CHAPTER 6

Echoes and Voices

        They say I got brains

        But they ain’t doing me no good

        I wish they could

        Each time things start to happen again

        I think I got something good goin’ for myself

        But what goes wrong

             —“I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times”

My sixtieth birthday was normal most of the day, which was the best present I could have asked for. It was rainy, which was a surprise for Los Angeles, but otherwise it was an ordinary warm summer day. In the afternoon, Melinda reminded me that she was taking me to dinner. “I know,” I said, even though I had forgotten. We got in the car and drove to the Mulholland Grill in Bel Air. While I was going into the restaurant, I saw a guy who looked like my friend Danny Hutton. Then I saw the rest of them—Van Dyke Parks; the guys in my band; Melinda’s mom, Rose; Tony Asher; David and Eva Leaf; Jerry and Lois Weiss; Ray Lawlor; Steve Desper—and I realized that it was a party for me. “I told you I didn’t want a big party,” I said to Melinda, because I had, and everyone laughed.

It was a really great time. I didn’t think there would be so many people, and I didn’t realize that each of the people would bring up so many memories. When I looked at Steve, I heard an echo of “Add Some Music to Your Day” from Sunflower, and that got me thinking about that record, and that cover photo. When I looked at Van Dyke, I heard an echo of “Surf’s Up,” and that got me thinking about SMiLE and how it would have been such an amazing record, and how I still hoped that it could come out. Some of the echoes I was hearing were on delay, like they were coming in from far away. Other echoes were closer. When I looked at Melinda, I heard an echo of “You Still Believe in Me,” which had come out on Pet Sounds. It was a love song from a guy to a girl, thanking her for not giving up on him.

        I know perfectly well

        I’m not where I should be

        I’ve been very aware

        You’ve been patient with me

        Every time we break up

        You bring back your love to me

        And after all I’ve done to you

        How can it be

        I try hard to be more

        What you want me to be

        But I can’t help how I act

        When you’re not here with me

        I try hard to be strong

        But sometimes I fail myself

        And after all I’ve promised you

        So faithfully

When I originally wrote the song with Tony, it wasn’t about Melinda. It would be another twenty years before I sat in the car at the dealership on Pico and Bundy. But I wasn’t hearing an echo of that original version. I was hearing an echo of the newer version that had just come out on Brian Wilson Presents Pet Sounds Live, a concert performance of the entire record that I did with Darian and the band at Royal Festival Hall in London at the beginning of the year. I had to sing songs that were originally sung by Mike, like “That’s Not Me” and “Here Today.” I had to sing “God Only Knows,” and God knows I couldn’t do as good a job as Carl had.

But I also had to sing songs that I had been singing my whole life, and that wasn’t necessarily easier. When you have hits and you have to perform them again and again over the years, it’s a strange process. You have to give the audience a version that they recognize, but you also have to give yourself a version that makes sense. Singing a song I made when I was twenty-five and believing in what it meant when I was almost sixty wasn’t easy. Melinda made it easier. She made all the love songs easier. But it was still weird to hear the original spirit of those songs across the years and then make them work in front of a crowd. I was a little nervous—more than a little nervous—but we did it. Hooray for us, and hooray for the audience. One review said that the harmonies were even better than the ones on the original album. I appreciated the compliment. I tried hard to make them work.

The year of my sixtieth birthday, I also went to a half-century celebration for someone else. And not just anyone: it was Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden Jubilee, which was an extended celebration of her fifty years on the throne. I was one of two American artists chosen to represent the United States at the queen’s Golden Jubilee. Tony Bennett was the other. It was such an honor. There was a huge concert scheduled for London just a few months after we did Pet Sounds at the Royal Festival Hall. We flew over about a week before to rehearse and stayed at a hotel on the Thames, right across the bridge from Westminster Abbey. London always has a really cool vibe, but this time was even more special because of the buzz over the Jubilee.

In our rehearsal hall, other rock stars would drop by to pitch in. My band and I would play “California Girls,” and then Eric Clapton would come out and sing a duet with me on “The Warmth of the Sun.” He said it was his favorite song, which was as amazing as hearing that “God Only Knows” was Paul McCartney’s favorite song. When Eric sang with me that time, he added a little inflection to the vocal that I now use myself whenever we do the song. And in the harmony-stack fade, he played a guitar part that was so great it’s indescribable. I will never forget the look on Paul Von Mertens’s face as he was watching Eric. It was like he was stoned! We also sang “God Only Knows” with the Corrs and “Good Vibrations” with everyone.

One of the nights in London, Melinda and I went out to dinner with Jerry and Lois Weiss at this steak place called Christopher’s. It was so good that we went back there three or four nights in a row. The first night, we exited the place onto streets so crowded with the celebration that it was hard to believe. You couldn’t get a cab—and even if you could, it couldn’t have moved a foot down the street. So the four of us took the London Underground. We got off by Westminster and walked across the bridge to the hotel. I tried to think about the last time I rode on a subway. Maybe it was New York City in 1964. Public places are always strange. Sometimes people recognize me and I get a little paranoid. No one did on the Tube, but the next day I was having lunch in a pub and a woman at the next table kept staring at me. I wondered if she recognized me from the Underground. Finally she came over. “Excuse me, sir,” she said, “but do you know you look exactly like the American musician Brian Wilson?” “I know,” I said. I didn’t want to tell her it was me. It seemed too egotistical.

The day of the concert, Paul McCartney was running through a rehearsal of “All You Need Is Love,” which was scheduled as the night’s closing song. Almost everyone was onstage, and Paul turned it into a group song. He had Joe Cocker doing one verse, Rod Stewart doing another, Eric contributing guitar. I stood in the back just singing the “love, love, love” background part when Pablo stopped the take. “Hey,” he said, “we’ve got something here. Brian, you come up front and sing that part.” They moved my mic up front and I ended up on the front line along with Joe, Rod, Eric, and Paul. It was a hell of a band! It worked great in the show. The place went wild. I heard there were over a million people watching it live in the streets on huge screens. What a trip. What a great song to close on. What a great celebration for the queen.

At my sixtieth, we didn’t close on that. But there was a closing song. Someone brought out a cake from the kitchen, and everyone sang “Happy Birthday.” Those harmonies were pretty good also, and the cake was great.

I tried to eat the cake slowly. People say I’m the fastest eater in the world, but I don’t know about that. I haven’t seen who is the champion. But I am a fast eater. That’s one of the reasons I have always had trouble with weight. Also, I love sweets. My daughter Carnie cooks. She’s a great cook. She makes pudding. She makes fish. Once on Father’s Day she called and asked me what I wanted. I really wanted cheesecake, but I told her she couldn’t make it because of my diet. I asked her to make macaroni and cheese instead. But for that same celebration Wendy brought an apple pie. I wasn’t supposed to eat sugar, but I kept asking her for the pie. They didn’t want me to get it, so I started to pretend it was like Christmas or a birthday. I started singing, “Happy Father’s Day to me.” Just like at Mulholland Grill, I figured that was a good way to get the apple pie.

But all that cake and pie adds up. Sometimes when I go to the doctor and get weighed in, the numbers stop me in my tracks. When the Father’s Day party ended, I did what I did when I got back from Mulholland Grill. I walked. As I have gotten older, walking has saved my life. I have always used it to lose weight but also to get out and think. There’s a kind of spirituality in making music but also in moving under your own power through the world. When I was in high school there was a song by Jimmy Charles called “A Million to One.” I remember hearing that in the car when I was driving with my friend Keith. We went to the beach and ran along the shore for almost an hour. I can’t run so much anymore now that I’m older, but I try to walk whenever I can. When I’m home I go to one specific park, a little triangular place off Bel Air. There’s a path around the edge that’s five-eighths of a mile. When I was doing my best I might be able to go around it seven or eight times. Now it’s less than that, but I still try. It’s both meditation and health. The vendors there know me. I sometimes stop and talk to them. If I’m getting a bottle of water, they’ll ask me if I’m thirsty or they’ll say, “How you doing, buddy?” Someone told me once that Frank Sinatra used to go to the same park.

If I’m not at home, I still try to walk. There are parks and beaches everywhere. In Maui once I came up a path and someone else was coming the other way. It was Magic Johnson. “Hi, Brian,” he said. I waved, saying, “Hey, Magic.” I kept walking. I had season tickets to the Lakers back then, so I knew I would see him again.

When I came off the road at the end of 1964, I was sure I wouldn’t play any more shows. In fact, Hawaii was one of the rare places I went onstage with the band after that. We went there in 1967. A promoter had scheduled a pair of shows there that we were going to film, maybe for a live album. I didn’t want to travel. I hadn’t traveled since Houston. But the guys kept asking me to go and finally I said I would, but only if they would let me bring my Baldwin organ. I loved the sounds it got. That meant that Carl would have to play bass. Bruce didn’t want to take the trip. It was funny, in a way. He had gone out on the road instead of me, and now I was going out on the road instead of him.

We did two shows in Hawaii like we were supposed to, but the record label didn’t think we sounded right. When we got back, we went up to Wally Heider Studios in San Francisco and tried to remake the whole live record in the studio, like with Beach Boys’ Party! That didn’t work, and we ended up scrapping the album.

Off the road in ’64, I was happier in the studio. I was a little worried that I was letting the guys down or that I couldn’t live up to our reputation. I decided the only way to prove my decision wasn’t a mistake was to write the best songs and make the best music.

It wasn’t easy at first. I was trying to get peace and quiet so I could think of new songs, but there were so many voices. Some of them were the voices of the band, trying to figure out what I was doing. My dad’s voice was in there, telling me I was weak. And then there were all the other voices, the ones that tell me that I’m worthless, that I should give up, that they’ll kill me.

I have heard those voices for a long time, maybe fifty years now. They first came to me when I was twenty-two, after I took LSD. LSD was something that people told me made your mind larger, and that sounded interesting to me. I was interested in exploring ways of getting expanded. The first time I took it, I had to go hide in a bedroom, and I thought mostly about my parents and whether I should be afraid of them. I also started to play what became “California Girls” on the piano, that sound of the cowboy riding into town. I played it and played it until I heard other things inside of it. But about a week after that, the first voices started to pop up. They’d sound like a real person’s voice, a person different from me who I couldn’t control, but inside my own head. I didn’t know what to do with them.

I stopped with the acid for about a year but then took it again when I was twenty-three. I’m not sure why I went back to it. Just young and stupid, I guess. Doctors have told me that the voices didn’t come from the acid, that they would have happened anyway, but I’m not sure. I didn’t have them before. When I was fourteen or fifteen I had anxiety spells. I would try to talk and fall into a stammer or stutter. I got locked up for a few seconds, frozen in place. That phase lasted about six months and it went away.

