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

by Peter Ames Carlin

  When the flight touched down in Los Angeles late that afternoon, nearly two dozen of Brian’s closest compatriots were waiting: Smile insiders Van Dyke Parks and his wife, Durrie; David Anderle and his wife, Sheryl; Brian’s driver, Terry Sachen; Marilyn and her sisters, Diane and Barbara; Carl Wilson’s wife, Annie Hinsche; journalist Jules Siegel; musicians Danny Hutton, Dean Torrence of Jan and Dean, and Mark Volman from the Turtles, in addition to a handful of cousins and other friends, all waiting for him to join them beneath the colorful, childlike mural of airplanes soaring into a soft blue sky in the TWA terminal. Webster took a variety of pictures, the group expanding and contracting to form a variety of combinations. Throughout, the center of the galaxy was always Brian, dressed in canvas boat shoes, white jeans, and a light blue T-shirt, his reddish brown hair swept low across his forehead so that it nearly covered the eyes that regarded the camera so coolly. To look at the pictures now is to see a shy but powerful young man flexing his authority. He’s distant but in command. Surely, “Good Vibrations” had something to do with that crooked smile that pulls at his lips. After all those months of work, all the anxiety, doubts, and stubborn belief, everything about Brian’s vision was being confirmed in spades. And unlike Pet Sounds, which won him critical praise at the expense of sales, “Good Vibrations” hit the hipsters just as it did the millions of kids who were just in it for the fun, fun, fun. But if “Good Vibrations” was Brian’s jet airplane, Smile would be a rocket ship, propelling him so far beyond the pop universe he had come to know that it was impossible for him to say where it would leave him.

  Or if he even had the courage to go through with the journey. Because Brian had already started feeling doubts about Smile. They were glimmers of darkness he had been trying to fend off with the constant motion of a vast array of interlocking musical, visual, and completely unrelated projects. But he needed other people’s enthusiasm to keep him going, and so every time he saw a flicker of doubt—as in the puzzled, unsmiling faces that greeted him in the TWA terminal—you could nearly see him recoil. And so once Webster had snapped his last photograph, Brian bid the crowd good-bye and left the airport with Marilyn to have dinner alone at an undisclosed location.

  Later, when Webster showed him a contact sheet of the finished shots, Brian would post a blowup of his favorite shot on his living room mantel: the Smile class of 1966. And later, after he had discarded it, the airport photograph would take on a symbolic importance, as if it marked the point at which Brian’s astonishing creative arc leveled off, nosing slowly toward a descent. It was hard to catch at first, if only because so many things seemed to be happening at once. “Good Vibrations” was still at the apex of record charts across the planet, while plans for Smile and all its related projects—the full-color booklet, the accompanying mini-films, the TV publicity, the articles already being written—were just ramping up into high gear. Capitol had printed up nearly half a million copies of Frank Holmes’s sweetly psychedelic smile-shop album cover, a mountain of them stacked up and waiting to be wrapped around the brilliant new music. Then there were all the side projects, everything from the short films Brian shot with the other Beach Boys to promote “Good Vibrations,” to his scheme for full-length features by, about, and starring the Beach Boys, to his ever-broadening plans for the group’s own Brother Records and the various musical and comedic works it would produce.

  And if that weren’t exciting enough, Derek Taylor had started to lay even more of the group’s public reputation on the shoulders of its semireclusive leader. “This is Brian Wilson. He is a Beach Boy. Some say he is more. Some say he is a Beach Boy and a genius,” read the headline of one typical profile. And the text didn’t let up: “This twenty-three-year-old powerhouse not only sings with the famous group, he writes the words and music then arranges, engineers, and produces the disc…. Even the packaging and design on the record jacket is controlled by the talented Mr. Wilson. He has often been called ‘genius,’ and it’s a burden.” It’s the last line that’s priceless (though the rest of it doesn’t hesitate to stretch the facts up to and beyond the breaking point), given the expert way Taylor, working through a reporter (or alter ego) identified as “’60’s Hollywood reporter Jerry Fineman,” manages to both assert Brian’s genius and then shrug it off as a nuisance in the same breath.

