When I grow up to be a man
Will I dig the same things that turn me on as a kid?
Will I look back and say that I wish I hadn’t done what I did?
Will I joke around and still dig those sounds
When I grow up to be a man?
—“When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)”
Much of what I see from my chair on the first floor of my house is kids. Melinda and I have five of them. Daria, the oldest, will turn twenty in 2016. Our second daughter, Delanie, is two years younger. When we first adopted them back in the ’90s, it was a new family for me, but also a reminder of an old family. I had two little girls once before, Carnie and Wendy, back in the ’70s, two little angels who came into my life. They grew up into wonderful women, but once they were little girls. I remember looking at them and loving them so much. I also remember looking at them and wondering what family meant.
After Daria and Delanie, Melinda and I adopted three more kids—Dylan, Dash, and Dakota. Late in my life, I got a big family. I see and hear it from my chair. Kids slam doors. Kids fight with each other or leave clothes heaped on furniture. Kids don’t do their homework on time. Kids go to games and the other kids go sit and watch and cheer them on. I sit there, mostly quiet, but I see all of it. My chair is the command center. Sometimes at night I’ll ask Melinda questions about something I’ve seen. “Why didn’t you make Dash pick up his jacket?” I’ll say. “Why didn’t you make him pick up his jacket?” she’ll say, laughing.
When there’s a big deal, Melinda will tell me that she needs my help. I know what she means. She means that it’s time for me to talk to the kids. When those times come, I’ll call them down and give them a little lecture. I’m stern. I never get mad or mean. But the kids know to listen. They know that if I’m talking to them about something, it’s important. I remember once a few years ago, when Daria came home from boarding school for Christmas break she left her suitcases out in front of the house. Not in the front hallway but outside on the lawn. It was driving Melinda crazy. She said something about it to Daria the second day and the third day, too, but the suitcases were still out there. “Brian,” she finally said. “You have to do something about this.” I did everything about it. I called Daria down to the first floor. Sometimes when I call her it’s to ask her a question or have her score me some carbohydrates from the refrigerator, but this time I said her name loud enough that there was no confusion. I told her to bring the suitcases inside. I said it real clear. The suitcases came in.
After I did Orange Crate Art with Van Dyke and I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times with Don Was, I started to get the idea of making my own record, for real. I was still working on some stuff with Andy Paley. We still had songs like “Desert Drive” and “Gettin’ in Over My Head,” and we had more songs, too, like “Chain Reaction of Love” and “Soul Searchin’.” There were record companies sending out good signals about signing me. The Beach Boys had just made a country record in Nashville with stars like Toby Keith and Lorrie Morgan and Willie Nelson. We took our old songs and performed them as duets with the country singers. Lorrie Morgan did “Don’t Worry Baby.” Toby Keith did “Be True to Your School.” It was a weird deal because there were so many moving parts to that record, and only some of them were me. The record was listed as being produced by me, but I can’t remember being as hands-on as I would’ve liked. I mostly coproduced. The one track I worked hard on was “The Warmth of the Sun,” with Willie Nelson. What a great voice he has, and what a thrill it was to work with him. I think I produced the hell out of that track. The record came out; unfortunately it didn’t do very well.
The coproducer on that album was Joe Thomas. Joe was a big guy with a good tan and his hair brushed back. He had been a professional wrestler at some point when he was young. With his muscles and his hair, Joe looked like he should have been from LA or maybe Miami, but he wasn’t. He was from the Chicago area. Eventually we started spending time there, too. How that happened was almost funny. Even though the country record did not score so well on the charts, I started to work with Joe. He was around, and he seemed interested in helping me make new music. Joe and I were hanging out and we decided to build our own studio. We had been recording in a place called River North in Chicago that was really popular. I think it was the biggest studio in the city. I went there to work with him on some new tracks. We mostly weren’t using the songs I made with Andy Paley. We were writing new songs, and that was fun. Melinda became friends with Joe’s wife, Chris, and one day Chris asked Melinda to go with her to look at a new house they were thinking of buying. It was in a city called St. Charles, which is about an hour away from Chicago. Right next door to the house Chris picked, there was another house for sale. “Let’s take it,” Melinda said to me.
At first I wasn’t sure what she meant. She told me that it was the right size for us and the kids, and it had a basement that looked like a perfect place for a recording studio. We’d keep the Los Angeles house, obviously, but when we went to Chicago we could be near Joe and Chris, both for fun and to have an easy way to work. We bought the house and started to put in the studio. It wasn’t easy. We dug the basement down an extra six or seven feet and put in three recording rooms and a mixing room. I made sure the walls were covered with fabric for sound control. If you talk to enough musicians, you always hear stories about creating perfect environments. Musicians have ideas about what will give them the best sounds on record. Guys at Columbia Records’ studio on Seventh Avenue in New York used to hang microphones from the top of the stairwell, ten floors up, and use the whole stairwell for reverb. I wasn’t trying for ten floors, but I wanted to have a space in St. Charles that worked for music. That was one of my requirements if we were going to get that house.
There are houses and there are homes. Burt Bacharach wrote a song about the difference between the two. A house is a building. A home is a feeling. With the dug-out basement and the fabric on the walls, St. Charles was a nice house, but it was never really a home. It was a house away from home. I grew up in a home in Hawthorne, California. It’s not there anymore. When the Century Freeway came through in the ’80s, the place got torn down. Eventually politicians put up a monument there about the birth of the Beach Boys. A monument is nice, I guess. But it’s even less than a house, which is less than a home.
The home was at 3701 West 119th Street. I grew up there with my brothers, Dennis and Carl. It seems weird to say that. It seems obvious. But there was nothing obvious about it at the time. The same way that Carnie and Wendy came into a family in the ’70s and Daria and Delanie came into a family in the ’90s, I came into a family in the ’40s. My parents had me first, in the summer of 1942. Dennis came along two and a half years later, at the end of 1944, and then Carl two years after that, at the end of 1946. Every new boy that came along had to go into the same bedroom with me. There just wasn’t any more room than that.
