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

by Peter Ames Carlin

  With Brian unwilling, unable, or unwelcome to take full control of the band’s musical vision, that became a free-for-all, too. Carl and Dennis wanted to keep the Beach Boys contemporary by recording and then performing new, more adventurous songs. Mike, on the other hand, preferred riding the energy that erupted from the crowd whenever they kicked out another classic surfing or car song. Weren’t they supposed to be in the business of giving people what they wanted? Al might have leaned more toward Carl and Dennis’s side, except that both of those guys were such degenerate drinkers and dopers he had to vote with Mike, if only to keep the group from being consumed by chaos. In fact, the lifestyle conflict had grown so profound by 1977 that the group had fallen into the habit of leasing two separate airplanes for their tours, one reserved for those who preferred not to indulge in high-altitude smoking, drinking, and snorting and the other for those who did. If the profligate nature of this compromise bothered anyone, their complaints went unheeded.

  As nonsensical as that solution was, the Beach Boys hadn’t been raised to work out reasoned approaches to problems. Thus, they retreated to their respective airplanes, rode to the shows in separate limousines, took the stage by separate doors, and gazed beadily at one another from separate microphones even as their voices twined together in those old tales of fun and friendship. When the time came for the gang to sing together around a single microphone—as per their custom when they chimed so sweetly about “Keepin’ those a-lovin’ good vibrations a-happenin’ with you”—chances were excellent that a knee might find its way, sharply, into the crotch of the guy standing next to its owner.

  This was all merely a convoluted way for them to reestablish the fact that their own relationships were based less on friendship than on shared ambition, one of the many traits common to the Wilsons. “You know, there’s a streak of insanity in that family. Their father was crazy, his father was crazy,” Mike chattered happily to the Washington Post in the late ’70s. He evidently thought no one would remember that he was talking about his own grandfather and uncle or that he’d had his very own rendezvous with a straitjacket following that breakdown in early 1970. “But along with that streak there’s a real creativity,” he added, as if that would make the foregoing seem less hostile.

  Unfortunately, barely harnessed rage was a recurring feature of Mike’s public persona. At the Big Sur Folk Festival in 1970—the group’s first serious entrée into the peace-and-love subculture—he’d introduced “Cottonfields” by pointing out how big a hit it had been in Europe, even as “heavy AM radio” in the United States ignored it. “A lot of people thought it was too trite,” he snapped. “So we all missed it that time, folks.” Playing an international convention of CBS Records executives just after signing their big new contract in 1977, Mike again launched into an onstage diatribe inspired by what he thought of as Warner Brothers’ lack of support for Love You (which had been released weeks after the Beach Boys had signed with the other label), leading him to refer darkly to “the things that have been done in the name of the music business.” And though Mike had become rich and famous as a result of that business, thanks largely to his fellow Beach Boys, he had also come to resent the way his cousins overshadowed him so consistently during their climb to the heights of pop stardom.

  He didn’t mind following Brian’s lead back in the old days. But then Brian had abandoned him for a succession of other collaborators and blown his own mind so thoroughly that he’d lost touch with what had made him—and them—so successful in the first place. Later, Mike had come to value Carl’s skills as the group’s onstage arranger and bandleader. But Dennis was a walking disaster. Not just because the middle Wilson was undisciplined and obnoxious (and had been ever since they were kids) but also because his looks and natural charisma let him get away with so much. “I could see the rivalry between Mike and Dennis for chicks,” David Marks says, thinking back all the way to 1963. “Just dumb ego clashing, which escalated into dumb fistfights, typical shit.” And if anything, the conflict had only grown worse. Mike could leap, spin, and wail his way through a two-hour show, but the moment Dennis stood at center stage during the encore to sing “You Are So Beautiful,” the place would erupt just because he had that impish smile and all that sun-bleached blond hair.

  Whatever motivated it, though, Mike had a point about his middle cousin’s penchant for obnoxiousness, and once Dennis had truly discovered the joys of cocaine and vodka in the mid-1970s, his onstage and offstage behavior grew even more mercurial: smashed cars, days-long binges, wired-up temper tantrums, sexual liaisons in the candlelit meditation room Mike had set up at Brother Studios. Dennis’s romantic exploits were another story entirely, though his two marriages to Karen Lamm (another drug and alcohol enthusiast) featured maximum fireworks, as would a long-term romance with Fleetwood Mac’s Christine McVie (then also a coke-and-booze enthusiast).

