Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall & Redemption of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson
Page 44
And it doesn’t end with the Beach Boys, either. Brian, as guileless and sweet as he seems, has an amazing capacity to be the eye of a perpetually swirling tornado of rage, hurt feelings, and litigation. His late ’90s partnership with Joe Thomas ended in a hail of lawsuits. The decision to use Tony Asher’s original lyrics to “Good Vibrations” on the new Smile not only served as a public slap to Mike but also resulted in a bruising conflict between Melinda and Asher, who had never signed a publishing contract for his percentage of the song. Negotiations with original Smile artist Frank Holmes broke down too, so painfully that by the time Brian’s tour hit San Francisco in the fall of 2004, the artist and part-time art teacher saw the show through his occasional job as an usher at the San Francisco Opera House.
Back in his hotel room, Mike said he hadn’t heard the new Smile. He had no interest in it, really. Though now that the record has become an international hit, he had grown quite interested in the copyright laws that might arguably have restricted Brian from copying his original arrangements so closely. “I mean, we paid for [Smile]. We paid for the development of it. We sang on it; we developed those tracks and then Brian shelved it.” Mike shifted toward legalese, explaining the concept of corporate opportunity, declaring that after spending years honing Smile’s legend, the Beach Boys deserved a chance to profit from its release. “I would have thought it would have been more honorable to put it together as the Beach Boys. That’s what they chose not to do; they decided they could live without the Beach Boys, even though it was a Beach Boys project.”
Except that Mike has to know this isn’t true. Other than the previously recorded “Good Vibrations,” Smile was entirely the work of Brian and Van Dyke. As Mike admitted in the same conversation, he and the rest of the group served almost entirely as session singers. “I was a singer in the production. I was not asked to participate in hardly anything, other than to sing in the parts.” And even if the sessions were paid for out of the Beach Boys’ recording advance from Capitol Records, Brian was at that point such a dominant figure in the group—he wrote, arranged, and/or produced virtually every note they sang, only occasionally with Mike’s lyrical help, and often with himself as lead singer—the other guys didn’t hesitate to refer to him as their all-knowing leader. “Brian is the Beach Boys,” Dennis observed once. “We’re his messengers.”
But Dennis is dead. Mike is alive, and after all of these years being the Beach Boys’ most public face, he seems determined to claim the group’s legacy for his own. Brian’s critical and commercial success with Smile, contradicting decades of Mike’s own assertions that such abstract music would only alienate record buyers, seemed to strike him as a personal affront. Being all but dismissed from “Good Vibrations” (Mike’s credit remained, albeit as the third collaborator) and publicly ridiculed in Brian’s many statements comparing the Beach Boys so unfavorably to his new group only made him angrier. And even if his theory about corporate opportunity didn’t bear fruit, Mike and his lawyers did manage to turn up a promotional CD that Brian’s management had allowed the British newspaper The Mail on Sunday to give away as part of their Smile coverage. It was a solo work, compiling Brian’s live renditions of his own Beach Boys songs with more recent solo songs. Unfortunately, the CD’s cover used the words “Beach Boys” prominently, along with a couple of 1960s-era photographs of Brian with the band. Therein lay, according to the lawsuit Mike filed in October, “millions of dollars in illicit profits,” “unfair competition, and infringing uses” stemming from a promotion that, as the complaint went on, “shamelessly appropriated Mike Love’s songs, likeness, and the Beach Boys trademark.”
Mike and his spokesmen continued to insist that he held no ill will toward his cousin, that he really blamed the handlers—meaning Melinda—who made all of his decisions and told him what to do. But such talk only sought to belittle Brian all the more, making a public point of his supposed helplessness. What seemed most clear was that Brian had something Mike wanted. He’d ventured back into the horizon and struck gold. And for reasons that had as much to do with the visions that had pulled their ancestors across the frontier as everything that had happened between them, Mike really felt that he was owed a share.
Everyone else makes do with Smile. And for the several thousand people who have come to the Hollywood Bowl on September 4, 2005, it’s more than enough. It’s just after 9:00 p.m. now; the honeyed, late-summer sun has long since fallen toward the ocean, leaving a darkness that now seems rich with the promise of a warm, eucalyptus-scented night. Brian Wilson has come home, back to the same hills he used to look down upon when he was writing the music he’s about to play. The stage is dark as Brian, his band, and half a dozen members of the Stockholm Strings and Horns find their places and take their final breaths before launching the final performance of the Smile tour’s title piece. They begin with the shimmering, wordless arcs of “Our Prayer,” their voices falling through the blackness like shafts of light through the jeweled windows of a cathedral.
