Part 7 of the Adult/Child saga.
WHAT is a [Beach Boy]? A [Beach Boy] is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music. His fate is like that of the unfortunate victims whom the tyrant Phalaris imprisoned in a brazen bull and slowly tortured over a steady fire; their cries could not reach the tyrant’s ears so as to strike terror into his heart; when they reached his ears they sounded like sweet music. And men crowd about the [Beach Boy] and say to him: “Sing for us soon again”; that is as much as to say: “May new sufferings torment your soul, but may your lips be formed as before; for the cries would only frighten us, but the music is delicious.”
– Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or
How much is too much? And when is too much still never enough? When you start asking yourself such questions you realize just how elusive a sense of satisfaction can be. Relationships with self and others crumble. Everything is always too much, and nothing is ever enough to make up for it. Those wide open feelers that can feel such bliss and ecstasy remain just as open when it turns to suffering and sorrow. Joy becomes unattainable when it demands external validation, yet that demand highlights the fragility that underlies the need. It’s the kind of feedback loop that spirals in on itself and implodes your soul if you let it go on for too long.
By 1971 Brian Wilson was spiraling into a dark, fragile, needy place. Despite the exuberant effort of all parties involved, 1970’s Sunflower had been an even bigger flop than Smiley Smile, and Brian dealt with the disappointment by retreating deeper into seclusion and addiction. Occasionally he’d emerge from his lair with a new mad scientist concoction like “My Solution”, but more often he’d simply disappear into bed all day and then out into the L.A. night-life when the spirit moved him… usually to hunt for more cocaine.
One song defines this era more than any other, the beautiful, haunting, canned-beat driven “Til I Die”. “I’d been depressed and preoccupied with death”, Brian allegedly wrote1 in his Landy-assisted 1991 autobiography. “Looking out toward the ocean, my mind, as it did almost every hour of every day, worked to explain the inconsistencies that dominated my life; the pain, torment, and confusion and the beautiful music I was able to make. Was there an answer? Did I have no control? Had I ever? Feeling shipwrecked on an existential island, I lost myself in the balance of darkness that stretched beyond the breaking waves to the other side of the earth. The ocean was so incredibly vast, the universe was so large, and suddenly I saw myself in proportion to that, a little pebble of sand, a jellyfish floating on top of the water; traveling with the current I felt dwarfed, temporary. The next day I began writing ‘Til I Die’”…
It opens immediately with a choral wail: “I’m a cork on the ocean, rolling over the raging sea. How deep is the ocean? HOW DEEP IS THE OCEAN?”
“I’ve lost my way”, Brian then solemnly, wearily sings in the solo spotlight, to be joined in harmony for the mocking rejoinder: “hey hey hey”…
“I feel like I’ve lost my talent. I’m working harder and getting less satisfaction than ever before,” Brian forlornly declared in April of 1967. A month prior, Van Dyke Parks left the Smile project. Things had just gotten too weird, and Brian’s hangers-on were treating Parks like the interloper in the entourage; if looks could kill, his body would be buried somewhere in the Hollywood Hills. These “friends” helped Brian orchestrate “humorous” interludes in the studio rather than writing songs; at some point in these sessions, you get the sense that Brian realizes the joke is on him. Parks didn’t see the humor to begin with. This wasn’t clever or funny, it was just asinine druggy horseplay. Brian was crashing out, but he was still too high to realize it, going a million miles an hour in a downward spiral.
And so Parks finally rode off on his high horse and left Brian to cultivate this chaos. But the question I can’t help but ask is: who was the most high? Together the two writing partners had been on an extended methamphetamine binge for the entire duration of their collaboration…
Having witnessed what someone with schizo-affective disorder looks like while abusing methamphetamines, I can’t help but recall this exchange from the John Cusack-era of Love and Mercy:
Melinda Ledbetter: When did you first start hearing voices?
Brian Wilson: 1963
In the 1960’s, amphetamine use was endemic in western society. For all the talk of the hippie drug culture, it was “mother’s little helper” that could be found in the home of the average everyday housewife. It wasn’t one of those bad drugs you had to cross the tracks to get, it was a prescription you picked up from your pharmacist. And if you were a touring and recording musician in this era, well, you’d be a fool not to pop a little extra pep to make it through a grueling schedule. It’s a modern miracle, work twice as hard but never feel tired! What could possibly go wrong?
