Welcome to the Adult/Child saga! This is an ongoing project of Beach Boys musings.
Part one serves as an extended introduction to this blog series, telling the story of the late 70’s “Brian’s Back!” era by simultaneously rewinding to the time of Brian’s late 60’s withdrawal and interweaving the two unfolding eras into one harsh, humorous, healing narrative. In doing this I’m attempting to put the story of Adult/Child into context within the grand scheme of the Beach Boys story, examining both the adult childishness, and the childish adultness that defines the band in this era.
Much like Carl did polishing up Brian’s raw Love You productions while still preserving their rough and rude core, I’m trying to keep a naive but knowing edge to my writing, sometimes a bit round and bumptious like that synth bass sound on Love You, but with an honest earnestness to match that album’s energy. Writing something purely academic about this era seems like a lost cause, so I’m leaving room at the tail end of these pieces for some gonzo free-form and oddball esoteric sources, to try and put the weirdness of the cult of The Beach Boys into a broader, reverently irreverent context. Alley oop!
In part 2, I look back at Brian’s 1967 withdrawal from the super-producer role, leaving the band to realize that they’re gonna have to learn the game if they want to remain competitive. Brian was playing on his own turf and terms from here on out, abandoning the competition entirely whenever possible.
Smiley Smile was the initial result, an album that could be called “anti-pop” if it didn’t shoe-horn in “Good Vibrations”. “Heroes and Villains”, also included, was the last gasp of that level of ambition from Brian, and the relative flop of the single broke his heart and ego in ways he never fully recovered from. But that song wasn’t pop the way “Vibes” was, it was more like a post-modern vaudeville soundtrack…
When Jimi Hendrix dissed the band and the single in a rundown of recent releases, his “psychedelic barbershop quartet” burn really stung. Yet, in the wake of Smiley Smile, they couldn’t escape it, admitting as much on stage in a failed attempt at recording a live album in the same stripped down style in Hawaii. That said, with half the band frying on acid, the harmonies are hardly even consistent enough to sound like a quartet!
From this point out, Carl and the rest of the group realized they could no longer count on brother Brian to be in-it-to-win-it. But, with the band setting up their main studio operations in Brian’s house, he could still participate when the vibrations moved him… literally, as the studio was beneath his bedroom. With everyone in the group taking the opportunity to learn and grow, they began truly producing albums as a collective, rather than counting on Brian to hold their reins.
The irony was that, with all this creative progress as a group, some of which still sounds strikingly modern, what brought great success back to the band was a perfectly assembled collection of their oldies but goodies. Now the demand was for material that directly looked backwards… and for the man that had orchestrated those greatest hits. But what kind of GOAT would Brian Wilson return as? And would his tongue still have the same way with the ladies that it did in his younger daze?
As The Beach Boys began to move beyond Smiley Smile as an insular world unto itself, Carl and especially Dennis began to move out of the shadow of Brian as producers and composers of their own material for the group. Some initial efforts are a bit awkward, and some collaborations are pretty questionable, but the younger Wilson brothers both begin taking huge steps here.
Those steps for Dennis would pay off eventually with his cult classic solo album, which showed him emerging fully from the shadows of his brothers while retreating under a fortress of beard, sick of being thought of as nothing more than the band’s beefcake. It was, unfortunately, the beginning of the end for any sense of stability his life may have possessed, rather than a hopeful new beginning. Conceived under the white cloud of an ever escalating cocaine habit, it would only be another 6 years before his spiral would conclude, although his creative streak would be over in half that time.
Meanwhile, Brian emerged from his own spiral, for the time, with The Beach Boys Love You. An utterly unique creation, I have to look at both the circumstances and the recorded product to find the closest point of comparison in David Bowie and Iggy Pop’s own recovery-centering comebacks recorded in Berlin during the same time frame. Slightly manic, weirdly innocent, yet also containing strange shadows and depths.
As the first album since Friends to feature Brian at the wheel, it’s interesting to compare the vibes of the albums. That effort was a true Wrecking Crew-assisted effort directed by the Beach Boys’ maestro, comforting but also unnerving. It’s the sound of a band that is almost turning into some kind of weird insular cult more than a product of the entertainment industry. It’s no wonder they’d get sucked into the orbits of The Maharishi and The Mansonites during this era.
