Catch a wave and you’re sittin’ on top of the world
—“Catch a Wave”
I never thought about topping SMiLE, not even after “Walking Down the Path of Life” got me pointed back in the right direction. It couldn’t be topped. But I started to have some sense of the right direction. In the beginning of 2005, Clive Davis contacted me to see if I would be interested in making a Christmas album. It made sense, in a way. The first spark of the second version of SMiLE came at that Christmas party when I sat down at the piano and started to play “Heroes and Villains.” And I loved Christmas albums. Phil Spector’s A Christmas Gift for You was one of the best albums ever, even if my piano playing didn’t make it onto “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.” And the Beach Boys’ Christmas album, the one from 1964, was one of my favorite projects, in a way, because we got to work with Dick Reynolds. That Christmas album was a split. Side one was originals I wrote, some with Mike, about the holidays. We wrote “Little Saint Nick,” which was a Christmas version of “Little Deuce Coupe.” We wrote “The Man with All the Toys,” which was a great song about Santa Claus that was like a postcard. It was just what someone would see if they happened to see Santa working in his workshop:
Someone found a lighted house
Late one night
And he saw through the window
A sight
A big man in a chair
And little tiny men everywhere
When I went back into the studio to do a new Christmas album in 2005, I rerecorded both of those songs. “The Man with All the Toys” felt different to sing now that I was older and bigger. I had some unfinished pieces of music that I gave to Bernie Taupin and Jimmy Webb to finish as holiday songs, and they did. Bernie took “Nobody Ever Did Me Like You Do,” the ballad I wrote for Melinda in New York, and put on some new lyrics; the song ended up being “What I Really Want for Christmas,” the title track. Bernie did a beautiful job, and it’s a beautiful holiday song. Jimmy’s song, “Christmasey,” was great, too. There are certain guys who can write lyrics like that, and I don’t know if there will be too many more of them. When you make something like the Christmas record, you can show the full range of what you know about production. Check out “On Christmas Day.” Listen to the dynamics and the way it builds. It’s got a great strong, slow-rock vibe. I did some traditional songs, too, though not “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.” I never did get to play piano on that song.
We recorded that album in April and then went back on the road for the summer. We were touring in Europe. We played a lot of great places, like the Glastonbury Festival. We went to Liverpool, where the Beatles were from, and sang their song “Tell Me Why” as a tribute to them—I hadn’t sung it since 1965, when we did a version on the Beach Boys’ Party! album. The next day we were flying from Liverpool to Ireland to play a few shows there. The airport in Liverpool was called John Lennon Airport. Can you imagine that? The flight from Liverpool to Dublin was a real trip. The entire plane was full of fans coming to see us play in Ireland. I was talking to everyone on the airplane sitting near me. People were singing the whole way. Someone called the plane Wilson Air and that stuck. I decided to cook up something special for the Irish fans, and the next night, in Cork, I taught the band the vocals for “Walking Down the Path of Life.” When we came out for the encore, instead of going to my keyboard at center stage, I went to Darian’s on the side. It was just me and the band doing vocals, and me standing up and playing keyboard with no other instruments. It came out great. That was the only time I debuted a new song that way. It was a spiritual feeling.
On that summer tour we did two nights in Rome. On our day off we went to Vatican City. We were downstairs in the catacombs where all the popes were buried. The guide told us about each tomb and the pope who was inside it. While he was talking, I slipped away. I wanted to sneak off to the tomb of John Paul II, who had died just a few months before. He was a good man. I wanted to look at where he was buried and think about that. As I was walking back to the tour, at least a dozen people came up and thanked me for my music. They weren’t all American. One couple was German. One woman was Japanese. There was an Australian family. They were from all over the world. I was still thinking about the pope and how everyone ends up the same eventually. All that’s different is what we leave behind.
Those thoughts stayed in my head. That alone was a sign that it was a good year. I had been in so many periods of darkness and confusion when I couldn’t hold on to my own thoughts. But toward the end of SMiLE my thoughts started to stay with me, and that continued on through 2005. I would go to sleep thinking about songs and wake up still thinking about them. They didn’t disappear. They just got a little fuller.