The voices are different from that. They are frightening. There have been times when they came every day and other times when they left me alone. When I’m working on a record in the studio, they’re less likely to be there. Lots of the music I’ve made has been my way of trying to get rid of those voices. Other strategies didn’t really work. Alcohol didn’t work, and drugs didn’t work, and sleeping didn’t work, and never sleeping didn’t work. All those things worked for a little while, but they never worked long. Those are the voices that people call mental illness. What does that mean exactly? It’s part of my brain that doesn’t change, so what has to change is the way I deal with it. The voices won’t disappear, so I have to make sure that I don’t disappear because of them.

What made it worse, at least early on, was that the voices in my head that were trying to do away with me were in a crowded space. They were in there with other voices that were trying to make something beautiful. Voices were the problem but also the answer. The answer was in harmony. That’s what I worked on after I came off the road in 1964. There was a period when I tried to make music that captured all those voices. One of the first songs we recorded then was “Do You Wanna Dance?,” a cover of an old Bobby Freeman song. Dennis sang lead vocals on it, and he did a great job—just straight-ahead rock and roll, with guitars and saxophones churning underneath. Then, around thirty seconds into the song, we got to the chorus and the whole thing just exploded. Al came in. Mike came in. Carl came in. I came in. We’re singing high. We’re singing low. We’re weaving around each other and through each other.

Because that’s a dance song, people don’t think of it as a spiritual thing, but it is, because it’s harmony. Our harmonies were always a very spiritual sound, a very beautiful sound. You start with one voice and go a third up and a third up to an octave. All of it is serving this one main melody, and it’s really wonderful. It makes you feel so good, and that’s one of the main jobs of music. Any music that gets to your soul like that is soul music. And it helps to remind you that voices are beautiful instead of dark things that echo in your head. What’s strange with harmonies is that I can hear them very much when I’m in the studio but not very much outside. When I walk into the studio, music happens and the voices stop happening. It’s a kind of magic. I don’t know what kind. But it happens for me mostly in the studio.

Recently I was watching the news, like I do every day. It’s news at four, then Wheel of Fortune, then Jeopardy! One of the stories on the news was about how anxiety and creativity are linked. There was some big study at a university, and the doctors who did the study said that anxiety and creativity are sort of the same thing: both of them are about dealing less with what’s in front of you and more with what’s in your head. Listening to what’s in your head, especially when you’re a person with anxiety, leads to negative emotions. But they’re also a form of imagination. If you can worry about problems when there aren’t problems around, then you can also think of stories or songs when there aren’t stories or songs around. You can make things go from not existing to existing.

I thought about that news report after I turned off the TV. So what if my brain gets worried before I go out onstage, wondering if the audience will like me? Maybe that’s because it’s the same brain that thinks of new melodies. So what if my brain gets worried before it gets on an airplane? Maybe that’s because it’s the same brain that can put instruments and voices together. When we were getting ready to go to London to do the concert that became the Pet Sounds Live album, I was nervous. I don’t like planes. But these days, being on the plane isn’t the worst part. The worst part is thinking about them before I get on them. I didn’t sleep the whole night before we were flying. Jerry Weiss, who takes care of everything for me when we’re on the road, asked me what I think about when a plane is taking off. I think, “Don’t blow up . . . don’t blow up . . . don’t blow up.” I hear myself saying it inside my head, and in a weird way I’m happy to hear it. I need to hear that voice, not to silence the other voices but to try to make some kind of harmony with them. Learning to let all those voices work together is what let me make records like “Do You Wanna Dance?” or “Help Me, Ronda.”

Or Pet Sounds. I thought about Pet Sounds at my birthday party at Mulholland Grill, because I was thinking about “You Still Believe in Me” when I was looking at Melinda, and also because the live record had just come out. But the truth is that I think about it often. It’s one of the records people ask about the most.

It’s hard to say exactly when the sound of Pet Sounds started. It was something that was coming for a while. Maybe it started when I first heard “Be My Baby” on the radio and I began to understand how you could make emotions through sound. Maybe it started when I began to understand more about soul singers like Dionne Warwick and Aretha Franklin and how they could make you feel amazing things with small vocal gestures. Maybe it started on the second side of The Beach Boys Today! when I started to make softer and slower songs that weren’t exactly love ballads but instead were snapshots of how I was feeling as I grew up. It was probably all those things put together. But it started to change what I was doing.

The first song on that album is “Please Let Me Wonder,” which I cut at ten o’clock at night at Western. I was starting to sing more about what people were thinking and dreaming about when they were in love, and how sometimes it was about what they didn’t have more than what they had. “Kiss Me, Baby” was one of the last songs we recorded in 1964, though we did the vocals early the next year. It’s about romance, but really it’s about a fight and maybe even a breakup; the romance is just imagined. “She Knows Me Too Well” had a great whiny falsetto sound, much better than “Let Him Run Wild.” I would call myself a versatile singer. I can sing sweet with emotion, but I can also do other kinds of vocals. It’s a cool message, too, one of those lyrics about a guy who is insecure and is able to say so in the song:

        I get so jealous of the other guy

        And then I’m not happy ‘til I make her break down and cry

        When I look at other girls it must kill her inside

        But it’d be another story if she looked at the guys

        But she knows me

        She knows me too well

        Knows me so well

        That she can tell

        I really love her

        She knows me too well

And “In the Back of My Mind” grew out of a song that already existed; the seed of the melody was the Skyliners’ “Since I Don’t Have You,” a beautiful ballad from the late ’50s. That must have been echoing in my head somewhere, and I wrote a new song about a guy who wasn’t able to be honest about everything that scared him.

        I’m blessed with everything

        A world to which a man can cling

        So happy times when I break out in tears

        In the back of my mind I still have my fears

That was one of the most honest lines I ever wrote: “In the back of my mind I still have my fears.” I’ve never been afraid to admit fear. But I didn’t sing that line. I had Dennis do it because he never really had a chance to sing very much. I thought his vocal was great.

The quieter and sadder songs on the record were good, but the fast songs were great, too. “Dance, Dance, Dance” was fantastic. We cut that in Memphis, and when we got back to LA we did it again in a second version that I preferred. Carl wrote the guitar intro for that one. The record ended with “Bull Session with the ‘Big Daddy.’” People say it’s a spoken-word track, but it’s not really a track at all. It’s tape from an interview we did with Earl Leaf, a famous photographer who wasn’t related to my friend David Leaf. We put it on the end of the album to show the way we were in the studio when we weren’t making music. We ordered burgers with French fries and pickles. Al wasn’t there but Marilyn was. The part I remember best from that is when Earl asks about a show we did in Paris. The guys were talking about whether they played well or not, and whether they made any mistakes. “I still haven’t made a mistake in my whole career,” I said, and Dennis said, “Brian, we keep waiting for you to make a mistake.” Back then I was young and I said things out of confidence, but I was right to say it. I was strict with the guys if they got their harmonies wrong. I was searching for a sound that I wanted to get, and I knew how to get it. I tried never to be mean about it, but I also didn’t want to relax too much and let that sound get away.

If the sound of Pet Sounds didn’t start on The Beach Boys Today!, maybe it was on Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!). Even though that record had big hits like “California Girls,” they were hits that were pushing us further in the direction I wanted to go. The song had an orchestral lead-in, and the main beat sounded like a cowboy and his horse walking into town but was borrowed from Bach. It was an opening, and I went through it. The other big hit was “Help Me, Rhonda,” which was a remake of “Help Me, Ronda” that we did faster and with slightly different lyrics. It was also just a better feel. The whole year after the flight to Houston, I kept thinking about what kinds of songs I should be making, and whether there were any limits to how a pop song could sound. I couldn’t really think of any limits.

I knew I had to explore that sound more. I had to go further in that direction, bring more orchestration and different kinds of arrangements into our music. One of the first songs we tried after that was “The Little Girl I Once Knew.” It was like a sequel to “California Girls.” The first two notes of the intro are Chinese tones. I sang harmony with Carl on that record. It was one of our best, but it didn’t sell at all. And when records didn’t sell at all, record companies started to put pressure on us. They wanted more music fast. I didn’t have more music fast. I was exploring. That wasn’t good enough for Capitol. The holidays were coming up, and they requested an album they could sell at the holidays. Maybe “requested” is the wrong way to say it. They expected one. I wasn’t ready with any new material yet, so we put out an album called Beach Boys’ Party! It was recorded to sound like it was live, but we cut it in the studio and sang mostly covers: we did the Rivingtons’ “Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow,” the Everly Brothers’ “Devoted to You,” and Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’.”

There was one big hit from that record that everyone knows, an old doo-wop song by the Regents called “Barbara Ann.” It was pretty simple, and we tore through it. Dean Torrence sang with us. It almost got to number one on the charts. Lots of people know that song because of what happened later, in the ’70s, when the ayatollah in Iran took American hostages and people started to make parodies of “Barbara Ann” called “Bomb Iran.” But in 1965 it wasn’t that kind of party. The whole record was just for fun, a way of getting a new Beach Boys record into stores. I got to sing “There’s No Other (Like My Baby),” a Phil Spector song he did with the Crystals. And then we did two Beatles songs, “Tell Me Why” and “I Should Have Known Better.” Just after we released the party record, the Beatles put out Rubber Soul. It came just at the right time. I was right in the middle of the next big thing.

The next big thing, at least at first, was an old song. It was a Bahamian folk ballad called “The John B. Sails.” Al recommended the song. He was a folk guy from way back, and he always loved the Kingston Trio’s recording of the song. He kept saying that we should do our own version of it. I wasn’t sure because I didn’t know that much about folk music, but Al kept saying he knew it could work as a Beach Boys song. To show me, he sat and played it on the piano. When he did that, then I heard how I could make the song work, and I got excited. I worked for a day and then called Al to come back and listen to what I cut. He loved it. It wasn’t just that, though. Sometimes you love something because it’s familiar. Sometimes you love it because it reminds you of something else you loved. That’s what I would have expected. But I watched him while he was listening to it, and I could tell from the way he looked that he loved it in a different way. He loved it the way you love something new, like a girl you have just talked to for the first time. I knew that we were going in a new direction. The song deserved its own title. The original folk song was called “The John B. Sails,” and the Kingston Trio version was called “The Wreck of the John B.” We changed the title again, to “Sloop John B,” which was the same name as a version Dick Dale had done. We weren’t completely past our surf roots.

When we recorded it, we went to Western with Chuck Britz, and I tried to match the arrangement I had in my head with all the studio players, who were the same people as usual, Hal Blaine and Carol Kaye and Billy Strange playing a twelve-string and the rest. We double tracked the bass. We had a glockenspiel. We had flutes, more than one. I don’t remember exactly how many takes we had to go through to get it right, but I know it was more than ten, because that’s where I lost count. When we put it out as a single, I held my breath a little bit. It was the first song in a while that I knew was going into uncharted territory, but I didn’t want that to mean it would miss the chart. It didn’t. It was the fastest-selling single we had ever put out. It sold a half million copies in its first two weeks, went to number three in the United States, and did even better around the world. It went to number one on three different continents: Europe (Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland), Africa (South Africa), and Asia (New Zealand).

