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

by Peter Ames Carlin

  As distant as Brian had been from the Beach Boys in 1971, he was even more removed as the group prepared to record their follow-up to Surf’s Up in the first weeks of 1972. But even as the other group members begged Brian for new material, they were rarely satisfied with the work he eventually gave them. For instance, when Brian submitted a quirky new rocker he’d written with Tandyn Almer called “Beatrice of Baltimore,” the group balked at Almer’s street poet–style lyrics (“She got a hole in her stockin’/She do a whole lot of rockin’/She do the shake down at Bumbles/She do the Chicano rumble…”) in favor of a new set of Jack Rieley originals that contributed the song’s new title, “You Need a Mess of Help to Stand Alone.” A second song written by Brian and Tandyn, an ode to a masseuse/hooker Brian knew called “Marcella,” also got the Rieley treatment, though this time he kept enough of Almer’s lyrics to share the writer’s credit. But Brian ended up being so absent during the recording of his songs, and on all the other songs on the new album, that the group actually had to edit his face into the group portrait that appeared on the inner sleeve of the album cover.

  That Brian had become a Beach Boy in name only might have been more evident if the group hadn’t been in the midst of several personnel shake-ups. Earlier in 1971, Dennis had capped a drunken tirade by punching through a bedroom window in his house and, in the process, severing a few tendons in his right hand. With his hand too damaged to wield a drumstick onstage, he had to pass his drumming responsibilities to a sideman, serving instead as a second stand-up singer or third keyboard player. This development only deepened Carl’s resolve to shake up the group’s lineup. Already, he and Jack Rieley had decided that the ongoing modernization of the Beach Boys might be enhanced by adding a couple of new voices into the mix. Eager to work with friends, Carl turned to Blondie Chaplin and Ricky Fataar, two members of the Flame, a South African group he helped bring to the United States and whose records he had produced. Both Blondie and Ricky could play a variety of instruments (Ricky being a particularly good drummer), sing, and write songs, which would help fill in the creative hole left by Brian. Both also came with a funkier, harder-edged music sensibility, which would shake up the Beach Boys’ squeaky-clean image nearly as much as the fact that they were dark-skinned Africans who had clearly never worn striped shirts in their lives.

  Brought in as full group members in February 1972, Blondie and Ricky added new gristle and bone to the group’s stage show, but their arrival—and the deepening influence of Jack Rieley that it represented—also spelled the end of Bruce Johnston’s seven-year tenure with the group. Announced in April, the longtime Beach Boy’s departure was described as being “by mutual agreement,” though his public critiques of the band (starting with an arch review of their next album he wrote for a British music magazine) imply something less amicable. Meanwhile, the rest of the group pursued their new album in factions, with Carl, Ricky, and Blondie in one studio; Mike and Alan working in another; Dennis off with Beach Boy sideman (and future member of soft-rock hit-makers Captain and Tennille) Daryl Dragon in still another; and Brian nowhere to be seen.

  The album that resulted, named Carl and the Passions: So Tough in homage to the vocal quartet Brian had led to the Hawthorne High School talent show thirteen years earlier, was a schizophrenic affair. Brian’s two tracks took some intriguing leaps, particularly in the instrumentation of “You Need a Mess of Help” (including a fiddle, banjo, and tack piano), while “Marcella” boasted a relatively complex vocal arrangement, percussion, and an unexpected slide guitar break that would have had far more impact if they hadn’t played the song at such a sluggish pace. (The song sounded far more vibrant on the In Concert album that would follow in 1973.)

