In 1983, on the cusp of becoming Big Brother, Ronald Reagan cursed the Beach Boys with the moniker “America’s Band”. It wasn’t the first curse brought down upon the group, but it would perhaps be the worst. Before the end of the year, it would claim its first victim in drummer Dennis Wilson, although it would be hard to say where his own demons ended and the curse began. Before the end of the 90’s it would take his baby brother Carl. In between these tragic losses, the band would have the biggest comeback of their career with the concentrated evil of “Kokomo”.

Only one Wilson brother got to outlive Ronald Reagan and experience what it meant to be an elderly Beach Boy, and he left us for the realm beyond the stars last year. Cousin Mike, less the eternal teenager and more the “Gran Torino” cranky old geezer, will probably die on the road with the current band that calls themselves the ‘Boys. High school classmate Al Jardine, meanwhile, continues on with dearly departed Brian’s Pet Sound Band, the road hardened equivalent of the cream-of-the-crop L.A. musicians that Wilson directed in the studio back in the 60s.

It took a 50th anniversary tour to bring the group’s leader back into the Beach Boys fold, after being almost entirely absent from the band for half that time. Let’s be honest, to paraphrase John Lennon, Brian Wilson wasn’t well. Each time he withdrew from touring was probably the best thing he ever did… next to avoiding participating in the recording of “Kokomo”…

Brian’s first retirement from the road was in 1964, having a nervous breakdown shortly before their plane took off on tour. The moment was brought vividly, agonizingly to life in Paul Dano’s viscerally embodied performance as Brian in the flawed but often brilliant “Love and Mercy” biopic.  For all that movie delved into, it never tried to reckon with the post-Smile, band-centered era of the Beach Boys, beyond a Brian in bed montage and a few lines of exposition from older Brian.

The time jump to the second half is so pronounced he’s now suddenly played by John Cusack in a performance that feels like John Cusack playing Brian Wilson, which, honestly, is pretty entertaining, don’t get me wrong, but… The important thing for us to understand now is where Brian Cusack’s nemesis, Dr. Eugene Landy, first came into the picture, which is left entirely outside the scope of the film. Much like every other villain in the Brian Wilson story, he proves himself first to be a hero…

Wilson’s withdrawal during the early 1970s was well known within the industry, but what was less visible was the effort his wife Marilyn had made to find meaningful medical help. As she later explained, Brian had developed a disarming ability to perform functionality in front of doctors, convincing professionals that he was healthier than he really was.

When they first met, Landy framed the situation in stark terms. He told Marilyn that Brian was an undiagnosed and untreated schizophrenic. What followed sounded, at least at first, like a breakthrough. During one of Landy’s early visits to the Wilson home, Brian walked into the room unexpectedly and said, quietly and without prompting, “Something’s wrong with me. I need your help.” Marilyn later said that was the moment everything began.

– Inside Brian Wilson’s Longest Battle: Control, Care, and Dr Eugene Landy

In the mid 70’s, people were taking bets as to who would reach rock and roll heaven first: Keith Richards, or Brian Wilson. No one expected it would take 50 years to collect on that bet. In Brian’s case, it was probably Eugene Landy who was most directly responsible for saving his life in the 70’s, encouraging and enabling his most expressive work of the era. It was definitely Landy who later nearly destroyed that life, in an attempt to control it and milk Brian for all he was worth for over a decade.

Landy’s presence looms large in the Brian Wilson saga. There’d be no way to tell his story without it. His spectre at first almost swirls at you in a svengali kind of hypnotic trance, but then the spinning stops and the man sits there with a concerned but confident look on his face. “I understand,” his eyes and demeanor say, “and I can help.” His sincerity is unquestionable, but… there’s something in that posture of relaxed confidence, as if the devil is in the details… 

Each of the Wilson brothers has their own existential pain. Dennis feels like a wound filled with sand in the back of your throat, with so much to say, but every word causing pain, and none truly expressing clearly what he wants them to. Carl’s hangs down in a way that feels like the weight of the world is on him, the only escape being into complete numbness, but haunted by the fear of losing everyone and everything he ever loved to that emotional void. Brian feels like both of those pains combined, but more than that, he himself feels lost, completely and utterly baffled. His only certainty is that everything has gone wrong and somehow it’s all his fault.

It wasn’t always that way for the brothers, but, in a way, it was. There’s no story in which their abusive father Murry is the hero, although it’s unlikely the Beach Boys would have existed without him. On the other hand, it’s likely Brian would have been able to hear in both ears without his father’s whap! to the head permanently deafening the poor youngster on one side, and giving him his signature sideways grin/grimace.

This handicap alone proved a tremendous hurdle to the group in the late 60s, when stereo production became essential to remaining on the cutting edge of pop music and Brian no longer had the capacity to produce as such. Considering how cattywompus some of those early stereo mixes could be, it’s a detriment to all of humanity that Brian Wilson was unable to hear himself participate in the sonic sculpting of the stereophonic spectrum… but, even more than that, the trauma of his childhood would almost guarantee that Brian would never truly learn to function without some form of punishment and abuse to motivate him…

Looking at the Wilson brothers only through the lens of pain and suffering is to do the full-spectrum emotional capacity of the Beach Boys a serious injustice. Between jubilee and despair was where they revealed the truth of their souls. “God Only Knows” is a prayer to preserve a love that opens the door to transcendence; it’s impossible to find the key without confronting the existential horror of losing that love. It’s a love that the stars themselves attest to, that can only be lost beyond the realm of space and time, or in a world where the stars have fallen from the sky.

Unfortunately, that place beyond the stars where love is lost was a realm Brian, Dennis and Carl were all too familiar with by the late 70’s. Cocaine had given way to heroin as a drug of choice, and Carl in particular, the man looked up to as the Rock of Gibralter in the band, embraced the nihilistic escape into emptiness it offered. Combined with the drinking habit that would haunt him to the grave, it left him sloppy and slurry, more Muppet than man.

Truthfully, the best way to listen to the late 70’s Beach Boys is to see the entire band as Muppets. It’s the only way to soften just how soul crushingly brutal the reality was, but it’s also the only way to connect with the emotional depths of the material, to get the full flavor of the cheese they were dishing out. This ain’t no Velveeta, this is pure California queso – life, birth, death and repeat reduced to a thick, delicious sauce that couldn’t come from anywhere else in the world…

Perhaps the place to start this story of Heroes and Villains is with the commercial failure of the song of the same name. In 1967 the world was still anxiously waiting for the the followup to the band’s 1966 rule-breaking global smash “Good Vibrations”. Producing that song had taken as much time, effort and tape as the entire Pet Sounds album that preceded it. Today, “Good Vibrations” seems like the cap of that classic era; in 1966, it was actually a comeback for the band, after Pet Sounds had landed with a thud stateside.

Brian’s attempt to cement that comeback was the complete disaster of Smile that followed, trying to produce an entire album of “Good Vibrations” all at once, every track recorded in modular sections that were endlessly re-shuffled. As those increasingly chaotic album sessions began to crumble, the song “Heroes and Villains”, which existed in seemingly endless variations of segments and fragments, was pulled out of the wreckage and whipped into some kind of shape for single release. 

The sepia-toned tale of “what a dude’ll do” in a town where he’s been hiding out so long “that back in the city [he’s] been taken for lost and gone and unknown for a long, long time”, turned out to prophecy Brian’s next decade of seclusion, when the single’s flop left an H-bomb sized crater in his ego. It would be nearly a decade before he would fully re-emerge, as a fragile shell of his old self, buried under a grizzled beard…

The Beach Boys would continue to struggle and strive as a group, but nothing they put out after their mid-60’s peak, no matter how tasty, caught fire with the public the way “Good Vibrations” had. Then, after spending the first half of the 70’s as one of the most under-appreciated progressive-pop groups in the world, success finally came back around to bite the Beach Boys square on the ass. In 1973, as far as the record buying public was concerned, the Beach Boys were cringe; in 1974 they were the childhood BFF’s you couldn’t believe you’d left behind.

The prior year’s Holland was a slightly awkward but earnest attempts to examine the legacy of colonization and ecological degradation, married to a combo of Stevie Wonder-esque layers of synthesizers and driving rock beats. It was the culmination of a three album-run where the band consciously tried to prove they were more than just eternal teenagers milking “Fun Fun Fun” for all it was worth, but if maturity sells, it seemed no one was buying it from a band of men who called themselves Boys. 

“Maybe you should just become The Beach”, their manager suggested, wondering if it would be worth it to try and start a new group with the creative trio of the Wilson brothers and ditch the other Boys, or if the hot mess of those three could even survive the attempt. Then their old record label released “Endless Summer”, a double LP set of all their greatest hits of the 60s, and it became the best-selling collection of their career.

Judging from the spooky album cover, where it looks like the bearded, gone-to-seed Beach Boys are emerging from the Smiley Smile jungle, you’d think this was the next installment in “The Beach Boys Bum You Out” , but this is a pure flashback extravaganza. Not entirely, endlessly “fun”, per se, but with the melancholy moments now softened with the warm, hazy glow of nostalgia, comfortably nestled amongst the celebrations of catching waves and chasing girls.

At the center of this revival was a ghost whose name haunts the credits, the band’s resident genius and notorious recluse. After 7 years of withdrawal from the spotlight, people began asking: “what the heck ever happened to that guy, Brian Wilson?” Hearing such a well-cultivated collection of classic tunes rounded up and laid out back-to-back, divorced from the early albums that were hastily assembled around the singles between tours, the unique, exultant genius of Mr. Wilson became undeniably apparent. 

