Part 12 of the Adult/Child saga.
In July of 1962, 21 year old Craig Breedlove made his first attempt to break the land speed record. It began with a jet engine that wouldn’t start, necessitating a last minute replacement. Luckily, they had a backup GE J47 Turbojet – the same used in F-86 Sabre fighter planes – for just such contingencies. When they got that installed and fired up, they discovered the steering rudder wasn’t worth a damn, causing the land-jet to veer wildly off course. This was the first, unsuccessful trial run of Spirit of America.
The ascendant Beach Boys weren’t setting any records yet, either, but they had landed their first national hit in the top 20. “Surfin’ Safari” is the sound of the band fully arriving in their original form. If “Surfin’” sounded like a barely competent garage-rock band, “Safari” sounds like the hottest thing around, with a lightly exotic, rocking groove that shows off the early, trebly twang of Carl and David Marks’ revolutionary guitar style. And it was Murry that pushed the treble til it sparkled and popped, still in more control of the knobs than Brian at that point. “Kick ass! Kick ass!” was his command, and the Boys proceeded to step into the ring and kick all manner of posterior.
Mike Love was was already busy facing his own personal responsibilities when The Beach Boys took off. Having watched his father’s family fortune crumble, the upper-middle-class kid was now in charge of raising his own family. The tragic undercurrent is that it was a family and a marriage he wasn’t ready for, and that he had been ready to go out of his way to ensure didn’t come into being. In 1961, teenage Mike and his high school cheerleader girlfriend were preparing to head south to Mexico to, uh, take care of an “accident”. I shouldn’t beat around the bush here like there’s some great shame to be avoided, the kids were planning on getting an abortion1.
When Mike’s mother found out, shit really hit the fan. Thou shalt not kill. Shotguns were drawn. Mike wouldn’t be getting out of this so easily. Thus began his first failed marriage, and perhaps the entire failure of his adult life. The boy + girl formula was showing him exactly what it added up to, and the choice of subtracting from that equation was off the table. And so a man who knew he wasn’t ready for such responsibility was forced to assume it…
Fortunately, success came swiftly to the fit fighting group. The next time they cracked the top 20 they’d go all the way to number 3, with their third song in the surfin’ formula: “Surfin’ USA”. Less a Chuck Berry pastiche than a direct quote of “Sweet Little Sixteen”, it’s a brilliant update of that classic rock and roll sound, with the surfy twang trebled up and those harmonies surging in on the chorus in a way that Chuck would never conceive of, brilliant as he was.
The band’s next top ten hit was surf song number four. You’d expect with the formula now well established, we’d get the ultimate surfin’ rocker of the early era, but we got “Surfer Girl”, the total inversion of that formula. Instead of a rocker surging with enthusiasm, this was a ballad gently yearning for connection. And it was a number 7 hit. Suddenly the formula had a counter-formula. But the trouble with formulas and inspiration is, when your inspiration is rooted in your emotional condition, how do you make a formula out of it?
Despite how large they loom in the band’s history, this was to be the end of the big surfin’ hits, just as soon as they’d begun. Cars were the next part of the fun and sun formula, and the “Little Deuce Coupe” single arrived later in July to take that formula into the top 20.
A month later, Spirit of America made its first successful run at Bonneville Salt Flats, setting a new world record by cracking and holding 400 miles per hour. The fastest car in the world was quickly celebrated by the fastest rising band in the USA on their 1963 all-car album named after their last hit. It could just have aptly been called Spirit of America.
The Beach Boys then organized their own pep rally2 for their next top ten hit, “Be True to Your School”, their defining anthem of exceptionalism and conformity. It’s telling that the immediate follow-up was “In My Room”. The ultimate early “be true to your heart” song, celebrating something beyond even romantic yearning – the yearning for solitude, for home, for somewhere to call your own – for control. The yearning for salvation.
It was co-written with Gary Usher, who was fated to be both Brian’s ultimate cosmic facilitator and greatest lost friendship. What could have been if they had continued developing together further into the 60’s? But the spirit of competition prevailed and Brian found himself severed from a true BFF by the controlling intervention of his father and manager, who had found Usher’s influence over Brian outgrowing his own. “In My Room” was a last tantalizing glimpse at their special creative kismet in the 60’s.