“Yeah Brian, what could possibly go wrong?” “Hey, who said that?!” “We did, bro.” “Who are you?!” “We are legion, bro”…
In 1964 the Beach Boys played 181 shows. It still stands today as the record for most shows they ever played in one year. Brian Wilson would play 176 of those shows and produce three full Beach Boys albums before his breakdown/retirement from the road in December. Father Murry accompanied the band for the Australian tour that had kicked off the year; after 3 years of managing the group, they decided they’d had enough of his stern taskmaster routine. When they returned to the USA, the band had a meeting and the Wilson boys told their father he was fired. Murry never saw it coming; he would spend the next three weeks largely in bed, nursing his wounds. The man who’d fought for his son’s right to produce his own recordings had been thrown under the bus by all three of his children. He’d never really be the same…
Brian never could have continued existing under Murry’s thumb, but without his controlling nature Brian’s indulgences began to grow. I suspect when he was prescribed Desbutal in 1965, it was to replace a pre-existing amphetamine prescription that began shortly after Murry was fired as manager and no longer micro-managing the boys on that 1964 tour. What we know for a fact is that the Desbutal days began in earnest with the recording sessions for Summer Days (and Summer Nights!).
Brian’s sharpness in this era is put in stark relief when his folks come into the studio during sessions for “Help Me Rhonda”, and a drunk Murry tries to take over the production, telling Brian and boys they’re doing it all wrong. “C’mon syncopate it!” he infamously declares, trying to get Brian to turn the song into a big band swinger. “Since she put me down babe a doob a dab a boo da”, he “helpfully” intones. “I’m gonna sing the words,” Al Jardine deadpans in response, still working up the nerve to nail his first lead performance. Later, as Murry continues yammering about syncopation and singing more “sexy”, Brian cuttingly tells his father “I got one ear left and your big loud voice is killing it!” Brian Wilson was a funny guy. But… you can hear his exasperation, especially after his father says he’ll just leave and yet… drunkenly just keeps digging in. “I’m a genius, too,” father says to child, in a tone that suggests you’re not a genius at all, you schmuck, you’re everything you are because you rode on the coattails of *MY* talent.
As things break down Brian storms into the control room and turns the mic on his father. “Are you going or staying, I want to know?” he asks in irritation, the edge in his voice suggesting all the energy he’s holding back from physically dragging his father out. I say irritation, what I mean to say is boundless but somehow barely contained rage, the kind of rage Murry never knew how to contain – the kind of rage that left bruises, if not permanent damage. Eventually…. E-ven-tu-al-ly… Murry gets the message. But he still feels like Brian is the one with the big head, he still sees himself as the victim, as Carl, ever the peacemaker, apologizes to his crestfallen father. It’s a painful moment in a painful saga, a look at the Wilson family’s personal Hell as a fly on the wall…
Even without dear old dad breathing down his neck, Brian was finding each new heavenly expanse could hold worlds of Hell he’d yet to envision. One came with reckoning with the limitations of his physical form, something that he’d never really had to do in his younger years. He hadn’t trained his voice as an adult singer, since its youthful force had been so pure and strong he’d had no need to, but when the inevitable ravages of time took their tole, he began losing the confidence he once held in his primary instrument. 1965’s “Let Him Run Wild” would see him push his young falsetto voice, and his compositional and production skills, to their absolute limit. The track and the vocal are both a tour-de-force from the young singer-songwriter, and even the lyrics are composed by solely Brian. The entire effort is the kind of next-level step that was needed to get to Pet Sounds. And he would hate the end result until the day he died. Too shrill, he declared. “I sounded like a little girl!”