One house, three kids, two parents: my father, Murry, and my mother, Audree. My mother was gentle, kind, and loving. She was nice to me whenever I needed it. If I was hiding under the sheets on a school day, she would call my name and tell me it was time to wake up. A few minutes later she would call me again. She always spoke kindly. Later on I wrote about the way she used to wake me up in a song called “Oxygen to the Brain.” The opening line of that song, “Open up, open up, open your eyes . . . / It’s time to rise,” that was my mom in the mornings. One of the first things I remember is her putting me in my crib. I don’t have a picture of it in my head, not really. If it were a picture, I would be remembering from outside myself. I remember it from inside myself, just the feeling of it, hands lowering you down but a face staying above you to protect you. For a while I was the only kid and she favored me. When Dennis and Carl came along, she spread out her love. No one can ever say that she didn’t try to love all her kids the same. But I think Carl probably ended up the favorite. He was the baby, and in some ways he was the easiest to love.
Mostly my mom worked. She didn’t go to a job, but being at home was the hardest job in the world. She cleaned up after us and did lots of laundry. Dennis got dirty all the time, rolling around on the ground. He was a wrestler in school—and in the rest of his life, too. If you walked by Dennis on a normal day, just tried to go past him to get to the other side of a room, there was a good chance that you’d end up involved in a wrestling match. My mom was also in charge of food. She didn’t have to go far to buy the groceries. There was a market only a few minutes down the street. She cooked all the time, and cooked well: porterhouse, roast beef, roast chicken. Back then there was no such thing as a vegetarian, not really. Meat was how you knew you were eating a good, full meal. People still remembered the war and the idea that all the good living could be taken away from them, so meat was America. The roast beef she made was my favorite thing, and it came with my other favorite thing, mashed potatoes. Food made the house smell great. Between meals there were snacks and treats. One of the things I remember is this sweet vanilla condensed milk, Eagle Brand. My mom would boil it until it turned brown and tasted like caramel. That was a great dessert.
My mom also drove us where we needed to go, because my dad was at work. Every morning she would make us brush our teeth and comb our hair. “Now get dressed,” she would say gently—the big thing back then was pink-and-black socks and trucker boots. Then she would drive us to school. In the afternoons and on weekends, she took us to the beach and to relatives’ houses. She turned us on to games around the house, like Monopoly. We used to love playing Monopoly, all the boys.
Mom didn’t discipline us much, except to warn us that our dad might. If we were doing something bad, she would stand back a little bit and put up a finger. “You’d better watch out,” she’d say, “or your dad is going to get you.” She was right about that. My dad was different from my mom. If he wanted us to wake up, he would stand in the door of the bedroom and say, “Hey! Get up!” Even when he was speaking softly, his voice wasn’t soft.
My dad worked in a company that sold lathes, but he loved music. It was something that was as important to him as his job, and then more important. He was the one who steered me and my brothers toward singing and playing, and who made it easy for it to be more than a hobby. He converted the garage into a music room—he didn’t dig seven feet beneath it and put fabric on the walls for sound quality, but he made a music room for Hawthorne the way I made a music room for the place in St. Charles. He sang with my mom when we were little and then tried to get the whole family to sing together. He even wrote songs himself, and not as a total amateur. He had some songs that did something in the world.
But there were other parts of his personality that were as bad as his love for music was good. There were days with my dad that I wish never happened, and not just a few of them. They added up to months or even years, and they had a big effect on almost everything that came later—every friendship, every decision I made about people, probably even every decision people made about me. I said before that there are parts of my life that are hard to talk about. Lots of the things that happened with my dad are in that category. It’s not that I can’t talk about them. It’s just that I don’t want to talk about them before I talk about other things, because it’s easy to misunderstand them, even for me. The things with my dad happened almost from the beginning, but I’ll talk about them later. They happened later, too, but I don’t want to talk about them now, at the beginning.
What was life in Hawthorne like? It was like life. I didn’t know anything else. My brothers and I went to school. We hung out in the house. Other kids from the neighborhood dropped by to hang out in our garage, or we went to their yards and played. We weren’t rich, but I never felt like we needed money. We got plenty of presents for Christmas. I got a Babe Ruth watch one year. Another year I got a train. My dad, always looking for ways to bring music into the house, bought us a Wurlitzer jukebox and stocked it with records by Les Paul and Mary Ford, Perry Como, Rosemary Clooney.
Rosemary Clooney was the first singer I remember hearing. She wasn’t the first singer I heard, but she was the first one I remember really hearing in an important way. She had a song, “Tenderly,” that came out when I was about ten years old. Listening to it was like a dream. There were these strings that came in at the beginning, and then a whole orchestra, though it was done so subtly. I think it was Percy Faith who was in charge of her orchestra. But the real star of “Tenderly” was Rosemary Clooney. She just came sweeping in with everything, and her phrasing was perfect: when she said the evening breeze caressed the trees, you could see the trees moving. You could understand why she was singing about them, and how she was like a tree herself. I hadn’t really heard a song like that before. I feel like I learned to sing from that song. I used to sing it to myself on the way to school, or when I was up in my room. My brothers sometimes told me not to sing and that it was annoying, but mostly they seemed to like it.
The other big member of the family was the television set. Maybe that’s true for all kids who were my age. The TV came to us around 1950, when I was eight years old. At first we watched whatever was on, all in black and white. There was wrestling and roller derby and game shows, and there were also kids’ shows, like Time For Beany. That was a show that aired in Los Angeles about Beany, who was a boy, and his sidekick, Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent. It was a great show.
California had great weather most of the time, so when we weren’t listening to records or watching TV, we explored our neighborhood. There was a tunnel that ran from one side of the town to another. Kids said it was a storm drain, but I wasn’t really sure what that meant. One afternoon my brother Dennis and my cousin Steve Korthoff told me to come with them and walk in the storm drain. It was fun to walk in the tunnel for a little while, and then it was less fun, and then it wasn’t fun at all. I started to get a headache. I didn’t like being underground that way. I kept saying, “I’m going back.” Steve and Dennis tried to convince me not to go. I was the oldest so I felt like I should be the leader, but I couldn’t be a leader if they wouldn’t follow me. I turned and went home, and on the way I slipped and cut my hand on some glass. Dennis and Steve kept walking, got bored themselves, and climbed up out of a manhole cover.
