The Last Beach Movie Revisited: The Life of Brian Wilson

Part 1

‘It was a childhood dream of mine: to make music that made people feel loved’ – Brian Wilson, 1992

It was another spectacular LA early evening in late ’74 with the sun still high in the sky and well, it just had to be said. The Hills were alive with the sound of music: Beverly Hills, that is. Or so imagined Paul McCartney as he glanced across to his wife Linda driving the two of them to a special social call/rendezvous with the ex-Beatle’s most audaciously talented musical rival from that era now commonly referred to as ‘the fabulous sixties’ – the Beach Boys’ reclusive mastermind, Brian Wilson. As their car whizzed past one garden – right alongside the sound of spinning hoses gushing out a gentle drizzle of water across a long verdant lawn – the sound of Neil Sedaka gushing ardently on about hearing ‘laughter in the rain’ was making itself instantly apparent. In another, the bulbous boom that is Barry White was serenading various species of pond-life. From the next, two adolescent bathers were twisting on a diving-board to the strains of the Eagles. And at the end of the street a transistor radio blasting out Disco Tex and his Sex-O-Lettes seemed to have temporarily petrified a small kitten also playing on the lawn. Everywhere you turned, it was as if the numb, throw-away sound of the seventies – with its ‘aural exciters’, cocaine-addicted session musicians, mellow vibrations, not to mention those inky-dinky, synthesizer sounds cropping up everywhere on soundtracks for TV/radio jingles – was seeping up through the landscape like so much swamp-gas. And so McCartney temporarily cast his mind back to better times, back to the last time . . . How long had it been?

How long had it been? Five . . . six . . . no, it had been over seven years since they’d last met, also in LA, in the early spring right before the summer of love itself, when the world was still full of promise and untapped cosmic possibilities. McCartney had arrived at a Beach Boys recording session with Derek Taylor, the suave Liverpudlian who was on both the Beatles’ and the Beach Boys’ pay-rolls, two crazy guys sporting these heavy-looking moustaches like they were students from straight out of the Russian revolution. Of course Brian was in control – fat, bashful, weird Brian with his pudgy fingers forever fiddling with the ample bouffant fringe virtually obscuring his glazed eyes and the room fall of vegetables piled up to farther authenticate the vibrations that needed to flow through the performance of this song called not unsurprisingly ‘Vegetables’.

Paul, who was used to eccentric behaviour in the recording studio, smiled indulgently and even nibbled a couple of carrots. Come to think of it, they’d had a hell of a good time together, even jammed out an eccentric version of ‘On Top of Old Smokey’. And at the end of a long evening – with good old Derek doing the prompting – McCartney sat down at the piano and played a new song of his entitled ‘She’s Leaving Home’ that floored everyone present, even moving Marilyn Wilson, Brian’s long-suffering wife, to a bout of unrestrained weeping.

There were tears in the eyes of Marilyn Wilson during this second encounter too, but they did not spring from joy; nor did they spring from the sound of beautiful music being played. In fact, there was to be no music whatsoever ringing from the Wilsons’ Spanish mansion that evening. Just the sound of a little dog’s static barking from down some steps a few feet away from the little changing-hut that overlooked the pool out there in the garden, where Brian Wilson had pretty much taken up permanent residence. Around this make-shift construction, the ex-Beatle had gathered with his wife Linda, Marilyn and a couple of friends, gently pleading with the overweight composer to come out and show himself.

But Brian wasn’t coming out. He stayed in there, petrified, all his guts clenched up, eyes shut tight, praying with all his might that all the tiny atoms of his body would somehow break down, so that he could simply evaporate into the thin smog-strained air surrounding him. It was all to do with something his brother Carl had told him not long before, something about Paul McCartney once claiming that Brian’s song ‘God Only Knows’ was the greatest pop song ever written. And, in his mind, it had all become hopelessly twisted: ‘Like, if “God Only Knows” is the greatest song ever written, then I’ll never write anything as good again! And if I never write anything as good, then I’m finished. I’m a has-been and a wash-up, just like everyone keeps saying.’

Dark thoughts swooping down. Dark mutterings speaking up. Ugly voices screaming and cursing, ‘It’s over for you, motherfucker,’ again and again.

He never came out until long after they’d all left. Someone said afterwards that you could just make out the sound of him inside that claustrophobic room, weeping softly to himself, like an unloved little boy who’d recently experienced a particularly savage beating.

‘Why in Christ’s name do you want to waste your time writing about Brian Wilson?’ an LA music biz hot-shot asked me with a withering look and a weary alcoholic voice. ‘It’s 1975! Go out and do something on Bruce Springsteen, for Chrissakes! Wilson’s all washed up. Bloated. Beached. Sure, he used to be great. Everybody knows that. Now, he’s just another sad fuckin’ case. Listen, I can’t stand to be around the guy. I’m just being frank with you here. He’s such a fuckin’ loser. I was with a bunch of people one night, driving around, and somehow he ended up there in the back of the car too, screaming and carrying on. He was wearing pyjamas and a bathrobe and he smelled fuckin’ awful. Later, we’re in this bar and he made this embarrassing pass at a waitress and she looked just terrified, like a big grizzly bear was about to attack her. Finally we ended the evening by having to stop the car for him and, Jesus Christ, I just remember sitting there watching him puke his guts out on to some nice middle-aged Californian couple’s front lawn at 3 o’clock in the morning.

‘And this guy – less than ten years ago – he was the fuckin’ king of California. The whole culture – the surfing, the hot-rods, the music, you name it – he was on top of it all. He ruled it all. All this’ – he waves his hand, indicating all the palm trees and endless perfect gardens spread out before us across this golden state – ‘all this was once his personal kingdom.’

The king of California, with madness in his eyes and vomit on his ‘jammies’: it was the Citizen Kane of all great rocky-horror stories, but for me it was more personal. I remember being twelve or thirteen years old and to escape from the ravages of adolescence I’d go into record shops to study Beach Boys album covers for what seemed like hours on end. They’d always be grinning a lot. There were always pretty girls surrounding them, with perfect blonde hair and ‘fuck me’ smiles. Surf was boldly cresting in the background. Weenies were often being heated up on a blazing beach fire under a big harvest moon. Everybody was happy and everybody was successful and clean and had great teeth and good hair (except Mike Love). ‘Fun’ wasn’t a concept I was too personally attuned to at this point in my life and I can’t begin to tell you how exciting it felt to stand there holding photographic proof that it actually existed somewhere – albeit thousands of miles away from the land-locked dumps I found myself inhabiting.

But that was nothing compared to the thrill of hearing the music itself. At the beginning, their records all sounded so intoxicatingly up-beat but there was also this aching feel creeping in, this pure tone of exquisite longing, that, when those voices got to harmonize over a set of sweetly melancholic chord changes, could just rip my heart out. However depressed I’d get, listening to the Beach Boys would always cause my moods to lift. I loved their music unconditionally and followed Brian Wilson’s phenomenal progress as a composer with a religious fervour.

Then, in 1967, something happened and Wilson was never the same again. His music quickly lost all its focus and ambition while he himself seemed to vanish off the face of the earth, save for the occasional press-shot of a fat, ungainly figure with disturbed eyes and an unsightly growth of beard.

That’s why I was currently resident in the ridiculous state of California, doing this equally ridiculous ‘gumshoe’ routine, tracking down and attempting detailed conversation with old alcoholic record execs, long-discarded song-writing partners, former image changers, self-styled scene-makers, Hollywood headcases, Sunset Strip scandal-mongers, hopeless drug cases and twisted mystics. I even went so far as to locate a female massage parlour employee he’d recently written a song about. It was a dirty job but someone had to do it and that somebody was me. Looking back, I remember how the darker it got, the more my eyes lit up and the more I fantasized that I was Lou Harper, the private eye in Ross McDonald’s The Moving Target swimming through the murky human debris of weird-assed LA to arrive ultimately at a deeper truth: I had to discover what really happened to the golden state’s once-golden princeling, the sad young man with the pale blue eyes and the fragile heart who, as a youth, somehow managed to tune his one good ear to connect with the music of the spheres until the awesome intensity of its sound finally drove him to insanity.