A year later Brian was holding strong at the top of his game and feeling almost happy with the results, following the artistic triumph of Pet Sounds with the commercial smash of “Good Vibrations”. There was a pep in his step, and new vistas on his horizon. Some of that pep came from the fact he’d discovered the secret of Desbutal, that it was as easy as cutting the two color pill in half to separate the methamphetamine from the barbiturate. Forget about psychedelic sounds, that collision of cellos and theremin was pure white light/white heat. Jngdy-jngdy-jndgy-jndgy…
By the time Smile began in earnest, Brian was basically a full blown meth-head. Woop woop! And Van Dyke Parks was in zing for zang, at least initially. Together they created entire conceptual worlds of song, colliding kaleidoscopic visions of the American Dream and the dark colonial legacy that underpinned it. And… a suite about the elements! And… songs about eating healthy and exercising! And… psychedelic humor?! Zen koans?! Apocalyptic tidal waves?! Surf’s Up, bitches! Get under the boat and do the swim! The collaboration was endlessly expansive, but it was becoming a vortex sucking in anyone and anything that came near, and it was spiraling completely out of control. Parks, whose childlike features softened a resting bitch face, was watching his whole Smile experience capsizing, turning upside down into an ugly, distasteful frown…
“You know, the other day I was having my picture taken by the great photographer Henry Diltz. And Henry said, ‘Smile.’ And I said, ‘There’s nothing to smile about.’” A bit taken aback, I assume that Parks is making an oblique reference to the new album2 of 44-year old tapes. But in fact, this time he has changed the subject, and I struggle to keep up. He goes on to make observations on problems facing the world today: issues like ecology, the culture of greed, and the “insufficiency of military revenge in an age of guerrilla tactics.” He stresses that he himself has a “deep sense of contentment, and my wife understands why I’m not prone to smile for pictures,” and that he really is a happy person. Unless someone tries to talk with him about SMiLE, that is.
Parks offers a fascinating perspective on the role of songwriting. It’s clear he’s given the matter much thought, as – for the only time in our entire conversation – his answer sounds a bit like a speech. “Songcraft — the process of songwriting – should be one that is immediately empathetic, offering consolation and entertainment on the face, and ripping jugular veins of contentment underneath.”
Ruminating on the songwriter’s fulcrum between “absolute faith and despair” and how great works explore that, Parks pauses. “I will say this: one of the market artists of our time — someone who represents the public’s fascination with that — is Brian Wilson. Because you don’t know whether to laugh or cry when you hear that stuff. And I think that’s what great art can do. Not should do – I don’t know what art should do – and that makes it precious.” Sensing the tiniest of openings, I pivot back to SMiLE…
“My only goal,” Parks insists, “was to see Brian come back as a functioning musician. That’s why I did Orange Crate Art with him, to prove that he could do it. I feel that I have paid my social debt in full.” With that, our discussion of Brian Wilson and all things SMiLE comes to a close… He does add a telling postscript:“Friends can be useful things. But that doesn’t mean that they can always agree. And I’ll leave it at this: To disagree is not to disrespect.”
Speaking, I suspect, obliquely of of the touchy subject of SMiLE but more universally of life and work in general, Parks makes this observation: “I continue to look through the windshield. The rear-view mirror is a nice reference, but the windshield is what brings me my info. That, and my implausible desire that my best work is ahead of me.”
– Van Dyke Parks Interview, Bill Kopp, 11/11/11
Parks knew how to hold his shit. He never understood why Bri couldn’t. Brian had never had to deconstruct his life, didn’t have an entire career already in the rear-view mirror. Sure, he’d given up on childhood dreams of beings a sports star, but he’d hung on to his ego a lot tighter than he realized. Van Dyke had already rebuilt his from the bottom up; when Brian left Smile behind him in the rear-view, he was about to blindly fall backwards into an abyss that it would never fully return from…
“I used to write on pills. I used to take uppers and write, and I used to like that effect. In fact, I’d like to take uppers now and write because they give me, you know, a certain lift and a certain outlook. And it’s not an unnatural thing. I mean the pill might be unnatural and the energy, but the song itself doesn’t turn out unnatural on the uppers. The creativity flows through… I’m thinking of asking the doctor if I can go back to those…” – Brian quoted in The Healing of Brother Brian, David Felton, Rolling Stone, 1976.
By late 1976, Brian Wilson had made numerous visits to Hell and back, going up, down, left, right, and sideways, if never all the way through. Now, with the regiment of tough love and physical/emotional abuse that Eugene Landy had put him on, he had managed to write and record two albums of almost all original material for the band to release. Seeing the proof was in the pudding, Landy doubled his fee from $10,000 a month to $20k, and was promptly fired.
