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

by Peter Ames Carlin

  Mike’s desire to revise the group’s history could be viewed even more clearly in the next major project, a two-part biographical drama aired on ABC in early 2000. Produced by actor, celebrity, and occasional onstage drummer John Stamos, the movie was intended to improve upon a 1990 TV miniseries, Summer Dreams, which had been based on Steven Gaines’s 1986 tell-all bio, Heroes and Villains: The True Story of the Beach Boys. That movie had been truly ridiculous, complete with absurd caricatures of the major characters (the Hawthorne-era Brian had been presented as a dork who wears loafers to the beach and can only gape in wonder as far cooler brother Dennis surfs, swains, and barks out ideas for hit songs), hippie-style wigs and beards that seemed to have been designed by J. Edgar Hoover, and cover versions of the group’s songs that hurt to listen to. An American Family, on the other hand, boasted the group’s original recordings (including unreleased rehearsals, outtakes, and the like), the expertise of group archivist and in-house filmmaker Alan Boyd (who earned a production credit), and creative input from all of the guys. But Mike enjoyed the closest relationship with Stamos; as a result, the film that aired, and particularly the section that touched on the more controversial aspects of the group’s history, appeared to reflect only his version of events.

  For instance, the personal devolution of the Brian character coincides almost exactly with the moment he stops writing with the Mike character. Virtually all of fake Brian’s non–Beach Boys friends and collaborators are portrayed as hippie goofballs, dope fiends, and/or thieves. Primary among these is the faux–Van Dyke Parks, a character whose name had to be changed at the last minute due to the savagely fictionalized nature of his portrayal. Here, the coauthor of Smile is seen mostly as a part-time drug dealer and full-time rip-off artist whose high-handed nonsense (composed for the movie by a subsequently aghast Beach Boys insider, who had yet to understand exactly how these scenes would go down) was every bit as ridiculous as fake Mike said it was. So how delicious it was for America to see fake Mike literally shred the lyrics while denouncing the pretentious freak’s work with Mike’s favorite put-down of the real Smile lyrics: “acid alliteration.” Those who were acquainted with history or had given even the most cursory listen to the commercially available “Good Vibrations” session tapes found it less appetizing to see Brian portrayed as being so helpless in the midst of recording that he needs Mike to tell him how to identify “the hooks” in his masterpiece single. And that was just one episode in a four-hour portrait of Mike as the more level-headed, yet equally creative, half of their hit-making duo.

  A few years later, Mike was steadfastly unapologetic about that chapter in Beach Boy history. Or anything. “A lot of times people see something in print that I’ve said and they say, ‘That Mike Love is an asshole!’ And I can appreciate where they’re coming from. But I look at it as humor. I have a sardonic sense of humor.”

  In December 2000, nearly a year after An American Family had aired, Brian was at a Christmas party at the house of band member Scott Bennett. He sat behind the piano, where he chatted with friends and teased out a few songs. He’s often most comfortable behind a piano, but there are always limits to Brian’s patience for anything; so when David Leaf’s wife, Eva, called out for Brian to play a verse of “Heroes and Villains,” everyone knew that she was wandering out onto very thin ice. Brian had not played the first song he’d written for Smile in public in more than thirty years. “If you had even mentioned it to him a month earlier, he would have freaked,” says Darian Sahanaja, who was astonished by what happened next.

  Brian shrugged. “Oh, I guess I’ll do it for you,” he said, hitting the rolling C chord that launches the first verse. “I been in this town so long that back in the city I been taken for lost and gone, and unknown for a long, long, time…” When he was done, the room broke into cheers. The reaction stunned Brian so much that he agreed to play the song again, this time with the band behind him, during his mini-set at a tribute concert for him being staged for the TNT cable channel’s cameras at Radio City Music Hall that next March. Brian had invited his Smile collaborator to see the show that night and had him take a bow—“Van Dyke’s here tonight!” Brian cried. “He’s here, and he’s happy!”—before the band launched into a driving rendition of the song, which prompted a standing ovation from the capacity crowd once it was done.