‘WE FIRST GOT . . . no, well. . . uh . . . my brother Dennis came home from school one day and he said . . . um . . . “Listen you guys, it looks like surfin’s gonna be the next big craze and . . . uh . . . you guys oughta write a song about it.” ’Cos at that time we were writing songs for friends and . . . um . . . school assemblies.

‘So it happened we wrote a song just due to Dennis’s suggestion and from there we just got on the surf wagon’cos we figured . . . y’know . . . it’d be a hot craze. It’s all because of my brother though.

‘And he didn’t know . . . he didn’t. . .

‘It just happened.

‘By chance.’

He was born Brian Douglas Wilson on 20 June 1942, at Centinela Hospital in Inglewood, the first of three sons brought into the world by Murray Wilson and his wife Audree, née Korthof. The three brothers were brought up in the post-war stucco community of Hawthorne, one of the utterly characterless and culture-free Californian suburbs positioned some thirty miles from the Pacific Ocean. The Wilson family was a claustrophobic, profoundly dysfunctional experience, with a broken, alcoholic mother, three terrified little boys and Murray, the vicious ogre, at the head of it all. In his younger days, Murray Wilson would have been referred to as a ‘pistol’, an extrovert boisterous sort who never got out of the habit of cracking terrible jokes and anticipating the response by elbowing listeners in the ribs. The whole family lived comfortably owing to his moderately successful self-invested business dealing in heavy machinery, but Murray’s dream was to make it as a songwriter in the music business.

If his talent as a composer was simply non-existent, his lack of success as a father was to prove rather more significant. Put simply, the man was a sadist and what he practised on his three sons was child abuse of the most vicious kind. ‘Murray was always out of his depth,’ a co-worker of his and the Beach Boys reminisced to me one day. ‘He was just a hot-shot from the suburbs but he knocked his sons about emotionally to the point where they became the image he’d set up for them. Carl had to take so much weight, be so calm. Dennis had to be such a crack-shot son. A daft man, really, but he certainly scared the hell out of his boys. Mike Love knew some great stories about him. I was always asking, “Tell me more stories about Murray, Mike.”’

They were invariably sordid and mean-spirited little sagas. There was the one for instance about the numerous times Murray back-handed Brian across his head as a baby, the heavy blows more than likely sparking his continual deafness in one ear from the age of two onwards. Or how about the tales of Murray and his two glass eyes? (He’d lost one eye in an industrial accident some years earlier.) There was a normal-looking one for everyday use and a special blood-shot model for those mornings after he’d drunk too much. On one such morning, he awoke in state of considerable disrepair to discover that Dennis had stolen the blood-shot eye and taken it to school to show off to his little punk buddies. Dennis was never to forget the way Murray’s belt stung his arms and legs when he’d come back home that evening. Murray was not only missing one eye, by the way: most of one ear was gone too, literally ripped off the side of his young head by his own stinking drunk of a father one night, a man reputed to be even more vicious than his own son.

Physical beatings and emotional brutality were virtually everyday occurrences in the Wilsons’ bleak, white-bread household, and though all three sons (and even, on occasion, poor, petrified Audree) were mercilessly picked on, it was Brian who suffered the worst because first he was eldest but also he was easily the most sensitive. Little brother Dennis was such a tough little bastard, dumb as hell and shiftless too, but so cute-looking he could always get away with wild escapades his ungainly elder brother would get nailed to a fence for perpetrating. The youngest of all, Carl, meanwhile seems to have been viewed merely as an indifferent little blob by everyone in his family (apart from Audree, who constantly spoilt him) at this juncture of his life, partly owing to the fact that he spent so much time hiding under his bed in fright while his brothers were being beaten by their father.

Well over thirty years later, when Brian Wilson was only one week shy of his fiftieth birthday, he would talk about his father still in a tone of utter dread:

‘You go through your childhood and you have a mean father that brutalizes you, that terrorizes you – and Dennis and Carl – many years ago with a double belt . . . He’d take his belt and he would double it over and he’d have maximum control and power and . . . Boom . . . boom . . . boom . . . boom [imitates sound of being whipped] he’d knock the hell out of us. In fact, I said to myself: “What in the hell was all that about?” A mean father who turned us into egomaniacs, ’cos we felt so insecure our egos just jumped up . . . It was such a scary feeling.’

Music quickly proved itself to be the one force able to still the malevolent emotions coursing through the house whenever Murray was playing king of the castle, which was whenever he was home. There was a piano in the living-room and he’d play it a lot, running through these silly tin-pot serenades he’d compose in a misguided attempt to break into the music business. Audree played too and Brian was only six or seven when he started playing himself, mostly in an attempt to impress his dad. He was always able to lose himself in the sound of music but the first time he fell hopelessly in love with it was the day at age fourteen when his mother bought him a copy of Four Freshmen and Five Trombones, an album of the renowned fifties harmony group’s honey-coated hush-a-bye-baby vocal stylings. The night he played it all the way through he felt his skin prickle at the back of the neck, the hairs rising all over his body and the white hot flush of communion with something sacred and all-powerful.

At age sixteen he was given a tape recorder for Christmas. The previous year Carl had introduced him to R’n’B music on the local radio stations and he was already writing songs in his head that he sensed were as good as anything by the Del-Vikings or even that Chuck ‘crazy legs’ Berry whose ringing guitar riffs Carl was starting to master on a cheap Rickenbaker guitar he’d got for Christmas. Then Mike Love – the Wilsons’ odious extrovert of a cousin who thought he was just so cool, then got his girlfriend pregnant when he was seventeen, had to marry her and suddenly he wasn’t so cool anymore – started coming round a lot. He was still a brash little egocentric prick but he sensed his only possible escape from a life of marital gloom and a numbing succession of straight jobs was to follow through on his half-baked musical ambitions. It didn’t matter to him that he didn’t have any musical talent: he knew gawky cousin Brian could play the piano and so he forged an alliance with him. Ambition, drive, a weedy voice and a capacity for extrovert behaviour that knew no bounds was what Love brought to the equation. He also managed the occasional set of asinine lyrics. Brian concentrated on the music as well as bringing in a fifth guy, an outsider called Al Jardine, to sing, basically because he’d accidentally broken one of jardine’s legs during a high school football play-off not long before and wanted to make it up to him.

At first they were the Pendletones. Then they called them selves Carl & the Passions before changing it yet again to Kenny & the Kasuals. Brian was Kenny. Then they recorded a single with a couple called Morgan who owned a little do-it-yourself local studio, funded by money Murray had given his sons to live on while he and Audree went on vacation. The long and short of it: they ended up cutting a song of Brian’s called ‘Surfin’ inspired by Dennis’s tall tales of riding the local waves; the Morgans stuck it out and, without consulting anyone, decided to credit them on the disc’s centre as ‘The Beach Boys’. The Wilson brothers and their two pals didn’t like the new name at all but couldn’t do much about it as their record starting selling in massive quantities all over the golden state and beyond almost immediately. As soon as he saw the reactions his boys were stirring among young record buyers, Murray wasted no time in asserting his awful omnipotence over everything he could. Never backward about coming forward, he immediately elected himself the Beach Boys’ manager, producer and song publisher, after he’d bullied Brian into handing over control of all his songs to his father. Then they went big-time and signed to Capitol under the A&R guidance of Nick Venet, a young LA hot-shot who favoured camel-hair coats, hip slogans and the same slicked-back look of deadly efficiency favoured by Hawaii Five-O’s Jack Lord. Venet couldn’t abide Murray: couldn’t stand the demeaning way he treated his sons, couldn’t stomach the clueless way he’d try to upstage Brian and the others in the recording studio, waltzing around like a puffed-up little Caesar screaming, ‘Surge! Surge!’ whenever he felt the tempo should quicken, which was practically all the time. But first of all he couldn’t stand the hideous fuckin’ promo shots Murray had taken of his three sons, Mike Love and a local replacement called David Marks (Al Jardine had decided to commit himself to the more exciting prospect of dentistry) looking like five little lost doomed rabbits in ill-fitting lumberjack shirts, being royally upstaged by the large wooden surf-board they awkwardly prop up. It took over a year of Murray’s merciless and tactless bullying before the Beach Boys finally snapped. Mike Love challenged him to a fist-fight on some wretched night-ride back from a far-away gig before pinning him square in the gut, causing the old man’s flabby weight to buckle before hitting the pavement with a resounding thud. They told him he was finished as their manager, the day after. Murray never forgave them, least of all Brian, and swore to get even, but by then it was too late. The son he’d terrorized and now envied with such a sickening ardour was taking control and single-handedly creating a whole new culture. As Nick Cohn observed in his book Awopbopaloobop: ’He [Wilson] worked a loose-limbed group sound and added his own falsetto. Then he stuck in some lazy twang guitar and rounded it all out with jumped-up Four Freshmen harmonies. No sweat, he’d created a bona fide surf music out of nothing. More, he had invented California.’