The song’s success meant that I could keep going and keep exploring. It meant that the other voices that doubted me—in the group and at the record label and inside my own head—quieted down for a little bit. I was writing songs as fast as I could. Some of them came easy. Some came hard. I was doing the lyrics with Tony Asher, who I was introduced to by a guy named Loren Schwartz. Loren was the same guy who introduced me to marijuana and LSD, which gave me some ideas, and also to Tony Asher, who gave me more. Tony was working in advertising and he was interested in music, and I just went on my gut instinct that Tony would be a great lyricist. It was complete vibe and instinct. I liked the way he talked. The rest of the band was in and out of Los Angeles; they went to tour Japan in January, the Midwest in February and March, Texas in April. When they came home between tour stops, they put down their vocal tracks. It was a new way of working, and it was better in some ways but worse in others.

One of the first songs I did in that new style was “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.” Tony and I talked about the feel we wanted. We started with the idea that it was a song about childhood, about hoping that things would turn out a certain way. There’s nothing like being a kid before you see that life is going to force you to deal with certain things. That was the spark of it, though Tony’s lyrics pulled it more into things that teenagers would worry about. It’s as much a song about sex as “My Obsession,” though it’s completely different, because it talks mostly about the emotions behind it. What would it feel like when you didn’t have to ask parents for permission to be with a girl? What would it feel like when you could listen to your own inner voice without hearing all these voices of authority?

        Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older

        Then we wouldn’t have to wait so long

        And wouldn’t it be nice to live together

        In the kind of world where we belong

        You know its gonna make it that much better

        When we can say good night and stay together

The instrumental tracks for “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” were done pretty easily, because I made them with the Wrecking Crew when the rest of the band was out on the road. When I say that they were done easily, I don’t mean that they were done quickly. I lost track of how many takes we did at twenty. But we got there, and we had a song that sounded perfect. It was a totally new bag of sound for us—or anybody else, for that matter. On the intro I had Barney Kessel playing this really great guitar he had, a one-of-a-kind twelve-string mando-guitar built by Gibson. It sounded like nothing else. He played right into the board. And I had two accordion players who made this amazing vibrational tone when I buried them in echo. We didn’t add vocals until March, when the guys were back from a quick tour in Oregon. To me, it was complicated because I was trying to teach the band a new way to sing on a new kind of song and they were doing the thing they knew best, which was to sing the old way better than anyone.

There’s a story that I helped Dennis get over his shyness at the microphone, and that’s partly true. It’s hard for some people to give it their all while they’re standing at a studio microphone. It’s an artificial place to be, but you’re trying to get real emotions. Some people put their hands over their mouths, cup them there, to give them a little more privacy. I suggested that to Dennis, and it worked great for him. I sang lead, Mike sang the bridge, and he has been credited with the part at the end, the “Good night, my baby / Sleep tight, my baby.” That part is great. It’s really the whole idea of the song pushed into two little lines: the guy is finally with his girl, or maybe he’s imagining being with her and sending her wishes. I kind of knew that would be the first song on the record.

Because the guys were in and out of town, because I had so much time to go down to the studio and try take after take, the musical canvas for that record just got bigger and bigger. For “You Still Believe in Me,” I used a harpsichord, just decided to try it out to see if it would work. On “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder),” I used a string quartet. I wrote out the parts in a manuscript and then I conducted. On “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times,” I wanted it to sound eerie, and that ended up with a situation where I introduced a new instrument to rock and roll: the theremin. Lots of the songs had Don Randi on them—he’s an amazing keyboard player, one of my favorites of all time. And then there were percussion effects that were mostly trial and error, like one song where someone beat out a rhythm on an empty water jug, or another time when we had a bongo but played it with a stick instead of by hand. The musical experimentation got held in place by the lyrics, which were sort of about the same kinds of things as “Caroline, No”: how teenagers and other young people felt out of place, how the world wasn’t always a good fit, how love was supposed to save you but ended up sometimes deserting you when you needed it the most.

The title track was an instrumental I wrote that I thought might be a spy movie theme. I loved Thunderball, which had come out the year before, and I loved listening to composers like Henry Mancini, who did these cool themes for shows like Peter Gunn, and Les Baxter, who did all these big productions that sounded sort of like Phil Spector productions. The instrumental was going to be called “Run James Run,” and I made it without the rest of the band, just me and some session guys. Roy Caton played the trumpet. We had Jerry Cole and Billy Strange on guitar, and we fed them through a Leslie speaker. Richie Frost played percussion on two empty Coca-Cola cans. We talked about sending it over to the James Bond movie people but put it on the album instead. It wasn’t the only Coke thing we used on the record. “Let’s Go Away for Awhile,” the other instrumental, had a guitar where we strapped a Coke bottle to the strings so it sounded like a Hawaiian steel guitar. It was supposed to have words, but I liked it the way it was so we left it alone.

The guys didn’t always get what was happening. We were living such different lives. They were out moving around, getting to new places. I was in one place, at home. Someone played me a song once by Frank Black. He was in the Pixies, a band I don’t know very well, and then he had some solo albums. On one of them he did a cover of “I Know There’s an Answer” where he put the original lyrics back in, when the title was “Hang On to Your Ego.” I wrote that after taking acid, about taking acid. People took it to get away from themselves, but that wasn’t the right way to take it. It was supposed to make you go deeper into yourself. I wanted to remind people that they could survive everything best if they remembered who they were. Mike didn’t like that title. He didn’t like the idea of it. He kept telling me that he wasn’t going to sing a song about drugs. Eventually I decided that maybe he was right, partly because of what the song itself was saying. I had to remember who we were. We were the Beach Boys. It also reminded me of what my dad said in his letter to me. I changed the title and the lyrics.

There are so many songs on that record that I love, but there are a few that I love even more. “God Only Knows” gets named as people’s favorite Beach Boys song regularly. Some people pick it as their favorite song of all time by any artist in the rock era. Some people pick it as their favorite song of all time, period. So I could say that I really worked forever on it, that I spent a year imagining how the melody would work and another year on the lyrics. But the facts are that Tony and I sat down at a piano and wrote it in forty-five minutes. I guess we had some concepts in mind before we started, mostly in pairs of rhymes we wanted to use. If you’re writing about faith and you’re writing about emotion and you’re writing about being afraid of losing connection, it’s easy to imagine what they would be: love/above, leave/believe. But we were also trying to go big with the song. It opened with the line “I may not always love you,” which was a strange way to start a love song. True, but strange. It made it so there was something at stake.

Also, it was a little daring to mention God in the chorus or the title of a song, at least at the time. There were really old-fashioned songs that did it. When Tony has given interviews, he has mentioned Kate Smith singing “God Bless America.” But this was a different God. This wasn’t any public God or American God. This was something more private, whatever force helps a person control their hopes and doubts. That made people nervous. It made Marilyn nervous. It made me nervous. But it also made me calm, because it let me get to a new world of thought and emotion. The lyrics were perfect from the first word to the last. You cannot write a better lyric than that.

The song went so smoothly in the writing, and then we migrated it into the studio. We had a big orchestra lined up for that one. I think there were more than fifteen musicians, which was lots for a pop song at that time. But we needed to get the details right. The devil is in the details, but the details are in God. Does that make sense? It makes as much sense as having a cello and a flute and a clarinet and a viola and an electric bass and an upright bass and a baritone sax and an accordion and a harpsichord. Tony played the sleigh bells. I was especially proud of the French horn part. I knew how I wanted it to sound and I hummed it to a guy named Alan Robinson. He was a great player who had been under contract at Twentieth Century Fox, and he had played on a bunch of movie soundtracks, including High Noon. I wanted him to do it glissando, which means sliding down the notes instead of skipping from one note to the next and leaving out the in-betweens. We went in and just kicked ass. If you look at the studio logs, it shows almost two dozen takes, but it didn’t feel that way at all. “God Only Knows” felt easy. It came out like melted butter.

When it came to the vocal, I had planned to do it myself, but I thought about other songs I had sung where I wasn’t able to do everything I wanted with the lyric. Mainly, I thought about how I would sing it as a lyric. I’d know where the meter was and where the rhyme was. But if I gave it to Carl, he could sing it just as a set of words that meant something. It would take away some of the self-consciousness. That was the advice I gave him: “Sing straight” I think I said. I didn’t mean that he needed to hit the words on the nose, only that the words were already there. The meaning was already there. Just do the words as they’re written. He did it, and he did a beautiful job with it. The first version had lots of other harmony vocalists on it, too, because that’s what we were doing around the time of Pet Sounds. It was me singing lower than Carl, and Bruce Johnston singing higher, and also Marilyn and her sister Diane, and Mike and Al, and Terry Melcher. I think I even spotted a guy who worked in the studio hanging around the edges hoping to get in. When I listened back to it, the layering was wrong. The song was so simple at its heart. It had just one voice. It’s an “I” song more than a “we” song. It had loneliness. It’s an anxious song, maybe, but also one that’s sort of at peace, because the character singing it—Carl, but Carl with the words of the song—can’t control it one way or another.

I’m proud of lots of my songs, but “God Only Knows” is one of the ones I’m most proud of because there’s a real message in it. And then there’s the way we ended it, with a round. I liked all those old songs that used rounds, like “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” (which I did a version of with Marilyn and her sisters in 1965) and “Frère Jacques” (which we used pieces of in “Surf’s Up”). I liked rounds because they made it seem like a song was something eternal. At the end of “God Only Knows,” that’s the feeling, that it could go on forever, that it is going on forever.

I love the whole Pet Sounds record. I got a full vision out of it in the studio. After that, I said to myself that I had completed the greatest album I will ever produce. I knew it. I thought it was one of the greatest albums ever done. It was a spiritual record. When I was making it, I looked around at the musicians and the singers and I could see their halos. That feeling stayed on the finished album. I wanted to grow musically, to expand our horizons and do something that people would love, and I did it. Lennon and McCartney were blown away. Marilyn was blown away. Carl was blown away.

Other people didn’t say as much about it, like Dennis and Mike. There was a feeling in the band at that point that maybe we were going too far away from hit records. “Sloop John B” was a hit and that was on the record, but it was different than the rest. The record company wasn’t sure either. They thought it was going in the wrong direction. But mostly everyone who wasn’t sure about it when it was released came around to it over time, even if they didn’t always admit it. And I did it all on four tracks, mostly. Bob Dylan said something nice about that: “The records I used to listen to and still love, you can’t make a record that sounds that way. Brian Wilson, he made all his records with four tracks, but you couldn’t make his records if you had a hundred tracks today.” I don’t know about that. There’s lots you can do with more tracks. But I know that four worked for me.