You wouldn’t think this, but I almost never went to the beach as a kid, even though it was only a few miles away. The first time I ever went to the ocean I couldn’t believe it. My dad took us, and I was so scared at the size of the ocean. Also, I had light skin that burned easily and I didn’t like squinting against the sun for hours. Once I went with my friend Rich Sloan and I kept my jeans on so the sun couldn’t get to me. And there was barely any surfing either. I tried once and got conked on the head with the board. So Los Angeles and California were more about the idea of going in the ocean than they were about actually going in the ocean. I liked to look at it, though. It was sort of like a piece of music: each of the waves was moving around by itself, but they were also moving together.
When I went to the house in St. Charles near Joe Thomas, there was no ocean. I missed it. I missed looking out at it. I had written so many songs that were inspired by the Pacific Ocean and the idea of the Pacific Ocean, and here I was two thousand miles from it. I know the miles because I asked someone to look it up. There was water, though, in St. Charles. We were right on the Fox River, and you could see it driving through town. The river was mostly pretty quiet. It was like a mirror. It didn’t send ideas out like the ocean.
The more I saw the river, the more I liked it, but the more it got me thinking about California. It was water just like the ocean. And thinking about California made me think about Holland, an album the Beach Boys made in 1972. That album was made in Holland, like its title said. The whole band went over there, all the Beach Boys, because Jack Rieley, a great guy and songwriter who was managing us at the time, saw that I was struggling in Los Angeles. I was exhausted from being separated from the group, from making music in the studio while they were out touring with it. There were problems with my weight. There were problems with cocaine. Jack wanted to give me a new start and new inspiration. We went over to Baambrugge to record. Rather than dig down seven feet and put in a new studio, we had a studio sent over from Los Angeles and rebuilt in a barn in the Netherlands.
I liked the place. I liked the food and the cobblestone streets. I liked the environment. But we were there half a year, and that was too long. We got homesick. What ended up happening is that we kept writing about California. I was smoking marijuana and listening to Randy Newman’s Sail Away album, which put me in a very spiritual mood and inspired me to write. I wrote Mount Vernon and Fairway, a ten-minute-long piece with six different sections. I named it that because I wanted Mike to think it was about him, and it was in a way. That was where his house was in Baldwin Hills when he was a kid.
My first concept of the piece, which I thought of as a fairy tale, was much more ambitious. The six sections would be linked by a fairy-tale theme, and I wanted to cut new arrangements of some of the songs we used to hear on our transistor radios in the late ’50s, like “A Casual Look.” They would be interspersed throughout. It would be a whole trip about the group. I even had my imitation of Mike’s dad in there, yelling at Mike’s brother, Stan. But when I ran it by Carl, he said, “What?” That shook me up and I backed off and stopped recording it. I am not sure to this day if he thought it was too creative or too ambitious or if he just didn’t like it. In the end, Carl was the one who ended up producing the whole fairy tale with the pieces I already had. We put it on as an extra for Holland, as an EP.
Mike and Al put together something they called the California Saga, which connected two songs, “California” and “Big Sur,” with a poem by Robinson Jeffers. I didn’t know much about Jeffers except that he had died a few months before we wrote “Surfin’ Safari.” But his poem “Beaks of Eagles” was great. It said some of the same things about people that I said in “’Til I Die,” that individual people can change but people overall never really change, that history is so much bigger than us all. And Al’s lead vocal on “The Beaks of Eagles” might be my all-time favorite Al lead ever. There are some great songs on that record. “Steamboat” kicks ass. I really like “Only with You” and “Funky Pretty,” too. It’s a damned good album no matter where or how we made it. The cover photo of the record has a picture of a canal that goes right through the middle of town.
If you look at the songs on Holland, it seems like we were writing and singing about a California we were remembering, but the truth is we were writing about a California we were imagining. When we were home in Los Angeles, at our own houses, we thought mostly about the things that were in front of us. When Jack took us away, we wrote more with our imagination. St. Charles wasn’t as far away from Los Angeles as Holland. Holland was 5,500 miles away. I had someone look that up, too. But it was still far enough away that I had to write with imagination rather than memory. That’s probably why I named that album I made with Joe Thomas Imagination.
Imagination was the first record I had made in ten years, the first real one. I had done Orange Crate Art with Van Dyke, and I had done I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times with Don Was, but this was different, a real record with a title and just my name—an actual Brian Wilson solo record. I don’t know what gave me the courage. Maybe time did, maybe waiting did, maybe medication did, maybe Melinda did. I also had a visit from George Martin. He was in Los Angeles for a documentary, and he came by the studio and we listened to “God Only Knows.” He remixed parts of it right then and there, and I was just amazed at how much better he made it sound. I told him he scored a better mix than I did on the original. It was a lesson from a brilliant man and producer. I loved what he did with the Beatles. I loved what he did with “God Only Knows” in the studio in 1997. And I loved him as a person. We got along great. When he passed away in March 2016, I was really broken up. He was one of the true greats, you know?
When Joe and I started Imagination, we had a routine down. I would wake up at ten thirty or eleven and call Joe, and he would walk over from his house next door. We would do a few hours in the studio, and then we would take a break for lunch. I did mostly the same thing for lunch every day—I ordered whitefish from a place called ZaZa. I loved the whitefish from that place. Then I would nap and relax and watch TV and Joe would go golfing. When he came back, we would all go out to dinner at a place called Mill Race Inn, which was about fifteen minutes away in Geneva. Then we would come back to my house, meaning the studio, and work for a few more hours. The record got made that way. Most weekends, though, we went home to Los Angeles.
At times it felt like a new family was growing there in St. Charles: me and Melinda and the kids, Joe and Chris and their kids. It felt like an extended family stretched over two houses. But it was also different from anything I had ever done. When I went to Holland, I went with the Beach Boys. That was my old family, stretched over two countries. I knew all the strange and great and sometimes less great ways that we worked together. I knew which songs of mine Mike would pull back from, and when I would have to fix up someone else’s songs by building a little piece of music to put between two other pieces: a bridge to get over a canal.
In St. Charles the record was being made mostly by two of us, and it was the first time I’d had that kind of working relationship. I had written songs with people before. I had worked on lyrics with people. But when I worked with people in the old days, whether it was Tony Asher or Van Dyke Parks, I mostly made the songs and then worked with them to get the lyrics right. When I made songs with Andy Paley, he helped out by playing great and keeping track of all the ideas we were having, and I have had other people in my life I felt so lucky to work with, from Jeff Foskett to Darian Sahanaja to Scott Bennett to Paul Von Mertens. If people make great music their whole life, they have to be smart about knowing it’s at least partly because of the people working with them. Music starts in your mind, but it ends up always being a collaboration. There are too many sounds happening all at once for it to be only one person.