Brian had the whole surfing beach craze cased all by himself. In 1962 he took Chuck Berry’s ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’ and transformed it into ‘Surfin USA’, again, in Cohn’s words, ‘the great surf anthem, the clincher: a hymn of unlimited praise’. In 1963 he even eclipsed his own fantasies for the Beach Boys when, with Jan Berry of Jan & Dean fame, he created ‘Surf City’, a virile all-American sun-kissed Valhalla where the gender ratio was strictly ‘two girls for every boy’. And who really cared if such fantasies were basically all pie-in-the-sky fantasy froth? Their very bug-eyed charm only helped compound the appeal further. Then just as the surfing craze was cresting to a peak, Wilson quickly expanded his range of topics to embrace the motor sports fad of the early sixties.

Already he was seeing other lyric-writers. First there’d been Gary Usher, a plucky little hustler five years Brian’s senior, who turned up at the Wilsons’ front door looking for an introduction. He and Brian had hit it off immediately and went on to write ‘409’ and the immortal ‘In My Room’ before Murray’s vicious meddling forced Usher unceremoniously out of the picture only a month or so after his introduction. Another brief collaborator was this jovial ‘jock’ name of Bob Norberg, who even let Brian stay at his place when things between him and Murray got too out of control at the Wilson house. Bob also introduced Brian for the very first time to the unearthly sounds of Phil Spector and his special productions of sundry pop and R’n’B singers, an encounter so earth-shattering to Wilson that Spector’s music would quickly become an all-absorbing obsession for him. Then came Roger Christian, who ‘was really . . . really a guiding light for me. I’d go over there, see . . . He’d get off at midnight, OK. He’d do a nighttime radio show from nine to twelve every night and we’d go over to Otto’s, order a hot fudge sundae and just . . . whew! talk and talk. We’d be writing lyrics . . . hustling, y’know. And all of a sudden we’d realize we’d just written fifteen songs.’

Christian’s lyrics were the acorn all-American gospel: stouthearted salutations to the competitive spirit littered with patriotic references to ‘daring young men playing dangerous games’ and in-depth motor mechanic descriptions of stripped-down cherry corvettes. The most famous Wilson-Christian collaboration has to be the classic ‘Don’t Worry Baby’, wherein Brian utilized a heart-melting set of chord changes and a feel already close to Spector’s in order to underpin what at first seems a straightforward teen passion proclamation. It’s only on closer inspection that the listener realizes the subject’s angst is focused on Christian’s protagonist having bragged his way into a potentially fatal car chase. Romance in Roger Christian’s lyrics was always a strict second-runner to heavy machinery. Cohn again:

There was by now no subject too soap-opera for him [Wilson/Christian] to take on. He churned out ‘A Young Man is Gone’, an ode to the departed James Dean, and ‘Spirit of America’ and ‘Be True to Your School’. At the same time, he did some fine rejoicings, full of energy and imagination – ‘Shut Down’, ‘409’, ‘Little Deuce Coupe’. Fine rock’n’roll music but brought up to date, kept moving and not left to atrophy. Best of all was ‘I Get Around’.

What Brian Wilson was doing now was making genuine pop art. Not camp word plays on pop, but the real thing. He was taking the potential heroics that surrounded him and, not being arty, not being coy in the least, turning them into live music. Simply, he’d taken high school and raised it to completely new levels. He’d turned it into myth.

But oh, how exhausting it was, building up these myths and then having to ceaselessly schlep all over the States promoting them via hysteria-ridden live dates. For over three years, he never stopped working, never slackened the pace for an instant, never lost the cold metallic taste of nausea lurking deep down in his guts. Then, one day, he started really cracking up.

Brian became completely hysterical on a flight taking the Beach Boys from LA to Houston for a show two days before Christmas 1964. His face first went red as a beetroot and then it turned deathly white and he started screaming he was going to die, before breaking down and crying like a little baby. They had to send him back to LA, where Audree met him at the airport and attempted to nurse him back to normality. But Brian’s condition was so ragged he went on to suffer two more nervous breakdowns in the following months. These traumas, though, were providential in the sense that they were finally able to extricate Wilson from all his touring commitments with the Beach Boys, enabling him to concentrate solely on composing and recording. In fact, the move was perfectly timed. Brian could now concentrate on what he did best and moreover be allowed the creative elbow-room to experiment a little more, develop new formulae to combat the likes of those pesky Beatles who had surpassed the Beach Boys’ sales and popularity in their own goddamn country that very year. Brian Wilson, left to his own devices, could settle that score easily enough. The other guys knew that. At that point, they still trusted Brian’s instincts implicitly.

Off the road and away from its attendant nightmares, Brian remained at home, sleeping through the day, staying up all night, smoking hash and listening intently to the songs of Bacharach & David, when not obsessing about the competitive nature of his work. And that meant getting wise to a few things. Ego, for one: the unfettered thrill of pitting one’s talents against all the other acts, bulleting up and down on the Billboard and Cashbox charts. This new band for example – the Rolling Stones – they weren’t so damn hot!

The Beatles, mark you, were different. Brian dug the hell out of those albums. And that Paul? Boy, what a talented guy!

As for Bob Dylan . . . Well, Dylan actually scared Brian a little, made him uneasy. Brian was frightened in this almost child-like way: disturbed by something he couldn’t quite fully comprehend, yet fascinated all the same. Brian was getting this funny vibe off of Dylan’s whole sound. He confided to friends that he honestly believed Bob Dylan was out to destroy music with his genius.

Meanwhile Brian Wilson began getting all wrapped up in big complicated ideas like ‘Art’ and ‘Civilization’. People would tell him the most commonplace facts about such-and-such a composer or painter and Brian would just flip right out: ‘You mean to say Beethoven wrote some of these works when he was completely deaf? Boy, I bet . . . I bet this whole painting thing has been going on thousands of years, right?’ A visitor would read a fragment from a volume of Omar Khayyám and Brian Wilson would leap up, his head just awash with all this magical dumb inspiration, screaming, ‘Wow’ and ‘Too much’ over and over again because he sensed right there and then that this guy had access to all the answers to the problems besetting our troubled universe.

