After it’s all been said
The music spinning in our head
Can’t forget the feeling of
The magic of that summer love
Ooh, I wanna take you there
Do you wanna turn back the pages
Memories in photographs
The world is changed
And yet the game is still the same
—“Isn’t It Time”
Over the years, I went to Australia as many times as I could. I went there with the Beach Boys in the ’60s and I loved it, and I still love it now. The place has a great vibe. Sydney is a great town. The people are surfers, so they get our music. The cab drivers are really nice. I brought the live version of Pet Sounds there, and over the years I have tried to go back whenever I can. When I was in Australia with my band for the live SMiLE tour in 2004, I checked into the InterContinental hotel, which overlooks Sydney Harbor, the Victoria Bridge, and the Sydney Opera House, my favorite concert hall in the whole universe. There is a really good lounge on the thirty-second floor of the hotel where you can order this dish called Hokkien noodles; I think I had it at least twice a day there. The harbor area has such a cool vibe. You can walk from the InterContinental down around the opera house, and then along this nice path with a park on one side and the harbor on the other. There are native Australians just hanging out playing didgeridoos, this long tube instrument that has this really deep one-note sound that resonates like a bass harmonica. It’s a great place to get your exercise in, and I walk it every day when we are in Sydney.
One day I went to walk with Jeff Foskett, who was by that time my assistant on the road as well as being my right-hand man on the stage. Out a little farther from the opera house, there was a memorial plaza with tiles for the war dead. I was checking out all the names, thinking about the battles and the soldiers. All of a sudden, under my feet, I saw a tile for a guy named Ray Lawlor. I told Ray about it, and when he got to Sydney I walked him out there and showed him. We talked about how strange it was that people with your same name were born, got old, and died. It was strange, but it was the most normal thing in the world. Time happened.
I’ve always known that about time, and I have always written about it. “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” was about that exactly. The Beach Boys recorded the song in the summer of 1964. I had just turned twenty-two. I was a single man about to be married. Our flight to Houston was still four months off. The band booked United Western Recorders for about a week and got the song done. There was lots of pressure on us because it was the next single after “I Get Around,” which was our first big hit. It had been number one on July 4 weekend. It must have gotten played at every barbecue.
A month after that we headed back into the studio to make the follow-up. It was just the lean, mean main band—me and my brothers, along with Mike and Al. I had the instrumental track done, and then we started writing the lyrics. I did most of them and Mike did some, too. We were really trying hard to think about growing older. We were trying to imagine the things that would happen in the future, and whether we would recognize the people we became. When you stand in front of a mirror, you’re changing. It’s like a movie. But how fast are you changing? It goes back to another song.
When I grow up to be a man
Will I dig the same things that turn me on as a kid?
Will I look back and say that I wish I hadn’t done what I did?
Will I joke around and still dig those sounds
When I grow up to be a man?
It was a fun song to sing, and I think I did an okay job, though I think some of the same things about “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” that I do about “Let Him Run Wild.” My voice goes up and up until it sounds like it’s whining. It loses some of the sweetness it needs. During the song we started a countdown, or really a count-up. Between lines, the backing vocalists would call out ages, two at a time, starting with fourteen. They went up to the last chorus, and even past it—during the fadeout the backing vocals kept counting. They got all the way to thirty-one. I guess it was the oldest age we could think of then. Like I said, I was only twenty-two. That was so far in the future. Back then thirty was like some kind of magic number. You didn’t trust anyone over it. You couldn’t really imagine being it.
When I did turn thirty-one, it was 1973. I was heading deep into depression and my drugs. Sometimes it felt like everyone was right, that it was an age near the end of your life. But so many things hadn’t even started. Dr. Landy hadn’t come to treat me for the first time. I hadn’t ended the marriage with Marilyn, or started the one with Melinda. I hadn’t recorded “Johnny Carson” or “Love and Mercy” or Lucky Old Sun. I had heard “Rhapsody in Blue” but I couldn’t have even imagined that someone would let me make my own version of it.