“God Only Knows” might be the best song on that record, but my favorite might be “Caroline, No.” I did it all by myself. I wrote the music. I sang the vocal. I even wrote the title, in a way. Tony was telling me about a new song he was working on. He wanted to call it “Carol, I Know,” and he said it on my right side, and I heard “Caroline, No.” He started to correct me but then he stopped. Caroline was a more beautiful name to sing than Carol. Chuck Berry had already done most of what anyone could do with Carol. Also, Caroline rhymed with Marilyn, and when I thought about the song and what it meant, I thought about Marilyn. We had been married for about a year and a half by then, but it seemed like so much longer. So much had happened. Maybe ten years of things had happened in less than two. I hadn’t lost my love for her, but I saw how love could be lost, and that scared me. Tony had experiences of his own that were the same or similar, and the song came together around those kinds of things. It was released as a Brian Wilson solo single two months before Pet Sounds.

        Where did your long hair go?

        Where is the girl I used to know?

        How could you lose that happy glow?

        Oh, Caroline, no

        Who took that look away?

        I remember how you used to say

        You’d never change, but that’s not true

        Oh, Caroline, you

        Break my heart

        I want to go and cry

        It’s so sad to watch a sweet thing die

        Oh, Caroline, why

        Could I ever find in you again

        Things that made me love you so much then?

        Could we ever bring ’em back once they have gone?

        Oh, Caroline, no

Even though “Caroline, No” was a sad song, it was fun in the studio. It’s kind of a Glenn Miller thing in the chords. It has that vibe. And I learned more about using certain arrangements or instruments to create the right emotions in whoever is listening. In that opening section, the one with tambourine, someone did percussion on a water jug, which had a lonely feeling. We had harpsichord and we had flute. When we were all done my dad made a suggestion that we ended up using, which was to speed everything up a half step so the vocals were even higher and more lonesome. At the end of the song there are some sound effects, a train and dogs barking. We were trying to think of the loneliest sounds. The dogs were my dogs, Louie and Banana. I recorded them at home and then we added them into the song. Louie was a Weimaraner. Banana was a beagle. Louie was my absolute favorite pet ever and Banana was my second favorite. People say the title of the record came partly from that, because Louie and Banana were making pet sounds when they barked. Some people say it’s about Phil Spector and that’s why it uses his initials. And other people say I named it that because the music is so personal. All of that is true and mixed together. The only thing that’s not true is that the album was named after the cover photo. We already knew what we were calling the record when we went down to the San Diego Zoo for the photo shoot.

Lots of other songs on Pet Sounds have sadness in them. They are all beautiful, but they are about how the world can be a hard place emotionally. “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” is a song about someone who doesn’t have something he wants. “God Only Knows” is as much a worried song as it is a peaceful song. “Here Today” sounds like it’s a love song, but the very next line shows that it’s a lost-love song: “Love is here today / And it’s gone tomorrow / It’s here and gone so fast.” And “Caroline, No” is about a girl changing over time, or changing in the mind of the guy who loved her. In the song, she does change for real, at least partly. Her hair gets shorter. But most of the change is in how the guy sees her. She doesn’t seem as happy to him, and when she doesn’t seem as happy, then she doesn’t make him as happy. It was a cycle that kept going.

I met Van Dyke Parks because someone played him an early version of “Sloop John B,” and that’s how we ended up working together. I think it might have been David Crosby who introduced us. At that time I had decided I was going to make a record even more amazing than Pet Sounds, and I asked Van Dyke to write lyrics with me. That led to the idea of SMiLE. SMiLE was a completely American record, in its music and in its ideas. We were right in the middle of an amazing time of music, but so many of the bands were British bands. The Beatles were doing great stuff, and the Rolling Stones and the Who and the Kinks, and underneath that there were dozens of other bands. The Zombies—man, they made some great records, too. Van Dyke and I wanted to do something just as good but for American music. He had a funny quote about that that was also about me.

Everybody else was getting their snout in the British trough. Everybody wanted to sing “bettah,” affecting these transatlantic accents and trying to sound like the Beatles. I was with a man who couldn’t do that. He just didn’t have that option. He was the last man standing. And the only way we were going to get through that crisis was by embracing what they call “grow where you’re planted.”

I didn’t know about snouts or growing where I was planted. I thought about what we were doing in the SMiLE songs as a kind of travel line. You know when they show people in movies traveling on a bus or an airplane by showing a red line stretching across a map? SMiLE was a line like that, but through time also. It started at Plymouth Rock and went all the way across to Hawaii, and it stopped along the way at important places in America like Chicago and New Orleans. There was a song that used a piece of “The Old Master Painter,” a Beasley Smith and Haven Gillespie song that Frank Sinatra had recorded, next to a piece of “You Are My Sunshine,” a great song that was the state song of Louisiana because the guy who wrote it, Jimmie Davis, became governor. There was a song that used “Gee” by the Crows, one of the first rock and roll songs. But it wasn’t just about taking pieces of musical history. There were songs about being healthy, about being healthy for yourself and for nature. “Vega-Tables,” later reworked as “Vegetables” for Smiley Smile, is the one that people know about because we used the sound of Paul McCartney chewing celery as percussion. “Child Is Father of the Man” was about mental health and knowing yourself so you could do the right things in the world. And then there were two huge songs at the corners of the project, “Heroes and Villains” and “Good Vibrations.”

That’s the album we started, a way of collecting poetry and sounds and myths and making a perfect thing from them. I was trying to create a spiritual vibe and love for the listener. It was partly about forgetting the ego, which is the reason all the letters are capitalized except for the lowercase i. I was trying to put my arms around everything that music could do, which was everything. “Heroes and Villains” is probably the best song in the whole project, and one of the best songs we ever made. There’s such a genius in Van Dyke’s lyrics, especially “Heroes and villains / Just see what you’ve done.” It has such perfect rhythm in the words. It pushes itself forward. That’s my favorite song from that set most of the time, but there are other great ones, too. Once someone told me that someone they had met said that “Surf’s Up” was important and really great. “Oh,” I said. “Who?” My head was turned when they said the name so I didn’t really hear. “Say it again,” I said and turned my head the right way. The person who thought it was great was Leonard Bernstein. Can you even imagine?

That album came during the sandbox time. The sandbox is sort of a famous thing. I wanted to have a different way of writing, so I brought a sandbox into the living room and set it up around the piano. In a way it didn’t seem like that big a deal. It was an environment that helped bring in ideas. One of the first songs Van Dyke and I made there was “Wonderful,” which almost felt like a classical piece with lyrics put over the top. I was completely locked in and focused. I knew exactly how the vocals should sound, the way they’re laid over each other like blankets on a bed. “Cabinessence” was another sandbox song, and another America song. Van Dyke wanted to write something about the railroads and how they brought people out to the prairie so they could start farms, homes on the range. And I had an idea for a big whirlwind of voices, just every voice you could imagine. Maybe they were the voices of people from the past. There’s banjo in there to make it sound like the America of the past. I tried to think about what it was like to go out into a completely unsettled place. And “Surf’s Up” is so beautiful. It really is a rhapsody, with all the key changes and tempo shifts. At times it seems like it’s just wandering, but it’s wandering in an amazing way. Van Dyke’s lyrics in that song are great, too:

        Hung velvet overtaken me

        Dim chandelier awaken me

        To a song dissolved in the dawn

People say they’re too complicated or they don’t mean anything, but that’s the thing about poetry. It’s ideas, and it makes you have ideas when you listen to it. For those kinds of lyrics, I never asked Van Dyke what they meant. I sang their meaning the way it seemed to me.

Sometimes we started working on songs and they didn’t get very far past instrumentals with no lyrics or at most a few fragments of lyrics. “Look” was like that. “Child Is Father to the Man” was like that. It was based on something written by Karl Menninger, a psychiatrist who had interesting theories about mental health and mental illness, and how people develop, and when doctors should try to help and when they should keep their distance. He was one of the founders of the Menninger Clinic in Kansas. Someone, maybe Van Dyke, also told me there was a similar idea in a poem by Wordsworth.

Poets and writers sometimes gave me great ideas. One of my favorite books was The Four Loves by C. S. Lewis. It was a great way of looking at all the different ways people express love: romantic love, friendship, charity, and sex. All of them are so important. They’re all things I have used in my life. Charity is especially interesting as an idea because it’s so simple. You share what you have with people who need it, and maybe when you need something, someone will share with you. What could be more pure than that? If I see a bum on the street, I will give him whatever cash I have on me, though I always tell him not to spend it on booze. If a guy asks me for a quarter, I’ll give him a twenty. My daughter Daria says she remembers going to McDonald’s with me once and I gave a homeless guy a hundred dollars. I don’t remember that, but it’s possible. I also play charity shows whenever I can. I should write a song about that, you know? I haven’t managed to do it yet. But I did write a song, “Child Is Father to the Man,” about the Menninger book. That was something.

We were trying so many things. You can say looking back that it was too many, but that wasn’t my concern at the time. I just wanted to reach for the highest heights, and sometimes it was too far over everyone’s head, including my own. There was a song called “The Elements: Fire” that started as a piece about Mrs. O’Leary’s cow, who supposedly kicked over a lantern and started the Great Chicago Fire back in the 1870s. History was funny that way. The idea that one little accident could wipe out a whole city was fascinating. For the recording session, I asked people to come into the studio wearing fire hats. I had a bucket with burning wood so the studio would smell like smoke. What I really wanted to do was record the pops and creaks of the wood while it was burning. But as it turned out, that song never made it. A few days after the recording session, a building near the studio burned down. Two days after that, another building burned. I don’t know if there were more fires or if I was suddenly just noticing them, but it made me uncomfortable. I put the masters away. There are stories that I even tried to burn the tapes, but either that’s not true or I don’t remember it. I don’t think I would have done that. I did sometimes have superstitious habits. During “Time to Get Alone” a few years later, I started worrying that the pollution in LA was messing with my lungs, so I arranged for an oxygen tank to be brought to the studio. But burning things would have been going too far.

The way that “The Elements: Fire” came apart, that’s how the whole thing came apart. There was a line at the end of “Cabinessence” that Van Dyke wrote: “Over and over / The crow cries, uncover the cornfield / Over and over / The thresher and plover, the wheatfield.” Mike sang it over and over, like it said. But he had no idea what it meant, and he didn’t think that Van Dyke could explain it either. I didn’t know what it meant, but I knew that it meant something. Maybe it was just me, but I found it hard to explain anything to Mike, and I wasn’t sure who should be explaining anything to anyone anyway.

And then there was the whole thing with Carl and his draft status. He didn’t want to go to Vietnam so he didn’t report to the draft board. They said he was a draft dodger, and the problem got worse and worse when he refused to do the things they asked of him. He wouldn’t do community service or anything. He had money so he could hire a lawyer, and they fought it out over the years. But it was more trouble at a time when I was trying to bring all the pieces of SMiLE together. It was like putting together a jigsaw puzzle on a wall instead of a tabletop. It kept falling.