Mike Love was busy trying to assert his own dominant spot in the band, becoming Brian’s most consistent lyrical collaborator for the next two years, proving he had his own kind of kismet with Brian when the formula was firing on all cylinders. The subsequent huge hit of the group would be the defining anthem “Fun Fun Fun”, where Mike demonstrates his knack for Chuck Berry-esque storytelling within the car formula. It brought a clever twist to the story of a speed demon chick cruising Daddy’s car around like she’s hot shit, totally forgetting to actually take care of anything she was supposed to be doing. The fun concludes when Daddy takes the keys away at the end of her solo joyride. But wait – Mike’s got a car he’ll take you cruisin’ in, and now we’ll both have fun fun fun!
You’d think the band was on top of the world at this point, and they basically were. Except… they were the second most popular act in England. And soon they would find the Spirit of America directly challenged by the spirit of Great Britain. The revolutionary war was being re-fought on the cultural front, and The Beatles would quickly conquer the top of the charts in America, a spot The Beach Boys had yet to reach.
But this was the competitive spark that was needed to get them there. You think you’re hot shit, coming over to our turf, well, we’ve already gotten around to your side of the pond and back. Bam! Six months into the British Invasion, Lennon and McCartney were Beach slapped from the top of the charts on July 4th, 1964.
“I Get Around” was the ultimate statement of the band’s progressive formula, beyond any figures of control or institutions of power, beyond even the steady 4/4 beat. It’s the song that truly defined the Spirit of America in that moment – pure, unbound freedom. My head’s on straight, my wallet is fat, the bad guys don’t fuck with us. We rule this turf…
If there was ever any doubt that the bad guys were gonna leave them alone, I imagine Carl would be the one to smooth things over. The teenage diplomat of the band, Carl had a sympathetic spot for tough guys like his old man. After the band fired him as manager, Murry had imploded, sinking into a deep depression and generally being miserable to everyone around him. Long suffering wife Audree finally decided she’d had enough, and before the year was out they were separated.
Carl went with Murry to his new apartment, hoping he could somehow cheer him up. Murry finally pulled out of his funk by taking over the management of Carl’s buddy Rick Henn’s band, renaming them The Sunrays, and setting them up in direct competition with The Beach Boys. His commands to “kick ass!” were now directed against his own sons. If they don’t appreciate my genius in your favor, I’ll use it against them. He went out of his way to have the group record songs about minding the authority of parental figures… regardless of their hit potential.
In early October of 1964 the Spirit of America’s record was broken, only for Craig Breedlove to return on October 15th and set the new record at over 500 mph. It would come close to being the last attempt he’d ever make, as a 1970 Sports Illustrated article recalls:
As the speeds increased, so did the dangers and, inevitably, the pressures to go faster still. Those pressures may have expressed themselves subconsciously that day in 1964 when Breedlove destroyed his three-wheel jet. After Spirit flashed through the measured mile on its return trip of the two required for an official record, its safety chutes ripped off, the brakes melted away and Spirit knocked over a telephone pole before finally hurtling into a canal 18 feet deep. Drenched but virtually unscathed, Breedlove climbed out of the cockpit and giddily declared: “And now for my next act I’m going to set myself on fire.”
The Spirit of America skidded for over five miles before crashing into the canal. This feat earned it a second world record that day – world’s longest skid marks. It is the one record by Breedlove that has never been beaten.
The skid marks from the chart topping, ground breaking “Good Vibration”s would prove equally long and legendary. By the time Brian Wilson was pulled out of the water, he was convinced he’d burned down half of Sunset Blvd. Smile’s wreckage was so vast, it could practically be seen from space.
Just as Smile was crashing and burning, 20 year old Carl was facing indictment for “dodging” the draft for Vietnam. The Spirit of America declared it needed him as a warrior, just like it had done with Elvis Presley nearly a decade earlier. But Carl declared he was a conscientious objector, that fighting would go against his spiritual beliefs. I think he truly meant that. Carl was always a man of peace, even as a boy. In his spiritual pursuits that was always the destination. National service vs. personal responsibility. Freedom vs. duty. How does one find the Spirit of America within such a dichotomy? What happens when the balance between God and country is irreconcilable?
Shouts of “draft-dodger” and rumors of a FBI arrest have threatened the clean-cut All-American image of the Beach Boys since Carl Wilson, 20, lead guitar, and “cuddliest,” youngest of the three Wilson brothers, refused to submit for induction into the Armed Forces on January 3, 1967.