Now it’s more than that many years past that. “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” keeps counting. I look younger than I did when I was younger, in some ways. In the ’80s my chin was looking bad, like a turkey gobbler, and Dr. Landy didn’t like that so I had a face-lift. I also got the bags under my eyes fixed. I kind of saw what he was doing, but then there were the facts. I wasn’t young anymore. I couldn’t get around the way I wanted to. I don’t think I could’ve thrown a baseball twenty feet. I look in the mirror now and I think about all the things that have happened. Mainly, one thing happened. I grew up to be a man.
Do I look back and say that I wish I hadn’t done some of the things I did? Of course. I wish I hadn’t done drugs. It messed things up. I wish I had spent more time or a different kind of time with Carnie and Wendy. Do I dig the same things I did when I was a kid? I love the radio. I try to walk every day. One thing I find as I get older is that sometimes you can try new things by trying things so old that they become new again. A few years ago Melinda and the kids and I went to a place in Laguna Beach. You stay up on the cliffs, but you can walk down and get to the ocean. I was watching the kids play and I decided to go in the water myself. I hadn’t been in the ocean for forty years. It was so great that I couldn’t get out. It was early afternoon and then late afternoon and I still wanted to stay there. For forty years I kept away from the ocean, but then I went back in. “I can’t believe I haven’t done this in so long,” I said.
For almost twenty years I kept away from the band. The Beach Boys hadn’t worked together, really, since the late ’90s. We did that country record with Joe Thomas, Stars and Stripes, and then we kind of stopped. There were always reissues and repackaging of old albums, almost every year, and they got thicker and fancier. Usually there was a sun somewhere on the cover. Most of them were the same songs rearranged, though at the end of 2011 Capitol put out a set that was a much bigger deal: The SMiLE Sessions. It was a huge box with nine discs that collected everything I did in 1966 and 1967. It was amazing to see it all there in one place. I can’t believe I did all that work. How did I? There was so much music, so many ideas, so many sections. No wonder I lost my way. When I think about the project, in whatever form, what gets me most is our vocals. They’re so spiritual. I think they are the best vocals the Beach Boys ever sang, and definitely they’re the most creative. To me, The SMiLE Sessions is a great box set, but I like the version we cut in 2004. That was when the album was finally finished. That was when the story was finally completed. That’s when the weight was finally lifted. But the box set is great, too.
While all those records were coming out, I saw some of the guys some of the time. But we were getting older, and everyone was living life. Time kept happening. There was always a “Beach Boys” out on the road somewhere, but I didn’t have anything to do with it in most of those years. Mike had the name. He got hold of it during the time I wasn’t touring and he held on to it. In a way, that was okay with me, although I didn’t know what it meant for there to be a Beach Boys without me or Dennis or Carl. I guess they were going around and singing songs that people loved, which was nice for the people who got to hear them. I was doing the same with my band.
One Thanksgiving I went up to Mike’s house near Reno. We took a walk together. We talked about life and also about records. We could always talk about old records, ours and other people’s. That always made us happy. Mike was telling me about songs that he still wanted to sing. “I want to do a version of ‘Chapel Of Love,’” he said. It was the number one song before we got to number one with “I Get Around.” We had done it on 15 Big Ones. I sang that one. I guess Mike wanted to sing a version himself.
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll do it.” But we never did it. Then in 2011, near the end of the year, someone called my office and said that 2012 was the fiftieth anniversary of the Beach Boys, if you counted the Surfin’ Safari record as the beginning. If you counted the “Surfin’” song as the beginning, the fiftieth was 2011. And if you counted my teaching “Ivory Tower” to my brothers as the beginning, the fiftieth was 1998. But 2012 was a good enough year to call the fiftieth. People at record companies wanted to see if I would think about getting back together with Mike and Al and Bruce and put out a new album and tour around to celebrate.