My new ideas also helped me to think about old ideas. That came from SMiLE, too. I had been back in the old tapes with Darian and Van Dyke, and that meant that I had to go back in time and figure out why I made certain choices. After SMiLE, lots of other old songs started to pop up in my mind. At some point I had worked on a version of “Proud Mary.” I love that song. I loved the original that John Fogerty did with Creedence Clearwater Revival, but I especially loved the version that Phil Spector did with Tina Turner. He took that cool rock and roll riff and just made it sound so big. I cut a version of it with Don Was where we had a big choir. It was a great version, but it never came out. I didn’t even know where the tape of those sessions was anymore. Almost ten years later I woke up thinking about it. I cut another version at Scott Bennett’s house. It was great. It had some pop. But I could hear that it wasn’t perfect, that the mix didn’t have enough left-hand synth bass on the second verse. I have to get Scott to remix that one of these days. It still bugs the hell out of me.
When I listened to that song or any other song, I started to hear those layers again. When a song came on the radio, I saw it in my mind as a whole thing, and then in pieces, and then I saw the pieces come together.
One day the song “That Lucky Old Sun” popped into my head. It was an old song about how hard it is to work and be a man but how easy it is to just be the sun and stay in the sky all day. The song was written by Beasley Smith and Haven Gillespie, the same people who wrote “The Old Master Painter,” which we put a piece of on SMiLE. “That Lucky Old Sun” was a big hit for Frankie Laine in the late ’40s, and everyone else sang it, too. Sinatra did it great. When I was little and his version came out, there was another version on the radio by Louis Armstrong. That was the version I liked the most. In California in 2005, I heard his version in my head. I thought I knew where the melody went and where the harmonies went. I thought I remembered that Gordon Jenkins produced it. Gordon Jenkins was a great arranger who worked with Sinatra, too. He did Where Are You?, which was one of Sinatra’s great albums, in 1957, and that same year he did a Christmas album called A Jolly Christmas from Frank Sinatra. Sinatra didn’t sing many of the same Christmas songs that I did on my albums.
I wanted to make sure that Gordon Jenkins did that version of “That Lucky Old Sun” for Louis Armstrong, so I went down to Tower Records to buy it. While I was there, I spent longer than usual looking through all the records. I looked at jazz and I looked at country and I looked at lots of rock and roll. I even bought a CD of the original Pet Sounds. No one could believe that I didn’t already have one in my house. When I was driving home, I listened to it, which wasn’t something I liked to do. Listening to SMiLE again was one thing, because that was a way of finishing it. Listening to Pet Sounds was more difficult. We had re-created it onstage, which I liked, but the original album was all memories. I had to skip “God Only Knows.” It was too hard. It reminded me of Carl, and that reminded me of everything else.
After I got “That Lucky Old Sun,” I reworked it completely. I used the lyrics but rearranged the chords. No one had ever done a version of the song like that. And then there was another burst of ideas. Or maybe it was that the burst at the end of SMiLE never went away. Ideas were coming almost faster than I could get to the piano. During that time I called Ray every morning to sing him little bits of pieces I was working on. I called him at five o’clock in the morning every day—he was back in New York, so it was eight o’clock his time. I never called so that he would hear the phone ring at 7:58 or 8:01. It was always eight. I was in bed still, but I needed feedback before I started working for the day. I would sing him a melody or tell him an idea for lyrics. I didn’t want him to tell me that it was good if he didn’t think so. But mostly he thought so. He would tell me that they were great. Or if he thought they were even better than great he would say that. He came up with a code so he could say it quicker: WCW, which meant World-Class Wilson. I was writing lots of WCW.
Right around that time, Dr. Landy died. He had lung cancer and got pneumonia and wasn’t strong enough to fight it off. He had been living in Hawaii at the time. When I heard about it, I was shocked. There wasn’t any good way to react. Parts of me were sad. Parts of me were guilty. Parts of me were relieved. Overall, it really knocked me back a step. But being knocked back a step in 2006 was different from being knocked back a step in other years. There were times in my life when it would have sent me to my chair or to my bed. But in 2006 I was working, and I just gathered up the news and kept moving into more work.