Instead of seeing the group as pathetic has-beens from the pre-Hendrix era, rendered forever irrelevant by the acid-rock explosion, the general public realized they did, in fact, want to hear surf music again. By this time they’d buried half the heroes that had usurped the Boys’ place at the apex of American culture, Jimi included; catching a wave in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate sounded like just the escape that was needed. As their greatest hits returned them to the top of the charts for the first time since “Good Vibrations”, one question hung in the air above all others: could Brian and the Boys come back and Do it Again… again?

If the more conservative members of the Beach Boys had hoped a return to the hit-making formula would follow the 1967 collapse of Wilson’s avant-garde Smile ambitions, what they got was something completely different than they’d ever confronted before: a Brian who simply didn’t want to make Beach Boys music any more. His legendary production prowess was suddenly discovered not to be an infinite resource that the rest of the band were automatically entitled to. No longer willing to take the credit for the success or failure of their records, from now on, their albums were “produced by The Beach Boys.” If it flops, it’s *everyone’s* fault.

The band “produced” record that followed, the un poquito Smiley Smile, was the lowest selling album they’d ever released at that point. It’s obvious the group wasn’t prepared to step up with their own take on the formula. What they end up with is Brian Wilson’s outtakes turned inside out, impishly anti-produced, playing up Jimi Hendrix’s “psychedelic barbershop quartet” dig to the hilt. The album is one of the most lovingly, brutally realized “fuck you” statements ever foisted upon one’s bandmates, but Brian makes sure to single himself out for crucifixion. In the album’s most truly schizo-affective moment, when the eerie, haunted re-cut of Smile’s lost-innocence ballad “Wonderful” breaks into a discarded segment of “Heroes and Villains” halfway through, the Beach Boys actually become the cacophony of self-critical voices in Brian’s head. “You’re not a genius”, one says somewhere buried within the din of mocking laughter. At that point, perhaps the voices in his head and the voices of the group sounded the same…

After the struggle of realizing Smiley Smile as a self-directed collective, the band spent their time honing their abilities and discovering what they all had to bring to the table as writers and producers. They learned to appreciate Brian as a rhizomatic collaborator rather than a leader, a node unto himself who might occasionally merge with what the group was working on, if the spirit moved him.

This state of affairs was enabled by building a home studio for the group directly under Brian’s bedroom. Laying in his bed, he would literally feel the vibrations of what the band were laying down below; if they felt good enough to move him, he might throw his robe on and come down to contribute a bit.

Carl and Dennis had both grown tremendously as writers and producers during that time, with Dennis’ “Forever” probably the most Pet Sounds-worthy track of anything the group would release after that classic album. I’d honestly rank it as the second-best ballad the band ever released, just beneath “God Only Knows”. Carl never wrote anything quite that transcendent, although he did write the two best Wilson ballads in the 80s, “Heaven” on his first solo album, and “Where I Belong” on Beach Boys ’85, the latter song the closest to a 80s update of “God Only Knows” as anyone got…

The point is to say that, when Brian went away, he didn’t just leave a cratered void for the duration of his absence; much like when he’d left the touring group, Carl had stepped up and become the de-facto leader of the group in the studio. But it was never a role he’d sought out; rather, it was foisted upon him as his brother withdrew. Now that eyes and ears were on Brian’s classic work, Carl and the rest of the band started to wonder for themselves: what would it take to actually bring Brian back? And could that spark come back with him?

Smiley Smile as a vibe peaked with the efforts that went into making what was supposed to be a live album, Lei’d In Hawaii, whose lewd pun of a potential title would only be surpassed when their Live in London album was reissued stateside as Beach Boys 69.

You’ll have to forgive me a bit of crude humor here. You’ll have to forgive Brian, too. During the rehearsals that were recorded before the shows in Hawaii, he orchestrated an exorcism over the sound of the band practicing “Heroes and Villains”, giving Mike Love the mic to rant about the single being their “nuclear bomb”. It’s been said that Brian himself wrote the whole rant; you can certainly hear him cracking up in the background.

I’d first encountered this recording while diving into the wealth of Smile-era bootlegs that had suddenly become accessible in the Napster-era a quarter century ago. What I hadn’t heard until this week was the full nearly 8 minute recording, where the band runs through the vocals a few more times before Brian buoyantly sings “lately I’ve been eating so much pussy!”

After their best Lei’d plans fell apart, with the Wilson bros dropping acid for the Hawaii show and delivered a timid, bizarre performance, the group returned back home to L.A. where friend Danny Hutton introduced Brian to his new best friend: high grade, pure cocaine. Its white specter would haunt him for the next decade, but, more than haunting him, it would make a ghost of the man himself, lost in a liminal realm where night was day and the rush of creative fulfillment was only a toot and a snort away. He was no longer Brian Wilson, the failed artist, he was Brian Wilson the fallen demi-God. The further he regressed into self-worship, the further he progressed in decay, and the further he withdrew from the band and reality…

One of the eeriest moments in the Beach Boy’s 60’s catalogue comes at the end of the decade, in the fade-out of Dennis’ “Be With Me”. It was one of the three songs he contributed to the band’s 20th album, 20/20; each one of these songs ends with some form of orgasmic climax. “All I Want to Do”, the earthiest of the three, ends with an actual sex tape Dennis recorded and mixed into the fade. “Never Learn Not to Love”, meanwhile, was a double negative statement concocted by none other than Mr. “Love and Death Cult” himself, Charles Manson, whose growing “family” had taken over Dennis’ bungalow and given our drummer a bad case of the clap. When that was cleared up for all parties involved thanks to Denny paying for a Family medical plan, Charlie Boy showed his appreciation (and paid off a few other debts and disasters) by giving him the song “Cease to Exist”. “Don’t change a single word”, he warned Dennis, “or I’ll come back and fucking kill you!” Dennis didn’t take his warning to heart, however (who’d ever heard of murderous hippies in late ‘68?), and altered the very title phrase of the song. No longer did it eerily begin “Little girl, cease to exist”, it now opened with “Cease to resist, come on say you love me”, which is somehow even creepier, especially followed by “give up  your world, come on and be with me. I’m your kind, and I see”.

“Be With Me” is embedded with this same tender misogyny; truthfully, almost all of Dennis’ songs are. They almost all revolve around personal freedom and the desire to merge with another individual at the soul level, and the possessiveness that comes with such an attempt as a raging egotist with massive amounts of unhealed childhood trauma. I guess Denny and Charlie weren’t so different in some ways. The big difference is that, where Charlie learned to use that traumatic desire to control others, Dennis simply lost all control…

Brian’s own unhealed trauma was haunting him back into seclusion by this point; Friends, the 1968 album where he finally seemed to come back out of his shell and really “produce” something after the lo-fi boogie of Wild Honey, was another massive flop for the band. It’s not hard to understand why; the album is truly, uniquely daffy, the first time the Boys captured Brian’s pushing for something beyond the pop music realm and managed to take it across the finish line. But this Brian was, despite his strivings for peace and love, still in a weird, weird place. Mark Prindle compared it to being sucked into a creepy cult:

From the moment Mike Love’s zombie-sounding peacenik voice begins the album with “As I sit and close my eyes, I feel peace in my mind, and I’m hoping that you’ll find it too,” my head immediately fills with visions of a guru leader locking me in the basement, feeding me acid and selling my children into sexual slavery… The whole album just reeks of fucked-up-the- ass Eastern philosophy as related through drugged-up rock stars…

“Meant For You” lures you into the insane cult and the rest of the album is a spooky ride through the insanity of late-60s hippie hell. First you try to keep your brain from exploding as the title track’s chorus features five voices rising higher, higher, higher until you manically scrape bloody lines into your own face. Then “Wake The World” brings in LSD-addled Brian Wilson alternating a catchy tuba chorus with a REALLY creepy “mesmerizing” Sesame Street-for-pedophiles piano verse. “Be Here In The Morning” continues the insanity with an out-of-control falsetto vocal, screwball chord changes, a klunky waltz beat and loony vocal effects in the chorus, which revolves around a moronic shout of “Ah-ah!” and about five million voices harmonizing one word together. 

“Be here and make my life FUUUUULLLLLLLL”…

And it continues like this for the next 20 minutes. Maybe I’m just more paranoid than most, but the whole fucking album makes me want to lock my doors and never go outside again!

While everything Prindle says is totally on point, the album still hits some kind of hypnotic sweet spot for cultists such as myself. One can almost imagine Brian as the dog in the house on fire, saying “this is fine”. That’s the vibe of the album: peaceful acceptance of the world burning down around you, which was pretty out of step with the vibe of the time. This was the same year the Beatles put out “Revolution”. Kids didn’t want “Wake the World”, they wanted “Not to Touch the Earth”. The complete indifference to this bizarre but triumphant effort was like a whap! right to poor Bri’s heart. He would only contribute one entirely new song to 20/20, “I Went to Sleep”, which was about aimlessly wandering around in his yard and passing out.

Despite the devastating disappointment of Friends, which as both a single and an album expanded the bomb crater significantly, there was a minor comeback story that immediately followed. It was the first time Brian and Mike leaned into the nostalgic realm together, so much so that it was initially conceived with “let’s get together and surf again!” as its central lyrical hook. Changing “surf” to the less explicit but more suggestive “do it”, Brian and Mike found a point of connection where there was still mileage left in the old formula for the first time since 1964. 

To be fair to Mike, the path back to that place wasn’t contrived at all; it was an actual day spent at the beach catching up with an old pal while catching some waves that convinced him to revisit the classic conception of what it meant to be a Beach Boy.

