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

by Peter Ames Carlin

  Brian’s intellectual inquiry was both fueled and muddled by the clouds of marijuana and hashish smoke that drifted in a perpetual haze over the Laurel Way social whirl. Tabs of acid were around too, though that was rare. “To the best of my knowledge, he may have taken LSD once,” says Michael Vosse, a college friend of Anderle who would soon come to work for Brian. “He wasn’t stoned all the time. Brian went through fads; he had hash because he could get it, and Van Dyke had plenty of pot. But really, Brian had a job to do, and he was a hard workin’ guy.”

  So just to keep the ideas popping and the buzz going until the sun came up in the morning, there were Brian’s ever-present Desbutols. Brian gulped fistfuls of the stuff, as it turned out, and his appetite for speed was matched only by his appetite for food. He’d have these enormous steak dinners, then roar off for midnight snacks at his favorite fast-food joints—Pioneer Chicken on Sunset or Dolores’s over on La Cienega. Marilyn made cookies when he asked for them, and when those were gone, then there were always cartons of ice cream and Reddi-wip, the stuff in the spray can, which he would sometimes spray right into his mouth. Soon his once-wiry frame took on the bulk and presence of a real Beverly Hills pasha.

  And just like a young royal coming into his own, Brian had begun to think in terms of empire. The Beach Boys had hired a young, ambitious new manager, Nick Grillo, earlier in the year, and he set up offices to oversee the group’s career, plot their concert tours, and run their finances. Meanwhile, David Anderle was working to pull together Brother Records, the imprint they planned to use as a more sympathetic, noncorporate home for side projects. Brian also wanted to pursue film projects for himself and the group. Derek Taylor’s contract had been extended for the foreseeable future, so he was busily spinning out his own brand of quirky, quicksilver hype. Brian had his cousin Steve Korthof as one personal assistant and another friend, Terry Sachen, performing a whole other set of vital chores and errands. As Taylor was ramping up the publicity to promote the release of “Good Vibrations” in October, he sent over Michael Vosse, then a young fan magazine reporter, to interview Brian in a coffee shop on Sunset Boulevard. Except once they got to talking, Vosse discovered that his subject was much less interested in talking about his new single than he was in his other interests. “He seemed to want to go off on a tangent about his theory on the divinity of humor, his idea that when you laugh, control goes out of the window. You’re doing something you have no way to rein in, and so it opens the doors for epiphanies.”

  Vosse’s enthusiasm for Brian’s ideas seemed to inspire the musician. He called the writer the next morning and promptly offered him a job. “The next day I went to see him, and he gave me a really nice Nagra tape recorder, a big reel-to-reel job that you could use to record in sync with a motion picture camera, and sent me out to go around town and record water sounds. He explained that part of the new album would be a suite of elements, and so he wanted as many variations of how water can sound as I could come up with. He said, ‘Take your time, go to oceans, streams, whatever.’ So I did, and it was exhilarating! I’d come by to see him every day, and he’d listen to my tapes and talk about them. I was just fascinated that he would hear things every once in a while and his ears would prick up and he’d go back and listen again. And I had no idea what he was listening for!”

  Vosse’s duties expanded with their friendship, and he became a regular companion for Brian, accompanying him on his daily rounds of meetings and recording sessions, then going with him to East Lansing, Michigan, when he flew out to teach the other Beach Boys how to play “Good Vibrations” onstage. Brian had Vosse bring the Nagra on the airplane, and when they got to East Lansing, he had him tape a long, rambling conversation with their taxi driver. Back home, Brian had Vosse appear with him on Lloyd Thaxton’s locally televised dance show, when he went to debut “Good Vibrations.” The appearance turned odd when Brian insisted on bringing out an enormous basket of vegetables he’d had Marilyn prepare and spoke at length to a very confused Thaxton about the benefits of eating plenty of roughage. Later, Vosse came along with Brian to a meeting at the offices of the then brand-new A&M Records to talk about doing a deal. Label boss Chuck Kaye was clearly excited at the prospect of doing any kind of business with Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, but his enthusiasm faded noticeably when he realized that Brian had come to pitch him a strange single called “Crack the Whip” he’d recorded for Jasper Dailey, an elderly photographer who had been shooting some pictures of Brian and the Beach Boys. Jasper, as it turned out, was a far better photographer than singer. “You could see the panic on (Kaye)’s face when he heard how awful it was,” Vosse says, laughing. “This look of, ‘What the fuck do I do?’ He’d really wanted to romance Brian, but Brian only wanted him to like Jasper!”

