Part 3 of the Adult/Child saga.
After their best Lei’d plans fell apart, with the Wilson bros dropping acid for the Hawaii show and delivering a timid, bizarre performance, the group returned back home to L.A. and made a desperate attempt to patch the live recordings together with studio tracks before finally declaring defeat and scrapping the entire endeavor. Finally free of the psychedelic specter of Smiley Smile, which treated the rhythm section as an occasional afterthought, they got down to some rhythm and blues and began to reclaim their mojo. Carl, still just a fresh-faced young lad of 21, decided it was time the band learned how to boogaloo1 it; it was the first time he would be over a decade ahead of the game, with Breakin 2: Electric Boogaloo2 not dropping until 1984. Carl’s initial attempt to craft his own song was a lightweight bop, but it was also a harbinger of things to come. It wouldn’t be long before he’d be taking the reins on more than just his own work.
It also wouldn’t be long before best 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…
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 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 are few stories 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.
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, listening to Friends, saying “this is fine”. That’s the vibe of the album: peaceful acceptance of the world burning down around you.
This was the same year the Beatles put out “Revolution”. Kids wanted “Not to Touch the Earth” or set it on fire. Songs of domestic tranquility wouldn’t be in vogue for at least a couple more years3, after attempts at revolution had turned into an extended bender that everyone was waking up from with the worst hangover.
In 1968, 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 their next album, “I Went to Sleep”, which was about aimlessly wandering around in his yard and passing out. The less than two minute track was recorded months before the Carl-led album sessions, and shows exactly which direction Brian was intent on heading at that point.
Despite the devastating disappointment of Friends, which as both a single and an album expanded the bomb crater in Brian’s ego significantly, there was a minor comeback story that immediately followed. It was the first time Brian and Mike leaned back 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”4 to the less explicit but more suggestive “do it”, the cousins found a point of re-connection where there was still mileage left in the old surf and sun 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 with an old pal soaking up rays and 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 with old friends the conversation turns to girls we knew when their hair was soft and long 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 Wilson’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 1969’s 20/20, besides a brief ode to taking naps, were archival efforts initiated by Carl. He recorded a lead vocal for Smile outtake “Cabinessence”, prefaced it with that lost album’s acapella intro “Our Prayer”, and made the pair the fantasmagorical, otherworldly climax of the album. Is this what Brian was trying to do with “Smile”? No wonder he’d 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”, conceived as the debut single for Danny Hutton’s new vocal trio “Redwood”5. Brian had been moonlighting with the group to produce the single. When this became known to the Beach Boys, 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!6
They’d already reclaimed “Darlin’” from the same fate, this was adding insult to injury. Unlike the quick turnaround of that 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 attempts lack. “Looking down through the valley so DEEP AND WIDE”, the vocals exclaim, exploding in a cosmic blossom from a warm hug to an unfathomable awe. It’s a moment both transcendent and terrifying, and it truly makes the song for me.
Brother Dennis, ever the devoted acolyte, was not only prepared to follow Brian into these strange, mist shrouded and shadowed valleys, 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.”
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”7. 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 supposedly 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.
“Be With Me” begins with Dennis arguing with his romantic partner about not being able to “play the game” as they prepare 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’s “freeeeeeeeee” transforms into “Briiiiiiaaaannnnn”, before he finally screams out his brother’s name from the bottom of the echo chamber, desperately, uncomprehendingly 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. Tentatively titled Brian Loves You, its manic, adolescent id energy has almost no point of comparison, except perhaps one: the music that David Bowie and Iggy Pop were creating together during the same time-frame, as they attempted to escape their own all consuming addictions and demons, consciously endeavoring to express the state of the artist in the moment while 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, still infamously divided. For Wilson, it’s hard to tell where a search for sonic transformation ends and the embrace of minimal effort begins. Meanwhile, the sound of Love You, as much as anything else, is Brian 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 more than 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 often 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 fully 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 of soul, while the rest of his face is buried behind the ultimate L.A. 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. It’s not Heaven, but… it’s not Hell?
In the pantheon of cocaine-desiccated cult classics, Pacific Ocean Blue sits in a direct linear continuum with Lou Reed’s Berlin, Gene Clark’s No Other and David Bowie’s Station to Station, its tales of existential despair often elongated and dissipated to very edge of sanity8. The journey it takes the listener on is almost incomprehensible, resembling nothing so much as the endless, pure white liminal 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.
