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

by Peter Ames Carlin

  So, only two weeks before the event, Brian pulled the group out of Monterey. They needed to work on “Heroes and Villains,” he said. What’s more, he argued, Carl Wilson, just then fighting off the military’s attempts to send him to Vietnam by arguing for conscientious objector status, might be too freaked out to sing in public. But neither of these excuses held much water for Monterey’s counterculture audience, who might not have tuned in, turned on, and dropped out themselves but professed deep admiration for the pop stars who had. Pleading contractual obligations just didn’t cut it. And while it was easier to sympathize with poor Carl and his draft board hassle, surely his darkest hour was a time to take strength in the community, not shun it. So you see, all “Good Vibrations” aside, the Beach Boys had just revealed themselves to be the surfing muscle-heads the hipsters had always assumed they were. And when 200,000 flower-bedecked, face-painted fans crowded Monterey’s fairgrounds to groove to the tunes, inaugurate a new chapter in American popular culture, and provide the backdrop for one of the most successful, influential music films in the history of cinema, Brian and the other Beach Boys were shut into a room in his new Bel Air mansion, listening to the sound of their own voices echoing off the stucco walls.

  Many years later, the Beach Boys–sanctioned documentary An American Band would play footage of Jimi Hendrix, perhaps the breakout star at Monterey, setting his guitar on fire amid its dying squeals of feedback beneath a snippet from his “Third Stone from the Sun”; “…and you’ll never hear surf music again!…” added for emphasis. It’s an unfair juxtaposition for Hendrix, since he bore no particular grudge against the Beach Boys and was, in fact, a huge fan of surf guitar king Dick Dale, whose then-ill health he might have been mourning (not celebrating) when he made that statement. But for the purposes of the Beach Boys’ narrative, the imagery is too perfect to ignore: The coming of Hendrix and all his freaky pals spelled doom for the pink-cheeked boys from Hawthorne, who could have beat Hendrix to his pyrotechnics by several months had Brian not lost his faith in “Fire,” the elements suite, and the revolutionary album that housed it way back in the middle of winter.

  But Brian’s angels were gone, and his faith had flown along with them. And though he was all but incapable of uttering this statement in plain English, he made it abundantly clear in the music he made to take the place of Smile. Recording almost entirely in the makeshift studio the group set up in the living room of his new Spanish mansion, Brian worked with the other Beach Boys to rerecord a handful of Smile tracks in spartan arrangements that leaned almost entirely on a three-tiered Baldwin organ someone had recently given him. The vocals come in simple arrangements with no audible double-tracking or echo beyond what can be found in a bathroom or—in the most elaborate studio trick on the album—the bottom of the empty swimming pool out back. A few glimmers of Brian’s sonic experimentation come through, but save for the Smile rebuilds, Van Dyke Parks’s elegant lyrics make room for the simple or the downright goofy, while Brian’s sonic perfectionism bows to an audio vérité aesthetic of false starts, audible mistakes, and fits of stoned giggling. Such organic sounds have their charms, to be sure, but they paled considerably beside the culture-rattling promises that had accompanied Brian and the Beach Boys through the second half of 1966 and the first half of 1967. And those false promises were only emphasized by the new album’s self-consciously silly, nonsense title, “Smiley Smile,” and the cover illustration that portrayed Frank Holmes’s smile shop lost and alone in a densely overgrown jungle.

  Released in mid-September, Smiley Smile was the first Beach Boys album to credit the entire group for its production, rather than just Brian. It also didn’t quite crack the top forty on Billboard’s album charts, thus becoming the worst-selling album in the group’s history. Perhaps anticipating this turn of events, Brian returned to the live band (replacing Bruce Johnston, who had sat out most of the Smiley Smile sessions too) for a pair of late-August Honolulu concerts the group had decided to record for a live album they had already named, puckishly, “Lei’d in Hawaii.” Unfortunately, the group’s performances were so flat the tapes were deemed unreleasable. But the band remained keen on the live album idea (and, perhaps, on the bawdy album title), so a few weeks later they all went into a Los Angeles studio to record themselves playing their set a bit more competently, with an eye toward pulling off the old trick of overdubbing cheers, applause, and between-song patter, then passing the thing off as an authentic live recording (see also the group’s 1964 In Concert album and the Rolling Stones’ ironically named Got Live If You Want It, plus too many subsequent “live” albums to mention). But while the stripped-down live-in-the-studio takes have some nice moments, the most important track to emerge from these sessions was an outtake of “Heroes and Villains” that probably wasn’t meant to emerge from the studio in any form.