The Beach Boys Love You, the release that most reflects Landy’s efforts, opens with circus stabs of organs, that ridiculous, almost symphonic synth bass, the slamming snare drum, and a single barked “YEAH!” that would do James Hetfield proud. Then everything drops out but that pulsing synth line and Carl steps up to the mic and declares the Beach Boys are back from Hell and in love again. “TO GET YOU BABY, WENT THROUGH THE WRINGER” he boisterously exclaims before the “band” kicks back in and is joined by a blaring baritone saxophone line. Oddly enough, it seems that coming back from Hell has left the Beach Boys unstuck in time and… back in high school? Or is it grade school? When we get to “Honking Down The” (gosh darn!) “Highway”, it’s really hard to tell. Reaching the end of the album, with the drunken croon of “Love is a Woman”, you have to wonder who spiked the wedding band’s punch. The percussion almost feels like an afterthought, like the drummer is barely conscious. Of course the “drummer” is just Brian and his snare and tom.
Somewhere in the middle of all this lies the oddball emotional psychodrama masterpieces of “The Night Was So Young” and “I’ll Bet He’s Nice”. The recently released box set preserves the tape of Brian Wilson bringing his new songs to the band for the first time, alone at the piano. When he gets to the bridge of “I’ll Bet He’s Nice”, Mike Love positively flips his wig. If he weren’t such a macho jerk you’d almost envision him getting a little teary eyed, but the joy he expresses is real. He picks up the vocals during the outtro and then declares, in blissed out awe, “That is a motherfucker!” After all those years of being accused of rejecting Brian’s gifts when he was at the apex of his creative powers and contributing to the breakdown that followed, you can hear the pride he feels, the privilege even, to have that talent back in the room with them again. Brian *was* back.
“Brian Wilson is the Beach Boys,” Dennis declared. “He is the band. We’re his fucking messengers. He is all of it. Period. We’re nothing. He’s everything.”
That didn’t mean everyone would ultimately be happy about the final results, Mike included. When it came time to produce “I’ll Bet He’s Nice” in the studio, it didn’t even get the minimalist treatment with the percussion, being entirely synth driven, with the secondary synth lead sounding almost like a purring, meowing cat. The bridge that Mike gushed over is delivered by Carl, his heartbreak mirrored and mocked by those mewling keys. The vocals in the verses are sung by Dennis in one of his most desiccated double tracked performances, sounding like he’s consumed nothing but whiskey and cocaine since he was left behind by his one true love.
That probably wasn’t far from the truth, or at least, it wouldn’t be. In ’76 Dennis was a mess, but at that point he was a mess on a roll. He’d signed his own record deal through Beach Boys manager James Guercio, and before the year was out he too would be ready to release an entire album of original compositions.
I’ve just made a monumental decision. [Dennis pauses dramatically.] I’m not guilty about masturbation anymore! [Then seriously, folks] I just started my own record company. It’s like, I’ve been in one group my whole life. I always thought if I wasn’t a Beach Boy I would fail. [Here Dennis sticks his arms straight out in mock agony.] So I called up my attorney and said, ‘Hey, get me a record company.’ But my biggest piece of shit is, I’m gonna do a movie where I’m gonna be a flaming gay boy who wants to be a policeman.
So many positive things are happening in the Beach Boys’ career right now. Let me tell you something about the Beach Boys . . . we had a very normal childhood. Our father beat the shit out of us; his punishments were outrageous. I never saw eye to eye with him, ever. In fact I used to lie to him when I was young. I learned at an early age to be very protective of myself, I played a great mind game. But one thing about my father— beautiful music would always melt my father’s heart. You always wanted to sing for him. Dad was a frustrated songwriter, and I think Brian wrote his music through him.
[Dennis suggests we go to his VW camper in the driveway, where we listen to a cassette of two cuts from his planned solo album. They have kind of a Beach Boys sound to them, but rougher, more rock & roll, like Dennis’ voice and temperament, Actually, they sound great.] – The Healing of Brother Brian
A year later, after holding Pacific Ocean Blue back for six months so it wouldn’t directly compete with The Beach Boys Love You, he was preparing to put his own group together to tour to support the album, when the Beach Boys gave him an ultimatum: cancel his plans or be expelled from the band. Dennis made the brutally hard choice to scrap his own ambitions and remain a loyal member of the Beach Boys family. He wanted to be there for Brian, even if he’d rather leave the Boys behind. In a short life that sometimes seemed like it could be almost entirely defined by bad decisions, it was one of the worst he ever made…
Speaking of bad decisions… In 1972, as constant cocaine usage began affecting the range and tone of Brian’s voice to such a degree that he barely even used it on record, he would discover a new favorite singer-songwriter whose voice and style would forever alter how he would approach his own instrument. That man was Randy Newman. As Brian obsessively listened to Newman’s moving but sardonic classic Sail Away, he realized the more cigarettes he chain smoked, the closer he could get to Newman’s signature croak.
