Part 5 of the Adult/Child saga.
In the 2000 television miniseries about The Beach Boys produced by John Stamos, the subtitle called them “An American Family“. It didn’t seem like it was meant to be subversive, and yet, when you look at what kind of a family unit the band made, and what that says about America… maybe more American families should be in therapy and drug and alcohol rehab, for one. And, as anyone who’s dealt with substance abuse amongst their family and/or friends will tell you, knowing that truth and making that decision are entirely different things, and only the person with the substance abuse issue can make that decision. Until they do, well… prepare to be torn apart, American Family.
It’s rare for a family to ever declare total enmity against each other, but it’s even rarer for a family to avoid dramatic conflict. The Beach Boys had more than their fair share of such, and the Wilson brothers as a blood-bonded band of brothers within the group had all found their own unique adaptations towards conflict and survival. These were born out of childhood trauma, and were rooted in mechanisms of preservation that sometimes had a way of perpetuating more of that trauma rather than alleviating it. You can eventually see every member go through the process of asking themselves whether keeping such a family together is even worth it. Perhaps less toxic partnerships can be found, free from so much water under the bridge. But then, sometimes even more toxic partnerships can come to leverage that trauma bonding…
In wrestling with layers of conflict and drama in the Beach Boys story, “Heroes and Villains” becomes a post-Kierkegaardian statement, with every character inevitably both hero *and* villain1 at some point in the saga. 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.
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, transference, and chaotically unpacked baggage. Subtle truths and delicate situations are handled in an ape-like fashion that’s half cute little dance, half horrific nightmare of shredded faces and emasculation.
“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 Brian attempting to process his own ugly infidelities and betrayals? When Dennis summons his most guttural, sorrowful voice for “My Diane”, is he mourning Brian’s impending divorce, or his own desolation and degradation? And when Carl drunkenly warbles “It’s Over Now”, whose crumbling marriage is he really singing about being haunted by?2
By the time Dennis steps up to sing Carl’s “Angel Come Home”, the suffering of the Wilson brothers has become nearly indistinguishable. They all wear it like an oversized bath robe, exchanging their traumas in the hopes that it will be easier to carry the pain of a brother than one’s own…
Each of the Wilsons has their own existential suffering, their own way of carrying that trauma. 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 it’s somehow all his fault.
It wasn’t always that way for the brothers, but, in a way, it was. To be neuro-divergent in a world that treated any divergence from typicality as if it were an affront to American Values, and yet to paradoxically achieve the American Dream at a young enough age to show up to highschool a true superstar… You were pretty much guaranteed to be stunted in some form. Add a violently abusive father to the mix, himself a product of brutal abuse, and your American Family was forever gonna struggle to reconcile that Adult/Child dichotomy. Success would not heal those wounds, it would only deepen them
There are few stories in which their alcoholic father Murry is the hero, although it’s somewhat unlikely the Beach Boys would have existed without him. His legendary zeal managed to get the group a major label record deal after a single regional hit single, then demanded Brian be allowed to produce the band’s recordings rather than the label’s own producers. 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 side3, 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 stereophonic spectrum… but, even more than that, the trauma of his childhood would guarantee that Brian would never truly learn to function without some form of punishment and abuse to motivate him. To love Brian Wilson is to be toughly loving, motivational as an external force, almost disciplinarian in nature. Or so it would seem.
At the end of the 60’s it was actually father Murry who helped Brian begin to make a brief comeback by co-writing the band’s next single with his boy, “Breakaway“, a brassy, sassy castanet-driven “gonna pull myself together” anthem. Brian then actually made a way for each happy day as his life turned around and began one of his most prolific periods of direct collaboration with his band mates.
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. 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, striking a balance between classicist pop with a progressive sheen better than almost any other album of the decade.
A huge part of the band’s leap forward was being led by Carl and Dennis. Carl had become the de-facto Beach Boys producer, helping to craft that new sonic sheen along with Steve Desper, and co-writing numerous songs on the album. Dennis, meanwhile, continued to grow as a producer in his own right, working together with touring keyboardist Darryl Dragon to craft his own unique sound. His songs are front and center on Sunflower, something that would never truly be afforded to him again.