I don’t think I really reacted, in some ways, and maybe I didn’t even understand what it meant until years later when I read an interview with John Fogerty. John used to live down the street from me and Melinda; we would see him out jogging and sometimes at the deli. In the interview, John was talking about how he felt when Saul Zaentz died. Zaentz was the owner of Fantasy Records, and he took all of John’s songs away from him after Creedence Clearwater Revival ended. They were tied up in so many lawsuits. John said that if you had asked him when he was younger how he would react when Saul Zaentz died, he would have said that he would go to the funeral and stand on the grave and dance up and down. But when it actually happened, he just looked at his wife and shrugged. Time passed. Things meant less or they meant different things.
That’s sort of how I felt in a world without Landy. At first I mostly called people. I called my daughters and my friends. I called some people who had known me when I was with Dr. Landy. It was weird to give them the news about him. I was still around and he was gone, and I was the one who was strong enough to say so. And then I just sat in a room and thought. I thought about the first time I ever met Dr. Landy and how desperate I was back then to get control of my life, of any part of it. He helped me do that. But he went too far. He went too far in every direction.
People sometimes ask me if Dr. Landy was a father figure, if he did the kinds of things that my dad did. I don’t think he was. Both of them liked to put themselves in charge of me and tell me what was best for me. But my dad loved me. He loved all of us. Helping us with the band benefitted him. He got profits. But he wasn’t only interested in the profit. Dr. Landy seemed at some point like he was only interested in the profit, in getting his name on my songs and taking credit and taking money and getting his name on my legal papers. Landy might have helped me a little bit, might have helped so that I didn’t sink lower and maybe even out of sight, but it was far outweighed by all the horrible things he did. Nine years of bullshit, remember. Also, I was partly my dad. I could sense things in me that were things in him. That didn’t happen with Dr. Landy, not even when he died. I only thought about the things in me that were different from the things in him. When my dad died in 1973, it really knocked me down. When Dr. Landy died in 2006, I heard the news and sat and thought about it for a while, and then I got back to work.
The songs kept coming, in pieces and sometimes whole. I talked to Scott Bennett about them almost every day, and we were often at his house recording. On the way over, we used to listen to Pet Sounds in the car, especially “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder).” That was my Valium. I wasn’t always up for listening to old songs, but that summer I really felt the connection. “That Lucky Old Sun” became a kind of beginning for the songs, and they moved out in all directions from there. I was excited about the new songs. I wanted to release them the way they were, but the band felt differently. Scott and Mark Linett and Jeff Foskett thought they needed to be rerecorded. Melinda agreed. Everyone agreed, really. They kept saying their opinion and eventually I decided they were right. I decided to turn them all into one album.
But when I laid out the songs, I didn’t always see how they were related to each other. Some of them were about memory and how it repeated in you, how echoes either brought you back things you had heard earlier or let you hear things differently. Some of them were about California. One was about Mexico. A few were love songs. Sometimes it’s okay to leave songs on their own. Sometimes you want to tie them together. That’s the real meaning of an album, going way back—people collected songs in a kind of book. I wanted the songs to be their own book. The only person I thought could do that was Van Dyke. We were both still humming a little bit from SMiLE, and when we spoke about the new songs, I asked him to write some narration over theme music I was composing. I thought it would tie the whole project together.
The album came into focus that way. We started with “That Lucky Old Sun,” the actual song, though not a full version of it. That became the title song. It was an album about suns moving across the sky all day, but also rising and setting. The whole thing would be like a day, and it would make you think of other days. That would let us make an album that was about memory and echoes. After “That Lucky Old Sun,” the next song was “Morning Beat,” which I wrote about a typical day of mine, and then I spoke a section of Van Dyke’s narration that we called “Room with a View”:
Just now I was thinkin’ ’bout another perfect day
Wishing it would come again your way
Down below, a sparkled city scatters by the bay
Tells you your suspicions are at play
One by one, a carpet of star-spangled cities sleep
Like so many dancing diamonds with a beat
Each of them are home with walls of stories they could tell
Meet the crack of dawn
A freeway starts to roll
An owl hoots it’s last good-bye to a coyote on patrol
Each day keeps me guessin’
Will you take what I’m confessing?