Claiming Conscientious Objection on the basis of a conflict of values (“My duty to God is far greater than any mortal demand”), Carl’s request was rejected ostensibly on the grounds of late filing. He was indicted by a federal grand jury on April 5 and entered a plea of “not guilty.”
According to his attorney, J.B. Tietz, a longtime veteran in these matters, Carl’s application was “short circuited, that is, instead of handling it so that he could have the opportunity to talk to the Board (Gardena), and the opportunity to have an administrative appeal (both rights being guaranteed by Congress) the Board handled it so that he was unable to have either.”
Denial of these rights, then, will form the core of Carl’s defense when he faces trial late this month. Until then, he is free on a $25,000 bond and was allowed to join the group in their European tour.
Reports that Carl will go to jail or leave the country rather than serve in any capacity are unfounded, say his lawyer and his father, manager-taskmaster guardian of the Beach Boys for two and a half years. A zealous patriot, Mr. Wilson respects his son for “following his heart” but encourages him to accept a noncombat position. Although Carl has made no official statement on this, he signed statement B on the C.O. application which claims exemption from “both combatant and non-combatant training and service in the Armed Forces.” His specific views on the Vietnamese war are not public.
Those who know Carl consistently describe him as a soft-spoken, intensely religious person. His pacifism is rooted, explains his father, in a deep respect for life, based on the Commandment, which was “hammered” into him as well as his brothers Brian and Dennis during childhood; so that the idea of killing anyone is unthinkable and fills him with “panic.”
He and his lawyer are prepared to use “every defense open to any individual,” and to appeal their case to the highest court if that should become necessary in order to avoid the participation in the horrors of war and “keep those good vibrations happening…”
Sue Lack
Fifth Estate # 33, July 1-15, 1967
The truth is, if Carl had gone to war in 1967, the band would have spun apart like an out of control merry-go-round, their center no longer present. The Beach Boys needed Carl Wilson more than the army did. The designated peace maker of the family, Carl attempted to be an empathic anchor for those that surrounded him. His peace was not rooted in law and order, but in emotional and spiritual reckoning. The tragedy of his life was that the people who needed him for his spirit of peace treated him like an infinite resource, as if his patience was inexhaustible. When it finally ran out, it was a harsh enough reckoning to almost completely destroy the final years of his relationship with Brian.
The end of the 80’s found Carl and the rest of the family fighting for Brian’s freedom from Gene Landy. It was a process that had begun almost as soon as Landy and Brian returned from Hawaii, but had dramatically accelerated as Brian’s health and well-being deteriorated. Old friend Gary Usher proved invaluable when the matter finally went to court. They’d reconnected in 1986, when Brian was attempting to launch a solo career (with Gene) and needed someone to help him get up to speed with the cutting edge of recording. It was a match made in Heaven, in Hell. The process was so emotionally exhausting, with Landy and his goons present at all times, that it was more than likely the root of the cancer that killed Usher, especially when Landy severed the friendship between them just as harshly as Murry had nearly 25 years earlier.
By the time Brian had been saved from the clutches of Landy, Usher was dead and buried, with his posthumously edited journals providing an inside look at the insanity of Landy’s control trip. Carl was about to receive his own cancer diagnosis. And baby bro was fucking done3. As soon as he saw the writing on the wall that Brian was safe now, he told him he hated his new retrofried songs and went to work on an adult contemporary album with Gerry Beckley and Robert Lamm. Carl wasn’t interested in looking backwards anymore. I’ve only got so much future guaranteed, I’m gonna stay focused on it until it’s gone.
Even without killing his body to try and stay alive, it wasn’t the first time Carl had been so disgusted with the state of the stagnant Beach Boys he would abandon the group for a brighter, more contemporary pasture. His first solo album presents him in the softest form of modern rock the early 80’s offered. In addition to affirming that “Heaven could be here on Earth”, he looked back in sun-dappled tones on his childhood in such a reverie that it reminds me of Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life. “Seems So Long Ago”, he sang of growing up in that little two bedroom family house, watching his folks work so hard to see they had the best life they could. Of course, just like Mallick’s own recollections, those sun-dappled memories were also streaked with brutal violence, and a level of alcoholism from both parents that would make Don Draper blush…
If Carl got his peaceful demeanor from someone in his family, it would be mother Audree. But it wasn’t a peace that came with reckoning or accountability, it was peace at the price of self, and even the price of her own children, who she did nothing to shield from Murry’s abuse. Instead she escaped into alcoholic pacification. To Mike Love, she was his saintly aunt, but he had no real idea what the price of that saintly countenance was.