  A canny publicist with a hipster’s sensibility and a novelist’s eye for poetic imagery, Taylor could sense how well the image of Brian as a solitary, quirky genius would play to the rapidly maturing, increasingly serious rock audience. What the recent L.A. transplant didn’t understand was how such an accolade would echo in the ears of its subject. Certainly, Brian wasn’t adverse to being celebrated. He’d even told Taylor that he knew he was better than his reputation gave him credit for being. But as with so many things in his life that pleased him, public acclaim had a way of tormenting Brian, too. Already the attention he had received within the industry for writing had become a point of contention between Brian and his attention-starved father. The other Beach Boys had long since come to resent that disparity too, particularly when they were the ones earning the cheers on stage night after night. And, Brian fretted, how could anyone live up to that kind of reputation? “I’m not a genius,” he said to reporters back then. “I’m just a hardworking guy.” Such understated humility fed Brian’s reputation even more. Everything he touched turned to gold, and the best part was that he was too hip to care! “I never try the impossible, but I’m always aware of the workable,” he said, summing up his approach to innovation at the end of the “Fineman” piece.

  But if Brian’s musical work inspired more people to regard him as a genius, his personal life spurred others to ponder the thin line between divine inspiration and complete lunacy. Consider his new, overwhelming appreciation for health food. What began with a slight alteration of his dietary regime (very slight, as it turned out) and a quirky song called “Vega-Tables” grew quickly into an obsession with fitness that led him to move the furniture out of his living room in order to make room for tumbling mats and exercise bars, none of which Brian seemed all that interested in using. Instead, the mostly sedentary, increasingly chunky musician contented himself with giving evangelical lectures about fitness—sometimes, as Derek Taylor recalled with a laugh to David Leaf, “while digging into a big, fat hamburger.” Talking to Leaf in 2004, Brian rolled his eyes at his own youthful contradictions. “I wanted everyone else to exercise. I was too lazy.”

  He was far more willing to join his friends in exercising the outer reaches of their imaginations, particularly when it came to humor or other forms of verbal high jinks. All through that fall and winter, he kept his home tape recorder close at hand, spending hours recording himself and friends while they chanted, played games, had pretend arguments, or just shot the breeze. It was just like the old days with his Wollensak recorder, except much, much weirder. To dig through the tapes is to hear hours of chants about fishies going swim-swim and the need for beets and carrots, beets and carrots, beets and carrots. “Everybody talk like Smokey the Bear!” Brian commanded in the midst of one chant. Nothing but harmless fun, it seemed to most of his friends. “Maybe he wasn’t as sophisticated as the sophisticates wanted, and he certainly wasn’t as retarded as the surfer guys wanted,” Vosse says. “But I thought he was funny. I still think he’s funny.”

  But not to Van Dyke Parks, who sounds vaguely mortified while Brian, Vosse, and David Anderle pretend to order treats from a psychedelic ice cream wagon that plays a plinking version of “Good Vibrations” (Brian was at the piano) as it cruises the neighborhood. Later Brian changes the fantasy, pretending to have been swallowed by the microphone. “Van Dyke! You’ve gotta help me!” he shouts. “No names, please. The place might be raided,” Van Dyke calls back, unamused. Even now he shakes his head at the memory. “I sensed all that was destructive, so I withdrew from those related social encounters,” Van Dyke says.

  Nevertheless, the silliness continued. Brian got the musicians at th
e recording studio involved in the fun too, at one point recording a long session in which the horn players talked through their mouthpieces, pretending they were trapped in their instruments. Intriguingly, given his own near-complete absorption in music, “falling into” instruments became a standard motif in Brian’s comic tapes that fall and winter. Goofing around for the recorder at home, he and Michael Vosse took turns pretending to get stuck inside the piano or the tape player’s microphone. And though at least one of Brian’s sound experiments—the whirs, bangs, and grinding of people working drills, pounding nails, and sawing wood—would end up being used in a finished recording, other sessions seem to be inspired by something other than Brian’s urge to create compelling new sounds.

