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

by Peter Ames Carlin

  But Reagan sure seemed to believe it. And after four years of Jimmy Carter’s stern lectures about sacrifice and failure, Reagan’s optimism, no matter where it came from, was intoxicating. Years of revising his own life in and out of the movies had taught the glamorous Californian a valuable lesson: An appealing fantasy can be far more powerful than an inconvenient truth. “We have every right to dream heroic dreams,” Reagan told the nation during his first inaugural speech in January 1981. “Those who say that we are in a time when there are no heroes just don’t know where to look.” Or, perhaps, where not to look.

  In a sense, the Beach Boys of the early 1980s provided a perfect sound track for the Reagan era. While Carl’s fight to earn conscientious objector status during the late 1960s prefigured the progressive tilt of their work in the early 1970s and the frank environmentalism of the mid-1970s, the increasing dominance of Mike—always the most politically conservative member of the group—in the late 1970s carried them, along with the country, farther to the right. By early 1980 they had played a benefit for the presidential campaign of George H. W. Bush. And though group members (particularly Mike, oddly enough) still spoke up often and loudly for the same environmental programs the Reagan/Bush ticket was determined to do away with, the group jumped eagerly at the chance to perform at one of the inaugural balls thrown to hail the new administration when it took office that next January.

  “You know, we’re not so politically savvy and all that,” Mike says. “But I think we liked Reagan quite a bit. And Mrs. Reagan, you know, nice people. And we liked the association of him being governor of California.” The Reagans liked being associated with the Beach Boys, too, a fact that would eventually become a point of national politics. “We did a benefit at the White House when the Reagans were there,” Mike continues. “I have a photo of us there; Nancy had her arm around me, and Brian, and everybody are all together there.”

  So even as their lives spun out of control and even as their commitment to their work ebbed and their own relationships grew cold and jagged, they continued to present themselves, in the words of Mike, circa 1983, as “…really positive and wholesome and fun. All our adult lives we performed to totally project a good time. And that’s what we’re going to do in the future.” Soon they came up with a new way to position the group for public consumption, a kind of self-generated honorific that seemed to summarize the place the Mike-led, eighties-era Beach Boys yearned to have in the cultural fabric: America’s Band.

  The album they released in the spring of 1980, Keepin’ the Summer Alive, came with a cover painting that portrayed the full group in their onstage formation performing for an audience of polar bears and a solitary penguin in a dark, icy tundra. Only the group is living inside a large glass bubble—its sand, palm tree, surfboards, and bikini-clad beauty kept at what one presumes is a warm but breezy eighty-five degrees. Safe in their own simulated environment. And completely out of touch with reality. As was the music that came inside the wrapper. Desperate to justify the fat advance they’d taken from CBS but unable (or unwilling) to blaze a new trail to the creative horizons that spawned their best work, the only thing they could think to do was to mimic the successes they’d had so long ago. So the group—actually Bruce, Carl, and Alan, with occasional visits from Brian and Mike and one brief appearance from the increasingly bedraggled Dennis—continued to produce songs, many of which were designed to be sung by boys half their age. “There’s nothin’ like a-romancin’ in the stands/Walkin’ down the hallways holdin’ hands…,” the thirty-nine-year-old Mike sang over the four chords Brian bothered to toss into “Some of Your Love.” Carl’s “Keepin’ the Summer Alive,” which became the new album’s title track, also featured a high school–aged narrator, as did the group’s cover of “School Days,” the one oldie that survived from the Western sessions in July. Of Brian’s other originals on the album, only the rollicking first single “Goin’ On” betrayed a trace of his usual sparkle, and some of that came from the whirlpool-of-harmony bridge he’d adapted from the 1964 outtake “All Dressed Up for School.”

