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

by Peter Ames Carlin

  The song had bothered Mike since he’d first heard it at a vocal tracking session in early October. Recorded in sections like “Good Vibrations,” “Cabin-Essence” began with a quiet verse called “Home on the Range,” which featured a tinkling piano, plucked banjo, bass, flute, harmonica, and a background vocal doing-doing-doing-ing up and down the scale beneath a sweet Carl Wilson vocal that described the frontier in terms only Van Dyke Parks could imagine: “Light the lamp and fire mellow/Cabinessence timely hello/Welcomes a time for a change,” it began. This vignette lasted all of forty seconds, then gave way to the section called “Who Ran the Iron Horse?”—a thunderstorm of drums, fuzz bass, and cello against a shrieking tempest of backing vocals and a central chant of “Who ran the iron horse?” meant to evoke the coming of the steam engine and the spread of the railroad. Then it was back to another “Home on the Range” verse, into another “Iron Horse” segment, this time adding a barely audible chant performed by Dennis, describing the amphetamine-fired thoughts of a modern-day trucker zooming through the twentieth century.

  They’d recorded most of that a few weeks earlier, but now Brian wanted them to voice the song’s final section, which he and Van Dyke called “Grand Coulee Dam.” This section, which took up the last minute of the song, began with two contrasting chants—“Have you seen the Grand Coulee?” and “Working on the railroad”—that spiraled skyward until they gave way to the song’s climactic chant, which Brian had asked Mike to sing as another whirlpool of backing vocals swirled above the backdrop of fuzz bass, banjo, clattering percussion, and cello: “Over and over the crow flies/uncover the cornfield/Over and over the thresher and hover the wheat field…”

  The only problem with all of this was that Mike had no fucking idea what any of it meant. And frankly, Mike had no intention of singing a word of this until someone could explain it to him. And that someone was Van Dyke Parks. So Mike, lyric sheet in hand, stalked up to Brian and told him to call this Van-whoever-the-fuck to the studio to explain it to him, face-to-face. So Brian did exactly that, dialing his collaborator and asking him casually—a bit too casually, Van Dyke would soon come to understand—if he might be willing to pay a visit to the studio and help Mike with a lyric or two. Well, sure, Van Dyke said, not feeling the least bit of foreboding as he piloted his new Volvo sedan down to the Columbia studios in Hollywood. “The only person I had had any interchange with before that was Dennis, who had responded very favorably to ‘Heroes and Villains’ and ‘Surf’s Up,’” Van Dyke says. “Based on that, I gathered that the work would be approved. But then, with no warning whatsoever, I got that phone call from Brian. And that’s when the whole house of cards came tumbling down.”

  What happened next has long become a central piece of the Smile legend, both because it marked a turning point in the album’s progress and because it resonates with so much psychological and cultural subtext. On the most immediate level, the conflict between Van Dyke and Mike represents the fight for the direction and meaning of the Beach Boys. But in so doing, it reveals even more about Brian’s own conflicted ambitions and impulses. When he pitted his new and old collaborators against one another, he was also setting up a duel between the opposing hemispheres in his mind. Was he going to be an artist or an entertainer; a cultural visionary or a pop music entrepreneur? Once music had been the only thing that made sense to him. No matter how bad things got around him, no matter how frantic he got in his own skin, Brian could wander off into his music and create a reality that didn’t just make sense, but actually rang with beauty. Only now the music couldn’t keep Brian’s demons away anymore, because now they had gotten inside the music. What once was his escape had become the primary battleground, and so now he would have to summon all his courage and strength and face them down, man-to-man. Except Brian couldn’t do that; instead, he got Van Dyke to do the talking for him on the floor of Columbia Recording studios, with Mike looming over him red-faced and fearsome.

  “I want you to tell me what it means!” Mike demanded, pointing to the line about the crow and the cornfield. He was tall and sharply dressed, consciously hulking over the smaller, bespectacled Van Dyke, who wasn’t about to be drawn into an argument about the quality of his work. Instead, Van Dyke dodged the issue entirely. “If you’re looking for a literal explanation of that line, of any line of verse, I don’t have it,” he replied simply.