At first I didn’t like the idea. I thought it was too much trouble. The main problem with a reunion was always going to be whether or not I could handle Mike. I knew a fiftieth anniversary would be the same deal. Lots of the onstage energy of the band comes from Mike. He’s the best at that. But Mike is also a stubborn guy who spends lots of time having strong ideas about his own ego. We spent too much time going to court. In the ’90s he got angry about how Tony Asher and Van Dyke Parks were credited on early records, and he asked for some credit back. Now on Wild Honey he’s credited on every song, even “Mama Says,” even though that part comes from what Van Dyke wrote for “Vega-Tables” on SMiLE. And then in 2005 there was a lawsuit over the CD that came out in England. That one made me more mad and confused because I didn’t understand it at all. It seemed to be about ego. That stuff was getting to me, and I hadn’t even agreed to the tour yet. But then I talked to Melinda and I talked to some friends and I decided that there were more reasons to bury the hatchet than to take it out again.
The closer the tour got, the more I started thinking about old stories. In 1964 we were playing a show in Seattle and Mike was being his usual self, talking out to the crowd, getting everyone excited. There were lots of microphones set up onstage and he grabbed one with one hand and another with his other hand. He looked funny, stretched out like that between them, and he started making a weird noise to go along with it. We were laughing like crazy. After a minute or so, Al Jardine got concerned. “Hey,” he said, “I think something might be wrong.” Al went over and kicked one of the microphones out of Mike’s hand. And Mike said, “My arms!” They were all purple. He had almost been electrocuted. Another time, in the middle of a concert, Dennis threw a spare drumstick at Mike and it hit him in the back. Mike covered up the microphone and said, “Dennis, meet me offstage.” They went to the side and had a fistfight, right in the middle of the concert. Dennis won. Mike should have known that. But Mike didn’t learn when he challenged Dennis to arm wrestling during “Surfin’ Safari,” and he didn’t learn when he called Dennis offstage. After the fight, they came back and finished the show.
I couldn’t remember everything. There was too much of everything to remember. But I liked the memories that came back to me. I liked thinking of them. They took my mind off other things, like my back. I had back pain on and off for years, but then it was on all the time, worse than ever. In the months before the tour, I was having real trouble getting around. I had to hunch over when I walked, and sometimes I felt numb spots in my hands. One evening Melinda and I were meeting Ray for dinner and I couldn’t really climb out of the car.
“You okay?” Ray asked.
“They say it might be Parkinson’s,” I said.
Ray was shocked but not too shocked. He was quiet and walked behind me to look at how I was moving. When we were sitting down and eating, he didn’t say anything for a while. “Look,” he finally said. “If that’s what it is, that’s not the worst thing in the world. Nobody dies from Parkinson’s. It’s not like you’re twenty years old. People usually die of something else while they still have Parkinson’s.”
I nodded but I wasn’t really listening, mostly because the doctors hadn’t really said that it might be Parkinson’s. I was just testing out the idea. I wanted to hear someone tell me that things would be okay, like my dad did on the Long Beach Pike roller coaster. It turned out that it wasn’t Parkinson’s at all, which I knew. I was sort of testing my friend and testing out the worst possible news in my own head. The real news was better, but not much better. It was spinal stenosis, which Carl also had. It was terrible.
But it wasn’t going to keep me from the tour. No way. Getting the Beach Boys back together was a big deal, organized by Joe Thomas and the entertainment lawyer John Branca. It was a big deal for me, but it was also a big deal logistically. There were papers to draw up. There were contracts to sign. There were promoters and lawyers and record labels that had to figure out what they would do when we were out there singing and playing our songs. As plans were coming together, I had to keep the news quiet. It was a big secret. When I was with friends who weren’t in the band, I couldn’t say anything. Instead we talked about the weather or about a great steak I might have tried at a restaurant.
One day a friend was visiting the house and just came right out and said something. “I heard you guys are doing a tour,” he said.
I sighed. “I’m glad you know about it because I was running out of lies,” I said.
