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

by Peter Ames Carlin

  It was strange and sad and almost entirely soul-killing, even when viewed from a distance. And it was also what Brian wanted. Or maybe not what he wanted as much as what he needed. For unless he had that stern authority figure telling him when to wake up, what to do, and then when to stop doing it so he could go to bed, nothing else in the world made sense. That externalized authority was like gravity to him, keeping his feet on the earth, giving him something to push up against. Brian might say that he hated it, and he certainly enjoyed finding subtle new ways to rebel against it. But even while he grumbled and moaned, he did what he had to do to make sure it was always there, keeping him from drifting off into outer space. So Brian kept Landy’s beeper clipped to his belt. He posed for publicity pictures showing the two of them pretending to ride surfboards, and he didn’t complain when Landy told one reporter that they had become, as he put it, “partners in life.” Landy continued: “We’ve exchanged names. He’s Brian Landy Wilson and I’m Eugene Wilson Landy.”

  Landy apparently didn’t notice how much like Invasion of the Body Snatchers that sounded. True enough, his particular form of treatment had dictated that he assume control over virtually every aspect of Brian’s life. But even that arrangement did not necessitate becoming his patient’s professional and artistic partner, let alone having the power to control the man’s artistic output. Or, for that matter, becoming his financial partner and being richly compensated as a result. For Landy had obviously never lost his appetite for a life bathed in the spotlight. And now that he held the reins to one of popular music’s most sought-after living legends, he was going to hold on with the sort of white-knuckled intensity that hadn’t been seen since Murry Wilson had worked his magic during the “Help Me, Rhonda” session twenty years ago.

  No wonder Landy referred so constantly to the abuses and manipulations levied by Murry Wilson. But the ferocity of the psychologist’s denunciations only put the similarities between biological father and his therapeutic heir into higher relief. Both were pugnacious go-getters; both had long cultivated showbiz dreams that bore fruit only through the talents of Brian Wilson. It’s also safe to say that both Murry and Landy loved Brian in their way. And Brian would never deny that they had both fulfilled an important role in his life. “I loved my dad because he knew where it was at. He had that competitive spirit which really blew my mind,” he said during the spring of 1998. A few months later, Brian confessed to National Public Radio’s Terry Gross that he still thought fondly of Landy. “Yeah, I miss him. I miss his personality.”

  It was an amazing admission, but not really all that surprising. For just as the younger Brian had depended on his father to fend off the Capitol Records execs and keep his own feet to the fire, the middle-aged artist relied on Landy to keep him sequestered from the more troubling members of his family (virtually everyone, now that you mention it), the Beach Boys organization, and whoever else made him feel uncomfortable. Landy’s aggressive insistence sparked Brian’s creativity, just as Murry’s perpetual demands got him going back in the early ’60s. Landy also put the spurs to Brian’s athletic ambition, setting up a rigid schedule of workouts that transformed Brian’s body. And once Brian dropped weight, Landy sent him to get his face touched up surgically in order to revive the boyishly handsome look of his youth. Now when Brian looked in the mirror, he took pride in his appearance, and rightfully so: He hadn’t looked this good since he was twenty-two.

  “People say that Dr. Landy runs my life, but the truth is, I’m in charge,” Brian wrote in a statement to the Los Angeles Times a few years later. And in a weird way he was telling the truth: As passive as Brian could be, he had also maneuvered Landy into being precisely the same father figure whose loss had so devastated him. But just because Brian craved the relationship still didn’t make it a healthy one.

  Once The Beach Boys was done, and especially after it failed to light the charts on fire, Landy and Brian set out to start his solo career. Sensing that Brian would work better with a collaborator, Landy set him up in 1986 with Gary Usher, the guy who had knocked on the Wilsons’ door back in late 1961 and gone on to cowrite “409,” “In My Room,” and a handful of Brian’s other early hits. The ever-suspicious Murry had shoved Usher aside before he and Brian could form a lasting professional bond, and though Usher had gone on to become a prominent record producer (working with the Byrds and the Surfaris, among others), they hadn’t seen one another in many years. Still, it didn’t take Brian and Gary long to become reacquainted, and soon they hunkered down in Usher’s studio, writing songs and recording demos, which they then began to sculpt into more sophisticated master tapes. And they were having a ball, according to Usher’s account (subsequently published in book form as The Wilson Project by the Australian writer Stephen J. McParland), until the interference started.

