I Am Brian Wilson

There’s a world where I can go and tell my secrets to

In my room, in my room

In this world I lock out all my worries and my fears

In my room, in my room

—“In My Room”

Mornings start at different times. In summer I wake up pretty early, sometimes as early as seven. It’s later in the winter—when the days are shorter, I sleep longer. I might not get up until eleven. Maybe that happens to everyone. It used to be worse. I used to have real trouble getting up in the winter, and even when I did, I might stay in bed for hours. These days it’s a little easier to start the day, no matter what the season.

When I wake up these days here in my house in Beverly Hills, I head down the back staircase to the den. That’s where the TV is, and also my chair. It’s a navy-blue print chair that’s been there forever. It used to be red. It’s been covered and recovered because I have a habit of picking at the upholstery. That chair is where I go when I come down from the bedroom. It’s my command center. I can sit there and watch TV, even though the set is at a little bit of a weird angle. I love watching Eyewitness News. The content is not very good, but the newscasters are pleasant to watch. They have nice personalities. They also give you the weather. I like game shows, but I am getting tired of watching Jeopardy! It’s the same bullshit every day. I like Wheel of Fortune. I like sports, too, mostly baseball, though I’ll also watch basketball and football. I get more interested toward the playoffs.

But the TV isn’t the only thing I can see from my chair. I can see into the kitchen and almost everywhere else. I can turn and look out the window and see into the backyard, which has a view of Benedict Canyon. The whole city’s stretched out there if you go and look. And there’s a touch-tone phone right next to the chair so I can call whoever I want. I don’t use a cell phone. I have had a few over the years, but I don’t like them. I love being in the chair. If I’m in Los Angeles, I’ll end up there 100 percent of the days. If I come into the room and someone else is sitting in it, I just stand nearby until they clear out. When I go on the road, I take another chair with me, a black leather recliner, so that I can have the feel of home. I have them set it up on the wings of the stage and I sit there instead of in the dressing room.

Some people reach for coffee first thing in the morning. I don’t. I’m not a coffee drinker. That doesn’t mean that I’m alert on my own all the time, though. My nighttime medications make me drowsy, and it’s hard to get started. There’s a little hangover from the pills. When I get to the chair, I’ll sit there for half an hour or so. Then I’ll go out to the deli for breakfast. Breakfast has changed over the years. When I was less concerned about my weight, it might be two bowls of cereal, eggs, and a chicken patty. These days it’s a veggie patty and fruit salad or a dish of blueberries. Most mornings Melinda will come into the room, and she only has to take one glance to tell what kind of mood I’m in. She’s been with me long enough to know what the good moods look like, and what the other moods look like.

She doesn’t say anything in the mornings usually. She lets me sit. If the mood lasts until afternoon or evening, she’ll ask me about it. “What’s bothering you?” she’ll say. Usually it’s that I really miss my brothers. Both of them are gone—Carl for almost twenty years, Dennis for more than thirty. I can get into a space where I think about it too much. I wonder why the two of them went away, and where they went, and I think about how hard it is to understand the biggest questions about life and death. It’s worse around the holidays. I can really get lost in it. When it gets bad, Melinda sits near me and goes through the reality of the situation. She might remind me that Carl’s been gone for a while, and that even when he was alive, we didn’t spend so much time together. Toward the end of his life, we saw each other maybe once a year or so. “Of course you miss your brothers,” she’ll say. “But you don’t want to miss them so much that it puts you on a bummer.” And she’s right. I don’t.

Other times it’s something else. Maybe it’s the voices in my head. Maybe it’s one of those days when they’re telling me terrible and scary things. If it’s one of those days, Melinda goes through the reality of that, too. “The voices have been saying they’re going to kill you for years,” she says, “and they haven’t done it yet. They’re not real, even if they seem real to you.” She’s right about that, too. On days when Melinda’s not here to talk to me, I try to remind myself of what she might say. I always remember to take a walk. That clears my head. I can usually get myself calm with a good walk.

Today, in the chair, I’m in a pretty good place. Things don’t seem so heavy and nothing’s getting me down. There’s a special event coming up. There’s a screening of a movie. It’s called Love and Mercy, and it’s a movie about my life. Not my whole life; it doesn’t go as far as this chair or this book. It’s a movie about my life and my music and my struggles with mental illness, both in the ’60s and later on. The movie covers thousands of days. Some of them were good days. Some were great. And good days grew out of bad, which is one of the main points of this movie and my life—much of it is about the love story between me and Melinda, and how she got the ball rolling to get me out of the hellhole that Dr. Landy had created for me. Melinda and I had been working on the movie for years, off and on, trying to get one made that told as much of the truth as possible. It took almost twenty years to finally get it done. Can you believe it?

