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

by Peter Ames Carlin

  To some observers, the hideous crime seemed like the lurid apotheosis of two centuries of Manifest Destiny. To others it revealed the spiritual hollowness of the twentieth-century California Myth, which leaned so heavily on the phony ideals propagated in the false-fronted buildings posing as the real world in the Hollywood back lots. To others, the crimes of the Manson family merely revealed the dangerous amorality of the hippie movement. That the Beach Boys had stumbled into the affair, led on by some mixture of amoral lust and desperate, if confused, attempts at spirituality, only seemed to confirm their own essential hollowness and the emptiness of the mirage they had pursued from the hallways of high school to the white sands of the beach to the escape of the highway to the sonic pyrotechnics of Pet Sounds and “Good Vibrations.” “Their vision had always been a passive one, and like many, they went from easy questions to easy answers,” Greil Marcus wrote in his 1974 book, Mystery Train. The problem, Marcus continued, is that they were faced with the challenge of growing up: “A challenge they failed to meet,” he concluded.

  Still, even if he felt the group had faltered in their pursuit of the American Utopia, Marcus couldn’t fault their intent or the spirit that drove them onward. “The Beach Boys were never fakes…(they) celebrated California hedonism, looked for its limits, experienced its failures. Their pleasures, as opposed to those claimed by such latter-day inheritors as the Eagles, have always radiated affection—because those pleasures were always rooted in friendship, or a memory of it.”

  Perhaps this was so because the world around them so often seemed to be bristling with thieves, con artists, and manipulators whose authority over their lives and affairs so often seemed inversely proportional to their concern for their well-being. Seven years since they had first signed with Capitol Records and nearly three years since they had started auditing the company’s books, the group discovered that the company, which had earned a fortune from their many hit records, had spent the entire time skimming 10 percent off the top of their profits. This thanks to a record breakage clause buried deep in the contract that had been eliminated from most other deals when records ceased being made from (highly breakable) wax and were instead manufactured from (nearly indestructible) plastic. Just to add insult to injury, the company had also failed to pay Brian nearly $1.5 million in producer’s royalties. The Beach Boys’ company sued Capitol for all their back royalties, and though the case would eventually be settled in the Beach Boys’ favor (the group got the rights to all of their albums from Pet Sounds onward), Capitol responded by deleting the group’s entire catalogue from its backlist.

  Meanwhile, Murry Wilson was busy working his own angles. Always the half-owner of Sea of Tunes, the publishing company that owned the copyrights to virtually all of the songs Brian had written in his career, he had at some point secured authority over Brian’s 50 percent of the company. How he did this, exactly, would eventually become the crux of another Beach Boys lawsuit. But in 1969, Murry could make a believable claim that those songs belonged to him. And as the decade was drawing to a close and his sons’ careers seemed to be drifting down for a landing, it occurred to him that the value of “Surfin’ USA,” “Help Me, Rhonda,” and “Good Vibrations” had long since peaked. Eager to sell while the selling was even halfway good, Murry cast around the L.A. music industry in search of buyers. And after rejecting an initial offer that would have left the group with 50 percent control over their catalogue, Murry decided to accept a $700,000 offer from Irving-Almo, the publishing division of A&M records, for the songs, lock, stock, and barrel.

  Brian’s attempts to talk his father out of the sale (which may or may not have included the violent confrontation described in Brian’s so-called 1991 autobiography, Wouldn’t It Be Nice) went unheeded. Murry figured he knew what the sum total of his son’s work was worth, and eventually Brian resigned himself to the inevitable. By the time Steve Love, Mike’s brother and an assistant to Nick Grillo, drove up to Brian’s house to collect his signature on the consent letter Murry needed to make the deal, the songwriter sat down and, with a heavy sigh, applied his signature. “He knew what he was doing,” Steve says. “He wasn’t happy, but he did it.” Murry collected his $700,000 and according to both Grillo and Steve, he kept every penny for himself. Brian’s catalogue of hits would eventually come to be worth tens of millions of dollars, but all that money went to the catalogue’s owners over at A&M.