  Paul Simon played a song that night, too (a beautifully reenvisioned “Surfer Girl,” performed solo on acoustic guitar), and he was so delighted by Brian’s performance that he invited him to join his summer tour of arenas and sheds as a featured opening act. Sensing that Brian’s resistance to Smile was ebbing, Melinda and Darian appealed to him to incorporate more of the music into the summer shows. Didn’t he see the ovation Vince Gill, David Crosby, and Jimmy Webb got at Radio City when they sang “Surf’s Up”? And wasn’t it beautiful when the Boys’ Choir of Harlem opened the show with “Our Prayer”? Brian conceded both points, and soon both of those songs were in the set list. “It was like little baby steps all the way,” Darian says. “Then we were looking for something that could follow the Pet Sounds show, and one day we just looked at each other and said, ‘How about Smile?’” And the weird thing was, Brian didn’t say no.

  For years, the album had represented everything bad that had happened in his life. Intended as the pinnacle of his artistic/spiritual exploration, Smile had instead become his biggest disaster. Previously Brian had been able to take all of his inner turmoil and project it into music that was even more powerful than the darkness that had inspired it. But with Smile, the process went so sideways that the turmoil had not only overwhelmed the music but actually colonized it. From that point forward, Brian had never committed himself so entirely to any piece of music. And when he even got close—with “Ol’ Man River,” or “’Til I Die,” or even the “Mt. Vernon and Fairway” fairy tale on Holland—he had been made to feel precisely as rejected and brutalized as he had felt when Smile was withering on the vine. “It was too painful for him to talk about,” Melinda says. “Let’s just say you wrote a book thirty-eight years ago; it was the best thing you ever did; you figured it would change your career. You show it to your family, and they do nothing but belittle it. It was his baby, something he created, and they didn’t like it. But he wasn’t strong enough to say: ‘Okay, I’ll get someone else to sing it.’ It was devastating for him. How would you react when someone mentioned it to you?”

  Here’s what Brian said in 2001, only a few weeks before he played “Heroes and Villains” at Radio City. “I don’t really ever want to put out the Smile stuff. It’s just not appropriate music.” He was talking on the phone, peering out of the window and feeling antsy. “Look, Smile scared me. We were taking drugs at the time. It was a very druggish kind of trip. But it definitely had the feeling of America in it. Van Dyke is into that, and he did a great job. I know it’s a legendary thing. The Smile trip is a legend.”

  Therein lay yet another excellent reason to leave that particular box in the attic. So many articles had been written about the album; so many books, documentaries, and docudramas had pivoted off of the legend of the Great Lost Album. How much of that frantic myth-making would have happened if Smile had actually come out? Nearly four decades since it failed to materialize, you could almost argue that the album’s absence had made a larger impact on the world than the presence of any music album could ever make. All those writers and filmmakers; all the musicians who wrote and arranged their own songs to sound like Brian’s; all of the superfans who communed with one another on the Internet, obsessing over micro-details of “Surf’s Up” tracking outtakes as if they were the very fibers of the Shroud of Turin—none of them was really thinking about music. In their minds, Smile had become a metaphor for every other fragmented dream and broken ambition in the world. It was the song “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times” played out as conceptual art: a human installation on permanent display wherever Brian Wilson happened to be standing.

  But Brian had never in
tended to sacrifice his art in the pursuit of legend. “I didn’t want to think about it at all, but it was the only thing anyone wanted to talk about!” Brian said a few months into 2004. And though things had changed a lot by then, even the memory of the myth surrounding Smile made him visibly uncomfortable. He fidgeted, peered out of the window. His sentences became abrupt, his face impermeable. “I said I’d junked the tapes, ’cause I had a real negative attitude about it. I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. But that didn’t change anything. Which was a pain, actually. You want to move on, ya know?”