At the same time, there was business to attend to. The first post-touring album turned out to be The Beach Boys – Today and it found Wilson both taking care of business with teen-beat bonanzas like ‘Dance, Dance, Dance’ and great high-school ra-ra romance rock (‘Good to My Baby’), as well as extending his range in both production and composition. What Wilson was now aiming for, in terms of production at least, was to pick up on all that had made Phil Spector’s records great – that majestic presence – and modify the very essentials to accommodate an almost self-effacingly ‘clean’ all-American white harmony combo sound. Less of that marvellously over-bearing Wagnerian pomp-and-circumstance stuff: more clarity, more fragility. Also, in songs like ‘She Knows Me Too Well’ and ‘In the Back of My Mind’, Wilson’s dream lovers were suddenly no longer simple happy souls harmonizing their sun-kissed innocence and undying devotion to each other over a honey-coated backdrop of surf and sand. Instead they’d become highly vulnerable, slightly neurotic and riddled with telling insecurities.

What was really happening was that Brian’s whole approach to romance was becoming more and more personalized, more honest in a distinctly autobiographical way. The innocence was still in there certainly. God, it had to be . . . for it remained the absolute deciding factor, the master-force that dictated to almost every aspect of his creativity. But everything was becoming more worldly now. The rigours of experience were beating relentlessly against his muse and Brian Wilson could no longer snugly dream on like before. To begin with, he’d somehow managed to get himself married. His wife’s name was Marilyn and she was the younger daughter of Mae and Irving Rovell, a nice outgoing Jewish family, comfortable enough to be able to afford the elder of their offspring Diane the benefits of a good nose job. Marilyn was no beauty and at times her and Brian’s relationship seemed more than a little strained. Also, it was becoming more and more apparent – even to the casual onlooker – that Wilson held the elder Rovell sister in slightly higher esteem. Maybe he was just a little infatuated with her. After all, she was prettier, with an aura about her that was a little more innocent.

Yet even with worldly temptation and a nagging wife to contend with, Brian Wilson’s penchant for creating ‘the great all-American teen anthem’ hadn’t deserted him yet awhile. In 1965 he went on to compose his greatest work in that effusive genre. ‘California Girls’ at once took all that was best in Wilson’s heroic myth-weaving patriotism stand and combined it with his new melodic and arranging sophistication. The results created an even more irresistible myth than the ones that had gone before. Twenty-seven years after he’d conceived it, it would become the one and only Beach Boys track Wilson could still get a jolt of pleasure listening to.

There were two more Beach Boys albums before the advent of Pet Sounds and both were, in their own sweet way, cop-outs or, more to the point, ‘manufactured’ product put out to placate Capitol. Both Summer Days (and Summer Nights) and Beach Boys Party were more easy-formula halcyon-days fare. The former was forced out by Capitol, though, such was Wilson’s talent at this point, even these out-takes and unrelated tracks recorded at earlier sessions were of breath-taking quality, most notably the Beatles homage ‘Girl Don’t Tell Me’ and the Bacharach-influenced majesty of’Let Him Run Wild’. The latter album was a different horse altogether and seems almost symbolic in retrospect A supposedly informal ‘live’ recording of a Beach Boys beach party (it was of course done in the studio), it featured lots of acappella singing, acoustic guitars strumming over the crackling of weenies, bongos, giggling babes ruining the choruses, everybody making much too merry. The whole album was very simple, very all-American and very dumb. Mike Love and Murray both thought it was a great piece of product, but you could hear Brian thinking to himself: ‘OK, that’s it now, you guys.’ From that point on, fan – good, clean or otherwise – was to become a very secondary consideration to art in Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys’ ever-expanding universe.

At the very end of 1965, Tony Asher had more or less settled into the routine at the office he was working at. The building housed a strictly nine-to-five breed: hack tune-smiths and instant slogan writers – straight-arrow dudes with mortgages and ulcers who concentrated their efforts on coming up with ‘jingles, catch-phrases and the like for various advertising campaigns’. Asher had been allocated about five products, and was making a moderate success of things. The bosses thought his jingle for ‘Gallo Wines’ for example was particularly promising. ‘And I’ve got to say it . . . I was really just interested in a regular income. Security y’know.’ He laughs to himself, ‘I am a pretty conservative guy.’ So imagine Tony Asher’s shock when, out of the blue, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys – the leader of America’s No. 1 top pop sensation – phoned him with a proposition.

Wilson had a problem. Capitol were once again on his back, breathing heavily and threatening possibly even to sue if a new Beach Boys album wasn’t quickly delivered. And all he had were two unfinished tracks: one, this weird backing track, replete with piccolos and flutes, for a version of ‘Sloop John B’, the other an abortive new song called ‘In My Childhood’ which Wilson had decided he hated, scrapping both lyrics and melody-line. (The basic track would later be transformed into the Wilson–Asher ‘You Still Believe in Me.’ Assorted bicycle bells and horns, added to complement the theme of the song in its original ‘Childhood’ form, were never wiped off the mix and can be heard on the Pet Sounds take to this day.) In short, Wilson needed collaborative aid fast, though why he enlisted Asher remains a mystery – not least to the lyricist himself.

Tony Asher had known Wilson vaguely from a few chance meetings when, in his younger days, he’d hung out at recording sessions attempting to peddle songs he’d written. The aspiring lyricist was a relatively worldly individual for his age and Brian Wilson had struck him as an out-and-out hick, very dumb, barely able to express himself in company at all, though, at the same time, he’d also seemed very conscientious and extremely hardworking. Asher could remember finding him pleasant enough to be around, but ultimately rather insipid. He can’t recall to this day whether, back then, he had mentioned to Brian the fact that he wrote lyrics but presumes he must have done.

So, anyway, here was the King of California with his oval face and his weird little voice at the very least offering Tony Asher the chance to pick up on a potential gold-mine in royalties. He told his boss he desperately needed three months’ vacation and precisely one day later he was to be found settling down to work with his new-found collaborator in the living-room of the latter’s garish mansion in opulent Bellagio.

Unbeknownst to both of them Pet Sounds was to prove Brian’s great musical ‘breakthrough’ and Asher’s role – though the credits on the album suggest a strict division between lyrics and music – was soon to make itself obvious. Wilson knew what he wanted lyrically. Each song, each melody and arrangement, stated a mood and Tony Asher’s job was simply to express that mood as eloquently as possible:

‘It’s fair to say that the general tenor of the lyrics was always his and the actual choice of words was usually mine. I was really just his interpreter. There were exceptions to the rule, mind you: as I recall, “Here Today” contains a little more of me both lyrically and melodically than Brian. Also I feel that I inspired “God Only Knows”.

‘I can even remember a discussion I had with Brian over that song because he was terribly worried that incorporating the word “God” into a song – into the title itself – might be considered blasphemous [laughs]. No, but it’s true. He loved the idea but was terrified that all the radio stations would ban the song just because of the word “God”. It took a lot of persuading.

‘Brian was constantly looking for topics that kids could relate to. Even though he was dealing in the most advanced score-charts and arrangements, he was still incredibly conscious of this commercial thing. This absolute need to relate.’

To this effect, Wouldn’t It be Nice’, the song that would lead off their finished creation, was little more than a sophisticated play-off on the old We’re too young to get married’ teen angst dialogue that Wilson had already zeroed in on in We’ll Run Away’, the song he’d written a year or so back with Gary Usher, not to mention his recent plaintively fulsome reinterpretation of the Four Teens’ vintage heartbreaker ‘I’m So Young’. But this time Brian Wilson was out to eclipse these previous sonic soap operas, to transform the subject’s sappy sentiments with a Godlike grace so that the song would become a veritable pocket symphony: two minutes of limpid harps imitating teenage heartstrings in a tug of love, growling horns, joyous little bells, cascading strings, harmonies so complex they seemed to have more in common with a Catholic Mass than any cocktail lounge acappella doo-wop – in short, a fantasy island of the most exquisite musical longing imaginable.

Brian knew the score, see. The beach wasn’t where it was at anymore. It wasn’t even as though he’d been actually into surfing. That was all Dennis’s scene. He’d just interpreted his brother’s enthusiasm, blending his own fantasies in to add a little extra flavouring. But this new music had a spiritual thing going for it. This was his music, the sound of his soul rising up, and as he leaned forward to embrace it Brian suddenly sensed that getting as close to the voice of God as possible was what was going to be truly happening for him, in the immediate future. At this point, he was out to move the very soul of teenage America, to create music so passionate, so majestic that when you turned on your radio – shazam – Instant Epiphany. And inspiration was everywhere.

