the record with nothing short of rapture. Bruce Johnston had taken an early pressing of the record to London, where once-and-future Beatles publicist Derek Taylor worked with L.A.-based record producer and gadfly Kim Fowley to organize the album’s UK unveiling. Stationing Bruce in a suite at the swank Waldorf Hotel, they shepherded the country’s most influential music journalists in for interviews. The climax of the trip came during an exclusive listening party at which England’s most popular and powerful musicians—led by John Lennon and Paul McCartney—filled the suite and sat in complete silence while the album’s thirteen tracks played. McCartney instantly proclaimed “God Only Knows” to be the greatest song ever written. John and Paul leaped back into their limo and made directly for the EMI studio on Abbey Road, where sessions for Revolver were already in progress. As legend has it, the duo set immediately to work on the lush “Here, There, and Everywhere,” laying down their own multilayered backing harmonies with the sound of Brian’s intricate Pet Sounds vocal arrangements still echoing in their ears.

  The rest of the British media and pop galaxy followed suit, more or less. Eric Clapton, then with Cream, said his entire band considered Pet Sounds to be “…one of the greatest pop LPs ever released…. It encompasses everything that’s ever knocked me out and rolled it into one.” Andrew Loog Oldham, then the manager of the Rolling Stones, was so thrilled that he wrote and paid for a full-page ad in the Melody Maker music trade magazine proclaiming Pet Sounds the greatest album ever made, an extraordinary gesture when you consider he had no stake in the record’s success.

  Such unfettered enthusiasm pushed Pet Sounds all the way to the number two slot of the British sales charts, while the singles released from the album in the UK (“Sloop John B.” and “God Only Knows”) both peaked at number two. The foreign chart action might have affirmed Brian’s faith in Pet Sounds, if not his bandmates’, but by the time his most recent album lit up the charts abroad, the head Beach Boy was already focused on his next musical vision. It was a song called “Good Vibrations,” and he’d been working on it on and off
for months.

  It began during the Pet Sounds era as a kind of rhythm and blues track, its verses built around a minor progression with a heavy bass, organ, and flute arrangement that would have sounded at home in one of the Four Tops’ gut-wrenching Motown love songs. In fact, the Tops’ next hit, “Reach Out, I’ll Be There,” used a very similar chord progression and Spector-influenced orchestration, and the two songs would race one another into the top ten during the fall of 1966. But while Brian’s tune was also a love song, his was far trippier. The initial inspiration came from an exchange he’d had with his mother as a child, about how dogs can sense if a person is going to be friendly to them even before they approach. “They feel the vibrations,” Audree told him, and the image struck him immediately. “It scared me, the word vibrations. To think that invisible feelings, invisible vibrations, existed scared me to death,” Brian told Rolling Stone’s David Felton in 1976. And yet the idea also appealed to him, particularly when he thought of lovers communicating on that same nonverbal plane. Musing on that notion one night, Brian had written some music he called “Good, Good, Good Vibrations” and played it for Tony Asher, who sketched out some preliminary lyrics: “It’s weird how she comes in so strong/And I wonder what she’s pickin’ up from me/I hope it’s good, good, good, good vibrations…”

  Thinking of placing the song on Pet Sounds, Brian took a stab at recording “Good, Good, Good Vibrations” during a series of sessions that began at the Gold Star studio on February 17. Already hip-deep into the instrument closet for the other cuts on the album, Brian pulled out a harpsichord, tack piano, flutes, clarinets, a cello, a Jew’s harp, electric fuzz bass, stand-up bass, bass harmonica, chromatic harmonica, organ, and the usual complement of percussion instruments to give the backing track the right exotic-to-majestic sound. The real crowning touch, however, came from the electronic theremin, whose high, ghostly wail he’d first added to the “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times” session three days earlier. Charged this time with evoking the vibrations zooming around on the psychic plane, the theremin soared above the entire track, playing the central melodic hook that lashed the chorus to the verse.

  But as the song began to take shape in the studio, Brian began to realize that “Good Vibrations” didn’t fit with the moodier, introspective songs that formed the nucleus of Pet Sounds. He put the song aside, even pondering handing it off to a soul singer such as Wilson Pickett, or to Danny Hutton, a young musician Brian had befriended. Hutton was managed by another mutual friend, David Anderle, who had recently started working for the Beach Boys, helping them set up a record label they would own and control. Maybe, Anderle proposed, Hutton could inaugurate the new label with his own rendition of “Good Vibrations”?

  Instead, Brian kept the tune for himself. And the more he came back to it that winter and spring, the more convinced he became that the song should be even bigger than the tracks he was orchestrating for Pet Sounds. After all, he was writing about the higher frequencies; why limit the song to any of the constructs that governed pop music? Wandering out past all the traditional pop boundaries, Brian began to think of “Good Vibrations” as a smaller, psychedelic version of “Rhapsody in Blue.” A “little pocket symphony,” as he put it, built from parts whose distinct rhythms, moods, and sounds would flow together to form a larger, cohesive piece. To enhance the song’s modular feel, he recorded different sections in different studios, using one room for its intimacy, the other for the grandness of its echo, and so on. “I saw the record as a totality piece,” Brian said in 1976. But creating that totality didn’t have to end with the chords and melody he wrote, the instruments he chose to play it, the vocals he arranged, and the way he chose to record them. Now he could play the recordings too, taking the pieces apart and putting them back together however it suited him.

