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

by Peter Ames Carlin

  And yet Brian’s Smile anxiety continued to hover over him in the next few weeks. At times he’d be present and focused, riding the currents of the musical epic he was, at long last, bringing home. A moment later he’d squint and cock his head, his shoulders suddenly stooped beneath the weight of the years. Then he’d be lost inside himself for a while, wandering the familiar maze of hope, love, and fear until something else—usually the overwhelming sound of his music being played so well and so lovingly by his band—would bring him out again. His eyes would snap back into focus, and then Brian would be back. As the tour grew closer, they set up on a soundstage in their stage formation; Brian would sit at his keyboard, front and center, snapping his fingers and grooving along to the music. Then they were in London at the Royal Festival Hall, with just hours to go. Once again, Brian seemed to collapse into himself, sitting alone on an easy chair, waiting to be sucked into the vortex. When Paul McCartney came backstage to wish him good luck, Brian grabbed his hand and didn’t want to let go. Then it was time to go out and play the opening set, and that slid by easily enough. Another break, and then the lights went down for the debut of Smile.

  Brian walked out onto the dark stage and took his place behind the keyboard. Sitting in the blackness for those moments, gliding into the first a cappella chord of “Our Prayer,” his heart fluttered in his chest. “I was so worried it wouldn’t go over,” he says. “It was so scary. I think fear and excitement, that’s something that goes together. It’s good scary.” Then “Prayer” was over, and as they sang the little doo-wop verse, the light began to rise. Then the snare drum announced “Heroes and Villains” like a starter’s pistol. And when Brian launched into the tale of the man who’d been taken for lost and gone and unknown for a long, long time, the entire hall burst into shimmering, incandescent light.

  CHAPTER 18

  In the spring of 2004, recording engineer Mark Linett is standing near the control panel of Your Place or Mine studios, talking about the ongoing recording sessions for Smile. It seems strange, after all these years, to be discussing Smile in the present tense. Stranger still that the mythical work is being completed in a recording studio located in the midst of suburban Glendale, California, in a studio space converted from Linett’s own basement. Just outside his front door, neighborhood kids ride their bikes, and a couple of them jump skateboards over the curb. Upstairs, his cleaning lady scrubs down the kitchen counters. Linett, meanwhile, spins an early mix of the new “Cabin Essence” instrumental track. “It’s still missing the ‘doing-doings,’” he says as the first verse plays.

  Linett is clearly a Smile buff with years of passion behind him. His work with Brian and the Beach Boys in the last fifteen years or so has turned him into a made man, of sorts. Now he has Carl’s handwritten lyrics to “Surf’s Up” (used during the 1971 vocal sessions) framed on his wall. He has the original tubes-and-dials control panel for Western’s number two studio in the corner. And when he recognizes the passion in another fan’s eye, he can walk to a filing cabinet and pull out something he knows is going to blow your mind. It is a dark metal container about the size of a small pizza box, only thicker, and he lays it gently in my hands. “You’re gonna want to hold that,” he says. “Those are master tapes from the original Smile sessions.”

  I look down at the yellowed index card taped to the top, which reads “Beachboys: ‘Tones’; ‘Wind Chimes.’” I feel the weight of it in my palms while the wheels in my brain spin, trying to factor this moment into the years Smile has lived in my mind. It’s wonderful to hold something so historical and mysterious. But at the same time, I also realize that something important is changing for me. In all these years of thinking about, mourning the loss of, returning obsessively to the fragments from, and pondering the overarching meaning of the legacy of Smile, I’d never really thought of it as something that could exist in the physical sphere I inhabit. But now I’m holding a part of it in my hands, standing on the very spot where Brian is breathing life into the finished recording. And how am I supposed to feel about that?