With Joe, the creative relationship was a little different. He would say that he was going to take a basic track that we had cut and get it into shape, which usually meant adding instruments. Then I would add the vocals. I loved singing into a microphone. The microphones there were Telefunken, and they got a good clear sound. But that also meant I had to share some things I wasn’t used to sharing. Joe brought a certain vibe to the record. He knew that the people buying my records were getting older, and he wanted a record their ears would like. I wasn’t always sure about the direction but Joe was, and that was how things went on that project. There’s a lyric on “Your Imagination,” “I miss the way I used to call the shots around here.” I don’t think I wrote that lyric. Joe did. But sometimes I felt it.
The way I used to call the shots around here:
Up in the bedroom in Hawthorne when I was a kid, we all started to sing. When I was ten or eleven, I went through a phase where I tried out some instruments. My dad encouraged it. I learned both the ukulele and the accordion. They were small instruments that were easy to have in a house where three kids shared a bedroom. I even played some shows for kids in school before I got sick of it. That was it for those instruments mostly.
When I got a little older, I switched over to piano and started picking out the melodies of songs I heard on the radio. I picked out the melody to “Tenderly” and played along with myself while I sang it. I learned to listen and sing, and then I learned how to teach others to listen and sing. Dennis and Carl and I had a little trio going, and I started bringing songs to the group. I brought songs by the Chordettes and the Hi-Lo’s and Nat King Cole. I brought “Ivory Tower,” which was a hit for Cathy Carr and Gale Storm when I was fourteen or so: “Come down from your ivory tower / Let love come into your heart.” And I brought so many songs by the Four Freshmen, who started out as a barbershop quartet in Indiana and designed more and more sophisticated ways for their voices play off each other. I tried to understand the way their voices were working, to take their songs apart like they were clocks and then rebuild them for me and Dennis and Carl. I’d listen to them until I understood the main melody and the harmony vocals above and below it. Then I would teach the harmony parts to my brothers. For three years we sang those songs and songs like them.
Later on with the Beach Boys, I had to learn that not everyone understood everything at the same time. Sometimes I would explain a song and Mike would take longer to understand what I was saying. The same thing happened when I was a kid. When I taught my brothers harmony parts, Carl got it right away, and he got it beautifully. He was our main man for vocals. Dennis took longer. I had to be patient with him. He had other things going on—different friends, different sports. He sang with us sometimes in our bedroom. But he didn’t like when we would try to tape our singing, and he wasn’t as interested in sitting at the piano with me. Carl was always on tape and at the piano. He was also the one who turned us on to R&B. We used to lay awake at night and listen to stations like KFVD and KGFJ. There was one show called Huntin’ with Hunter where the DJ was a guy named Hunter Hancock. He had come to LA from Texas in the ’40s, and he was one of the first white DJs to play R&B. Carl loved the records he would play: Johnny Otis, the Penguins. We had never heard anything like it. They were just as sophisticated as the Four Freshmen but different. We tried to imitate those harmonies also.
When I was twelve or so, I really got into that music along with the vocal groups, and I kept going on the piano. My uncle Charlie taught me to play the boogie-woogie like it was done on those Johnny Otis records. There were other players I learned about also, like Ivory Joe Hunter and Pinetop Perkins. I went to my piano all the time and did it. I ended up calling that kind of playing Uncle Charlie’s Boogie. When you look at a recipe, it lists ingredients before it tells you how to cook them. Those were my ingredients: beautiful songs by singers like Rosemary Clooney, vocal harmonies from groups like the Four Freshmen, and the boogie-woogie. Those are the sounds that started moving around in my mind.
We lived about two miles from Hawthorne Municipal Airport, and all day long there was nothing but airplane noise. I didn’t really like airplanes, even then. My mom’s dad, who was also named Carl, flew planes. We had Carls in every generation. My grandfather Carl was in the Shriners and always smoked a cigar and had a sword in a case with rubies all over it. He also had a pilot’s license and learned to fly small planes all around Los Angeles. When I was ten or eleven, he took me up with him. I was excited but very scared. “Don’t worry, Brian,” he said. “It’s okay.” It was comforting to hear him say that, even though I decided I didn’t want to keep flying with him. Planes were a problem even if you weren’t up in them. The noise got in the way of our singing. We had to shut the windows to keep it out.
But when we got to a certain point in practice where we thought we had a nice version of “Ivory Tower,” we would call my parents in and sing for them. My dad was interested not just in music but in how it was recorded, so he would buy us recording equipment sometimes, and we started putting our songs down on tape.
Music was starting to be everything, but it was still all about family. I was singing with my brothers. I was learning piano from Uncle Charlie. I was getting my ideas down on tape machines my dad was bringing home.
And there was more family around, too. My dad’s brother Wendell and his wife, Billie, lived near enough that we would visit there often. They had two kids, Wendy and Mike (both are names that came up over and over again in the extended Wilson family), who were about the same age as me and my brothers, and when we were there, we played checkers or Monopoly with them. Wendell collected strange things and always had surprises. His house was the first place I ever saw a theremin. I was fascinated with it. I knew you could make music with human voices or pianos—and, I guess, with ukuleles and accordions—but the idea you could invent new musical instruments was something I had never thought about.
My dad’s sister Emily, who everyone called Glee, married a guy named Ed Love, who was in charge of a sheet-metal company. They had money because of that, more than us, and six kids. The oldest was Mike—another Mike. This Mike, Mike Love, was very friendly and very funny, and he made me laugh. I really liked him. We hit it off real well, and soon enough he was almost a fourth brother. When I was fourteen, the two families went Christmas caroling together; we sang “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” and “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” As soon as Mike and I could drive, we started driving over to each other’s houses to hang out. Hanging out meant watching TV sometimes, or it meant talking about school or girls, but it also meant singing—the same way I taught harmonies to Dennis and Carl, I taught them to Mike and his sister Maureen. We also did Everly Brothers songs. I loved “Dream.” They were the best duet singers I ever heard. I don’t even know how they did what they did.