  Not long afterwards, Hal Blaine, the man who had played the drums on so many Beach Boys hits, answered a knock on his door and found a downcast Brian standing on his doorstep holding a box of his framed gold records. Blaine was at first delighted to see his old friend, but happiness soon faded when he realized that Brian had come to give him the last physical evidence he had of his glory days. Blaine tried to talk him out of it, but Brian was adamant. And though Brian eventually agreed to take all but a few of the awards back home with him, it seemed clear to Blaine that Brian had no intention of ever looking at them, let alone hanging them upon the wall, ever again. “He was removing himself from his own past,” Blaine remembers. “He was headed somewhere else, but I don’t think he knew where that was, exactly, and right then I don’t think he cared. And it was very, very sad.”

  CHAPTER 9

  One afternoon in early 1969 the group was busy working on a track in the studio at Brian’s house when he came rushing in through the bright blue, hand-painted door, still in his pajamas and holding a sheet of paper. “I’ve got a great idea!” he cried, waving the just-typed document in the air. Brian explained that he was holding a five-way agreement to declare that from this day forward, the group would be known not as the Beach Boys, but merely as the Beach. “We’re not ‘boys’ anymore, right? We’re men! So why do we want to call ourselves Beach Boys? All we’ve gotta do is sign this, and we’ll change it for good. Look, I already signed it myself!” Brian held the paper in front of his face, pointing to the fresh ink on the line next to his name.

  Whether Brian’s impulse to create a new identity for the band stemmed from his reading of the marketplace or from a desire to disassociate himself from the past isn’t quite clear. But he was obviously fired up about his idea and just as obviously deflated when the other guys brushed it off without much of a thought. “They all just kind of shrugged and said, ‘Aw, come on, Brian, we don’t wanna do that. That’s how the public knows us, man,’” recording engineer Stephen Desper remembers. “And that was it. He put the paper on the piano, and it stayed there until I picked it up and took it away.”

  After dismissing Brian’s proposal, everyone’s attention turned back to the job at hand, which was finishing up the loose ends of the Beach Boys’ last album for Capitol Records. Released in March 1969 and named 20/20 to note that it was the twentieth album they had released, the group’s final original album for their label consisted almost entirely of uncollected singles, B-sides, and a handful of leftovers from the last few years. But whatever the album lacked in thematic coherence, it made up in the quality of the pieces contributed by each band member. Kicking off with “Do It Again,” Brian and Mike’s retro surfing single that had been a minor hit the previous summer, the album soared just as high with Carl’s shimmering adaptation of “I Can Hear Music,” took a slight turn with Bruce’s quirky marimbas-and-shrieking-guitar cover of “Bluebirds Over the Mountain,” then shot skyward again on the strength of Dennis’s yearning “Be with Me” and his flat-out nasty rocker “All I Want to Do,” which included the results of an actual recording of the drummer doing all he wanted to do with a groupie he had brought into the studio for that very purpose. The last track on the side, Bruce’s keyboard-led instrumental “The Nearest Faraway Place,” lost its way in a syrupy muck of harps and piano glissandos, but the second side kicked off in classic form with Brian’s graceful production of Al’s revamped Leadbelly tune, “Cotton Fields,” and then waltzed through Brian’s “I Went to Sleep” and the plangent “Time to Get Alone” before falling into a spiritual black hole with Dennis
’s Manson adaptation, “Never Learn Not to Love.”