  When the final note of Smile vibrated to a stop on February 20, 2004, the Royal Festival Hall erupted into a wild ovation that went on for ten full minutes before Brian could even call Van Dyke to the stage for a bow. The acclaim didn’t end on that first night. Reviews of the Smile shows were ecstatic, to say the least. “Groundbreaking complexity and sophistication…[the premiere] of Smile made it seem like the grandest of American symphonies, and Wilson the natural heir to Charles Ives,” wrote the critic in London’s The Guardian the next morning. “What we do know now is that Wilson and Parks created a glorious piece of music whose grand ambition is outstripped only by its inherent beauty and cumulative power,” Randy Lewis wrote in the Los Angeles Times a few days later.

  The same electricity fired the next five nights in London, then followed the group through their brief tour of England and Europe. Back in the United States in the springtime, the group set to work recording a studio version of the now-completed Smile. And though Brian was credited as its producer and arranger, he tended to avoid the all-important mixing sessions, either because he figured his work on the project was done or because he still couldn’t imagine hearing those sounds in the sanctified surroundings of a recording studio. “It was taxing for all of us because we knew what was being taken on,” says Mark Linett. Still, they took it step by step, following the sonic blueprint Brian had laid down in the fall of 1966 in hopes of recapturing the original work’s mystery, even as they transformed it into the sleek patterns of 1s and 0s that define digital recording. “Brian would come in, make comments, take stuff home, then make more comments,” Linett continues. “The third time he came in, I gave him a CD and I said: ‘Hey, there it is. Smile, ready to play on your CD player.’ I swear you could see something change in him. And he’s been different ever since.”

  A few weeks before Linett handed Brian that CD and a few months after the London debut, Brian sat in a delicatessen in a mall near his home in Beverly Hills. His latest solo album, Gettin’ In over My Head, built largely from songs he’d been fiddling with on and off for as long as twenty years, was about to come out. The record featured guest shots from some of his most famous admirers—Paul McCartney, Elton John, Eric Clapton—but Brian was most excited to talk about Smile. “I was worried it wouldn’t go over,” he said, recalling opening night in London. “But I got a ten-minute standing ovation. Ten minutes! I mean, I got bored after a while. I said, ‘Okay, that’s enough!’ but they wouldn’t shut up. It’s almost scary.”

  What was scary?

  “That I couldn’t believe they could like it so much.”

  Wasn’t that exciting, too?

  “Being afraid is like bordering on excitement,” he said, pausing to think for a moment. “It’s good scary.”

  But Smile used to summon the bad kind of scary, right?

  “Yeah, I had a negative attitude about it.”

  What changed?

  “I don’t know. I just got hungry to get better.”

  As if to emphasize this point, Brian reaches for the barbecue beef sandwich he’s been gnawing on between questions and takes a big bite. “This is really good,” he said.

  Intriguingly, some of Brian’s most fervent fans and Smile admirers didn’t share his appetite. As much as they had mourned its loss for so very long, the prospect of having a completely finished, officially released Smile proved unsettling. For now that Brian had taken the famously unfinished album back into his hands, he had simultaneously plucked it from theirs. Having a finished Smile, after all this time, changed everything about its accepted place in the cosmology of modern cultural history. In its unfinished, half-imaginary state, Smile had been both nothing and everything: a parable about corporate greed; a warning about the dangers of the drug culture; a modern retelling of the legend of Icarus. Or maybe it was just a record most people hadn’t heard, but you had, with a depth of understanding no one else had ever achieved. Hence the endless and en
dlessly heated arguments about What Brian Had Really Meant, and Why It Ended, and so on. “Some of Smile’s majesty is its mystery,” Jeff Turrentine wrote on the online magazine Slate.com. “To return to this now-mythic collection of songs is to gild the rarest, wildest lily in pop music.”

  Other critics and fans pursued the same line of reasoning, their musings and writings posing the same series of questions: What if the myth of Smile was actually better than the real thing? What if everything the world had come to believe about what had been lost in Brian’s collapse turned out to be, well, wrong? This prospect seemed particularly likely considering the cruelty of the years that had come between. To compare the troubled, but unfathomably brilliant Brian of 1966—the man who had just created Pet Sounds and “Good Vibrations”—with the troubled, unfathomably damaged Brian of 2004—the man who made a point of declaring, “I don’t think I have another Pet Sounds in me”—was sobering. How could this faded, emotionally hobbled middle-aged man pretend to finish the work of his razor-sharp younger self?