  Still, the album contained at least one piece of work that was, despite itself, revelatory. The tune was one Bruce had brought in, a retelling of the band’s history he had first written after leaving the group in the early ’70s. Now renamed “Endless Harmony” (the original title “Ten Years Harmony” clearly being no longer accurate), the song came in two parts; the first, longer piece featured Bruce singing alone above a series of jazzy minor chords descending across the keys of a shimmering Fender Rhodes piano. The music is a bit melodramatic (à la Bruce’s “I Write the Songs,” which had proved such a natural fit for a moist-eyed Barry Manilow), but that’s a perfect fit for lyrics that begin describing the teenaged Beach Boys as carefree nature lovers who loved to sing until the onset of fame transformed them into iconic figures with the power to turn their own simple pleasures into a vast fortune. Most of this is complete hooey, which may be why Bruce is so stumped at the end of the verse when the lyrics pose the existential query: What does any of it mean? Why, it’s the beginning of an endless harmony! he declares. Which seems willfully naive at best, given the state of the band’s relationships, never mind their physical health. Nevertheless, the entire group joins in at full force, while the rest of the guys weave a wall of harmony behind him, oohing and ahhing behind a first-person verse that salutes the motherland (“God bless America!”) while also thanking its citizens for their patronage, then shifts back to patriotic gratitude before settling on traditional showbiz self-congratulation: Everyone loves the Beach Boys! At which point the song deserves to come sputtering to a dissonant, discordant end.

  Instead, something kind of magical happens. The background chorus turns rich and full, each voice finding its own line of perfectly woven melody until they all join a wordless, skyward progression of dah-doo-dah, dah-doo-dah, dah-doo-dah that comes to a sudden stop, leaving only one aching falsetto to trace a sad arc down until he falls once again into that billowing cushion of voices. For in those moments, in that one sighing chord, you can hear all the hope and beauty they put into every great song they ever made. And you can also hear the sorrow, because that one mournful voice, engineered to sound exactly like Brian, is actually Bruce mimicking the sound of the man who had envisioned the Beach Boys but now couldn’t even be bothered to make the session. The horizon he had created had become a mirage. And that didn’t bother the other Beach Boys at all.

  Every so often they actually seemed to be having fun. An enormous show at the Knebworth Festival in England that June brought out 100,000 fans on a rainy night, and their enthusiasm in turn brought out that old playful spirit. The entire six-man band was there, with a seemingly clear-eyed, playful Dennis thrashing the drums while a clean-shaven, freshly shorn Brian played the grand piano, managing sharp (if joyless) vocal turns on “Sloop John B.” and “Surfer Girl.” Visiting Seattle six months later, the group played another basketball arena show, this time only days following the murder of John Lennon. Brian seemed dazed that night, sitting mutely at the piano, sucking on his endless procession of Marlboros with an out-of-body intensity. But only a few feet away, Dennis reigned supreme on the drums, barely looking up from the task of holding down the rhythm. He was particularly in-the-pocket on “Good Vibrations,” laying back on the beat to emphasize the psychedelic funk that had always hidden just beneath the surface of its chorus. “Say a prayer for John,” Carl had called out at the end of the show, and the roar of approval that came back seemed to rock the entire group back on their heels. Carl smiled, nodded, and then began applauding himself, leading the others as they joined the spontaneous ovation for their one-time rival.

  Such moments of unity were rare. Keepin’ the Summer Alive earned miserable reviews, spun off no hit singles, and then peaked at number seventy-five on the Billboard charts. That failure—along with the usual array of backstage habits, problems, and conflicts—cooled whatever remnants of creative fire might have remained in the gro
up. And more than half a dozen years since they had settled on their oldies-based repertoire—and grown accustomed to the wild ovations it earned them night after night—they began to balk at the notion of rehearsing or showing up for preshow sound checks. Why bother, some band members argued, when they could just roll in at showtime, crank out the usual two dozen songs, and leave eighty minutes later to the same raucous standing ovation? “The Beach Boys set plays itself,” Carl told a reporter at the time. “We can play a real turkey of a show and then people will still come back afterwards and say, ‘That’s the best concert I’ve ever seen in my life.’” To the others, that realization was liberating. But it was beginning to drive Carl nuts.

  “They wouldn’t rehearse or try doing new material,” he complained to the New York Times. “It was disturbing to get up onstage and not feel the energy, the joy you expect from the Beach Boys.”

