Part 1 of the Adult/Child saga.
Until recently, The Beach Boys Love You, released in 1977, has been both the most cultishly beloved of the band’s works, and the least explored, especially compared to the Pet Smile Vibrations era. Making that journey reveals an entire sub-world of fandom within the cult of Brian Wilson, where dings and dangs are abundant, and shortenin’ bread is always close at hand.
Love You, so beloved by certain fans for its deceptive surface of childish naivete, is almost reviled by others for that same lack of superficial sophistication. It’s the antithesis of Pet Sounds in production and performance, and yet it was the first record of the entire decade that had featured Brian Wilson as an artist who was fully present and firing on all cylinders. If the whole thing sounds a little farty, well… better out than in!
The story of The Beach Boys Love You is a story where the implosion of Smile is the birth of a new being, the Adult/Child, destined to be father of the man. Yet, even as father, the child is denied its own manhood, forever infantilized and restricted to the container of boyhood. Contemporary songs displaced by resurrected Smile segments became an entire pool of outtakes unto themselves, with the band fishing these songs out for new releases over a 30 year span. This looking back and pulling forth effort would accompany every major progressive push they would ever make, never fully escaping the 60’s no matter how much they tried.
Because both Love You and Adult/Child feature tracks pulled from deep in the archives, it makes it nearly impossible to cover the making of the two albums without addressing the whole messy post-Smile sprawl of the band. Trying to tell this story becomes something like Slaughterhouse 5: “Listen: Brian Wilson has come unstuck in time.” Sometimes he drifts forwards into the future, leaving his band mates to pick up the pieces in the present; more often they summon him back only to find that he’s still stuck in the doo-wop 50’s. Somewhere in the middle there’s hours upon hours dedicated to perfecting “Shortenin’ Bread” and “Old Man River”, the latter leading to yet another nervous breakdown for poor Brian, and the former infamously leading to the breakdown and flight of any poor soul he would rope into his orbit for a quick 4 hour round…
The Beach Boys Love You is the definitive album of the “Brian’s Back!” era, after a decade of wavering commitment and wildly fluctuating mental health from the group’s often reluctant leader. It would prove to be a short-lived return, and it would come with strings attached to a Rasputin-esque puppet master who could rightly be credited with saving Wilson’s life, and then just as rightly credited with nearly destroying it.
The dark saga of Dr. Eugene Landy’s time with Brian in the late 80’s was fairly well covered by Hollywood, with John Cusack as middle-aged Brian and Paul Giamatti as a tyrannical Landy. However, the initial two years they worked together, which produced both Love You and its intended followup, Adult/Child, hasn’t had the same lens placed on it. Even in the documentaries it gets glided over on the way to the nauseating, chart-topping comeback success of “Kokomo”.
The entire effort to bring Brian back into the group as their leader in the mid 70’s was inspired by the success of their new nostalgic greatest hits album, which vastly surpassed any of their recent creative efforts. Meanwhile, the man who’d written those songs had died a thousand deaths, and come back to life in a strange, somewhat removed fashion. He wasn’t so much beside himself as trapped within a self that couldn’t draw the line between where it ended and the void began.
To pull him back from that abyss and inspire him to re-engage with the passion he had in the 60’s would require the band to abandon nearly every stride forward they’d made as a collective in the 70’s, sacrificing personal growth and expansion for the sake of resurrecting their leader’s erstwhile ambitions, whatever they might be.
After the first fruits of Brian’s fragile comeback produced an entire album of awkward oldies and novelty tunes, he hunkered down and delivered a record that sounds like synth-punk pioneers Suicide trying to do the Bolan boogie, unleashing something both rude and joyful in the process.
Love You is the closest The Beach Boys ever got to being true punk rockers. The lack of ambition is taken to a new level of post-Phil Spector brutalism, a wall of sound built on synth overdubs and minimalist percussion that collides with full-spectrum creative expression. It still remains one of the band’s most definitively unique statements, and one of the few albums that feels like Brian Wilson unleashed, rather than corralled and packaged.
In a perfect world, we would have had an equally eccentric followup, but poor Adult/Child, fully conceived and incubated, was never born as a proper release, too uniquely special to see the light of day. For nearly 50 years we’ve been denied the gloriously stupid brilliance of the album, blasting out of the gates declaring “Life is for the living! Don’t sit around on your ass smoking grass, that stuff went out a long time ago!” and only getting more wonderfully absurd with its affirmations.