By 1975 he was clocking 8 packs a day. The results when he finally stepped back in front of the mic that year were shockingly apparent, when Brian opened his Muppet face and full bore croaked out “I’d like to spend the summer in O-HI” *crack* “O!” This was by far the worst he would ever sound, which is saying a lot. He would never again regain the choir-boy purity of his youth, but how many choir boys do? We all hit puberty eventually. Brian’s voice change just happened to come with a mid-life crisis…
Like many boys who hit the big time at a tender young age, Brian seems like he struggled with the transition from childhood to adulthood. Before his Adult/Child voice drop, he presented as a rather androgynous figure. I wonder if this was part of what shocked Brian about David Anderle’s portrait of him during the Smile era, to see a sense of dysphoria that went beyond gender and into an existential realm of embodiment itself.
Here was a being that would never be comfortable in its own skin, would never be truly comfortable in any material form. Whether he grew up to be a man or turned into a girl singing about it, if Brian Wilson was striving to transition towards something, it was into the state of music itself, pure disembodied sound.
In the meantime, he’d taken on a floral printed, curvy form that resembled your depressive but hilarious lesbian aunt, and honestly, it was a look that suited him. I can’t help but wonder what ways he would have found to express himself in a society where more space is found for ambiguity in gender roles and expressions. Would The Beach Boys have found a way to include a gender-neutral member? The Beach Boys and Them? Or would that have been fucking with the formula too much?
Let Him Run Wild, I wish I hadn’t done it. I sounded like a fairy on it. That was the only one that I regret recording.
But you re-recorded the song for Imagination. Were you more pleased with it the second time around?
I liked it better because it was in a lower key. The original I would have thrown it away if I could have.
You were worried with your falsetto voice that people would call you a fairy? Is that why you stopped singing falsetto for a while?
Yeah, for a while there, because I didn’t want to be considered a chick.
What changed your mind and led you back to singing with a falsetto voice?
The band told me, ‘if that’s the way you sing, don’t worry about it.’ I thought people thought I was a fairy.
– “Christmas With Brian Wilson”, interview by Ken Sharpe, Record Collector, 17 October 2007
Something about Gene Landy seemed to push Brian out of this androgynous territory. Man up! was the message. It had been the direction Brian had been pushing himself in, which was part of the intentional degradation of his angelic young voice. But it was also a kind of shame-based cycle for Brian, the failure to grow up and be a man. Too sensitive, too emotionally driven.
It’s hard not to think of post-Smile Brian as the bearded burnout, but when you look back you realize that’s just the Hollywood myth. The beard came with the Landy-assisted comeback. Brian remained relatively clean shaved until that point, never sporting a full beard in any photos, just a hungover shadow. The classic burnout beard was actually something like a gender-affirming step: Landy wanted to show the world the boy was becoming a man. There was no room for genderqueer neutrality now, no matter how hetero-normative. If Brian was going to be a man, and he *was* going to be a man, he was damn well going to look like one, without question.
In 2004 Brian Wilson returned to/from Hell to “man up” and complete the Beach Boys’ lost masterpiece, although he did so without a single living Beach Boy (or Gene Landy) present. Instead it was Brian Wilson Presents: SMILE!, the entire operation conceived and executed with his Pet Sounds touring band. Thanks to their adeptness at recreating the Wrecking Crew sound, they were able to go into the studio with Brian and re-record the album’s tracks so on-point, you’d be forgiven for thinking they hadn’t simply remixed the originals3.