Both Love You and Pacific Ocean Blue seem to be reckoning directly with the fallout of that time. Or maybe Love You is even reaching back further, struggling to find a sense of innocence before times turned so dark. But they also reach directly forward in a way that makes them sound like now still. They are unique creatures made by unique creatures, and they demand to be met where they are coming from. Will you be able to survive the journey? Heaven is just a car ride away…
In part 4 I look at some of the work it took to drag Brian Wilson out of bed and get him back in the game. Initial efforts found him refusing to play by any kind of rules but his own, finding a speed fueled groove and directing the band through the bluest lyrics they would ever lay down together. Realizing this wasn’t going to get them anywhere back on the radio, they called in some professional help, which quickly escalated once the surf police got involved. By the time a riderless surfboard came drifting back into shore, you had to wonder if we’d seen the last of the elusive Beach Boy.
But then something magical happened, when a bedraggled creature that looked like Brian showed up to church and began singing a new song about old songs being new again. He shyly made his way through the first verse, and then the gospel choir roared to life with him on the chorus, and suddenly this creature came roaring to life with them. It’s a perfect exchange of chi from all participants, a beautiful, joyful circuit of love. A new spirit was born in Brian Wilson, a holy spirit, a moving, grooving spirit. The Adult/Child, Thump, has entered his temple. And he’s ready to work smarter, not harder, for his salvation.
Lucky for Thump, technology had evolved to make that task easier. Instead of demanding perfection from a cadre of session musicians, searching for the perfect sounds, he could summon up a mix of synthesizer tones that hit just as much of a sweet spot. Combined with a basic drumbeat, and led through some creative explorations with therapist Eugene Landy, Brian was ready to thump out some songs that no one saw coming. More than moldy oldies and bawdy groovers, he would show the world what kind of new pet sounds he’d been playing with. But was the world ready for a song that sounded like a sad cat? Or another one where he calls his sweetheart “baby” and means it literally? Or was this gonna end up being another one of those stress dreams where you’re back in high school, you forgot to study for the quiz, and you’re not wearing pants? Gee whiz!
This week I begin to wrestle with some of the deeper trauma that shaped the Wilson brothers’ lives, attempting to at least feel out all the brothers before recognizing that the full scope of their American Family relationship is too much for one therapy session (or even a 2 part miniseries) to cover.
For this installment I try to hone in on the weight that Carl had been holding for the group, a burden that had quickly, steadily grown before the youngest Wilson could even get his learner’s permit. The archetypal Child/Adult of the group, the central pillar of responsibility between Dennis’s Samson-esque self destruction and Brian’s devastated state watching columnated ruins domino, Carl was “born 30” according to his mother, but he wouldn’t live to be 60… I can only begin to weigh what his loss meant to the group here, and what he sacrificed in his own life for their sake.
For now, after an underworld visit to the Capitol Towers echo chamber that sounds about as close to a disembodied heaven on earth as it gets, I take a crack at retelling the Aristocrats joke to further offload Beach Boys trauma while wallowing in filth and disgust as an attempt at humor, so if that’s not your thing you probably won’t want to read the post-script… needless to say, viewer discretion is advised.
By 1972, it was Carl’s passions that were truly leading the group forward, while Dennis was becoming more and more possessive of his own passionate output, coming close to releasing a solo album around this time before deciding he wasn’t ready to make that plunge alone. Carl’s work is both gently spiritual and passionately forceful, showing that his surrender to the meditative waves did nothing to dull his perception of the suffering of others, or the ghosts that haunt this land. “Trader” pushes America’s Band straight into a reckoning of settler colonialism that begins like “Run For the Hills” and ends with an extended plea for healing, a desire to move beyond systems of domination towards a land-based vision of a cooperative commonwealth. It was heady stuff for a boppin’ tune, violent and tender, confrontational and yearning.