‘ “Wouldn’t It be Nice” was definitely Brian’s idea,’ says Asher. ‘The innocence of the situation – being too young to get married – seemed to be immensely appealing to him. I can remember being in restaurants with him and some young girl would inevitably walk in and he’d almost melt, y’know. He’d get all misty-eyed and just stare at her, muttering on and on about, “Oh wow, she’s just so-o beautiful. Don’t you think . . .”

‘Also, there was his sister-in-law Diane and I don’t . . . I don’t think I’d be wrong in saying that he was definitely infatuated by her. Again, he was obsessed with this innocent aura she seemed to possess. Brian was really just so naive.

‘I’ve got to be frank here, I guess. See, the only times I actually enjoyed myself or even got comfortable with Brian were when I was standing by the piano working with him. Otherwise, I felt hideous! First, there were the physical surroundings which exhibited the worst taste imaginable!. I came over one time and he’d bought. . . God, my powers to describe these are just inadequate, but. . . They were two clockwork parrots sitting on a perch made out of feathers. And every feather was dyed some disgusting synthetic colour. These monstrosities cost him apparently something like 700 dollars and he thought they were just the greatest [laughs] . . .

‘Concurrent with all this, Brian was also starting to cultivate an entourage – and the people that were surrounding him were inevitably rather more learned . . . more sophisticated, generally more knowledgeable than he was. There was a guy named Arnie Geller. He was really just a hanger-on who later became Brian’s flunky [‘a job’, according to Derek Taylor, ‘not even worthy of a dog’]. And Terry Sachen, an ex-roadie who’d become another hanger-on. Plus a couple called Lauren and Judy Schwartz who had a great influence on Brian, I seem to recall. Lauren was heavily into mysticism. In fact, a couple of years later he changed his surname to “Darro” in order to spiritually balance the number of cyphers in his name [laughs],

‘Anyway, Lauren was something of a Mephistophelian character. He was a real social manipulator and he turned Brian on to all this awful literature. Well, Brian just became over-awed by all this bullshit. . .’

Volumes like The Little Prince, the works of Kahlil Gibran, Krishna – ‘the marshmallow mystics’ as Asher calls them – were devoured ravenously. Herman Hesse was a firm favourite; Brian even descended to the likes of Rod McKuen and Walter Benton’s This is My Beloved. And each work was greeted as a further extension of the Word.

‘Brian just got so hung-up on all this crap, this dumb mysticism. There was another thing too, a record made in 1958 called “How to Talk Hip” which was basically a humorous bohemian thing about smoking dope: “in” humour from the whole Dharma Bums era.

‘Anyway, this junkie beatnik type says at one point after a long build-up, “And then we’ll have world peace!” [Laughs.]

‘Brian thought this was so-o amazing! . . . That was going to be the title of a song on Pet Sounds – “And Then We’ll Have World Peace!”’

Lauren Schwartz, it transpires, also turned Wilson on to his first acid trip and introduced him to this whispery-voiced little bohemian guy with funny-looking glasses who wrote songs and was something of an intellectual – a poet too – and an avid user of amphetamines. His name was Van Dyke Parks, and he was going to take over the chore of writing Brian Wilson’s lyrics just as soon as Tony Asher had stepped out of the clique.

Listening to Pet Sounds nowadays, it’s all too tempting to imagine Wilson and Asher feverishly pounding out these remarkable songs as though their lives depended upon it. The lyricist doesn’t remember it quite like that, however:

‘I wish I could say Brian was totally committed. Let’s say he was . . . um, very concerned. But the thing is, Brian Wilson has to be the single most irresponsible person I’ve ever met in my life. You just wouldn’t believe the extent of this absolute lack of responsibility he constantly maintained.

‘I mean, there were always documents to be signed, appointments that were never kept. Christ, Capitol would even phone me as kind of a last resort and say, “Listen, we hear you’re seeing a lot of Brian. Would it be possible to get him to sign this?” I mean, I can even remember seeing this 125,000 dollar cheque that he needed to endorse, just laying around the house.

‘He had this obsession with sleeping, for example. He’d sleep all through the daytime – only get up when it was dark. He was smoking an awful lot of dope then. He just used to get these incredibly intense depressions. He’d just started taking acid too.

‘You asked me if he ever showed flashes of lunacy, right? I’d have to say . . . Well, he had fits of this just uncontrollable anger. Then he’d fall apart and start crying during play-backs of certain tracks.

‘He was constantly being buffeted between these two emotional extremes. From elation to depression and back again. It’s like . . . yeah, you could say he was doomed in a way. He was just so damn self-destructive! It wasn’t the acid, so much. It was more things like the way he seemed to surround himself constantly with bad people and bad situations.

‘That whole claustrophobic scene with his family for example was so blatantly obvious to me. It was like this dumb guy saying to himself, “Aw, gee, I don’t deserve all this success. I’d better surround myself with all these jerks to make up for my good fortune.”

‘First there was the weird relationship he maintained with Marilyn, his wife. It was this constant interplay of Brian just acting in this utterly belittling way toward her and Marilyn retaliating by storming off into another room yelling back something quite inane. It was always very caveman-like, like something out of The Flintstones. Personally, I could never understand why he’d married her in the first place. I don’t know, maybe he actually loved her!’

The Beach Boys had been out on an extensive tour of foreign countries while Wilson and Asher were beavering away on the music for Pet Sounds. In fact, they’d just returned from a highly successful sojourn in Japan when they were allowed to hear what big brother had been up to in their absence. From the get-go they didn’t like it.

Here they were back from a highly lucrative tour of Europe, where in England they’d been voted as suddenly more popular than the Beatles themselves, having fdcked anything and everything wearing a short skirt and packing a pulse-rate, and Brian had been back home all along wasting his time with this Asher guy – whom no one knew – on this high-falutin’ un-American pansy-assed ‘ego music’. Asher still recalls their reaction and personalities vividly:

‘Well, I always thought Al Jardine was kind of an underrated force in that band. I felt he was genuinely impressed by some of the music we were making. He’d take me aside sometimes and tell me how good it was.

‘But Dennis . . . oh God, Dennis wasn’t bewildered by anything! He just wanted to get the hell out of the studio and get back on the beach [laughs].

‘And Carl . . . well, I always felt Carl was playing a part, y’know. He wasn’t so much a hypocrite as . . . well, he seemed to be totally into promoting this role of himself as calm, loving, serene. He was always stroking his wife’s hair, for example, acting the Fat Buddha.’

Then there was Mike Love, who couldn’t conceal the fact that he was utterly pissed off by the whole set-up. Love’s main concerns were success, money and pussy in no particular order; art and self-expression did not appeal to his set of values in any way whatsoever. So he acted morose and wouldn’t say much in front of Asher or Brian except to throw in the occasional barbed ‘Well, it sure sounds different to the old stuff wise-crack. And if that wasn’t enough, there was always good old Murray Wilson, by now completely out of his depth, but still desperately determined to make his daunting presence felt. According to Asher:

‘Murray was so strange. I’ve got to say that he came across to me as a really sick man. Pathetically so, in fact, but sick none the less. There were times, for example, when he’d be saying to me, “Oh! All I’m trying to do is to help Brian. He hates me, he hates me.” Or, “Why are the other guys giving Brian such a hard time? Can’t you talk to them, make them see . . .”

‘And then, behind Brian’s back, he’d be talking to the other guys . . . in the bathroom, say, just stirring it up. His whole thing it seemed to me was to get the guys at each other’s throats constantly so he could establish himself as the one solid figure. He wasn’t the leader though – Brian was – and Christ, you wouldn’t believe how Murray secretly resented him for that. His own father!