Will you find the heartbeat in LA?
What was the heartbeat in LA? Partly it was old Beach Boys songs. Scott and I decided that it was okay to be nostalgic sometimes. I had been making music for almost fifty years. There must have been some songs or ideas that I could go back to and look at again. We wrote “Forever She’ll Be My Surfer Girl” as a love song not to a girl but to the actual song. There’s a line in the lyrics, “Sweet voices right from heaven / Radio seven,” partly because “Surfer Girl” went to number seven in Billboard and partly because the BBC has Radio 2, and I liked the sound of Radio 7.
“Oxygen to the Brain” was an especially great song for me. It was about getting through challenges, no matter how difficult they seemed. When I sang it, I thought about all the times I refused to give up, all the times I had pain and doubt but decided instead to make music. That meant that I was thinking about every day. That’s the thing about mental illness. It’s a struggle every single day, so you have to invent ways of getting through it. You have to come out the other end with the right parts of you still in place. That’s what that song was about, learning to do that:
Let yourself float
Don’t carry that weight
Never destroy
When you can create
Ready steady
California
I’m fillin’ up
My lungs again
And breathin’ life
Around that time Mike Love was over to my house for dinner. He and I were the only family left from the original band. Mike was a great front man. He always had so much energy. But seeing Mike was hard sometimes. He and I had been through so much that I didn’t even like to think about it. We had been in court once in the ’90s when he sued over royalties from the early songs. I lost that case during a trying time in my life. We were back in court in 2005 when he had a problem with a free CD that was given away by a newspaper in the UK. Mike had a funny way of looking at things. He was always an aggressive person. He was the one who wanted to try to arm wrestle Dennis the day we were doing “Surfin’ Safari” even though it was obvious that Dennis was going to kick his ass. That was his choice, his thing.
What I thought about when I thought about Mike was something that happened before the lawsuits. It was the day the Beach Boys got into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It was in 1988. I had finished the first solo record I made with Dr. Landy, which was going to come out later in the year. I made a short speech and talked about how much I loved “Be My Baby.” I said I hoped that we would be back in twenty-seven years to get inducted again. It’s funny, because that’s how much time has gone by again. So much time has passed. After I spoke, Carl talked about missing Dennis. At that point it was only five years since Dennis drowned and all the sadness about it was still so recent. Finally Mike gave his speech. He talked about how harmony was both a musical idea and an idea about love. He said something about how Paul was suing Ringo and Yoko and couldn’t be there, and that was a shame because it wasn’t harmony. But then he started to talk about other bands. He said that we were still rocking better than them. He said he would like to see them do what we were doing. He called out lots of other people, like the Beatles and the Stones and Billy Joel. He said that Mick Jagger was “chickenshit to get onstage with the Beach Boys.” Carl looked over at me during that speech and said, “We’re fucked.” I didn’t really feel that way, but I didn’t feel the way Mike felt either. I just felt embarrassed for us. Some people thought Mike was joking, but I didn’t know him to joke in that way. Bob Dylan came on later and he joked for sure. He said, “I want to thank Mike Love for not mentioning me.”
The day Mike came to dinner and I was working on That Lucky Old Sun, we went out to the car. I had written a song called “Mexican Girl,” which is probably the best song ever written about a Mexican girl. I played it for Mike and asked him if he would want to work on the lyrics. “I could make it twenty-five percent better, but I don’t want to,” he said. “If we do anything, I want to start from scratch.” There were times that would have made me sad or angry, but in the car it only made me laugh a little. Mike was Mike. You can’t wallow in the mire.
The songs kept coming. I even recorded a tribute to my dad. I had always loved his song “His Little Darling and You.” It was beautiful to me when I was a kid and stayed beautiful whenever I went back to it in my head. When I was doing Lucky Old Sun, I borrowed part of that melody, reworked it, and put it in a song called “Just Like Me and You.” That ended up as a bonus track on a version of the album. But it was one of the ways I was proving I wasn’t afraid of making new things that were also old things. I wasn’t afraid of the past. That was the thing about the sun. It had to do the same thing every day and make it feel new. The sun was good at that. It was one of the reasons it was so lucky.
