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

by Peter Ames Carlin

  “I know—I KNOW!/That we can take it one more miiiiiiiile!”

  The smoke was still in his voice, the layers of rust rattling away in his pipes, but he put everything he had into the last word of that line, drawing it out as long and as far as he could before the choir joined him for the final refrain:

  “’Cause we’re singin’ that same song/We’re still singing that saaaame soooong…”

  As the summer moved toward the fall, the group’s momentum continued to build. The regular touring band (minus Brian) played another dozen shows at basketball arenas and stadiums, then they all turned up looking tanned, fit, and tight on the cover of People magazine in late August (“Still Riding the Crest 15 Hairy Years Later,” the article was titled). A few weeks later, Rolling Stone weighed in with another cover profile, this one focused almost entirely on Brian’s resurgence. But while the cover of the magazine (which showed Brian on the beach the day he taped his surfing bit for NBC, wearing a blue bathrobe, a yellow surfboard tucked beneath his left arm) carried the hopeful title “The Healing of Brother Brian,” the story by David Felton sank even deeper into the weird truth beneath the public relations campaign. The guys sat together for the story, cracking each other up. (“I’m Dennis, and I’m the cute one!”) Brian spoke at length about his past work and his ambition for the future, then played some new compositions that left Felton swooning. “It just grabs you and follows you around like a little angel. It makes you feel good and gives you hope,” he wrote of the love song Brian called “Marilyn Rovell.”

  But Landy and his army of minders scuttled through Felton’s story, not just dictating Brian’s activities and correcting his behavior, but also doing it in the most humiliating ways imaginable. (“This is embarrassing to me. I just feel brought down,” Brian admitted in a rare private moment.) Brian spoke happily about the progress he’d made in the past year—he had lost quite a bit of weight, had a stylish new wardrobe and haircut, and was, it seemed, pleased to be up and around. But he also tended to act out—for instance, quizzing Felton in mid-interview about his ability to score cocaine or speed. “Do you have any at home? Do you know where you could get some?” he asked, and his query ended up in the pages of Rolling Stone. When the writer proposed that even making such a request would seem to defeat the purpose of his therapy, Brian shrugged amiably. “You just saw my weakness coming through,” he said. Also his passive-aggressive response to Landy’s bullying.

  Still, as much as Brian resented Landy’s relentless control over his life, being forced to answer to an aggressive, demanding authority figure also felt familiar and, as much as he might have hated to admit it, comfortable. Just like Murry had once done, Landy gave Brian boundaries and expectations. Now he had no choice but to get up in the morning, pull on some shorts and running shoes, and then drag his ass around the UCLA track for a half hour or so. After that his bodyguard would drive him home, where a nutritious breakfast was already waiting. Then came the shower, a fresh change of clothes, and the quick march over to the piano, where Landy or one of his minions made sure he fingered the keys and at least tried to pound out a new song or two before lunch. And no matter how tired or bored or anxious he felt, Brian was absolutely required to go to the recording studio, because the time was already booked. “He’d come in and say, ‘Well, I’ve got to be here for the next couple of hours. What can I do?’” Earle Mankey remembers. “But that was the only way he’d get his dinner.” And, surprisingly enough, Landy didn’t hesitate to use his patient’s ongoing appetite for drugs as a motivator, too. “He was also allowed to smoke one joint a day if he did his work,” Mankey says.

  Trish Campo (formerly Trish Roach), then Brother Studios’ chief administrator, recalls Landy using less pleasant motivational methods. “He used to go out of his way to embarrass Brian. I remember he had a young kid working for him, and I remember seeing him standing over Brian with a fucking baseball bat, like if you don’t knuckle down and do what we want, I’m gonna hit you with the bat.” Was this really a recipe for creative inspiration? One afternoon that summer Campo looked into the studio and saw Brian at the piano gazing vacantly up at a decorative stained glass window that had planets and stars on it. Later that afternoon Campo heard a new song coming out of the studio: “What do the planets mean?/And have you ever seen/Sunrise in the mornin’, it shined when you were born…”

  That song became “Solar System,” and like most of the songs he produced that summer and fall, Brian created it almost entirely on his own, writing all of the music and words and playing almost all of the instruments—keyboards, synthesizers, and even the drums—himself. And though many of the new songs began as make-work tunes that sprang from his most familiar musical and lyrical touchstones, most of them ended up pirouetting through his quirky palette of melodic, harmonic, and structural tricks. Even if he started off writing simple me/you love songs set in classrooms, cars, and throbbing hearts, the years had warped his perspective in fascinating ways. “It’s a frighteningly accurate album,” says Earle Mankey, who engineered the sessions. “It may have sounded like a lighthearted album. But that’s a serious, autobiographical album: Brian Wilson giving what he had. Sort of like Eraserhead.”