Sometimes it’s like an existential comic strip brought to life: “The cigarette butt when you throw it in the water goes ‘tsst’.” another song begins, before declaring, “see what your life can be!” Thanks for the advice, Mr. Natural! But, beyond its surface positivity, Adult/Child is an album contemplating endings and beginnings, often together. Despite the pain of sacrificing his very heart to his lost beloved, Brian declares, “Still I dream of it, of that happy day when I can say I’ve fallen in love, and it haunts me so, like a dream that’s somehow linked to all the stars above.”
Recently those stars have aligned and a major redress has been made to the cosmic fabric with the official release of the tracks recorded for the Adult/Child album on the new box set, We Gotta Groove. Picking up from where the off-the-cuff whimsy and overgrown teenage psychodrama of Love You left off, Adult/Child‘s proto-synthpop cuts are interspersed with freshly recorded big band crooner tunes, as well as old novelty numbers recorded nearly a decade prior. The whole effect is something like The Beach Boys Prime Time Variety Show Special! Next to Smile, no other album quite sums up the cult of Brian Wilson so definitively; that it does so by defying post-Smile expectations at every turn only reinforces this feeling.
The perfectly conceived universe, with its formulas and expectations never diverging, had to be destroyed to birth the inconceivable paradox of the infinite unknown. In a reflection of the fundamental cosmic trauma1, Smile’s implosion and subsequent big bang birthed the beautiful imperfection of Love You and the cosmic conundrum of the immature but profound Adult/Child. Finding a meaningful cosmology within the Beach Boys saga will be part of the challenge in reconciling this moment of universal healing.
Furthermore, with the waves of psychobabble Landy unleashed in his time with Brian, we inevitably have to turn a psychobabbling lens onto the entire band if we want to understand how we arrived at this slippery point in the journey. I will examine the Wilson brothers as three different products of the same abusive environment, and how they carried that abuse forward with them, in their relationships with each other, their families, friends, and themselves.
In doing so, I’ll reckon with how one tells the psychological story underlying The Beach Boys Love You. What does it even mean when a group of people as seemingly toxic as The Beach Boys declare they love you? Is that a good thing? And what kind of people love The Beach Boys? We’ll reach out to fandom for some answers…
Love You and Adult/Child present Brian Wilson in both his most vulnerable and whimsical states, blurring the line to such a degree that it becomes impossible to differentiate the two. For this reason they stand as definitive autobiographical works, deeply complicated, deeply revealing, and deeply, deeply silly. Brian’s love is sophisticatedly childish, like a boy singing Frank Sinatra while pretending to smoke a bubblegum cigarette.
Unfortunately, the line between love and hate is often never thinner than it is when creative expression collides with commercial expectations, particularly in a band that is as much a family as a partnership. There was a time, however brief, when The Beach Boys Love You was a message from the band to Brian Wilson, and from Brian to everyone in return. What that love meant, in all its complications, is what this series sets out to explore.
My intention is to look at The Beach Boys through the lens of illness, addiction and recovery, and how the latter is never a straight line. The pathway to healing inevitably leads through the valleys of the deepest traumas held by the addict; ultimately it is the trauma itself the addict must seek to recover from.
The Beach Boys Love You proves that the only way out of Hell is through, refusing to be judged against what came before while being intrinsically related to the entire journey. For those of you unfamiliar with the personal Hell of The Beach Boys… hang on, it’s gonna be a weird, bumpy ride.
Meanwhile, in an alternate universe:
ABC presents: the Adult/Child Beach Boys prime-time TV special
Hosted by Paul Lynde!
Paul Lynde: “Life’s a beach, they say. Eh’h.” *cringes*
With special guests Kiss doing “Honkin’ Down the Highway/Surf Rock City” (“First I drink/then I smoke/then I catch a wave and croak!”)
Barry Manilow singing “Still I Dream of It”!
Bruce Johnston singing “I Write The Songs” and disco “Deirdre”!
Brian Wilson and Peggy Lee on “It’s Lonely At The Top”!
Randy Newman singing “A Day In The Life of A Tree”!