  It begins at the start of the song’s first verse, with the backing vocals over a simple, organ-dominated backing track. But just when Brian’s lead vocal is supposed to begin, Mike Love starts to speak with false-stentorian authority.

  “In every recording group’s career there comes that moment when you realize you have a nuclear bomb on your hands. Right now, Brian Wilson, the leader of the Beach Boys, is about to unleash his nuclear power and sing for you the song that went all the way to forty!”

  Shifting from mock-serious to bitterly sarcastic, Mike’s rant becomes even more barbed as he goes on.

  “It topped the charts at about forty, and the next week it just zoomed right off to, oh well, about 250. Right now it’s lurking at about 10,000 on this year’s top 10,000! Come on in here and sing! Wail your buns off!”

  Mike hurls a few barbs at the other band members next, teeing off on Dennis’s smoking, Carl’s loud breathing, Al’s obsessive teeth picking, and Brian’s eating. But when “Heroes and Villains” moves to its final verse, he returns his attention to the song itself with added venom, particularly when he hears the group move toward Van Dyke’s “sunny down snuff I’m alright…” line.

  “Ah, this is probably my favorite part in all my career recording. And if it keeps up like this, it probably won’t last much longer. Ah, sunny down you ol’ snuff, you. If I ever sing anything like that again, I’m gonna…”

  Mike makes a fart sound, then cracks up, suddenly aware of how bitter his rampage had become. From this point his voice lightens.

  “Really folks, it’s all in fun. Really, you’ve gotta figure on one hit well…I mean every six years you’ve gotta get a little animosity generated somehow. And besides, being basically masochists, we kind of enjoyed having this record bomb.”

  To hear this, particularly understanding the tension between Mike and Brian during the Smile era and the fairly obvious contempt Mike held for Brian’s more artistic impulses, is a little terrifying. After all, Brian labored obsessively on “Heroes and Villains” for months on end, and Mike knew better than anyone how far Brian would push himself in pursuit of the right song, the right sound, even the right feeling behind the voice of one singer in the backing chorus. He knew how his cousin had been raised and knew how fragile his sense of himself could be. So could Mike really be so spiteful that he’d not only ridicule Brian’s most recent attempt at a masterwork but also commit his words to tape? And then overdub his screed onto the song’s musical and vocal foundation? How filled with hate would a person have to be in order to launch such a vicious attack at the delicate spirit of Brian Wilson?

  Listen closely to the tape and an answer will begin to emerge. Listen for the high-pitched laugh that follows Mike’s cry of “Wail your buns off!” Listen for the same voice’s even louder guffaw when Mike ridicules “sunny down snuff.” Then, when the backing track ends and even Mike has had enough, listen to that same voice punching in on the control room intercom: “Okay, come on in!” Because that’s the voice of the ghoul who had first sketched out and then produced this brutal insult to the memory of Smile. And as it turns out, the voice of that merciless Smile basher b
elongs to Brian Wilson.

  CHAPTER 8

  It’s not the failure that kills you, as much as the hope. That’s what gets under your skin and makes you believe that things can change, that life matters, that the distance between possibility and reality is nothing compared to human ingenuity, hard work, and a trace amount of God’s grace. And it was in this spirit that Johnny Wilson built himself an airplane from scratch in the spring and summer of 1915.

  As recounted by Timothy White in The Nearest Faraway Place, the great-uncle of Brian, Dennis, and Carl Wilson was a dark-eyed, sensitive adolescent whose preternatural ability to build gadgets both large and small had already made him something of a hero around Hutchinson, Kansas. Inspired by Orville and Wilbur Wright’s 1903 flight in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, the teenaged Johnny Wilson had designed and built a steam-powered biplane whose spruce-and-canvas body seemed so revolutionary that his neighbors would actually pay a nickel for the privilege of peeking through the folds of the tent he had pitched to serve as a temporary hangar. And though he was shy, Johnny thrived on the attention paid to his creation. As the afternoon of his first test flight drew near, he and his brothers distributed handbills to alert the townspeople of the coming event.