I couldn’t tell you the exact day I stepped away. It was almost fifty years ago. But at some point I knew SMiLE was done—or rather, that I was done with SMiLE. It was too much pressure from all sides: from Capitol, from my brothers, from Mike, from my dad, but most of all from myself. We were late in our delivery to Capitol. “Heroes and Villains” was supposed to be the follow-up single to “Good Vibrations.” The label wanted it by Christmas, but it wasn’t ready. Nothing was ready. Van Dyke had already split the scene, and there were still holes in the lyrics of other tracks. No one could do them like Van Dyke, which meant that no one could do them at all. I tried but they were too sophisticated. I couldn’t come close. And with no lyrics, we had no way to do our vocals. The rest of it was just chaos. I didn’t know which fragment went with “Cabinessence” or “Do You Like Worms?” I didn’t know how to finish “Surf’s Up.” It was all over the place. It was too rhapsodic.

And the voices were everywhere. I heard Phil Spector’s voice, talking to me about whether I could do something as complicated as his records. I heard my dad’s voice: “What’s the matter, buddy? No guts? Too scared to finish it? Can’t do it, can you? I told you that this so-called masterpiece of yours was going nowhere.” And I heard the other voices, the ones that wanted to do me harm. We’re coming for you, Brian. I heard them more and more. The band needed to move forward, to grow. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it the way I wanted to, and then I couldn’t do it at all. I just chucked it.

SMiLE eventually had a happy ending. But it was a long eventually. For years it wasn’t happy at all. When I couldn’t finish it, I went into a period where the bad things seemed to happen more and more. There were more fights with the rest of the band and more drugs and more voices in my head. When I think of that period, I think more about Pet Sounds than about SMiLE, and I think about “Caroline, No,” which was sort of about Marilyn, but, as time went on, sort of also about me. It was a song that was a story about how you can lose yourself and worry that you will never get yourself back. I know Tony didn’t write it that way, but sometimes I needed it to be that way to help explain things.

Years turned into other years that were the same year. When the band left Capitol for Reprise, when we went to Holland, when my dad died, when I went off to try to do the group California Music—those years, that year, got worse and worse. It got darker and darker, with more voices, more drinking, and more drugs.

The drugs started like they started for lots of people: sort of innocent, not very intense, because they were around, because they were part of what it meant to be a creative person in the ’60s. I first started smoking pot in late 1964. It was great that first time. I had a glass of water and I couldn’t believe it. The water tasted so good, you know? And it made me less nervous, which was always my biggest problem. The first song I wrote when I was smoking was “Please Let Me Wonder.” I got stoned on pot, went to the piano, and I wrote that song in a half hour. Lots of the songs from that period worked that way: “She Knows Me Too Well,” “Let Him Run Wild.” Pot locked me in with my piano, and that gave me more ideas about what it could do. I also heard how instruments sounded when you put them together. If you put the piano and guitar together, it was almost another instrument. The bass and drums were a third thing, not just two things that were going at the same time. I got freed up to think outside of what pop songs were.

Other drugs had different effects. Acid was something else, like I said, because it put voices in my head. That was a bad drug. I’m sorry I did it. I liked Seconals, downers—they were a relax pill. Cocaine came along in the late ’60s, maybe 1969. When I wrote “Sail On Sailor,” there was coke around. I also cowrote, with Al and Mike, “He Come Down,” which sounded like it was about the end of a drug trip but was really more of a gospel thing. That was for Carl and the Passions—So Tough. I love that tune. Mike’s lead is so soulful. Spirituality was the other side of drugs back then, or maybe it was its own kind of drug, in a way. So many people who didn’t like to be in the world the way it was looked for other ways to deal with it. Mike got deep into meditation. He took me to meet the Maharishi, who was a great spiritual master. His speaking voice was very gentle and kind of high-pitched. I started meditating, and it worked great for about a year. It really calmed me down. Then it stopped working. At some point I was so nervous that I couldn’t even relax enough to meditate. That sent me back to drugs.

The drugs weren’t something that I liked for themselves. They were ways of dealing with the fact that my head wasn’t right. But they didn’t solve a thing. With the drugs, in fact, came every other kind of problem. Bad days turned into bad months and then bad years. The music stopped almost completely. Or the music went on without me. During bad years, I hid in my apartment or my house, wherever I happened to be living at the time. I was out of the light, and mostly the light was out of me. Sometimes I had to go to hospitals for a little while, to relax and think—or to relax and not think. It was hard at those hospitals. They were unfamiliar places. The lighting was different than what I was used to, and the sounds were different and I had a hard time sleeping. I stayed up most nights. One of the times I went, in the late ’60s, I was there in bed, trying to get to sleep, and I heard a noise at the door. I turned and there was a guy there with a huge hard-on. I looked away from it, up to the guy’s face, and it looked just like Tonto! I mean the actual Tonto from the TV Lone Ranger show, Jay Silverheels. I wasn’t sure that it was him. He had everything but his horse, Scout. “Are you Tonto?” I said. The guy didn’t say anything. He just stared at me. Then he turned and left the doorway.

The thing about being in a hospital is that you’re stuck in the same room. You see the same door. If you’re at home working, you see the same few doors: the doors of your house, the doors of the studio. If you’re at home not working, you see even fewer doors. You see your bedroom door and maybe the door to your music room. Eventually you only see your bedroom door, and then it’s like another kind of hospital. You have only four walls and whatever you say echoes off them. It’s an echo chamber, but the sounds in it aren’t music. They’re more like the bad voices.

In the ’70s I was home all the time. But what I did when I was home wasn’t necessarily what you were supposed to do when you were home. A father is supposed to come home and ask his kids about their day. Most of the time I didn’t come home. I was already home. And when I went out and came home, I didn’t ask anyone about their day. I was taking speed or doing coke or coming through the door drunk with a cigarette in my hand. I would hug the kids. How did I not get them with the cigarette?

We lived in a house on Bellagio with so much glass. We had a dining room table that got covered with glass. We had stained glass in one of the rooms, a big pattern with a butterfly or a bee. There’s a piece of it on the cover of Wild Honey. We had these big refrigerators that were all glass. Glass was transparent, so I could see what was happening on the other side of it. It was clear when my head was not. Once I painted the house purple, but Marilyn didn’t like it and I had to put it back to its regular color, a kind of cream.

During those years, between making albums, many strange things happened. Sometimes they probably seemed funny to other people. I remember one warm day when I went outside wearing only pants. It didn’t seem like I needed more clothes. Carnie was coming home from school on the bus. I was waiting for her. When I saw the bus, I stepped out in front of it, waving my arms. The driver opened the door. Kids were making noise and he quieted them. “Do you have a cigarette?” I said.

In that house, we had a top-of-the-line stereo with big speakers. I tried to play all the music that was coming out of California. I played the Carpenters. I played the Eagles. I played Fleetwood Mac. I played the Beatles, too, and the Stones, and ELO. I made sure to play “Be My Baby” every single day. The stereo was one of my instruments.

The clock was not. The day had certain times for things, but they weren’t necessarily my times. Meals happened without me. Kids went to school and came back and I might still be in a bathrobe up in the bedroom or downstairs sitting at the piano, still in the bathrobe.

We had visitors. Paul McCartney would come over with Linda and Mary and Stella. Paul was dressed cool then, too. He was in all white leather with these red shoes. The kids went outside to play, and Paul and I sat down at the piano and we sang together. I think we sang “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean.” Sonny and Cher would come over and bring Chastity. John Phillips from the Mamas and the Papas was around, too. We played basketball. Elton John hung out with us sometimes. When Carnie was six, she invited him to her birthday party. He couldn’t come but he sent her back a note with a teddy bear. And once Shaun Cassidy dropped by. The girls really liked that. They screamed and screamed and screamed. Now and again I got out into the world. I ran into Michael Jackson briefly at a party—very nice guy, very pleasant. I met Stevie Wonder a few times, but it was hard for me to get a feel for the kind of guy he was.

We had more visitors. Rich Sloan, my old buddy from Hawthorne, came by. Once we went to Westwood for lunch and I asked him to buy me some cigarettes. I smoked two of them as fast as I could before we got back to the house.

There was so much glass in the house, but the walls between the rooms weren’t glass. You couldn’t see through them, which was good. There were so many bedrooms in the house. I wasn’t a good husband. Sometimes there were other girls around.

I wasn’t much of a father, but I could be a good father at times. The backyard had a pool and there was an upper level with a pond. We had koi in there. Wendy fell in. Marilyn saw and started yelling and I ran. I didn’t usually run, but I ran that time. I got my hand down in there and got her with one arm and rescued her.

I spanked the kids sometimes. I found cigarettes once in Carnie’s room, maybe a bottle of something. I spanked her and then I was really upset over what I had done. I was crying so hard. But I made them laugh, too. I remember taking them to Farrell’s Ice Cream. Someone ordered the Zoo, which had thirty scoops and weighed something like six pounds. On the menu it said that it served between one and fifteen. I’m sure it was a joke, but I decided to take it seriously for a second. I decided that it served one. I asked them for the serving spoon from the kitchen and tried to eat the whole thing.

Those years are blurred from drinking and drugs, and they’re blurred because of how fast they went by. Once I came home and before I was even inside the door I threw up. Once I started sneaking drinks again with medicine and I fell and hit my head. That scared me. I stopped for a little while. I let my hair grow longer so it covered up the bump and the scrape. A little while later I went back to short hair. I cut it myself. I mean I started to cut it myself, but it was uneven and I went from one side to the other, making it shorter and shorter. I got a haircut that was right down to the head. People said I looked like a soldier. Where did my long hair go? How did I lose that happy glow? It was so sad to watch a sweet thing die.

Even at the worst of it, I tried to get to my kids with music. I tried to create a link with them. I taught them songs on the piano. I taught them “California Girls” and “Sloop John B.” They would ask me how many songs I wrote. I didn’t know. I said hundreds. If they asked me to make up a new one, I would, though it would be about a dog or cigarettes or the weather.

I went outside wearing just pants, and usually inside I didn’t have a shirt either. That was not a good time. I was 270 pounds. I didn’t always remember to shower. I stayed in bed or roamed the halls of the house like a ghost. The only place I could settle down and feel like I wasn’t coming apart was at the piano.

I loved Marilyn but it wasn’t working at all. She had been with me since the beginning. It was so important to have her because she was one of the only people who helped me get through anything with my father or my brothers or the band or the voices or the drugs. But things were whirling around me. It was all happening a thousand miles an hour and I was afraid to even step off. You can’t step off of something going that fast.