  The bad vibrations from that tune don’t linger, however, because the last two songs on 20/20 turned out to be two highlights from the Smile sessions: the wordless invocation “Our Prayer” and the frontier mosaic “Cabinessence.” Carl had dug the songs out of the group’s vault, mostly to give Brian a larger presence on the album. But Brian had complained bitterly about this violation of the stillborn Smile and then refused to participate in the vocal sessions Carl scheduled to add an extra layer to “Prayer.” “He was superstitious about those tunes,” Desper remembers. “He’d leave the house when the guys were working on them. He didn’t want anything to do with them, really.” But even if that glimpse at what might have been struck a sour note to Brian, the first appearance of tracks from Smile (as opposed to the rerecordings on Smiley Smile) struck a resounding chord with anyone who had heard about the ill-starred album. Because even two years later, in the season of the Grateful Dead’s formless live album Live/Dead, the Who’s conceptually ambitious rock opera Tommy, and a hundred other expeditions beyond the known horizons of pop music, these two glimpses at Smile revealed a musical frontier that no one else had begun to imagine.

  It’s impossible to know what might have been had Brian found the strength to finish Smile while so much of the pop music world was still transfixed by the wailing theremin at the end of “Good Vibrations” and eager to hear what would come next. In any case, though, those days were long gone: 20/20 barely snuck into the top seventy on Billboard’s album charts (although it conformed to the pattern of the previous few years by climbing into the top three in the United Kingdom). Beyond frustrated with their commercial circumstances, everyone in and around the Beach Boys was more than happy to be rid of their last major commitment to Capitol. But they still owed the label one last original single, and Murry Wilson took it upon himself to make sure it was a good one. Telling Brian it was up to him to give the group a lift to a new label, Murry sat down with his eldest son and helped him write “Break Away,” an energetic, horn-fired pop single that can be read either as a declaration of independence for the entire band or a statement of purpose from its erstwhile leader: “I’m gonna make away for each happy day/As my life turns around.”

  Despite Brian and Murry’s best efforts, though, “Break Away” stalled just south of Billboard’s top sixty. This commercial disappointment did nothing to elevate the Beach Boys’ stock among the record companies that band manager Nick Grillo was attempting to woo, but neither did Brian’s antics. At times he seemed bent on ending the group’s career before it could sign on with a new label. For instance, Grillo was very close to finalizing a fairly rich deal with the European label Deutsche-Gramophone in the spring of 1969 when Brian sat down with some European reporters, ostensibly to promote the just-released “Break Away.” Instead, he spoke at length about the band’s fading popularity and deepening financial desperation. “We owe everyone money,” he said. “And if we don’t pick ourselves off our backsides and have a hit record soon, we will be in worse trouble.” As he went on, Brian seemed to relish being the bearer of such dire tidings. “I’ve always said, ‘Be honest with your fans.’ I don’t see why I should lie and say everything is rosy when it’s not.”

  The Deutsche-Gramophone offer evaporated soon afterwards, and it took Grillo another few months to come up with anything nearly as good. This time the offer came from Reprise, a boutique label in the Warner Brothers family. Founded as a jazz label for Frank Sinatra, Reprise had come to specialize in hip, underground-type artists such as the Grateful Dead, Neil Young, and Little Feat. Van Dyke Parks recorded for Reprise and also worked as an executive in the label’s film division, producing a series of short films designed to promote the label’s records and bands. Van Dyke was about a decade too early to make a dent with his proto–music videos, but he still had the ear of Reprise chief Mo Ostin. When Van Dyke heard that his Beach Boys–loving boss was hesitant to sign the group to the label, he made it his mission to make sure the deal came together. Ostin’s biggest question, Van Dyke recalls, was if Brian still had what it took to make music. “Mo asked me specifically if Brian would be involved, and would I see to it,” Van Dyke says. “I said yes, and I had a couple of opportunities to see to that in the next few years.”

  But first the Reprise executives wanted to see Brian, just to make sure the group’s reclusive leader was up and around and not, as rumored, completely out of his mind. Grillo set up a date for the execs to tour the Beach Boys’ studio at Brian’s house on Bellagio Road, and he made sure the man of the house would be up, dressed, and ready to share his newest work when they all arrived. Brian promised he would, and so Grillo drove up to Brian’s house with the other men in tow, leading them through the gate and down to the parking area at the rear of the house. The group had just emerged from their cars when Brian came out, his long hair combed, his clothes neatly pressed—and his face painted a vivid shade of bright green.