  Nevertheless, anticipation built through the summer of 2004, spurring a wave of media attention that grew to a crescendo with Smile’s release in mid-September. The top-selling album on Amazon.com for two solid weeks, the album, formally titled Brian Wilson Presents “Smile” debuted at number thirteen on the Billboard album charts. The five-star review in Rolling Stone, written by the notoriously sharp-tongued Robert Christgau, set the tone for the avalanche of notices and features that would come: “This seemed like a terrible idea. Instead, it’s a triumph…Wilson’s voice has deepened and coarsened irreparably…but he can convey commitment and belief—belief that his young, bonkers self composed a work that captured possibilities now nearly lost to history. Smile proves that those possibilities are still worth pursuing.”

  Acclaim for the finished Smile, along with international sales that pushed it to platinum status and beyond, carried Brian through the winter. In March 2005 he traveled to Austin, Texas, with Van Dyke and David Leaf to discuss Smile as part of a panel discussion at the South by Southwest music convention. Brian did interviews the day before, shuttling around town in a limousine. Sitting in on a radio studio show, he listened to the new “Heroes and Villains” and sang along with the first verse. “I love this song!” he said to no one in particular. The disc jockey, Jody Denberg, interviewed Brian gently, interspersing questions about Smile with tracks from the album. When “Surf’s Up” ended, Denberg paused for a moment of silence before saying, simply: “That’s what love sounds like. Brian Wilson. ‘Surf’s Up.’ From the album Smile.” When he prefaced a question about the 1966 sessions by mentioning the Beach Boys, Brian interrupted him. “No, not with the Beach Boys. With Van Dyke Parks. The Beach Boys didn’t sing on any of those tracks.” Denberg, who knew better, stammered for a moment, then changed the subject.

  The next morning Brian was in a less buoyant mood. Sitting in his suite atop the Four Seasons hotel, he seemed antsy and uncomfortable, looking back and seeing only the anguish that had shadowed him for so long. “The other Beach Boys didn’t like Smile; they didn’t want to do it,” he said with a shrug. “But my new band is so much better. They play better and they sing better, too. I have a much better time with them, anyway.”

  This was something Brian had said before and would say again many times during the next few months. It was bracing to see that the version of “Good Vibrations” he’d chosen to use in the new “Smile” substituted the roughed-out lyrics Tony Asher had written early in the winter of 1966 for the Mike Love version that had been released a few months later. And it’s easy to imagine that Brian’s motivations for all this Beach Boy bashing had less to do with the musical support they had once provided than the emotional kind they hadn’t. The triumph he’d finally achieved with Smile was both affirming and, on a bad day, devastating. What if he’d had the support to finish the record in 1967? What could he have gone on to achieve in 1968? These are the kinds of questions that are impossible to answer, particularly given the demons that had haunted him even during his most successful years. Nevertheless they spoke to him, and he talked back. Other ears were listening, too, and they would soon be speaking to him, as well.

  A couple of months after Brian’s visit to Austin, Mike Love sat in his suite atop the massive Mandalay Bay casino, its windows overlooking the fringe of Las Vegas’s industrial grid and the dusty, undeveloped expanse beyond. He and the group that carries the Beach Boys license had played their usual set of oldies to a large, enthusiastic crowd on, in, and around the resort’s artificial lagoon the previous night, and they would do the same thing that night. Mike drank from a jug of apple juice, regarding his guest suspiciously even as he cracked jokes and told his story.

  “I think Van Dyke is really talented, brilliant, and fun. He’s got a sense of humor. I ask[ed] Van Dyke Parks, ‘What the hell does “Over and over the crow cries, uncover the cornfield” mean?’ And he said, ‘I haven’t a clue, Mike!’” He laughed. “I don’t know if he was saying that just because I was there in his face. But I always liked lyrics that are boy-girl, or made sense, or connected to the mind of people.”