  One tape captures more than twenty-four minutes of dialogue after Brian ushered a group of friends and puzzled session musicians (who still seem to be getting paid, given the “When do I get my W-4?” crack one of them makes) into a pitch-black recording studio. The dialogue begins with Jules Siegel attempting to lead everyone in a dorm room–style party game called “Lifeboat,” where the players portray survivors of a shipwreck who must decide who among them should be tossed into the water to save the others. But the game soon dissolves into random exchanges that veer toward frustration and then anger. Michael Vosse, who, for some reason, Brian sent to be by himself in a far corner of the studio, is the first to lose his temper when he gets lost in the blackness and collides with a piece of equipment. “Brian, I can’t see!” he yells angrily, but his boss cuts him off: “Well, that’s tough shit!”

  Siegel pipes up, and the talk grows increasingly barbed between Vosse and the writer. “If you can’t find your way out, why should any of us help you?” Siegel says. Vosse yells back an insult, and the tension infects the rest of the crowd. But perhaps Brian set them up to fight; when Vosse turns his anger on someone else, one of the women in the group says with a giggle, “This is supposed to be an argument!” But maybe she didn’t know what was going on, either. “No, they’re really into it,” Siegel says gleefully. “What are we doing in here, Brian?” someone asks awhile later. “I want Michael to try to cheer everyone up,” he responds, but the mood gets even worse when someone in the control booth starts playing the tape of the instrumental figure at the center of “Heroes and Villains.”

  “I feel so depressed. Really, seriously,” Brian says, prophetically. “I keep sinking. I’m too down to smile.”

  No matter how frantically Brian worked to write and record his music, no matter how much free time he could consume with his comedy tapes and other enthusiasms, nothing seemed to hold back the shadow that was creeping over him. At times the darkness seemed to be coming from every direction at once. Nick Grillo’s examination of the group’s royalty statements from Capitol uncovered years of underpaid royalties. Brian, for instance, had never once been paid for his work as a producer. The group filed a lawsuit against the label, but the move only prompted more tension in his dealings with the executives already impatient to get Smile in stores. Worse, several of Brian’s closest aides came to believe that Murry Wilson, who had negotiated and countersigned the first contract, might have had something to do with the situation. How could such a savvy, hands-on businessman have failed to recognize the disparity between what Capitol owed and what they were actually paying? They even speculated that he may have received some kind of kickback in exchange for not tipping off his sons that they were being ripped off. No one knew for sure, but Murry already frightened Brian, and such conjecture only exacerbated the anger, shame, and paranoia that infected his relationship with his father. And all of it only added to the weight of the creative burden he was already straining to lift.

  That burden was only growing heavier, thanks both to the structural and thematic complexity of the new music and also to the reaction it had received from his family in and around the band. True enough, the guys always had to be pushed and dragged through any complicated new assignment. Brian expected that, particularly when they were squeezing sessions between dates on their near-endless tours. But it had gotten even worse during Pet Sounds, given their doubts about Tony Asher’s lyrics. Brian had hoped the excitement about “Good Vibrations” might put them in a more cooperative mood, but he hadn’t factored in how the presence of Van Dyke, along with all the other staffers and assistants and the array of friends that came along with them, would set off alarm bells in the ears of his bandmates and their family and friends. They’d always been suspicious of outsiders, and this crew of intellectual hipsters—who only encouraged Brian’s wildest ideas and fueled his weirdest behavior—heralded the worst possible turn of events for a band of pop stars whose wealth and fame stemmed entirely from the songs their leader had once written about cars, surfing, and girls.

  Still, the vocal sessions had started cheerfully enough back on September 19, with an evening session for “Prayer,” the choral invocation Brian wrote to start the album. It’s a beautiful piece, the unaccompanied voices traveling wordlessly through a series of complex harmonic modulations that rise and fall delicately. But as the group gathered around the microphone in the Columbia studio, Brian sounded too nervous to hear how delighted they were with the first song they’d attempt for their latest album. “This could be considered a track,” Al Jardine mused, but Brian shook his head.

  “Nah, we don’t want to do that.”

  “But it’s beautiful!” Dennis cried. And yet Brian still balked at calling “Prayer” an official song. “This is intro to the album, take one,” he said to the engineer. There was an uncomfortable silence, and it took Carl, the unflappable baby brother, to stir the group’s leader from his reverie: “Brian. Direct, okay?”

  “Uh, okay,” he responded hastily. “Let’s try to really pull it off good, okay?”