When the album opens, the first voice you hear is Dennis’s, on his funky, naggingly syncopated “Slip On Through”. It kicks off a bit of a “Beach Boys present” showcase for every member of the band, as 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 5-20 different key-changing modulations (sorry if I lost count) in under two minutes. It ends with an a capella 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. A teenage pocket symphony to God, by gum. “You are there like everywhere like everyone you see, happy ’cause you’re living and you’re free. Now, here comes another day for your love.” What it is, Bri.Positive vibe abound.
In addition to the fresh tracks he was laying down, Brian actually reached back to Smile himself to add its “Water Chant” to the Smiley Smile/Wild Honey outtake “Cool Cool Water”, then added some watery Moog sounds on top. It’s a fascinating pastiche that is a little too bubbly for me to call a personal fave, but it is certainly unique. Elsewhere he sings a song about a bird at his window, perhaps the same one that visited brother Dennis earlier. This time the bird speaks French!4
In addition to his classic ballad “Forever”, Dennis’s contributions also include the lusty romp “Got To Know the Woman”, and “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 gamely 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!” For this brief moment that wasn’t just wishful thinking on Dennis’s part. Brian was back in the swing of things, but making music for joy’s sake rather than a sense of competition.
That said, this was the beginning of the era where his B-grade material would get displaced by the B+ material the other band mates brought in – when they weren’t stepping up to fill for his total absence. Sunflower could have easily been dominated by at least 10 fresh Brian tracks rather than 5, mostly quirky slices of life that would have added up to a pretty good Friends sequel. Instead, we get the emergence of Bruce Johnston as a singer/songwriter with his slightly syrupy, slightly creepy “Deirdre”, which seems to be a mash up of a few different teenage runaways in the Manson family that were drifting through the Beach Boys orbit around this time.
Meanwhile, Carl 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 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.
Sunflower brought a stunning leap forward for Brian and Carl together; their co-composed “All I Wanna to Do”5 pushes into an echoing dream pop 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.
Sunflower‘s failure to thrive on the LP market was a shocking blow to the proud parents, marking a new low for the band’s commercial fortunes. Brian especially was crushed. When he (barely) emerged next year, the two new songs he contributed reflected that spirit. “I’m a leaf on a windy day, pretty soon I’ll be blown away. How longs does the wind blow? UNTIL I DIE…”
This was preceded by a song from the point of view of a dying tree, woodily sung by new manager Jack Reily, who is joined by Van Dyke Parks for the outro, delivering the reedy reverie “Trees like me aren’t meant to live if all this world can give is pollution and slow death”. Damn, man, tell us how you *really* feel. Poor Brian done broke away way down low. He’d need a mess of help to stand alone from now on. Any hope of ever fully recovering was pretty much crushed at this point. Could a successful Sunflower somehow have saved him? Or was he already far too fragile to avoid breaking?
The Surf’s Up album presents us with not only the resurfaced Smile shipwreck of the title track, Frankensteined together and finished up under Carl’s direction, but also Carl’s own defining composition, “Feel Flows”. 50 years later it would lend its title to the box set 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 “Surf’s Up” perfectly.
“Long Promised Road”, his other original tune on the album, is a song about rising up to life’s challenges set to a futuristic, synth and percussion-driven production that sounds like something Genesis would do a decade later. Though Jack Reilly’s lyrics tend toward overwrought poetics, Carl’s soulful delivery renders lines like “so hard to lift the jeweled scepter when the weight turns a smile to a frown”, and “so hard to drink of passion nectar when the taste of life’s holding me down” into resonant passages instead of schlock.
Carl was 14 years old when he began his musical career, and within a few years 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 live 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 somewhat 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. Carl didn’t exactly crawl back to the band, and he managed to actually push them forward into at solid, punchy contemporary sound for their 1985 album. Still, the fact that Carl’s songs are the best by far makes me wish he’d just done a whole 3rd solo album with Beach Boys producer Steve Levine. Instead, by the end of the decade he was resigned to be a professional sideman to Mike and Al.