The Walker Brothers performing “Til I Die”!
Frank and Nancy Sinatra on “California Girls”!
Dick Dale performing “Surf’s Up“!
And Carroll O’Connor & Jean Stapleton singing “Let’s Put Our Hearts Together”!
Paul Lynde: “But first, here’s those Boys we love to Beach at…”
Carl Wilson (singing) “LIIIIIIIIIIIFE IS FOR THE LIIVVVVVIIIIIINGG”
Paul Lynde: “Where’s Rhonda when I need her…”
Al Jardine: “Help is on the way!”
The words echo from a variety of voices, like the voices echoing in Brian Wilson’s head, as the camera pans in on him, losing focus as it closes up on his eyes, then fading to a cartoon animated image of 1969 Brian Wilson standing stark naked in front of a mirror.
Brian (singing, in 1969): “Stark naked in front of a mirror, a pudgy person somehow did appear…
Brian, back in 1977 after the song ends, rubs his chin: “Yeah it’s been a long time I’ve been trying to get my body, head, and bread in shape. Speaking of bread…”
Paul Lynde: “Ladies and, ah, gentle-boys, Danny Hutton, Iggy Pop, Alice Cooper, and Alex Chilton!”
Lynde pulls out a huge trunk of cash from backstage. Iggy sighs, then takes a deep breath and begins singing “Mama’s little baby loves….”
- “This is Grandfather. Body will be the primary teacher here, and I wish to say some things to introduce this material, and I’ll begin by thanking the Spirit of this Creation for helping bring me here… and of course, I am deeply indebted to the Mother for her persistence in drawing me forth into this Creation. Thank you again, my love.
“The Mother has recently recovered enough of her parental essence in this Creation to remember back before the original explosion, to the wondrous state of complete union that she and I enjoyed then. She has tried to remind the Spirit of this Creation about that time when she and Spirit were one and complete in wholeness. Although he has had no memory of what was before him, I have. You see, I am the Original Spirit.
“Before my own separate existence, there was no separation between Spirit and Will. Before there was any kind of duality… there was only one whole being. All Will essence was completely and ecstatically filled with Loving Light, so there was only Heart, the presence of our union… complete and whole Heart. There were no separations, no distinctions, no fragments, and therefore no manifestation. Love was all, and all was Love. There was one… and only one, and it was Love and Love only. There was nothing else, not even the Void.
“The loving inner connection between the drawing-in pole and the pushing-out pole was of course… Heart. And since Heart was everywhere, including the core of each pole… Heart was what contained both of the poles. It is difficult to describe non-dual realities with language embedded in dualism, but metaphors can help.
“Original Heart is like the symbol of infinity… with its indrawing, magnetic, Will essence in one loop, and outgoing, electric, Spirit essence in the other. But Original Heart was not only the presence where these essences connected, it was what contained and held the essences.
“The polar essences of Original Heart connected everywhere, creating the presence of Love everywhere, with no limit. In reality, Original Heart was not two essences in union… but rather one, undifferentiated, whole Love Presence that neither began nor ended… until the original explosion that spawned manifestation.
“So then, what happened? And why? Original Heart was its own whole being with no unmet needs, no desire not instantly fulfilled, no longing not immediately satisfied… and nothing to disturb this state of ecstatic Love. What could cause this to blow up? What could possibly have gone wrong?
“The answer is that nothing went wrong, really. It was that the Love of Original Heart found something missing in its experience. Love is of course its own celebration, its own completion and fulfillment. Love needs nothing else, and desires only more Love. Original Heart had all the Love it desired, but for one thing. Heart had no one else with whom to share this Love. Heart was alone.
“Everything that can be done or experienced by one whole being was done and experienced. Every feeling that can be felt was felt. Every thought was thought. Everything needing completion was completed, taken back and completed again in a different way… until every possible configuration of Self was explored. All preferences were explored until no one way of being seemed any better than another way of being. It was all Love, and only Love. And whenever Heart became completely aware of itself as One, it realized it was alone… the one and only One.