By the time it dropped in 1977 it was both shockingly contemporary and completely out of time, fitting snugly if uncomfortably 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 Pacific Ocean Blue 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 delirious awkwardness of the whole exchange. “Even love,” he continues, “and the things we hold close.”
Nope, not even love ultimately survives in Dennis’s world… it drifts off with the static at the end of another syndicated TV 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. To be the recipient of that love would turn out to be a challenge that none of his lovers could ultimately endure. Anyone who got sucked into his tragic orbit was lucky not to drown with him.
Looking at the Wilson brothers only through the lens of pain and suffering, however, 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 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.
Much like The Muppets, the awkward, goofy charm of The Beach Boys, filled with hopes and fears, serves as the vessel for our own aspirations and striving. Proving that there’s no business like show business, they take their own dreams (good *and* bad) and turn them into a lucid engagement with the audience, making a pilgrimage of the process. The entire journey towards putting on a show becomes the show itself, more dramatically complicated than it ever could have been conceived as a simple, straightforward production. “Produced by The Beach Boys” becomes less an album credit and more a cosmological precept. It’s their universe – we just live here…
Jesus said, “If those who lead you say to you, ‘See, the kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty.”
“Let him who seeks continue seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will become troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will be astonished, and he will rule over the All.”
“The man old in days will not hesitate to ask a small child seven days old about the place of life, and he will live. For many who are first will become last, and they will become one and the same.”
“Do not tell lies, and do not do what you hate, for all things are plain in the sight of heaven. For nothing hidden will not become manifest, and nothing covered will remain without being uncovered.”
“Recognize what is in your sight, and that which is hidden from you will become plain to you . For there is nothing hidden which will not become manifest.”
“Blessed is the lion which becomes man when consumed by man; and cursed is the man whom the lion consumes, and the lion becomes man.”
“When you see one who was not born of woman, prostrate yourselves on your faces and worship him. That one is your father.”
Jesus saw infants being suckled. He said to his disciples, “These infants being suckled are like those who enter the kingdom.”
They said to him, “Shall we then, as children, enter the kingdom?”
Jesus said to them, “When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same, so that the male not be male nor the female female; and when you fashion eyes in the place of an eye, and a hand in place of a hand, and a foot in place of a foot, and a likeness in place of a likeness; then will you enter the kingdom.”
From: The Gospel of Thomas
The Nag Hammadi Library
Translated by Thomas O. Lambdin
- Merriam-Webster defines boogaloo as: “a genre of Latino popular music of especially New York in the 1960s influenced by soul and rhythm and blues.”
↩︎ - Via Wikipedia: The subtitle “Electric Boogaloo”, originally a reference to a funk-oriented dance style of the same name, entered the popular-culture lexicon as a snowclone (a clichéd phrase in which one or more words can be substituted to express a similar idea in a different context, often to humorous or sarcastic effect) used to denote an archetypal sequel. The usual connotation is that of a ridiculous sequel title or of a title of a follow-up to an obscure or eclectic film or other work.
↩︎ - James Taylor released his own debut album in 1968, on The Beatles’ Apple Records. Even though it including one of his most beloved songs, “Going to Carolina In My Mind”, it too was a total flop, despite being just as good as the smash hits that followed it. Other than some orchestral interludes between songs, it sounds a lot like the soft rock sounds that would enrapture an audience who had burnt on on acid rock by the end of the decade.
↩︎ - Listen closely to the final pre-chorus and you can still faintly hear Mike sing “surf” beneath “do it”. Then listen closely to the fade of “All I Want to Do” to listen to Dennis actually doin’ it.
↩︎ - Van Dyke Parks claims he gave the group their later name as superstar hitmakers, “Three Dog Night”, although, as singer Chuck Negron emphasizes in his autobiography, Parks is the only one who claims this. Everyone else credits Danny Hutton’s long-time girlfriend, actress June Fairchild, who read it in a magazine story about Australian aborigines.