  To the uninitiated, Brian seemed to be veering between humor, eccentricity, genius, and incipient insanity. At one point during the previous summer, he decided it would be inspiring to feel the beach beneath his feet while writing at the piano in his living room, so he’d had a large sandbox built around the instrument, then had a truckload of sand shoveled in to fill it up. And there it would remain, at least until he figured out that his dogs, Banana and Louie, were also using the sand for their own creative purposes. A little later he decided it would be inspiring to have meetings and conversations within the confines of an Arabian-style tent. So he had an elaborate silk tent designed, constructed, and installed. Once the matching silk pillows were in place, he excitedly invited his inner circle through its elegant flaps to give the thing a test run. And they soon discovered that Brian’s insistence that the thing be built without a vent at the top meant that the accrued body heat (to say nothing of the varieties of smoke generated) had no way to escape the tent, while fresh oxygen could not find its way inside. The gang tumbled out after an hour or so, all of them sweating, coughing, and choking, and the tent sat in the living room, mostly unused, for the next few months before Brian finally had the thing taken down.

  Other passions rose to take the tent’s place. When Capitol Records sent him an early home video camera and monitor as a Christmas present, Brian set it up near the sofa in the living room alcove and interviewed his friends Johnny Carson–style. (Michael Vosse: “His first show was with Van Dyke and then-wife Durrie Parks, and you can imagine how it went. They came on to show how to roll a joint. And it was like Albert Einstein shows you how to get high.” Van Dyke Parks: “What? I would really like to see that. I’m surprised I’d be on film or tape. But who knows.”) Shopping one day, Brian’s eye was captured by a tall, rotating display of futuristic dolls that came in plastic bubble boxes. Entranced by the dolls’ shimmering hair and sparkling eyes, he purchased the entire thing, spinning rack and all, setting it up just behind the organ in his music room.

  He spent hours looking at the stars through his telescope and playing Ping-Pong, then replaced all the furniture in one room with gymnasium mats so everyone could exercise together—when they weren’t smoking pot, doing speed, or eating one of the vast steak dinners Brian loved. Everything he thought of seemed to lead somewhere else. They should open a twenty-four-hour telescope store! Brian announced, sticking with the idea nearly as long as his whim to open a twenty-four-hour sporting goods store so L.A.’s other night owls would have somewhere to buy Ping-Pong tables at 3:00 a.m. Along with Vosse’s water sounds, Brian also captured hours of stoned conversation he had with friends and colleagues, including party games, staged arguments, chants, and weird improvised skits. One night he became so enraptured with the sound of silverware on the table that he orchestrated his guests in a series of complex rhythms and counter-rhythms, looking for a perfect sound. “We oughta record this, make this part of the album!” he cried. “You didn’t know if it was a put-on or if it was serious,” says Danny Hutton, who sat at the table that night.

  For Michael Vosse, it was all just another day at the office. “I’d been around a lot of people in showbiz by then, and nothing about his eccentricities struck m
e as unique,” Vosse says with a shrug. “I thought he was funny. I mean, he used to write me memos on children’s stationery, and he’d always address them to ‘Clark Kent’ and sign them ‘Perry White.’ People can look at that now and think he’s wacko. But all those things that people looked back on later as quite alarming were all kind of funny back then.”