  The way Landy’s system worked, Brian never went anywhere without one of his minders—usually Kevin Leslie, whose muscular physique and mane of blond hair earned him the nickname “the Surf Nazi” from one of Brian’s friends. Scott Steinberg or Landy’s twenty-two-year-old son, Evan, also became regular companions. Most often they would sit silently in the corner, observing and taking notes. But then the psychologist began to make his presence known, first by demanding that Brian and Gary work on one song instead of another, then by sending Brian in with new lyrics written by Landy and/or his live-in girlfriend, Alexandra. Unfortunately, Landy’s actual poetic sensibility was quite a bit shakier than his self-confidence, and his words tended to revolve around sentimental love tales or psychobabble that was as dull as it was obvious. “In my car/I’m captain of my destiny…/Pretty baby, come cruise with me” went one typical chorus.

  Actually, Landy preferred to steer Brian’s destiny, particularly when it came to the women he cruised with. All of which became evident to Melinda Ledbetter the day she met the shy rock star on the sales floor of Martin Cadillac, where she was working in 1986. He had come with Landy in search of a new car, and once the blonde former model pointed out a town car nearby, Brian decided to buy it on the spot. “It was the first car I showed him,” she says. “This brown Seville, and it was just ugly.” They got to talking back in the sales office, and Brian was soon telling his new friend about his brother Dennis and how two years had passed since he’d drowned, but that still didn’t change how terribly upset he was about it. “My first impression was that he was someone who was troubled,” she says. A couple of days later, Landy called Melinda at work to ask if she might want to go out on a date with Brian. Understandably, being asked out by a man’s therapist struck Melinda as a trifle bizarre. Nevertheless, she agreed to the date, and a few nights later Brian came to pick her up at the apartment complex where she was living. And though he had apparently forgotten the exact number of her apartment—Melinda realized he’d arrived when she noticed that he was standing in the middle of the building’s courtyard shouting her name—they were soon in the back of a black stretch limo, cruising up through the Hollywood Hills to the Universal Amphitheater to see the Moody Blues perform. And the more they talked, the more she became enamored of Brian. “He was so different from anyone that I’d ever met. Just the sweetest, most naive guy—so honest and sincere.”

  And so closely monitored. In addition to the two attendants who were accompanying the couple, Landy himself called in every hour or so to hear the latest on how it was going. All of which struck Melinda as a bit unsettling. But what really mattered to her was that the open, soft glow in Brian’s blue eyes had warmed her heart. He called back a few days later, and they went out again. And soon they were fast friends, talking on the phone and going out to dinner or to the movies on a fairly regular basis. But they were never alone.

  If Brian had grown resigned to Landy’s omnipresence in his life, he couldn’t always feign enthusiasm for it, particularly when it came to his music. As Gary Usher noticed, whenever Landy decided to take over writing lyrics for a particular song, Brian’s interest would diminish almost immediately. And just
as he had complained about Murry’s overbearing ways in 1961 and 1962, Brian spoke often to Usher (when Kevin Leslie was out of the room) about how much he wanted to break free of Landy’s grasp. “I live in a strange hell,” Brian reportedly said. “I’m a prisoner and I have no hope of escaping.” Usher also described Brian’s tales of feeling so trapped when he woke up in the morning that he would scream into his pillow until his voice was too raw to talk. He also claimed to have attempted suicide in the summer of 1985, diving into the ocean and swimming straight out to sea until one of Landy’s men chased him down and pulled him back to shore.