  “You don’t know what it means?” Mike laughed. “You wrote it and YOU don’t know what it means?”

  “I have no excuse, sir.”

  Feeling out of place, out of sorts, and unwilling to become a part of what he already suspected was a family feud with roots and motivations that had nothing to do with Smile, Van Dyke spun on his heel and glided out. Out into the control room, down the hall, and out to his Volvo, determined to never return. “That’s when I lost interest,” he says. “Because basically I was taught not to be where I wasn’t wanted, and I could feel I wasn’t wanted. It was like I had someone else’s job, which was abhorrent to me, because I don’t even want my own job. It was sad, so I decided to get away quick.”

  Van Dyke would be back, and work on the album would continue for several more months, but a chill had come into the air. Brian’s energies grew even more scattered; his appetite for amphetamines and hashish accelerated, and his episodes of paranoia became more profound and frightening. One night that winter he attended a screening of John Frankenheimer’s movie Seconds. Arriving a few minutes late, Brian had just settled into his seat when a voice from the screen seemed to greet him by name: “Hello, Mr. Wilson.” And if that was freaky, the experience grew steadily more terrifying as Brian saw the other Mr. Wilson suffer a panic attack on an airplane (just as he had done two years earlier), attempt to reconnect with his past by touring an old family home (which Brian had also done down in Hawthorne immediately following his breakdown), and then discover a new self among a group of wild-hearted bohemians (just as Brian had done first with Loren Schwartz and now with his gang of Smile assistants). “Even the beach was in it,” Brian fretted to a friend in Jules Siegel’s article. “Birth and death and rebirth. The whole thing. It was my whole life right there on the screen.” Couldn’t it be a coincidence? he was asked. Brian shook his head. It was mind gangsters, probably in the employ of a wildly envious Phil Spector. “I’ve gone beyond Spector,” Brian explained to Siegel. “I’m doing the spiritual sound…it’s going to scare a lot of people.”

  Brian’s friends managed to talk him down from that emotional precipice, but others loomed no matter where he wandered. After the session for “Fire,” also known as “Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow,” in December, Brian noticed what he thought was a sudden spike in fires in and around downtown Los Angeles. Had his music created some kind of voodoo spell that was slowly setting the entire city ablaze? Brian found this prospect so terrifying that he destroyed his copy of the tape immediately and vowed that the music would never be aired in public. Not long after that, Brian became convinced that he was being followed and that someone was listening to his conversations on the telephone and perhaps in his house. Brian confessed his fears to Anderle and Grillo, and to put Brian at ease, they hired a team of surveillance experts to sweep his house for bugs. “These guys searched the house for hours and found nothing, nothing, and nothing,” Michael Vosse recalls. “Then they drove off in his Rolls for like an hour, then came back saying, ‘We found a microphone in there!’ Honestly, I think it was a hustle. And then it became another distraction from the music.”

  The security guys started making regular checks of Brian’s house and property, but the increasingly fearful musician took his own steps to ensure security. One day he called all of his friends and contacts and commanded them all to change their telephone numbers. Then he decided to move all of his important business meetings to the deep end of his swimming pool. This served two ends, Brian believed, since it was obviously impossible to bug a pool, and anyone floating half-naked in twelve feet of water would probably be more honest t
han someone hiding behind a suit and tie.

  Were Brian’s fears entirely misplaced? At least one of his friends still believes that Brian and perhaps Carl were being followed by detectives hired by Murry, who was eager to find out if his boys were taking as many drugs as he suspected. Still, Brian’s fearful episodes worked their way from his immediate circle of friends and acquaintances into the media and then into legend. Jules Siegel’s article made much out of one episode in which one of Brian’s friends is greeted at the recording studio door by Vosse, who informs him that he won’t be welcome at the session inside. “It’s not you; it’s your chick,” Siegel quoted Vosse as saying. “Brian says she’s a witch, and she’s messing with his brain so bad by ESP that he can’t work. It’s like the Spector thing. You know how he is.”