Carnie was singing at her grade school graduation. I had my short soldier hair then. She was in a play about a circus, and in her part she worked with a magician and sang a song. I couldn’t believe how she sang. It was beautiful, and I knew singing. That was a nice feeling. That made me proud.

Another time Marilyn and I went to Disneyland. I love Disneyland. It’s one of my favorite places. We watched the fireworks. We came home and brought candy for the kids. They were scared because there was an earthquake, just a little one. We sat in our bed and ate candy.

Things got worse. I was at home or out in the driveway without a shirt. I was deep inside drinking and drugs and almost never with the group. The voices were still coming, and I was having a harder time doing things that would quiet them down. Then Dr. Landy came for the first time, and for a little while I got better. I was back with the group starting right around the Bicentennial, and we were making the kinds of records I wanted. One of the best of those was Love You, in 1977. I was able to use the studio again the way I used it with Pet Sounds, and I wrote some songs that were about how I felt in my thirties, the same way that Pet Sounds was about how I felt in my twenties. I wanted to make a record to help everyone around me feel better. We picked up an old song called “Good Time” that Al and I did back around the time of Sunflower. “Good Time” was just what it said it was, a light song about spending time with girlfriends:

        My girlfriend Betty, she’s always ready

        To help me in any way

        She’ll do my cookin’

        She’s always lookin’

        For ways she can make my day

        And when I’m lookin’ at her

        The sound of pitter-patter

        On rainy days like today

        Could get you feelin’ warmer

        And you know what-a that can lead to

        Maybe it won’t last but what do we care

        My baby and I just want a good time

        Might go up in smoke now but what do we care

        My baby and I just want a good time

“Good Time” was originally on the album Marilyn did with her sister, in the group we called Spring, but with all the names of girlfriends changed to boyfriends: Betty was Eddie instead, and then later there was a girl named Penny that we had to change to a guy named O’Ryan. “Ding Dang” was another song brought in from an older session. It’s one of my favorite songs ever, even though it’s less than a minute long. It makes the whole album for me. I wrote that with Roger McGuinn. I was at his house, talking to him, and I said we should write a song together. We started with a simple line: “I love a girl, I love her so madly / I treat her so fine but she treats me so badly.” Later on I wrote the “Ding Dang” part. The keyboard riff has been stuck in my head for years. I love it so much. When a riff is that great, there’s a bigger song that stretches out on both sides of the song on the record. The “Ding Dang” on the album is only like a snapshot of a larger idea.

Lots of that record is great party music: “Mona,” “Honkin’ Down the Highway.” There’s a beautiful ballad called “The Night Was So Young.” We sang great harmonies on that. “Johnny Carson,” which Mike sang with Carl, was a very intimate tune. I tried to depict the mood of watching The Tonight Show, and also how hard it was to be an entertainer year after year.

        When guests are boring he fills up the slack

        Johnny Carson

        The network makes him break his back

        Johnny Carson

        Ed McMahon comes on and says, “Here’s Johnny”

        Every night at eleven thirty he’s so funny

        Don’t you think he’s such a natural guy

        The way he’s kept it up could make you cry

People thought it was a strange way to use music, to write a song like that, but I was using everything I had learned. That album has lots of sounds. I love the way the vocals leapfrog each other during the “Don’t you think he’s such a natural guy” line. Marilyn and I did a duet on “Let’s Put Our Hearts Together,” which was a really sweet song about marriage. One thing on that album was the synthesizer bass lines. I did all the bass lines for the record with an ARP and a Moog synthesizer. A song like “I’ll Bet He’s Nice,” which is about a guy telling a girl that he doesn’t want to hear about her new guy and how great he is, could have easily been on The Beach Boys Today! but it would have sounded completely different. The way it is on Love You, it’s an amazing machine bass sound that just pulls the whole song into it. It’s like an undertow. Those were some of the best bass lines I ever wrote.

I also love the cover of that record. It was really colorful. The overall mood was trying to celebrate good things even if they were surrounded by problems. I tried to carry that mood into the shows we did for that record. It was fun to go out behind a record that I really believed in, but it was tense. Sometimes I was hoarse. Sometimes the other guys were—Dennis came out for an encore in Philadelphia to sing “You Are So Beautiful,” which people know mostly from the Joe Cocker version but don’t know that Dennis helped write. And sometimes there were backstage blowups. Mike was getting on my nerves at that time. He always had a slightly different idea about who we needed to be as a band. He wanted to be at the center, and he had the energy to do it. Sometime during that tour, I socked him. He didn’t like what I was wearing. It was a blue-and-silver pleated cape, like an Elvis thing. Mike told me I looked silly and I just started slugging him. I was really hitting. Stan Love, Mike’s brother, and a guy named Rocky Pamplin, who went with us on the road as bodyguards, pulled me off him. Mike didn’t hit me back. If he did, he would have knocked me unconscious. Instead, I remember a strange feeling of waiting for something that never happened. Lots of that tour was that feeling.

It wasn’t just the band. On “Good Time” there was a lyric that could have been about the band or also could have been about my marriage to Marilyn: “Maybe it won’t last but what do we care / My baby and I just want a good time.” Well, I was only partly right. It didn’t last, and I did care. When I was in the mental hospital in San Diego, I called Marilyn and asked for a divorce. She said yes. I didn’t know what else to do. Things were either whirling even faster or they were just stopped still in the air around me. There was more of my life to live. I had to meet Melinda. I had to get back in the studio and onstage. But I didn’t know any of that yet. I was floating on the sea for a while there.

In 1978 I went back to a mental hospital in San Diego. Some people said mental facility. It wasn’t the first time. I had been to one back in the late ’60s. I don’t remember much about the time in San Diego. It was the same time as my divorce from Marilyn. One of the nurses there was a girl name Carolyn, a black woman, and when I got discharged I asked her if she would come work for me and take care of me. We ended up going together for a few years. I was living first in a rented house on Sunset and then in Pacific Palisades. My head wasn’t on straight at all and I would sometimes say stupid things to her. Once I got impatient and said, “Get your black ass in there and make me lunch.” I apologized immediately but I didn’t feel right about it. She split pretty soon and it was mostly because of me. I’m sorry about it even today. Carolyn, no.

I didn’t feel right about her or myself or anything. Dr. Landy was gone and things got worse, and then he came back and things got better for a little while. Then they got worse again. He took the Green Tree house where I’d been living and had me rent another house on Latigo Shore Drive in Malibu. In that house, he had me on lots of medications. I wasn’t sure I needed all of them, but some of the ones I was taking prevented me from saying anything about the other ones. I used to lie in bed and make noises to calm myself down. Someone came in and asked me what was wrong. Maybe it was Gloria. Was she there by that time? Whoever it was didn’t get an answer. She went to open the curtains and I told her not to. I had it in my head that someone was coming to kill me. I heard noises coming. She listened with me and said it was just the ocean. But it didn’t sound like the ocean to me. Sometimes the noises and the voices made me angry and I started punching the wall. I punched it hard enough to bleed. I got a stud.

Daytime was better. The drapes were usually closed, but I could sense the light and I knew that it was there. I heard voices during the daytime, too, but they were gentler. Gloria came and sat with me. I’m sure it was Gloria. I tried to tell her what the voices were saying. They were telling me bad things about myself. Sometimes they told me to do things I knew I shouldn’t do. Sometimes she would say that she heard voices, too. The voices she said she heard were telling me that I needed to rest. I don’t know if she really heard them. But I was tired and I couldn’t tell if there was light behind the drapes and I listened to her voices. I know Gloria was there because once Dr. Landy was trying to get my attention by grabbing my chin and squeezing. Gloria told him that it wasn’t right to do that, and then Dr. Landy said that he was going to call immigration. I told him not to do that.

At the worst of it, I didn’t have any energy. I forgot to brush my teeth. Sometimes I couldn’t make it to the bathroom at all. It’s nothing I remember very well. It was like being drunk all the time but worse. It was just like being in dark clouds.

So many things happened, but I can’t easily put them in order. Once I was in the Malibu emergency room getting a weigh-in and this guy walked up to me. He had curly hair and was on the short side. “Are you Brian Wilson?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Hi,” he said. “I’m Bob Dylan.” He was there because he had broken his thumb. We talked a little bit about nothing. I was a big fan of his lyrics, of course. “Like a Rolling Stone” was one of the best songs, you know? And “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” and so many more. What a songwriter! I invited him over to my house for lunch the next day.

That was a longer conversation. We just talked and talked about music. We talked about old songs we remembered, songs before rock and roll. We talked about ideas we had. Nice guy. He added vocals to a song I was working on around that time called “The Spirit of Rock and Roll.”

But that was a rare bright spot. Most of the time that house in Latigo Shore was bad. It was bad for eating. It was bad for sleeping. It was bad for thinking. And it was bad for playing music. Once I was in the Jacuzzi relaxing and Dr. Landy came storming right at me. “Get your clothes on,” he said. He led me by the back of the neck down to the music room in the basement. We were in there for five or six hours. He kept asking me to make songs. But I didn’t have any songs in me. I didn’t have any voices in me, good or bad. There was no echo, only emptiness. Dr. Landy had no patience for the emptiness he had helped to make. He screamed at me. When my dad used to scream at me, the words were sharp. When Dr. Landy screamed, the words were flat. They didn’t sound like anything. I was numb to them. He bent down and put his face right next to mine, but I hardly heard a thing. He threw papers and threw pens and finally he left. Another day he put a sheet with music notation on the piano and asked me to play it. The music was simple. I could have played it. But I was so tired that I just wanted to go to bed. Dr. Landy wouldn’t let me go. “Do it,” he said. He screamed again, again without an exclamation point.

The worst part of all of was that I ended up disappointed in myself. Maybe I could have written a song. Maybe I should have played the music. In my life before Dr. Landy, in my life before the drugs that brought Dr. Landy, I knew how to deal with disappointments. When I was young, Phil Spector called me in to watch him produce a song for his Christmas record. We had met after I heard “Be My Baby” on the radio and drove over to tell him how much it meant to me. The Christmas song was “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.” He was using so many session musicians, an entire orchestra almost. Hal Blaine was there, and Leon Russell and Tommy Tedesco—all the guys who later played with the Beach Boys. Phil Spector asked me if I wanted to play piano. I couldn’t believe it. That was exactly what I wanted. “Just one thing,” he said. “Play it hard.” I played it as hard as I could. I really leaned on the keys.

Fifteen minutes later, Phil Spector came back into the studio. I was so excited. I stood up when I saw him coming. “Brian,” he said. “I don’t think I’m going to need you on this one.” I was disappointed, but I was cool about it. That was the business. You didn’t cry over spilled milk. And we ended up cutting our own version of the song the next year, on our own Christmas record. I didn’t play piano on that one either. It was Gene DiNovi, a great jazz pianist who played with almost everyone, from Dizzy Gillespie to Anita O’Day to Artie Shaw.