“It’s automatic when I talk to old friends the conversation turns to girls we knew when their hair was long and soft and the beach was the place to go”, Mike nasally croons over an electro-distorted drum beat that slaps you upside the head like Murray’s right hand. “Pay attention, son!” it violently demands. “The Beach Boys are taking you back to the beach!” In the UK they Beach slapped their way back to the top of the charts for the first time since “Good Vibrations”. In the US they just cracked the top 20. Ironically, the success of the single seemed to drive Brian towards seclusion as much as the failure of “Friends”. 

The only other original compositions by him that appeared on 20/20 were archival efforts initiated by Carl, who recorded a lead vocal for Smile outtake “Cabinessence”, prefaced it with the acapella “Our Prayer” from the same era, and made the pair the climax of the album. Sorry, Denny, it’s “over and over the crow cries ‘uncover the cornfields!’” that would blow most people’s loads and minds when the album dropped. Is this what Brian was trying to do with Smile? It was baffling and boggling, in a way that made “Strawberry Fields Forever” feel like a cakewalk. No wonder Brian had been lost in that cabin in the “Smiley Smile” woods ever since.

The other long-gestating track was late 1967’s “Time to Get Alone”, the first fruit of Brian’s introduction to cocaine. It was conceived as the debut single for Danny Hutton’s band “Redwood”. Unbeknownst to the Beach Boys, Brian had been moonlighting with the group to produce the single. When it finally did became known to the group, they were furious.

“What the fuck are you doing, giving away hit singles to other groups, you selfish sack of shit?! We need a hit single!” They’d already reclaimed “Darlin’” from the same fate, this added insult to injury. Unlike that quickly reclaimed minor hit, “Alone” took another 18 months to whip into releasable shape. While it lost the more fantastical rococo flourishes of the bridge when an entire instrumental bit was excised, it gained a strange existential edge the earlier versions lack. “Looking down through the valley so DEEP AND WIDE” suddenly explodes the vocal arrangement from a warm hug to an unfathomable awe. It’s a moment both transcendent and terrifying, and it truly makes the song for me.

The coked-out arrangement of “Time to Get Alone” was where Brian learned to embrace sweet insanity, with each progressive note of the track played on a different instrument. It’s a trick he’d revisit on his first solo album 20 years later, with “There’s So Many” being an under-appreciated callback to this era of madcap creativity.

Dennis, ever the devoted acolyte, was not only prepared to follow Brian into these strange, dark corners, he was inspired to compose his own dispatches from that same liminal realm. His first released compositions on “Friends” were reveries of seeking inner peace and admiring the beauty of the world around him, recognizing how fleeting that beauty could be: “Where’s my pretty bird, he must’ve flown away, if I keep singing he’ll come back someday”.

(This isn’t a song about a bird.)

On the next year’s “Be With Me”, Dennis begins by arguing with his romantic partner about not being able to “play the game” as she prepares to go out on the town. By the end of the song He declares that all the love in the universe should be with him, because everyone and everything is a part of him. The unspoken implication seems to be, “oh Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?” The truth of infinite interconnection is only felt for a moment before separation returns. “Come with me,” he pleads, “a part of me. Freeeee (ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba aaaaaaaaaaaah)”. The final climax of the song is almost lost in that extended fade, when Dennis’ “freeeeeeeeee” transforms into “Briiiiiiaaaannnnn”, before he finally screams out his brother’s name from the bottom of the echo chamber, desperately pleading for his love to return…

1977’s The Beach Boys Love You is the sound of that return to the land of the living, a snapshot of one of the world’s hardest drug addicts trying to create something sober for the first time in over a decade. Its manic, adolescent id has almost no point of comparison, except perhaps one: the music that David Bowie and Iggy Pop were creating together concurrently as they attempted to escape their own all consuming addictions, consciously endeavoring to express the state of the artist in the moment, finding new inspiration in electronics and mini-maximalism.

For Bowie and Pop, the search for a new sound took them to the Krautrock capitol of Berlin, a world unto itself, infamously divided. For Wilson, it’s hard to tell where a search for perfect sonics ends and the embrace of minimal effort begins. As much as anything else, the sound of Beach Boys Love You is Brian Wilson creating the biggest sound he can with the littlest gear and the fewest collaborators possible. He doesn’t even bother to bring in a proper percussionist, bashing out the beat himself on what sounds like nothing beyond a snare and a tom 90% of the time, so stark and minimalist it sounds like a primitive drum machine. The general absence of a bass drum is filled in by the belching, bumptious synth bass, an entire wall of sound unto itself.

Pacific Ocean Blue, meanwhile, is like Animal stepping out from behind the drums and baring the depths of his soul… and for all the celebration Dennis’s one and only complete solo album has received since, it feels like few critics wrestle with just how damn difficult it is. The cover image perfectly encapsulates that open book/impenetrable depth dichotomy, with the look in Denny’s eyes like a piercing kaleidoscope, while the rest of his face is buried behind the ultimate LA burnout beard. His fiercest moral inventories are delivered from the deepest depths of a coked-out haze, trying to get to heaven in his car and passing out halfway there… finally pulled out of a stupor with some smelling salts just in time to stumble out onto the sidewalk and into the club.

In the pantheon of cocaine-desiccated cult classics, it sits in a direct linear continuum with Gene Clark’s “No Other” and David Bowie’s “Station to Station”, its tales of existential despair often elongated and elaborated to very edge of the artist and the listener’s sanity. The journey it takes you on is almost incomprehensible, sometimes resembling nothing so much as the endless, pure white spaces of George Lucas’ dystopian “THX 1138”, with no point of reference to give one a sense of direction, the entrance and exit both consumed by the blinding whiteness. When it dropped in 1977 it was both shockingly contemporary and completely timeless, fitting snugly in-between the confessional post-psychedelic blues-pop of “Rumours” and the outre’ sonic sculpture of David Bowie and Brian Eno’s atmospheric efforts together, landing somewhere squarely between The Thin White Duke and “Heroes”, with a bit of Iggy’s “Lust for Life” thrown in for good measure. What it lacks is the give-and-take of those fundamentally collaborative (and/or combative) albums; what it presents us with instead is a man who is shattered in division with himself, perpetuating an entire cycle of abuse and betrayal upon his own existence. “Driver, drive on”, declares the passenger, unable to tell the difference between heaven’s clouds and a coke-induced white-out.

“All things that live one day must die, you know”, he later forlornly sings over a three note melody that is entirely too close to the intro of the MASH theme-song for comfort, adding to the fucked up awkwardness of the whole exchange. “Even love,” he continues, “and the things we hold close.”

Not even love ultimately survives in Dennis’ world… it drifts off with the static at the end of another syndicated re-run. But by God, that wouldn’t stop him from celebrating it from the center of his crumbling heart for as long as it would keep beating….

“Heroes and Villains” becomes a Kierkegaardian statement in the Beach Boys saga, with every character in the story ultimately both hero *and* villain. Every act of beauty has an equally ugly counterpoint, every creative triumph is paired with self-destructive defeat. These are things one learns to accept as a member of the Beach Boys cult. Unlike most cults, the fallibility of our leaders is not denied, but celebrated, the fullness of their human frailty itself the embodiment of their divinity. To be Christ-like is to be fully human, after all, and to see where that divinity remains in the depths of degradation.

“Adult/Child” and the surrounding material reflect that holy/ungodly mess more honestly than any other Beach Boys album. It’s their “Blood on the Tracks” era, with Dylan’s bitter swirl of poetry replaced with awkward earnestness. “Don’t hate her guts just ’cause she took me away”, eternal teenage doofus Brian pleads, “and maybe you’ll wanna make friends with her someday!” Is this song about the high school quarterback cheating on his cheerleader girlfriend with some other girl named Sherry? Or is it about Brian cheating on his wife with her sister? And is the subsequent “My Diane” about his sister-in-law Diane, or actually about his impending divorce? When Carl drunkenly warbles “It’s Over Now”, is he singing about Brian’s divorce or his own separation? When Dennis sings Carl’s “Angel Come Home”, is it a lamentation for Carl’s loneliness, or Denny’s? At some point the pain of the Wilson brothers becomes almost impossible to differentiate. They all wear it like an oversized bath robe, trading their traumas in the hopes that it will be easier to carry the pain of a brother than one’s own…

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In 1974, with “Endless Summer” a smash hit, manager James Guercio finally got all the Beach Boys together in the studio for the first time in years. Prior to this, Brian Wilson’s last writing and production contributions to the group had been recorded as hodge-podge ad hoc configurations, with half of the vocals of the classic minor-hit “Sail on Sailor” contributed by folks outside the band. The song’s torturous route from composition to completion would include pleas by Brian to be hypnotized by “Smile” collaborator Van Dyke Parks so he would forget he was crazy. “Cut the shit, Brian”, Van declares dismissively; pull your head out of your ass and let’s write a hit song.

At one point, “Sailor” was yet another one of the songs that Brian wanted to produce for Danny Hutton’s group, who were now riding atop the charts (where the Beach Boys used to surf effortlessly) as Three Dog Night. This highlights the confusion and chaos of the song’s origin even further; Parks makes it sound like he pulled the song mostly out of his own ass with Brian’s slight assist, while other tales paint it as having been composed during a coke binge at Hutton’s house over a year earlier with Tandy Almer and Ray Kennedy, then recorded by Three Dog Night while still in that white haze. Kennedy later recalled a 1970 or ‘71 session that only blurs the scene further:

We went in and cut the basic tracks with Three Dog Night; we hadn’t slept in about a week. Then Brian got up with a razor blade and cut the tapes and said, “Only Ray Kennedy or Van Dyke Parks can do this song.” And he left. We all stood there looking at each other going, “What?” He called me every day after that, and I wouldn’t talk to him. Three or four years later, I heard it on the radio and went, “Who’s that?”