The screening for the movie isn’t today. It’s soon. But today is a regular day. I’m going to get cleaned up, comb my hair, and go out for breakfast. There’s a stoplight on the way to the deli that stays red forever, almost nine minutes. Later I might go see my son Dylan play basketball. He’s eleven, and he’s a great little player. I used to see more of his games; it’s gotten harder since I had back surgery. Dylan also plays the drums a little bit. That helps him get tension off his chest. It might be a good idea for me to teach him piano.

When I wake up in my house in 2015, I am happy to be here. When I woke up in my house more than two decades earlier, I wasn’t sure how I felt. The doctor had just gone out the door. The doctor was Eugene Landy. The patient was me. “I am leaving because I lost my license,” he said. “Bye, Brian.”

I didn’t say anything. I was glad to see him go. His back, moving away from me, was like a tide going out. Dr. Landy’s leaving was my freedom. Through history there are stories about tyrants who control entire countries. Dr. Landy was a tyrant who controlled one person, and that person was me. He controlled where I went and what I did and who I saw and what I ate. He controlled it by spying on me. He controlled it by having other people spy on me. He controlled it by screaming at me. He controlled it by stuffing me full of drugs that confused me. If you help a person to get better by erasing that person, what kind of job have you done? I don’t know for sure, but he really did a job on me.

Sometimes memories come back to me when I least expect them. Maybe that’s the only way it works when you’ve lived the life I’ve lived: starting a band with my brothers, my cousin, and my high school buddy that was managed by my father; watching my father become difficult and then impossible; watching myself become difficult and then impossible; watching women I loved come and go; watching children come into the world; watching my brothers get older; watching them pass out of the world. Some of those things shaped me. Others scarred me. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference. When I watched my father fly into a rage and take a swing at me, was that shaping or scarring? When I heard voices in my head and realized that they weren’t going to go away anytime soon, was that shaping or scarring?

When I sit in the chair in my house, I try to watch everything. I have always been that way. I try to listen to everything also. I have always listened to sounds in the studio and sounds in the world, to the voices in my band and the voices in my head. I couldn’t stop myself from taking all those things in, but once they were in me, I couldn’t always handle them. That was one of the reasons I made music. Music is a beautiful thing. Songs help me with my pain, and they also move through the world and help other people, which helps me, too. I don’t know if that’s the whole story, but it’s part of it. The struggles I have faced—from the way my dad was, to the arguments in the band, to the mental health issues that have been around as long as I can remember—are all things I have tried to deal with in my own way. Have I stayed strong? I like to think so. But the only thing I know for sure is that I have stayed.

I’m thinking of a picture. It’s a picture of a picture, actually—me in the early ’70s, lying in bed, looking at the cover photo of the Beach Boys’ Sunflower album, which came out in 1970. The album’s photo of the band—of me; my brothers, Dennis and Carl; my cousin Mike Love; Al Jardine; and Bruce Johnston. It’s the whole band, but not just the band. My daughter Wendy is there, too. Mike’s kids Hayleigh and Christian are there. Carl’s son Jonah is there. Al’s son Matt is there.

The photo was taken at Hidden Valley Ranch, which was Dean Martin’s place near Thousand Oaks. We were all out on the golf course, goofing around. Ricci Martin, Dean’s son, was the photographer. He was a cool guy, and good friends with my brother Carl. Eventually Carl produced an album for him called Beached. It was a really nice record. Dennis drummed on it. There’s a beautiful song on it that Carl wrote called “Everybody Knows My Name.”

For the cover photo of Sunflower, we dressed mostly in red, white, and blue, and over the photograph there was a banner with the group’s name and then the title of the album in a rainbow. I was all in white: white shirt, white pants, white shoes. I was looking down, partly because Wendy was in my lap, wearing pink. I was in pretty good shape at that time. My weight was good. I look calm. Maybe not happy, but sitting right in the middle of everything. Sunflower was the first record the Beach Boys made for Brother/Reprise Records, after recording for Capitol Records for a decade.

Photographs can be misleading, and the cover photo of Sunflower sure is. I was the center of the band in the photo, but by the time that record came out, I wasn’t at the center of the band anymore. Some people will say that I pulled away from the center. Some people will say that I was pushed away. Maybe it was a little bit of both. I’m not sure. What I’m sure of is that all the guys in the band had different ideas about what kind of music to release, how to go onstage and perform our songs, when we should repeat ourselves and when we should try new things. Because Sunflower was our first Reprise record, I wanted to go all the way with being new. I even had the idea that we should change the group’s name to the Beach, because we weren’t boys anymore. I told the rest of the guys that and they didn’t like the idea. They thought it would confuse the people who bought our records. We had careers to protect, which meant we had sales to protect.