After the preparing, the actual reunion was pretty straightforward. We met up at Capitol, all the guys, and recorded a version of “Do It Again.” The song was already nostalgic when we recorded it in 1969, so it made sense to do “Do It Again” again. It wasn’t just me and Mike and Al and Bruce. David Marks was there, too. He hadn’t played rhythm guitar with us since the early ’60s. The whole process of recording was a great feeling. You couldn’t pretend that time hadn’t happened. But the music brought everyone back. You couldn’t sing an old melody and not go back there a little bit.
The reunion was also sad in some ways. Being back with the band made me miss my brothers. When we started, it was a family band, and I was the only part of the family left. We had never made a record without Carl, and we had only made a few without Dennis. I even missed my dad in some ways. I thought about the old songs and how he would stand there and tell us we were doing them wrong. Surge! At the time it wasn’t something I liked at all, but over time you had more memories and less time to think about them.
Over a month or so we made a record, That’s Why God Made the Radio. That was a kind of reunion all by itself. Joe Thomas came back and worked on it. It wasn’t exactly the same as making a solo record. We had to find material that was right for everyone to sing. Joe and I still had a few songs we worked on around the time of Imagination that I didn’t think were right for me to do as a solo artist. We got those and finished them. The title track was one of them. We had a piece of a song and Mike finished it up and turned it into “Spring Vacation.” His new lyrics were great. They made the song at least 25 percent better. I wrote some songs like “The Private Life of Bill and Sue” and “Beaches in Mind.” The album we ended up with was a good record, though it was different in spirit than any record we ever would have made before. That was partly because of the technology. We put the record together on Pro Tools, which is the modern way of doing things, instead of going into a studio with dozens of musicians.
I sometimes read in interviews that Mike wants to go into a room with me and write new material for the Beach Boys. But it’s just not done that way anymore. That’s a ’70s idea. At this point, we go with the new way. I write lots in the studio. It’s a real musical environment. That record started with “Strange World” and moved through other songs, like “From There to Back Again” and “Pacific Coast Highway.” The last song on the album was “Summer’s Gone.” It was a beautiful melody. It was also one of those songs that people thought was a farewell, like “When You Wish Upon a Star.” It was definitely nostalgic, but anything we made in 2012 would have been nostalgic. We were looking backward. That’s how seasons went. When I sang it, I was thinking of Carl and Dennis and my dad, but it was like “Caroline, No” also, because I was thinking about younger versions of myself:
Summer’s gone
Summer’s gone away
Gone away
With yesterday
Old friends have gone
They’ve gone their separate ways
Our dreams hold on
For those who still have more to say
Summer’s gone
Gone like yesterday
The nights grow cold
It’s time to go
I’m thinking maybe I’ll just stay
Another summer gone
Summer’s gone
It’s finally sinking in
One day begins
Another ends
I live them all and back again
Summer’s gone
I’m gonna sit and watch the waves
We laugh, we cry
We live then die
And dream about our yesterday
Working as a group again wasn’t only about thinking through the past and dreaming about the future. It was business, which meant that it included every other part of record making. We had a cumbersome photo shoot out by the beach where we all had to roll up our pants so they wouldn’t get wet. I knew what they were going for, but I wish they wouldn’t have gone for it. It was a fright. Then we took the show on the road. We premiered on the Grammy Awards, singing “Good Vibrations.” I felt great about it. I wasn’t even that nervous that time. I sounded good to myself in the hall.
We sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Surfer Girl” at Dodger Stadium at the beginning of April. And then we were off, on the real tour: Tucson, Grand Prairie, New Orleans, Atlanta, Raleigh. The tour lasted almost five months. We did seventy-two concerts. It was almost one a year for my age. We did two nights in New York. We did two nights in Chicago. And that was just the United States. We went all over the world after that: to Spain and Italy and Sweden and Norway, and then to Japan and Singapore and Hong Kong. We went to Australia, of course. We had to go to Australia. And then we finished up in England, playing two of the most famous venues in London: one night at the Royal Albert Hall and one night at Wembley Arena. Between those shows Melinda and I threw a dinner for the whole band and crew at an Italian place in London. We wanted to celebrate the whole thing and all the great feelings. Mike and Bruce Johnston didn’t come to that, which bummed me out.
