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

by Peter Ames Carlin

  But was that his way of distancing himself from the record? Not that Imagination didn’t have its charms. Some of the new songs were lovely, and “Happy Days,” the two-part suite with movements contrasting Brian’s bad old life with his easygoing new one, was structurally daring and, in its second half, ebullient and sweet. The prominent viola on the new version of “Keep an Eye on Summer” was inspired, as was the elegant woodwinds arrangement on “She Says That She Needs Me,” a song that also meandered from section to section in ways unheard of in most pop tunes. The complicated tumble of vocals that trace the downward chord progression on “Cry” could raise the hairs on the back of your neck. And Brian’s multitracked vocals sounded like the aural equivalent of buttercream frosting—thick, sweet, and delicious. Throughout, he sounded relaxed, focused, and emotionally present: a man whose head might still get lost in the clouds, but whose feet were now rooted firmly on the earth.

  Or maybe that was just more of Joe’s sonic airbrushing. For many listeners who had come to associate Brian’s best work with his most idiosyncratic sounds and notions, Imagination bore many distressing signs. The real Brian Wilson would never homogenize his music to sound exactly like every other song on the radio, they complained. For even if he didn’t mind spinning reporters with meaningless happy talk, you could always tell a real Brian Wilson song by the piercing, often uncomfortable honesty he injected into its grooves. How could you know that, then hear the lite-metal “Dream Angel” (“We can fly forever, never wonderin’ why!”) and even imagine that it emerged willingly from the same man?

  Maybe it would have felt different if Imagination had actually scaled the charts. Instead, the album stalled in the number eighty-eight spot, while the lead single, “Your Imagination,” only just grazed the adult contemporary Top Twenty before slipping back into obscurity. With a veritable platoon of writers shuttling in and out, some of them finding Brian in a less-than-cheerful mood, the buzz in some corners of the media took on the familiar gothic ring. A blistering, if desperately overheated, exposé in Britain’s pop culture magazine Uncut called on a vast array of anonymous sources to describe the “predicament” Brian had landed in, “relinquishing” his hard-won liberty to a “blonde phantom, shades of [Gloria] Swanson in Sunset Boulevard.”

  Awash in rumor and unsourced accusations, illustrated with a rich variety of extremely unflattering photographs, the Uncut story set the standard for brutality-masquerading-as-concern. Others would follow, many of them written by people who found Brian’s two-word answers, occasional memory lapses, and flights into fantasy to be evidence of the misery being inflicted upon him. “I was discomfited for days afterwards about having been a part of a process that I cannot believe he enjoys,” the Guardian’s Ginny Dougary wrote after her audience with the troubled wizard. “And I wonder whether, even now, Wilson is being leaned on to conform to other people’s demands.”

  Only a few years earlier, Mike had been weeping with rage on A Current Affair, wishing death upon the man who he said had kidnapped his defenseless cousin. “I’d like to kill him with my bare hands!” he snarled. But by 1997, Mike had found a new malefactor, hinting darkly to a hotel ballroom full of onlookers at the Rock ’n’ Roll Fantasy Camp in Miami’s South Beach that while all the Beach Boys would love to reunite, “Brian usually has someone in his life who tells him what to do. And now that person kinda wants to keep him away from us. I don’t know why. You’d have to ask her, I guess.” Actually, Brian was the one who rolled his eyes when asked if he even considered himself a Beach Boy anymore. “No,” he said. “Maybe a little bit. But as far as a new album, I don’t know. I don’t really know for sure if I even want to do one.” Nevertheless, observers from every corner of Brian’s life continued to insist that he was being bullied and abused by, well, someone. A year later, another unnamed source in the Uncut story fingered Joe Thomas, asserting that “Brian is too scared, and too lazy, to say ‘Fuck you.’” Or maybe he was just saying it to the wrong people or in the wrong ways.