Adult/Child picks up from where that yearning left off. And it wouldn’t be born into this world tenderly, instead it would be tossed aside, the dumpster baby of the Beach Boys catalog. Dennis was heartbroken. He’d been telling the world what a joyous being was about to be delivered by Brian while he promoted his own solo masterpiece. A year later, when all was said and done, he was disgustedly quoted cursing Mike Love’s meditative karma, his grief still palpable.
If Adult/Child picked up the tender yearning of “Trader”, Pacific Ocean Blue was more about violent reckoning than gentle embrace, although it finds a truly soft and soothing space when it remembers to breathe. There’s something about much of Dennis’s work that almost makes it hard to catch your breath, but when you do it seems to drift on the wind like a seabird on an updraft, or a sailboat cruising across the open sea. “No more lonely nights”, he promised, and you wanted like Hell to believe… you just didn’t want to have to accompany him there to make it a reality.
Part 7 examines what it means to embody the spirit of The Beach Boys in a world where manhood is a primal competition, and yet the artist is expected to wrestle with the human condition to “win”. It’s a bit like Luke Skywalker on Dagobah, decapitating Darth Vader only to find his own face beneath the mask. The shadow of dissociated manhood, and the villainy it is capable of, will always haunt the Boy.
Yet, there is something in that dissociation that allows such beings to survive journeys that a more even-keeled person could never make it through. If it’s the foundational gift of The Beach Boys to descend into the depths of Hell and turn the cries of torment into the sweetest of harmonies, what kind of toll does that pilgrimage take on the condition of the Beach Boy? After so much time in the flames, does he even conceive of himself as a boy anymore? At what point do the flames burn away so much of the form itself it becomes unidentifiable, more of a fallen angel caked in filth and garbage, beyond any dichotomies and binaries of gender?
“When I grow up to be a man”, the young Boy sang, and then he found the way to Neverlandand and may never have come back if someone hadn’t dragged him. After an extended, androgynous adolescence that swung from buzz-cut butch jock to pillowy lesbian aunt, Brian Wilson was finally forced to grow up, grow a beard, and “be a man!” when Eugene Landy showed up with a bucket of water and a bar of soap and told him to stop worrying about being a “fairy” and scrub his butt like a proper adult.
In a lot of ways, it was something like a flashback to the Wilsons’ father Murry showing up to the “Help Me Rhonda” session. “Syncopate it!” he drunkenly barks – man up and make it “sexy”. As far as Murry was concerned, he was modeling a tough but fair manhood to aspire towards. If it happened to leave a few bruises on the children along the way, well, that’s what it takes to toughen them up.
It was the primary target for that “manly” rage, Dennis, who summed up the twisted truth of his father, that a beautiful melody could melt the man away completely. “We never saw eye to eye”, he says, and yet, when he shares that insight, you know that the connection between the ears and the hearts of the father and his sons was stronger than appearances would have you believe. If the child is father of the man, the music must be the mother of the soul, and when the two come together it’s a real motherfucker!
As the first half of the Adult/Child saga draws to a close, Part 8 serves as a sun-soaked reckoning and a boots-on-the-ground travelogue plan for the fall. It begins by looking both directly into the glare of the sun, then into the shadows it casts, hoping to see past blind spots and not avoid examining some glaringly obvious negligence and abuse. Growing up in both the shadow and the glare of violence and alcoholism, it was often hard for the Wilsons to even conceive of what a healthy level of exposure could look like. Wrestling with this knowledge is not to make an excuse for some egregious behavior, but it will require walking some fine lines to weave threads of accountability through all parties involved, including the entire cultural history of America.
Meanwhile, looking towards a fall pilgrimage through the physical geography of Beach Boys Land, I’ll be tracking a loop de loop of old L.A. haunts, from Santa Monica to Marina Del Rey, on down to the crashing surf of Dockweiler Beach. If only the vast gash of LAX, the military-industrial sprawl of El Segundo, and the ghosts of Surfridge didn’t block the back paths between the sand and the suburbs, I could make a perfect cycleable circle out to Hawthorne and back. Forget about it, kid, this is L.A.
Instead, I’ll make a stop in the Wilson’s old hood when I decamp from a coastal spot on Venice Beach and head inland on the way to Cerritos to catch Al Jardine performing with the Pet Sounds band on their Beach Boys Love You tour. Then I’ll make one more loop de loop, this time to a graveside tribute and then a visit to Brian’s old Bellagio Rd. neighborhood, and a pass by the studios where their 60’s classics were recorded.