Every night we played some new songs and some old songs. We did right by them. We also did right by Carl and Dennis by including old footage of them on video and singing along with it. Carl got to sing “God Only Knows,” of course. Dennis got to sing “Forever,” from Sunflower. It almost made me cry when I heard the song from the stage, the same way my dad’s song “His Little Darling and You” made me cry back when I was in grade school. “Forever” was so beautiful. And even more than that, it was like a prediction. It was a song about going away from the people you love but keeping that love for them. Dennis wrote it more than ten years before he left, but it was almost like he knew what would happen. Singing that along with him was a real thrill.
If every word I said
Could make you laugh
I’d talk forever (together my love)
I ask the sky just what we had
It shone forever (together my love)
If the song I sing to you
Could fill your heart with joy
I’d sing forever (together my love my my my my)
Forever
I’ve been so happy loving you
Let the love I have for you
Live in your heart
And beat forever (together my love)
Forever
Forever
I’ve been so happy loving you
Baby just let me sing it, my baby
I wanna be singin’, my baby
So I’m goin’ away
But not forever
Na na na na
I gotta love you anyway
Forever
The tour wasn’t always easy. I had to be Johnny-on-the-spot. I had to get every cue and pay attention to things I hadn’t paid attention to in decades. And my back was getting worse and worse. Doctors gave me cortisone shots to ease the pain, and they worked a little bit. But easing it isn’t the same as making it go away. I had trouble walking, though fans may not have really noticed; I was at the piano bench the whole time anyway.
But mostly I had the time of my life. Mostly I loved it. Everyone was together, singing songs we made when we were together, and that made me happy. That made me whole. I remember on one of the tour stops we had dinner. We were all there. Mike was there. If you closed your eyes you could almost forget the year. There were times that I wanted it to keep going forever, just like Dennis sang.
That tour ended in a weird way. We had played all the dates we were supposed to, but we were doing such a great job that offers started coming in to extend the tour. I would have done it, but Mike didn’t want to do it. He went back to the way things were before, where he was touring with the Beach Boys name. He said he wanted to play smaller markets. And that was the end of the fiftieth reunion.
It took me a long time to come down from that tour. I came down hard. I was thinking about everything we had started again. I thought we were having the time of our lives. And then I started realizing that it was probably really over this time. Summer was probably gone. And that’s sad. I would love to hear Mike sing some real rock and roll. It would be a big thrill. Maybe we’ll do “Chapel of Love” again one day. But maybe not.
After that, Joe Thomas helped arrange a joint tour for me and Jeff Beck. Jeff is a virtuoso guitarist and has been for a half century; he was inspired by Cliff Gallup, the guitarist for Gene Vincent, but he took things so much further. Jeff has always been able to do amazing things. He puts so many notes into each bar. I love the complexity he brings to his music. But our tour was very difficult. It had a strange vibe from the start, and it never evened out. Jeff’s guitar sound, for some reason, was annoying to me. There were too many times that set lists changed or energy shifted. I never got firm footing. We worked on a few tracks in the studio with Jeff, but they didn’t get finished the way I wanted them to. They weren’t up to standard. We didn’t use them. As hard as that tour was, I got through it. I gave myself a nickname that helped me realize every hard part was just a corner to turn: Brian Willpower Wilson. It reminded me that the only way to go was forward. And I did get to play “Danny Boy” onstage with Jeff. What a beautiful song.
