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

by Peter Ames Carlin

  As 1978 began, the Beach Boys were headed in a distinctly hellish direction. A hugely successful tour of Australia nearly resulted in another breakup when Dennis, allegedly working with Carl’s money, bought some heroin that ended up making Brian sick. When Stephen Love called a meeting to figure out exactly where the drugs had come from, Brian’s bodyguard Rocky Pamplin ended up punching a drunk Carl in the face, knocking him unconscious.

  “Mike levitated off his chair, he was so jubilant that Rocky smacked Carl like that,” Stephen Love recalls. “We were so shook up that Dennis had even scored the heroin, so we were making a stand against hard drugs.” Not that it made much of an impact. Carl got so wasted before the next night’s show that he slurred his words noticeably and then nearly fell over during “Good Vibrations.” And just when it seemed like Carl was going to drag the “Gotta keep those a-lovin’ good vibrations a-happenin’ with you” sing-along into bedlam, it fell to Brian, of all people, to pull it back by launching the band into the “Hum-de-dum” chant he’d pulled off the original recording before completing the final mix in 1966.

  But if Brian had moments of clarity, the larger fabric of his life was fast unraveling. Unable to build a trusting relationship with a new therapist, his mood swings grew more pronounced. He slid back into despair, and his drug use only exacerbated his emotional problems, while his deepening emotional isolation tore at the already-stretched fabric of his marriage. The alienation had drawn both husband and wife to take comfort in other partners, and during the late summer of 1978, Brian finally told her the marriage was, at long last, over. He moved into a rented house near the Riviera Country Club on Sunset Boulevard, and his trio of helpers came along to help him set up housekeeping. But while Stan, Rocky, and Steve Korthof tried to instill a kind of normalcy and structure to Brian’s life, the dark tide in his brain pulled him even further into the looking glass. Many days he’d lie on the sofa staring up at the ceiling for hours, smoking cigarettes down to the filter and then flicking the butts onto the floor, where they’d burn holes into the hardwood floor. Sometimes a curl of smoke would rise from the floor and Brian would watch it go, wondering if the house might finally burn down. Would that finally put an end to the darkness in his head?

  When he got too hungry or bored to stay on the couch, Brian had rituals he’d use to keep his demons at bay. He’d eat steaks for every meal, then polish off entire cakes and sacks of cookies or vats of ice cream for dessert. After that he’d sprint out to the pool, then walk around it as fast as possible for as long as possible. He’d go until he was drenched with sweat, until his leg muscles were shaking with the effort of propelling his increasingly blubbery body through the late afternoon heat. Physically drained, he’d limp back into the house and play “Be My Baby” for a few hours. Or sometimes it’d be “Rhapsody in Blue” that he would play again and again as he sank into the cushions, the ember of his cigarette glowing red as the house fell once again into the dark. If the panic gripped him again, Brian would cloud his mind with whatever chemicals he could introduce into his haunted cortex. If there was nothing in the house, he’d sneak out the door and wander down to Sunset Boulevard, where he’d get so drunk that he’d wander out into traffic, almost as if he hoped some speeding bus would do for him what he didn’t have the courage to do himself.

  The guys tried to help. Steve Korthof, a former US Marine, would make like a drill sergeant, bellowing at his cousin to get the fuck out of bed, get his clothes on, and make something of his life. Rocky—the muscle-bound ex–male model—followed suit, using his sheer physicality to intimidate Brian into motion. Brian would do as he was told, getting out of bed, pulling on his clothes, and then sitting at the piano to write some music, all the while planning his next bolt for freedom, his next score. “It was terrible for him, because the doctors gave him these pills that made him sluggish. But Rocky and Steve were screaming at him all of the time, and he just got fucking sick of it,” Stan Love says. “He was a grown man, and he didn’t like it. You wouldn’t like it either, no matter how crazy you were.”