  If anything, the new atmosphere of creative and personal experimentation drew people to Brian’s door. Brian’s usual crowd of musician friends still came up, and with Anderle serving as a go-between, the crowd took on a decidedly intellectual air. Jules Siegel, an erudite magazine writer who had recently moved to Los Angeles from New York, was so impressed by Brian that he decided to not only hang around regularly but also document the scene in a long, impassioned article he’d presold to the Saturday Evening Post. Paul Robbins, who wrote for the Los Angeles Free Press, an alternative paper, also became a regular visitor. Still, Brian couldn’t charm all of his guests. When Siegel brought his friend Thomas Pynchon up to the house one night, the famous hipster novelist sat in stunned, unhappy silence while the nervous, stoned pop star—who had dragged him into his then-new Arabian tent to get high—kept kicking over the oil lamp he was trying to light. “Brian was kind of afraid of Pynchon, because he’d heard he was an Eastern intellectual establishment genius,” Siegel recalls. “And Pynchon wasn’t very articulate. He was gonna sit there and let you talk while he listened. So neither of them really said a word all night long. It was one of the strangest scenes I’d ever seen in my life.”

  But no matter how odd things got at home, work on Smile continued at full throttle. Crafting instrumental tracks in the studio, Brian worked with just as much authority and creativity as ever, coolly directing the mostly older, almost entirely straightlaced musicians on songs that bore little resemblance to anything they had ever played. “It’s gotta sound like jewelry!” he instructed a percussionist during a session for “Surf’s Up.” Later, he coaxed the musicians to let the rhythm dissipate naturally at the end of verses. “Don’t worry about how it falls apart at the end of the verse. That’s generally what it’s supposed to do,” he explained. When bassist Carol Kaye found this instruction difficult to reconcile with the standard perfectionism required of studio musicians, Brian eased her concerns with a smile. “Hey, but don’t worry about it, Carol.” “But I worry,” she called back from the studio, only half-joking. “You mustn’t,” Brian said. “You mustn’t worry.” Not that sloppiness or imprecision was the goal, as Brian showed when he called the next take to a halt after only a dozen bars or so, pointing out a lapse by the drummer. “Let’s have a little more foot pedal.” The next take lasts about half as long before Brian punches in to stop it. “The basses aren’t quite together!”

  The article Jules Siegel wrote—ultimately killed by the Saturday Evening Post editors, but published in October 1967 by a magazine called Cheetah—described sessions for the “Fire” section of the elements suite that began when Brian distributed plastic fire hats to the studio full of musicians (including strings and horns), then had one of his assistants light a bucket of kindling on fire so everyone could smell smoke while they played. But all of that was dwarfed by the music itself, a screaming pictorial instrumental composition that combined pounding drums; a sinister, repeated bass line; wailing strings; and the high-pitched shriek of sirens to evoke the feeling of fire engines confronting a hellish inferno. At one point, Siegel wrote, a producer working down the hall poked his head in the control room to see what the ruckus was and ended up standing there, completely agog, for a long time. “This is really fantastic! Man, this is unbelievable!” Siegel quoted the guy as saying. “I don’t believe it. I just can’t believe what I’m hearing!” Even now Siegel recalls the incident clearly. “I still remember how dumbfounded he was just hearing the music come out of the speakers,” he says, laughing.

  Siegel’s article would play a significant role in the legend Smile would eventually spawn. But it was the feverish testimony of observers like that pop producer—whose name no one can recall—that created the buzz that spread across the Los Angeles music scene with as much force and mystery as a new batch of Owsley’s handmade LSD. “Have you heard it yet?” people asked one another, breathlessly. “Have you even heard ABOUT it?” And it wasn’t just the fire hats and blazing buckets in the studio or the piano in the sandbox, the hashish tent, and assorted other oddities that excited them (though that probably didn’t hurt). It was all that impossibly strange, yet amazingly beautiful, music that only a few, select people had been lucky enough to hear in the recording studio or from the acetate records Brian took home at the end of the day. Derek Taylor spread the word even further in the press, sometimes in stories he wrote himself, minus a byline but with all the charming hyperbole you’d expect from a Taylor piece. (“I have an idea. I’m not sure exactly how this is going to work, but we’ll try it,” Brian is heard declaring at the start of one experiment that comes to include layers of reverb, overdubbing, and other manipulations. When it’s done, Taylor describes the session musicians shaking their heads in wonder, musing, “How did he do it?”)