And then it was 2014, which was another fifty-year anniversary—not fifty years since the band started but fifty years since 1964, the year of everything. I thought about the way 1964 started, with so much promise. I thought about how much work we did: the albums, the shows, the interviews, the rehearsals. It seems like we fit ten years into that year. And then I thought about the way it ended, on that flight to Houston. It was always that cycle: always doubts, but always making sure that I got past those doubts. Any time in my life I thought the bad feelings or the harmful voices had gone away completely, they came back. But as Melinda taught me, any time they came back, they went away. I had to keep going, whether it was fifty years or fifty-two or more. I didn’t know anything else to do. Brian Willpower Wilson.
And then I bounced back from that period of exhaustion. I bounced back into the studio. I was working with Joe Thomas again after That’s Why God Made the Radio. We decided that I would sing with younger singers, mostly women. I wrote new songs that sounded like old songs, and I put some young voices on them. Zooey Deschanel was good to work with. She had a real sweet voice. Kacey Musgraves moved right into the song she did, “Guess You Had to Be There.” It took her only three takes. And she did something nice when she sang, a kind of gliding. That’s a sound I always liked. You don’t need to get down in the weeds of a song. Sometimes you let it move smoothly under you.
When I had fourteen songs, I decided that was an album. I called the record No Pier Pressure, partly because of the cover art, which was based on a picture of the Santa Monica Pier that my daughter Daria took. It was also a little bit of a pun. I wanted to think about being free of the pressure to go back to the idea of the Beach Boys or people’s ideas of rock and roll.
But I didn’t just sing with young female singers. I also sang with some of the old guys. Al Jardine was on there. It was great to sing with him again. It brought me back to the good sound we used to have. Al’s best-known vocals in the old days were “Then I Kissed Her” and “Help Me, Rhonda,” but my favorite was the singing he did on Holland, on “The Beaks of Eagles.” There’s a lyric that’s just beautiful: “In dawn’s new light a man might venture.” I sang a song called “Whatever Happened” with Al and his son Matt, and another one called “Sail Away” with Blondie Chaplin. Blondie had been with the band back around Holland and Carl and the Passions—So Tough, where he sang songs like “Here She Comes” and “Hold On Dear Brother.” Al and Blondie sounded incredible on No Pier Pressure. Voices get older but they keep their spirit.
When it came time for the last song, I knew what I would call it. I called it “The Last Song.” Like with “When You Wish Upon a Star” on the Disney record, like with “Summer’s Gone” on That’s Why God Made the Radio, I wasn’t sure if it would really be the last song, but there was a greater chance each time I made a record. Lana Del Rey was supposed to sing it, and she started, but something happened and she wasn’t able to come back and finish her vocals. The funny thing about “The Last Song” is that it wasn’t really a song about things finishing up as it was about things continuing:
Don’t let go
There’s still time for us so let’s take it slow
I wish that I could give you so much more
Far away
And maybe we’ll be coming back someday
Together in the end
To sing with you again
“The Last Song” ended with a sad line that was also true: “There’s never enough time for the ones that you love.” When I sang that, I thought about everyone. I thought about the ones who were gone and the ones who will be here when I am gone. I thought about Carl and Dennis. I thought about my mom and my dad. I thought about Wendy and Carnie and Marilyn. I thought about Melinda, Daria, Delanie, Dylan, Dash, and Dakota Rose. I thought of everyone, and I wondered if everyone ever thought of me.
Friends came to the house to have dinner with me and Melinda: Jerry and Lois Weiss and Ray and some others. We ate early and then got ready to go. “We’re leaving the house at six thirty,” I said. And then I said it again, as a question: “Six thirty?”
Jerry was used to that from the road. He was used to me asking about the time over and over again. “Right,” he said. “About fifteen minutes.” But it was thirteen minutes.
We were going to see Love and Mercy, the movie about my life. It wasn’t the first time someone had tried to make a movie like that. Dr. Landy had tried to get something started where William Hurt played me and Richard Dreyfuss played Dr. Landy. Then there was Grace of My Heart, which was really more a movie about Carole King’s life, or someone like her. There was a character played by Matt Dillon who was someone like me. I wrote “Gettin’ in Over My Head” for it and sent it to them, though they didn’t end up using it. Then Don Was did the documentary about me, I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times, and after we were done he told me that he thought there was more story there. He brought around a guy named Marvin Worth, a producer who had done a bunch of movies, including Lenny, the movie about Lenny Bruce that starred Dustin Hoffman.