Mike Love is such a backwards looking motherfucker that his childhood feels more like Rebel Without a Cause than a modern mid-century period drama. His father would be the first to admit he was the beta in his parents’ marriage. I can imagine a pre-balding Mike coming home to find his dad in a kitchen apron and bawling “You’re tearing me apart!” James Dean, of course, exemplified that American Spirit of going fast and taking chances, and the tragic consequences such a course could take. He would get his own memorializing song in the early Beach Boys catalogue, “A Young Man is Gone”.
Once he was forced into the family life, Mike could no longer claim to be cause-less. The ungovernable young man was now shackled to adult responsibilities. The marriage would disintegrate by 1964, leading directly into his second marriage. For the rest of his life, Mike would find himself “Doing Time As A Ladies Man”. His cock and his wallet would dictate all the decisions he would make from here on out. Marriage number six seems to be holding strong, but one gets the feeling Mike himself can barely get out of a chair these days, much less get anything else up. He’s gone from Rebel Without a Cause to Giant, the eternal youth lost in ancient desiccation and awkward comb-overs.
Mike’s big Jett Rink meltdown moment came at what should have been a victory lap: the band’s induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. When it was time to make a speech, Mike let every ounce of resentment he’d ever had come out like a giant stream of diarrhea over everyone present. It starts off innocently enough, talking about harmony. But it quickly turns that idea of harmony into a competition:
We love music and we love harmony. And we love all people too. <…> And I think it’s wonderful to be here tonight, but I also think it’s sad that there are other people who aren’t here tonight. And, uh, those are the people who have passed away, those are the obvious ones. But the other not-so-obvious ones are people like Paul McCartney, who couldn’t be here tonight because he’s in a lawsuit with Ringo and Yoko. That’s what he sent a telegram to some, uh, high priced attorney in this room, you know. And that’s a bummer, because we’re talking about harmony, right, and the world. If we can’t get it together in America and in England, and harmony within our groups. I mean, believe it, you can believe it the Beach Boys have their own “interstescene” or whatever you call it, squabbles. But that’s a bummer when Ms. Ross can’t make it, you know? The Beach Boys have continued to do, about, we did about 180 performances last year. I’d like to see the Mop-Tops match that! I’d like to see Mick Jagger get out on this stage and do “I Get Around” versus “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”, any day now.
Now a lot of people are going to come out of this room tonight and say, ‘Mike Love is crazy!’ Well they’ve been saying that for years. There aint nothing new about that.
But what I’m talking about is, forget this room. The United States is just 6 percent of the population of the world. <…> [M]y mother, the Wilson, Emily Wilson <…> When [the Wilsons] first came to California they were Kansas dustbowl Swedes who didn’t have enough money to rent or buy a house , they lived in tents, on the beach in Hunnington California when they first came out. And now we’re sitting in this room with all this glitterati glissando. All six percent of us. And we’re hassling, we’re fighting, interstescene squabbles, you know, messing around.
What I want to see is this whole room recognise that there is one Earth here, and I want us to do something fantastic with all this talent. and all this wonderful spirit and soul. And I’d like to see some people kick out the jams, and I challenge The Boss to get up on stage and jam.
(During Mike’s pause, someone in the house band plays the theremin line of “Good Vibrations” during the crowds tepid response)
I wanna see Billy Joel, see if he can still tickle ivories, lemmee see. I know Mick Jagger won’t be here tonight, he’s gonna have to stay in England. But I’d like to see us in the Coliseum and he at Wembley Stadium because he’s always been chickenshit to get on stage with the Beach Boys.
In 1992, after 27 years away from the races, 55-year-old Craig Breedlove prepared a new Spirit of America to reclaim his speed king throne. It was the same spirit that was simultaneously animating Mike Love’s Beach Boys to pursue Summer in Paradise as their crowning achievement. It took Breedlove four years from planning to test running4, where he crashed at around 675 mph. Meanwhile, the competing British team would break the sound barrier with their attempt, cruising an astonishing, face-scrunching 763 mph. The Spirit of America would never surpass 676. Breedlove passed from cancer at 86 years old in 2023. At a rapidly dwindling 85 years old, Mike Love may not live to outpace Breedlove. You can be the fearless cock of the walk and still come in second place. The American Spirit has a hard time accepting that. It’s probably time we consistently get used to not being number one. “Good Vibrations” can’t dominate the competition forever. Maybe The Spirit of America needs to be a spirit of shared prosperity rather than a competition.