  Blondie and Ricky contributed one splendid song in the acoustic waltz “Hold On Dear Brother” and one funky love song, “Here She Comes,” that would have sounded more at home on the album if the other Beach Boys (beyond Carl, whose voice can be heard in the backing chorus) had made audible contributions to it. Mike and Alan hopped on the early ’70s Jesus-rock bandwagon, albeit with Transcendental Meditation overtones, with “He Come Down,” a neogospel number that bore coauthor Brian’s fingerprints on its surprisingly stirring gospel choir segments. Mike and Al turned to Carl to cowrite “All This Is That,” which wove references to Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” and TM teachings into a somewhat awkward lyric (I am that/thou art that/And all this is that…) that didn’t even come close to compromising the song’s floating melody and the sparkling harmonies that—as Carl’s falsetto soars away in the song’s final moments—seem to drift off into infinity. Dennis reached for his own kind of spirituality with a pair of love songs whose elaborate orchestrations and unrestrained romanticism hearken back to the Hollywood of the ’40s and ’50s. Indeed, the more successful of the two had first boasted the working title “Old Movie” before Dennis settled on “Cuddle Up.” No matter the title, the combination of strings and full vocal arrangement, played against Dennis’s wavering voice, came closer to achieving the mood of passionate vulnerability he was after.

  Released in May, the stylistically meandering Carl and the Passions would eventually become a cult favorite, with devotees including Elton John, who penned ecstatic liner notes for the album’s 2000 CD re-release. But in 1972 the brief record (it was comprised of only eight songs clocking in at less than thirty-five minutes, which was short even in those days) proved underwhelming, particularly given the decision by Warner Brothers to package it as a double album with Pet Sounds, one of the five Capitol albums the company had purchased in the Beach Boys’ contract. The pairing served not only to drag the group back into the past it had worked so hard to escape, but it also forced a direct comparison between the hit-and-miss fruits of the band’s new, democratic era and the jaw-dropping glories of its Brian-led heyday. The contrast did not serve the new music very well at all, and the package stalled on the Billboard charts at number fifty.

  If Brian noticed the album’s middling performance, he wouldn’t have cared very much. By 1972, the once hypercompetitive producer was happiest working outside the spotlight with people who made him feel comfortable. One of these turned out to be David Sandler, an aspiring young songwriter/producer he’d met at a recording session. Sandler, who had grown up in Minneapolis idolizing Brian, came to Los Angeles in 1970 hoping to make some connections. Happenstance led him to Bruce Johnston, who liked what he heard on Sandler’s tapes and invited the young musician up to Bellagio to watch the group record at Brian’s home studio. That afternoon they were trying to record a horn arrangement to go with “Good Time,” but when Brian finally woke up and padded down to the studio, the eight horn players he found waiting for him didn’t know what to play. “So he went to his office and wrote horn charts while talking to me,” Sandler says. “It was an amazing horn line, with this overriding French horn riff, and he did the whole thing while having a conversation with me.”

  Sandler went back to Minnesota not long afterwards, but he kept in touch with Brian on the telephone. When he moved to L.A. a few months later, his idol gave him his first major break by tapping him to coproduce the debut album for Spring, the new duo act Marilyn had formed with her sister, Diane. Better still, Brian invited Sandler to move into a guest room in the Bellagio house, and he would remain there as the recording went on for the next two months. As a houseguest and collaborator, Sandler found himself living at the core of Brian’s emotional netherworld, where the simplest tasks could become enormously complicated and the most ambitious projects rarely amounted to as much as you expected they might.

  Still, sessions for the Spring album were relaxed and fun, Sandler remembers. And while Brian’s energies ebbed and flowed from day to day, he ended up doing significant work on more than half of the tracks. “On ‘Tennessee Waltz’ he played the whole track, just stacking the instruments,” Sandler recalls. “‘Awake’ was the same way, and on ‘Sweet Mountain’ we were standing side by side, doing bass parts on a synthesizer.�
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  Other times, though, Brian wouldn’t show up at all. On those days, Sandler and Steve Desper (credited as a coproducer) either ran the show themselves or with help from Rick Henn, who had followed Brian’s musical example ever since he worked for Murry as a member of the Sunrays.