The album reached back into the past in other ways, too. In 2006, during the time I was writing it, I was in New York. It was a sunny day and I was walking down Broadway with a group of friends. Ray Lawlor was there, and David Leaf and Jerry Weiss. David and I were in town promoting the DVD he made about the SMiLE record, Beautiful Dreamer: Brian Wilson and the Story of SMiLE. Someone suggested lunch at Baldoria, this great Italian restaurant, and someone else agreed, and we were on our way when we saw the Brill Building across the street. It was right around the corner from the restaurant. David stopped to look. It was like he was standing outside a church. “Can you believe it?” he said. “Everyone was here: Leiber and Stoller, Goffin and King, Mann and Weil.”
I was hungry, but I needed to stand there for a while with him to soak up the vibe. I didn’t say much, just tried to get the magic of the place. Eventually we remembered how hungry we were and headed to our lunch. I scored a margarita, with double the alcohol, but I didn’t drain it. I just sipped a little to get calm and enjoy myself. We started talking about New York and songwriting and the city’s past. Some of the guys were native New Yorkers and they told me about the first time they ever heard Dion or Frankie Lymon or the Del-Vikings, and I told them my version of the story, which happened in California.
After about twenty minutes, I noticed that Ray was staring across the room, looking at a table of two women. “Hey, Bri,” he said, “isn’t that woman with her back to us over there a dead ringer for Carole King?”
“She does look like Carole King,” I said, “because it is Carole King.” Everyone at the table laughed. They got my joke, that it would have been funny to see her right after walking by the Brill Building. I sipped more of my margarita until I had to go to the bathroom. “Gotta go take a piss,” I said to all the guys, though none of them had asked.
I went to the men’s room, opened the door, and the first person I saw was Barry Mann. Now I thought I was dreaming, maybe. Pass the Brill Building, walk to lunch, imagine you see Carole King, and then see Barry Mann? He cowrote so many great songs with his wife, Cynthia Weil. “Uptown” and “We Gotta Get out of This Place” and “I’m Gonna Be Strong.” I said hi to Barry and took him to the table to meet the guys. I asked him if he wanted to sit with us. “I’d love to,” he said, “but I’m sitting over there with Carole.” There was a silence at the table, which I guess he thought meant he had to explain. “Carole King,” he said. “And Cynthia.”
“Cynthia Weil?” I said. I was still thinking of all the songs they wrote together. I don’t know which one was in my head by that point. Maybe “He’s Sure the Boy I Love” or “Walking in the Rain.”
Barry laughed. “Walk over there with me.”
I crossed the dining room with Barry. The two women were bent over their plates. “Look who I found in the men’s room,” Barry said.
Carole looked up and started to shriek with surprise. She got up and kissed me on the cheek. “What on earth are you doing here?” she said.
“Having some pasta with my friends.”
“I cannot believe this,” Cynthia said.
I went back to the guys in a great mood. “Can you believe running into Barry Mann in a goddamned men’s room in New York?” I said. “I’ll be goddamned. We’re in the room with three of the greatest songwriters ever.”
“Don’t you mean four?” David said, which was nice, but I was still in disbelief. I told the other guys that we had to do something for them. One of my favorite songs that Barry and Cynthia ever wrote was “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling.” They wrote it with Phil Spector, and it was a huge hit for the Righteous Brothers in 1964, the year that everything happened. Right there at the table I worked out a little arrangement of “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” just the first verse, that had a part for me, a part for Ray, a part for David, and a part for Jerry. Then we went over and performed it for their table. We did well enough with the serenade that they couldn’t stop smiling, and neither could we.
New York is the only place in the world where things like that happen. A few years later I was in town for a concert and Ray brought some pizzas to the gig. They were amazing. Sometimes good pizza just can’t be beat. When I was getting ready to fly back home a few days later, I asked him if we could go to that exact pizza place. Ray told the driver and we went to the place, New Park Pizza in Howard Beach. When we walked in I went right to the counter and ordered a large pizza. The pizza came out of the oven, and I picked up the biggest slice and bit into it. It was hot, but it was great. “This is the best goddamn pizza I have ever had,” I said, because it was. I flew back home, thinking about it the whole way. A few days later I was still thinking about it. I called Ray. “Hey,” I said. Remember that pizza we had?”