‘And the other guys . . . listen, the Beach Boys would have gladly ganged up on Brian if they conceivably couldVe but they were powerless. No one really challenged . . . no one could challenge Brian, for Chrissakes! Because they weren’t talented enough to take over. God knows, they’ve proved that since.

‘I mean, even then they were trying to do things off their own bat and it was just pathetic really.

‘As far as I’m concerned, the Beach Boys had become absolutely expendable to Brian Wilson’s music. Absolutely, yes. No question about it. I mean, they were getting to be an impediment to him even in the areas they should have helped. There used to be incredible rows – fist-fights, everything.

‘They were all allocated certain vocal parts, OK, and they wouldn’t be doing ’em right so Brian would just explode and start screaming, “Goddam it, you assholes, we’ve been here for three hours and you can’t even do this simple thing!”

‘Brian could have done it all by himself. The Beach Boys didn’t play a single note on the album, either. It was all session musicians – Hal Blaine, Larry Knechtal, Ray Pullman and Billy Strange as well as the Sid Sharpe Strings.’

On the second side of Pet Sounds one of the tracks featured is a number called ‘I Know There’s an Answer’, featuring lyrics written not by Tony Asher but by Terry Sachen, the ex-roadie/hanger-on at the Brian Wilson homestead who’d go on to chauffeur the composer haphazardly around in a black Rolls-Royce with tinted windows. The original title of the song, however, was ‘Hang On to Your Ego’ and when the Beach Boys discovered this, they just couldn’t handle it. Hang on to your ego? No way were they going to participate in a song with a title like that. Asher was there to observe Brian cave in to his nagging in-laws on this issue:

‘You see, all the time Brian was having these nagging fears that the music was maybe going a little too far out. He knew it was great in a way, but he was out on his own, out on a limb with his brothers and cousins – his whole family set-up – undermining his confidence. There was this constant inner conflict going on.’

Brian Wilson suddenly backed down. The ‘Hang On to Your Ego’ title was axed, the decision becoming the very first in a tragic series of paranoid freak-outs that eventually were to destroy the whole experimental fabric of his ‘new’ music.

It’s possible that Brian Wilson was also seriously considering launching a solo career. Certainly he was trying to establish himself as a separate entity from the Beach Boys in the media. In one interview conducted while Pet Sounds was being mixed he even spoke critically of other members. Mike Love ‘couldn’t stand being alone long enough to write something creative’, while baby brother Dennis ‘is the most messed-up person I know . . . If you want him to sit still for a second, he’s yelling and screaming and ranting and raving . . . I think he’d fall apart if the girls stopped screaming for him . . . I pray for Dennis a lot.’ More tellingly, he chose to put out a solo single just prior to the release of Pet Sounds – a track from the album itself called ‘Caroline No’. The song meant a lot to Brian. Many years later he’d claim it referred directly to the first girl ever to break his heart back in high school, one Carole Mountain. But Bruce Johnston, Brian’s touring replacement, felt it went deeper than that: ‘There is no such person as Caroline . . . there never was. That song was directly about Brian himself and the death of a quality within him that was so vital: his innocence. He knows it too.’

The album, though Asher denies that such a policy was consciously activated, is in many respects the first concept work ever in rock. Beginning with ‘Wouldn’t It be Nice’ and its glorification of the two young lovers’ star-crossed longings, the album documents the male participant’s attempts at coming to terms with himself and the world about him. Each song pinpoints a crisis of faith in love and life: confusion (‘That’s Not Me’), disorientation (the staggeringly beautiful ‘I Just wasn’t Made for These Times’), recognition of love’s capricious impermanence (‘Here Today’) and finally, the grand betrayal of innocence featured in ‘Caroline No’.

Then again, bearing in mind this conceptual bent, there are certain incongruous factors about the album’s construction. The main one is the inclusion of the hit single ‘Sloop John B’, as well as of two short instrumental pieces, at least one of which (‘Let’s Go Away for Awhile’) Tony Asher had in fact written lyrics for. The reason for this, is that Capitol had gone far beyond simply demanding, issuing ultimatums and stipulating deadlines that they knew fell on deaf ears – they confiscated the tapes to Brian Wilson’s masterpiece just before it had reached completion and released it as it stood.

A cover shot was taken at a zoo in the LA district just prior to the group being banned from the place for ‘mistreating the animals’ (the incident made the small columns of the LA Times; Dennis had apparently been the ringleader).

The Beach Boys singles ‘God Only Knows’ and ‘Wouldn’t It be Nice’ were issued and both sold in spectacular quantities, but over in America the album itself was, ironically, to live up to the barbed prophecies of the ‘guys’, Murray and Capitol itself. It bombed.

1966 was evidently not a good year for ‘visionary pop music’ taking off in America. Even Phil Spector’s orgasmic ‘River Deep Mountain High’ nose-dived away from the US charts almost as spectacularly as it was taken into the hearts and homes of the more astute British consumer, prompting the increasingly demented producer to retire altogether from the studio for several years. The Beach Boys’ new-found mass audience in Britain – presumably the very same breed that had discovered the group via the incomparably banal ‘Barbara Ann’, their first large-scale hit in the country some months earlier – bought the album in droves, causing it to gloriously transcend even its expected cult acceptance.

Brian’s own ‘Caroline No’, one of the most beautiful songs he has ever written, however, failed to activate sales anywhere. Even after dear old Murray had allocated himself the final say by commandeering the final track and speeding it up from the key of G to the key of A ‘in order to make Brian sound younger’.

Tony Asher meanwhile had disappeared back to his secure post at the advertising department: ‘That was the nature of my personality then. To be able to depend on a regular income. And I found Brian’s lifestyle so damn repugnant. I mean, for every four hours we’d spend writing songs, there’d be about forty-eight hours of these dopey conversations about some dumb book he’d just read.

‘Or else he’d just go on and on about girls. His feelings about this girl or that girl. It was just embarrassing as well as exhibiting this awful, awful taste. His choice of movies, say, was invariably terrible. TV programmes . . . Everything. Plus he was starting to get pretty weird.’

Asher still doesn’t regret disassociating himself from Wilson and the Beach Boys:

‘I do believe Brian is a musical genius. Absolutely. Whatever I thought about him personally was almost always overridden by my feelings of awe at what he was creating. I mean, he was able to create such extraordinary melodies . . .

‘God knows where he discovered those chords, those ideas for arranging a certain song. Maybe he’d had some formal training, though I seriously doubt it. I can vividly remember for example the first time he played me his finished track for “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)”. I was literally speechless. Let’s just say it was a great joy making music with him but that any other relationship with Brian was a great chore. I just felt, see, that the guy was going to go . . .’

Over the top, so to speak?

‘Yeah, but that there was nothing I could possibly do to prevent it happening. That whatever was causing his problems had been predestined inside of him from the age of nine, say. I’d try to talk with him about it and everytime it just fell on deaf ears. He’d say, “Oh, I can’t handle this” or use some other useless catch-phrase.’

And now?

‘The stories I’ve heard about this untogetherness these days would seem to figure. It could easily have happened, really: the irresponsibility . . . the inability to get himself together would ultimately just have had to affect his music. His occasional “conditions” must have transformed themselves into a total lifestyle.

It’s so weird though. I mean, you were talking to me just now about Pet Sounds being a masterpiece. Neither of us at the time thought that. . . at least, I. . . I don’t know. I was more impressed by the production, really.

‘To me it was just a great album, and nothing more. I remember Brian was always saying during play-backs, “Boy, for the first time ever Beach Boys songs are going to get lots of cover versions.”

‘As far as I was concerned, it was just a chance to show some people like my parents, and the guys at the advertising company, that rock music could be . . . a mature medium. That’s about as far as it went for me.

‘Brian, though, was looking for acceptance. I mean, “God Only Knows” . . . Mantovani could have easily made a cover version of that song. Lawrence Welk, too. But before . . . well, Andy Williams would never have covered something like “Little Deuce Coupe”.