The Rolling Stones have just released their 25th studio album, Foreign Tongues. If Mike Love dies before Mick Jagger, I hope calling Jagger a chickenshit is somehow incorporated into his epitaph. Meanwhile, there’s still time for Mike and Mick to have a proper cock-off. C’mon, guys, let’s make it happen.
To be continued…
Meanwhile…
Excerpts from: “The Beach Boys are trying to destroy me!”
By John Mulvey, Uncut.co.uk
This interview was conducted in 1995.
“Little surfer, little one, made my heart come all undone/Do you love me, do you surfer girl?”
He’s singing now, sitting at the piano, hammering out a song he wrote some 33 years ago; its innocent sentiments would make most 53-year-old men shy away from it, ashamed. The voice is a little coarser, but there’s still an amazing depth of feeling invested in every last resonating syllable; an adolescent lust transfigured by a yearning, a high melancholy and a profound sense of uncertainty at what the future will hold; and sunny optimism underpinned with doubt, as ever, but now augmented by a powerful, reconciling faith…
The chorus ends, slides into a new bridge, written to comfort the singer in one of his regular emotional slumps. “God shines down his love and mercy/For those in need tonight,” he sings, with a passion and fervour almost strong enough to send the most defiant atheist spinning towards the nearest church. Beautiful? Damn near transcendental.
<…>
Heavy and greying, Wilson hardly looks like a rock star — but he doesn’t look much like the wasted and ravaged monster of legend, either. Andy Paley claimed: “He’s the best comedian I know,” and it’s immediately apparent that he’s not averse to taking the piss out of himself and public perceptions of himself <…> The trouble is, as his moods swing wildly from sentence to sentence, it’s hard to tell when he’s joking and when he isn’t.
“First of all we need to do the one thing in life that we should do, and that is to bring spiritual love to people. Which we did in the ‘60s, and over the years, and I feel another cycle coming on to maybe have what I call a carte blanche from God to record. I don’t think I thoroughly understand what that really means.”
He laughs gently.
What do you think it means?
“Well, one way would be to say green lights, but that’s kinda scary, y’know, so I guess you could say, just another chance to express ourselves and do something that people would like, that we could bring spiritual security to people.”
The whole machinery surrounding you now — Melinda, David, Andy — seems very secure.
“It’s like a shell to me. It curves like this” — he reaches out expansively — “like I’m back here in this shell and they’re screening out some of the bad shit and keeping some of the cool shit cool, y’know? And it’s kinda scary, but it’s like playing football. When you first learn how to play football it’s kinda scary, to get hit real hard by a tackler, y’know? But then, later on, you get mad and you start slamming around because there’s no other way to do it. <…>
“But I never know from day to day what the fuck is really up, that’s the only problem with me. I know The Beach Boys are good, I know I can make music, but the rest of the trip I don’t know about. It’s confusing, it’s very confusing. The shell around me has given me a strength inside not to blast open, but to pry open something good and new, something positive. And I think that’s what I could do.”
Andy says you’re undecided which material is for your solo career and which is for The Beach Boys?
“Well, we’ve already gone through that shit with Melinda and David. The Beach Boys are out. The Beach Boys are being assholes to me. So I take the lesser of two evils; I’ll work on my own, solo, before I work with a bunch of guys that don’t give a shit about me.”
Why are they being assholes to you, Brian?
“Why? Well, there’s probably five or six real good reasons why they don’t like me. One is they’re jealous. Two: erm, they’re assholes. Three: they’re too businessmen and too businesslike. And four: there’s no respect. They have no respect for me. They just spit at me and kick me, no respect at all. I say, ‘Well, fuck it then!’ “ He’s really wound up now.
Even Carl’s doing this to you?
“Carl is my brother, but Carl is an asshole. I love Carl, I love his singing, but he’s an asshole to me. Those guys are assholes. I oughta beat the hell out of them all. I dunno, I’d probably get beat up if I tried that.”
You reckon?
“I’d get beat to hell. Mike would beat me. I couldn’t handle that — he’s very bulky, strong, he’d beat the hell out of me!”
Al’s quite small, you could have a go with him.
“Al’s cool, man. He’s not too good a singer, but he’s a pretty nice man.”
