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

by Peter Ames Carlin

  Brian and Van Dyke talked for a while, touching briefly on business matters. The sum of their collaboration agreement went, more or less, like this: Brian asked what Van Dyke needed, and Van Dyke told him he needed a car. Brian asked what kind, and Van Dyke mused that Volvos are supposed to be safe and reliable and, when asked, guessed that they cost something like $5,000. Brian picked up a telephone, recited Van Dyke’s name and address to the person on the other end, told them to cut a check for five grand for delivery the next day, and that was that.

  Not long after that they were settled in at the piano, where Brian pounded out the first chords of a song he’d been working on, a hurtling countrylike tub-thumper that reminded Van Dyke instantly of Marty Robbins’s “El Paso.” Yes, Brian said, nodding, he’d actually been thinking about the Old West when he wrote it. In fact, he’d been thinking of calling it “Heroes and Villains.” Van Dyke picked up a pencil and paper and started to write, listening carefully to the meter of the melody Brian was la-la-ing over the chords, making sure the syllables he wrote coincided exactly with the rhythm of the music. Soon, he had an opening verse:

  “I’ve been in this town so long that back in the city/I’ve been taken for lost and gone and unknown for a long, long time…”

  Brian smiled and nodded, and Van Dyke turned back to his pad, one ear cocked to the music, the other tuned into the sound of his pencil scratching across the paper. They worked that way for hours, both of them feverish with the excitement of their new connection and the thrill of creation. “I have no idea if it was day or night,” Van Dyke says. “Probably both. But we had the whole thing, apart from one section, in one sitting. That was the enthusiasm.” As the lyrics took shape, the images that spilled out across Van Dyke’s page seemed to take all of the feelings Brian sensed inside of himself and project them into vibrantly colored, abstract glimpses into another, parallel world. Set in a lawless boomtown somewhere out on the fringes of the Old West, “Heroes and Villains” described a world lit up by ambition and riddled with gunfire. The narrator speaks as a man who has become a part of the scene, but not of it, exactly, because he’s still so thrilled and terrified by everything he sees. “Heroes and villains, just see what you’ve done done” he sings again and again, as the music pivots from minor to major and back again. The indictment, if that’s what it is, later expands to take in the sweep of the nation around them: “Bicycle rider, just see what you done done/To the church of the American Indian.” By the time it ends, the narrator has aged and seen his own children grow to adulthood. But if he has been transformed by the decades spent in the boomtown, has he become a hero or a villain? That’s one question he won’t, or can’t, answer.

  If “Heroes and Villains” seems set in the Deadwood, South Dakota, of the nineteenth century, the struggle it describes—modernity versus tradition, good versus evil, hope versus fear—fits just as easily into twentieth-century Hollywood. In a sense, it was a capsule version of American history and the lives of every striver who had tamed its wilderness, laid down its streets, or created the art that described it. It was all there, right down to the booze, gunfire, greed, and stubborn survival, against all odds, of innocence: “She’s still dancing in the night unafraid of what a dude’ll do/In a town full of heroes and villains.”

  “And that gave ignition to the process,” Van Dyke says. “The engine had started. It was very much ad hoc. Seat of the pants. Extemporaneous values were enforced. Not too much precommitment to ideas. Or, if so, equally pursuing propinquity.”

  Other songs came nearly as quickly, and so Brian booked more studio time starting on August 3. He spent the first day back working on a marimba-dominated instrumental track for “Wind Chimes,” another new tune he and Van Dyke had written. But the new burst of inspiration also prompted him to return to “Good Vibrations” a week later, winnowing his many hours of instrumental tracks down into the elusive mini-suite he’d been imagining since the middle of winter. He’d made enough progress by August 11 to dial his brother Carl in the Fargo, North Dakota, hotel where he and the rest of the band had just played a gig at the Memorial Auditorium and play him the edited instrumental track over the telephone line. “He called me from the recording studio and played this really bizarre-sounding music over the phone,” Carl recalled. “There were drums smashing…and then it refined itself and got into the cello. It was a real funky track.”