I remember back in the winter of 1963 when the reservoir up at Baldwin Hills gave out and a big flood knocked down hundreds of houses. People drowned, too. I took Carl in the car and we drove over there. The cops were standing at the head of the street. “You can’t come in here,” one cop said.
“But my cousin lives up there,” I said. Carl, in the passenger seat, nodded and tried to look worried. They waved us through. The funny thing is that I don’t even know if they lived in Baldwin Hills anymore. I think they had moved to View Park. But I wanted to see what happened with the flood.
As time went on Mike did more than carol with us. He became part of the whole Wilson music project. We started singing up in the bedroom and then went to the garage to sing and play some more. Mike played the saxophone, sort of. He played, but he wasn’t really a player the way some guys were. But Mike could sing. He had a deeper and rougher voice that worked really nicely with the rest of us. When you build up harmonies, lots of it is teaching people parts, but some of it is listening to the sounds they’re already making and building something out of that. Later on we added in one more singer and player, Al Jardine, who was a guy from the neighborhood who played guitar with a band called the Islanders and was deep into folk music. Al was also in a band called the Tikis back then, and he had already been making songs, sort of; in junior high he recorded a version of a Longfellow poem called “The Wreck of the Hesperus” with some of his own music, and also wrote a song called “Steam from the Washing Machine.” That was more of a teen song. And Al could also play stand-up bass.
As a kid I was a real athlete. My dad took me to a park near the house and showed me how to hit a baseball with a bat. He held the bat in his right hand, floated the ball up there with his left hand, and then swung the bat. It went whap! and the ball flew as far as I could see. Then he made us do it. Of all my brothers, I was the best. I was the oldest, but I was also the best. Carl wasn’t much of an athlete. He didn’t take to it. Dennis was a good athlete, but he was more into things like wrestling. At team sports, I was the best. In baseball I could run the bases in seventeen seconds, go all the way around. And I had a great arm, a Willie Mays arm. I was a lefty, and I could bring the ball all the way in from center field to the catcher. When I was seventeen, I thought I would be a major league baseball player. Then I got into the music business, and it got into me. I think it probably worked out for the best. My high school uniform is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. It has the grass stains. They never washed out.
It was a big time for California baseball back then. We got our first team in the mid-’50s, the Dodgers, who came from Brooklyn. I wasn’t really a Dodgers fan. I was a Yankees fan. I played center field myself and wanted to play center field for the Yankees, though Mickey Mantle already had that job. I also loved the Red Sox—they had Ted Williams and Johnny Pesky and Dom DiMaggio, Joe DiMaggio’s brother. There was a third DiMaggio, Vince, who was also a center fielder. They were a brother act, too. I remember listening to Buddy Blattner doing the game of the week on ABC. I remember listening to baseball on the radio and sometimes switching over to hear music. Andy Williams came on all the time, singing his early hits like “Canadian Sunset” and “Butterfly.”
I had a great arm, but that was about as far as it went. Even though I could smack the ball far when I threw it up in the air the way my dad showed me, I batted under .200 in games. I think it was .169. I couldn’t hit a curveball for shit. I had only one home run. Can you believe that? I also played football. That’s what kids did in California. I started playing as a junior in high school and lasted about a year. I was the quarterback, and I was pretty good at it. I could see the field and time it so the ball got out to the receivers. I could also really throw. Once I was with some friends and we had a contest to see who could throw the farthest. I put it up in the air, and someone down the way measured where it landed and said it went sixty-five yards. I guess I had the arm.
Al Jardine played with me. He was a back. During one game, I called for a pitchout. I told him I was going to pitch to the left. But I got mixed up and looked right. Al was standing out there all on his own and three guys hit him, high and low, and his leg just snapped. I had to hear about that for years. “You know, Brian,” Al would say, and I knew what was coming next: “You’re responsible for my broken leg.” He tried to make a joke about it, tried to be sarcastic, but it has come up too many times over the years for me to think he doesn’t still hold a little bit of a grudge. And then I got hit myself. During practice one afternoon I got knocked on my back and the corners of my vision started to fade. I felt like everything was going black. It scared me half to death. I went right up to the coach and told him I wanted to quit the team. “Fine,” he said. “Go to the showers.” That was the end of my football career. Back to music.
Time jumps around. One day you’re hearing a song on the radio. The day after that you’re bringing other guys into your family’s house so you can complete the puzzle and make records of your own. My dad helped push us toward being a real singing group. He thought it was a great idea for me to bang around on the piano until I had a song of my own.
Time jumps around so much that it’s hard to remember exactly what happened. Plus, it’s been written about so many times that it’s almost like a story someone else is telling me instead of a piece of my own life. I was noodling around at the piano. Dennis came home and told us that all the guys were getting into surfing. Dennis was the real surfer of the group. He thought that if we wrote a song about it, it would be cool, and we might be cool along with it. I started fooling around and singing just that one word, surfin’, trying to make a song out of it. Mike was around that day, and he added in some bass notes, bom-bom-dit-dit-dit. I added some more chords. Mike added words. I cooked up harmonies. If you look at a recipe, those are the ingredients of a song.
Surfin’ is the only life
The only way for me
Now surf, surf with me
We fooled around with the song. We sang it a bunch of times and wrote more words for it and took out some of the words we had already written. We practiced harmonies until they sounded right to us, and then changed a few notes around to make the sound more exciting or unexpected. It was just a family thing then. It was playing for the family, and playing in the family. It was the fall of 1961 and I’m not sure that any of us thought it would go much further than that.
But we tried. The first step was to get a name for the group. You couldn’t have a record if your group didn’t have a name. We tried a bunch of names, like Carl and the Passions and Kenny and the Cadets. Eventually we ended up naming ourselves the Pendletones. I don’t remember whose idea it was, maybe Mike’s, but it came from the same place as the song. It was part of the package. Pendletones was a name about the way surfers dressed—plaid Pendleton shirts over white T-shirts and khaki pants. Real surfers put a layer of Vaseline under the shirts to keep warm, but we weren’t real surfers. We were real singers.