Did the latest Beach Boys “asshole” behaviour come about around the Baywatch Nights recording?
“Yeah, we managed to get Carl on tape but we couldn’t get Mike on tape. That wasn’t the best chemistry or song for The Beach Boys that we were doing. We could try another one, there’s always something else to try.”
But you don’t really want to at the moment?
“No. Assholes should be treated like assholes. That’s how I feel about my group. I can’t get nothing but detours and bad vibes, it makes me wanna split the state and go live in Miami or Hawaii and live a couple of years on my — our — money and not do anything. Y’know, it’s a tragedy that people get that way. They’d rather destroy something than do something. I’m just waiting around, I’m as positive as I can possibly be.”
What are they trying to destroy exactly?
“Well, I think The Beach Boys are trying to destroy me as a producer. I think they’re trying to make Terry Melcher their hero and me their villain. Fuck that shit, y’know? I’m not gonna go through that.”
It’s incredibly sad when you think what you’ve done for them.
“I think it’s sad, yeah.”
You think Mike’d still be pumping gas if it wasn’t for you?
“Nooo. I ain’t shit when it comes down to it, but I certainly don’t think he is, either,” he laughs. “I mean, a fight is a fight, y’know?”
But you’ve had so many fights with him over the years and yet still you go into the studio with him?
“You mean being in the same room with him? We can still do that, yeah. We still have that together, but we’ve gotta work on ourselves. How would you deal with it? If you went in the studio with The Beach Boys, and you were gonna produce them, how would you go about doing it?”
I don’t know… hold a gun to their heads, I think.
“Really? Oh, so you’d force The Beach Boys like a gangster?”
Well, from what I know about Mike, it seems that force is the only thing he understands.
“He relates to that. That’s a good idea, thank you,” he laughs. “That’s really cool. You mean put on the pressure?”
Yeah. How many times has he done that to you over the years?
“Probably once.”
Melinda snorts. “Oh yeah, with a couple of zeroes behind it.”
“He put me on an insecurity trip for about a hundred years by just not looking at me like he really cared that much for me.”
“Brian lets his emotions get involved with his family and his work,” interjects Melinda. She has left her seat and is now supportively stroking her husband’s neck and shoulders tenderly as she talks. “With them, it’s all work.”
“I mean, I don’t care,” continues Brian, clearly meaning the opposite. “The only things I have to go on are feelings. If I feel that nobody likes me, or that the group is a big scam, it’s gonna put me on a bummer but the worse it gets to me, the worse it’ll be for me later. Because you can’t put a person through that much bullshit and not expect that person to turn up with some kind of ego-trip disaster that’s gonna fucking scare people to death. <…> So that’s my problem. I used to think gangsters ruled my life, but I don’t think that any more.”
But emotional gangsters have, in the past, used nasty techniques to rule your life?
“What it applies to me is,” he taps out the rhythm of the words with his glass, “I’M-BEING-FORCED-TO-DO-SOMETHING-I-DON’T-WANNA-DO. I’ve had emotional gangsters run my life for 20 years. I pray to God with all my heart and soul that it doesn’t happen again. I don’t wanna go back to that place. <…> The real trip is that we’re gonna go forward with a solo career and we’re not gonna let anyone like The Beach Boys slow us down or fuck us up. The Boys are big businessmen, and people are a little scared of ‘em, but at the same time there are people in the industry who can kick The Beach Boys right out of the world.”
But all The Beach Boys do is cynically cash in on your reputation.
“But the Boys themselves didn’t even know what the fuck they were doing. They didn’t realise that they were being messengers for higher people.”
Melinda: “That’s how he looks upon them; as the messengers of his music.”
“And they were so scared that they literally kicked some butt. And nobody can sing better than Mike Love — he’s the best singer in the whole industry, except for Danny [Hutton].”
What about Carl?
“Nah. Carl can’t sing for shit. The best he can do onstage is go: ‘HO!’ and yell. <…> The truth is, there’s no getting out of bad vibes, no getting out of people that don’t like you.”
“The problem is, the reality is, he does care,” continues Melinda, honestly, “but it’s a constant struggle. All he’s ever wanted is for them to be nice to him. It’s so hard for him to have any type of conflict in his life. He just hates conflict. He wants everything to be OK all the time.”
Do you remember a time when you were as happy and contented as now?