  At first Brian didn’t want to do any concerts. “He’d been told for years how bad he was onstage,” Melinda says. And it became a self-fulfilling prophecy, particularly at the one-off show they did in a theater in St. Charles during the spring of 1998. It was a short concert, just a handful of Beach Boys songs and a few selections from Imagination performed with an all-star backing band (Bruce Johnston, Christopher Cross, the Eagles’ Timothy B. Schmit), mostly for the benefit of the video cameras. And though the audience gave him a standing ovation the moment he walked onstage, Brian was so terrified that he could barely open his mouth. Much of the performance seen and heard on the resulting promotional video was recorded later, with the close-ups captured after the audience had left the building—and even those vocals were overdubbed a few days later in the studio. “He’s just a shy kind of guy,” Melinda says. “But I was pushing him to tour because he never really got to realize the impact that his music had on people. I just felt he needed to go out and see how much people loved him, because he didn’t know.”

  Once the Imagination publicity had run its course, Melinda and Joe began putting together the infrastructure for a full-fledged solo tour. Joe recruited a few of his Chicago-based musicians, while Melinda called on some of the Los Angeles people Brian had expressed an interest in playing with. Primary among these was the Wondermints, the avant-pop group Darian Sahanaja had gone on to form. Brian had met the group in 1995 at a tribute show for Brian where they performed a set of his more obscure songs. Andy Paley had brought Brian to the show, slating him for a surprise appearance at the end of the night. So Brian had been sitting backstage during the acts, nervously checking his watch, when the Wondermints struck up “This Whole World,” the sound of which caused Brian’s ears to perk up: “Whoa,” he cried. “Who’s THAT? That sounds great!” When he met the group later, he nodded toward them and said to Andy, “If I’d had those guys in ’67, I could have taken Smile out on the road!” So when it was time for him to actually hit the road with a new band, Melinda called to see if Darian and his bandmates might be interested in helping out. Darian, Nick Walusko, and Mike D’Amico signed on, along with Darian’s friend and occasional utility Wondermint Probyn Gregory, and in January 1999 they flew to Brian’s house in Illinois to start rehearsing.

  Seasoned Beach Boys sideman Jeff Foskett was there too, playing guitar and handling the high falsettos, along with singer/multi-instrumentalist Scott Bennett, reed player Paul Mertens, bassist Bob Lizik, drummer Todd Sucherman, and background singer Taylor Mills, the lone woman in the outfit. And while Brian stayed out in Los Angeles, the musicians worked together in his basement recording studio to come up with stage arrangements for their leader’s songs. Joe Thomas served as bandleader and had some strong feelings about how Brian’s classic songs might be enhanced for a modern audience. “He had a lot of ideas,” Darian recalls. “He played the piano, so he loved embellishing things. Lots of little riffs. Basically, he wanted the show to sound like Imagination.” None of this sounded quite right to Darian, who recalls that he reached a breaking point when Joe instructed the rhythm section to play “Caroline, No” as a “sexy, Sade kind of thing.” Darian complained to his manager that night, saying he was considering calling it quits. “And apparently he called Melinda, who called right over to Joe and told him that unless the Wondermints were happy, Brian wasn’t going to come out to work on the show.” The next morning’s rehearsal began with a brief confrontation between Joe and Darian, but they soon agreed to find a way to make it work. “It was almost as if I’d gained some respect,” Darian says, recalling how from that point onward, Joe made a point of asking for his feedback.

  When Brian finally did fly in to join the group, Darian paid careful attention to his responses. “When liberties were taken, his response would be, ‘Uh, cool.’ Or he wouldn’t respond at all, so you’d have to ask, and he’d say, ‘I think it sounds, uh, good.’ But as soon as we did a song close to his original arrangement, he’d go nuts
: ‘Wow! Outtasite!’ And then he’d want to hear it again. And that made perfect sense to me, because in my mind, Brian has always been about doing parts, and how the parts come together and create this gorgeous feeling. He’s always hid behind this wall of sound. That’s what he wants…the strength came in the overall ensemble.”

  The rehearsals continued for the next few weeks, leading up to the tour’s scheduled kickoff in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on March 9. The band was certainly ready, but once again, Brian was clearly terrified. “He was absolutely gray,” Darian recalls. When the time came to board the bus for the long drive to Michigan, a blizzard struck the Midwest. The bus turned out to be a regular passenger bus rather than the luxe touring bus most bands travel in, and to make things even less pleasant, its heater was broken. “We were all trying to keep warm, and Mike D’Amico was sick, so we were trying to keep him bundled up. And Brian was in a really bad way—cold and miserable and just frightened beyond belief.”