Not only wasn’t I completely in control of the group, but I wasn’t completely in control of myself. How do you know when a problem starts? Did it start in 1964 on an airplane to Houston, when I freaked out and decided that I couldn’t tour with the band anymore? Did it start in the ’40s when my father whacked me because he didn’t like how I was acting? Did it start in the ’70s with drugs or long before that with the beginnings of mental illness that no one knew how to handle? What did it matter when it started? What mattered was that for a while it wouldn’t end. I was scared at the time Sunflower came out. I felt like the band was slipping away from me. I felt like I was slipping away from myself. The time in my life when I had complete control and confidence in the studio was behind me, and I didn’t know what was ahead. I didn’t know how to get that control and confidence back. I once called it “ego death.” I didn’t know if anything would ever come back to life.

I couldn’t have known that almost fifty years later I’d be in a mostly stable and happy place, still dealing with those things but having learned so much about how to do it. I also couldn’t have known that before things would get better, they would get worse. A few years after Sunflower it was much worse. I was worse. My body was filled with drugs and alcohol, and my brain was filled with bad ideas. The bad ideas came from the rest of it and caused it, too. Back then, like I said, mental illness wasn’t treated in a straightforward way. People wouldn’t even admit that it existed. There was shame in saying what it was and strange ideas about how to deal with it. Back then, I wasn’t going anywhere most days, and when I was in the house I didn’t even move around much. I felt stuck because I was depressed, and that caused me to gain weight, and then I felt stuck because I had gained weight. I got up to over 300 pounds. I wasn’t going onstage with the group. I could write songs, but I did it less and less. I needed help desperately, and people close to me were desperate to get it for me.

And so the doctor came. My wife at the time, Marilyn, called for him. It was right around the United States Bicentennial and everything was red, white, and blue like the Sunflower album cover. It felt like Independence Day all year. But Dr. Landy didn’t believe in independence. He wanted me to get the weight off and develop healthier habits, and the way he decided to do that was to put himself in the middle of everything in my life. He called it twenty-four-hour therapy. There weren’t any more hours in the day. When friends came to see me, Dr. Landy interviewed them to make sure they passed his inspection. When I was allowed to see friends, it was never on my own. Dr. Landy always sent someone to monitor me, sometimes more than one guy. He wanted to make sure that the people weren’t bringing me drugs or anything else unhealthy.

It would be a lie to say that he didn’t get results. He took the 300 pounds and brought them down to about 185, which is the weight I should have been. I was a football quarterback in high school and that was what I weighed back then. I hadn’t appeared with the band onstage in about a decade, except for a few shows—I did a pair in Hawaii in 1967, one at the Whisky in LA in 1970, and a few shows in Seattle a little after that. But mostly I just couldn’t get on the stage. In 1976, after a few months with Landy, I managed to come on for a few songs in Oakland and then did a whole night in Anaheim for a show being taped for TV. I only sang lead on one song, “Back Home,” which was coming out on an album we were just about to release, 15 Big Ones. That was the message: back home.

Dr. Landy’s stay with me was pretty brief in 1976. He got some results, but then he went too far. He was getting too involved, and then I found out what he was charging. I confronted him about it. I was pretty angry. No one was happy to be talking. I threw a punch and he threw one back and that was the end of it—that time, at least.

Things were better when he left. We put out some pretty good records, not only 15 Big Ones but also Love You in 1977. But then there were bad years again. The worst of them, 1978, was one of the worst years of my life. I went into a mental hospital in San Diego and then called Marilyn and asked for a divorce. I couldn’t control my thoughts and I couldn’t control my body. It wasn’t the first time I had felt like that, but in some ways it was the worst because of what I did to deal with it. I drank Bali Hai wine and did cocaine and smoked cigarettes and my weight went higher than ever; at one point I tipped the scales at 311 pounds.

There were so many costs. One of them was the music. Record labels kept asking us for new albums. Maybe “asking” is a polite word. They expected them, and didn’t expect anything but yes for an answer. So we ended up making records, but they were records that showed how the band was being pulled in many different directions at once, albums like M.I.U. Album in 1978, L.A. (Light Album) in 1979, and Keepin’ the Summer Alive in 1980. Most fans of the band don’t like those records. Some fans don’t even know about them. There are only a few songs on those records that I like when I think about them, like “Good Timin’” and “Goin’ On,” but mostly they aren’t worth thinking about too hard. I didn’t do much on those albums. I wasn’t in any shape to do much. The same was true onstage. In March of 1979, a day or so after I got out of the mental hospital, I flew into New York for a concert at Radio City Music Hall. I was about as unprepared as possible in every way. I lasted for one song, “California Girls,” and then split to the side of the stage. On one tour I was playing bass, and I spent almost the entire concert back there perched on an amp. The amount of singing shrank and shrank until it was just the middle eight of “Surfer Girl” (“We could ride the surf together”), the first verse of “Sloop John B,” and not much more than that.