My parents went to Mexico on vacation and left us money to take care of ourselves. Instead, we went and rented instruments and rehearsed “Surfin’.” When they got home and found out, my dad was really pissed at what we had done. He threw me up against the wall. But when he heard what we had cooked up with the song, he calmed down. He thought we sounded pretty good. He was proud of us, even, and that made us so happy that we decided to do more with our music. Dad knew a music guy named Hite Morgan who had an office on Melrose Avenue, and he piled us into Hite’s office and we sang “The John B. Sails,” a folk song that Al knew. Hite Morgan liked what he heard. He said so and Dad kind of smiled, not a full smile but enough of one for me to tell that he was really happy that Hite Morgan liked us. But Hite Morgan wasn’t sure about the song. He told us we needed a song of our own. Someone piped up—I think it was Dennis—and said we did have our own song. I had to speak then and say it wasn’t finished. “Well, come back when you finish it,” Hite said.
That’s what we did. We went into Hite’s studio and that was our first real recording session. We worked on “Surfin’” all day. I wanted it to sound a certain way, and I kept everyone there with my questions. I didn’t like the way that people’s voices were falling in the mix. I wanted to rethink it. After a bunch of takes, my dad wasn’t sure what we were doing was working. He said something about how we were kids—and it’s true. We were. He thought he had a better idea of how to make it sound the right way, how to bring the guitar up, how to make sure all the voices could be heard. He said he wanted to produce the session, and we let him.
When we were done, Hite Morgan said he was going to make it into a record. He went off somewhere. We didn’t know where. It turns out he went to a guy named Herb Newman who owned a label named Candix Records. It wasn’t until the crates were unpacked that we saw the label had changed our name from the Pendletones to the Beach Boys. A guy at the label named Russ Regan didn’t like our name. He changed it. We were in my car the first time we heard the song on the radio. There were three or four songs by local bands and listeners had to pick their favorite. We went crazy. I ran up and down the street yelling. Carl felt sick from excitement. There’s no feeling like being a new band and hearing yourself on the radio, except maybe when that band is your family. The story has been told a thousand times by a thousand different people, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen exactly that way.
When I was a kid, I made music with my family. As I got a little older, I made music with other people who were part of our inner circle. By the time I was in my forties, I was making music with lots of people. My musical family was constantly growing, and every new person I worked with taught me something. I hope I taught them, too. Families can be the strangest, most wonderful things.
During the Imagination sessions we took a trip down to the Florida Keys to write a song with Jimmy Buffett. “You know, Brian,” Joe said on the plane. “We’re going to be close to Kokomo.”
“Really?” I said. “Kokomo” was a song the Beach Boys did without me. My cousin Mike wrote it with a few friends of the band, all great music guys. One was John Phillips, from the Mamas and the Papas. One was Scott McKenzie, who wrote “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair).” And then there was Terry Melcher, whose mom was Doris Day and who worked with so many people back in the ’60s like the Byrds and the Rising Sons. The Beach Boys had known Terry forever. He had been in a group with Bruce Johnston, the Rip Chords, before Bruce joined our group.
Terry was also the guy in the middle of the situation with my brother Dennis and Charles Manson. Dennis, who knew two of the girls in Manson’s group because he had picked them up hitchhiking, introduced Manson to Terry and tried to get the two of them together on a music or film project. It didn’t work out well. Terry and Manson didn’t get the right ideas about each other and they stopped being friends. A little after that, Terry moved out of the house on Cielo Drive where he was living with Candice Bergen and Mark Lindsay, the lead singer from Paul Revere and the Raiders. And a little after that, Manson came to the house. He wasn’t let in because Terry wasn’t there anymore. The people who were there were Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate. The Manson people came back one more time and killed Sharon Tate and four other people. For years people tried to figure out if the Manson family was looking for Terry or if it didn’t make any difference to them who was in the house. Families can be the strangest, most horrible things.
It’s weird that “Kokomo” has anything dark in its past because it’s such a light song. It’s a feel-good party song. When Mike and John and Scott and Terry finished writing it, they told me they were going into the studio to cut it, but they told me too late. I couldn’t make it to the session. Mike and Carl sang lead. Bruce Johnston and Al Jardine sang backup. It was a huge hit. I think it went to number one. The first time I heard it on the radio, I loved it, though I didn’t even know it was the Beach Boys. When someone told me who was singing, I couldn’t believe it. It had such a cool sound and such great harmonies, and the lyrics were nice and relaxing.
When Joe told me that Jimmy Buffett’s place was near Kokomo, I got excited. “Can we go there?” I asked.
“Sure,” Joe said.
“That’s cool.” I mentioned it to someone else on the plane, one of the musicians, and he looked at me strangely. I turned back around and Joe was laughing. “What’s the joke?” I asked.
“Kokomo’s not real,” Joe said.
“What do you mean?”
“It doesn’t exist.”
Now everyone was laughing, and I started laughing, too. I wasn’t against jokes. I played jokes all the time when I was a kid. Once my friend Rich came over to the house. My mom was sitting in the music room and I introduced them to each other. Then I said to my mom, “Rich thinks you’re fat and need to go to Vic Tanny’s.” That was a gym. Rich looked like someone punched him in the stomach. But my mom didn’t mind. “I know my son,” she said, laughing. After that, Rich and I went into the kitchen and played a game with a funnel. You put a penny on your forehead and then leaned forward and tried to drop it in the funnel. I missed once or twice. Rich told me to lean back to get a better angle. When I did he poured a glass of water into the funnel. It got the front of my pants all wet. I was so mad. I threw the funnel down on the ground.
I got mad pretty often. Once I hit the wall in the kitchen. It was a good thing I didn’t get the stud. But with the funnel, I wasn’t that angry for long, and when I thought about it I wasn’t sure I was angry at all. Other pranks I did to make people feel better. One of my cousins, Sherry Ann, got hurt. She banged her head bad. She was in St. Vincent’s Hospital, and I went up to see her and wrapped my head in toilet paper so I looked like a mummy. I wasn’t really a mummy, but I wanted her to think just for a second that I was so that she wouldn’t think about her own head and how it hurt. It was an escape.
That’s how I felt about Kokomo. It didn’t matter to me if it was a real place or a fake place. Even a fake place, if it’s made up of real ideas, can be real for a second. The song we ended up writing with Jimmy Buffett, “South American,” proves it. It was a kind of fantasy about fame and attention. The guy in the song has lunch with Cameron Diaz. But there’s also an escape:
Got a letter from a long-lost cousin of mine
Who owns a little piece of heaven in the Argentine
It’s a different planet, it’s a different place
He calls it out of this world without traveling to space
During Imagination Carl started dying. He was barely fifty, but he was sick with lung cancer. Carl had smoked since we were kids, which people never believed; he had such a pure singing voice that it didn’t sound like he had ever touched a cigarette. That summer the Beach Boys were out touring without me. Carl was too sick to stand for most of the concerts. He sat on a stool.