  What Siegel neglected to mention in his story was that he was the guy being banned from the session and that the woman in question was his girlfriend and future wife, Chrissie. So, it seems fair to ask, was she a witch? Siegel says no but admits that she was a beautiful woman with a powerful personality who enjoyed flirting with other men. Indeed, Siegel would later write an article about his wife’s affair with his famous novelist friend, Thomas Pynchon. “She was so beautiful she made Snow White look a bit crude. I’m sure this aroused such heavy fantasies that [Brian] felt like she was in his head,” Siegel says. “You don’t need any supernatural explanations for the effects of that on raging male hormones, do you?”

  Another famous episode involved Anderle, an enthusiastic amateur painter who had been inspired to work secretly on a portrait of his boss for several months. Painting from memory, Anderle had produced a dark, moody vision of Brian, his skin the color of alabaster, his mouth bent in a curious smile, his blazing eyes peering out of a blackness that bristled with icons and figures. According to Vosse, who accompanied Brian to Anderle’s apartment, the effect on the painting’s subject was immediate and intense. He got right up next to it and stared for what seemed like hours, counting the objects that orbited his painted visage and tracing them with his fingertip. Everything about the painting struck him as extraordinarily significant, from the way the spray of icons hovered in the background to the numerological significance of their number and order. “He thought it captured his soul,” Vosse says. And for a frightened young man who felt his soul was perpetually at risk of slipping away entirely, this was not a good feeling.

  Van Dyke, who never recovered from his public dustup with Mike, left the project for good in April, bound for the peace and quiet of Palm Desert with a contract to produce his own solo album for Warner Brothers Records. Others were falling away, too. Vosse left in March, his relationship with Brian undone by the other Beach Boys, who resented paying the salary of an aide who worked only for one member of the group. Anderle would also be gone by the end of the spring, no longer willing to navigate the rocky straits between Brian’s creative world and the professional one he refused to engage. Soon the Laurel Way house grew quiet, the happy chatter at the all-night rap sessions and pool parties replaced by the silent churning of Brian’s thoughts and the circular patterns his fingers would make as they searched for melodies on the piano keys. Then Brian and Marilyn would leave the Laurel Way house altogether, abandoning the seat of Pet Sounds, “Good Vibrations,” and Smile for a larger, even more elegant, tree-shaded Spanish mansion tucked into the gated community of Bel Air.

  As winter became spring, Brian’s work on Smile had slipped into a frantic pursuit of the single that would follow “Good Vibrations” and herald the album. He conducted an endless chain of instrumental and vocal sessions for “Heroes and Villains,” searching desperately for an arrangement of melodies, sections, and moods that would give the song the coherence it seemed to lack. More sessions, more sections, more songs. An array of takes for the various pieces of the “Elements” suite (minus a new “Fire” section, which had yet to be composed). Run-throughs of other songs, some with titles, some without, then, curiously, a cover of Burt Bacharach’s “Little Red Book.” Then back to “Heroes and Villains” again. The Capitol execs were keening for the single, baying for a new album, desperate to come up with some follow-up to the multimillion-selling “Good Vibrations.” But Brian could only keep tinkering, recording more and more music that made less and less sense to anyone but himself. Except he was just as baffled as anyone. Brian left the studio for a month starting in mid-April, then picked up again in mid-May, concluding with a session on May 18 for the water section of the “Elements,” known as “I Love to Say Da Da.” Another session was planned for the next day, but Brian failed to show up, and it was cancelled.

  And then it was over, a year after Brian had first described the album he then called Dumb Angel. Eight months since “Good Vibrations” catapulted the Beach Boys into a whole new orbit of popular and critical acclaim. Six months since the music industry began to buzz about an album so powerful and revolutionary it would transform not just rock ’n’ roll but all of popular culture. One month since Brian had been called a musical genius, nearly, in the Leonard Bernstein special on CBS. “In truth, every beautifully designed, finely wrought, inspirationally welded piece of music made these last months by Brian…has been SCRAPPED,” Derek Taylor wrote in a British music magazine. “Not destroyed, but scrapped. For what he seals in a can and destroys is scrapped.”