There’s one show I remember from 1982. It was at the Westbury Music Theatre in New York, and there was a stage that circled around like a lazy Susan. We were playing “Do It Again” and all of a sudden I started laughing. I couldn’t stop. I had cigarettes on top of the piano and I managed to grab them. We took intermission, and then I came back and perched on the corner of the stage as it rotated and I smoked. I was laughing, but nothing was funny. I was coughing, and I couldn’t come up for air. A few weeks later I was given a letter that told me I was out of money and fired from the band. The first part wasn’t true. The second part was, in a way. Everyone’s patience for the Bali Hai and the drugs and the cigarettes and the giggling had come to an end.

This time it was the Beach Boys who called Dr. Landy. It was a group decision, except for Dennis. I don’t think they knew what else to do. At first Landy took me right to Hawaii. When we were there, he started me on an exercise regime, no more drugs, no nothing. I had to kick it all. It took me about a week, but I did it. That week cleaned me up, but it was hard. I was rolling around in bed. I was screaming, clutching at the sheets. I never felt so fucked up.

When Dr. Landy came back, he had the same idea as the first time around, which was that the people near me were part of the problem. That meant that everyone had to go. Caroline, my girlfriend at the time, was one of the people who had to go, even though she was doing nothing wrong. It was sad. But soon I was pumped so full of what Dr. Landy was giving me that my memories of her just faded away.

The first time through, Dr. Landy had succeeded a little bit. His method was never perfect, but it gave me relief. The second time through, there was no relief. Relief would have been a kind of freedom, and he didn’t believe in freedom. He gave me more and more pills and called them vitamins. He sent girls to keep me company. He played games with me where he put his hand on my leg to see if I had feelings for anyone. He had barbecues at my house, but instead of inviting my friends or family, he invited his family and other doctors. He made big plans, like going back to Hawaii and then to London, but then the plans disappeared without explanation. He let me have a margarita every once in a while. He screamed so loud it made me cry.

Sometimes I worked up the courage to confront Dr. Landy just a little bit. “Gene,” I would say, “why are you here?” He wouldn’t answer me. Instead he would ask a question back: “Did you eat at the wrong time?” or “Why aren’t you clean?” I didn’t know why I wasn’t. There was food on my clothes. I wasn’t cutting my nails regularly, and no one else was either. I couldn’t focus because of the medication, but I also didn’t want to focus because I was ashamed and afraid. So many days during that time were just a waiting game from sunrise to sunset, to the moment they would end. I must have run into old friends or talked to people in my family who thought they weren’t getting any real part of me, and they were right.

Gene didn’t want any other people around me. He wanted me to depend on him for everything. His methods could be violent. Sometimes that reminded me of my dad, which seemed wrong. It was wrong for him to feel like a father when he was worse in every way. He was angrier. He was more unfair. I had no idea if there was any love to go along with the anger. With dads, you struggle to get independent. You push against them and sometimes they push back. With Gene, it seemed like he never wanted me to push. He hired a woman named Gloria Ramos to make me food. Gene told me about Gloria before she came. He told me that she was working for him. He told me that she was going to cook for me and buy some groceries. There had been another woman before her named Deirdre, but she didn’t stay long.

I wasn’t sure about Gloria at first because she was working for Gene. That made me afraid. But I watched her and decided that she wasn’t like his other people.

Gloria didn’t speak much English, but I spoke a little Spanish so I could talk to her. There was a song called “¿Cuando Calienta el Sol?,” which means “How hot is the sun?” I would sing that and also play some piano for her. For a while, she was my only friend. I loved eating frozen yogurt but Gene wouldn’t let me, so Gloria would order it for herself and share it with me. Other times she watched TV with me, and still other times I didn’t feel like watching TV so I asked her to close the drapes and blinds and just leave me there in the dark. She wouldn’t do it. She said she had to leave the door open. I wanted it closed for lots of reasons. I told her one: mosquitos could get in, and they could make you sick. She told me that they had medicine for that kind of thing, but I didn’t know if medicine would work.