His most important role in The Beach Boys 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 include the band’s appearance with Uncle Jesse on “Full House”, and everything that is happening in this New Year’s Eve performance of “Kokomo”, except for Carl’s soulful, lightly inebriated vocals. Never the most prolific of writers, he saved his handful of original songs for a side project with his friends from America and Chicago (the bands). The project was so far on the side that it’s adult-contemporary sound was completely out of date by the time it was finally released in the year 2000. Unfortunately, Carl himself didn’t have that much time left.
Perhaps the defining Carl Wilson moment of the early 90’s is captured on a videotape 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. At just 51 years old, Carl had gone to God, leaving the world to learn to live with the cataclysmic truth of his absence.
30 years before his passing, Carl made an exploratory underworld-esque journey with engineer Steven Desper. While mixing the instrumental tracks for the proto-karaoke Stack-o-Tracks, the two arranged a tour of Capital Tower Studio with engineer Don Henderson that eventually led them deep into an underground lair, where four doors awaited them at the end of a ladder. They entered the third door and found themselves in a rectangular grey room that was empty except for a pair of speakers pointed at a pair of microphones: echo chamber #3. Decades later, Desper recalled:
I asked Don if we could experience the room as it operates – in the dark. He departed, closing the heavy door behind him. As he left to turn off the light, I moved to the wider end of the room while Carl stayed at the narrow end, facing like the speakers.
The light went out leaving us in absolute blackness. It was scary. I heard Carl take a deep breath…
…and then came, “I may not always love you.” The sound was nowhere, and everywhere.
“But long as there are stars above you, you never need to doubt it, I’ll make you so sure about it.” This was unqualified pleasure; heaven in a box.
“God only knows what I’d be without you.” It was as pure as possible, no speakers or microphones, just Carl and my ears. With the last decay of reverb, the light came back on. As I moved closer I could see Carl with a big smile. We just looked at each other; we both knew. No one spoke, trying to hold on to the last memory of the sonic joy we had just experienced.
Soon the door opened and it was time to leave.
Meanwhile…
Gilbert Gottfried, at the afterlife roast of Brian Wilson:
I would’ve gotten here sooner, but I got held up in customs for bringing too much Ding Dang Shortenin’ Bread on my trip Rolling Up To Heaven from my regular gig in Hell.
Audience: (boos) Too soon!
GG: Okay, a talent agent is sitting in his office. A family walks in, man, woman, and their three boys. The talent agent goes “What kind of an act do you do?” First the dad tells the oldest kid to take a shit on a plate, then he pounds down a martini and starts barking “SYNCOPATE IT!” Mom starts singing “Is It True What They Say About Dixie” while the oldest kid starts singing “Mama’s little baby love shortenin’ bread”.
Dad pulls out the Crisco and starts greasing up Mom’s tits, then bellows “ALLEY OOP!” By this point the youngest kid has started leading all the others in singing “FUCK HER BIG TITS!” Some neighbor kid comes in and starts running around with his arms out pretending to be an airplane while Dad gets busy furiously fucking Mom’s tits. The oldest kid says “I don’t like airplanes!” and goes to play with himself in the corner, and then this new kid wearing Mickey Mouse ears comes in and just sits down right on top of the pile of shit.
The oldest kid, he goes out and gets a bunch of goats, then tells everyone else to start fucking them. Then, this twerpy kid with glasses shows up and starts fucking everyone with vegetables and crowing “cock a dude’ll do a whole town full of heroes and villains!” He steps back and takes a look at the rest of the mess being uleashed and decides things are just too weird and takes off with the last of the veggies. The oldest kid goes running off crying to his room and Charles Manson comes in and starts frying bacon on a gas powered camp stove, staring at Mom, singing “Look at Your Game, Girl”.