  The band would lean on him for new songs, citing the demands of their new CBS contract, but they wouldn’t let him write what he wanted to, so what was the point? “He hated the pressure,” Stan Love says. “Mike was pressuring him to write with him; Marilyn was on him about the money thing.” Even his moments of enthusiasm for touring had been stymied. “Carl wouldn’t let him play the bass for the entire show, which is what Brian wanted to do. He didn’t want him to sing out onstage, either. Carl really stymied him, because he didn’t want to be overshadowed.” Or maybe Carl just knew that Brian’s performances could be as erratic as his emotional condition, and he didn’t want to risk the embarrassment of having his brother lose it onstage during a key moment.

  As the months passed, Brian’s moods began to edge toward anger. He’d storm around the house throwing things at the wall or kicking out the windows. He’d bellow at his helpers or at no one and storm off to sit alone in the dark for hours on end. Pushed to wit’s end, Stan and the others would take Brian to see a psychiatrist and beg to put their hulking charge into a mental hospital for observation. One psychiatrist was evaluating Brian in his office when he made the mistake of taking out a pipe and lighting it, just like Murry used to do when he was lecturing his sons. Suddenly Brian snapped and came at the guy across the top of his desk. Stan Love was in the waiting room at the time and had just leaped to his feet when the panicked doctor burst into the waiting room. “He was screaming, ‘Help me! Call the police!’”

  Brian went to the hospital after that. But if Brian was crazy, he wasn’t dumb, and he could always talk his way out again. Even if he seemed resigned to staying in the hospital for a while, then the Beach Boys would come calling, wondering if he felt well enough to make the next concert tour. And then he’d be off on the road for a month or so—doing a little better, perhaps, thanks to the rigid schedule and discipline of touring—but then that would come to an end and he’d be back on the couch at home again, with the cigarette-scarred floors, the worn-down couch, the shoe-scuffed patio, “Be My Baby,” “Rhapsody in Blue,” and the recriminations in his head.

  One day Brian wandered off again and didn’t come back, which would have been scary even if he hadn’t left his wallet, keys, and identification at home. He was missing for days before a call finally came in from a man in San Diego who had seen him in a gay bar, playing the piano for drinks. What happened before then—what he’d eaten, where he’d slept, whom he’d been with—was a mystery no one was particularly eager to unravel. But at least that shook everyone up enough to get Brian back in a mental hospital for an extended stay. And he was, by all accounts, making progress. Then the Beach Boys called again to check in: They were already overdue to start making their first album for CBS. How would he feel about heading over to Florida to help them? Brian signed himself out of the hospital, hopped a flight, and was back with them again, back at work in the recording studio.

  The sessions did not go well. Neither did the meeting/listening session when CBS chief Walter Yetnikoff flew out to check in on them. Brian put together a reel of songs they’d been working on, some still in production but nevertheless a pretty good picture of what they’d been doing. “It was the first time [Yetnikoff had] come to see them at work, and they were excited,” Stan Love recalls. “He showed up, and he was obviously excited about it. But then they played him what they thought was the album, and when it was over, he turned to the group and said, ‘I think I’ve been fucked.’”

  Realizing they had a lot more work ahead of them and that he was in no shape to lead any group, let alone the fractured, fractious Beach Boys, Brian called back to Los Angeles and summoned Bruce Johnston back into the fold. Bruce was only too glad to heed the call, and now that he had his own earth-rattling hit (he had written Barry Manilow’s schlocky 1975 smash “I Write the Songs”), the group was more than willing to let him try his hand at producing the album.

  Amazingly, th
e album that resulted was a big improvement over M.I.U. Called L.A.: Light Album, a title that evoked both Los Angeles and the city’s long-standing position as a capital of vaguely mystical New Age religions (the liner notes explained the title Light Album as referring to “The awareness of, and the presence of, God here in this world as an ongoing loving reality”), the album’s strength came largely from its diversity of voices. Kicking off with “Good Timin’,” a pretty, harmony-rich ballad Brian wrote with Carl in 1974, the album skipped right to Al’s slight “Lady Lynda” before easing into Carl’s lovely maritime ballad “Full Sail.” Carl also contributed “Angel Come Home,” a tale of heartbreak and remorse sung by Dennis with great, shambling feeling. Things turned even funkier with Dennis’s brooding, pulsing “Love Surrounds Me,” a reggae-laced ballad that may be the most underrated song of his career. Mike checked in with “Sumahama,” rescued from its faux-Japanese strings and bursts of phonetic language (shades of “Belles of Paris”) by its bittersweet melody and the sensitivity he brings to his tale of the girl searching for her missing father.