Sometimes I would explain the whole picture to her, as a way of explaining it to myself. I would tell her that I was famous because of the Beach Boys, and that I had made things that people loved, and that I was worried I wouldn’t be able to do that anymore. She would say that no one cared about that. Not in a bad way. She wasn’t saying that people didn’t like my music. She was saying that no one cared about that when they weren’t around me, and that being a healthy person was just as important. That made me cry. She asked me what I wanted her to do and I just didn’t know. I wanted her to stay because I felt safe.

Finally Gene left. There were lots of reasons why he left. But the final straw was when I started seeing Melinda and she got enough looks into my life to see what Gene was doing, and that even if he had helped me once, he wasn’t helping me anymore. Thanks to Melinda calling my mom and brother and helping them get the goods on Landy, Carl and his lawyers started working on freeing me from the situation and I started feeling more courage. Still, even after people figured out that Gene was doing nothing good for me, he was around for a while. He got into my music. I remember one real fight with him. He had started out charging me something like $25,000 a month for treatment. I don’t remember the exact number. But there were so many other expenses. He was living in my Pacific Palisades house and remodeling it with my money. He was taking his family to Hawaii for a month and sending me the bill. And the monthly expense kept increasing. In the late ’80s I looked once and it was $30,000. In the early ’90s I looked again and it was $35,000. I couldn’t stay silent. “What is this bill here?” I said to him. He looked at me like he didn’t understand the question, but he understood it fine. “I thought I’d charge a bit more,” he finally said. I lost my temper with him. That helped me see that his days were numbered.

When Gene finally left that second time, I tried to get back on my feet. In some ways, I was happy. It felt like a tremendous weight was gone from my shoulders. My steps were easier. Still, there were days when I was too depressed to do anything. I couldn’t go to a restaurant or to the movies. I could deal with it by getting angry, but I wasn’t sure what was making me angry. I could throw a can in the air or kick something, but that didn’t solve the problem really. I slowly got back to being me. It took me a while. After all, it was nine years of bullshit.

Or was it thirty years of bullshit? I said that I don’t know how far back to draw the line that led to Landy, but I do know one point the line passed through. That was in 1964, at Christmastime. I was with the band on an airplane going to Houston to play a show at the Music Hall there. Just a few days before, we had returned to Los Angeles from Tulsa, where we played their new arena. In the airport I started to feel like I was slipping away a bit. At first I thought it was about my marriage. Just a few weeks before, I had married Marilyn. I was a young husband, only twenty-two, and she was an even younger wife, just sixteen. I was happy we were married, but I was worried, too. My thoughts about love and romance were all confused. How do you ever know if you’re the right person for someone or if someone is the right person for you? A few months before, we were all hanging out and I noticed her talking to my cousin Mike Love in a way that I thought was a little too friendly. That night I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

“Do you like him?” I asked.

“Sure,” she said. “He’s a great guy.”

“No. I mean do you like him?”

“That’s ridiculous,” she said.

“Is it? Be honest with me.”

She tried to calm me down and eventually did, but the thought was still there at the airport.

But that was only a small piece of a bigger puzzle that was falling apart faster than I could put it together. The band was huge. We were more than famous. When we hit number one in Sweden with “Surfin’ Safari” back in 1962, we laughed about it. Number one in Sweden. But “Surfin’ Safari” also went Top Twenty in the US, and then it seemed like there were Top Ten hits all the time: “Surfin’ USA,” “Surfer Girl,” “Be True to Your School,” “Fun, Fun, Fun.” It was hard to get any higher than that because of the Beatles. They were on Ed Sullivan in February of 1964, and in April they had all five of the top spots in Billboard. That week we were at thirteen with “Fun, Fun, Fun.” In May we released “I Get Around,” and that went into the Top Twenty when songs by the Dixie Cups (“Chapel of Love”), Mary Wells (“My Guy”), and the Beatles (“Can’t Buy Me Love”), still, were at the top.

Then in July something changed on the chart. The top song wasn’t by the Dixie Cups or Mary Wells or the Beatles. It was by us. “I Get Around” was number one, right above “My Boy Lollipop.” I couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t just Sweden anymore. “I Get Around” was also our first gold record. And it wasn’t just how many people were buying our records. It was how people were talking about our records. They made us out to be the next great pop act after the Beatles, though we had been putting records on the charts for years. And some people were saying we were even better, that our songs were more interesting or sophisticated or created more positive energy.