The rest of his “Family” comes in and just starts clapping, with the middle kid joining in. After a while the Mickey Mouse kid gets tired of all the fucking shit and goes back to Disneyland, but not before he fucks Charlie and all the Manson girls. While the oldest boy stays locked in his room, the other boys go to Africa and come back with a couple of black boys in tow. Then Randy Newman comes rolling in with a piano and plays the albums Sail Away and Good Old Boys between providing running commentary. When he gets to the song ” Naked Man” the oldest kid comes out of his room and starts singing “Shortenin’ Bread” again.
By this point Dad’s fucked mom’s tits off and doesn’t know what to do with himself, so he just builds up such a fierce hard-on it explodes and kills him. Three Dog Night come in and Randy Newman gives them “Mama Told Me Not To Come” to perform as a tribute to dead Dad, but Chuck Negron fails to heed the warning of the song, and pretty soon his dick swells up and splits open like an overcooked hot dog. Then the entire Fleetwood Mac organization, roadies, groupies, husbands and wives, shows up, and the middle kid just fucks them all senseless.
The cousin has just been standing around this whole time, bragging about his sexual prowess while he watches everyone else do all the hard work. Eventually someone hands him the kid version of a Theremin and he awkwardly makes ooo wee ooo noises with it. Then he starts pounding down apple juice and strips naked and starts pissing on everyone and everything. Terry Melcher comes in just as Charlie starts making up a new song: “Off the Florida Keys…” Finally the cousin gets so aroused by Charlie’s song that he starts 69’ing Melcher while Charlie fucks them both while still softly strumming and singing “Aruba, Jamaica, ooh I wanna take ya…”
Meanwhile the middle kid unleashes so many sexual juices from every angle that he literally drowns in them. Then the Olson twins show up with Uncle Jesse and the Rippers, Dave Coulier, and Alannis Morrisette, and they all just start going at it in the mess left behind. This guy who says he’s a doctor comes in and yells at the oldest kid to clean his shit up, throws a bucket of water on him then grabs a bar of soap and starts shoving it up the kid’s ass, yelling “THIS IS THE ONLY WAY YOU LEARN!” Then he berates him into writing the world’s whitest rap song. Finally, the neighbor kid can’t take it anymore, goes “Loop De Loop!” hops out the window, and flies his ass straight through the Twin Towers!
The talent agent stares in horror and disbelief, then finally, timidly asks “what do you call this ‘act’?” And they all sing together, in perfect harmony, “THE BEACH BOYS!”
- “The old world is one of dichotomies and separation. Right and wrong, good and bad, heroes and villains. Like fleshy little classifiers, we are. This is this, that is that. Humans, en masse, moonlighting as machines.
The new world is one in which we see the power in the stories that we tell to shape reality. We follow our intuitions into a more beautiful future. We see opportunities for shaping more beautiful outcomes in the teetering of reality all around us. We finally see: I am powerful and reality is flexible. There are no heroes or villains. Just people in quantum superpositions, hero, villain, and everything in between, all at once. Capable of anything.
To see it all, to see each other, to see humanity, to see our beautiful Earth, in all of its messy complexity and dynamism, teetering in a quantum superposition between every possibility, and to declare it divine. To see it all and to declare it divine. When we finally look around—here! now! you! me! looking around!—and declare it divine. Rather than pick it apart, let it be whole.
Welcome to the new world.”
– Nicole Hemenway, Beyond Heroes and Villains
↩︎ - Brian and first wife Marilyn Rovell divorced in 1979. Carl and his first wife, Annie Hinsch, separated in 1978 and divorced in ‘82. Dennis was divorced from his 3rd wife, Karen Lamm, in 1977, remarried her a year later, then they divorced again in 1980, but their relationship would continue on and off until his death.
↩︎ - He still did vastly more with one good ear than most of humanity has ever done with two. Bob Dylan declared: “Jesus, that ear. He should donate it to the Smithsonian.”
↩︎ - “Le moineau est venu se poser à ma fenêtre.” Which translates to: The sparrow came to land at my window. So perhaps it wasn’t the bird speaking after all, merely a French speaking voice in Brian’s head? I have more questions than answers now…
↩︎ - Not to be confused with the previous albums randy “All I Want to Do”.
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