  The touring group got back to L.A. in time for the first vocal session on the August 24, working from the set of new lyrics Brian had commissioned from Mike Love, who wrote most of the new verses in his car on the way to the recording studio. Mike apparently thrived under deadline pressure—his words added a delicate sensuality to the track, while the bass vocal line he suggested for the chorus transcended its own verbal goofiness (rhyming “vibrations” with “excitations”) by emphasizing the funky bass line already thrumming beneath the music. The vocal sessions would continue for nearly a month, with Brian once again monitoring every tonal and spiritual nuance of every note sung and double-tracked by every member. When Brian made his final mix on September 21 and then sat back in his chair in the control room at Columbia Studios and heard the finished song for the first time, he felt as if the skies above him had opened up. “I remember I had it right in the sack. I could just feel it when I dubbed it down, made the final mix from the sixteen track down to mono. It was a feeling of power…a feeling of exaltation. Artistic beauty. It was everything,” he told Rolling Stone in 1976. “I remember saying, ‘Oh my God. Sit back and listen to this!”

  The song that emerged, finished in the last week of September and released to the public three weeks later, made an impact on popular culture that was both immediate and lasting. Shockingly, “Good Vibrations” blew past the standard sub-three-minute limit designated as the industry standard by record executives and radio programmers. Its contrasting moods and rhythms—veering from the delicate, flute-filled opening verses to the rumbling, wailing cello-and-theremin chorus to the Jew’s-harp-and-honky-tonk-piano first bridge to the echoing, churchlike organ on the second bridge and the round of arching falsettos that lead to the final chorus—exploded even the most progressive notions of how a pop song could be written, constructed, and performed. “Good Vibrations” sounded like nothing that had ever been played on the radio before, and as it rocketed to the top of the Billboard charts—selling 400,000 copies in the first four days and one million in its first month—it came to summarize a feeling that had been building in youth culture throughout the mid-1960s.

  In that sense, “Good Vibrations” functioned as a kind of mirror image to Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” a similarly popular, catalytic, and even longer (though it had been sliced neatly in two for radio play) number one hit from the year before. Dylan was (and remains) a wonderfully musical songwriter, but the impact of “Like a Rolling Stone” comes most immediately in its lyrics, which string together surreal images—the chrome horse; the Siamese cat–wearing diplomat; the sad, yet sinister person known as “Napoleon in rags”; and the final rebuke, “You’re invisible now”—with such striking authority that it forever transformed the vocabulary of popular music. And though the target of Dylan’s six-minute chain of accusations was purposefully vague, its elusiveness only amplified the song’s universality. Dylan might have been addressing a lover, the masters of a corrupt institution, his own arrogance, or perhaps some combination of them all. But as Greil Marcus points out in his book Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads, it was the overall sound that mattered most. Taken together, Dylan’s slashing poetry, the screeching guitars, pounding drums, and wailing organ became a generational cry of frustration and statement of purpose.

  And if the rollicking, roaring “Like a Rolling Stone” seemed determined to destroy everything in its path, the meandering, crystalline “Good Vibrations” stood on the same ground pointing blithely in the opposite direction, building a new utopia of its own. Where Dylan’s voice was tart and piercingly intelligent
, the Beach Boys were sweet and boyish. Where his music was visceral and rough, Brian’s was sophisticated and honed to a high shine. And while it was the Minnesota poet’s wild, psychedelic language that would transform the culture, it was the California studio whiz’s equally wild, equally psychedelic music that sounded like a vision of the future.

  At a moment in time when popular music meant more than ever, these songs meant more than any American rock ’n’ roll tune ever had. They were the yearning of a new generation and signposts for a movement that would, for a time, promise to redefine the meaning and possibilities of American culture. As “Good Vibrations” came to dominate the sales charts and AM radio, Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys found themselves teetering unexpectedly near the leading edge of the burgeoning youth movement.