  To be fair, Brian’s internal world wasn’t anywhere near as horrifying as David Lynch’s monstrous nightmare about sex and procreation. But the songs that made up the album he planned to call Brian Loves You (eventually retitled The Beach Boys Love You, though it was essentially a solo album with contributions from Carl, Dennis, and to a lesser extent, Mike and Al) projected a vision of life that was just as distorted and unsettling as the view from a fun house mirror.

  The hard-rocking opening cut, “Let Us Go On This Way,” kicked off the album with one of those tortured cries of joy that could only come in a love song by Brian Wilson: “To get you babe, I went through the wringer/Ain’t gonna let you slip through my fingers…” From there the lyrics sketched a first-person tale of adolescent love—“God please let us go on this way,” the chorus pleaded—but the cracked harmonies behind Carl’s forceful lead, particularly Brian’s wavering falsetto, implied something far less innocent. That mood was only expanded in “Roller Skating Child,” which pursued the same themes, only with a grown-up perspective that made it sound like a kind of musical interpretation of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita, complete with vivid descriptions of adolescent sexuality (the ribbons in her hair, her devious wink, her preternatural facility on skates), careless parenting (“Her folks let me stay with her ’til late at night”), and the lust-fueled escape that sounded so much like Humbert Humbert’s scheme you can almost imagine him singing with Mike’s voice. That these songs could only come from the imagination of Brian Wilson became clear with “Mona,” a traditional, four-chord ’50s-style love song whose grade school rhymes (movie/groovy, etc.) turned into a tutorial about Brian’s favorite songs: “Come on, listen to “Da Do Ron Ron now/Listen to ‘Be My Baby’/I know you’re gonna love Phil Spector…”

  Brian came up with a much more interesting musical track for “Johnny Carson,” which transformed the album’s standard instrumentation (organ, piano, synthesizer, and simple drums) into the relentless noise of industry—gears turning, belts spinning, steam hissing. Meanwhile, the lyrics elevated the then-reigning king of late-night TV into an icon of male strength, resilience, and charm. All of which was extremely strange, of course, and became stranger still in the refrain, which picked up speed as it shifted to a minor chord that emphasized the struggle behind the Carsonesque lines that followed: “It’s nice to have you on the show tonight/I’ve seen your act in Vegas—outtasight!” The second refrain practically cried out with admiration: “Don’t you think he’s such a natural guy?/The way he’s kept it up could make you cry!”

  Musically inventive, instantly hummable, emotionally vivid, and well past the point that separates the normal from the freakishly bizarre, “Johnny Carson” served as the pivot point for the entire album. From there it just got weirder, starting with
the nursery-rhyme erotica of the Sunflower outtake “Good Time” (“My girlfriend Penny, she’s kinda skinny/So she needs her falsies on…”) and picking up speed with “Honkin’ Down the Highway” (which anticipated a parentally instigated assignation the singer promises will end with him “Takin’ one little inch at a time, now/’Til we’re feelin’ fine, now…”).

  “Solar System” was a celestial variation on “California Girls” (“Venus the Goddess of love/Thank all the stars above!”), only with a fractured lead vocal (Brian again) that emphasized its core daffiness. “I’ll Bet He’s Nice” and “The Night Was So Young” reveled in traditional shades of self-pity, jealousy, and loneliness, but they were only brief diversions on the way to “Let’s Put Our Hearts Together,” a melodically tricky duet between a hoarse Brian and stiff Marilyn in which the lovers expressed dim-witted insecurities (He: “I don’t want to tell you that I care for you and have you just ignore me…”; She: “I know you’ve had so much experience that you don’t need another person in your life…” ) before agreeing that they will “See what we can cook up between us.” “I Wanna Pick You Up” followed, morphing the object of desire into either a disturbingly sexualized infant or a dismayingly infantilized adult. As sung in Dennis’s whiskey bray, swooning observations such as “I wanna tickle your feet” lost whatever innocence they might have had. By the time he got to the final coda, “Pat, pat, pat her on her butt, butt/She’s gone to sleep, be quiet” sounded nearly obscene.