When we played “I Get Around” and “Wendy” on Ed Sullivan in September, that cinched it. We were in striped shirts and white pants, an outfit that would become kind of like our uniform. It was the Beach Boys’ equivalent of the Beatles’ mop tops. That’s how we were remembered. The stage was a trip. Someone had the idea of putting roadsters next to us. We played around them. I couldn’t really absorb any of it then because I was performing, but I have seen it since. I’ve always loved the way the girls screamed when they showed a close-up of Dennis at the drums. And Mike had a funny little dance that he broke out when Carl was doing his guitar solo on “I Get Around.” We did four more songs at the T.A.M.I. Show a month later, which was really an amazing concert: not just us but the Miracles (with Smokey Robinson, one of the greatest singers and songwriters ever), the Supremes (with Diana Ross), Marvin Gaye, Lesley Gore, Jan and Dean, James Brown, the Rolling Stones, and even Chuck Berry. Can you believe a lineup like that? And we were right in the middle of it.

It made me happy, but it made me dizzy also. When I started, I just wanted to make music with my brothers and my friends and leave the business to my dad, who was managing us. We were a family band in every way. But that year we got big, things changed. It was scary for me. We got going really fast. I was kind of a dumb little guy. I didn’t really acknowledge we were famous. Every now and then I would, but I was so busy cutting records, writing songs, and going on tour that I didn’t have a chance to sit down and think about it. So instead there was just this exciting feeling that was sort of sickening. We were climbing, but what was up there when you went even higher? And what if you fell? That made me nervous and afraid, and I closed my eyes and tried to feel brave.

That December, at the gate in the airport before we flew off to Houston, nothing was working and my bravery was gone. “I don’t want to go on that plane,” I told the band.

“I don’t know how else we’re going to get to Houston,” Mike said.

“I can’t be on it. I won’t be on it.” I called my mother and told her to come pick me up. She laughed a little and told me not to worry. But that worked about as well as closing my eyes.

We boarded. The plane went faster and faster down the runway, lifted off, and started climbing. What was up there when we went higher? I heard the other guys talking. Dennis said something about a girl he was supposed to call back. Carl said something about the harmonies on “I Get Around.” Then my thoughts swarmed and I blacked out. To me I blacked out. To everyone else it looked like I was screaming and holding my head and falling down in the aisle.

When we got to Houston we went straight to the hotel. In my room I quieted down, which didn’t mean that I calmed down. Mike and Carl visited me. I stared straight at the window like it was a wall. I had so much going on inside my head, but I couldn’t make sense of any of it.

The next day I flew right back home to California while the rest of the guys went and finished the dates. Glen Campbell replaced me the next night in Dallas, and then they went on to Omaha, Des Moines, Indianapolis, and Louisville. When they came back to LA, I called a band meeting. “I’m not going to play with the band anymore,” I announced.

“You’re quitting?’ Carl said.

“No. I just mean that I’m not going to play onstage. I want to stay home and write songs.”

The guys didn’t believe it at first, but I said it enough times for them to eventually believe me. Glen pinch-hit for me a little while longer, but soon he wanted to do his own solo trip, so the band hired a guy named Bruce Johnston. Bruce was a staff producer at Columbia Records who had played in a group called the Rip Chords. He had a similar falsetto to mine.

I stayed at home and wrote. At first it was great. I had some songs I was working on that I thought would really stretch what music could do. Those songs turned into The Beach Boys Today! and Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!), and then they turned into Pet Sounds, and then Pet Sounds turned into SMiLE, and then SMiLE turned into nothing. Along the way the pressure started to pile up again and the blackouts happened again. The voices in my head happened, too, more and more often. I was trying to make this amazing music, and the band was rehearsing all the time, and I couldn’t handle the pressure. I couldn’t always figure out how to balance the time by myself thinking of songs and the time with other people playing them. I knew that I couldn’t do it on the stage, but then there were times when I thought I couldn’t even do it in the studio.

I didn’t know who to talk to. I didn’t really tell the other guys in the band. I might have said a word or two, but I could tell from the way they were listening that they didn’t really understand. Once I told my dad and he narrowed his eyes and said, “Don’t be a pussy. Don’t be a baby. Get in there and write some good songs.”

And that’s what I did. I wrote some good songs. But through the whole thing, I was sinking. Later on, much later, I would have a support network to help me figure out what to do when I was sinking. I didn’t have that then. I had problems instead. People would look at what I was doing and look past it. It was “Brian—he’s an eccentric guy” or “That’s just Brian being Brian.” But no one ever really tried to look into what was happening with me and my mind and get me out of there.