  That said, the arbiters of serious culture were not prepared to speak of the Beach Boys in the same breath as Bob Dylan. Certainly, a significant percentage of the literati still dismissed the group as little more than candy-striped tools of consumerism. Skeptics were everywhere, particularly in the United States, where Pet Sounds had been much less popular than it had been abroad. But at least some corners of the youth demimonde—the hippies who hadn’t yet been identified in quite that way—had been made to cock their collective ear. “They’ve found the new sound at last!” the London Sunday Express had raved above its ecstatic review of “Good Vibrations.”

  Like the Sunday Express, many musicians understood the significance of Brian’s achievement on the album, as did a few members of the small but increasingly influential band of journalists and intellectuals who had begun to apply serious analytical thought to rock music. Not all were convinced, however. “I know L.A. hype when I hear it,” snipped Ralph J. Gleason, a San Francisco–based jazz critic whose affection for Dylan had only recently steered him toward the wild and wooly latitudes of rock ’n’ roll. Such attitudes dismayed Brian, if only because they reflected an image of the Beach Boys he was actively trying to leave behind, despite the stubborn efforts of his father, the Capitol Records executive suite, and a significant percentage of his own band, none of whom, it seemed, were convinced that the success of “Good Vibrations” hadn’t been some kind of fluke. But it also inspired him, sending him back to the music, which drowned out even the most discouraging words.

  Brian and Van Dyke worked constantly through the end of the summer and into the fall, usually recording with the studio musicians during the day and then reconvening on Laurel Way in the evening to write some more. High on Brian’s Desbutols one night, they stayed up until dawn writing a stately, two-movement piece that began in the darkness of a crumbling, decadent society, then turned to face its inevitable destruction and the dawn that waited beyond. Most of the song was written during the summer, but it remained untitled and its last verse was still patchy until later in the fall, when Dennis Wilson returned from the band’s British tour with tales of how some of the Brits had actually pointed and laughed at the band’s striped shirts. Dennis’s humiliation—he was near tears as he described it—touched Van Dyke deeply and crystallized the mood of sophistication-gone-cynical they were trying to express in the song. “We’ll call it ‘Surf’s Up,’” he told Brian. And then he had the final lines: “Surf’s up, aboard a tidal wave/Come about hard and join the young and often spring you gave/I heard the word, wonderful thing, a children’s song.”

  Not that the paisley-bedecked Van Dyke was eager to pull Brian back toward the buttoned-down slickness those woefully out-of-step shirts represented. But the Anglophilia that had dominated American pop culture in the wake of the Beatles’ invasion had always stuck in Van Dyke’s craw. Particularly in the midst of a decade in which his nation was struggling to locate its moral bearings in the depths of the Cold War, the last throes of institutionalized racism, generational mistrust, and societal divides. The darkest side of that fight had come to his family’s home just a few years earlier when his older brother Benjamin, an up-and-comer in the US State Department, had died in mysterious circumstances while on assignment in Frankfurt, Germany. The family dealt with the blow as best they could, but the grief followed Van Dyke to Los Angeles and fueled his muse when he sat down at the piano with Brian. “I was dead set on centering my life on the patriotic ideal,” Van Dyke says. “I was a son of the American revolution, and there was blood on the tracks. Recent blood, and it was still drying.”

  Four decades earlier, George Gershwin had set out to make his “Rhapsody” a portrait of the nation he knew. “I heard it as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America—of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, or our metropolitan madness,” Gershwin had written. Now his two young inheritors had set out to do precisely the same thing. As the nights passed and the songs came together, the separate traumas that defined the two songwriters’ lives and the stubborn hope for the future they refused to abandon came together into a series of musical vignettes that merged into an impressionistic portrait of the American past and present. “I’d just come off this personal Everest and was trying to make reason of my own life,” Van Dyke says. “We were panning for good information, and it all felt very California and very frontier. The whole state of California felt like a frontier to us. And the whole record seemed like a real effort toward figuring out what Manifest Destiny was all about. We’d come as far as we could, as far as Horace Greeley told us to go. And so we looked back and tried to make sense of that great odyssey.”