The newest Beach Boy, Blondie Chaplin, was selected as the lead singer for the single. It’s no wonder Kennedy didn’t instantly recognize the group. It would be Blondie’s big shining moment in the spotlight; he would depart just before that spotlight firmly shifted back to Brian, although he remains among the Beach Boys family and friends to this day.

A version recorded with Kennedy’s original lyrics would see the light of day in 1976 when he would bring it with him to the minor super-group KGB with Mike Bloomfield, Rich Grech and co.

 “Damn the thunder and the lightning, it’s so frightening when you’re coked out!” he bluesily wails. Fair enough.

The other proper song that Brian contributed to “Holland” was an oddball astrological love story that sounded like a one-man-band deconstruction of Captain and Tenille… which would appear to be counter to the timeline, with their hit arrangement of “Love Will Keep Us Together” still two years from dropping, but then one remembers that the Captain himself was a touring member of the Beach Boys prior to his own hit-making career, and it all starts to make sense. I wonder if “Captain” Darryl Dragon introduced Brian to the synths he would deploy on his own track. Paired with a minimalist drum pattern that sounds like a stiffer version of the oddball rhythms that Bri used to compose for Hal Blaine, it was both a dead-end and a new direction simultaneously. It would be another three years before its minimalist innovations would again be pursued.

Meanwhile, in ’74, attempts to bring Brian “back” were legendarily disastrous, if tremendously compelling for us cult members. Two songs would emerge in rough forms that would later be treated by some cultists like last gasps of brilliance when they finally emerged at the end of the decade, but, truth be told, both “California Feeling” and “Good Timing” are far closer to the schmaltz that would overtake Wilson’s solo career, where second wife Melinda wanted Brian to be a Disney prince more than a Beach Boy, than anything truly timeless.

The two tracks that really present the state-of-the-genius at the time are part of the same continuum that would lead to the hours-long session singing “mamas little baby loves shortening bread”, driving the pair of Alice Cooper and Iggy Pop from Brian Wilson’s house in a state of delirium, questioning their sanity more than those infamously real wild guys ever realized was possible.

“Ding!” (dat!) “Dang!” (woo!) “Ding dang a ding dong!” was the 60 second version of this saga that would finally be excerpted and released on “Love You” three years later. It’s three minute long precursor was called “Rolling Up to Heaven”; it’s primary exclamation/exultation is “FUCK! HER! BIG TITS!”

The Beach Boys did not release any new recordings in 1974…

Sometimes I forget that not everyone treats the band like a religion. “Adult/Child”? they ask in confusion, “is that a collaboration with his daughters, like Wilson-Wilson?”

The answer is actually, no, but… yes? When Brian did record an album with Carnie and Wendy, he managed to sneak a snippet of his “Shortenin’ Bread” vamp into one of the songs. He was fortunate his daughters ever forgave him for the shit show he brought into their young lives. The most tragically horrifying anecdote in his half-made-up, Eugene Landy directed “autobiography” is the story Brian tells where he gives little Carnie a bear hug, and doesn’t realize he’s grinding his lit cigarette into her skin the entire time, as she cries out in pain, squirming to escape his embrace.

In this town full of heroes and villains, sometimes it’s impossible to know where accidents end and deliberate, if dissociated, acts of evil begin. Brian Wilson, schizo-affected musical genius, contained multitudes. They didn’t always come through him, though, they came *at* him. And for at least the last 50 years of his life, they were all, as often as not, singing “mamas little baby loves shortenin, shortenin, mamas little baby loves shortenin bread”… was it a regression to infantilism, or a father trying to transmute his arrested adolescent misogyny into something more innocent? What kind of world would we live in today if Brian Wilson had remained fixated on tit-fucking instead of making shortenin’ bread?

It’s easy to forget, especially in light of what a doughy figure he would become, that Brian Wilson was a full-blown jock in high school. A sensitive jock, mind you, a bit of an oddball, but a jock nonetheless. If he hadn’t been so adept at music making he probably would have channeled his achievement-oriented personality towards some form of sportsball. The locker room culture of “just grab ’em by the pussy!” pervaded his worldview. He easily could have grown up and into the kind of asshole that leads an entire nation into the gutter. Would Brian Wilson have become an American Hitler if he’d failed to ever become a successful artist? Probably not. But… it’s insidious what this modern world does to drive out the goodness from a person when it finds ways to milk them for all they’re worth to perpetuate its systems of oppression. Just give ’em shortenin’ bread and circuses.

You see? This is why you never want to become “America’s Band”…

It’s 1976. After years of political corruption the USA finds itself in a downward economic spiral. “Brian’s back!”

It’s 1985. The Iran/Contra scandal reveals that political corruption has only grown deeper. “Brian’s back!” Dennis, the only Wilson brother who was a surfer, drowned 2 years prior. Irony haunts the Beach Boys.

It’s 1995. Bill Clinton begins to have sexual relations with that woman. “Brian’s back!” Carl. Fucking. Hates. It. Nothing sounds like a hit to him. Then again, nothing did anymore. What was he supposed to do, collaborate with Pearl Jam? Not everyone can be Neil Young. Mike, sure the “Kokomo” formula is still relevant, convinces Brian and Carl to record a song for Baywatch Nights. It’s not good, but it’s the only song released from this reunion attempt. Brian looks like he wants to castrate Mike in the video. Carl looks like he hopes it’s a hit, but it doesn’t look like his hopes aren’t high.

It’s 2004. The post 9/11 security state has become the new norm. “Brian Wilson Presents: SMILE!” Brian’s back, Boys be damned. Carl’s been dead for 8 years, his final tour with the band undertaken between chemo treatments. Brian tours “Smile” with his “Pet Sounds Band”, Mike tours “Endless Summer” with “The Beach Boys”, Al Jardine, who left BB’s following Carl’s death, tours with “Beach Boys Family and Friends”, an MVP roster of BB road associates including Daryl Dragon, along with his sons Matt (who’d earned his stripes spending the prior decade with the Boys on the road) and Adam, along with Brian’s daughters.

It’s 2012. America is still struggling to recover from the “Great Recession”. Perhaps it never will. It’s the Beach Boys’ 50th anniversary. “Brian’s back!” They release one mediocre reunion album together. Produced by Joe Thomas, the late grate autotuned noisegate producer that was handpicked by Melinda to be Brian’s ticket to MOR immortality, it’s not good. Much better are the two tracks from the failed reunion of 1995 released that year on the Boys’ career-spanning boxset, including Carl’s final lead vocal, “Soul Searchin’”. It’s a wonderful soulful blast of a tune, something that should have been in the montage of a mid-90s rom-com blockbuster.

Every version and variation of the Beach Boys that was separately touring merges into one Beach big band and sets out to celebrate the anniversary. Brian Wilson mostly sits behind his piano and stares into space, occasionally singing a line into a live-autotuned mix. At the end of the tour, citing the insane overhead of such an entourage and wanting to get back to the state fair circuit, Mike Love officially fires Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys.

(That was supposed to be a mildly clever riff on the “Watchmen” meme, but you see what happens when you try and get clever with the Beach Boys, all that damn painful lore comes spilling out like buckets of tears…)

2026. Brian’s dead. Look at the fucking world. “Brian’s back!” A boxset entirely dedicated to “The Beach Boys Love You” and “Adult/Child” albums is released. 

It also features a handful of remixes and deconstructions of their preceding “comeback” album, “15 Big Ones”, but leaves the album itself absent. Go grab a copy from your nearest buck bin, it’s a real piece of shit! Unfortunately only one of its 3 diamonds in the rough was given the remix treatment for the set, the Righteous Brothers Brian and Carl duet, “Just Once in My Life”. Here is where we hear Brian lock in to the dense-minimalism that would define the sound of this era, recreating the wall of sound without a studio full of session musicians, but with a version of the Beach Boys broken back down to the simplicity level of the Smiley Smile-era. Combined with the right synth tones in the right layers, he could summon that whole wall of sound around this basic group. Shit, with varispeed multi-tracked vocals, he could summon it entirely on his own. This was a game changer… Suddenly Brian realized he could be just as half-assed as he’d been during the era when he told the band to go fuck themselves and produce their own albums, and yet… this time he’d beat Phil Spector at his own game. Brian *was* back, ready to make the state-of-the-art his own. Now, about those songs…

At some point, Eugene Landy had the bright idea to convince Brian Wilson that songwriting was the key to his healing journey as much as cutting out the sweets and eating three square meals a day that weren’t cocaine. As with all things the man did for Brian, it’s hard to tell where the true concern ended and the desire to become Wilson’s domineering partner in life and art began. By the time the pair collaborated on Brian’s occasionally brilliant solo album in 1988, Landy was claiming he should have been credited as co-writer for the songs on “The Beach Boys Love You”. Wherever the truth may lie, it’s hard to imagine some of these songs being birthed without some form of, “c’mon, Brani, let’s try and make sense of your life. What’s on your mind?” sessions.

“Well, I was watching Johnny Carson last night. That guy sure works hard!’ “So do you, Brian.” “I do?!” “When you want to.” Next thing you know, out pops a song about Johnny Carson, with lines that can’t help but seem to be about more than just a TV talkshow star:

“When guests are boring, he picks up the slack. The network MAKES HIM BREAK HIS BACK.”