I wasn’t following the progress of the disease too carefully. We didn’t have a very close relationship toward the end, and that was hard. Whatever was happening with the Beach Boys at that point, we were brothers. We had started out listening to the radio in our room, and we had been through forty years of being together in the same band. Carl had helped get Dr. Landy to leave the second time, and I was grateful for that. Through 1997, our mom was in bad shape. We were a little closer for a little while, Carl and I, but his health was failing, too. It’s hard to talk about the way people’s health goes. It’s the life going out of them in a way that’s very hard to understand.
The last time I saw Carl was at his house off Benedict Canyon. Carl hadn’t met Daria yet. He kept saying that he didn’t want to meet her until he was better because he didn’t want to scare her. We got a call from Gina, Carl’s wife, that she wanted to have a small Super Bowl party and that Carl finally wanted to meet Daria, who was a little more than a year old then. When we got there, Gina met us. “Carl’s sleeping,” she said. Lots of family was there at that party. Gina’s mom was there. Carl’s son Jonah was there. We sat with everyone, and then about an hour later Gina went back to get Carl and wheeled him out into the living room in a wheelchair. He was very sick. His skin was so yellow. Except for his beard he had hardly any hair. The fucking chemotherapy had really done a number on him. Up until then, Daria had been afraid of anyone with a beard. Beards made her cry. But when Carl reached for her, she put her arms out and went right to him. She rested her head on his shoulder. We all got the idea that it would be her first and last visit with her uncle Carl. Before we left, Carl said he was looking forward to coming to Chicago to sing with me on my new record. When Melinda and I got back in the car, we looked at each other, and both of us had tears in our eyes.
A few weeks later we were back in St. Charles, working on the record. It was our anniversary, so I took Melinda into Chicago for dinner at Morton’s. We had a great night, really meaningful and happy after the sadness of seeing Carl slipping away, and we went back to the St. Charles house. As soon as we got home, Joe came rushing over. “I have some bad news,” he said. We knew and we didn’t know. “I am very sorry to tell you this,” Joe said, “but Carl just died.”
It really broke me up. Carl was a nice kid. He never got in trouble. He was the peacemaker in the family and certainly the peacemaker in the band. He was the most spiritual person I knew. One of the reasons I wanted him to sing certain songs, especially “God Only Knows,” was that he could put such innocent and natural feeling into things. Singers can practice hitting notes. They can learn about styles by listening to jazz vocalists or singers from other countries. But just to go out there and sing a song in a simple way that makes everyone who hears it feel something deeply, that can’t be practiced or even learned. You have to be born with it. Carl was born with it. And when Carl died, that thing he was born with died with him also. Hearing about his death was one of the roughest trips I had to go through. I didn’t understand it at all. Carl was gone. He went somewhere, but I didn’t know where.
A few months after Carl died, Frank Sinatra died also. I never met him, but I felt so connected to him. He did lots of his great records for Capitol, just like we did. I always loved his voice, and during rough times I put him on when I was trying to sleep. I heard that B. B. King used to do the same thing, and it made sense; there was something so soothing about the way he could find the sad part of a song. My daughter Carnie even wanted to do an album of his songs with me. I felt strange about it, so I didn’t do it. I’ll never be Frank Sinatra.
Once I was backstage before a show and I was very nervous. I’m always nervous before a show. I never know how an audience is going to respond to it. Someone there at the show had known someone else who worked with Sinatra, who knew that Sinatra threw up before every concert. I loved hearing that, not because I liked to think of Sinatra sick but because I couldn’t believe that someone as cool as he was had the same problems I had. I wrote a song for him once called “Still I Dream of It.” He didn’t say yes to the song, and that bothered me. It was a beautiful song about loneliness and hope:
Still I dream of it
Of that happy day
When I can say I’ve fallen in love
And it haunts me so
Like a dream that’s
Somehow linked to all the stars above
The song ended up on an album named Adult/Child, which was filled with those kinds of songs. It was a Beach Boys album that never came out. I made it in 1977 during a period that was pretty interesting for the group, even though it was a hard period. Adult/Child had arrangements by Dick Reynolds, who worked with us on The Beach Boys’ Christmas Album back in 1964, the same year he worked with Sinatra himself. I wanted to make a record with a similar feel as the records by classic vocalists like Sinatra, so I called in Dick Reynolds to help us out. Other guys in the group didn’t like the idea. Mike couldn’t believe it. When he heard the demos he just shook his head and stared at me. The record label wasn’t sure about the album either. Often the record labels agreed with the other guys in the group. The album never came out, though I ended up putting the demo of “Still I Dream of It” on the soundtrack for the Don Was documentary we made in 1995.
Adult/Child was Dr. Landy’s title. He meant that there were always two parts of a personality, always an adult who wants to be in charge and a child who wants to be cared for, always an adult who thinks he knows the rules and a child who is learning and testing the rules. I also thought about it in terms of family. I thought about my dad and me, and all the things he did that were good and bad, all the things that I can talk about easily and all the things I can’t talk about at all.
In December 1963 the Beach Boys released “Little Saint Nick,” our first Christmas record. A month after that, Frank Sinatra started working on an album called America, I Hear You Singing, which was the one Dick Reynolds helped arrange. It was an album of hopeful, patriotic songs done in duet with Bing Crosby; they recorded it in response to the Kennedy assassination, which had happened back in November. The day of the assassination, I was at home, playing around on the piano and relaxing. When the shooting happened, everyone knew instantly. It was all over the TV and on every kind of news. I called Mike and he asked me if I wanted to write a song about it. I said sure. It seemed like something we had to think about, and songs were the way I thought about things. We drove over to my office and in a half hour we had “The Warmth of the Sun.” We didn’t think of it as a big song. It was a personal response. But it got bigger over time because of the history linked to it.
I’m scared of lots of things, and I can say for sure that going onstage after Imagination was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Playing live with the band wasn’t something I liked very much, even in the old days. When I watch myself on Ed Sullivan or the T.A.M.I. Show, I can remember how uncomfortable it felt. Many of my worst memories are from being nervous up there, and many others are from the things I did to keep myself from being nervous up there. Some of the drinking was because of that. Some of the drugs were because of that. Some of the voices in my head I heard just before I went onstage, and they didn’t have anything good to say about me.