  Carl was only thirty-four. A recent move to the mountains of Colorado had helped him kick most of the bad habits that had been fogging his vision for much of the second half of the ’70s. So why should he stick with the Beach Boys if they wouldn’t follow his lead to new music, or—at the very least—back to a tighter, more musically precise show? The more he thought about it, the more Carl realized that he didn’t want to be a part of it anymore. So he left to start a solo career. Writing primarily with Myrna Smith-Schilling (wife of his manager, Jerry Schilling, and a member of the gospel group Sweet Inspiration that had once backed Elvis Presley) that winter, he made a moderately successful solo record, Carl Wilson, that leaned heavily on the rhythm-and-blues tunes he’d fallen in love with when he was first learning to play guitar in junior high school. That spring he formed his own band and hit the road, playing clubs in the Northeast and then touring the state-fair-and-arena circuit as the opening act for the Doobie Brothers. Sometimes the tour would nearly cross paths with the Beach Boys, who continued to tour without him, playing the same songs in more or less the same order to the same delighted crowds, few of whom seemed to notice that the band’s usual lead guitarist, bandleader, and lead voice on a dozen of its most popular songs had been replaced by an anonymous musician.

  Meanwhile, Dennis had fallen even further into alcoholism, devolving from the muscle-bound sex symbol he had once been into a rheumy-eyed, bloated hulk who had trouble sitting upright on his drummer’s stool. Often the middle Wilson brother would behave so badly onstage that the group would exile him for weeks or months at a time, instructing him not to return until he could walk a straight line and play a simple four/four rhythm without falling over. Pared down to only Mike, Al, and Bruce, the stage group would be forced to drag Brian out onto the road in order to get at least one Wilson brother onstage. The fact that the group’s onetime leader could barely hit the piano keys in time to the music, let alone be bothered to play the correct chords, didn’t seem to matter. (“I play in the key of BW,” he shrugged one night to a roadie.) When the houselights dimmed and the arena filled with the wistful opening chords of “California Girls,” the shared dream the song evoked seemed to overwhelm whatever familiar faces or spirit might have been absent onstage.

  At a show in St. Paul, Minnesota, in the early fall of 1981, the crowd of high school kids and ruddy-faced young families roared happily the moment the Beach Boys took the stage. Dennis wasn’t there either that night, and with only three original members, plus Bruce, to carry the load, the band resembled a wounded duck in flight. Mike—dressed in his now-standard costume of white tennis clothes and a truck driver’s cap—paced the stage wildly. And though Brian was immensely overweight and visibly unhappy, Mike seemed to relish directing the spotlight at him—“…and now we’re gonna hear it from my cuz, Brian Wilson, the man who wrote ‘God Only Knows’ waaay back in that faraway land called the 1960s…”—time and again prompting the overwrought man to turn his cracked, ruined voice to the looping, soaring melodies he’d long since surrendered to Carl. Finally, as the band came back for its encores for “Good Vibrations,” Brian only made it through the first two lines before calling out, sadly: “Help me on this one, guys, please help me now, I can’t…”

  Beyond the footlights, the beach balls continued to fly and the chain of bunny-hoppers twined up and down the aisles, easily a thousand people strong and all of them bouncing happily to the dreamy, joyful music Brian Wilson had written but no longer had the ability to sing.

  As they reached the twentieth anniversary of the Labor Day weekend that marked the beginning of the group that became the Beach Boys, the creative dissolution visible on stage and audible on record radiated into their increasingly shattered lives offstage. Brian had started a relationship and then moved into a house in the Pacific Palisades with Carolyn Williams, a nurse he had met during his last stay in the mental hospital. She was, by all accounts, a sweet, well-intentioned woman. But even given her professional training, Carolyn was overwhelmed by the severity of her man’s dysfunction and the strength of his desire to warp his tortured consciousness. In this he found ready companionship, along with a seemingly bottomless supply of cocaine and vodka, in Dennis. Often Dennis would come over to see Brian, luring him to the music room with a sack of McDonald’s hamburgers and a few grams of cocaine.