  Here, Johnny Wilson’s life took a turn for the worse. For only thirty minutes before he was scheduled to climb aboard his hand-built machine and fly off into the air, the skies went black and the Midwestern breeze stiffened into a wind. Then it was a gale, whipping into a frenzy of dust and brush that swept just ahead of the funnel cloud blowing up from the south. The crowd bolted for cover, with Johnny and his brothers close behind, and it was all anyone could do to cover their heads while the twister raked across the field and headed straight for the gleaming new airplane. Soon the shrieking winds died down and the tornado was gone. But when Johnny emerged from hiding, he discovered that his treasured airplane had been torn to pieces, scattered willy-nilly over several miles of the rugged Kansas farmland.

  Devastated by his bad luck, Johnny turned sullen and strangely preoccupied. He soon set to re-creating his treasured airplane, but he’d already spent much of his money on the first aircraft, and work on the replacement went fitfully for months, then years. It ended completely when Johnny signed up to be an army aviator in World War I. But Johnny didn’t fly in Europe, either, and though his engineering ingenuity won him medals, the horrors he encountered in the trenches of France left him a nervous, tentative shadow of the charismatic young man he had once been. Married eventually and then relocated along with the rest of his family to Southern California, Johnny bounced from job to job in the aeronautics industry, seemingly on the brink of success before the shadow of that tornado would sweep across his mind and send his thoughts scattering in a hundred directions. “He was the hero of the family, full of ideas and dreams,” Johnny’s younger brother Charlie told White in his book. “Maybe if he’d gone slow, maybe he could have gotten well. But no one let him go slow.”

  The tornado that swept across Brian Wilson’s life in 1967 was just as freakish and perhaps even more emotionally devastating, given the fact that it erupted not from the whims of nature, but out of the mouths of his friends and family. They were the ones, in his eyes, who had blown his masterwork to smithereens. Did they really expect him to just dust himself off and get right back to building their next profit-making venture? Obviously so, since they had celebrated the death of Smile by installing a fully functioning eight-track recording studio in the living room of Brian’s house, the better to capture any stray musical notion he might produce the instant it rose from the lid of his shiny black Chickering piano. They wanted his music, but only if they could control it (and him), which is why the group had voted to relieve Brian of his sole authority over their creative affairs. Now they would all split the burden, the authority, the credit, and the money.

  Brian didn’t mind, he said. He’d worked so hard for so long, why not let the other guys see how easy it wasn’t? At times he even liked the idea of having the studio right beneath his bedroom. Brian came home with an assortment of water-based acoustic paints so the guys could decorate the walls with colorful, psychedelic pictures. He also brought in a massive load of hashish to serve as a communal source of inspiration for the Smiley Smile sessions. They all partook—even Al and Mike—and its bonding effects can be heard both in the giggling fits and the glee they take in their simple, psychedelic doo-wop: “On and on she go dum-be-doo-dah/On and on she go dum-be-doo,” they sing on the doggerel-like “With Me Tonight,” and with such conviction you’d think the words might hold the secret to the universe—a secret Brian figured could be unraveled even faster if they only looked happier while they recorded. “Hey, now, wait a minute. I have an idea!” He chirped half a line into one take, ignoring engineer Jim Lockert’s grumbling, “Hey, what the hell is that?” as he bubbled on. “If you sing that with a smile, I swear to God. You wait and see what happens, I swear to God!” Everyone giggled some more, and Brian counted off the next take, his own face split open with a big, self-conscious grin.