  “Airplane” spun a more mature perspective on romance, albeit from the suspended animation of 30,000 feet above the earth, where a man can muse on life and love without actually engaging in it. Back on the ground with the built-in Vegas encore “Love Is a Woman,” the album staggered to a close in a hail of honking saxes, tootling flutes, and hoary crooning.

  It wasn’t “Good Vibrations.” It was barely even the Beach Boys. But Love You was a mesmerizing and at times darkly lovely portrait of the world as viewed through the eyes of an emotionally fraught thirty-four-year-old rock star whose own success has become an inescapable trap.

  But even as Brian seemed to resign himself to his new life as a creative functionary working under Landy’s thumb, the shrink was wearing out his welcome with the rest of the Beach Boys. The breaking point came in late November when he encouraged Brian to accept an offer from Lorne Michaels to make a solo appearance on the November 27 edition of Saturday Night Live. The rest of the group was also in New York that weekend, fresh off of a pair of sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden, and they would have welcomed the chance to get their hipness ticket punched on the show that was seen as the TV zenith of mid-1970s cool. But Michaels only wanted Brian, and so Landy pushed for it to happen. Unfortunately, Brian’s star turn was something less than an unalloyed triumph. Sitting petrified behind a grand piano that had been placed in a sandbox, smiling wanly whenever Landy, standing just off-camera, flashed a card instructing him to do so, Brian led the show’s studio band through a sluggish “Back Home” and a magic-free “Good Vibrations” before climaxing with a shaky rendition of “Love Is a Woman.”

  Viewers at home, including this one, weren’t sure what to make of it all. It still seemed amazing to see Brian Wilson performing anywhere, let alone looking so relatively fit and trim. And though it was painful to hear his voice shredding those once-crystalline songs, there was something romantic about the haunted look in Brian’s eyes—if only because it confirmed the truth of the psychic melodrama at the heart of all of his songs. And in so doing, it made him seem heroic, not just for the rigors of the music’s creation, but also for having the courage to sit at the piano and even attempt to play it in public.

  If the other Beach Boys saw it that way, they didn’t like it. On the contrary, they developed real concerns about the state of Brian’s therapy. Stephen Love was particularly chagrined, since his suspicions about Landy dated back several months to the day when the shrink had proposed being paid with a percentage of Brian’s earnings rather than an hourly rate. “It was like a brain surgeon saying, ‘Well, if this patient lives, I get 10 percent of his income,’” Stephen says. Instead, Landy had increased his time and staffing so radically that the monthly charge had risen speedily from $10,000 to $20,000. Figuring enough was enough, Stephen—who oversaw all of the group members’ incomes and expenditures—decided the shrink had to go. To make his case to Brian and Marilyn, he brought along Landy’s most recent monthly bill. “And Brian was so appalled at how much he was paying this guy, he actually took a swing at him!”

  Landy and company were gone by the beginning of December, making way again for Stan Love, whose pro basketball days had come to an end for good. Joined by a friend named Rocky Pamplin, a one-time Playgirl model who entertained secret hopes of starting his own career in music, the pair of live-in bodyguards/counselors did their best to keep Brian focused, busy, and relatively clean.

  And for a time it seemed to work. Brian kept up his pace as 1977 began, cranking out a new batch of tunes that ranged from the lushly orchestrated ballads “Still I Dream of It” and “It’s Over Now,” to quirky observations on baseball (“It’s Trying to Say”) and movies (“Lines”), to loopy glimpses at his own life, such as “Life Is for the Living.” Brian also declared his intention of returning to the road full-time, even pulling out his old Fender Precision bass to get his licks back in shape. “I feel more into it now,” he told writer Harvey Kubernik at the time. “Rehearsals went real good, and I got some of the fire back.”