  Word drifted to New York City, where David Oppenheim, a producer for CBS News at work on a special about rock ’n’ roll to be hosted by Leonard Bernstein, decided to feature Brian and his new music on the show. Oppenheim and his crew came out in December and ultimately filmed a segment with Brian, sitting alone at his piano in a burgundy button-up shirt, playing and singing “Surf’s Up.” It was a moving, if understated, performance, and its power was amplified by the narration that described Brian as “one of today’s most important pop musicians” and “Surf’s Up” as “…poetic, beautiful in its own obscurity.”

  And though Brian had to back down from an original promise to deliver the album in time for the Christmas shopping season, Capitol Records took out ads in Billboard and other trade magazines promising Smile (“With the ‘Good Vibrations’ sound!”) in January. Anticipation for the new album grew when Britain’s influential music trade magazine, the New Musical Express, released its annual readers’ poll. NME POLL SENSATION: BEACH BOYS BEAT THE BEATLES. True enough, with “Good Vibrations” still near the top of the charts, the magazine’s readers proclaimed the Beach Boys “World Vocal Group” of the year with a hair more than 100 votes separating them from the hometown heroes, who scored 5,272 votes to the Americans’ 5,373. The same poll showed Brian as the fourth-ranked “World Music Personality,” his 3,028 votes landing him just behind third-place finisher John Lennon (3,515) and just ahead of Bob Dylan (1,931), braying his way into the fifth slot.

  As 1966 whirled to a close, it seemed as if Brian had realized his most audacious visions. The moment he had created, starting with Pet Sounds, screaming into “Good Vibrations,” and then vanishing completely into the sparkling, mysterious thickets of Smile, had become a perfect wave, a perfectly rigged custom machine. It was everything he’d ever wanted—commercial popularity, unbelievable artistic freedom, unimaginable acclaim from his peers. All the rules were gone now, all the expectations shaken into dust. Able finally to transcend pop’s norms and his own limitations, anything could happen.

  Anything, it seemed, except what did.

  CHAPTER 7

  Just after the airplane roared off into the morning sky above the Chicago airport, Brian got an idea. He turned to Michael Vosse, recently hired and on his first trip with the boss, and chattered excitedly. “We’ve gotta get everyone together for a portrait!” They were still climbing into the clouds then, their backs pinned into their seats as Brian talked his way up to cruising altitude. They could get the pilot to call ahead to L.A. and tell Marilyn, he said. Have her book the Beach Boys’ photographer, Guy Webster, and then call the whole gang together to meet them at the TWA terminal to take the photo when they stepped off the airplane at LAX. Everyone would show up, right? What else did they have to do on a Sunday afternoon in late October? Brian rang his call button and summoned the stewardess to his seat.

&nbs
p; They had flown east a day and a half before so Brian could oversee the other Beach Boys’ first performances of “Good Vibrations” at back-to-back shows scheduled for Saturday afternoon and evening in the gym at the University of Michigan. The performances had gone well, and the college audience had responded to the new song—released just two weeks earlier and already at the top of the Billboard charts—with such an ecstatic ovation that the other Beach Boys had pulled Brian onstage to take a bow and then join in on their encore of “Barbara Ann.” Brian hadn’t wanted to step back into the spotlights at first, but the cheers had followed him out of the hall and now onto this airplane, where the altitude had pushed his mood toward giddiness. “I need to get a message to my wife, right now!” he told the stewardess, filling in the details in a rush of wild enthusiasm. “We need to take a picture; the airport; just call my wife, she’ll do everything else….” The stewardess first tried to brush off Brian’s demand, explaining that the pilot would have to call the airport control tower and have the message relayed from there via telephone, really only something they did in the case of emergencies. But Brian kept insisting, mentioning the Beach Boys, even, and the important business—show business!—all of this entailed. Had she heard “Good Vibrations” yet? What did she think? Finally, the woman agreed to take her famous passenger’s query to the cockpit. And soon after that, the pilot radioed the message to L.A., where an airline official finally phoned Marilyn to transmit Brian’s written instructions about whom to call and why. “As if,” Vosse says now, “Brian was doing government business.”