  But such moments of hilarity tended to be drug-induced and fleeting. For one thing, Brian couldn’t help feeling stung by his reduced authority. He was supposed to be the group’s visionary, but now they had rejected his vision, so why give them anything else to reject? It pissed him off, really, but that wasn’t the sort of thing Brian could ever say. Instead, he’d stay in his room or else go off to a friend’s house and drift off on a drug binge for a few days. “Sometimes he’d show up for sessions, sometimes not,” recalls Stephen Desper, a young recording engineer who started working at Brian’s home studio during the Smiley Smile sessions in the summer of 1967. “Sometimes he’d get all screwed up and disappear for a few days. That certainly impacted his creative abilities. And that made him feel guilty because there was so much pressure on him.”

  No longer able or willing to produce his usual torrent of new music, Brian filled in Smiley Smile with castoffs from Smile. But instead of using the intricately crafted tracks he had already recorded, Brian redid the tunes in slapdash versions that seemed to diminish or alter their original intent and meaning. The Smile recording of “Wonderful,” for instance, had been a jewel-like ballad featuring an elegant arrangement of harpsichord, strings, horns, and blooms of delicate vocal harmony that celebrated the resilience of love and innocence even in the face of cynicism. The Smiley Smile version, on the other hand, featured a tossed-off organ track, high-pitched backing vocals produced either by a sped-up tape or the voice box–shrinking effects of helium, and a midsong digression into an unstructured doo-wop sing-along, with much giggling and drugged-out whispering (“I can feel it coming on! I can feel it coming on!”) until the verse briefly reasserts itself at the song’s conclusion. “Wind Chimes” went through a similar transformation, losing its shimmering marimbas in exchange for a horror movie–like organ and a midsong blast of dissonant noise (immediately following the line, “It’s so peaceful, close to a lullaby” ) that twists the once-dreamy song into something more like a waking nightmare.

  Was this Brian’s conscious (or perhaps subconscious) commentary on what had happened to his music? Certainly, Smiley Smile was the first album he had been involved with that represented a step backward in terms of production values and songcraft. “It was a bunt instead of a grand slam,” Carl Wilson would eventually complain, although he stopped short of acknowledging how the group production credit, to say nothing of some group members’ vocal disapproval of the album Brian had intended to be his biggest masterwork, might have brought this about.

  Still, even if Smiley Smile never became a hit, the album’s reputation improved with hindsight, particularly when Bob Dylan and the Beatles went on to release their own stripped-down, warts-and-all albums in the next few months. But John Wesley Harding and The Beatles (aka The White Album) came without the self-destructive gestures that Brian wove into Smiley Smile. “Everyone was worried about how Brian seemed to be slipping back,” Desper says. “But he d
idn’t know what he wanted to do next. He didn’t want to go back and make more surf songs. He knew he wanted to move on, but he didn’t know the direction. He thought he knew what the new direction ought to be, but the (group) didn’t go for it.”

  Some days Brian would stay in his bed, gazing vacantly at the ceiling while the sounds of music-in-progress filtered up through his pillow from the studio just beneath his room. Other days he’d jump out of bed with all the energy and enthusiasm he had ever had, suddenly exploding with his new riff or a song that had come to him while he was watching a bird flutter past his window. “The vibe was still great,” Danny Hutton recalls of those days. “He’d have me over and he’d suddenly say: ‘I’ve got this idea, man!’ Then he’d point to a jar of wild honey. ‘That’s it! That’s what the album’s gonna be called!’ And the other guys were thrilled.”

  They were less thrilled when Brian devoted his energy to Hutton’s group, a three-singer outfit Brian had named Redwood, intending to sign them to Brother Records. Brian was so excited about the group’s prospects, in fact, that he had not only given them two of his most recent songs, “Darlin’” (actually a rewrite of “Thinkin’ about You Baby,” a song Brian had given to a singer named Sharon Marie in the early ’60s) and “Time to Get Alone,” but also recorded the basic tracks in a real studio, with his old gang of studio hotshots putting their usual fire into the music. They were just starting to work on the vocal tracks when Carl and Mike walked through the door of the Wally Heider studio where they were working, looking anything but happy. “Mike got us outside and said, ‘Hey, what’s going on? We’ve got an album to do. Why don’t you wrap this up?’” Hutton recalls. “And Brian was physically afraid of Mike. Not that Mike used to beat him up, but he’s a tough guy physically, and Brian wasn’t like that, so Mike could definitely push him around mentally.”