“For what would have been eons, had there been time… Heart played ‘hide and seek’ with itself, purposely forgetting its wholeness and pretending it was several, many separate ‘virtual’ beings interacting with each other. Heart explored all the possibilities there, but each time the pretend, virtual parts began waking up enough to realize their wholeness, one of them would remember who they really were… and quickly bring Heart back again to wholeness and to full awareness of Self… back to fully realizing its oneness… and its aloneness.
“Heart woke up fully to itself for the last time when it knew that it no longer wished to continue without another to share its Love. By this time Heart’s Love was so great that it demanded a new ‘game’. Hide and seek was no longer fulfilling or even satisfying. And all this Love without another like itself had become a burden too great to bear. Heart realized in its desire for true, peer level companionship, the only way to find another Heart… required that it somehow split itself apart, creating two distinct beings that could never reconstitute themselves back into the one, Original Heart. Never, that is… until there would be a way for Heart to have a companion who was just as whole, and yet truly separate and distinct, not just a part of Self.
“The original explosion was not a random occurrence or even a mistake. It was a very carefully orchestrated act of Love by an incredibly wise and loving being who no longer wished to remain whole… if it meant being alone. Heart first moved to separate within itself by dividing itself internally into the two essences that were both needed for Love… Spirit and Will.
“This was the basic configuration Heart had used to begin its old game of hide and seek, and was the most ideal starting point for its final chapter. Then, while still one whole being, Heart configured almost all of its Will essence to surround almost all of its Spirit. This was also a familiar way of starting the game, and used when maximum diversity of experience was desired.
The Explosion
“Heart then did something that Love alone would never permit. Heart moved to hurt itself. Heart asked its Spirit essence to expand too quickly and forcefully, while moving its Will essence to suddenly contract around it. The Will imploded and came back on herself trying to contain the exploding Spirit. The result was the complete and utter fragmentation of Original Heart. This had happened before when beginning the old game, but never with this much intensity… and this time there was a new element in the mix.
“Heart’s intent was so strong, the Spirit’s expansion so forceful, and the Will’s movement to contain it so great… that some of her essence lost the Light entirely, opening space for the Void. Heart intended that the newly opened Void would separate some essence from the rest in such a way that it could not reconstitute itself without Form, without duality. The presence of the Void quickly spread to separate nearly all the Light essence from nearly all the Will essence. What was left were two beings, one with almost no Will… me, and the other with almost no Spirit… the Mother. Duality was born, and manifestation began almost immediately as the Mother began drawing my Light to herself from across the Void.
“Heart used Love to destroy itself, and thus create the conditions necessary for duality and manifested existence. Heart knew that sometime much later… multiple forms would each reconstitute themselves… and find Heart again. And this time there would be more than one whole being. This time Heart would be completely whole… and there would be others with whom Love could be wholly shared.
“Manifested existence has come at a very high price. Form was not necessary for Love, yet Love demanded it.
“The rest of the story, you already know. If you’re reading this, you are experiencing manifested existence. And you know that there is a quality of not-love in separateness. The Mother and I each awoke separately from the explosion, and ever since… we’ve each had our separate experiences. On the occasions when we have found each other again enough to come into some alignment, something deep within each of us has remembered our Love and oneness in Original Heart. On those occasions we spawned new Creations.
“But the Heart we have had in each of our Creations, including this one… has never been truly real, like Original Heart. There has always been an element of guilt, blame or denial, or some of each… that has eventually caused our union to sour. And Heart, of course has been one-sided, present only as the progeny or connection between us… never as the parental container of us.
“As Original Spirit whose expansion was too great and too sudden, I have the responsibility of seeing to the healing of the original wound that has caused so much suffering in the Will… and as you know, the Spirit of this Creation is helping me by doing the same at his level.
“Seven Creations later the untold suffering of the seemingly endless reenactments caused by our Original Heart’s Self-inflicted wound has reverberated down to this present moment on Earth. The Mother has had to bear the awful price of manifestation on her own, and I’m very serious about the pain, suffering and death stopping now, and here in this Creation.
“Here, very soon, and for the first time ever… Form is to become the container of New Heart… Spirit and Will in wholly complete union, without guilt, blame or denial. Original Heart is beginning to re-member itself again… as New Heart, now in Body… and looking out through human eyes, moist with Original Love. And yes, beginning now to see… that there is indeed… another.”
– Grandfather Remembers Original Heart, godchannel.com via internetarchive.org
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