“You’re a star, Brian. Stars work hard for us, bringing us light and guidance. They illuminate this world.” “Illuminate this world? The whole planet? WHAT DO THE PLANETS MEAN?!” “Brian, you just have to look to the solar system for wisdom. Look at the stars, they’re not alone in the sky. Look at all the constellations.” “Some of them are animals!”

“Let’s talk about your breakdown on the plane.” “I thought Mike was fucking my wife!” “Why would you think that. Brian?” “I dunno, I guess I was afraid if I wasn’t home with her she’d find someone else to be with.” “But look, here she is still with you all these years later. Isn’t that great?” “Wow, yeah, I should write a song about her!” “What if you go back to that plane ride, but re-imagine that instead of leaving her behind, you’re on your way home to see her at the end of a long tour.” “Oh, wow, man, wow. Yeah! Airplane! Carry me back to her side!” “The airplane isn’t a vessel of your pain, now, it’s the vehicle that delivers your love back home.” “Wait, I’ll write a driving song too! HONK! Get out of my way, I’m heading home to see my baby! HONK! HONK!”

If Brian really was gonna come back, the Boys better appreciate where he was coming from this time… and Eugene Landy was coming with him.

Each album from early 70’s “Brian’s gone”-era has one defining, stunning Carl Wilson moment, songs that show him not only growing in his own artistry, but truly pushing the sound of the Beach Boys forward into progressive, uncharted territory. He ended the 60’s by first proving he could hold his own as a classicist by orchestrating a technicolor remake of the Ronnette’s “I Can Hear Music”, working with Stephen Desper to take Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound forward to stereo, a year before Phil himself made such a modern comeback from his own reclusion. For the first time, the Beach Boys sound truly stereophonically lush to modern ears; 57 years later the production still sounds timeless, despite the throwback nature of the tune itself. 

Next year’s “Sunflower” brings a stunning leap forward for Brian and Carl together; their co-composed “All I Wanna to Do” (not to be confused with the previous albums randy “All I Want to Do”) pushes into an echoing dreampop territory that sounds at least a decade ahead of its time, like something the Cocteau Twins would later concoct to cast a spell over the listener. Macho Man Mike Love contributes one of his tenderest lyrics and vocals to the group, offering to “give you all the love I can, and help you in whatever you do.” Despite the famous animosity that could arise between the cousins, it’s hard not to hear that as an offer of support from Mike to Brian, a reflection of the era of camaraderie that prevailed for this brief moment, where everyone was on board and working together to make something great.

1971’s “Surf’s Up” album presents us with Carl’s defining song, “Feel Flows”. 50 years later it would lend its title to the boxset of this era, which is more than appropriate, as it manages to capture both the futurism of “All I Wanna Do” and the resurrected-phoenix energy of the album’s “Smile”-salvaged “Surf’s Up” perfectly. Its message captures the moment, too: cocaine is a helluva drug.

1972’s “Carl and the Passions: So Tough!” puts the baby brother front and center in the incredibly confusing album title. The toughest bit was selling the Beach Boys as anything contemporary audiences wanted to hear. Carl, Mike and Al wrote the album’s centerpiece together, the meditative mantra “All This is That”, a total surrender of self to some of the lushest harmonies the group would ever record. As the title mantra is repeated during the extended fade, Carl adds his own falsetto “Jai guru dev” to drift across the waves. Namaste, brother. 

The final album of this 70’s trio, “Holland”, presents a harder side to Carl’s contemplation on the song “Trader”. Long story short, the trader is the colonizer, a Christopher Columbus stand-in. Picking up from where the “Smile” lament “bicycle rider, see see what you’ve done to the church of the American Indian” left off, Carl and lyricist Jack Rieley cast their gaze back to the first arrival of the “Trader” (traitor?) to this land of plenty, who writes back to send help to tame the land, “signed sincerely”… 

By the end of the first half of the song the narrative resembles “Run For the Hills”, with the natives driven from their lands, “and so sincerely” they cry out… The shift that follows this is a remarkable transformation from the bounce that brought settlement to the continent, as the survivors withdraw and nurse their wounds, and the music itself becomes tender and caring instead of brash and arrogant. The lyrics follow this transformation, “embracing together, like the merging streams, crying dreams, making it full. Begging intently for a slight reprieve, a night of ease, hands to touch, beyond the sorrow”…

Carl was 14 years old when he began his recording career, and within a year he would effectively be the leader of the live Beach Boys. His mother Audrey said he was born 30. By the time he actually turned 30 in late 1976, he’d been the Beach Boys’ backbone for half his life. “And this is the thanks I get,” you can hear his eyes saying in 1977 photos. He’d just been voted out of the leadership position foisted on him in puberty by his own dearest brother Brian, siding with Mike and Al over the direction of the band. I’m still not clear if “Adult/Child” was scrapped before or after this incident. But, after they completed a disastrous Australian tour, you can see Carl begin looking for the exit door.

“I haven’t quit the Beach Boys but I do not plan on touring with them until they decide that 1981 means as much to them as 1961.”

In the early 80’s he launched a half-hearted solo career. His first album was too soft to even be called soft-rock, and his second was an attempt to BTO boogie by way of Fleetwood Mac that is sabotaged by a mix so thin it hurts your ears to try and crank it loud enough to rock. Both were flops.

By the middle of the decade he was resigned to be a professional sideman to Mike and Al, although he still could deliver a highlight in the studio like “Where I Belong”. His most important role from the late 80’s until his death was as the curator of the deep cuts in the live set. Performances of songs like “This Whole World” and “Wonderful” are highlights of the era. Lowlights are the band’s appearance with Uncle Jesse on “Full House”, and the craptastic comeback “Kokomo”. Even the latter is made listenable by Carl’s lead, however processed in digital cheese it may be.

Perhaps the defining Carl Wilson moment of the early 90’s is captured on a VHS tape from a friend’s wedding, as he plays a stunning unplugged arrangement of “God Only Knows”, dressed in an all white tux,  while the catering crew is busy in the kitchen behind him. 

Six years later, “The world is a far lesser place without you” would be his epitaph. He was only 51 years old.

The 1976 “comeback” album was called “15 Big Ones”, and by that they could have meant honkin’ jobbies. Folks, I’m telling you true, most of this material belonged in the toilet. It could be worse (oh, it would get so much worse), but… oof. Brian’s return was embarrassing on almost all levels at this early stage. Now firmly under the care of Eugene Landy, Brian was convinced by him to go on Saturday Night Live as part of his healing journey and play a solo piano rendition of… “Good Vibrations”??? It was bizarre and awkward. Equally bizarre and awkward was Dan Akroyd and John Belushi showing up to Brian’s bedroom as the “surf police”, handing him down a conviction for falsely representing himself as a surfer boy when he had never, in fact, set foot on a surf board. His sentence was meant to fit the crime: Brian Wilson must prove his mettle and catch a wave. Down to the beach they dragged him, in his robe, and he was set off to sea, never to return…

The two Brian Wilson originals that deserve our attention on the “A Dozen Big Turds (with a few gems in there)” album, a platter dominated by unimaginative oldies covers, are a delightful blast from the past and a bouncing drive into the present. “Had to Phone Ya”, in form and content, would have fit right in with the lightly rococo, mundanity celebrating “Friends” material like “Busy Doing Nothing”. Its origins actually stretch back to the “Pet Sounds” sessions, during which an instrumental was cut in that album’s wall-of-sound style. Given a fresh take on the new album, it still resurrects those delightful horn charts from 1966, but gives them a more New Orleans-y feel with the drier mix. Funnily enough the song seems to be far ahead of its time, when his phone call gets answered with an delighted “Hey Brian!” Who had caller ID in 1975? Only someone living in the future, that’s who.

(I want people to answer my phone calls with that much enthusiasm.)

The other track that stands out, that should have been the lead single of the album, was the Roy Woods-meets-Captain and Tennille cruiser-bop “It’s OK”. That big bounce sound was in full effect here, like a giant beach ball getting tossed between convertibles stuck in L.A. traffic. It also presents a look at Brian’s return from his own point of view: “Gotta go to it, gotta go through it, gotta get with it.” The only way out is through, the only escape is in surrender. Brian might not be clear about what “it” is, but he’s going to find out.

Instead of positioning this existential bop as the song of the summer, Reprise and the Boys launched their return with a shit-ass rendition of Chuck “Shit Ass” Berry’s “Rock and Roll Music”. It also had that bounce, but it’s a goddamn ear irritant as far as I’m concerned, with the pretty ugly vocals naggingly echoing every line. “Just let me hear some of that rock” ROCK “rock” ROCK “ROCK AND ROLL MUSIC!” It was the worst of the Beach Boys. It did OK, but “It’s OK” should have been the smash hit comeback. Instead it flopped, caught in the ugly brown wake that R&R Music, and the rest of the album, had left behind, too late to be the summer defining bop it deserved to be. It was a bad taste experience that almost everyone regretted being involved with. The Beach Boys’ biggest hit album in a decade was instantly destined for the bargain bin.