“I remember,” he said.
“Can you FedEx me a pie?” He laughed but I didn’t, and I guess that’s how he knew I wasn’t joking. So he went there and I guess they taught him how to pack it up and freeze it and it came the very next day.
I picked one of Barry and Cynthia’s songs that day in Baldoria, but Carole wrote a million great ones, too. One of my favorites was “I’m into Something Good.” It also came from 1964. She wrote it and gave it to a girl named Earl-Jean, which is a strange name for a girl, though she did a great job with it. Some people knew her version, but most knew the version Herman’s Hermits did later that year. They went to number one with it on the British charts in September, just a few weeks before we performed “I Get Around” on The Ed Sullivan Show. It really was the year that everything happened. “I’m into Something Good” is such a happy song. It’s the kind of thing you can hum all day. I redid it a little bit back in the early ’70s. I had ideas about how it might be arranged differently. In my head I heard slightly different backing vocals and piano parts, and this breakdown around the two-minute mark. It was the same song but not exactly the same. I played my version for some friends and even scheduled a recording session to cut it. About a half hour before we were supposed to record, I cancelled the session. I’m sure the musicians were mad, but I just thought that maybe I shouldn’t do it. There was something about the arrangement that wasn’t quite right, or maybe it was something about the room. Then I forgot all about it. Maybe thirty years later Ray was visiting me and he mentioned it. It all came right back to me. “In the key of A,” I said. I went to the piano and played the beginning.
That was a time when I was remembering lots of songs. When we were doing Lucky Old Sun I decided to go back into the studio with it. I called Ray to come out. Why not? He was my memory on it. He couldn’t come out right away. I think it was a Wednesday. But he said he could be in LA by Friday. Ray flew in, we went into the music room, and I started playing. The version I had was mostly just me on the keyboards and then singing the lead over the track.
When I listened back, it was missing something. “You know what?” I said to Ray. “It would be great on the track to have Carole King singing backup. Do you think we could make that happen?”
“Of course,” Ray said. “Call her up.”
I didn’t think I could. It seemed like too much. So Ray did it. He called David Leaf, who gave him the number of Lorna Guess, Carole’s manager, who was also married to Carole’s guitar player, Rudy Guess. Then Ray called Lorna, and Lorna told Ray that Carole was working on a book and had just gotten to a part where she was talking about how she always wanted to work with me. Ray said that was great because I had an idea for a song. They worked it out and Carole flew in from Idaho. I guess Ray gave her directions to the house.
Ray kept saying that Carole was coming in a hybrid. I wasn’t sure what that was. Finally this tiny green thing drove up and Ray went down to meet her. He brought her up, along with Lorna and Rudy. I couldn’t stop myself from smiling. I was so happy to see Carole. I don’t know if she thought it would be a normal studio. It wasn’t. It was the music room again, with me and Scott Bennett and a computer. That was a great way for me to work. Scott was so fast and on top of things. But I wondered if Carole would mind. She didn’t. “I’m ready,” she said, and she started humming “I’m into Something Good.” You couldn’t help humming that song.
But I had another idea that I’d thought of between when I invited her and when she came. It’s like I said, ideas were coming at me all the time then. “Wait,” I said. “Listen to this.” I had a song called “Good Kind of Love” that I wanted to use on Lucky Old Sun. It was another happy song about finding the right person in your life and how it helps you deal with things you might keep secret without that person. First, it talks about what the girl is feeling.
Imagine when she’s sleeping
And all the dreams she’s keeping
She keeps them in a jar
And not too far from her heart
Later on there’s a part that sounds like it could have been from one of Carole’s old songs, or mine: “Run to him, run to him, right to his arms.” In fact, when I wrote it I was thinking about Carole, which is why I wanted her to sing it.