  And yet Brian persevered, and eventually one of the Wilson/Usher songs, “Let’s Go to Heaven in My Car,” ended up in the sound track of the Police Academy 3 movie. But when Seymour Stein, the president of Sire Records, saw Brian induct Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame in early 1987 (singing an a cappella version of “On Broadway”) and signed Brian to a solo contract, he insisted that he be allowed to appoint his own coproducer to help Brian stay organized and on-task. Landy accepted Stein’s conditions—particularly since Stein agreed to let him take an executive producer’s credit, too—and Stein tapped staff producer Andy Paley, a multi-instrumentalist/producer who had been a Brian fanatic since his grade school days in Boston. Later he’d formed the Paley Brothers with his brother, Jonathan, and recorded an album at Brother Studios in the mid-1970s. Ten years later Paley had become a full-time producer, working on albums for artists ranging from Patti Smith to Jerry Lee Lewis. But when Stein called to tell the Boston-based musician about his new opportunity in California, Paley didn’t hesitate. He jumped on an airplane for the coast and was soon installed in an apartment building in Burbank, from which he commuted every day to Brian’s house in Malibu to help his hero write and record a batch of new songs. “We started writing pretty much right away,” Paley recalls. “Brian’s house was right on the water, and the atmosphere was pretty cool. Except that Landy was checking me out, trying to use me as someone he could manipulate to help him get stuff out of the record company.”

  Generally, Paley would get to Malibu somewhere between 9:00 and 10:00 in the morning, usually finding Brian drinking tea out on his porch. They’d go running, then sit in the hot tub for a while and talk. Like the work he’d done with Tony Asher and Van Dyke Parks, Brian’s work with Paley sprang largely out of conversations they’d have about whatever was on their minds at the time. “My job was to kick him in the ass and get him going,” Paley says. “It was difficult because he was medicated, and that slowed him down a bit. He was also in mid-career and didn’t have anything to prove anymore.” So they’d shoot the breeze or sometimes go off to see a movie just for a change of pace. Even more often they would sit in a quiet room and meditate together, both of them chasing the elusive sparks of inspiration that might lead to a song. Often, Paley would show up with a riff or a verse and play it for Brian, asking what he thought of it—did he think he could come up with a bridge or a chorus? If Brian heard something that excited him, he’d jump onto the piano bench and start pounding away, and a few minutes later they’d have the rough outline for a song.

  Such moments were often punctuated by strange intrusions by Landy or his minions swooping in to maneuver Brian into doing whatever the doctor wanted. Paley recounts one vocal session where Brian’s minder interrupted a take to tell Brian that he was singing the wrong words. “The guy was saying something like, ‘Brian, don’t you think the lyrics would be better if Alexandra fixed them?’ And Brian said, ‘No, I like them the way they are.’ Then the guy’s like, ‘Well, what did you tell me last night when I said you could have that milkshake if you switched the lyrics?’ And then Brian said, ‘Oh, okay. The new lyrics are better than the old ones.’”

  When Landy was determined to get his way, the team of producers and engineers in the studio had to come up with subterfuges to keep him from undermining Brian’s work. At one point they were working on “Meet Me in My Dreams Tonight,” a song Brian had written with Paley. But Landy had composed another set of lyrics to the tune—something about experiencing a “love attack,” Paley recalls—and ordered Brian to sing the song again using the second set of words. Landy had forbidden the engineers from even mixing the original “Meet Me in My Dreams,” but when he flew to Hawaii one morning for a vacation, they lured the day’s bodyguard out of the studio for a Ping-Pong game, mixing the original lyrics into the tune when he was down the hall. Once that version made the rounds of the executives at Sire, Landy’s “love attack” was never heard from again.

  One of the biggest struggles involved the Smile-like suite that Lenny Waronker, Sire’s secondmost senior executive, had asked Brian to prepare for the album. A longtime fan of Brian’s more artistically ambitious work, Waronker was particularly eager to see Brian complete at least one new example of the extended, modular style of recording that had represented the step beyond Pet Sounds and “Good Vibrations.” Brian had been cool on the idea at first, but he liked the name Waronker had suggested—“Rio Grande,” from the movie of the same name—and spent the next few days with Paley composing a few new pieces and stringing together a bunch of previously unrelated bits into an impressionistic frontier-style narrative. They were nearly done writing when Landy walked in with a new set of lyrics that revised the piece into a psychology-themed epic called “Life’s Suite.” But even if Brian couldn’t muster the strength to tell Landy to back off, Waronker—who was coproducing the “Rio Grande” sessions—rejected Landy’s “Life’s Suite” lyrics out of hand. Once again, Landy grew apoplectic, but Waronker would have none of it, and they completed the frontier-themed piece as composed by Brian and Paley.