  The drummer also maintained a more-than-healthy sexual interest in basically any woman who meandered in his direction. “Dennis was all about sex,” says Trish Campo, the Brother Studios administrator who had been the drummer’s friend and confidante since they met in 1970. “He called his penis ‘The Wood,’ and it had its own identity. It really ran him. But he wanted everyone, especially women, to totally love their moment with him.”

  The Wood notwithstanding, Dennis’s behavior would present a challenge to even the most sympathetic business partner. Though Dennis could write and produce songs that all but rivaled Brian’s for emotional power and melodic grace, the perpetual state of hysteria he tended to operate under made him something less than an ideal session leader. As a sad result, even a beautiful song such as “Wouldn’t It Be Nice to Live Again” (recorded during the Surf’s Up sessions in 1971) went unfinished.

  The fact that he managed to score a solo deal with Caribou Records (courtesy of old pal James Guercio) and then produce an album, Pacific Ocean Blue, that notched surprisingly strong sales and far better reviews than either of the group’s mid-1970s efforts only further rankled Mike and Al. Maybe, they hinted in not-so-subtle ways, it was time for Dennis to pursue his solo career full-time and leave the Beach Boys to more stable heads. But even if Dennis yearned to strike out on his own, he’d never been anything but a Beach Boy. Everything that mattered to him—music, public adoration, endless streams of cash—flowed directly from the group that had defined his existence since he was sixteen. Indeed, the prospect of appearing anywhere without his usual safety net proved so terrifying that Dennis balked at making any solo appearances to promote his album. A planned club tour was cancelled only days after it was announced.

  Still, the professional and emotional strings that kept Dennis locked into the Beach Boys didn’t necessarily reflect an abiding closeness between the three Wilson brothers. While Brian, Dennis, and Carl certainly shared a fraternal bond, the blistering environment created by their father had burned away some essential connective material. For all the time they spent singing, playing, traveling, drinking, drugging, and puking together, the Wilson boys never seemed to feel truly at ease with one another. “If there wasn’t the Beach Boys and there wasn’t music, I would not even talk to them,” Dennis observed at one point. “But through the music, I fell in love with my brothers.”

  But as ever, love in the Wilson family tended to be a mixed blessing. Dennis often showed his love for Brian by sharing his drugs with him, which was obviously not a healthy prospect for either of them. Carl may have been more circumspect about using with or around his emotionally fragile brother, but no amount of brotherly love could make him feel happy about stepping aside to let Brian assume control of the band’s musical output. Carl felt he had, in the decade since Brian had left them all high and dry, earned the right to take the reins. What’s more, he didn’t believe that Brian had the fortitude—let alone the exposure to the outside world—to create new music that would fit on modern radio. That the “Brian Is Back!” campaign had reestablished him in the public eye as the genius responsible for all
of their careers rankled Carl just as much as it did Mike.

  But they didn’t seem to have a choice in the matter, which may explain why the dedication the band wrote to Brian on the inside dust sleeve of Love You managed to be as condescending as it was outwardly fawning. Printed beneath a large picture showing him beaming happily at a party while Marilyn whispers in his ear, the writing begins with an all-caps headline: “TO BRIAN WHOM WE LOVE WITH ALL OUR HEARTS.”

  From there the whole thing just got surreal:

  “We wish to express our appreciation, and acknowledge your willingness to create and support totally the completion of these songs. We thank you for sharing yourself and your music with us, and all those who love you as well. An unspeakable joy being with you (sic) in your expression of the music you put out there for everyone. Brian, we feel honored and grateful and we love you.

  Their mood changed noticeably after Love You failed to make much of a dent on the charts that spring. Unsurprisingly, given its odd sound and feel, Love You jumped into the Top Fifty, sputtered for a month or two, then sank without leaving so much as a ripple. The band continued to play a handful of Brian’s new songs in concert (“Honkin’ down the Highway” could really rock), but the commercial failure struck the others, and particularly Mike and Al, as an affront. They had told Brian that his new songs were too weird, too out there, to appeal to the mass market, and though the CBS contract required Brian to write and/or produce 70 percent of the group’s music, that didn’t mean they had to let him produce whatever he wanted. From now on they would record and release music the fans wanted to hear—and because they were the ones up in the front lines onstage every night, they would be the ones to judge what would appeal.