The snatch of the Crows’ old doo-wop hit “Gee” ignites the rollicking “Heroes and Villains.” Then the music hurtles forward, a riot of instruments and voices, sometimes clashing, sometimes weaving together, all of it capturing the clamor of the boomtown, the promise and danger of the frontier. When the action pauses, a darker reflection about this new society emerges: “Bicycle rider, just see what you done/To the church of the American Indian…” This meditation leads back to Plymouth Rock, to ponder the mysteries of the new land and the pilgrims’ progress from the granite shores of New England to the verdant beaches of Hawaii. The newcomers bring their hopes, but also the limits of the old world: its economic imperatives, its military might. The music lopes through the verses, then snaps taut for the “…just see what you done done…”choruses.
Then we’re back on the frontier again, chugging westward past farms and fields, rolling hills and mountainsides where the stars touch the land and God’s breath hangs thick in the air. But now comes a rumble in the distance, the roar of machinery—the industrialized future gnashing its teeth. Just above the fields, a Chinese worker laying the rails pauses, his eye drawn skyward by the cry of hungry birds wheeling through the air. “…Over and over, the crow cries, uncover the cornfield/Over and over, the thresher and hover the wheatfield…”
After the rumbling, twirling end of “Cabin Essence,” there is a brief pause before the start of “Wonderful”—the harpsichord, pizzicato strings, soaring background vocals, and muted trumpet jewel-like beneath Brian’s voice, straining against the constraints of age as he ascends the scale to describe the resilience of innocence, even in the face of the nonbelievers. The music grows more pensive—taking in the circular pattern of life, growth, and death—as the perspective jumps from parent to child and back again, all the while pivoting off of a line Van Dyke borrowed from William Wordsworth’s “My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold,” “Child is the father of the man.” Quiet wonder builds into a celebration, horns and bells joining a jangling keyboard into a Sousa-like figure that gives way again to the stuttering tempo of the “father of the man” chant and then the reassurance of the father: “Easy, my child—It’s just enough to believe…”
The music shifts again, settling into the hushed grandeur of “Surf’s Up,” its jewelry-rattling percussion, tautly plucked strings, and fretting trumpet lines setting the stage for the self-deceptions of high society and the crumbling of a decadent civilization. But from the ashes, hope emerges anew: “Surf’s up! Aboard a tidal wave/Come about hard and join the young, and often, spring you gave,” Brian sings, paying tribute to his own youthful vision even as he prepares to dive into the wild mysteries beyond the horizon. “I heard the word, wonderful thing/A children’s song…”
The third movement begins in a town square, where an old-fashioned brass band oom-pa-pas through an instrumental version of the “Heroes and Villains” cantina section, while the fresh morning air stirs thoughts of love and old-fashioned health advice that i
s so obvious it seems positively comic. “I wanna chow down my favorite vegetable/I love you most of all…”
So there is escape. An exotic mix of marimbas, strings, slide whistle, and flutes sends the music over the horizon to the Pacific isles. “A shanty town—a shanty in Waikiki/And juxtapose a man with a mystery…” Pirates appear, luring us even further into the unknown. But never beyond the view of Plymouth Rock, and the restless impulse that peeks through the chorus’s call for that old piece of granite to keep rock, rock, rolling on over.
The marimbas come back for a whispered idyll with wind chimes—the chiming, fluttering decorations catching the eye, but not quite distracting the mind from the sadness that never quite vanishes with the breeze. “Now and then, a tear rolls down my cheek…” A new variation of the “Heroes and Villains” theme erupts at full blast, the trombones sliding in and out of a bluesy seventh chord, upping the temperature until a rush of sirens and slide whistles heralds the full-throated roar of a fire, a wall of flame, smoke and torment played in tones of scream, distortion, and sonic destruction. This is the music Brian once thought had been powerful enough to ignite a series of fires across the city of Los Angeles in the spring of 1967. It terrified him so much that he didn’t listen to it again for nearly forty years. Brian faced up to his terror in his way. As the embers of “Fire” die away, he sings a mournful phrase composed by Van Dyke to reflect the musician’s own journey from 1966 to 2004: “Is it hot as hell in here, or is it me?” A little of both, perhaps, as the eerie chorus of wailing spirits implies. But he keeps moving westward—“There’s still a promise we must keep…”—all the way back to Hawaii, beyond the sea, where the cool blue waters wash us right back into the tumbling light of “Our Prayer,” falling into the sonic prism that sends them exploding out into the air again in the form of “Good Vibrations.”