  The self-titled album that resulted turned out to be an interesting mishmash of covers and a few Brian Wilson originals (though most were retreads from an earlier era). Brian’s “Tennessee Waltz,” for instance, juxtaposed the old-timey jangle of a tack piano against echoing percussion, a synthesizer bass, and a backing chorus of tightly woven harmonies. Brian’s one new original song (cowritten with Sandler), “Sweet Mountain,” featured neatly contrasting major/minor sections, while a slowed-down take of “This Whole World” came with a new and bracingly off-kilter vamp written by Sandler. Some of the song choices are a bit too pedestrian (Leon Russell and Bonnie Bramlett’s “Superstar,” for instance), and Marilyn and Diane sound more comfortable harmonizing than they do carrying a song as lead vocalists. But Spring had its charms, and when United Artists released it in the early summer of 1972, Marilyn made the publicity rounds on the Beach Boys’ tour, promoting the album by talking about Brian’s intense commitment to the project. “Sometimes he would cry at sessions because he liked a song so much he couldn’t believe it,” she said, going on to explain: “He’s very emotional.”

  Throughout the recording of that album and then for months afterwards, Sandler saw all of Brian’s emotions at close range. One night he took Sandler down to Hawthorne to visit an uncle who wasn’t feeling well, then took him on a tour of old haunts that ended, at Brian’s insistence, at the Foster’s Freeze drive-in. A conversation about the sound of mission bells inspired Brian to drag his friend out one night to cruise old churches. “We’ve gotta get one! We’re gonna steal one!” he kept saying, so insistent that Sandler didn’t realize he was kidding until he turned the Rolls-Royce back toward home. But Brian could be deadly serious too, such as on the night when he began enthusing wildly about a particular kind of canned sloppy joe mix he enjoyed. “He was just dying for a sloppy joe, and he knew exactly which store had it, so we went out and bought it, brought it home, heated it up, and ate it. He was a really simple person, considering how successful he was. Just a very unfettered guy. But there was always a core of lucidity about him. He never seemed that crazy to me.”

  Sandler, on the other hand, was a perfect companion for Brian: a musical collaborator who appreciated his talents but neither demanded nor expected anything of him. So when Brian struggled out of bed in the late afternoon, he’d head down to his den and spend hours with Sandler, talking about whatever occurred to him. “We’d talk about arrangements and about girls. I’d bounce ideas off of him to see if he’d get interested.” Sometimes Brian would merely gaze out of the window, saying nothing as Sandler described songs he wanted to record, with certain horns paired off against one another, the strings providing this texture while the guitars went this way and the keyboards went over here…and Brian would seem a thousand miles away until he’d murmur something—“You’re gonna have a sonority problem there”—that cut to the heart of an issue Sandler wouldn’t have started to perceive until he heard the music on the tape.

  As Sandler came to understand, Brian’s musical inspirations were just as overpowering as they were unpredictable. Musing one night on the titular similarities between the Four Tops’ “Baby, I Need Your Lovin’” and the Spencer Davis Group’s “Gimme Some Lovin’,” Brian pulled Sandler into the studio and began to work out a medley arrangement. “It was really unusual, because he wanted to do a whole verse of one song, then a verse of the other,” Sandler remembers. “He started with the drum machine, finding these two beats that sort of fought each other. I was playing the organ, doing these droning fifths, like bagpipes, and he was on the piano playing this really nice rhythm against the drum machine. Brian was very excited about it and called in Desper to come over and record it, and it went down perfect. Then he couldn’t remember some of the words to ‘Gimme Some Lovin’,’ so he called in Spencer Davis, who happened to be in town, and he came over and was listening to it, going, ‘This is smashing! This is smashing!’” Later, Brian called in some of the Beach Boys to work out a full vocal arrangement. But, as Sandler recalls, they weren’t crazy about the song, and their indifference cut the legs out from under Brian’s enthusiasm.

  A few months later, Sandler got a call from David Berson, a Warner’s executive who had heard the Spring album and marveled at how the record (released on the United Artists label) sounded more like a Brian Wilson album than anything the Beach Boys had done for his label. “They had spent a lot of money on the group, and they wanted to do a better job getting a return out of them,” Sandler says. “As it turned out, Warner’s had just signed Phil Spector to a deal on one of its labels, so Berson said, ‘You can obviously get Brian out of bed. I’ll get Spector with him, and we’ll get them to produce a record together!’ I didn’t know what to say, but I went to Brian’s. It was late afternoon, and he was still in bed, but I went in and said, ‘Hey, how’d you like to produce a record with Phil?’” But the prospect of working on a project with his own idol made Brian blanch. “He said, ‘No! I don’t wanna do that! I want to produce a record with you!’ He just didn’t want to get into a heavy situation like that.”