“Well, er… no. Actually, no. Well this interview of course is a big breakthrough,” he laughs again. “I had a dream the other night and I kept dreaming that I said to myself: ‘I wanna break on through to the other side!’ Didn’t some group do a song like that? Morrison, right? Morrison from The Doors. I’m trying to write a song about that.”
And what’s on the other side?
“Ohhh…” — he starts singing again — “ ‘Milk and honey on the other side, Hallelujah!’ The last coupla days, my brain just hasn’t been functioning right. I have auditory hallucinations in my head.”
Melinda elucidates: “Basically, Brian has problems with depression. Day to day it varies, and auditory hallucinations are caused because the neuro-transmitters in the brain have gone haywire. So we’re on new medication, we’ve alleviated a lot of the old medication. So some days he has great days, and other days are…”
“…Lousy,” he mumbles.
“…Lousy. And the problem is that stress is a major cause of auditory hallucinations through depression. It’s an on-going thing that Brian’s always gonna be dealing with, but for the first time in his life he’s with people that understand what he’s going through instead of saying: ‘You’re crazy.’ And what we know about the brain is… nothing.”
Brian burps loudly. “I’m not sure about the brain, but I don’t understand what goes on between brain and emotion when you write a song. Are you writing a song from your soul or from your brain? It’s weird. What goes on?”
So would you have sacrificed the creativity to have avoided the depression?
“Yeah. It gets back to being scared, because if you’re depressed, that’s gonna fuck your mind up. Being depressed these days, that throws your mind into a scared situation.”
But for an entire life of complete emotional and psychological simplicity, would you have sacrificed every note of music that you’ve written and played?
He becomes vague and makes desperate attempts to change the subject. Melinda firmly takes over the questioning. “No, Brian. If, in fact, you could have a life free of depression and auditory hallucinations, free of all the emotional insecurity that you’ve gone through, would you trade that with having your life with music?”
He answers very quietly. “No.”
“No, I don’t think so,” she says, satisfied.
“As much emotional security as I have, I still need more, though,” he returns.
But music’s so important to you that you’re prepared to go through the rough times?
He’s very distant, suddenly exhausted.
“Yeah. Oh yeah.”
- It wouldn’t be until 1967 that abortion would become legal in any of the United States. It was doctors who pushed for legalized abortion. They were tired of seeing women suffering horrible injuries and even death from botched illegal abortion jobs. Making the process safe and humane was the only solution. But, here we are in a world where morality is legislated. Thou shalt not kill, but those shalt let others die. Salvation presented as an escape rather than a responsibility. The historic irony is that medieval Catholics didn’t consider the fetus “alive” in the first trimester – or least not embodying a soul. Until “quickening” had occurred, i.e. the baby began to kick, abortion was not considered killing another living being. Abortificants were part of the Catholic tradition. The use of such was not thought to put any souls at risk for damnation. Abortion has been the third rail of the culture war for my entire lifetime. I was never alive before Roe v. Wade, but I sure remember it being repealed. Since then expecting mothers have been left to die in avoidable, foreseen complications due to restrictive new state laws. Perhaps the most infamous recent case involved a braindead mother-to-be kept “alive”, counter to her family’s wishes, so that her child could be delivered before her empty husk was discarded. Prior to that there were at least two women who were forced to bring life-threatening pregnancies to term who did not survive. So much for the sanctity of life. An article originally written in November of 2024 but updated this past month (6-24-26) puts the number of publicly documented “preventable deaths caused by abortion bans” at 12.
↩︎ - Brian’s future teenage wife and her teenage older sister bring the cheerleader chants. It’s the corniest of all the big hits, and exactly the kind of thing that would make the coming counter-culture treat the group like the ultimate squares.
↩︎ - The Hebrew word for salvation is “Yeshuah”. It is the source of the name “Yeshua”, aka Jesus. It is a feminine word. It means relief from suffering and subjugation. It is a verb and a noun, just as love is. It is more of an action than a decision. Are you setting the captives free? Are you sharing communion, feeding the hungry and clothing the poor? Are you working in service of peace?
↩︎ - If you ever want to reckon with unexpressed rage and resentment, go through cancer treatment with someone you love. It’s kind of like celebrating Festivus, but with more airing of grievances…
↩︎ - It took Mike, Melcher and Co. 4 years to followup “Kokomo” with a proper album from the proof-of-concept of that mega-hit. They wiped out somewhere around 666 MPH too…
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