When Melinda told me I should think about doing some solo concerts for Imagination, I had all kinds of excuses. But every time I told her one, she had an answer. People only wanted to hear the old hits? No, they didn’t—the album was getting some great reviews. I was too old? No, I wasn’t—other rockers were still doing it even if they were older than me. I didn’t have a band? This stopped her short for a little while. Then one night we saw a group called the Wondermints in Hollywood. They played lots of Beach Boys songs in their show, and I liked what they did with them. They kept the spirit of the originals. The main guy in the Wondermints, Darian Sahanaja, seemed to understand the way my songs were built. That night, I told someone to go ask them if they wanted to be my band. The Wondermints loved the idea. We added in some other Chicago musicians we worked with when we were recording Imagination—especially Scott Bennett, who played guitar, keyboards, and vibes, and Paul Von Mertens, who played sax, harmonica, and organ—and all of a sudden I had a band.
Playing with the new band was different than playing with the Beach Boys. Hearing my own backing band behind me, that was a trip. In the old days, I always felt like I was right in the middle of everything. With the new musicians, there was a little distance—not in a bad way, but they were behind me, helping me bring my songs to life. There wasn’t the same kind of ego and the same kind of infighting because we weren’t family in the same way. That made things a little less intimate, but maybe it also made them better. And then eventually we were family.
We did a few dates with other people, including Jimmy Buffett, shows where we came out and played some hits. Our first real show was in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It was March 9, 1999—I remember the date because it had so many nines. I was on the floor of the dressing room. I wasn’t sure I could go out. All the nervous things were happening to me. My friend Ray Lawlor came backstage to see me. When he saw how I was feeling, he sat down in silence for a minute. Then he said my name. “Brian. You’ve already hit the home run. Now you just have to jog around the bases.” I went out and kicked ass that night, and the audience loved it.
The next night in Chicago at the Rosemont Theatre, I didn’t have to sit on the floor backstage anymore. I went out and looked straight into the crowd. Jerry Weiss, a friend of mine who later took care of everything on the road, was there. David Leaf was there. Melinda was always there. I made sure to find out exactly where they were because they gave me confidence. And that night I had it.
We toured around the Midwest for a little while: Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin. After a few weeks we had a barbecue at the house in St. Charles. It was great—so many hamburgers and hot dogs. I went downstairs into the studio with some friends and started playing “Marcella.” That’s a song that always made me happy because it had some of the rock and roll energy of the Rolling Stones. It’s an energy song. Then I did another medley of the oldest stuff I could think of at the moment; “Be My Baby” was in there, and also “Surfer Girl.”
“Should we go back upstairs?” someone asked.
“Why?” someone else said. “Let’s just stay down here. This is the life.”
That made me think of “Busy Doin’ Nothin’.” It was a song from the late ’60s that I wrote about just hanging out. I sang it mostly by myself, which didn’t happen very much back then. Marilyn, my wife at the time, was on the song for a few seconds, but otherwise it was all me. It was a nice little song with a kind of bossa nova melody—sweet, light, with lots of nice places for my voice to go up into the corners of the song. I got through about half of the song there in the basement and then suddenly forgot the rest of it. “I can’t remember,” I said.
“Come on,” someone said. Everyone must have thought I was joking. But I wasn’t joking. I didn’t remember the rest. I was tired.
“I’m done here,” I said. I lifted my hands off the piano and went upstairs to take a shower. I brushed my teeth and hair. About a half hour later I went back downstairs in my bathrobe. I sat at the piano and it came back to me immediately. I called upstairs. “Hey,” I said. “Come here.” Some people came downstairs, and I played the whole song for them.
I wrote a number down
But I lost it
So I searched through my pocketbook
I couldn’t find it
So I sat and concentrated on the number
And slowly it came to me
So I dialed it
It’s a real pretty tune. It was a song about forgetting and remembering what I forgot and then remembered. That seemed funny at first, but then it seemed sad. Life is so much about losing. These days losing a phone number is no big deal. You can find it anywhere on your phone. But back then it was more of a worry. Maybe you wouldn’t be able to call the girl or guy whose number it was. You thought for a second they might be gone forever. That’s how I felt about “Busy Doin’ Nothin’” when I lifted my hands from the piano and went upstairs. But it came back to me.
Some things never come back. When I was a kid we had a dog named Chico. He was a Chihuahua. We let him play baseball with us, and he started to get good at it. He ran away from home. We didn’t know where he went. Then one day I was walking home from school with Dennis and we saw Chico lying in the gutter dead. We both broke down crying.
Thirty years later I was sitting on a couch trying to think of a song when Dr. Landy came into the room. “I have something for you,” he said. He bent down and stood back up and there was a puppy on the floor. It was beige, and its eyes were happy but its tail wasn’t wagging. Maybe it was a little afraid. I got down on the floor right next to the puppy and hugged it. I named the dog Buddy. A few months later Dr. Landy wanted me to sit at the piano and write a new song, but I couldn’t. I just didn’t have one in my head or my heart. Dr. Landy went into the room, grabbed Buddy, and said he was taking him out of the house. Gloria told him not to, but he did. I sat on the couch and couldn’t stand back up. I couldn’t even speak. All I could do was cry, and that’s what I did.
There’s another song on Imagination called “Cry”:
A silly quarrel
That’s what we had
Then I heard you cryin’
You broke my heart
Broke it in two
How could I have left you alone
Like that to cry
The song was one of the ones I worked on with Joe Thomas. It was about a fight I had with Melinda. We were in our backyard, lying in the sun by the swimming pool, and we started arguing. I told her that I was going to leave—not just the house, but her, the whole thing. I wasn’t really serious, but I wanted to see how much it bothered her. She started to cry, which almost never happened. I tried to make her feel better, but I still felt bad. Then I went right off and wrote a song. “Left you alone like that to cry” was a sad thing to sing. It was sad because of the idea of crying, and because of the idea of being left alone. I dedicated the record to Carl, who was gone. Dennis was gone. My dad was gone. My mom was gone. They were in me, still, to remember or to imagine. But I was the last Wilson.