  Some songs—“Heroes and Villains,” “Surf’s Up,” and others—emerged whole, with verses and choruses that locked together in obvious ways. Others came out as individual episodes, each of them a discrete segment of the sepia-to-psychedelic collage of musical/lyrical moments that emerged from their shared vision. Some sections were as simple as a description of a barnyard or the cool air of a clear, country morning; others were more esoteric. “Cabin-Essence” contrasted placid verses describing a frontier home with a thundering chorus giving voice to the coming railroad. The song’s climactic section zoomed skyward, simultaneously evoking the Grand Coulee Dam (and the electrified future it represents) and the eyes of a Chinese laborer as they follow the arc of a hungry crow circling a thresher working a cornfield. “Do You Like Worms” told the story of the Europeans sailing for Plymouth Rock, contrasting the hope that sailed with them to—in a reprise of the “Bicycle Rider” theme from “Heroes and Villains”—a glimpse of the damage they would wreak upon the unsuspecting natives, both on the mainland and then, later, in the Hawaiian Islands.

  Another series of sections (including titles such as “Vega-Tables” and “Wind Chimes”) described the transcendent beauty of the natural world, while several others (“Wonderful,” “Child Is the Father of the Man”) traced the pursuit of God in the face of an increasingly decadent civilization. Van Dyke’s lyrics found an elegant balance between vivid down-home portraiture and a kind of James Joyce–inspired psychedelia that found its power well past the boundaries of traditional lyrical verse. Similarly, Brian’s music contrasted traditional American instruments (banjo, steel guitar, fiddle, mandolin, harmonica, and tack piano) with symphonic arrangements and modern electric instruments.

  “Surf’s Up” was the locus for all these threads, but as they wrote and recorded more themes and vignettes, Brian couldn’t resist taking apart the puzzle and putting it back together again in a completely different way. Should the end of “Heroes and Villains” be the middle of “Barnyard”? Would “Child Is the Father of the Man” work better as the climax to “Surf’s Up”? Or was “I’m in Great Shape” actually part of “Barnyard”? The “Heroes and Villains” chorus—the “just see what you’ve done done” theme—became a recurring motif, a thread of doubt curling through multiple songs. But every time he’d make one decision, another section would get written and recorded and all of the options would change again. Brian would come home with more acetate records of the tracks-in-progress and spend hours playing the sections for his friends in different orders, searching for the m
ost logical progression. The sheer number of sections and vignettes opened up a seemingly endless number of possibilities, and each seemed just as perfect as the next.

  “[I’d say], ‘God, Brian, why don’t you leave it already? Just leave that. It’s perfect that way,’” David Anderle recalled to David Leaf in 1978. Then Brian would spin the discs in a completely different order. “And I’d say, ‘Well, of course, that’s perfect, too.’”

  And the music he was creating was only one facet of Brian’s plans for the future. “The door has been opened for a whole universe of experience for me,” Brian told a fan magazine interviewer that summer. To some extent, this was due to the books he’d been reading. Inspired by Loren Schwartz and the circle of young Hollywood sophisticates he had come to know, Brian had stacked his bedside table high with works ranging from the I Ching and Subud philosophy to tracts on astrology to the novels of Hermann Hesse to detailed charts of the stars and planets. And though Brian had never shown much interest in visual art, he was intrigued enough by the cartoon-style pop art he saw at the studio of an artist friend of Van Dyke’s named Frank Holmes to let him take a shot at drawing a cover for the record Brian and Van Dyke had decided to title, with maximum hopefulness, Smile. The colorful, childlike drawing Holmes produced of a shop selling smiles (inspired by an abandoned jewelry store he’d seen near his home in Pasadena) appealed to Brian so much that he asked the artist to illustrate the twelve-page booklet he’d convinced Capitol to include with the album. The resulting illustrations were, like the songs themselves, abstract and a bit cryptic. But also like the songs, they projected a childlike sense of wonder that was poignant and just a little bittersweet.