  Landy found other ways to assert his control over the recording process, often moving sessions from one studio to another at the last minute and then confiscating all of the master tapes when they were done working. His helpers used the studio’s intercom system to eavesdrop on sessions when they were in another room—though the engineering crew soon figured this out and thus stopped using the intercoms. Often, Landy’s meetings with Stein, Waronker, or Russ Titelman (an old friend of Brian’s who had gone on to become an influential producer and was now coproducing several tracks on the album) devolved into screaming matches, with the pugnacious psychologist bellowing the loudest. Landy’s fits weren’t only about significant artistic decisions: One magazine article from the era portrayed the engaging sight of Landy pitching a major fit when Sire arranged for him to be met at the airport by a Lincoln Town Car rather than the stretch limousine he had been expecting.

  “Anything good we got out of those sessions was done totally on stolen time,” Paley says. “Landy was always checking in, phoning in directions, basically never wanting to give Brian any breathing room. It was a hassle and many times heartbreaking because we’d do something good, finally, and then Landy would swoop in and dive-bomb it.” But when they did have peace in the studio, Brian could work with amazing speed and precision, often dreaming up and singing complex, multipart vocal arrangements while standing alone at the microphone. When Titelman requested a revision to the lyrics of “Melt Away” in midsession, Brian stepped away from the microphone and paced across the studio floor, muttering, “I’m gonna get it, I’m gonna get it, I’m gonna get it.” About a minute later, he put the headphones back on and sang a new line—“I feel just like an island/Until I see you smilin’”—that so perfectly fit the mood and meter of the song that Paley could only gape with wonder. “He was under pressure, but what he came up with was just such a beautiful, cool twist.”

  The moments of creativity could be magical. But as Landy continued to do battle with the Sire Records team, most often using Brian as his cudgel, the recording process dragged on for more than a year. Star collaborators—Jeff Lynne, Lindsey Buckingham, and Terence Trent D’arby, among others—shuttled in and out. As time passed and the bills began to pile up, pressure from the record company only increased. Still, as Paley recalls, Bria
n’s sense of humor remained intact. Once, after they had taken one of their meditation retreats in a nearby studio, Brian turned to Paley and noted, “The only way this whole record is gonna work out is with medication and meditation.” On his way to the men’s room on another day, he noticed a group of young musicians hanging out in the lounge at the A&M studio and walked up to a pay phone near where they were sitting. After picking up the receiver, he pretended to listen quietly for a moment, then began to wail. “What? A plane crash? No! NO! Don’t tell me that! It can’t be true! Okay, bye-bye.” Brian hung up and walked to the bathroom without saying another word. When he came out a few minutes later, he approached the group of guys and shrugged apologetically: “You know, that was just a bogus call.” Paley watched the whole thing unfold from down the hall, barely able to contain his laughter. “The best part was, they had absolutely no idea who Brian was.”

  As the record finally neared completion in early 1988, Stein and Waronker made sure that everyone at Sire Records knew how vitally important the record was to them and to the company. Actually, their colleagues had already figured it out—both execs had been so wrapped up in the micro-details of Brian’s recording sessions that many of their other tasks had been left undone for months. But now that Brian Wilson, as the album was now called, was on its way, they made certain that every conceivable publicity tool would be wielded to maximum impact. A vast ad campaign was set into motion. The most elaborate promotion kits in the history of rock ’n’ roll—including lengthy historical essays by David Leaf, a step-by-step recounting of the album’s birth, a probing Q-and-A with the artist, and a detailed career-long discography—were mailed to virtually everyone in the entertainment media. Once again, word of a Brian Wilson comeback drew immediate attention from the nation’s biggest publications. And when advance tapes of the album went out to critics, the excitement became even more intense: This was no lame, latter-day Beach Boys album. Brian Wilson, the critics began to whisper to their friends and editors, was the real deal: melodic, poetic, full of extravagant arrangements and unexpected instruments. And, of course, wave after wave of those beautiful harmonies. Titelman was going around calling it Pet Sounds ’88, and to everyone who had heard the album, even that assertion didn’t seem terribly outlandish.