Not being able to play piano on “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” was bad news and a disappointment, but it didn’t depress me. But other times I would be in the middle of a perfectly good day, with no bad news for miles around, and I would get depressed. I would go to bed and wouldn’t get out for days. Sometimes it was simple depression, and sometimes it was other things, too—the voices in my head, or the sense that the world wasn’t spinning right. It felt like a big cloud moved over me after I junked SMiLE.

Even when we moved past it, I wasn’t okay with things. The idea of the record kept weighing me down. I could feel it on me whenever I started to get too far into hope and possibility. I would write a really cool tune, start the recording process, call the guys in, then suddenly lose interest and walk away from whatever I was doing. I started making up excuses like I didn’t feel good or I had a sore throat, anything I could come up with to avoid confronting my own work. I was afraid of failing, afraid my dad was right, afraid I couldn’t live up to the example that Phil Spector set for me. It was the depression creeping up on me that would eventually go over me completely, take away my spirit, and paralyze me for so many years.

I was in bed in the early ’70s. We recorded at my house, but for most of the morning I’d stay in bed. Then I would come downstairs and one of the guys from the band or an engineer would pull their head up and squint at me. “What’s the matter with you?” they would say. I wouldn’t know exactly. “I just feel down,” I’d say. I would work for a while and then go back upstairs. It was just a matter of steps. Back upstairs I would try to hear what they were doing, and sometimes someone would call up to me and say they needed me again. That’s how “Marcella” worked. I was mostly done with the production and I ran out of gas, so I left. A while later I heard them calling up to me. They wanted my voice. I went down and finished up the song. Once or twice I asked the guys to forgive me when I couldn’t be there, though I wasn’t sure why I was asking for forgiveness for something I wasn’t doing on purpose. Depression was something that went over me like a kind of tide. I can hear it in some of the music I made back then. Mike started saying that even the happy songs sounded sad.

Later on my mom told me that when my dad was upset about something—like when we fired him as the manager of the band—he got depressed and stayed in his bed for days. That wasn’t something I knew at the time. It’s strange to think about it, because maybe everything gets handed down through the blood. My dad drank, maybe because his dad did. That was what people did back then. They tried to make life better so it wouldn’t get worse. How they tried were just guesses, and sometimes they were wrong guesses. They were stabs in the dark.

I was listening to the radio once and they were interviewing some jazz producer. He was talking about how Miles Davis once watched a movie that he had been asked to write a soundtrack for. It had a plot twist. One of the characters wasn’t who she was supposed to be, or maybe someone was dreaming and woke up in the middle. Anyway, he had a specific thing that he said about the movie afterward: “It’s got a wrinkle in it, don’t it?” I never saw the movie he was talking about. I don’t know that much about jazz. I don’t even know that much about Miles Davis. But what he said is true about life and every part of it. It’s got a wrinkle in it, don’t it?

When we put SMiLE away, Capitol was still on us for a next record. The record that came out of it, Smiley Smile, was a different kind of thing completely. The story has been told so often about me completely bailing out from the Beach Boys after I junked SMiLE and just cutting out to my room, but no way is that true at all. It’s total bullshit. Smiley Smile is the first and best piece of evidence. My instinct told me it was time to get the other guys involved in some of the production work. I leaned on Carl for most of it. He had been working with me in the booth here and there, especially during the Beach Boys’ Party! sessions, so it felt like he had it in the pocket.

For starters, we pared down some of the tracks I did for SMiLE and recut them ourselves, without the Wrecking Crew guys. We used only a few pieces: the backing track from “Heroes and Villains” came along with us, and also the end of “Vega-Tables.” We took “Good Vibrations,” which was already a huge hit and needed an album to be on. But other than that, it was all new. We went back into the home studio in Bel Air and cut the album in a month and a half, June and July 1967. The studio wasn’t quite ready yet. I had set it up to make demos. So to get certain effects, we had to do so many different things. We recorded vocals in the swimming pool. We recorded them in the shower. We got incredible effects with nothing fancy at all. We did them ourselves, without the Wrecking Crew guys. That was amazing. I would like to do that again, something kind of modest, without really rambunctious instrumental tracks.

The instruments on that record were a little softer. Carl called that record a bunt instead of a grand slam. But it had some incredible things on it. “Little Pad” is really cool. “Fall Breaks and Back to Winter,” too. And the sound is as interesting as the songs. I had a white Baldwin organ that was just fantastic. I don’t know where that is. It might be in storage. But that’s the kind of thing I would like to try again, to go for those low organ notes. They did great things to “Heroes and Villains,” kept it warm. I used the other guys to make the record more than any time since Beach Boys’ Party!, especially Carl. For the first time, an album came out with the credit “Produced by the Beach Boys.”

Smiley Smile bombed. It was such a different sound for us—for anybody, really. The public wasn’t ready for it. Next was the Wild Honey album. That was a quick one, maybe the quickest. We were going to do that Hawaii live album but it didn’t pan out, and right after Smiley Smile we went back to the studio. I got inspired and wrote a whole batch of songs in an R&B style, collaborated with Mike on the lyrics, and started recording in my house. The band played all the instruments ourselves. We started in late September and had the record done by mid-November and out by mid-December. I thought it sounded great, another total departure. Wild Honey did much better than Smiley Smile and got us back on the radio—we scored two Top Twenty singles, “Wild Honey” and “Darlin’,” with Carl wailing on lead vocals—and we were on to another record.

Through that whole time, the real SMiLE stayed on the shelf as we moved on to Friends and 20/20. It was a high shelf also—too high to reach. I never talked about it to people. I knew that people discussed it, because it was kind of a legend, but they rarely brought it up with me. Then, after Imagination, I was at that Christmas party at Scott Bennett’s and I sat down at the piano and started to play “Heroes and Villains.” I don’t know why I did it, exactly. It wasn’t to show it off or bring it back up. I just heard something that was an echo of it and it got me thinking. Someone told me it sounded great and I went further into it. That was the beginning of starting to play those songs again.

About a year later there was a tribute show at Radio City Music Hall. People could pick any songs they wanted. Paul Simon did “Surfer Girl.” Billy Joel did “Don’t Worry, Baby.” Elton John did “God Only Knows.” I sang “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” with Elton and “Heroes and Villains” on my own. Wilson Phillips—my daughters Carnie and Wendy and John Phillips’s daughter, Chynna Phillips—sang “You Still Believe in Me,” and it blew my fucking mind. It was a real trip hearing all the different singers. I liked seeing how people changed a little part of an arrangement, or re-created songs that we built in the studio. Vince Gill, Jimmy Webb, and David Crosby did such a beautiful version of “Surf’s Up.” It was a great night and really amazing to hear so many people who wrote such great songs on their own playing my songs.

During rehearsals, I dozed off on a couch in the back of the green room. The Harlem Boys Choir was singing “Our Prayer,” which I had set aside when I stopped work on SMiLE. A version of it was on the 20/20 album, at the end, with “Cabinessence,” another song from the project. I was half-awake in the green room listening to the choir, and I flashed back to the original sessions. It pulled me up into the harmonies. I was listening harder now, up on my elbow. When it was over, I ran out to the stage. “Hey, guys,” I said. “I wrote that!” From the darkness there was applause.

After that I started thinking more about SMiLE, not just “Heroes and Villains” but the whole thing. There were so many great songs and pieces on there, and they had come out wrong. I don’t mean that they weren’t recorded well. I was okay with the version of “Our Prayer” that the other guys put together for 20/20. What I mean is that they were supposed to come out as one whole thing. The original album was a big idea about America and myth. Forty more years of America had passed and finally I could see my way across all the music we were trying to make back then. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like a living thing again instead of something in a museum.

After the live Pet Sounds record, I put out an album called Gettin’ in Over My Head. It was a mix between a compilation and a spring cleaning, even though it came out in summer. I still had some of the songs I had done with Andy Paley, and I still thought they were great. I wanted them to see the light of day. I had made some more songs with Steve Kalinich, who was great, and I had leftovers from working with Joe Thomas. I had the idea to send the songs around and see if I could get some other singers to perform them with me.

I could. Lots of people wanted to do it. We went into the studio to record. They were other rock singers around my age, and it was a blast to produce them. I didn’t go easy on them either. Elton John did a song called “How Could We Still Be Dancin’,” which is one of my favorites of all my solo stuff. I told him to get out there and play the piano like Billy Joel. Eric Clapton did one called “City Blues” with me in London. I wasn’t happy with the first takes, so I went in to tell him. “Hey, man,” I said, “if that’s the best you can do, I guess we’ll just use it.” Eric killed it on the very next take. And Paul McCartney sang a song with me at Western called “A Friend Like You.” Sometimes he was flat on his vocals and I had to say so.

The most important singer I brought in on that record was for a song called “Soul Searchin’.” It was a song I had written with Andy Paley, and the singer was Carl. It was his last vocal. He had recorded it with me years before, and I had never found the right spot for it. Gettin’ in Over My Head was the right spot.

Four of the songs came from Sweet Insanity, though I didn’t reuse “Water Builds Up.” I did use “Let’s Stick Together,” which was “The Waltz” and had new lyrics written with Van Dyke Parks. Van Dyke had come back into the picture because I was thinking about SMiLE all the time. And because I was thinking about it all the time, I was also talking about it all the time. It was in many conversations with the band, and one day Darian asked me if I would ever remake it. It was a brave idea and a crazy idea. There were lots of memories in there that were hard for me. The memories of the music were great, but the memories of everything around it weren’t. And even the music was a question instead of an answer. I sometimes heard songs on the radio that were great songs but simple songs, and I wondered about the people who made them. Was it easier to do songs like that? Was it healthier? They could just do them and then go on to other things. Melinda listened to the tracks and told me, “Brian, this is so brilliant—you have to finish it.” But I still wasn’t sure.

Darian took the lead. He loaded all the fragments of old songs onto his computer. We started to listen to them together. We started to think about how they could be whole again. He was my leader. But I was his leader. We were each other’s leaders. He would tell me that something should be one way, and I would agree, and then a few minutes later I would have another idea.

I hadn’t listened to all the tracks since I made them the first time. Some of it I remembered perfectly, but other parts were a real surprise. It was very emotional because I took a lot of drugs during the making of SMiLE, and I wasn’t always at my best mentally. I had depression. I had fear. I wasn’t sleeping well. The second time through I remembered sleeping so badly and worrying so much.

Darian didn’t stop there. He found original lyric sheets for a song called “Do You Like Worms?” that we couldn’t completely decipher, so I called Van Dyke Parks, who had been there for the original songs. The very next day he came by and helped make sense of all the lyrics. It was a real trip to listen to those old bits and pieces a third time, not just with Darian but with Darian and Van Dyke. I asked Van Dyke if he had ever thought about writing the rest of the lyrics. He had. Slowly, with the band, with Van Dyke’s help, we started to rebuild SMiLE. We didn’t use all the pieces. But we used lots of them. The thing I remember best was going through the third movement, from the California Saga into Hawaii. I was so proud about that. It brought back so many memories.