Marvin decided that he wanted to do a movie of my life. We talked about it, and he had someone write a script, but then he passed away. The movie got shuffled around, moved from person to person, and eventually Marvin’s wife took over and brought Rob Reiner to meet with us. Rob Reiner really wanted to make the movie, but he wasn’t sure how to do it. It was like his SMiLE, almost; all the things that it could be started to overwhelm him. The movie went away for a while. No one was really thinking about it. In the meantime there was a TV movie called The Beach Boys: An American Family that Melinda didn’t even let me see. She told me that it didn’t show how I really was, or how I had ever really been. She said the movie made me seem unaware when, if anything, I was too aware, that it made me seem insensitive when, if anything, I was too sensitive. And since I was too sensitive, she said, there was no real reason to show it to me. That was what Melinda did then and what she always does. In the twenty years we’ve been married, she looks out for me and makes sure that certain things that might hurt me or ruin my mood don’t get through. The actor John Stamos, who is a huge Beach Boys fan and was involved in that movie, even apologized to Melinda for how I ended up looking.
A few years after the TV movie aired, Warner Brothers got the feature film project to a guy named Bill Pohlad, who had produced movies like Brokeback Mountain and Into the Wild. Bill was really interested in getting the project moving again, though he wanted to have someone write a new script. Melinda and I were completely on board. We thought it was a chance to be honest about everything that had happened in my life. Bill hired a writer named Oren Moverman, and as Oren worked on the script, he and Bill started to talk about directors. Oren thought Bill would be the best director for it, even though he had never directed. “You should do it,” Oren said. Bill said he couldn’t imagine really doing it. One day Bill called and asked us what we thought about him directing. I was so happy. I knew he was the right guy for it. He just had the right ideas, and even though he loved the music I made, he wasn’t such an obsessive fan that he was afraid to make the movie his own.
The movie was built as a two-track story. It was about two periods in my life, mostly: the time before and including Pet Sounds in the ’60s, and the time with Dr. Landy in the ’80s. Paul Dano played me when I was young. John Cusack played me when I was older. Elizabeth Banks played Melinda. Paul Giamatti played Dr. Landy. The movie went back and forth between those two periods and tried to show how lots of the other problems in my life, especially drugs and alcohol, were connected to mental illness. That was the story underneath everything. It was the story underneath the movie, like it’s the story underneath this book, because it’s the story underneath my life. I wanted to tell it as fully as possible.
As the movie went along, Bill wanted to involve me in the music, but I didn’t want to get too much into it. Atticus Ross was doing the score, and he was weaving together pieces of old songs. But Bill kept asking. He said he wanted one love song for Melinda. I eventually did it to please him. The best way for me to approach it was to think of it as just another song, with a purpose and a deadline. I wrote one song called “Whatever Happened” that Bill wasn’t sure about, and then another song called “One Kind of Love.” That one Bill really liked, and he took it for the movie. When it came time for the final version, he had a hard time figuring out where to put it. I thought maybe it should play over the end credits, but he wanted “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” for that spot and he wouldn’t budge. It ended up going into a scene where Melinda and I were driving. It came out of the car radio.
So friends came for dinner. I don’t remember what we ate that night. Then we all went to see the movie at a theater in Hollywood. My daughter Wendy was there, too. It wasn’t the official Hollywood premiere—that was later, and all the actors came to that, along with my daughter Carnie. But it was the first time I saw the whole movie, and I was really proud.