It’s impossible to imagine this turn of events without Brian’s second wife Melinda by his side. He may never have conceived of putting such a world-class touring band together in the first place without her influence in his life. Although she’d make some poor decisions for him at times, dissuading him from finishing his mid 90’s solo record with perfect foil Andy Paley in favor of working with the thoroughly unimaginative Joe Thomas, for Smile she stepped out of the way and let Brian and the band be the ones in charge. Darian Sahanaja in particular was something of a co-producer, helping Brian with arranging all the pieces of the puzzle, which was much easier than it was in the 60’s thanks to digital technology. No longer would the modular song-bits have to be physically tape spliced together; now they could simply be moved around like Tetris pieces.
Even with modern miracles involved, having a cultist lead the band kept the sonic recreation immaculately accurate. Trying to imagine the plasticy sheen Joe Thomas would have brought to the proceedings here truly makes me shudder. For once in Brian’s Adult/Child life, it seemed like everything that could go right, did go right. It took 37 years, but he’d finally snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.
Funnily enough, the jawline he accomplished this with cut a significantly different profile than it did in the 60’s and 70’s. Between his appearance looking like a clean shaved Shaggy from Scooby Doo in 1986 and the release of his solo album two years later, he’d had subtle but extensive plastic surgery that, in addition to taking the Shaggy droop out of his eyelids, gave him a much more immediately masculine profile. In his doughier final years he would almost revert back to lesbian aunt Brian, but it would be a much butch-er look than it ever was before. Whatever it was, it was Brian, and occasionally it even looked like a happy, contented creature, balanced in both comfort and style.
It’s hard not to wish Brian had come up with a retirement plan after the triumph of Smile, especially since the Autotune came on board immediately after. By the time The Beach Boys reunited eight years after Smile‘s revival, you could see the spark fading as you heard the Autotuning rising up. His candle had always flickered in the wind, but that flame gradually dimmed as it continued to flicker. At its dimmest Brian seemed barely ambulatory, much less present; it’s pretty much impossible to Autotune a singer that can’t even open their mouth to sing. But sometimes that flame could still flare up above something that required a constant relighting as its wick grew shorter.
Those final shows with The Beach Boys were a parting gift to the band’s fans, and occasionally they even seemed to give something back to Brian, magic moments when he became more than just a geezer forcing himself to relive past glories he’d burnt out from half a century ago. Suddenly the child found its center restored as father of the man and the choir boy voice briefly rang through. The moments when the candle flames reached up to the heavens prove beyond doubt that if Brian had an ultimate form here on earth, it must have been as an angel. Maybe he remains with us in some angelic form yet…
Meanwhile, in an alternate timeline a year in the future…
“Now in high definition, It’s the 50th anniversary of The Beach Boys’ Adult/Child Television Spectacular! Uncut and uncensored for the first time since its original broadcast!”
Mike Love, wearing a rainbow hat and a sequined blouse tied at the midriff, is talking to Iggy Pop, who’s wearing a red cocktail dress and lipstick.
Mike: “Y’know, nowadays when you say ‘are you a boy or a girl’, half the time you’re actually talking to a woman. Like, get a load of this one ”
CUT TO: camera pans up to reveal Paul Lynde dressed as a skateboarding Rosie the Riveter, chewing bubblegum…
Paul Lynde: Hey, fellas. (snaps his gum)
Mike Love: (singing) Hey little tomboy, sit here on my lap, I’ve got things that I’ve gotta tell you…”
Carl Wilson: (singing) Time to turn into a girl!
Mike Love: (singing) We’re gonna teach you to kiss, you’re gonna feel just like this.
Brian Wilson: (singing in falsetto) They’re doing it all over the world!
Tomboy Paul is dolled up and taught to kiss by each one of the Beach Boys, ending with a tender smooch from Carl, and the two turn towards the camera gleaming smiles, with a heart shaped optical closing in on their lips as they gently smooch again…
- , Wouldn’t It Be Nice: My Own Story, Brian Wilson with Todd Gold
↩︎ - This interview was conducted shortly after the release of The Smile Sessions box set in 2011.
↩︎ - This isn’t a universally held opinion, as some folks find certain digital keyboard substitutions glaringly obvious, but somehow that doesn’t offend my ears the way using Autotune on the vocals would have. Harpsicords aren’t very dynamic instruments, after all… But still, they shouldn’t have spared any expenses tracking real instruments down, so for those that do hear it, I feel you.
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