And it wasn’t just the lyrics. We dug up old sounds and old ideas also and put them back into the old puzzle to make something new. There was a song called “She’s Goin’ Bald” on the Smiley Smile album in 1967. Originally, it was different. Originally, it was called “He Gives Speeches.” It was a strange little piece, lots of voices. To do that in 1967, we used something called an Eltro Information Rate Changer, which changed pitch without speeding up or slowing down the tape. The Eltro was one of those toys we used as a tool. About a year after we tried the Eltro, it was the voice of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey. When we were doing SMiLE again in 2004, people who heard it thought abut HAL, not the original record.

It reminded me of something that Ray Davies said once about using Indian music in his music, and the Beatles. He did it first, but then more people knew about the Beatles, so he went from being two years ahead of them to being two years behind them. Sometimes that’s a more comfortable way to do it. It might feel like people don’t remember all the ideas you had or that you were first, but it takes the pressure off. Making SMiLE again was like rebuilding a sand castle or raising the Titanic. Everyone remembers how it used to look. But everyone also understands that it’s never going to be exactly the same as it was before. It can’t be. That’s not how time works. But it meant something new to people. One of the guys in my band, Probyn Gregory, had been a fan of the idea of the album forever. In the early ’80s, he took out an ad in the newspaper asking Capitol to release some version of it. Twenty years later he played on it. Can you believe it?

Lots of my life has been a struggle with understanding how much my music meant to people. It took a long time for me to get it. Sometimes people needed to tell me. Other times I heard it in the music. That happened when I was finishing SMiLE. I started to hear again all the different things we were putting in there, all the different parts of American music. We were trying to reach everyone, and finally we did. People say SMiLE is one of the greatest albums ever made. I’m not sure about that. I am proud of it, but I also think it’s a little overstated, overdone. I think it’s too much music—not too complicated but too rhapsodic, with too many different sections. Still, finishing it was a huge relief. It was a weight lifted.

At the studio, Mark Linett, our engineer, walked over and handed me a box. “What’s this?” I asked. “That’s SMiLE,” he said. I held it right next to my heart.

When the album came out, I sat with Van Dyke and asked him how the hell we did it in the first place. He didn’t really answer. He had a little grin on his face. The CD was on a little table between us. I got goose bumps.

SMiLE was hard in the studio—it was hard in the ’60s and it was hard forty years later, though not as hard. It was easier onstage. By the time I finally finished the album I understood more about what I was supposed to do for audiences. I understood that I was supposed to make them happy. And so I got on airplanes even though I was tired and worried. I chewed on yellow Ricolas for my throat and drank some tea to try to slow my mind down. I pumped myself up as time got close and then circled up with the band. And then I went out and tried to give the album to the audience. All my fears disappeared whenever I was onstage. That’s why I think that the only real answer is in music. Some answers are in my own songs, and some answers are in other people’s songs. One of the songs that never fails is “Let It Be.” I sing it to myself all the time. Whenever it comes on the radio, it lifts me. Whenever I have mental problems, it saves me, big time. It’s like a Valium to me.

The other songs that lift me are my daughters’ songs. That’s for different reasons. That proves to me I made something that will last forever. Whatever talent I have, whatever I got from my dad or from wherever, I passed it on to Wendy and Carnie. They got some singing talent from me and some from Marilyn. I knew that Carnie could sing as far back as when I saw her in grade school in the circus play. It made me so proud. But I didn’t know that both of them would end up singing for real. They had a singing act. Carnie and Wendy worked together along with John Phillips’s daughter. They were big stars for a while. Their album sold ten million copies! I loved seeing how good they were as singers, but also it scared me. Not because of them but because of what else was out there. I told them to look out for the sharks. But I am happy they went into music. It reminds me all the time of what Marilyn and I gave them.

Later I called Carnie and asked her to record a song with me. It was called “Fantasy Is Reality/Bells of Madness.” It was for a Rob Wasserman album. When we made the song, I watched Carnie as she sang. I was looking at my daughter and thinking about when she was little; about her sister when she was little; about how I was young then, too; about the cover of Sunflower; about feeling my mom’s hands as she lowered me into the crib. People are beautiful. Life can be, too.

In the studio that day with Carnie, I was so happy that I told her to give me the telephone. I called a random number. Some guy answered. “Hello,” I said. “Did you order a pizza?” The guy said no. “Well, screw you then,” I said. We must have laughed for a half hour.

My kids have always brought out the kid in me. But I never really got over the guilt that I was a lousy father to Carnie and Wendy. I remember I took Wendy to lunch once in Malibu. I wanted to tell her I was sorry. I wanted to make sure she knew I loved her. I had things that took me away. Some of them were things I wanted to be doing. Some of them were things that happened to me. But I wished I had been there more. I didn’t say everything I wanted to say, but I said some of it.

I hope I can be a good father to my younger kids. I have made the effort to stay involved with all of them. Sometimes I take the girls to the beauty parlor to get their nails done, or I take all of them out for ice cream. I have played concerts for Daria and Delanie’s school, and once Jeff Foskett and I worked with Daria’s school choir when they were performing my songs in a competition. That made me a cool dad, I think, or at least made me as cool as the other dads who put in time for their kids. When Daria was six, I arranged with Michael Jackson to have her birthday party at his Neverland Ranch. Her whole class went. What a far-out trip! I couldn’t believe how excited she was.

Delanie is at school in Boston now, so it’s a little quieter around the house during the school year. The two youngest kids, Dash and Dakota Rose, go with me for pizza and to watch Dylan’s basketball games. And Daria drives now, so she can be in charge of the younger kids and bring them to me and Melinda. They meet us at the deli for lunch or at a great Mexican place on Ventura called Casa Vega. I love the flan there. And sometimes we go to the movies, load up on snacks, and enjoy the show. I hope the kids think I’m a good hang. One thing I love to do with my kids now is a thing I also liked to do with Carnie and Wendy, and that’s play piano and sing. Their favorite song is the one I didn’t write, “Barbara Ann.” That’s okay; the singing is the gift.

And the kids are the gift, because they keep the family going. When Wendy had her first baby, I got real excited and ran around the hospital saying, “Leo Wilson’s here!” I knew it wasn’t really his name. He had her husband’s last name. But I liked the sound of it.

There are lots of turning points in life. That year of SMiLE was a big one for me. In some ways it was one of the worst years of my life, and in other ways it turned into one of the best. It had ways in which it was the worst because I finally had to confront SMiLE head on, which meant thinking through all the ways that it almost sunk me, all the things I had hoped for it and couldn’t handle. But I finally got it behind me. We toured the show all around the world in 2004 and 2005. I played it live around a hundred times. Can you believe that? And the record was a huge success, more than a million copies. It wasn’t just a way of avoiding failure anymore. It was a success. It wasn’t just that I put the bad vibes behind me. I put good ones in front of me. The end of that SMiLE tour was the start of a creative explosion, the first real time like that since the Love You album.

I remember when it started. I had been bringing a small Yamaha synthesizer on the road for the bus and the hotel room so I would have something to play whenever I got the urge. And I was getting the urge all the time toward the end of that tour. I was hearing music in my head again, and it was coming in louder and clearer than the voices. The music began pouring out of me, at all hours of the day and night. I was playing not only on the tour bus but in the hotel and in my music room at home. I wrote so many songs, had so many ideas, and a good portion of it was done on the road. I had the idea to do a children’s album at one point, and I wrote a song called “Life’s a Merry Go Round” that came to me all in a rush, complete with an arrangement—Hammond B-3, ukulele, bells, tuba, accordion. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I was hearing me again, you know?

When we went to Carnegie Hall, I couldn’t believe it. Brian Wilson in Carnegie Hall! I wondered what my dad would have thought. Would he be proud? We were staying at the RIHGA Royal in New York City, and I got to thinking about how the hell I got all the way from junking SMiLE in 1967 to playing it live at Carnegie Hall in 2004. It was a great feeling but also overwhelming. Melinda was right there with me, and every time the fear started to wash over me, she told me I had to keep going. Nobody ever did that to me in that way, with that mix of firmness and confidence and love. I came up with a title to explain Melinda, “Nobody Ever Did Me Like You Do.” In a few hours I had the whole tune in the can—chords, melody, lyrics. It was a really sweet ballad with a really cool chord progression.

And then in Australia, at our hotel, I was talking to Jerry Weiss in the lounge. He was telling me about this path that he walked on every day. It was at a park near his house. I got the idea of writing about a path, and I couldn’t get it out of my head. The next morning when I woke up, I went to the Yamaha and started playing what was in my head: four ascending chords followed by three descending chords. I knew I had something. I called Jerry and had him bring a piece of paper, and I started talking through all the ideas that came with the chords. I had a title, “Walking Down the Path of Life.” I had some lyrics. Once I knew I was hooked into something real, I worked on it before sound checks and at the hotel. Finally I finished the song. It was a spiritual thing, almost a personal gospel track:

        Walking down the path of life

        Feel His presence day and night

        In me, with me all the time

        His love comes to me so sublime

        Warms me, heals me, wash my sins away

        Shows me how to live my life each day

        Every night, I will pray

        I’ll be good every day

        Make me strong, show the way

        When I was a little child

        I learned that prayer was so worthwhile

        As I grow, I’m on my own

        But I will never be alone

A bunch more songs poured out of me at that time, some of which I knew I had to put out as soon as I could, some of which I never released. We finished up the SMiLE 2004 tour in Auckland, New Zealand, and I remember getting back to the house in California and telling Melinda it was the best tour I had ever been on. I thanked her again for pushing me to do it. It was the best thing I could have done, no matter how much it scared me at the time.

Christmas 2004 was a good time. The holiday vibe around the house was great, and I was sure that nothing would get me down. But then I was watching the news on TV the day after Christmas and the announcer came on and said that there was a massive tsunami in Asia. A few hundred thousand people were killed or missing. My heart sank. So many people were hurting. And then it hit me more personally. For SMiLE, we toured and recorded with the Stockholm Strings and Horns, great players from Sweden. Markus Sundland, our cellist, went vacationing with his girlfriend, Sofi, in Phuket, Thailand. They were there when the tsunami hit. They were sitting by a pool, and when the wave hit they were swept away. Sofi got lucky and was taken up into a tree. She was there for three hours with both of her legs broken, but she lived. Markus was missing. We were all devastated. Melinda and I went on CNN with Larry King to publicize Markus being missing and to see if we could get some help in locating him. They found his body weeks later. We were all heartbroken. But even then I noticed a difference. I was sad, but I wasn’t so down that I couldn’t get back up. I was sad and able to use the things I was feeling to put emotions into my music. That was the way it was supposed to work.