  First off, the group shelved Brian’s planned next album, Adult Child. Much like Love You, the songs Brian had recorded in early 1977 veered between boyish musings and devastatingly personal statements of loss and regret. That might have been fine, except that a significant number of the songs (including a cover of the ’30s big band classic “Deep Purple”) had been gussied up in elaborate swing arrangements by Dick Reynolds, the Four Freshmen’s arranger whom Brian had last commissioned to do some string arrangements for the Beach Boys’ 1964 Christmas album. So, even if Brian’s rusty baritone on “Deep Purple” hadn’t made him sound like Tom Waits on quaaludes, even if Carl didn’t sound quite so drunk on “It’s Over Now,” nothing about those jaunty horns, the sighing strings, and the whacked-out spirit of ring-a-ding-ding struck anyone in the Beach Boys organization as being even remotely radio-friendly. Or, as Stan heard his brother Mike ask Brian the moment he heard the new tracks: “What the fuck are you doing?”

  Not making the next Beach Boys record, as it turned out. And perhaps that didn’t bother Brian. He’d already coasted on his ’60s reputation for more than a decade, and it was easy to conclude that his new styles—heavy on the whirring, belching synthesizers one minute; overloaded with cheesy strings and horns the next; and always so light on the lyrics, vocals, and polish—were intended to show that he was coasting. Or even, in his passive-aggressive way, that they were a hostile gesture toward the bandmates who made a habit of rejecting his most personal work. “Carl took his productions seriously and did really careful mixes,” Earle Mankey recalls. “When Brian came in, he’d say, ‘Let’s mix this,’ and after one pass, like five minutes later, he’d say, ‘That’s good!’ Or maybe he’d say, ‘More bass! More vocal!’ But that was it.”

  So now that they wanted to take back control, Brian could shrug it off and hit the road, playing and singing when it suited him or sitting mutely in front of an unamplified piano when it didn’t. If they were desperate to get his name on some new songs, he’d toss off something in ten minutes or maybe dig through the cobwebs for some old tune he could pass off as new. What did he owe the Beach Boys, beyond what he had already given them, and what had they ever done for him? Just thinking about it made him furious. “The Beach Boys were pissed at him, and he at them,” says Stan Love, whose role as Brian’s caretaker continued into the late ’70s. “He wasn’t going to produce a song for them, because he didn’t like them as people anymore. The major conflict was with Mike. Brian didn’t want to write with him anymore, but of course Mike tried to hang on, doing his arrogant pressure trip on him. And Brian didn’t dig it.”

  Inevitably, Brian’s attention reverted to the chemicals he had turned to in order to replace the comfort and euphoria he got from his music. Though his trio of bodyguards tried desperately to keep his most destructive habits at bay, Brian excelled at concealing his stash and sneaking off to use it; and before they realized their backs had even been turned, he’d have vanished—off to a bar, off to wherever Dennis and his reliable array of substances might be. Hours later Brian would stagger home, eyes pinwheeling in his head. From that point on, life around the Wilson house on Bellagio Road would go from weird to worse. Lunging once to give Carnie a hug, Brian forgot that he was holding a burning cigarette in his hand. The ember sizzled into her skin, and her screams were still echoing in his ears the next morning when the hungover, horrified Brian locked himself in the bathroom and shaved his head as a badge of shame. Still, when Carnie took matters into her own hands by throwing her old man’s vodka and cigarettes down the toilet—“None of my friends’ parents smoke and drink!” she’d hollered at him—Brian was so enraged that he spun her around and gave her bottom a hard whack. It was the one thing he swore he’d never do, and after gaping at his daughter for a second, Brian burst into tears. He spent the rest of the evening wandering from room to room, weeping mournfully.