  And Brian wasn’t the only man feeling overshadowed by the failure of what so many perceived as his greatest achievement. “That was just a few months of work I did as a contract employee many, many years ago,” Van Dyke Parks said in 1998. He was having breakfast in a New York hotel, trying to be polite to his guest, but there was no mistaking the firmness in his voice. “Life goes on. I had other opportunities and I took them. Really, I think it means a lot more to other people than it does to me.” Which was understandable. For while Van Dyke had grown easily into the profile of a true gentleman of the southern fashion, complete with elaborate manners and a mischievous twinkle in his eye, he was also a hardworking musician, producer, and arranger who didn’t necessarily appreciate how his decades of work with the likes of the Byrds, Little Feat, U2, and Rufus Wainwright, among many others, plus his own albums and movie sound tracks, still resided in the shadow of something that didn’t quite get finished in 1967.

  Other currents swept just beneath the surface, too. Van Dyke had to resent seeing some of the songs he cowrote with Brian subsequently appearing without his name on them. And if Van Dyke felt guilty about abandoning his Smile partner just as the going was getting tough, he was also a hardworking professional who believed that Brian’s surrender, followed by decades of near-complete withdrawal, mounted to another kind of betrayal. All of those conflicting impulses had long since blended together into something so hard to confront that Van Dyke, just like Brian, just didn’t want to try anymore. Even in 2004, Van Dyke continued to distance himself from the legend that, he said one more time, meant so much more to everyone else.

  So, you might wonder, why did he keep his copies of Frank Holmes’s original Smile lithographs framed on the wall of his music room, hanging right above the keyboard where he works every single day? When asked this question, Van Dyke was silent for a moment. When he opened his mouth, his wife, Sally, interrupted him: “He’s got you there, Van.”

  At first the band figured they’d just play the existing Smile tracks onstage. Take what had been released and figure out how to present it as a live performance. Brian clearly wasn’t thrilled with the notion—“It was still hard for him to come to grips with Smile,” Melinda says—but everyone else was so gung ho that he just shrugged and resumed his course down the path of least resistance. In this case, that meant allowing his managers to book the Royal Festival Hall for a few nights in early 2004 and announce that the shows would include the live debut of Smile. At that point, Brian’s anxieties became immaterial. “It was tough to pick up again. Brought back bad memories, you know?” Brian’s eyes darkened, and he looked down at the table in front of him. “But my wife helped me get into it. She said, ‘Look, don’t worry about it. Just go ahead and do it, it’s gonna be great.’ So I did, and it changed for the positive.” As if reviving the rock generation’s most notorious unfinished album could be that easy.

  Early in the fall of 2003, Brian sat down and wrote out a list of song titles that he remembered from the Smile era and faxed them over to Darian, who had been appointed “musical secretary” for the project. The keyboard player took the list into the Beach Boys’ tape vault, downloaded all of the available material into his laptop, and took it up to Brian’s house. Soon Darian was driving up into the hills every morning, joining Brian at the piano in his music room, where they would listen to the original songs and snippets and figure out how they were originally intended to go together. Sometimes the complexities would overwhelm Brian, and he’d curl up in an armchair, moaning hopelessly, “How are we gonna do this, Darian? How the hell are we gonna do this?” Then he’d hear something that tickled him, and he’d jump up again. “What was that? How’d we get that sound?” and the work would continue. “I could tell he was already freeing himself,” Darian recalls. “He’d be saying, ‘Oh yeah, that’s supposed to be a part of this song,’ or ‘Use that bit to connect these two songs over here,’ and it was really neat.”

  One morning, as they played the original instrumental track for “Do You Dig Worms,” whose words and melody had never been known, Darian got to pose the question every Smile obsessive had wanted to ask for more than thirty-five years: “I said, ‘Brian, was there anything else that was supposed to happen here?’” Brian dug through the faded scraps of paper he had before him, found one with Van Dyke’s handwriting on it, and then started to sing: “Waving from the ocean liners/Beaded, cheering…” Then he was stuck. What was the next word? He couldn’t read the writing. After a moment or two spent attempting to decipher the phrase, Brian picked up the phone and dialed his old collaborator. They hadn’t spoken in a few years, but Brian got right to the point. “Hi, it’s Brian. Do you know that song ‘Do You Dig Worms’? What’s that word in the first verse right after ‘cheering’?”