Carole didn’t know the song, so I taught it to her. We went back and forth in the room. I sang a part and she sang a part. Bedroom singing, teaching people their parts. It was like what happened fifty years before in Hawthorne. Carole said she loved the song. She said it was better than “I’m into Something Good,” which wasn’t true. Then we started the recording. When she started on the verses, she came in a little bit wrong. “Carole,” I said, “you are flatting, but I really like your dress.” I wanted her to sing it right, but I also wanted to make her laugh. Near the end of the session, Carole was nervous that she was going to miss one of the high C notes, but she hit it perfectly, and when she did she went around the room slapping people’s hands.
“Okay,” I said. “We’re done.” I started to leave and turned around to say good-bye.
Carole stared at me. “What about ‘I’m into Something Good’?” she said. “I came out from Idaho.”
We did that for a while, too. It went so well. The two songs with Carole ended up on the special edition of the album with the song I wrote from my dad’s song.
I loved working with Carole. She was a real pro. Back in the ’90s, just after Dr. Landy left, in the years when Melinda and I would drive around and listen to the radio, there was a movie called Grace of My Heart. It was about a singer and songwriter like Carole, a fictional version, and it had a character in it who was a singer and songwriter like me, a fictional version. The movie showed how the Brill Building sound came together, and then the character like Carole went out to California, where she met the character like me and learned all about the music on the West Coast. California Music. There were things about the movie that I liked and things that didn’t make sense to me, but one thing that it made me think about was how long we had been making records. We had been through so much, in our lives and in our music. When I was around Carole, or Barry Mann, we didn’t even have to talk about it, really. We knew how much we all knew. I remember once I met Chuck Berry on an airplane. “Hey, how are you?” he said and then turned the other way.
When I was around younger singers, it was harder for me. I didn’t know what they thought about what I had done, and I didn’t know what they wanted me to think about what they had done. Sometimes they weren’t even that young, but they were young to me. I was at the Ivor Novello Awards once and a young guy came up to me. “Brian, Brian,” he said.
“Hey, man,” I said, “can you score me a Diet Coke?”
It was Bono. I didn’t know him that well.
Another time Don Henley came backstage and brought his copy of Pet Sounds. I think it was the original record he’d had since he was a kid. I knew the Eagles, of course. If the Beach Boys were California in the ’60s, the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac were California in the ’70s. Don Henley sat down next to me and started telling me everything about his history with Beach Boys music. He said that we inspired him so much when he was growing up, even though he was in Texas at the time and not in California. He told me that he listened to the harmonies of the group but also to the way we put songs together. Then he asked me to sign the record. I took a Sharpie from the table in the dressing room. There are always Sharpies around for signing things. I wrote on his record, “To Don: thanks for all the great songs. Brian Wilson.” Don was so grateful. It was almost like he couldn’t talk. He turned to leave. “Hey, Don,” I said. “Wait a second.” I took the record back, crossed out “great,” and wrote “good.” Some people would have been mad, but Don just looked at it and laughed. Another time Melinda and I were at the beach in Santa Monica and Don came up to say hello. “Hey, man,” I said, “your hair’s really been through some changes.” Don laughed at that the same way he laughed at the album.
The songs I did with Carole ended up on the same special edition of Lucky Old Sun that had the song I remade from my dad’s song. But every edition of the Lucky Old Sun album was special. It was just a great time when I was able to make music that was old and new at the same time. One afternoon we were working on “Midnight’s Another Day.” That was a song about feeling down and depressed, and how sometimes the only way to deal with those feelings is to wait them out until you feel good again. It was the kind of song that was easy to sing when I was feeling good again.
Lost in the dark
No shades of gray
Until I found
Midnight’s another day
Swept away in a braying storm
Chapters missing, pages torn
Waited too long to feel the warmth
I had to chase the sun
The song was sounding strange to me. I liked the arrangement, but it was missing a certain sound. I could hear it in my head, but I couldn’t hear it on the record. I kept slowing down the sessions and starting them and then finally I realized what it was: a small foot-pump organ. Scott and I hopped into the Mercedes and drove over to Studio Instrument Rentals, a place off Sunset owned by Jan Berry’s brother Ken. The Berrys had a third brother, Bruce, who is mentioned in Neil Young’s song “Tonight’s the Night.” I always liked Neil—talk about pleasant. When we got to SIR, it was full, but all the people working in the place knew me. They brought out a small organ and set it up right in the store for me to test out. I sat down and started pumping the thing with my feet, checking out how it sounded. It sounded great. “This works,” I said to Ray.