  At first it seemed like Brian was offering to coproduce a new Beach Boys album with Sandler. But the moment the talk began to revolve around contracts and other real-world commitments, Brian shut the discussion down.

  “There were personality things, family things, going on,” Sandler says. “I was orbiting out there as an outsider, so it was difficult to know what you’re dealing with. But he was definitely trying to establish some independence from the group, and the Spring album was part of that. He still had a lot of music in him, but I think he was depressed. And maybe some of the people who were supposed to be helping him were hacking away but not helping him that much.”

  Despite the commercial disappointment of Carl and the Passions, the Beach Boys hatched an ambitious plan for the recording of their next album. Inspired by a copacetic visit to the Netherlands, the group decided to abandon Los Angeles in order to spend the summer recording in Holland, where the people were friendly, the living was relatively cheap, and the distractions few. With engineer Stephen Moffitt dispatched to find or build a suitable recording studio and another staffer charged with renting houses and cars for the band, their families, and assorted entourage members, the entire group decamped for Europe in early June 1972. Everyone, that is, except Brian, who really wasn’t all that eager to leave home after all.

  Not that there was anything he could do about it. Marilyn, Carnie, and younger sister Wendy (born in 1969) had left along with the other Beach Boys, and they all expected Brian to join them overseas as soon as possible. And as ever, the rest of the group—along with their employers at Warner Brothers records—expected Brian to kick up a few new gems so the new record would make at least as big an impact as Surf’s Up had made in 1971. What’s more, the other Beach Boys kept pledging that Brian was getting back on his feet and was ready to take the helm again. In fact, they had promised Mo Ostin, back when he was purchasing the rights to their post-1966 works as part of their record deal, that Brian would deliver a finished version of Smile for the label. That Brian had no intention of doing anything of the sort didn’t stop the group from taking a $50,000 advance for the album or from hyping its imminent arrival to reporters and concert crowds, all of whom would gasp and applaud with delight.

  To Brian, the thought of working on Smile—his stillborn paean to the vital core of love, hope, and terror beneath the American experience—made about as much sense as the thought of spending the next few months making music in a distant country that had nothing to do with the world he knew, as if his geography was the problem. It was the invasion of Brian’s internal landscape that had shattered his will to create. The Beach Boys had done
that, along with his family, again and again, stripping the soil, weighing the profit-bearing minerals, and shipping them off to be sold at market rates. And now they expected Brian to help them mine his depths again and were asking him to travel halfway around the world for the privilege? Just thinking about it made Brian sink into a bleak, desolate fog.

  One voice came to him out of the darkness. It belonged to Randy Newman—that sad, teasing bray—singing the opening track and title song to his newest album, Sail Away.

  On the surface, Sail Away’s title song presented the same misty vision of American freedom and opportunity Murry had always used to motivate his boys toward greatness—except that the song’s narrator was an eighteenth-century slave trader easing one of his victims into a lifetime of bondage. And Brian could relate, on a spiritual level anyway. He knew how it felt to follow a dreamy vision, only to be sucked into the maw of a rapacious economic machine. As he listened to the album again—and again and again, as per his usual practice with records that struck his fancy—he heard a piece of himself in the rest of the songs, from the self-pity of a modern living legend (“It’s Lonely at the Top”), to the self-deluded freak-show entertainer (“Simon Smith and His Amazing Dancing Bear”), to the unthinking xenophobia of modern America (“Political Science”), to the uncaring God who hovered coolly above it all (“He Gives Us All His Love” and “God’s Song [That’s Why I Love Mankind]”). A decade removed from the days when his utopian vision of America enraptured the world and transformed his family’s American dream into mountains of cash, Brian could hear the story of his internal landscape in “Burn On,” the song inspired by the plight of Ohio’s Cuyahoga River, which, as Randy Newman sang, had grown so thick with petroleum sludge that it had actually erupted into flame.