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

by Peter Ames Carlin

  But the Beach Boys stuck it out, and when they got the misbegotten “Rhonda” out of the way, the two bands came together in a way that was both unexpected and yet entirely right. The moment began with the first notes of “Okie from Muskogee,” which the Beach Boys had taken to using as a subtle commentary on their own retro image and, implicitly, the far more decadent reality beneath it. The Dead dug that joke too, and as their cover of Haggard’s “Mama Tried” earlier that evening had made clear, they also got off on playing the role of the ornery outcast. Once Bruce hit the opening bass riff for “Okie,” it took about two beats for the entire eleven-piece conglomeration to swing into the rhythm, and from that moment forward, the two bands were perfectly synchronized.

  Mike sang lead with just the right ironic touch, his dry baritone a perfect foil for Garcia’s curling, shimmering guitar lines, which twined around the Beach Boys’ harmonized voices like an embrace. For this moment, at least, the two bands that had helped define their respective eras in California pop music could stand on the same stage, look out at the world around them, and sing the same song.

  Just a moment later they slammed full-throttle into another mutual favorite, Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” interweaving Garcia’s stinging guitar leads with a three-way lead vocal from Bobby Weir, Carl, and Al belting out the harmonized “Go! Go Johnny go–wo-wo-wo-wo! ’s” that the Beach Boys had used when the song was their final encore back in 1964. By the second verse, Carl and Al had improvised harmony parts around Weir’s lead, and the energy in the final chorus nearly lifted the dusty old theater off of the ground before coming to an abrupt, ringing halt.

  “Thank you, Grateful Dead!” Bruce yelled when it was over.

  “Thank you, Beach Boys!” Weir shouted back.

  “Let’s hear it! Let’s hear it!” Garcia said, standing back to join the audience’s ovation as the Beach Boys walked off the Fillmore stage. And if Jerry’s public benediction didn’t carry enough weight in the pop culture climate of 1971, the more private one that took place in the Fillmore’s sound booth surely would. That’s where Bob Dylan had been watching the show, sitting with Jack Rieley and at least one reporter who happened to overhear the bard as he turned to Rieley and gestured to the five Beach Boys just as they were leaving the stage. “You know,” he said, “they’re fucking good, man.”

  As they went back into their recording studio, they were determined to come up with an album that would finally prove Dylan’s point to the entire music world. Following Rieley’s suggestion that they take on political issues in their music, Mike and Al came up with “Don’t Go Near the Water,” a catchy plaint about water pollution that featured clever backing vocals and a textured instrumental track built from synthesizers, banjos, and an intriguingly dissonant piano part contributed by Brian. Carl came on strong with his first two significant compositions, a quasi-gospel number called “Long Promised Road” and the floating, synthesizer-laced “Feel Flows.” Both featured lyrics by Jack Rieley, whose workmanlike verse tended toward simple rhyme schemes and imagery that was either a bit overheated (e.g., “Long Promised Road” ’s “So hard to lift the jeweled scepter when the weight turns a smile to a frown/So hard to drink of passion nectar when the taste of life’s holding you down” ), impossibly cryptic (“Unbending, never-ending tablets of time/Record all the yearning/Unfearing, all-appearing message divine/Eases the burning,” from “Feel Flows”), or both. Still, Carl’s music was hard to resist, and the layered tracks he produced—combining his big brother’s ear for sonic texture with modern instruments and recording processes—elevated the songs well beyond Rieley’s literary limitations.

  Al tossed in the folk-inspired “Lookin’ at Tomorrow: A Welfare Song” and dusted off a charming Sunflower leftover called “Take a Load Off Your Feet,” a whimsical argument for foot care that featured a vast array of sound effects and ambient noises, including Brian honking the horn of his Rolls-Royce, scraping a spoon on a cereal bowl, and skipping across the asphalt roof of his garage. Dennis came in with a variety of songs, including “4th of July,” a protest song about the Nixon administration’s attempts to silence critics of the Vietnam War that he had cowritten with Rieley, and “(Wouldn’t It Be Nice to) Live Again,” an intensely romantic love song that featured achingly beautiful harmonies from the entire group. Bruce came through with the tenderly nostalgic “Disney Girls (1957),” while Mike took on the fiery campus scene by transforming Lieber and Stoller’s “Riot in Cell Block #9” into “Student Demonstration Time,” a guitar-and-horn-fired stomper in which its author (his voice distorted by a bullhorn) recounted demonstrations and riots ranging from the antiwar riot in Isla Vista, California, to the shootings at Kent State before ending with the strangely hedged conclusion “I know we’re all fed up with useless wars and racial strife/But the next time there’s a riot, well, you best stay out of sight.”