When Dr. Landy left, he left me to my freedom. I can’t say that I knew what to do with it right away. I had been on a routine for a while, and being off the routine was relaxing in lots of ways. I was kind of in a holding pattern, but not a bad one. I hung out with Melinda mostly. We would go to lunch and drive around. We would go to Hollywood Boulevard and the movies almost every night. Melinda used to laugh because I would spend hundreds of dollars on souvenirs like I was a tourist or a junk-aholic. We listened to the radio sometimes. K-Earth 101. It’s an oldies station in Los Angeles with a huge broadcasting range. People can hear it as far south as San Diego and as far north as Bakersfield. When we were just starting out, they called it Boss Radio. It began broadcasting in 1941, just before I was born. It broadcasts from Mount Wilson in the San Gabriel Mountains. I’m not named after the mountain and it’s not named after me, but it’s a happy coincidence. At night Melinda and I would listen to artists like Johnny Mathis, Nat King Cole, Randy Newman, and Kenny G.

Music circled me as an idea. One of the first people I called when Landy left was Andy Paley. Andy had a great history in pop music. He worked with lots of people and worked with me on the first solo record. If Landy was the bad part, Andy was the good part. When I started to get that feeling again about making music, I called him. “Let’s write some new tracks,” he said.

We wrote a song called “Soul Searchin’.” We wrote a song called “Desert Drive.” We wrote a song called “You’re Still a Mystery.” We wrote them with the Beach Boys in mind because Don Was, the producer and bassist, wanted to do a Beach Boys record. That didn’t pan out because Carl didn’t like the songs—I don’t know why. Then Sean O’Hagan, from the band the High Llamas, was going to do it. That didn’t happen either. The whole project just weirded out. Anyway, when we were writing, we didn’t use a big professional studio, and usually we didn’t even use the four-track in my house. We just sang and played and recorded on a boom box. When songs got better and they were ready to be picked off the tree, then we booked studio time for me. I would call friends like Danny Hutton, who sang with Three Dog Night, and he would come in and help flesh things out. It felt the way it sometimes did in the old days, and that was freedom. But it was hard to imagine doing any of it alone. I needed Andy there with me, or at least someone I trusted who would keep me encouraged. I was scared as hell to go and make new music. It was always a combination of scared and excited for me. I didn’t see it as an album yet. I was never really sure where it would all end up.

Sometimes I would play the new music for Dr. Marmer. Steve Marmer—he was the doctor I went to after Landy left, and he was one of the people who helped me get my balance back. They say there are three things that matter when you are dealing with mental illness: finding the right support network, finding the right medication, and finding the right doctor. Dr. Marmer was definitely the right doctor. Dr. Landy had bullied me about music. He had bullied me about everything. Dr. Marmer talked to me about it. If I said I was thinking about music, he told me that he thought it was a good idea. If I played him a new song or part of one, he was supportive. And even though sometimes we talked about my thoughts and feelings, sometimes we just talked about music. And not my music, even—classical music or singers that we both liked. Lots of the things I was thinking and feeling then, or trying not to think and feel, came out only when I talked about music. Later on, Dr. Marmer came to see a show of mine and he was so happy. He couldn’t believe that the onstage me was the same me in his office. He couldn’t believe that I could be in command that way. The truth is that I will never really be comfortable up there, but I know how to tough it out and get through it. And whether I’m comfortable or not, it’s a place where I can be what I am.

In late 1993 I got a call from Van Dyke Parks. I hadn’t really worked with him since the late ’60s, on SMiLE, but we worked on “Sail On Sailor” together in the early ’70s. Van Dyke called me up and asked me to sing lead on a track of his. He had a song that he thought would be a perfect fit for me. It was called “Orange Crate Art.” He wrote it because oranges were such a part of the California experience, and also because people say that nothing rhymes with orange. I said I wasn’t sure if I was up for singing on the song, so he came to visit to convince me. I wasn’t busy with anything else, and it was obvious. I was just sitting in my bedroom watching the TV set. I don’t mean I was watching a show or anything. It was just the set. I liked thinking about all the things that used to be on it, all the shows I had ever seen.

Van Dyke came in and convinced me to come record with him. When I got to the studio, the equipment was kind of like the TV. I liked thinking about all the things that used to be on it. But I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it. “Why am I here again?” I asked him. He laughed. “Because I hate the sound of my own voice.”

I sang on that song, and I ended up singing on a bunch more. That wasn’t what I thought was going to happen, and sometimes it made me so nervous I felt sick, but we ended up with an album. The album had the same name as the song, Orange Crate Art. The whole thing was ready for me, thanks to Van Dyke. He wrote out all the lead vocal parts on charts and I came in and sang them. Then I arranged and sang my harmonies, stacking my vocals to add the Brian Wilson vibe to the record. The songs were about his ideas of California, the history of the state, and the myths that change the way people see history. At the very end, he even added a Gershwin piece, “Lullaby.” That was completely his idea, but it was an idea I liked.