The movie wasn’t easy to watch. It was about the bad parts of my life as much as the good parts. The worst were the scenes with Dr. Landy, when he would yell at me. There were a couple of moments when some of what was onscreen was so intense that Melinda had to put her hand on my leg. But I watched the whole thing straight through. There were exciting scenes about creating Pet Sounds and also some softer scenes that showed how I was struggling with mental illness even back then. I liked one quiet scene especially, a scene where Paul Dano, playing the younger version of me, leaves the studio and goes to the parking lot to smoke a cigarette. Hal Blaine is out there, too, and he and I have a conversation about making things, and how it’s not easy but it’s worth it, and how talent has to be nurtured and protected. I liked that scene because it reminded me of one of the reasons I kept going all those years. I kept going to protect my love for music, and eventually I found people who could help protect me also.
Afterward the theater was quiet. Slowly people started talking. Wendy was saying that there was so much she didn’t know about the Landy years. “I had no idea,” she said.
Finally Melinda turned to me. “Are you okay with it?” she asked.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Living it was so much worse.”
The final scene in the movie showed me and Melinda holding hands, looking at the empty lot in Hawthorne where my house used to be. That was a way to finish the movie, but it wasn’t how the real story ended. It ended with me marrying Melinda and being with her and being happy that I was with her. It ended with adopting kids and making more records. It ended with meeting friends at my house and agreeing to go see the movie. And then it ended with me walking out of the theater, still going, still there. I was proud of what the movie showed. It didn’t try to pretend that I was a different kind of person, either better or worse. It didn’t look away from mental illness, but it also didn’t make me into a cartoon nut who went into his bedroom for years while his bandmates traveled around the world making music.
Having the real story out there was very appealing to me, because it did a job that was hard for me to do in conversations or interviews. I wasn’t usually the kind of guy who would make a big deal about correcting a misunderstanding. If someone got the wrong idea about me, I might agree with the wrong story just to get out of the conversation. But the movie put it all out there. It was honest about everything I went through, and how I survived it. And for me, that was the other main point. Survival was the other main point. Finding ways to make it through was the point. If my life helped people get to the point where they could have that thought, too, that made the movie valuable.
When people started saying that the movie was good and might get some awards, I was excited that “One Kind of Love” might get awards, too. When it got a Golden Globe nomination, I was excited to see what would happen with the Oscars. What happened was disappointing. As it turned out, the song wasn’t eligible for an Oscar nomination. The Academy had strict rules about what songs were eligible. Either a song had to be shown over the first end titles or it had to be in the body of the movie for at least forty seconds, in a way that moved the movie along from scene to scene. I was disappointed because without those rules the song seemed like it would be a shoo-in for a nomination. But we got to go to the Golden Globes, and that was really fun. We lost to “Writing’s on the Wall,” the song that Sam Smith did for the James Bond movie Spectre. That was funny in a way because fifty years before, the instrumental title song for Pet Sounds was originally written as a James Bond theme. It was called “Run James Run.” That was the one where the percussion was Richie Frost playing on two empty Coca-Cola cans. There was no percussion like that on “Writing’s on the Wall.”
The most rewarding thing about the whole experience was to see what people took away from the movie, mainly the idea that mental illness should be handled in a humane and straightforward way. It’s a struggle like any struggle. It’s something I’ve had to carry around most of my life, and something that really kept me off balance until I learned how to get my head around it—and to have people around me who helped me do that. So many people wrote us or called to say that the movie helped them deal with similar problems in their own life, with family or friends.
One of the people who wrote was Michelle Obama. She helped set up a partnership between the movie and the Campaign to Change Direction, an organization that encourages people to see mental illness differently. I have met other presidents and First Ladies. I have played for queens. But I’m not sure that I have ever been prouder than when we made that arrangement with Campaign to Change Direction. I mean, I always knew that my music was inspirational. I could always look out into a crowd and see people dancing to “California Girls.” But I didn’t always feel the same way about my life. There were times that I worried about it, that I felt it was shameful, that I felt I couldn’t be honest about the things I was thinking or the voices I was hearing. Making the movie was a challenge because it was an honest self-portrait, and when people responded to it the way they did, it made me proud of my life also. To be told that other people could learn from it and get stronger was even better.