  Did he ever wonder, in light of Sgt. Pepper and the subsequent rise of all things psychedelic just at the point when Smile was supposed to be released, if his resistance to Van Dyke’s abstract verse might have been a mistake?

  “Nuh-uh. Not at all. Never. I didn’t fuck up. By not getting into the acid culture? I don’t think I was a fuck-up. I mean, I can write abstract poetry. Yeah, I did 166 lines of iambic septameter. Yeah, that’s me. But I’m talking about a three-minute pop single here.”

  At sixty-four, Mike is a stout middle-aged man who walks with a bit of a limp, but he puts on an energetic show with his group—they play the first thirteen songs of their set virtually nonstop. And years of meditating have kept him limber enough to twist his long legs into a half-yogi position as he continued, often contradicting stories and recollections that have long since been written, rewritten, and carved into the stone of accepted history.

  “I had nothing to do with shelving Smile. It was Brian’s paranoid schizophrenia…He became paranoid and a recluse for the most part. And who says I didn’t like the words? Just because I said I didn’t know what they meant didn’t mean I didn’t like them.” He untwisted, then retwisted his legs. “I have zero against Van Dyke Parks. That’s why I said, ‘What the fuck does that mean?’ It’s not meant to be an insult. He didn’t get insulted. He just said, ‘I haven’t a clue!’ And it wasn’t like I was against his lyrics. But people don’t know the way I think. And they don’t give a fuck about the way I think, either. But that’s okay. I’m a big boy, and I can take that. I was just asking: What did it mean?”

  Mike’s cell phone rang, and when he picked it up, his features loosened and his voice softened. It was his youngest daughter, a grade-schooler, calling from home in Lake Tahoe. A moment of confusion—she was pretending to be someone else at first—ended quickly, and he got up from his chair and walked into the suite’s open kitchen area, whispering gently to her about what she had been doing with her mom, what they had planned for the rest of the day, how long it would be until he got home to see her again. After a few minutes he hung up and sat back down again, wrapping his legs beneath him as his blue eyes sharpened and his face hardened for battle. “Where were we?”

  Back where they have been for so long, waltzing obsessively with the hurt, anger, and unending hostility that has surrounded the Beach Boys since before they had even imagined they might be the Beach Boys. Perhaps it would have been different if their own parents had displayed the unconditional love Mike had just lavished upon his distant, happily chattering daughter. Nevertheless the Beach Boys survived, even thrived, transforming their own pain into music that captured something of the world around them. Just don’t tell this to Bruce Johnston, the other quasi-real Beach Boy in Mike’s current group, who responded via e-mail with a chuckle. “I can tell that you are far deeper into the Beach Boys
thing than I will ever be in 100 lifetimes!” he wrote. “It’s only business to me.”

  And not a pleasant business, either. First Bruce resisted an interview for this book because he said he was worried about getting sued. He changed his mind, briefly, but then changed it again when he got tired of Brian’s barbed comments about the Beach Boys. “I spent years showing full support for Brian, but now that’s all changed because of his current point of view,” he wrote in another e-mail.

  Brian and Carl could barely speak to one another in the last decade or two of Carl’s life. Mike and his brothers, Stan and Stephen, are currently estranged. Stephen’s tenure as the group’s manager—which coincided with their most financially successful years in the mid-and late seventies—ended with him getting fired, rehired, and then fired again. Worried that the band would try to stiff him on his percentage of the CBS contract (an established pattern for the group, according to several sources), Stephen used his signatory power in the final days of his tenure to take the money for himself from the group’s accounts. For this misdeed his brother and cousins had Stephen convicted of embezzlement.

  Beach Boys–related litigation goes on endlessly. All of the original members of the group, except for Dennis, have sued at least one other member of the band, with Brian being everyone’s favorite target, due perhaps to the perpetual flow of money from his songwriting royalties. No wonder there are three separate groups traveling the world singing three separate renditions of “Good Vibrations.” “There’s something pretty special about the [vocal] blend the Beach Boys have,” Mike said. “But Carl’s dead and Brian doesn’t sing like that anymore. I’m not invited to sing with Brian, and Al and the rest of us are on the outs.”