  The question pushed Brian into a ticklish situation. Up until that point—several months since the announcement that he intended to perform Smile in Europe—Brian had yet to say a word to Van Dyke about his new plans for their old collaboration. This left his former partner feeling aggrieved and more than a little hurt. “I didn’t want to hear about its reemergence from the press,” he said. “But of course I did.” Which awakened memories of seeing “Wonderful” turn up on Smiley Smile without his name on it. Much like “Sail On, Sailor” had made its much-trumpeted debut with a veritable laundry list of coauthors (Jack Rieley, Tandyn Almer, Ray Kennedy), none of whom had been sitting with Brian and Van Dyke when they had actually composed the original song in 1971. Even at the Radio City tribute in 2001, when Brian had flown Van Dyke and Sally out to New York to see the show and be singled out for an ovation, the Wilsons had neglected to invite the Parkses to join Ricky Martin, Billy Joel, and the Go-Gos, among others, to the exclusive after-party thrown in a swank midtown restaurant. Instead, Van Dyke had invited a few friends back to his hotel suite and toasted the evening in more intimate surroundings. “This was Brian’s night,” he said. “That’s important. He’s a good man and he deserves to be celebrated.” But the thought of Brian tinkering with Smile (the spectral presence of which he would eventually compare to Miss Havisham’s rotting, rat-filled wedding cake in Dickens’s Great Expectations) on his own was more than his erstwhile collaborator could stomach. When Melinda had called one day to invite him to the Smile premiere in London, Van Dyke had refused. This clearly wasn’t his project anymore, he said.

  And yet, Van Dyke did not want to impede the process, either. So when Brian called that morning, he told him to fax the “Worms” lyric sheet over. He called back a few minutes later to declare that his original handwritten word had been “Indians.” “Beaded, cheering Indians behind them…” Brian and Darian finished the morning’s work session, and later that day Brian called Van Dyke again. This time they talked for quite a while. And when Darian drove into Brian’s driveway the next morning, his boss was standing on his doorstep, rocking back and forth on his heels. “Van Dyke’s gonna be here in fifteen minutes,” he said. From that point, Van Dyke was a part of Smile again, recalling the lyrics that hadn’t been written down, composing new ones to fit holes he hadn’t quite filled in 1967, and adding his part to the new melodies Brian was composing. Gradually the old and the new folded together so effortlessly that even Darian couldn’t tell where one began and the other left off. “Brian would sing a melody, and I wouldn’t know if it was new or something that had always been there,” he says. “Van Dyke would listen, look up, and then point
up in the air and nod his head, like confirmation of some thread he’d left behind. It was really weird and beautiful to see at the same time. Consistency questions went out the window. They’re the same guys! Though Brian has gone through hell and back, but something about their flow, their rapport, seemed exactly the same. For them to come up with ideas now, whether they were there all along or if they were new, it was seamless to me. They created their own universe.”

  He’d only just managed to tiptoe back in, but as happy as he was to be looking at the world again from the inside of Smile, Brian could feel the familiar terror welling up inside. Once again, he was preparing to introduce his baby to the world. What made him think it was going to go any better this time than it had in 1967? The first day the band convened at his house to start rehearsing the vocals in earnest, the enormity of the challenge ahead sent Brian reeling into a panic attack. Bolting from the rehearsal in his living room (precisely at the moment the band was singing the line, “Aloha nui means good-bye,” which was either a joke on his part or an amusing coincidence), Brian jumped into his car and drove himself to the emergency room at St. John’s Hospital, informing the doctors he was freaking out. “He totally lost his grip,” Melinda recalls. The puzzled doctors called back to the Wilson home, sending Melinda and David and Eva Leaf screaming down the hill to see what was going on. Brian already seemed pretty calm by the time they got there, and the moment Melinda suggested they all go out for dinner at Ivy by the Shore in Santa Monica, Brian leaped off of his gurney and put on his shoes, completely healed.