‘It’s a shame, really – what’s happened since. I suppose I must hold the same view as most everyone else. I haven’t heard anything particular stirring from Brian or the Beach Boys. That track “Sail On Sailor” is just dandy, but otherwise it’s been down to just isolated brilliant flashes.

‘It’s tragic actually – ’cos it’s obviously still there, but it’s no longer in any usable form.

‘But that’s Brian, maybe, for you.

‘A genius musician but an amateur human being.’

Part 2

‘We were doing witchcraft, trying to make witchcraft music.’

‘The “Brian Wilson is a genius” thing? Yes, I started that off,’ confesses Derek Taylor, a laconic acid-era Ronald Coleman-type with a gentle scouse burr to his voice and a remarkably agile memory for one who fried his senses so ferociously throughout the late sixties. ‘It was my line: “Brian Wilson is a genius, I think.” I seem to recall it all came about because Brian told me that he thought he was better than most other people believed him to be. So I put this idea to myself and went around town proposing it to people like Van Dyke and Danny Hutton and they all said, “Oh, yes, definitely, Brian Wilson is a genius.” Then I thought, “Well, if that’s so, why doesn’t anyone outside think so?” Then I started putting it around, making almost a campaign out of it.

‘And I still believe it. Absolutely, Brian Wilson is most certainly a genius. It was something that I felt had to be established.’

Pet Sounds was about to be released when Taylor was taken on the Beach Boys’ pay-roll, receiving a handsome 750 dollars a month for renovating the group’s public image. Strategically, it was an extremely canny move – instigated, naturally enough, by Brian, who saw Taylor as a vital factor in establishing credibility for the Beach Boys’ image and his own new music. Derek Taylor was at that time the single most prestigious figure with whom to have one’s name linked in matters of promotion. He was very witty, very dry, a kindly soul, and also a Liverpudlian then resident in a city still totally besotted with folk of said nationality. Most decisively, he knew the Beatles and had actually worked with them and Brian Epstein. There could be no more spectacular recommendation. Once enlisted into the ranks, Taylor worked fast. The candy-striped shirts that had for so long symbolized the Beach Boys’ image were conveniently ‘lost’, while marriages – all had been wed for some time now, unbeknownst to their fans – were immediately made public knowledge.

Next came the grand initiation ceremony afforded the release of Pet Sounds. Taylor convened a reception in a suite at the London Hilton, where England’s most prestigious pop pen-pushers were given a preview of the album. Self-styled LA ‘freak out’ specialist Kim Fowley was unofficial master-of-ceremonies at the unveiling. Marianne Faithfull hovered fetchingly, while guests of honour Paul McCartney and John Lennon sat, their ears cupped against the speakers, listening intently to a music that represented the most formidable threat to their own aesthetic dictatorship of rock in the year 1966.

According to Fowley, after the record had finished Lennon and McCartney left the suite, returning immediately to the latter’s St John’s Wood home, where, under the heady spell of Brian Wilson’s ‘new music’, some hashish and a couple of amphetamine pills, they went on to compose ‘Here There and Everywhere’ that same evening. For Brian, information like this was music to his ears. Moreover, that George Harrison had spent hours phoning acquaintances to rave over the album’s merits or that Andrew Loog Oldham had, upon being handed a test-pressing, pontificated that the work be labelled the ‘Scheherazade of pop’ – this was precisely the kind of effusive reaction Brian Wilson was after.

‘By this time Brian had become very, very competitive,’ confirms Taylor. ‘So much so that it was no longer that healthy sort of competitive spirit thing. It was a mad possessive battle against the Stones and particularly the Beatles, an absurdly maniacal “Who’s the fairest in the land?” campaign, really. And I was in the middle of all this because . . . Well, firstly, he liked me because I was English and different. My life-style certainly seemed to appeal to him greatly.

‘But also there was the problem about my other connections. He’d constantly be testing the strength of my devotion to his cause. For example, he’d play me a new song and immediately start this thoroughly insistent psychological arm-twisting tactic, making statements like “Better than the Stones, yeah?” Then he’d put on . . . oh, “Paperback Writer”, say, and keep saying in this deliberately cute, precociously taxing way – actually he’d sound just like Tony Hancock when he indulged in these sessions – “Is that any good? I ask you. Is that really any good ?” And I’d have to say very deliberately, “Yes, Brian, it is very good ”! He was never satisfied though. Never.

‘It’s strange, too, because the fact that Pet Sounds hadn’t sold at all well didn’t affect him in the least. I doubt, in fact, whether it even registered with him. He was only interested in these “Who is the best?” heats.

‘The Beatles. . . now, the Beatles were hot enough not to be over-concerned about anybody else, but they did think the Beach Boys were good. In fact, they’d arrived at that conclusion long before I had.

‘Brian . . . of course, at that time Brian was very hot. He was always talking about a new plateau. All the time: “The next record will create a new plateau for the Beach Boys in terms of creativity and acceptance.” Always these grand statements.

‘He was constantly making changes with his collaborators too. Tony Asher had left the picture by that time and Van Dyke [Parks], who was also as hot as hell right then, was brought in to deal with the lyrics. I mean, Van Dyke was mad too, but it was a constant thing, and on that level anyone with the appropriate sensitivity could relate to it. Brian on the contrary . . . Well, one day he’d be coherent, bright, and the next he’d be so damnably illogical and strange. He was scary quite frankly.

‘Brian was taking acid, smoking a hell of a lot of grass and generally enjoying a new-found freedom that he would ultimately cut himself off from during one of those totally illogical frenzied brain-storms of his that would inevitably wreak havoc over everything.

‘In terms of an era, this was all pretty much pre-acid, mind. I seem to recall only Brian and Dennis were turning on at this time. The rest certainly weren’t.

‘The other Beach Boys? Oh, it was always something of a pleasure touring with them because they were professional, you know . . . good company. They were very concerned about Brian too. All the time they’d be asking, “How is Brian? What does he think?” and so on. I never really heard a single disparaging word in all that time. Maybe a few jokes about his eccentricities, but always basically affectionate.

‘Mike Love by then was tough as hell and was taking care of things. A worldly fellow, Mike. Marriages, and all that. There was no God in his life, then, I can tell you!

‘Then came Al Jardine who was . . . amusing. He possessed a very dry sense of humour did Al. Bruce [Johnston] was very business-like, very diplomatic.

‘Dennis was . . . oh, I could never make up my mind whether Dennis was actually childish or child-like. Maybe more of the former. He was pretty wild, certainly. Irresponsible, too. Though I didn’t find him to be much of a problem.

‘Carl was so sweet and young I found him difficult to relate to really. I just felt too damn worldly next to Carl’s innocence. I was frightened I might taint him in some respect [laughs].

‘I didn’t really have too much contact with Murray, which was probably just as well. I remember one half-hour when he rushed into my office. The first thing he said was, “Am I coming on too strong?” I immediately replied, “Yes.”

‘He wanted photographs, so I gave him some new shots with the boys’ hair protruding over the ears and touching the collar and he tossed them away: “Never mind that, I want them looking like Americans. It’s for a six-foot . . . no, make that an eighteen-foot stain-glass window. Just imagine this – the boys looking like Americans, and ‘Sea-of-Tunes’ [the name of his publishing company] inscribed underneath.”

‘He just kept throwing these photographs around then suddenly leapt up and ran out of the office. He never really intimidated me. Though I wouldn’t have liked to have been one of his sons. Brian hated him from time to time. And, of course, Murray hated the new music, which didn’t help matters.

‘I also recall having – oh God, I still can’t believe this one! – a conversation with Brian and Dennis about the Beach Boys never having written surf music or songs about cars; that the Beach Boys had never been involved in any way with the surf and drag fads.