  It was an intricate process in the pre-digital, pre-sixty-four-track age, stretching to twenty-two recording sessions that took place in four studios over the course of seven months. As more time passed and the expenses added up (“Good Vibrations” would eventually cost a then-unbelievable $50,000 to record), the song’s avant-garde sound, structure, and length (more than 3:30, also unbelievable for a pop single in the mid-1960s) became increasingly controversial in and around the group. “There was a lot of ‘Oh, you can’t do this; that’s too modern’ or ‘That’s going to be too long a record,’” Brian recalled in 1976. “I said, ‘No, it’s not going to be too long a record; it’s going to be just right.’”

  Still, there were times when the song flummoxed him completely, so much so that Brian would walk into a session, consider the myriad possibilities and problems that lay ahead, and cancel the session on the spot, sending a dozen of Los Angeles’s most expensive studio players home without getting a note out of them. But if the intricacies of “Good Vibrations” scared him, they also enticed him. Even as Brian took a six-week break from the studio that summer, leaving “Good Vibrations” in pieces and his family, bandmates, and corporate chiefs hovering somewhere between puzzled and furious, he had already started envisioning an album that would be even more ambitious. He already knew the entire album would follow the modular approach he was trying to master for “Good Vibrations,” with individual sections flowing into songs that flowed into other songs that drifted into individual movements that ultimately formed a symphony. It would be his “Rhapsody in Blue.”

  When he sat at his piano at night and gazed out at the lights spreading out beneath him, he could feel something taking shape. It would be the spiritual music he’d been talking about for so many months. “A teenage symphony to God,” was how he began to describe it. Sometimes, when Brian would take a few Desbutols (a kind of amphetamine) and stay up late at night thinking and playing, slowly working his way into that inner space where the melodies would start to arrive, he would see small figures moving through the air above him. They seemed angelic to him, and he figured them for the heavenly beings that were delivering the music to him. Brian began to call the album Dumb Angel, perhaps in their honor, but like so many of his plans, this would eventually change.

  What didn’t change was his need for a collaborator. Tony Asher had provided just the right straightforward sensitivity for Pet Sounds, but now the music was becoming wilder, more free-form, and the lyrics would have to be just as adventurous. He mentioned all this to Terry Melcher—who had helmed sessions for the Byrds, Paul Revere and the Raiders, and Judy Collins, among others—and the young producer (and son of Doris Day) thought immediately of Van Dyke Parks. The twenty-three-year-old musician had just written a song called “High Coin” for Harpers Bizarre, and the tune’s playful, punning lyrics (“We’re in the high times, baby/Where words are lost and tempest tossed in lemon-lime/When times and places effervesce/In words of wonder, from down under, I’m no less/I’m fine, it’s my time”) seemed to be exactly what the head Beach Boy was yearning for. Actually, Brian and Parks had already met several times in passing during the previous year, first when David Crosby brought him up to Laurel Way to hear an early acetate of “Sloop John B.” They’d also bumped into one another at their mutual hangouts in Western Recorders and Loren Schwartz’s apartment. “I had suggested the cello triplets in ‘Good Vibrations,’ so he knew what I was doing,” Parks recalls. But they’d never really had a chance to get to know one another, so Melcher invited them both to a party at his house on Cielo Drive in mid-July and pulled them together out on the lawn to talk things over.

  They made, at first glance, an oddly matched pair. Brian, tall, pale, and a bit doughy in his striped surfer’s shirt and blue jeans, was always a bit awkward around new people, particularly when it came to making small talk. The bespectacled Parks, on the other hand, was elfin and slight, decked out in a paisley shirt and old-fashioned trousers held up with red suspenders. And Parks, who spoke with a warm southern drawl, could talk a blue streak about his boyhood in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, the years he spent as a child actor in New York and Los Angeles (he’d shared the screen wi
th Grace Kelly in The Swan), the years he’d spent studying music and literature at Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh, and the burgeoning music career that had already taken him from the concert halls of the Northeast (as a part of the Greenwood County Singers) to the leading folk clubs of Los Angeles (where he and his older brother Carson performed as the Steel-town Two) to a studio career. But really, he was just as interested in discussing the poetry of Bukowski and Ferlinghetti or, better yet, the impenetrable beauty of James Joyce.

  Parks can’t remember what they talked about that night, but it’s clear that Brian was impressed. “He seemed like a really articulate guy,” he said many years later. “Like he could write some good lyrics.” Brian first suggested that Parks finish off the still-incomplete lyrics to “Good Vibrations.” But while Parks appreciated his new friend’s egalitarianism (“I liked his inclusive attitude to get me involved with him. That took a lot of straight, normal good manners.”) and was so broke he and his wife were living above a garage in an apartment that didn’t even have a bathroom of its own, he was as conscious of his own unique abilities as he was of his new friend’s commercial success. Thus, he concluded, if they were going to collaborate, it should be on something they both had a hand in creating. Brian saw the logic to that, and off they went. “He said, ‘You write some words for me,’ and we just started immediately,” Parks says.

  A few days later, Brian asked Parks to come up to his house on Laurel Way. He arrived on his motorcycle, trailed by a police officer who hadn’t been convinced that this shaggy-haired little guy actually had any legitimate business roaring around Beverly Hills. Things got even tenser when it turned out that the shaggy little guy had neglected to bring his driver’s license. But a little fast talk from Parks convinced Johnny Law to at least lead him to Wilson’s house, where his host would not only welcome him with open arms but also vouch for his identity. Brian opened the door, as promised, and when it turned out that the cop’s sister was a Beach Boys fan and would just love an autographed album, well, that was the end of that scrape with the law.