  The band’s new momentum on the road kept everyone fired up in the studio, where the atmosphere was, for the most part, just as collegial as it had been during the Sunflower era. The only exception, unfortunately, proved to be Brian, who seemed to spend most days alone in his room, either sleeping off whatever he’d done with his friends the previous night or just gazing silently at the ceiling above his head, watching the dust motes float through the shafts of sunlight. “He’d talk about being depressed, in his way,” Desper says. “He’d say, ‘Well, I just can’t get with it today. I’m out of the loop.’” When the music coming through his floorboards excited him enough to draw him back into the loop, Brian would either clamber down to the studio in his striped pajamas or phone in an idea from the intercom on his bedside table. “He added a lot of parts, but more instrumental than singing,” Stephen Desper recalls. Months of cocaine use, along with the corrosive effects of heavy pot and cigarette smoking, had also taken a toll on Brian’s vocal cords. “He could do falsettos and stuff, but he’d need Carl to help him. Either that or I’d modify the tape speed-wise to make it artificially higher, so it sounded like the old days.”

  Even more important, the band needed to get Brian’s original songs on the album. Unfortunately, he was either unwilling or unable to write new material for the band, at least not of his own volition. Still, he would respond to prodding on his up days, as when Rieley convinced Brian to collaborate with him on “A Day in the Life of a Tree,” another environmental-themed song that described the world’s plight in the voice of a slowly dying tree. Curiously, Brian asked Rieley to sing the lead vocal on the song, either because the manager’s faltering delivery fit the emotional tone he was trying to create or because he was playing another one of his pranks, asserting his power over the commanding Rieley by fooling him into making an ass out of himself in the most public way imaginable. And while it could be true that Brian was about as fond of Rieley as he was of being forced to write songs, it seems more than possible that Brian was just as enthusiastic about Rieley’s singing as he claimed. For one thing, he worked on the song for days, experimenting with a harmonium, an antique pump organ, and a smaller pipe organ to create the sounds that would illustrate the different phases of the tree’s life. Brian also took the time to create an intricate, lovely vocal arrangement for the song’s conclusion (featuring the entire group plus Van Dyke Parks), and according to more than one observer, he was moved to tears when the final vocals were recorded.

  All of this makes it reasonable to assume that the song is as much about his own personal malaise as it is about the larger ecological one. When Brian lay in his bed for days at a time, listening to the music being recorded beneath his feet and pondering the distance between who he’d been in the mid-1960s and who he had come to be in the early 1970s, there could be no more accurate portrait than the lyrics of “A Day in the Life of a Tree.”

  One day I was full of life, my sap was rich and I was strong…

  But now my branches suffer, and my leaves don’t offer poetry to men of song.

  From that point, when the music swells and the voice
s rise into the interlocking harmonies that Brian had once created so effortlessly, the conclusion they reach about the plight of the tree—or any sensitive creature—is chilling:

  No life’s left to be found,

  There’s nothing left for me.

  Brian’s sense of desolation might not have been quite so acute from day to day, but as he became less prolific, the songs he produced grew increasingly forlorn. One night in the summer of 1970, Brian drove down to the beach and went for a walk in the sand, pondering the thunderous roar of the waves and the endless expanse of inky water that lay beyond. Only a few years earlier, that same ocean had inspired nothing but a sense of possibility. But now, with so much music behind him, the fruits of his success all around (including the shimmering Rolls-Royce he drove to the beach), and the power to do anything he wanted with the rest of his life, Brian realized that he still felt as lost, alone, and terrified as he ever had. Back at his piano a few hours later, the feelings became a series of floating augmented chords, a melody, and then, finally, words.

  I’m a cork on the ocean

  Floating over the raging sea…

  I lost my way.

  The song had no chorus, just a series of verses that described Brian’s angst with analogies drawn from the world outside his window. In the second verse, he imagines being a rock in a landslide, falling into a bottomless valley. In the third, he’s a leaf on a windy day, wondering how long he can go on gripping the tree that holds him down. A brief instrumental passage led to the song’s conclusion, a repeating chant of one phrase: “These things I’ll be until I die…”

  “’Til I Die,” as Brian came to call the song, was another of his small musical miracles, so removed from traditional pop structures that the chords seemed to drift from key to key as if they were just as unmoored as the narrator. The lyrics, written without the assistance of a collaborator, are both straightforward and evocative as the physical analogies in each verse—the cork adrift on the ocean, the rock tumbling into the valley, the leaf losing its grip in a windstorm—conclude with a concise expression of the feelings the image represents: “I lost my way,” “It kills my soul,” “Until I die.” Brian felt a little self-conscious about the song, considering how much of his wounded emotional core he revealed in its verses. But he also knew it was one of the best things he’d written in many years. So once it was finished, he sat down in the studio to sing it for the other guys, assuming they’d greet it with the same full-throated enthusiasm they’d shown for his efforts in the mid-1960s. But this time they seemed unimpressed. Those words are such a downer, Mike said. Aren’t pop songs supposed to be fun? Who would want to listen to something that grim? Blinking with surprise and hurt, Brian shrugged. Stung by the criticism, he put the song away for a few months, then brought it out again for the Surf’s Up sessions in early 1971, when the band came asking for more material. Brian cut an instrumental track—combining layers of vibes, organ, and an electronic drum machine—and ran the group through a rigorous series of vocal sessions so they could master the intricate vocal arrangement he had put together. But still conscious of Mike’s criticism from the previous summer, Brian fiddled with the lyrics for days, going so far as to record a version of the song with more upbeat conclusions to the first two verses—“It kills my soul” became “It holds me up,” while “I lost my way” became “I found my way.” But even the other guys recognized the thematic contradiction presented in the new lyrics, and so given the choice between having a new original Brian song on the album or not, they reverted to his original, darker lyrics.