  “He came out and said, ‘Oh, hi!’ and goes about the whole thing as if nothing is wrong,” says Stephen Desper, who observed the entire scene from the opening handshakes to the farewells an hour or two later. “Brian was the perfect gentleman, very astute and very polite, only with his face painted green. And he knew damn well what he was doing. But the funniest thing was that no one said anything.”

  Not until the Reprise guys had left, at any rate. Then Grillo, sensing yet another all-but-signed record deal was about to fall through his fingertips thanks to Brian’s efforts, went into full freak-out mode. “Brian!” he shrieked. “What the fuck are you doing? What the fuck are you doing?” Brian, Desper recalls, smiled innocently and shrugged. “Just seeing what would happen.”

  Or maybe he was looking for another way to control the fate of the group he had created and had lost his ability to steer. The deal the group eventually signed with Reprise hinged on Brian being an active participant in all their musical endeavors. But in typically paradoxical fashion, he both resented that burden and the fact that his brothers, cousin, and friends had in the last few years developed songwriting and production chops that were strong enough to stand on their own. Indeed, by the end of 1969, the other members of the group had become so confident writing and producing their own tracks that they didn’t really need Brian’s help. Dennis in particular had developed a musical voice that was both distinct from his big brother’s and also distinctly beautiful. When he showed up in early 1969 with his yearning ballad “Forever,” he gave the band a love song that rivaled Brian’s most melodic, emotionally complex ballads. “It wasn’t like Brian was making a choice to be less involved,” Desper says. “It’s just that you’ve got limited hours in the day. Brian is a gentle guy; he doesn’t like to hurt anyone’s feelings, so if someone’s working on something else, he wasn’t going to jump in there and say, ‘Look, this is my production and my house, so get outta here!’ That’s totally out of character for him.”

  Brian Douglas Wilson, 1942 (Collection of Brian and Melinda Wilson)

  Brian, Carl, unidentified friend, and Dennis, in front of their family’s home, circa 1950 (Author’s collection)

  Brian, Dennis, and Carl, circa 1954 (Author’s collection)

  Brian (bottom center), pitcher in American Legion ball, 1957 (Collection of Rich Sloan)

  Left: As a cross-country runner, fall 1959 (Collection of Rich Sloan)

  Below: Goofing around in the Sloans’ yard (Collection of Rich Sloan)

  Brian (center) harmonizes with cousins Mike (far right) and Maureen (next to Mike) and other friends at the Loves’ 1959 Christmas party. (Collection of Stan Love)

  Senior Skip Day 1960. Brian is at far right, wondering why Rich Sloan (to his right) has just thrown ink on his shirt. He doesn’t know that it’s disappearing ink. (Collection of Rich Sloan)

  Freshly minted high school grad Mike Love had no idea what to do with his life in 1960. (Collection of Stan Love)

  Murry posts another hit on the Wilsons’ mu
sic room wall as young stars Brian and Mike look on. (Capitol Records archive)

  In the early ’60s, the Beach Boys’ parade of hit singles made them a hot concert draw. (Capitol Records archive)

  Portrait of the young hitmaker at work (Capitol Records archive)

  With Pet Sounds, Brian pulled the group into new musical horizons. (Capitol Records archive)

  Brian and Van Dyke Parks look for the holy sound during a Smile session. (Courtesy David Leaf)

  Brian expected his follow-up to Good Vibrations to be his greatest achievement to date. Instead, Smile fell to pieces. (Courtesy Frank Holmes)

  As Brian stepped back, Murry made his stand. (Author’s collection)

  At home in Bel Air, preparing for parenthood (Capitol Records archive)

  On the musical sidelines, but always up for a game: Brian in 1969. (Courtesy Stan Love)

  With his big brother out of action, Carl helped lead the group back from obscurity. (Courtesy Stan Love)

  Driven and relentless, Mike turned himself into a prominent frontman. (Courtesy Stan Love)