  The group began to sing, slowly finding their way through the intricate weave of voices in the first verse. A few broken takes later, Brian’s attention wavered again, and he called to Danny Hutton, out in the control room. “Do you have any hash joints left, Danny? I know that you do.” Hutton indicated that he didn’t, because Brian groaned his reply (“Awwww!”). Nevertheless, drugs remained on his mind. When another take broke down, he turned to someone else and either joked or asked with striking directness: “You guys feeling that acid yet?”

  The other Beach Boys were certainly not feeling acid in the fall of 1966. And to Mike Love, the hardworking front man who prided himself on being in touch with the tastes of the group’s vast audience of clean-cut teenagers, no one but a tripped-out acid freak would ever come close to feeling the bizarre new songs Brian was crafting for the group. “Good Vibrations” had been weird enough, but at least Brian had had the good sense to let him put his own down-to-earth lyrics on top of all that crazy music. Anyone could understand a love story about two people. But what would anyone make of “Heroes and Villains,” with its bizarre, purposefully nonsensical tale and its constant use of nonsense phrases like “sunny-down snuff”? What exactly was going on in “Do You Like Worms” with the “Rock, rock, roll/Plymouth rock roll over” line? And what kind of song title was “Do You Like Worms”? In a song that doesn’t even mention worms once? And who but a drug addict would know what the phrase “columnated ruins domino” meant?

  None of this made any sense to Mike, and when he saw how scattered Brian seemed, particularly when he came drifting into the studio in the company of Michael Vosse or Van Dyke Parks, his fury became obvious. Why were the Beach Boys, his group, suddenly being infiltrated by hippie weirdos? What sort of hippie bullshit, or drugs, or, more likely, both, were they feeding to Brian? And how could any of this end up producing the Beach Boys’ next hit album?

  Not everyone felt quite so strongly. Carl loved Brian’s new music, so much so that he made a point of coming to the instrumental sessions when he was in town, adding guitar where he could and, mostly, watching his older brother work. Al Jardine was a pro, willing to do what he was told when the time came for him to sing. And even if Den
nis Wilson was less engaged in the recording process (being far more involved with his various cars, motorcycles, and every other form of adult fun that fell in the lap of a sexy young rock star in Los Angeles in 1966), he was still supportive enough to talk the record up in the press. “Smile makes Pet Sounds stink, that’s how good it is,” he told one reporter. But Mike, on the other hand, was less convinced. More to the point, he was not content to trust his entire career to fan magazine hype and hippie bullshit.

  “I called it ‘acid alliteration,’” Mike says. “The [lyrics are] far out. But do they relate like ‘Surfin’ USA,’ like ‘Fun, Fun, Fun,’ like ‘California Girls,’ like ‘I Get Around’? Perhaps not! So that’s the distinction. See, I’m into success. These words equal successful hit records; those words don’t.”

  As Michael Vosse recalls, Mike’s obvious distaste for the new songs hit Brian hard. “The vibe was getting worse and worse. Brian was trying to complete one of the most ambitious projects in pop music. But the people close to him were rolling their eyes and saying, ‘Are you sure?’ And that really got to him.”

  Brian began to dread the vocal sessions and often tried to soften his anxiety by getting high in the car while Vosse drove him down to the studio. His drug use only emphasized his other eccentricities and made it far more difficult for him to explain why it was so important for them all to crawl around and make animal sounds for the background of “Barnyard” or to groan and moan like primordial creatures to accompany one of the other sections that still didn’t have a name or a discernible place in this (or any) rock ’n’ roll record.

  “Everyone was high but me,” Al remembered in Goldmine in 2000. “Brian made us crawl around and snort like a bunch of pigs on a section of ‘Heroes.’ It was like being trapped in an insane asylum.” The conflict simmered through the fall and into the winter, festering to the point that even the triumphs of the season—including their biggest hit single ever and months of playing to ecstatic crowds, particularly in Europe and England, where the new Pet Sounds material earned just as much rapturous applause as the earlier hits—did nothing to ease the tension. It all came to a head on December 6, in the midst of a recording session for the final movement of “Cabin-Essence,” then known by its working title, “The Grand Coulee Dam.”