  The one track Brian would have nothing to do with would become the new album’s title song. Carl, knowing that the Reprise executives expected more than two original Brian Wilson songs on a Beach Boys album, had ventured once again into the vaults in search of an unreleased song that would both fit the band’s new sound and yet bear an obvious resemblance to Brian’s classic work. With this in mind, Carl discovered the tapes for “Surf’s Up,” the song from the Smile sessions that created so much excitement when Brian first unveiled it on the Leonard Bernstein special in 1967. The only trouble was that the song had never been completed. Brian had long ago recorded a fully orchestrated instrumental track for the tune’s first movement, but in the tumult of the era, he had never gotten around to recording the second half. In fact, the only reason that anyone outside of Brian and Van Dyke knew what the song was supposed to sound like was Brian’s performance on the Bernstein show, a tape of which remained in the group’s vaults. If not for that, the song might have vanished along with the rest of Smile.

  Once he’d collected the few “Surf’s Up” tapes he could find, Carl brought them back to Brian’s home studio and worked with engineer Stephen Desper to figure out exactly how much of the song existed and what needed to be done in order to finish it. Hearing the song being played in the studio, Brian came downstairs and was both surprised and dismayed to learn that Carl was determined to put the song on the group’s new album. No, he didn’t want to help them on it. No, he had no intention of recording a lead vocal for the song. In fact, he wanted nothing to do with it. “Brian was afraid of it and refused to work on the song,” Desper wrote in his self-published book, Recording the Beach Boys. “At times (he) left the house when production started.”

  Carl and Desper continued working on the song, adding a few keyboard and percussion parts and a new vocal by Carl to the instrumental section Brian recorded in 1966. To make Brian seem more present, they used his solo performance from the Bernstein special for the song’s second half (which actually seemed to fit the section’s more stripped-down mood), with a simple voiced chord to ease the transition from one to the next. A few Moog bass highlights accentuated the bass part Brian had played on the piano, and in the spots where his singing had grown shaky, Carl added some subtle vocal backing to give it more richness. When all that was done, the last remaining puzzle was the final section, just after Brian had sung, “I heard the word, wonderful thing, a children’s song,” at which point the song took on the chord pattern from another Smile song, “Child Is the Father to the Man.” Brian’s original performance of the song ended with him singing a series of wordless “Ahhhhh’s,” but Carl remembered a more involved vocal chant, and they were nearly finished pasting it all together when the studio door flew open and a slightly disheveled-looking Brian, his belly hanging out of his striped pajamas, stormed inside. As Desper recalled in his book, their jaws fell open when Brian announced that they needed to add something to the final movement of “Surf’s Up.” It was a lyric they didn’t know, and if they opened up a track for him, he’d sing it right now. Desper set up a microphone and gave Brian a set of headphones, and they all sat back and gaped as he added the missing lyric—and the final piece to the “Surf’s Up” puzzle.

  A children’s song, have you listened as they play?

  Their song is love, and the children know the way.

  The album, now called Surf ’s Up, was released by Reprise at the end of August 1971. It climbed into Billboard’s Top Thirty, becoming the group’s bestselling album since Wild Honey, and the reviews were even better. “After suffering several years of snubbing, both by rock critics and the public, the Beach Boys stage a remarkable comeback,” Rolling Stone’s critic declared. “The Beach Boys are back.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Near midnight one evening in 1969, a young magazine writer named Tom Nolan wandered down a street in West Hollywood. As Nolan would write later, he had just seen Skammen, Ingmar Bergman’s darkly surreal commentary on the psychological aftershocks of war. Still reeling from Bergman’s disturbing, surrealist imagery, Nolan paused outside a health food store. Noting its whimsical name—the Radiant Radish—he pushed open the door and walked inside. Immediately, the place seemed a little off-kilter. The ceiling lamps had been switched off, so the only light was the ghostly fluorescent glow emanating from the shelves. The only other person in the store, Nolan noticed, was the baby-faced guy behind the counter
, who gazed up silently from behind a thick curtain of long brown hair. He didn’t say a word, at first, although he did manage a nod when Nolan came through the door. Also, he was wearing a bathrobe.

  Actually, Nolan was less surprised by the robe than by the simple fact that the man wearing it was a millionaire rock star whose penchant for seclusion had become nearly as famous as the many hit songs he had written and produced. Just three years after writing and producing “Good Vibrations,” Brian Wilson was selling vitamins out of a health food store in West Hollywood. As Nolan would later write in the two-part Beach Boys profile he published in Rolling Stone in 1971:

  He ran his fingers over the rows of bottles, seeking just the right supplement. “Did you get a call for B12?”

  “A call?”

  “From your doctor. If you got a call—”

  “No.”

  “Well, now, unless there’s a call, we—You can’t—” He would not sell me any B12.