  If Taylor’s distinction between “destroyed” and “scrapped” seems unclear, Brian must have felt the same way. In fact, there’s reason to suggest that Brian didn’t even know that Taylor announced the demise of Smile, a release that may have been authorized by other factions in the Beach Boys. After all, his final sessions for “I Love to Say Da Da” actually took place two weeks after Taylor’s statement was published in early May. He finally completed “Heroes and Villains” in June, though the new, streamlined version—sliced down to 3:36 from versions that ranged from six minutes, to eight, to a rumored (and yet to be discovered) eleven-minute edit—did away with the song’s more adventurous sections and leaned heavily on newly recorded, stripped-down instrumentation. Brian’s Smile-era friends would spend decades bemoaning the loss of the original “Heroes and Villains,” but in the summer of 1967, Brian felt strongly enough about the new version that he kept it to himself for weeks, waiting for his astrologer, a woman named Genevelyn, to identify the perfect moment to spring it upon the unsuspecting world. She came to Brian early in the evening of July 11, and what happened next would become yet another signal moment in the cultural legend that would come to grow around Brian Wilson and Smile.

  As Terry Melcher told the tale to Rolling Stone in 1971, it all began just before midnight on the eleventh, when Brian gathered his remaining intimates into a flock of limousines and sped from the gates of his Bel Air home down into Hollywood and the studios of KHJ-AM radio near the Paramount lot on Melrose Avenue. A little fast talk got the flotilla past the guard at the parking lot, and soon Brian and his entourage were parading through the radio station and into the central on-air studio. Here, Brian pulled out his prized seven-inch acetate of “Heroes and Villains,” the long-awaited follow-up to “Good Vibrations,” the product of a year’s worth of obsessive labor, and presented it to Tom Maule, the overnight disc jockey just then commanding the station’s turntables. “Hi, I’m Brian Wilson,” Melcher recalled hearing the pop monarch declare. “Here’s the new Beach Boys single, and I’d like to give you and KHJ an exclusive on it.”

  Borne up by months of hype and now the assurances of his astrologer, Brian expected Maule to either burst into tears, fall to his knees in prayerful thanks, or perhaps faint dead away with the shock of his good fortune. Instead, the guy just kind of shrugged. “I can’t play anything that’s not on the playlist,” he said, only sort of apologetically. At which point, Melcher recalled, Brian seemed to teeter on his heels, seemingly close to passing out. Maule ultimately was convinced to call his program director at home—“Put it on, you idiot!” Melcher recalled hearing the guy shriek—but by then the moment was go
ne, and Brian’s fragile psyche had already been shattered. “It just about killed him,” Melcher said.

  Released officially at the end of the month, “Heroes and Villains” notched respectful, if slightly puzzled, reviews (“Weirdly fascinating,” the UK’s New Music Review decreed), but its stripped-down, Southwestern-meets-psychedelic-barbershop sound left listeners underwhelmed, particularly in the shadow of post–“Good Vibrations” hype. In a world still rocked by the Beatles’ psychedelic masterpiece “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” Brian’s “Heroes and Villains” seemed beside the point. The song peaked eventually at Billboard’s number twelve slot, which struck nearly everyone in the Beach Boys camp as both an unmitigated disaster and the final word on the misbegotten folly that was Brian’s Smile era.

  Wounded by the relative indifference to “Heroes and Villains,” Brian started to plummet, and his flailing attempts to protect himself—mostly by falling back into the grasp of his family and the band they had formed—took on a desperation that soon bordered on self-immolation. Months earlier, when they were still riding high on “Good Vibrations,” the Beach Boys had been tapped to headline the Monterey Pop Festival in mid-June. But as the day drew close and the event’s cultural significance began to seem clear, Brian, who had also been asked to join Paul McCartney, Smokey Robinson, and Mick Jagger, among other youth culture leaders, in the festival’s board of governors, began to worry. Once Brian had imagined Monterey as the perfect place to publicly unveil Smile, but in June, with “Heroes and Villains” still in shards and Smile in ruins, they didn’t have anything new to play. To make matters worse, they’d be standing in front of a Bay Area audience drawn to hear younger, hipper bands like the Byrds, the Jefferson Airplane, and Moby Grape. How would the Beach Boys—still clad in their striped shirts and still boasting a set-list full of surfing, cars, and innocuous fun—go over with that crowd?