↩︎ - Chuck Negron: Danny was friends with Brian Wilson, who was at the peak of his career and wanted to produce an act other than the Beach Boys. Brian had written two songs especially for us to record, “Time to Get Alone” and “Darlin’” (See videos below). We worked on the numbers with him for several months and he thought we were the hottest voices he’d heard in years. He even hired the string section of the L.A. Philharmonic to come in and record with us at Wally Heider’s studio.
Brian, a musical genius, would record us and then play the tape back fifty times, making little changes here and there. I couldn’t even tell the difference and would sometimes fall asleep during the process. Brian loved the sound we gave him and he wanted to sign us to a contract with the Beach Boys’ Brother Records label. We didn’t even have a name yet but he was calling us Redwood. We were naive enough to believe that the other Beach Boys would support Brian and us in this new endeavor. Nothing could have been further from the truth.
I should have seen it coming. One day Mike Love, Brian’s cousin and fellow Beach Boy, dropped by the studio to check us out. The vibes. changed immediately. To me, Mike seemed an arrogant, self-serving guy and when he walked in it was as if a black cloud had suddenly surrounded Brian. I figured I would try to break the tension. Mike was wearing an expensive cashmere overcoat, and I said, “Wow, that’s a beautiful jacket.” He turned toward me and in a condescending tone answered, “Well, you just keep trying to do the right thing and maybe you’ll get one too, man.” Later I heard he was bad-mouthing us to Brian, saying, “They’re nothing.”
It soon became clear that Mike Love and the other Beach Boys wanted Brian’s immense songwriting and producing talents used strictly to enhance their own careers. It all came to a head several weeks later when Mike Love, Carl Wilson, and Beach Boys guitarist and singer Al Jardine came to the studio and heard our version of “Time to Get Alone.” They maneuvered Brian into the control booth and reduced him to tears. It was a cruel and pathetic scene. Danny, Cory, and I were in the studio and could see it all happening through the control booth window.
It was as if Brian had turned into a little boy. The conversation appeared quiet and calm, but we could tell it was emotional and intense. The others were doing most of the talking like overbearing, controlling parents. Brian would move to get away and they would block his escape. We couldn’t hear what was being said, but I think a good lip-reader would have picked up something like, “We don’t give a shit about these guys and we want those songs for us.”
We could actually feel Brian crumbling, and when he came out of the booth a tear dropped down his cheek. His head was lowered and his shoulders sagged. It was the body language of a child who had just been scolded and punished. And this brilliant musical icon-whose songs defined one generation and influenced another-weepingly told us, “We can’t do this. I have to give the songs to them. They’re family and I have to take care of family. They want the songs. I’ll give you any amount of money you want to finish an album, but I can’t produce it. They won’t let me.”
The Beach Boys owed Brian Wilson everything, but could not have cared less that he desperately wanted to launch this special project. He needed it to pursue his personal and artistic freedom, yet they quickly bullied him out of it. At the same time, the Beach Boys would never even have considered how important it was to Danny, Cory, and me to record our first album with the great Brian Wilson.
As eccentric as Brian could be, he was always a nice person. He made the Beach Boys a part of the American landscape, and the other band members should be forever grateful to him. Mike Love especially should thank God every day for Brian Wilson. Brian gave Mike a great career and made him a rich man. He did it by giving his cousin Mike a job that in my opinion no one else would have hired him to do – sing.
“Darlin” became a hit when the Beach Boys recorded it themselves. Ironically, Three Dog Night went on to become the most successful Amer-ican rock group of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Beach Boys would have made millions of dollars in additional royalties had they listened to Brian and signed us to a contract.
– Three Dog Nightmare ↩︎ - Despite being credited to Dennis alone, rumors have persisted that this was another Charles Manson co-write. Unlike “Never Learn Not to Love”, there is no known previous version recorded solo by Manson to confirm this. Still, considering Dennis had lyrical co-writers on every other song he ever released, and how easily I can imagine Manson strumming and singing something similar, it seems like a good bet. At the very least, it’s a deeply Manson-inspired song. Weird, dark vibes abound in it.
↩︎ - Although, actually, the longest song on the album is only 4:22, with most tracks not even cracking the 3 minute mark. They’re just so un-songlike so much of the time that they really stretch your perceptions of time’s flow. It’s one of the most accessible un-accessible albums ever made! Get stoned and listen to it really loud! ↩︎
To be continued…
Brian Hildebrand Land 
Leave a comment