“Great,” he said. “Ready to go?”
“I want to try one more thing,” I said. By now the entire warehouse staff and all the customers in the place were gathered around. I tried a version of “Surfer Girl” that was different from the original 1961 version. It was more like a version we did in 1967 in Hawaii. It was a slower and smoother version. When I played it at SIR, that was the version, and when I was done, everyone applauded. It was like a concert.
Ray and I took the organ and carried it down the street to the Mercedes, where we jammed it into the backseat. We went home, Ray split, and I worked more on “Midnight’s Another Day.” All the people who were around for that song—Melinda, Scott, and even Ray—couldn’t believe it, all that effort just to get a few notes of a specific sound on a track. Ultimately Scott and I didn’t use that little organ on the basic track. It didn’t get the vibe I thought it would. But I had to try, you know?
For another song on that record, “Going Home,” I had it in my mind that I needed Tommy Morgan, who had played with the Wrecking Crew and was one of the best harmonica players I had ever heard. I knew I wanted his sound. I hadn’t worked with Tommy for years; I knew him back in the ’60s and he had come to do some tracks with me and Andy Paley in the ’90s. I didn’t know how to reach him. I called up the musician’s union and got Tommy’s information and then called Tommy directly. “This is Brian Wilson,” I said when he answered. “I have a job for you. Bring all your stuff.”
Tommy and all his stuff showed up on time, and he played a great part. Then he was done. But a few minutes later when I turned around, he was still there. “Hey,” he said. “When are you going to cut the vocals?”
“As soon as you leave,” I said.
“Well,” he said, “actually, I’d like to stay because I’ve never seen the vocals cut. I always just did my parts and left. I want to see how you do it.” Tommy stayed on the side and watched me sing.
The song itself was about my own life, about the ways I had let things unravel over the years and the ways I was picking up the threads.
At twenty-five I turned out the light
’Cause I couldn’t handle the glare in my tired eyes
But now I’m back, drawing shades of kind blue skies
It’s good to travel
But not for too long
So now I’m home where I belong
And that’s the key
To every song
I’m going home
I loved the concert tour we did after that record. Taking the new songs out was so exciting. It was material I believed in—more than that, it was material that seemed like it was tapping into the same kind of vibe that had made the old songs special. In those shows, we closed the first half with “I Get Around” and in the intermission I went to hang out with the band. They were the same guys who had been playing with me for almost ten years at that point: Darian Sahanaja and Scott Bennett on keyboards; Jeff Foskett and Nicky Wonder on guitars; Mikey D’Amico on drums; Nelson Bragg on percussion; Probyn Gregory on guitar, horns, and theremin; Brett Simons on bass (he had actually just joined up when Bob Lizik split for a few years); Taylor Mills on vocals; and Paul Von Mertens on saxophone and harmonica. I got comfortable back there with them. Some of them were studying like professors and some of them were acting like clowns. I knew that if I looked I would see a half-full beer bottle next to Mikey, or that Paul would be sitting a little apart, going through the second half of the show in his head, or that Scott would be bouncing around trying to keep the room’s energy high. Just like every house isn’t a home, every band isn’t a family. But I had been in a band that was an actual family, and the band that played with me around 2006—most of them are still with me now—is the closest I’ve come since.
The new songs worked so well that I started to see old songs in new ways. We started those shows with some older Beach Boys stuff: “Do It Again,” “The Little Girl I Once Knew,” “Dance, Dance, Dance.” We were also adding in “Salt Lake City,” a song from Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) that we had never played live before. In sound check, Paul was playing the sax break and all of a sudden I thought of something. “Stop,” I said. “Stop everything.” Everyone was confused. “Paul,” I said, “when you get to the second four bars of the break, I want you to double up.” We had our friends the Stockholm Strings and Horns with us on that tour, so we had a second sax on the stage. No one understood why I wanted it to go that way until they heard it, and then they understood completely. Dynamics! I don’t know for sure that I wouldn’t have heard those things a few years before, but I know that I was hearing them more clearly when we went out on the road after Lucky Old Sun. It was WCW more often than not.