And now Smile has come full circle, to its point of departure in the summer of 1966, up somewhere beyond the physical realm, up in the air above Brian’s piano, where a lifetime of hope, horror, joy, sorrow, and regret inspired the sonic waves that are just now vibrating in the leaves of the eucalyptus trees surrounding the Hollywood Bowl. Brian is hunkered down at his keyboard, his body nearly still, the expression on his face all but unreadable. He may be the only person in the Hollywood Bowl who isn’t up on his feet, dancing to the music. But Brian is focused on singing his part. He sits behind his keyboard, his eyes half closed but his face alive with feeling as his music fills the night around him. “Good, good, good, good vibrations,” he sings. “Good, good, good, good vibrations.”
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CREDITS
“Don’t Worry Baby”
Written by: Roger Christian and Brian Wilson. © 1964 Careers-BMG Music Publishing (BMI) / Irving Music, Inc. Copyright Renewed. All rights for the US administered by Careers-BMG Music Publishing (BMI). All rights outside the USA controlled by Irving Music, Inc. Used by Permission.
“Got to Know the Woman”
Written by: Greg Jakobson and Dennis Wilson. © 1970, 2000 (renewed) Careers-BMG Music Publishing (BMI) / Daywin Music, Inc. (BMI) / Brother Publishing Company (BMI). All rights for the US administered by Careers-BMG Music Publishing (BMI). All rights for Brother Publishing Company administered by Wixen Music Publishing. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.
“Little Deuce Coupe”
Music by Brian Wilson, Words by Roger Christian. © 1963 Careers-BMG Music Publishing (BMI) / Irving Music Publishing. Copyright Renewed. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. All rights for the US administered by Careers-BMG Music Publishing (BMI). Used by Permission.
“Shut Down”
Words by Roger Christian, Music by Brian Wilson. © 1963 Irving Music, Inc. Copyright Renewed and Assigned to Irving Music, Inc. and Careers-BMG Music Publishing (BMI) for the USA. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.
“Surf’s Up” written by Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson
© 1971, 1999 (renewed) Safe & Sane Music (ASCAP). Administered by BUG / BriMel Music (BMI)
“Do You Like Worms” written by Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson
© 2006 Safe & Sane Music (ASCAP). Administered by BUG / Brother Publishing Company (BMI)
“Roll Plymouth Rock” written by Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson
© 2004 Safe & Sane Music (ASCAP) and BriMel Music. Administered by BUG / BriMel Music. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.
“Do You Like Worms/Roll Plymouth Rock” by Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks.
© 1967, 1995 (renewed) Brother Publishing Company (BMI). Administered by Wixen Music Publishing. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.
“Sail On, Sailor” written by Van Dyke Parks, Brian Wilson, Raymond Kennedy, Tandyn Almer and John Rieley III
© 1973 Safe & Sane Music (ASCAP) / Brother Publishing Company (BMI). Administered by BUG / Wixen Music Publishing (BMI). All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.
“Child Is The Father Of The Man” written by Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson
© 2004 Safe & Sane Music (ASCAP) and BriMel Music. Administered by BUG / BriMel Music. All Rights Reserved. Used by P
ermission.
“On A Holiday” written by Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson
© 2004 Safe & Sane Music (ASCAP) and BriMel Music. Administered by BUG / BriMel Music. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.
“In Blue Hawaii” written by Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson
© 2004 Safe & Sane Music (ASCAP) and BriMel Music. Administered by BUG / BriMel Music. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.
“All This Is That” by Al Jardine, C. Wilson, M. Love
© 1972, 2000 (renewed) Wilojarston Music (ASCAP). Administered by Wixen Music Publishing. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.
“California Part III (California Saga)” by Al Jardine
© 1973, 2001 (renewed) Wilojarston Music (ASCAP). Administered by Wixen Music Publishing. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.
“Surf’s Up” by Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks
© 1971, 1999 (renewed) Brother Publishing Company (BMI). Administered by Wixen Music Publishing. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.
“Add Some Music to Your Day” by Brian Wilson, Michael Love and Joe Knott
© 1972, 2000 (renewed) Brother Publishing Company (BMI). Administered by Wixen Music Publishing. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.