  The album’s flip side featured Dennis’s lush ballad “Baby Blue,” then eased off with Carl’s “Goin’ South” and a good-humored version of Brian’s boogie-woogie arrangement of the folk standard “Shortenin’ Bread.” Unfortunately, all of these—and perhaps the entire album—were overshadowed by the album’s lead single, an eleven-minute reworking of Brian and Mike’s R & B workout “Here Comes the Night.” The song first appeared as an album track on Wild Honey in 1967, but now Bruce and his friend Curt Becher—a pop producer called in for this sole purpose—had decided to turn the song into a full-fledged disco tune, complete with throbbing bass, shrieking strings, wah-wah guitars, and layer upon layer of synthesized beeps, whirs, rattles, and clanks.

  If the group was worried about the prospect of leaping onto a commercial bandwagon that diverged so completely from their previous influences and innovations, they were even more eager to score a hit single. The band (and particularly Carl) worked hard to give the song their distinctive vocal flair, but no one seemed to have figured out that the disco tide that had swept across the culture in the mid-1970s had crested, which cast the Beach Boys’ unexpected sashay beneath the mirror ball into the worst light imaginable. And you didn’t have to be violently opposed to disco to feel dismayed by what “Here Comes the Night” represented—the Beach Boys had apparently come up so short in the search for market-friendly gimmicks that they couldn’t even find a new way to steal from themselves. Observant fans also noticed that the best songs on L.A. sounded suspiciously like the work of solo artists. Indeed, both of Dennis’s songs had been plucked from a stockpile he’d been building for his second solo album, tentatively called Bamboo. The vocals on Carl’s songs seemed limited entirely to layers of his own voice with occasional help from Dennis and Bruce. And if Brian sang a note anywhere on the album, his voice is so far down in the mix as to be completely unidentifiable.

  They continued to tour, taking the stage to the symphonic overture of “California Girls,” then spinning their voices into the same harmonies, throwing their bodies into the rhythms they knew as intimately as the pulse in their veins. The new “Here Comes the Night” nearly got them booed off stage the night they debuted it at Radio City Music Hall that spring, but they had long since learned how to adjust their own interests to suit the audience’s expectations. The song was history by the next night, and the other new songs rotated out of the set soon after, and then they were back to singing the same old songs in the same old way, reliving the same old fantasies and harboring the same old fears. Only now they all seemed to be doing it alone, standing at their own microphones in their own spotlights, no longer talking between songs or even glancing into one another’s eyes when they sang the same old unifying prayer about “Keepin’ those a-lovin’ good vibrations/a-happenin’ with you.”

  When the band came home to play the Universal Amphitheater that summer, Rich Sloan—Brian’s childhood friend and high school teammate—came up to see them play, the first time he had had the chance to see the Beach Boys perform in person. He was even more excited to go backstage before the show and spend some time catching up with his old friends. But when he got to the bungalow that served as the band’s dressing area, Sloan found that the enthusiastic group of strivers he’d known in 1962 had faded over the years. The rambunctious Dennis the Menace he had once known now stumbled through the door with red-rimmed eyes and hair so unwashed it looked like dreadlocks. In his hand Dennis carried a liter-size Coke bottle he had filled with milk and rum. “Dennis and Carl were a pair,” Sloan recalls. “Mike and Al did their thing, and poor Brian was somewhere in the middle. Actually, Al didn’t even want to go into the bungalow. I had to go outside to talk to him, and he was saying that they never saw each other anymore, except at recording sessions and onstage.”

  Sloan could hear the rumble of stomps and cheers as the hometown crowd geared up for the Beach Boys to take the stage, but even as curtain time came and went, the group sat in their dressing room, staring mutely at an episode of Mork and Mindy. “I’ll never forget that,” Sloan says. “Their manager kept rushing in saying, ‘Guys! We’ve got to get out onstage!’ Finally they took us out to our seats and they came out to play.” Dennis, visibly drunk, came trailing a substitute who sat nearby in case he passed out or just decided to walk off. Brian sat mutely at his piano for most of the night. The crowd cheered just the same, although Audree Wilson never quite got in the spirit. “She’d been saying that it was so sad. The guys had had so many highs over the years, but now all three of her boys were getting divorced at the same time. What was going to happen to them now?”