  The group finally got to Ann Arbor, where an eager audience awaited at the 1,700-capacity Michigan Theater. The show began with a twenty-three-minute video retelling of Brian’s musical and personal past. Pictures of Dennis and Carl incited huge ovations, as did shots of the Pet Sounds album and, even louder, a picture of Frank Holmes’s Smile artwork. The only sour note was the resounding boo that echoed through the hall when Mike’s face filled the screen. But that was long forgotten by the time the film climaxed in a series of still photos that illustrated audio of the young Brian leading a studio full of musicians through “The Little Girl I Once Knew,” the avant-pop single that signaled the start of the Pet Sounds era. The sound of one take breaking down led to another count-off (“Here we go!”), and that led, incredibly, to the sound of the live band playing the song’s opening bars. When the lights came up, Brian was at center stage, dressed all in black and sitting stoically behind an electric keyboard, surrounded by an eleven-piece band. “We met when she was younger, annnnnd I had no eyes for her…” And the crowd went berserk.

  It was hard to pick out Brian’s voice in the group harmonies on “She’s Not…,” particularly because he was singing the midrange notes rather than the falsetto. But he took a definite, if shaky, lead on “This Whole World” and then another one on “Don’t Worry, Baby,” and then the show started to roll. “I was constantly looking over thinking, ‘Okay, this is where he bolts!’” Darian says. In fact, the band had already assured Brian that he could leave whenever he felt overwhelmed—they’d just keep right on playing until he was ready to come back out. “And I figured ‘’Til I Die’ would do it; he’d be gone. But he stayed, and then we got through the whole show.” The set list touched all of the eras in Brian’s career, including six selections from Pet Sounds (including both instrumentals), two from Sunflower, a few ’70s songs (including “Back Home”), three songs from Imagination, and an array of the more interesting, if lesser-heard, songs from the early days (“All Summer Long,” “Kiss Me Baby,” and so on). And though Brian barely touched his keyboard, and even if his voice would occasionally wander away from the notes he was intending to hit, he served as the center of the entire two-hour-plus show, singing lead on each of the twenty-seven songs, rattling off introductions, and even cracking a joke or two. Darian recalls, “I remember thinking, ‘Wow! He did it!’ It didn’t matter if the show was any good, he didn’t bolt! And that was huge.”

  The first tour was actually just four dates in the Midwest. But the band reconvened in June for a six-stop swing through the Northeast, then flew to Japan—another hotbed of Beach Boys fans—for a night in Osaka and then a three-night stand in Tokyo. Those dates became another turning point when Joe Thomas, who didn’t like to fly, chose not to make the trip. He was already pressuring Brian to start work on a new album, but according to Melinda, the joys of performance had already turned Brian’s head away from the studio. “It gave him so much confidence. He’d get offstage and say, ‘I got ten standing ovations!’ After all those years, he still had no idea how people felt about his music.” And though he’d valued Joe’s support during the making of Imagination and during the first tour, not having him around in Japan felt surprisingly okay, too. “We were having our preshow circle, where we each say something,” one band member remembers. “It was the first show in Tokyo, I think, the second night in Japan. And Brian said, ‘Hey, not having Joe around last night worked out okay! I think we’re gonna keep on rolling without him for a while.’” They never saw Joe again. But the band did indeed keep rolling, first with a nine-show swing down the West Coast in the fall, then ending the year (and the century) with a New Year’s Eve show at the Redondo Beach Performing Arts Center.

  As surprising as it was to see Brian performing entire shows onstage and eventually seeming relaxed and even happy up there, it was even more bracing to see the fruit of his career presented in such a serious way. For more than two decades, the Beach Boys had played Brian’s music as if it were the sound track to an All-American pep rally, complete with cheerleaders, flags, and fireworks. But as its inside-the-recording-studio opening made clear, Brian’s show was entirely about the music and the warm, adventurous spirit that linked “Fun, Fun, Fun” to “Let’s Go Away for Awhile” and “Love and Mercy.” As Dave Hoekstra wrote for the Los Angeles Times: “At the end of the evening Wilson stood triumphant on the stage—a man who has emerged from his darkest, most paralyzing blue period to again celebrate his music—and the human spirit—for his fans.”