Much like “It’s OK”, the entire followup album the band released got swallowed in the sewage of their botched comeback. It did the band zero favors that they signed a new record deal with CBS before the album’s release, owing only two more albums to Reprise on their current contract after 15BOs. “The Beach Boys Love You”, the followup where Brian truly came back in the fullness of his current capacities, was too odd and un-commercial for Reprise to even bother promoting. A year into his comeback, Brian was already considered a has-been again…

Sometime in mid-1969 Brian Wilson pulled out of his post-“Friends” malaise and started writing new material. He then began one of the most prolific periods of collaboration with his bandmates since perhaps 1965, when they’d recorded most of the “Summer Days (and Nights!)” album together between tours. This was the point when everyone had learned to bring their A-game to the table, including engineer Steven Desper, the co-architect of their stereophonic sound. His first innovation in that regard was a simple accommodation to Brian’s disability: he rigged up a mono monitor for Brian to hear the stereo signal. Prior to this, Brian couldn’t even clearly hear half of the mixes being concocted on the stereo spectrum. Although he’d never truly hear the final mixes, he could at least hear the balance as a mono signal piped straight to his one good ear.

Desper was a sonic innovator. According to the man himself, the albums he recorded with the group have never been properly mastered, meant to be passed through a proprietary “sonic matrix” to create a 3d effect to the stereophonic spectrum. Needless to say, this was something even less appreciable to Brian, alas. Perhaps it was, to get a bit audio techy,  a process to phase shift the stereo signal in a way that would have been self-canceling in a mono mixdown, with elements actually disappearing from the mix, hence needing to be applied in post. At any rate, it seems like Desper really wanted his pseudo-surround to be industry standard audiophile gear, but it, like a lot of Beach Boys-adjacent dreams, it never happened.

What did happen is he helped the band produce a trio of albums that occasionally sound as sonically expansive as “Dark Side of the Moon”, and as musically varied as one of those “loss leaders” smorgasbord promo double albums Warner/Reprise was fond of releasing at the time. Reprise had signed the band for their followup to “20/20”, then promptly rejected the first assembly presented by the band. The smorgasbord was a bit too smorgy, so the band went back to the board and re-assembled it into “Sunflower”. 

Led off by a funky, naggingly syncopated Dennis composed-and-sung tune, it kicks off a bit of a “Beach Boys present” showcase for every member of the band. From Denny’s funky-butt intro we slam headfirst into Brian’s transcendent bubblegum blast of “This Whole World”, which sounds like what would happen if someone rewrote “One Bad Apple” to have somewhere between 10-15 different key-changing modulations (sorry if I lost count) in under two minutes. It ends with an acapella breakdown where all the boys chant “aum” while Carl lays down some of his most soulful wordless vocals, and then declares “late at night I think about the love of this whole world”, the rest of the band stunningly echoing the title phrase like the Beach Boys choir. Brian was back!

If everyone brought their A-game to the album, half of the material is still B-status, including Brian’s, but the highlights are all top tier. In the evolution of the Beach Boys’ sound, it strikes the perfect balance between a classicist sound with a progressive sheen better than any other album of the decade.

In addition to “Forever”, Dennis’s contributions also include “It’s About Time”, a churning, almost latin-y rocker, the kind of thing Stephen Stills was great at producing during this era. It’s ably delivered by Carl, but clearly written to be from Brian’s POV: “I used to be a famous artist, proud as I could be, struggling to express myself for the whole world to see. I used to blow my mind SKY HIGH, searching for the lost elation. Little did I know the joy I was to find knowing I am only me!”

Alas… despite the exuberant effort of all parties involved, “Sunflower” was an even bigger flop than “Smiley Smile”. Brian retreated deeper into seclusion and addiction, occasionally emerging with a new mad scientist concoction like “My Solution”, but more often disappearing into bed all day and into the L.A. night-life when the spirit moved him. Usually to hunt for more cocaine.

One sonic concoction defines this era more than any other, the beautiful, haunting, canned-beat driven “Til I Die”. The song opens immediately with the choral wail, “I’m a cork on the ocean, rolling over the raging sea. How deep is the ocean? HOW DEEP IS THE OCEAN?”

“I’ve lost my way”, Alan Jardine then forlornly declares in the solo spotlight, to be joined in harmony for the mocking rejoinder: “hey hey hey”…

“I feel like I’ve lost my talent. I’m working harder and getting less satisfaction than ever before.” – Brian Wilson, April 1967

In March of 1967, Van Dyke Parks left the “Smile” project. Things had just gotten too weird. Brian’s hangers-on were treating Parks like the interloper in the entourage; if looks could kill, his body would be buried somewhere in the Hollywood Hills. These “friends” helped Brian orchestrate “humorous” interludes in the studio rather than writing songs; at some point in these sessions, you get the sense that Brian realizes the joke is on him. Parks didn’t see the humor to begin with. This wasn’t clever or funny, it was just asinine druggy horseplay. Brian was crashing out, but he was still too high to realize it, going a million miles an hour in a downward spiral.

And so Parks finally rode off on his high horse and left Brian to cultivate this chaos. But the question I can’t help but ask is: who was the most high? Together the two writing partners had been on an extended methamphetamine binge for the entire duration of their collaboration…

Having witnessed to what someone with schizo-affective disorder looks like while abusing amphetamines, I can’t help but recall this exchange from the John Cusack-era of Love and Mercy:

 Melinda Ledbetter: When did you first start hearing voices?

Brian Wilson: 1963

In the 1960’s, amphetamine use was endemic in western society. For all the talk of the hippie drug culture, it was “mother’s little helper” that could be found in the home of the average everyday housewife. It wasn’t one of those bad drugs you had to cross the tracks to get, it was a prescription you picked up from your pharmacist. And if you were a touring and recording musician in this era, well, you’d be a fool not to pop a little extra pep to make it through a grueling schedule. It’s a modern miracle, work twice as hard but never feel tired! What could possibly go wrong?

“Yeah Brian, what could possibly go wrong?” “Hey, who said that?!” “We did, bro.” “Who are you?!” “We are legion, bro”…

In 1964 the Beach Boys played 181 shows. It still stands today as the record for most shows they ever played in one year. Brian Wilson would play 176 of those shows and produce three full Beach Boys albums that year before his breakdown/retirement from the road. Father Murry would accompany the band for their Australian tour; after 3 years of managing the group, they’d had enough of his stern taskmaster routine. When they returned to the USA, the band had a meeting and the Wilson boys told their father he was fired. Murry never saw it coming; he would spend the next three weeks in bed, nursing his wounds. The man who’d fought for his son’s right to produce his own recordings had been thrown under the bus by all three of his children. He’d never really be the same…

I suspect when Brian was prescribed Desbutal in 1965, it was to replace a pre-existing amphetamine prescription. “Here, try this speedball instead, it shouldn’t make you so anxious.”

The Desbutal days began in earnest with the recording sessions for “Summer Days (and Summer Nights!” Brian’s sharpness in this era is put in stark relief when his folks come in to the studio during sessions for “Help Me Rhonda”, and a drunk Murry tries to take over the production, telling Brian and boys they’re doing it all wrong. “C’mon syncopate it!” he infamously declares, trying to get Brian to turn the song into a big band swinger. “Since she put me down babe a doob a dab a boo da”, he “helpfully” intones. “I’m gonna sing the words.” Brian deadpans in response. 

Later, in mounting frustration, as Murry continues yammering about syncopation and singing more “sexy”,  Brian cuttingly tells his father “I got one ear left and your big loud voice is killing it!” Brian Wilson was a funny guy. But you can hear his exasperation, especially after his father says he’ll just leave and yet… drunkenly just keeps digging in. “Are you going or staying, I want to know?” Brian asks in irritation. Eventually…. E-ven-tu-al-ly… Murry gets the message. But he still feels like Brian is the one with the big head, as Carl, ever the peacemaker, apologizes to his crestfallen father. It’s a painful moment in a painful saga, a look at the Wilson family’s personal Hell as a fly on the wall…

By late 1976, Brian Wilson had made numerous visits to Hell and back, if never all the way through. With the regiment of tough love/physical and emotional abuse that Eugene Landy had put him through, he had managed to write and record two albums of almost all original material for the band to release. Seeing the proof was in the pudding, Landy doubled his fee from $10k a month to $20k, and was promptly fired.

“The Beach Boys Love You” opens with circus stabs of organs, that ridiculous pulsing, almost symphonic synth bass, the slamming snare drum, and a single “YEAH” that would do James Hetfield proud. Then everything drops out but that synth line and Carl steps up to the mic and declares the Beach Boys are back from Hell and in love again…

“TO GET YOU BABY, WENT THROUGH THE WRINGER” he boisterously exclaims before the “band” kicks back in and is joined by a blaring baritone saxophone line. Oddly enough, it seems that coming back from Hell has left the Beach Boys unstuck in time and… back in high school? Or is it grade school? By the time we get to “Honking Down The” (gosh darn!) “Highway”, it’s really hard to tell.

“He’s not well, you know.”

By the end of the album, when you reach the drunken croon of “Love is a Woman”, you have to wonder who spiked the wedding band’s punch. The percussion almost feels like an afterthought, like the drummer is barely conscious. Of course the “drummer” is just Brian and his snare and tom.

Somewhere in the middle of all this lies the oddball emotional psychodrama masterpieces of “The Night Was So Young” and “I’ll Bet He’s Nice”. The recently released box set preserves the tape of Brian Wilson bringing his new songs to the band for the first time, alone at the piano. When he gets to the bridge of “I’ll Bet He’s Nice”, Mike Love positively flips his wig. If he weren’t such a macho jerk you’d almost see him get a little teary eyed, but the joy he expresses is real. He picks up the vocals during the outro and then declares in awe “That is a motherfucker!” After all those years of being accused of rejecting Brian’s gifts when he was at the apex of his creative powers and contributing to the breakdown that followed, you can hear the pride he feels, the privilege even, to have that talent back in the room with them again. Brian *was* back.