  One tape from the era reveals the brothers switching off between piano and Hammond organ, collaborating on a sad, drifting spiritual-style tune called “Oh, Lord,” then pounding out a spirited rendition of Brian’s “Peter Gunn”–style stomper, “City Blues.” As the night wears on and the pile of cocaine begins to shrink, the mood turns more manic. Song fragments trail on forever, leading nowhere except the same “Heart and Soul”–style changes, with a few words or a phrase scatted over the top. At one point they play the same four chords together, over and over, while Brian sings lustily: “Oh, oh, I feel so fine/I feel so fiiiine today, I feel so fiiiine…” It’s a nonsense song, the sort of thing you or I could write merely by putting our hands on the piano keys and playing the most basic chords in the rock ’n’ roll songbook. But after a minute or so a coked-to-the-eyeballs Brian stops and exclaims loudly, “Whoa! Wow! You were really getting into that! I was feelin’ so good on the organ!” The writer and producer of Pet Sounds, the creator of some of the rock era’s most elaborately orchestrated music, is so thrilled by the four chords he’s managed to string together that he’s screaming at the top of his lungs. “I made that song up! I made it up! I was so into it, I can’t believe it!”

  True enough, the distance Brian had come was hard to believe.

  “Everything I am or ever will be is in the music,” Dennis had said once. “If you want to know me, just listen.” When the Beach Boys sent him away, he would make occasional attempts to clean up, checking into detox programs and swearing that he was going to see it through. But he never could find the resolve to stick with it, and soon he’d be back on the streets of Venice again, wandering from liquor store to bar to crash pad. And though he would beg the others to let him return to the group, once Dennis was back on the road, he’d soon start drinking again, sometimes collapsing onstage, other times picking fights with Mike, who made no secret of his contempt for his cousin’s inability to control his own appetites. That Dennis was also going out of his way to share his drugs and booze with Brian only made things worse.

  Carl came back to the Beach Boys in time for their summer tour in 1982 and just in time to see Capitol’s “Beach Boys Medley,” a Frankensteinian stitching together of original “Good Vibrations,” “Surfin’ Safari,” “Help Me, Rhonda,” “I Get Around,” and “Shut Down” sounds into one 4:08-long mess. And though the “medley” (which was actually one in a chain of similarly awful, record company–created mash-ups to hit the charts in the early eighties) was all but unlistenable, it only just missed Billboard ’s Top Ten (peaking at number twelve), thereby becoming the group’s biggest hit since “Rock ’n’ Roll Music” hit the top five in 1976.

  If the success of the “Medley” enhanced the group’s income or brought more crowds into the shows
, it did nothing to alter the darkening relationships within the band, to say nothing of the accelerating emotional and physical declines of both Brian and Dennis. And while the Beach Boys continued to tour and had in fact helped pioneer the lucrative double-billing of major league baseball games and rock shows (thereby becoming a sort of official companion to America’s pastime), their real lives had taken on a surreal darkness that was nothing short of cinematic. And then some.

  One night at the Universal Amphitheater, the usual backstage tension between Mike and Dennis followed them onstage, where an off-mike comment from Mike enraged Dennis so much that he kicked over his drums and flew off the riser at the group’s lead singer, spurring a fistfight that raged in full view of the increasingly horrified arena. “They had security usher Dennis offstage and lock him into a closet so he wouldn’t come back,” Trish Campo recalls. Fortunately, they still had enough percussionists onstage to have one ready to jump into Dennis’s seat for the rest of the show. Eventually the group made it a policy to keep the cousins apart, using roadies to make sure Mike and Dennis stayed out of one another’s sight until the moment the show began. Even then they were steered to separate doors on separate sides of the stage. And just when the cousins’ relationship had fallen to its nadir, Dennis’s teenaged daughter Jennifer introduced him to a girlfriend named Shawn. She wasn’t quite twenty then, this short, pug-nosed blonde with the dimples and ready smile. But there was something very familiar about her face—the angular shape of her jaw, the thin aqualine nose—and when Dennis learned her last name was Love, he thought back to the little-known paternity case Mike had faced in the mid-1960s. The child in question belonged to a twenty-two-year-old secretary with whom Mike had apparently spent some quality time. And though the comparatively unsophisticated blood tests of the era indicated that Mike could be the girl’s father, a judge ruled that the woman had failed to prove her claim “by a preponderance of the evidence.” Whatever that means. Nevertheless, Mike paid out $9,500 to get the woman to renounce any future claims that might be made on behalf of the child, and everyone went on with their separate lives. Except for baby Shawn, who was only starting hers.