  Energized by the experience, Brian began to consider even more daring ideas. The crowd had loved the Pet Sounds songs so much—they even gave standing ovations to the two instrumentals—that Melinda, Brian, and his managers talked again of performing the entire album onstage. Certainly this band wouldn’t feel intimidated by the album’s intricate arrangements, the many exotic instruments, and the breakneck shifts in rhythm and tone. They’d already played half of the album, for one thing. And this time around they could do themselves one better, hiring an orchestra to add elegance and power to the presentation. And if anyone in the group doubted that Brian was capable of singing the songs he’d written, they kept their doubts to themselves. This was Brian’s music, his legacy, his life. As far as this band was concerned, anything he wanted to make of it was exactly the right thing to do.

  The Pet Sounds tour traveled the United States in the summer of 2000, splitting the evening into four parts: First came an opening orchestral suite of Brian’s music, as arranged by Van Dyke Parks; then came an hour-long set of Brian’s hits and rarities, performed by the band without the orchestra; then the band and orchestra would team up on Pet Sounds, climaxing with the bonus single, “Good Vibrations.” After that, the band would come back for a mini-set of big hits, ending with Brian’s near-solo rendition of “Love and Mercy,” the song from his 1988 solo album that had become his regular show closer. The tour traveled abroad in 2002, and a four-night stand at London’s Royal Festival Hall attracted sellout crowds that included the glittering likes of Elvis Costello, Roger Daltrey, Eric Clapton, and Paul McCartney. Wrote David Sinclair in the Times of London: “Such was the emotional fervor generated by the performance that a substantial section of the audience rewarded him with a standing ovation after every single number.”

  If Brian had taken control over his music in the last years of the 1990s, Mike was doing his best to solidify his control over the Beach Boys. With Carl gone, he had also moved to rid the band of Al Jardine, his perpetual annoyance for the past decade. Exactly what led to the split, who did what to whom and why, and the legality of it vis-à-vis the group’s long-standing corporate structure, is far too conflicted, confusing, and tied up in litigation to explain in detail. Ultimately, Mike ended up making a deal with the Beach Boys’ corporate parent, Brother Records Inc. (BRI, one of whose owners continues to be Al Jardine), for the right to tour under the name the Beach Boys. Which is precisely what he did, performing the group’s biggest hits with Bruce Johnston joining him on the stage-front keyboard while t
he rest of the vocal and instrumental parts were handled by a rotating band of hired hands. Al stewed on this for a while, then set up his own alternative Beach Boys act, joining with Brian’s daughters Carnie and Wendy, his own sons Matt and Adam, and longtime sidemen Billy Hinsche, Ed Carter, and Bobby Figueroa in a group he called the Beach Boys’ Family and Friends. Unfortunately, Al had neglected to secure a license from BRI, so another storm of litigation ensued, mostly revolving around Al’s use of the words beach and boys in such close proximity. The notion of “friends” and “family” didn’t enter into the discussion, but that had been the case for a long time.

  Mike’s contract with BRI allowed him to use the Beach Boys name for the time being; but with one century ending and the vast future sprawling ahead, he had started to think in terms of history and his place in it. Mike’s 1992 lawsuit for song copyrights had been fueled in part by his desire for fair and equitable credit for what the Beach Boys had achieved artistically. And when he was interviewed a few years later for 1998’s Endless Harmony, the group’s official documentary, Mike argued aggressively for his importance in the Brian-Mike songwriting team and thus in the creative development of the Beach Boys. “Ultimately, I think the Beach Boys meant so much to so many people because of the positivity,” he declared to filmmaker Alan Boyd. “And that was me. Brian was melancholy. I was Mr. Positive Thinker.” Mike’s assertion had a whiff of truth to it, particularly when it came to the cousins’ public personalities. But Brian’s music has rarely been dirgelike (even the saddest songs on Pet Sounds sounded ecstatic), and songs he wrote solo or with other collaborators were (and continue to be) upbeat to the point of giddiness. (“…And when I go anywhere, I see love, I see love, I see love…” he wrote in his solo 1970 composition “This Whole World.”)