  For some people the answer seemed all too obvious: Brian was going to die. His family and the Beach Boys—as if you could find a distinction between those two entities—either felt powerless to do anything to change his direction or didn’t have the energy to try. What they did do, however, was book him for another recording session. Only this one was going to be in Western Studios in Hollywood, literally in the same room (studio number three) where he’d once wielded sound as masterfully as Galahad had wielded his sword. And it would be just like it had been fifteen years earlier. The original Steinway piano would be there. Hal Blaine would marshal a band of Brian’s favorite musicians. Up in the control room, the modern seventy-two-track digital gear would be covered with plywood upon which they would set up the old four-track Ampex recorder, Urei tube console, and original Altec 604e speakers Brian had used in the ’60s. Chuck Britz, always Brian’s most trusted engineer, even agreed to come out of retirement to run the vacuum tube mixing board they’d managed to dig up for the sessions.

  For all the elaborate planning, the sessions took on the feeling of a wake, albeit one with a living corpse. “They figured this was the last time Brian would record at Western,” says Bellagio-era engineer Steve Desper, who had also been called in to consult. And with an eye toward posterity, the group also arranged to set up an old Studer recorder to get a fly-on-the-wall perspective on everything that happened once Brian started to work. Still, some held out hope that maybe, just maybe, the experience of being back on his old turf surrounded by all his old colleagues would stir something in the thirty-eight-year-old ruin of a man. “They wanted to see if Brian could be motivated to get back into his old self, back when he was recording Pet Sounds and all that,” Desper says. “But getting into Brian’s head is a lot more difficult than getting that old sound.”

  Particularly when he feels the glories of his past starting to weigh down upon him. And that was precisely what happened the moment the overweight, heavily bearded musician walked a bit unsteadily from the white light and heat of a July afternoon through the doors and into the hermetic darkness of the studio. “From the moment he walked in through the door, everyone stood up and applauded,” Desper recalls. “And what was he supposed to do? Record another ‘Good Vibrations’ on the spot? You could see he was uncomfortable, and nothing Mari
lyn (who had come down to offer support to her ex-husband), Carl, Chuck, or I tried to do was going to help.”

  Brian had a couple of new tunes—just trifles, really, a few changes he’d been messing around with—but he didn’t want to pull those out while everyone was staring. Instead, he suggested a couple of oldies, and in the next few days they ran through takes of Chuck Berry’s “School Days (Ring! Ring! Goes the Bell),” the old R & B song “Stranded in the Jungle,” and “Jamaica Farewell.” He relaxed enough to work on one original song, a mostly improvised, three-chord reggaelite tune they eventually called “Sunshine.” “He just didn’t warm up to the effort,” Desper says. “Even if you went back and tried to make everything work, you couldn’t take Brian back. He was a different person. You couldn’t go back and revisit those times.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Ronald Reagan, the Midwestern boy turned actor turned TV pitchman turned governor of California, rode for the White House wearing a white hat (literally, in his ads) and wielding a misty vision of the American Dream. “Some say that spirit no longer exists. But I have seen it—I have felt it—all across this land,” Reagan declared as he accepted the Republican nomination that July. And Americans figured they saw the same things reflected back to them in Reagan, so much so in fact that they were willing to overlook his rather obviously dyed hair and seemingly rouged cheeks. And that the old-fashioned family man had not only been divorced but also enjoyed only the most distant of relationships with his two sets of children. Oh, and then it turned out that a lot of his public pronouncements—about the Cadillac-owning welfare sponges bleeding the nation dry, about the mountains of pollution caused by trees, about his own experiences liberating the prisoners of Nazi death camps, and about the inevitable trickle of money from the investment accounts of the leisure class into the pockets of the working poor—never quite penciled out, either.