“Brian Wilson is the Beach Boys. He is the band. We’re his fucking messengers. He is all of it. Period. We’re nothing. He’s everything.” – Dennis Wilson

That didn’t mean everyone would ultimately be happy about the final results, Mike included. When it came time to produce the song in the studio, it didn’t even get the minimalist treatment with the percussion, being entirely synth driven, with the secondary synth lead sounding almost like a meowing cat. The bridge that Mike gushed over is delivered by Carl, his heartbreak mirrored and mocked by those mewling keys. The vocals in the verses are sung by Dennis in one of his most desiccated double tracked performances, sounding like he’s consumed nothing but whiskey and cocaine since he was left behind by his one true love.

That probably wasn’t far from the truth, or at least, it wouldn’t be. In ’77 Dennis was a mess, but at that point he was a mess on a roll. He was busy preparing to go out on his own solo tour when the Beach Boys gave him an ultimatum: cancel the tour or be expelled from the band. Dennis wanted to be there for Brian, even if he’d rather leave the Boys behind. He made the hard choice to scrap his own ambitions and remain a loyal member of the Beach Boys family. In a short life that seemed sometimes like it could be almost entirely defined by bad decisions, it may have been the worst he ever made…

Speaking of bad decisions… In 1972, as constant cocaine usage began affecting the range and tone of Brian’s voice to such a degree that he barely even used it on record, he would discover a new favorite singer-songwriter whose voice and style would forever alter how he would approach his own instrument. That man was Randy Newman. As Brian obsessively listened to Newman’s moving but sardonic classic “Sail Away”, he realized the more cigarettes he chain smoked, the closer he could get to Newman’s signature croak.

By 1975 he was clocking 8 packs a day. The results when he finally stepped back in front of the mic that year were shockingly apparent, when Brian opened his Muppet face and full boar croaked out “I’d like to spend the summer in OH-HI” *crack* “OH!” This was by far the worst he would ever sound, which is saying a lot. He would never again regain the choir-boy purity of his youth, but how many choir boys do? We all hit puberty eventually. Brian’s voice change just happened to come with a mid-life crisis…

When “Adult/Child” was delivered to the record company, every Wilson brother was in the process of getting divorced or separated from their spouses. The final rejection came from the record label itself. Some dispute the claim that shelving the album was Reprise’s call, that it was Mike and Al saying “how are we gonna take this nonsense on the road and not get laughed off the stage?” This wasn’t the fun fun fun folks wanted, this was a weird hybrid of minimalist slices of life in the style of “Love You” (some tracks outtakes from that album’s sessions) and a handful of big band swinging crooner tunes. The band may have been right to reject it, but it was a huge loss for us cultists, one that has finally been remedied with the release of the new “We Gotta Groove” box set.

The album has long circulated in a hissy bootleg, so those in the know were able to track it down fairly easily. I first became aware of its existence thanks to Mark Prindle’s cult-classic record review site. Much like “Adult/Child”, Prindle’s style rested somewhere between earnest and wide open love of music and life and a juvenile desire to to shit all over both and/or make a huge nonsensical joke out of everything, with the line between often incredibly blurry. As such, he gets down to the essence of the album in a nutshell (emphasis mine):

“Don’t sit around on your ass – smokin’ grass. That stuff went out a long time ago!” That is the SECOND LINE on this LP. This REJECTED LP. This BRILLIANT, HILARIOUS, MORONIC REJECTED LP. Don’t think I’m trying to be hipster by giving a rejected album a 9. But also don’t think that this is a serious album to be seriously hunted down and listened to with serious ears like (I Don’t Wanna Be Buried In A) Pet Sounds (-atary). This is mid-70s Brian Wilson we’re discussing. He was a loon, see. But a FUN loon! A fun loon out to make himself and others as happy as possible under the sad circumstances. And the person who can listen to any given 10 seconds of this album without getting a big mocking grin on their face is an unpleasant, hurtful person who should be framed for murder and hung from the injection chair. Here’s why:

It’s a full-blown Vegas extravaganza! A musical festival of overblown show tunes with violins and horn sections for dancing with a cane and crooning in a tux! Cover tunes include “Deep Purple,” “On Broadway” and “Shortening Bread,” all performed with complete tongue-in-cheek sincerity (if that’s possible. If not, shut it). Originals… include “Life Is For Living” (the one that mentions doobs), “Help Is On The Way,” (with its uproariously phrased opening verse, “Stark naked in front of my mirror/A pudgy person somehow did appear/Seems lately all I’ve eatin’s sugar and fat/It’s gettin’ obvious that’s not where it’s at!”), the sickeningly sexist “Hey Tomboy,” in which the band converts a tomboy into a GIRL (“Okay, put on a little lipstick, let’s see what it looks like” – “Now let’s put on a dress and some makeup!” – “Okay, now shave your legs for the first time!”), the out-and-out PATHETIC “Games Two Can Play” (in which Brian, in all seriousness, recites the verse “Joe South was singing `Games People Play’/ And I like to play games that two can play!”) and “Still I Dream Of It,” an honestly beautiful old person-style ballad he wrote in hopes that Sinatra or Davis Jr. would sing it. Neither would – THEIR LOSS. Fantastic song! And, like every other track on here, impossible to hear without imagining overweight bearded Brian standing on stage in a lounge, walking back and forth in front of the orchestra with mic in hand, singing with an eye on the stars, mesmerizing the audience with his dapper moves and manly yet sensitive delivery.

I didn’t intend to quote 3/4 of Prindle’s review, but it’s so on point I don’t know how I could write my own without directly ripping it off. I might as well quote his concluding paragraph while I’m at it:

It’s impossible to believe even for a second that the album wouldn’t have bombed miserably and been ripped apart by critics had it seen official release at the time. But 25 years on, this stuff sounds really really REALLY good. No fears or worries, no anxiety or terrorism. No hateful, evil Palestinians and Iraqis spreading fear and pain around the globe while George Bush’s America waves banners of peace, sends over airplanes filled with emissaries of hope, and works day and night to create a global community of togetherness and understanding for all of humanity. Just straight, obvious, bullshit entertainment for old people like me, I’m 29.

It’s almost 25 years later and we’re at war for peace in the middle east again. And this album still sounds really really REALLY good. Dennis summed up the weird but good vibrations in a contemporary interview, still promoting it as the next album by the band while on the promotional tour for his own record, highlighting Brian’s return to the leadership position of the band:

The new album, his “Adult/Child” album… strangest album I’ve ever heard. And his vocals are the best I’ve ever heard him. I’m really elated with the new album, it’s really gonna be a surprise. I don’t know where it’s coming from, but it’s positive, again.”

Once the album was canceled, that positive feeling within the band was gone forever. Every attempt at a comeback would seem to be snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. With Landy gone, Brian ballooned to 300 pounds, his cocaine habit unable to burn off his hamburger intake. Dennis had attempted a followup to “Pacific Ocean Blue”, but the half finished album would be cannibalized to fill out the Beach Boys CBS records debute, “L.A. Light Album”. True to its name, it saw the Beach Boys drifting into divorcee yacht rock territory, and I say that as someone who truly loves half the album. Brian didn’t even directly participate in its creation, instead he is represented by the true pre-Kokomo monstrosity in the band’s catalog, an 11 minute long disco remake of “Here Comes the Night” that refuses to go anywhere interesting for that entire duration. They should’ve done an extended remix of “Shortenin’ Bread” instead.

The worst albums of this post “Adult/Child” era were ironically the ones where Brian was “participating” in their creation, where one gets the feeling he doesn’t really want to be there. “M.I.U. Album”, recorded at the Maharishi International University in Iowa in an attempt to separate Brian from his L.A. drug sources, is a flaccid attempt at pop MOR that replaced “Adult/Child” as the Boys’ final Reprise LP, yet, perplexingly, kept the goddamned monstrosity “Hey Little Tomboy” from that rejected release. Carl and Dennis refused to go with the program of forced sobriety and only appear on that one track on the album. Dennis later had this to say:

“I hope that karma will fuck up Mike Love’s meditation forever. That album is an embarrassment to my life. It should self-destruct.”

It also featured songs co-written with Ron Altbach, who turned out to have some kind of creepy association with Jeffrey Epstein, casing empty Malibu mansions in the early 80’s? It’s still not entirely clear from Altbach’s own memoir. What is clear is a photo of the two with stockings on their head, Altbach clearly identifiable in his Beach Boys tour jacket. Once again the degrees of separation from unfathomable evil are a bit too close for comfort.

The final album to feature Dennis was the nadir of this era, “Keeping the Summer Alive”. The album cover features the Beach Boys performing in the opposite of a snow globe, with the summer they’re keeping alive just an artificial environment they’re encased in. Their audience: a group of arctic penguins. Bouncy pop-rockers co-written with Randy Bachman can’t overcome the antiseptic production that makes it sound as if each vocal part has been recorded in its own booth on its own track, which was probably true. But the blend of voices was totally off, the chemistry of the Boys around one mic totally missing. It’s the worst the band would ever sound vocally until their 2012 swan song. Even the post-Kokomo, sans-Brian 80s-90s dreck sounded better than this from a vocal production standpoint.