I want to see what the land itself has to say before I really proceed forward into part 2, where I attempt to draw a map of the L.A. scene in the 60’s and 70’s. In the meantime I’ll probably get one more flashback in, looking at summer as a definable season in the Beach Boys story. Just because L.A. always feels like summer to somebody doesn’t mean you can’t get the shivers in the winter, as Dennis’s final hours show us. Finding that season in the sun where everyone was warm and comfortable in the band will be an interesting challenge…
Part 9 is a look towards summer as spring comes to a close, leading up to Brian Wilson’s birthday on cusp of the summer solstice. But first, a quick look at the birth of California, a process that was fraught with compromise in the waning days of American slavery.
California as a state made slavery illegal, but it highly encourages you to prostitute yourself. Eventually you can even make slaves out of the members of your own family. It’s a vicious cycle, one that preys on the innocent, and twists prey into predator and back again without the victimized-victimizer even being aware of what has occurred.
But here we are, trying to talk about summer time. Isn’t that a bright, cheerful, innocent vacation from the woes of the world? If you’re lucky, perhaps. Sometimes you might even be lucky enough to fall in love, like young Brian Wilson and his even younger first wife, Marilyn Rovell. While things were above the board between Brian, Marilyn, and her parents when Brian moved into their house in 1963, it’s still hard to feel okay about a 21-year-old man having a relationship with a 15-year-old girl. But at least it was just a single 15-year-old we have to reckon with in Brian’s case. Brother Dennis, by his own admission, was apparently collecting a whole harem of teenagers with Charlie Manson out at Spahn ranch later in the decade. His published justification was an uncompromisingly subjective morality, where personal desire ruled over all else. Heavy, huh?
By the time the band was trying to keep the summer alive a decade later, Dennis was a ghost of his former self, steadily deteriorating into his addictions while his dreams and ambitions slipped away. Brian, meanwhile, had his beard shorn off to reveal The Ghost of Summer’s Past, and showed up to haunt England for their live performance in Knebworth. Dennis’s elevated spirits are at least 75% alcohol when he calls England beautiful, before serenading them with a hit song he never got credit for co-writing. Another decade later, John Stamos would serenade his TV bride with Dennis’s most beloved credited anthem, while the original Beach Boy rolled over in his sea grave. When it was re-recorded for a new Beach Boys album, Summer in Paradise was closer to a sick joke than reality; its only redeeming features are that Carl was still alive and Autotune hadn’t been invented yet. As far as the rest goes, well… it’s a Mike Love thing. A rapping Mike Love thing, in the worst case scenario, a “Summer of Love” that looks more like a fresh season in Hell.
Welcome to the Mike Love Death Watch! At least that’s how it feels these days. As the oldest living Beach Boy embarks on what may be his final summer in the sun, we have to wrestle with the legacy of the most hated member of the band. The reckoning of Mike Love’s life has begun, and as the batteries appear to be draining, fresh accusations highlight just what a bunch of creepy dudes the Beach Boys were capable of being.
No one would argue that Mike Love isn’t an asshole, which is a harsh thing to say about a dying man, but… is he a gross, creepy asshole? I mean, we know the answer already, but… is he an egregiously gross, creepy asshole? And in making so many qualifications about how gross and creepy of an asshole does a middle aged man have to be to sleep with teenagers, are we outing ourselves as a society with gross, creepy asshole values? Maybe we all need a good dose of Smiley Smile to flush this sickness out of our system and beat the diseased formula once and for all…
Inevitably, my musings on America’s Band have led me to muse on the state of disunited America, on the cusp of its 250th birthday. Much like the sad condition of 85-year-old Mike Love, the nation itself is really not looking good. Thankfully, there is still a lot of spirit left in the land. When the people realize they are the base of power, perhaps we can all really have “Fun Fun Fun” and catch a wave of cooperative prosperity. But, we also need to figure out how to take away daddy’s keys in the meantime… and reckon with the damage that’s already been done.
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