  If the other Beach Boys noticed his ongoing dysfunction, they were either too preoccupied with their own problems or too satisfied with the status quo to do much of anything about it. They’d managed to broker a tentative resolution to their September 1977 blowup, but that had been motivated less by a real desire to maintain their creative collaboration than by an unwillingness to lose the extremely lucrative CBS contract. Needing to produce the final album owed on their Warner Brothers contract before they could really cash in, the group decamped to Fairfield, Iowa, where Mike had secured recording space and living quarters in the meditation-friendly dorms of Maharishi International University. Getting away from L.A. and its many distractions (in other words, drugs) would help them focus on the project, he had argued. That might have been true, but the increased focus did nothing to enhance their creativity, and what eventually emerged from the Iowa sessions turned out to be the most cynical, spiritually void work the group ever produced.

  In fact, M.I.U. Album, as the record was called, may be one of the worst records ever made by a great rock band. Coproduced by Al and backup keyboardist Ron Altbach, with Brian credited as executive producer (almost certainly for contractual purposes), the record had a generic easy-listening sound, heavy on the tinkly keyboards and sweeping strings, with nary a trace of Brian’s ear for quirky texture. As for the songs themselves—the horror, the horror. Consider the point at the end of the first verse of Mike and Al’s “Kona Coast,” when Mike declared, with all the authenticity a bald, middle-aged, nonsurfer could muster: “I wanna go surfin’ where I dig it the most, in Hawaii!” Such an obvious echo of Brian’s far superior 1964 tune “Hawaii” would have been bad enough were it not for the tune’s plodding rhythm and limp guitars. That Brian, singing in the strongest falsetto he’d delivered on record since 1970, had been pressed into reprising the swooping falsetto from the earlier tune just added insult to injury.

  That’s not to say that everything about the album is a disaster: “She’s Got Rhythm,” the opening song, boasted an energetic verse and bracing falsetto lead from Brian, even if the tale of the “foxy girl” who gets away during a night of “disco dancing” made about as much of an impact as the barely audible drums and generic bass line. Al’s pair of ’50s covers (“Come Go with Me” and “Peggy Sue”) went down easily enough, but that can’t be said for “Hey Little Tomboy,” an Adult Child leftover and certainly
the worst of those songs, which reveled uncomfortably in an adolescent girl who is putting away her skateboard and baseball mitt in order to get hot and heavy with the swain portrayed by Mike. “I’m gonna teach you to kiss/It’s gonna feel just like this,” he crooned in what may be the most unsettling moment in the entire recorded history of the Beach Boys.

  Still, “Tomboy” got stiff competition when Brian and Mike’s “Belles of Paris” popped up a few songs later. Here, Mike’s attempt to graft some tres chic francais into his overview of Parisian delights descended quickly from ridiculous to unintentionally comic. “C’est tres jolie en Paree in the spring,” he sang, sounding about as sophisticated as Pepé Le Pew. M.I.U.’s final insult was the concluding track, the Altbach-written “Winds of Change,” whose soupy strings and reverb-heavy piano were meant to underscore the emotional impact of lines about cosmic oceans that flow into hearts and quiet dawns that sing songs to everyone. And just in case that weren’t aggravating enough, Brian reprised yet another fragment from one of his far better songs, in this case the bittersweet cry, “won’t last forever…” from “When I Grow Up.”

  Unsurprisingly, the gruesome album topped out at number 151 on Billboard ’s album chart, a failure in every respect. But even M.I.U. wasn’t quite as sad, cynical, and wrong as the Christmas-themed songs the group created for the holiday album they gave Warner Brothers as a final kiss-off. It was largely a combination of lightly rewritten M.I.U. songs—“I wanna spend Christmas where I dig it the most, in Hawaii!” they declaimed in “Melekalikimaka,” actually a revised “Kona Coast,” and leftovers from earlier projects (1970’s “Loop De Loop” = “Santa’s Got an Airplane,” 1976’s “Hey There Momma” = “I Saw Santa Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”). Apart from a pair of good new originals (Carl’s punchy, horn-driven “Go and Get That Girl” and Dennis’s meditative “Morning Christmas”), the album—which was swiftly rejected by Warner Brothers—represented an even more hideous new low for the Beach Boys (though some of the tracks were, inexplicably, released on the CD release of the group’s 1964 album).