Dennis didn’t even bother to try and contribute an original tune, although he had plenty socked away at that point after his album sessions collapsed. The band had sold their 70’s studio, and Denny was no longer free to come in and experiment on his own time. There was one last gasp of creative effort between him and Brian, recorded in an offhand fly-on-the-wall session called “The Hamburger Sessions” and/or the “Cocaine Sessions”, so named because those were the substances Dennis would use to motivate Brian to write. Most of the songs reflect their origin, being pretty empty of substance but full of cholesterol. The one transcendent moment is perhaps the true sequel to “God Only Knows”, where Brian Wilson, somewhere far beyond the stars, gets down on his knees and begs his creator for mercy. “Dear Lord”, he pleads, “delight in me.” At least, that’s what his murmured plea sounds like to these ears. He was certainly no longer capable of taking any delight in his own life. The fallen demi-god now admitted his mortal and moral frailty, begging his creator, his higher power, for forgiveness. It would come, in its way, someday, but not this day. And never for Dennis, at least not in this life…

If their father drove Brian towards achievement, and Carl towards cooperation, with Dennis it was pure chaotic defiance. I can imagine Murry beating the shit out of a young Dennis the Menace, and Denny just laughing and laughing the whole time, only making the old man hit him harder. There was a kind of joy he derived in provoking that reaction; his morale would improve when the beatings continued.

When he shows up in photos clean-shaven the last year of his life, the decay is suddenly undeniable. It’s not just the self-inflicted damage of drink and drugs, but the actual beatings he continued to receive, even after Murry’s death. Maybe Dennis hoped they’d beat some sense into him as much as those who laid into him did, like cousin Stan Love. At some point it must have just become punishment for punishment’s sake.

Dennis was a disaster, a nightmare even, but it was never intentional. When he shows up, it’s directly in your face and larger than life, whether it be the maniac or the depressive. His life was driven by chaotic trickster forces, but his whole-hearted, eager charisma begs you to come with him on what is bound to be a chaotic misadventure. Just ask Christine McVie’s ghost. The combination of soulmate-grade kismet and pharmaceutical-grade cocaine that fueled their passionate romance at the end of the 70’s was so intense it’s a miracle the pair even survived to see the birth of the 80’s. If they’d remained together she probably would have drowned with him. But then, like her bandmate Stevie Nicks sang, “drowning in a sea of love” is “where everyone would love to be drowning”…

Speaking of… the final Brian Wilson song to be properly recorded with Dennis was a delightful minor key bounce dedicated to Ms. Nicks. “I have adored you for so long, and the vibrations are so strong,” he yearningly declares, “you make me feel like I belong.” It was a wishful act of projection more than a true vibration, which is basically all the Beach Boys were at this point as recording artists. They wouldn’t release a new album for 4 more years. “Stevie”, although recently leaked in pristine form, remains officially in the can; Brian was still too embarrassed by it to authorize its release on the 2012 box set.

Christine McVie, meanwhile, subtly but unmistakably appears in the background of Dennis’s last contribution to the Beach Boys cannon, 1979’s “Love Surrounds Me”, where Dennis repeatedly declares, despite love all around him, “there’s no love of my own.” Between McVie’s distant, ghostly oohs and the screech of a parakeet (?), you sense Denny may not ever find it again. 

A string of failed romances would follow, with his final moments spent diving for things he’d thrown off his old boat in the drunken dissolution of one of those crumbled bids for intimacy. At some point in the hunt for his souvenirs, the sea of lost love surrounded the truest Beach Boy and claimed him for its own. I can almost picture him reaching a moment of surrender sitting on the ocean floor, looking at a discarded photograph or memento. Fuck it. What was left to come up for?

“Adult/Child” came to a surreal but haunting conclusion with Brian’s attempt to write a song for Frank Sinatra. Much like Randy Newman writing the lament “It’s Lonely At the Top” for the famous crooner, Old Blue Eyes failed to see the appeal, and so it fell to the song’s author to deliver it in his most completely sincere tongue-in-cheek performance. To be fair, that childhood whap! upside the head had always left Brian with a bit of a compulsive sideways tongue-plant.

“Still I dream of it, of that happy day when I can say I’ve fallen in love”, he craggily croons between drags on his cigarette, like the drunk superstar of the karaoke bar (ahead of his time once again), “and it haunts me so, like a dream that’s somehow linked to all the stars above.” God only knew how, but he was gonna find a love that outshone those stars, and find the ground beneath his feet again. “I’ll find my world, someday I’ll find my world, woah oh oh, yeah yeah yeah.” Here’s hoping that positive affirmation pays off. In the meantime, somebody get this man another drink!

By 1966 Brian Wilson was at the top of his game, following the artistic triumph of “Pet Sounds” with the commercial smash of “Good Vibrations”. There was a pep in his step, and new vistas on his horizon. Some of that pep came from the fact he’d discovered the secret of Desbutal, that it was as easy as cutting the two color pill in half to separate the methamphetamine from the barbiturate. That collision of cellos and theremin was pure white light/white heat. By the time “Smile” began in earnest, Brian was basically a full blown meth-head. And Van Dyke Parks was in zing for zang. Together they created entire conceptual worlds of song, colliding kaleidoscopic visions of the American Dream and the dark colonial legacy that undergirded it. And… a suite about the elements! And… songs about eating healthy and excercising! And… psychedelic humor! Zen koans! Apocalyptic tidal waves! Surf’s Up, bitches! The collaboration was endlessly expansive. And it was all spiraling out of control.

Parks had probably been taking speed since he was a child actor. He knew how to hold his shit. He never understood why Bri couldn’t. Bri had never had to deconstruct his life, didn’t have an entire career already in the rear-view mirror. He’d hung on to his ego a lot tighter than he realized. Van Dyke had rebuilt his from the bottom up. When he left “Smile” behind, Brian’s was about to ascend into an abyss that it would never fully return from…

“You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way.” – Bob Dylan

In 2004 Brian Wilson returned to/from Hell to complete the Beach Boys’ lost masterpiece, although he did so without a single living Beach Boy present. Instead it was “Brian Wilson Presents: SMILE!”, the entire operation conceived and executed with his “Pet Sounds” touring band. Thanks to their adeptness at recreating the Wrecking Crew sound, they were able to go into the studio with Brian and re-record the album’s tracks so on-point, you’d be forgiven for thinking they hadn’t simply remixed the originals.

It’s impossible to imagine this turn of events without Brian’s second wife Melinda by his side. He may never have conceived of putting such a world-class touring band together in the first place without her influence in his life. Although she’d make some poor decisions for him at times, dissuading him from finishing his mid 90’s solo record with perfect foil Andy Paley in favor working with the thoroughly un-challenging Joe Thomas, for “Smile” she stepped out of the way and let Brian and the band be the ones in charge. Darian Sahanaja in particular was something of a co-producer, helping Brian with arranging all the pieces of the puzzle, which was now much easier to do thanks to digital technology. No longer would the modular song-bits have to be physically tape spliced together, they could simply be moved around like Tetris pieces now.

Even with modern technology involved, having a cultist lead the band kept the sonic recreation immaculately accurate. Trying to imagine the plasticy sheen Joe Thomas would have brought to the proceedings here truly makes me shudder. For once in Brian’s Adult/Child life, it seemed like everything that could go right, did go right. It took 37 years, but he’d finally snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.

The next 20 years would be a victory lap of a race he should have stopped running sooner, one that he couldn’t fully understand what he was running for (or even from). He never really liked being on the road, he only liked it when his family created comfort and support around it. At least they were able to do that, even if someone should have stepped in and said “It’s time to retire” sooner. Melinda could have encouraged that, but some say she could be a villain as much as a hero in that regard. She knew Brian needed to be dominated to be productive. But at what point had he done enough? At least he wasn’t propped up in such a way that enabled a fascist dictator to take over America, although it did solidify Mike Love’s takeover of America’s Group…

It’s so damn tempting to want to wrap this saga up with a bow, much like “Love and Mercy” leaves you with the “and they lived happily ever after” ending. But even in that film the fairy tale is undercut by the reality of Brian Wilson replacing John Cusack as himself for the end credits, playing a stripped down performance of the title track of the film and looking like a deer in headlights. It’s far more unnerving than his performances of “Smile” with the band, closer to that SNL run through of “Good Vibrations”.

Brian Wilson was never well, you know. None of the Wilson brothers were. But, if ever there were a musical group that embodied the archetype of the wounded healer, it would be them.

There’s a realm of studies into near death experiences that I’m somewhat obsessed with, based on the stories of those who’ve experienced such, framing it as a complete re-run of their lives, but through literally everyone else’s shoes who they’d ever had even the smallest of emotional impact on. The result is a total emotional reckoning with one’s existence.

I can’t help but think of such a death trip in the wake of the passing of an artist like Brian who touched so many people’s hearts. For all the pain of his personal existence, for all the pain he brought those around him, I hope he got to experience that delight we’ve taken in his creation, in the sharing of his soul. God only knows what kind of a blessing that must be.

“Oh I love that simple way people live from day to day. There’s a song inside of you and it gets stronger every day and it’s trying to say to you everything will be alright. That’s what we’re trying to say to you.”

You can hear the joy radiate from Dennis’s shredded voice as he delivers brother Brian’s lyrics. He was perhaps the first and truest believer; there probably wouldn’t be a church of the Beach Boys without him. His transcendent form must be taking delight in this moment too, the same way he delighted in witnessing the birth of Brian’s creations, ever the doting uncle. I suspect Carl is equally delighted, inhabiting every “Liiife is for the liviiiing!” with the full anchoring force of his infinite presence. 

As its father has departed the Earth and rejoined his brothers, “Adult/Child” finally returns from beyond the stars, like the reborn star child at the end of “2001: A Space Odyssey”. May its bearded, blessed presence bring love and mercy to us all in these dark and desperate times, and may the Wilson brothers know God the way God has known them.

Aum dop ditty.