Around the same time there was another project. This one looked backward, over my shoulder. I was still a little scared to look forward. Don Was had talked about making a record with me—instead, he decided to make a documentary about my life after the Beach Boys. He had the idea to name it after one of the songs from Pet Sounds, “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times.” We came up with an idea for the soundtrack, which was to take some of our old songs and make them young again. I don’t listen to Beach Boys music that often. Sometimes it brings back some bad memories, you know? But there are times when I’ll go back and hear records and try to think about them—not what I was thinking when I made them but what they are as music.

For the soundtrack, Don Was cut the instrumental tracks himself with great musicians like guitarist Waddy Wachtel and drummer Jim Keltner. Don is a great bass player himself. Then I came in and sang on them. We did “Caroline, No” again, one of the most beautiful songs from Pet Sounds. We did “The Warmth of the Sun.” We did songs from my solo album like “Love and Mercy” and “Melt Away,” and when we did those songs, we took Landy’s name off the credits, which by then was my legal right. I even cut a version of “Do It Again” with my daughters Carnie and Wendy. We all sang my original high part together. It’s a great version of that tune, worth checking out. Wendy came with me to The David Letterman Show to play it, which was nerve-racking but fun. I sat at the piano and she was in boots next to me. Billy West, who does voices on TV, played guitar with me for that performance. He got the solo.

The soundtrack ended with “’Til I Die,” a remake of a song originally on Surf’s Up. It was one of my saddest songs, and also one of the best Beach Boys songs where I wrote all the music and all the lyrics. I remember when I wrote it. I was walking out by the water and thinking about how big everything was and how small I was, how insignificant I was—and not just me but how insignificant everyone was. Did people even matter? Life flashed by so quickly you couldn’t even grab hold of it, but people spent all of it trying to find meaning and purpose. I went to the piano and tried to capture the melody in my head, and then I wrote lyrics trying to explain all the things I was thinking and feeling.

I’m a cork on the ocean

Floating over the raging sea

How deep is the ocean?

I lost my way

Hey hey hey

I’m a rock in a landslide

Rolling over the mountainside

How deep is the valley?

It kills my soul

Hey hey hey

I’m a leaf on a windy day

Pretty soon I’ll be blown away

How long will the wind blow?

Ohhhh

The lyrics go way down and then the “hey hey hey” picks them back up and then the lyrics go down again. Those are the waves, the raging sea. There’s a lyric that Van Dyke wrote on Orange Crate Art, in a song called “Palm Tree and Moon,” that has the same idea: “When a comet comes out to fall / Why on earth do we feel so small?”

I was happy with the records I was starting to make again. They weren’t about people moving in all directions at once, like some of the Beach Boys records from the ’70s and ’80s. They were records by people who were all trying to do the same thing. But when I went out to talk about the documentary, I wasn’t comfortable. I didn’t like questions about why I had been away. I didn’t think I had been away. I had been right where I was all the time. Maybe my band moved away from me. Maybe audiences moved away. But I hadn’t gone much of anywhere, which was part of the problem. I was sure I needed to get started again, but I was also afraid to get started again. One of the hardest things was overcoming the fear that I would never make music the same way again—not that I wouldn’t know how, but that people wouldn’t let me. Around the same time I wrote some new songs with Tony Asher, who wrote many of the lyrics on what was probably the most famous Beach Boys record, Pet Sounds. In the ’90s, after not working with him for years, I got back together with Tony and we made some new songs. We weren’t sure when they would come out. I wasn’t sure if I was going to make a normal record. I wasn’t sure if I could.

As it turned out, I couldn’t quite do it yet. We made a song called “This Isn’t Love” that came out without Tony’s lyrics on an instrumental album, and then with lyrics in a Flintstones movie, with Alan Cumming singing it. Later on I released it myself on a live record. Another song we wrote, “Everything I Need,” was really nice to make. I remember cutting the track for it and how comfortable it felt. Hal Blaine was there, drumming. Carol Kaye was there, playing bass. Tony Asher was there. I scored a cool vibe those few days in the studio, a real sense of the old days. When it came time a few years later for the song to go on an album—one by my daughters Carnie and Wendy, who were recording as the Wilsons—things changed. I was going to record and produce the album with them, using some of the new songs I had written with Tony. But the girls were young. They wanted a vibe and a feel that I couldn’t deliver. I got the idea I should just wish them good luck and bow out. And when I bowed out, things changed. Things changed with the songs I had written. There was a day when they were overdubbing strings. When I got there, the string players were already cutting. They weren’t using my arrangement. I had a twinge, remembering how it felt to have my music taken away from me. “I don’t want it to happen again,” I said. I wasn’t sure who was listening. I put my foot down, but I was unsteady on it.