  To the surprise of nearly everyone, the “Brian Is Back!” campaign had actually worked. Brian Wilson was slimmed down, relatively clear-eyed, and back in action. The new record had been a hit; Love You was already in the can; and the album after that was close to finished. That would end their commitment to Warner Brothers, and so the nation’s biggest record companies were lining up to offer the group lucrative deals for whatever they did next.

  But even as Dennis Wilson walked away from me that afternoon in late December, with another sold-out show just ahead and the most profitable year the Beach Boys would ever have set to begin, he and his big brother, along with the rest of the group, were already veering toward a new set of disasters that would change their lives and the meaning of their work forever.

  CHAPTER 13

  As 1977 began, Stephen Love’s plan moved easily into its next stage. The Beach Boys were the subject of a bidding war between record companies that resulted in an insanely lucrative deal from CBS Records, guaranteeing close to $1 million per album, plus bonuses for high sales, on top of a $2 million signing bonus. Wherever they went they played in the biggest arenas, were given the most generous guarantees ($50,000 per night) in the business, and sometimes earned two or three times that amount once the ticket sales were totaled. If that wasn’t enough, they had reclaimed the pop world’s respect, too, and not just from the Chamber of Commerce types, the beach ball–bouncers, the bunny-hoppers, and the pseudo-surfers who wore baggie shorts and huarache sandals to their shows in Nebraska. Thanks in part to the relentless chorus of “Brian Is Back” coverage, virtually every sensate person who cared about rock music had come to understand that the Beach Boys were serious musicians complete with serious angst and extremely serious appetites for sex, drugs, and all-around degeneracy. “A diseased bunch of motherfuckers if ever there was one,” raved Lester Bangs, the snarling prince of the punk-rock writers. “But the miracle is that the Beach Boys have made that disease sound like the literal babyflesh pink of health…. Maybe it’s just that unprickable and ingenuous wholesomeness that accounts not only for their charm, but for their beauty—a beauty so awesome that listening to them at their best is like being in some vast dream cathedral decorated with a thousand gleaming American pop culture icons.”

  If they had been different people, the Beach Boys might have taken up residence in that cathedral and stayed there forever. They would have realized that the transcendent beauty of their music had nothing to do with the surf, the cars, or the
girls in the songs that made their audiences howl and everything to do with the way they sang about them. They would have understood that it was the belief in their voices and the friendship their harmonies signified that brought tears to people’s eyes. It was the idea of surfing—the naked desperation that could drive you out into the waves or across a parched landscape in pursuit of something that’s gotta be better than this—that registered in people’s hearts and imaginations. To see the Beach Boys perform in the mid-to-late 1970s and hear this motley, bearded, paunchy, notoriously fucked-up group of nearly middle-aged men singing about school and cars and catching waves required a suspension of disbelief that was, in its way, daring.

  On September 1, 1977, something like 150,000 New Yorkers crowded into Central Park to make that leap. All five Beach Boys came out for that muggy, late-summer afternoon, and together with their crack team of backing keyboardists, percussionists, and horn players, they lit up the Great Lawn with a three-hour extravaganza that began with “California Girls” and ended with “Fun, Fun, Fun,” but also included four songs from Love You and key highlights from Pet Sounds, Surf’s Up, Holland, and 15 Big Ones. The throng danced and sang along the whole time, and if you’d been watching from a distance, it would have seemed entirely triumphant.

  Only two days later, though, and unbeknownst to the cheering throngs, the Beach Boys were in an angry knot on the tarmac at Newark airport, screaming and gesturing and trading accusations that were so vile and livid that by the time the factions had stormed off in opposite directions, pretty much everyone who had been there suspected that the Beach Boys had sung together for the last time.

  In a way it’s not surprising to learn that it was their own appetites that tore the Beach Boys apart: They fought about money, who should be their manager, why that guy was taking such a big percentage of their income, and why they ought to pay anyone a premium rate just to field the offers the most popular band in America would get anyway. The fact that they were all making far more money than they ever had before only seemed to make them more bitter. No matter how much each of them had, they seemed to expect even more—more of their own songs on the album, more in the shows, more of their friends in the backing band or on the front office staff.