‘I was told this one afternoon and I kept saying, “Listen, how can . . . I mean, how dare you give me this nonsense about you never having been involved in all this? I have the proof right here.”

‘But no, they would not concede. I just felt it sad that they should be so determined to disown their past. The Beatles went through that – at about the same time, as it happens.

‘That all-American tag that Murray was still attempting to yoke them on to had done them a hell of a lot of damage. Brian, in particular, suffered. I mean, to begin with, it was really nothing new to Hollywood that people were strange, lived vampire-like existences, had bizarre whims. It was just that Brian Wilson was not supposed to be strange. And even then, with Brian . . . it’s weird actually, because Brian would only do things in fits and starts as if they had just been invented.

‘He was definitely a man of whims. Fanatical . . . illogical whims at that! Religions were one thing. He’d be into Subud one minute, then on to something else without bothering to really absorb any of it.

‘And also there were his food fads. Oh God, yes, his food fads! [Laughs.] I did most of my business down at the Gaiety Delicatessen, a restaurant in Hollywood . . . basically because I was something of a heavy drinker at that time. Brian seemed rather fascinated by this semi-alcoholic existence because it had never seemed a really strong Californian trait to drink a lot. Anyway, he’d be sitting with me in this restaurant going on and on about this supposedly strict vegetarian diet of his, preaching vegetarianism at me while at the very same moment he’d be whacking down some massive hamburger.

‘It was such ridiculous hypocrisy and I’d turn on him and say, “Look, do you realize what you’re doing? Here you are preaching on about dieting and stuff and you’re stuffing back this massive hamburger.” And he’d just fix me with this cunning look of his, signifying, I suppose, that the joke was really on me.

‘Also . . . God [laughs], Brian was telling everyone that the next album would be recorded in a gymnasium and that he wanted me to coordinate the transformation of his recording studio into a gym.

‘It was, again, all so bloody absurd because the man couldn’t even pick a bar-bell up! He was driving us all crackers by that time because, well, God, he was so temporary, it was awful. And I’d dread the phone call at 4 a.m. demanding that I come over because I knew he needed me. We had a terrible falling-out that lasted about three weeks.

‘I couldn’t stand the fact that Brian didn’t want me to like any other artist but himself. I could never stand bands competing over me. It was never a problem with the Byrds, mind. But Brian. . .

‘Mind you, he was making some amazing music at that time. I mean, even when I couldn’t face him, even when I couldn’t handle his mad competitiveness or his temporary whims, he could win me over with his music. He could manipulate people, could Brian. He was very cunning, very clever, even though there was a naivety there. Part of him was this terribly shy young man whom you could tell the most mundane things to and he’d express just sheer amazement. . .

‘But despite his strangeness, how could you deny him when he was creating something like, well, “Surfs Up”?’

Taylor was hardly alone in his role as Brian’s trusted confidant. Jules Siegel was a journalist with furtive eyes and a near fatal fondness for LSD who had been one of Brian’s special little gang, one of the stellar crew bent on making Brian Wilson’s new spiritual music as cataclysmic a multi-media event as humanly possible. He was present at session after session, watching the madness pile up, hearing extraordinary music being played and recorded only to discover that most of it would never see the light of day, and that he too would be banished from the gang just as suddenly and inexplicably as he’d been taken in in the first place. Siegel was a pal of David Anderle’s, a noted LA hipster/businessman who’d recently left MGM having almost succeeded in wooing Bob Dylan to the label in mid-’66. But all that was in the recent past, as, Anderle was now hanging out and working with America’s other great white rock genius on all sorts of creative projects, the pre-eminent one being the establishment of a Beach Boys record label all their very own, named Brother Records. But there were all these other amazing ideas just buzzing around, particularly on those crazy nights when Anderle and Brian would be spread out by the pool with the lava lamps a-glowing and that big telescope you could focus in on all the stars and planets with, lost in great mind-scrambling sessions boosted by amphetamines and pot wherein both parties would space out and giddily theorize about the imminence of a better world beginning with a bigger bolder style of life bereft of borders and limitations.

Van Dyke Parks liked those little black speed pills too. He was a bookish-looking fellow with owlish little glasses and a personality that was more flamboyant than maybe burly guys like the rest of the Beach Boys could comfortably relate to. His self-penned LA music hustler’s biography of the time – entitled ‘Van Dyke Parks is real, valid, and twenty-two!’ – claimed, among other things, that ‘at nineteen he slipped from parts in TV dramas to Carnegie Institute where musical oceans deluged his mind . . . Returning to the ocean, he contemplated the meanings and considered the lilies. He wrote a song, a pop-art version of Beethoven’s ninth symphony, and called it simply “Number Nine”. He is undoubtedly where it’s at’ He’d also been a session organist for the Byrds, had created some musical waves of his own around LA and now he was into his self-styled ‘American gothic’ period of lyric writing, a sort of ‘Rock-Rock-Roll-Plymouth Rock-Roll-Over’ type of abstract thing. Brian would play Parks these little musical pieces – ‘feels’ he’d called them – and the lyricist would conjure forth these self-conscious artsy splurges of imagery. Sometimes it was pretentious gibberish but there were other times when something was created like the fantasia of ‘Surf’s Up’ or the eerie simplicity of ‘Wind Chimes’ or the homely surrealism of a ‘Cabinessence’, and it was all at once blindingly clear that something of extraordinary cultural importance was taking place, because everyone in the room would gasp and rise as one, exploding with spontaneous applause. Anderle and his protege, singer Danny Hutton, Siegel, another writer, Paul Robbins with the satanic beard, worldly Liverpudlian Derek Taylor, Michael Vosse, Anderle’s assistant, with the thin moustache and the omnipresent white panama hat – they’d all be on their feet, glowing because here they were in the presence of America’s very own baby Mozart, playing the midwife and helping him nurture this latest in an ongoing series of breakthroughs in contemporary popular music for a brave new world.

Hearing Pet Sounds (as well as meeting Brian round at dope dealer Lauren Schwartz’s) was what had tripped them all out in the first place. That was the first breakthrough, and Brian had got straight on to the second stage that very autumn with this wild track he’d first written with Tony Asher called ‘Good, Good Vibrations’. It was even short-listed as track fourteen on Pet Sounds by a Capitol A&R guy for a while before getting dropped, and Brian had ended up devoting session after session as well as tens of thousands of dollars to finding the sound that best represented the acid-dazed tones now ringing around in his head. The song itself could already boast a long and bizarre history, as David Anderle takes up the story:

‘When I really got in with Brian, it was right around the time of the fourth attempt at “Good Vibrations”. I heard it, and it knocked me out, and I said, “Uh, oh there’s something happening here that is unbelievable.” And the next time I came up, it was quite different again. And then I came up one evening, and Brian said that he’d decided to totally scrap “Good Vibrations”. He was just not going to put it out. The track was going to be sold to Warner Bros, to be put out as an R’n’B record, sung by a coloured group.

‘Originally, see, it had been a lot shorter . . . tighter rhythmically and melodically much simpler. It was much more of a commercial ditty.

‘Anyway, I told Danny this and he said, “Well, let’s see if I can’t record the song myself and have Brian produce and finish the basic track.” So I called Brian back the next day and made him the proposition – which I don’t personally think prompted him to decide to finish . . . though maybe. Well, anyway, he went ahead and finished it.’

And ‘Good Vibrations’, with its vocal arrangement and that innovative use of the theremin went on to become the Beach Boys’ biggest-selling single ever, totally undermining – at least temporarily – the prophecies of such as Murray Wilson who’d seen ‘all this progressive stuff as dealing out the veritable deathblow to the popularity of his boys.

‘Good Vibrations’, then, was the Brian Wilson master-plan in second gear. Reports had it that the third stage would next be achieved via the follow-up single – a Wilson-Van Dyke Parks collaboration, ‘Heroes and Villains’, of purportedly epic proportions. Finally, there would be the unveiling of the biggest jewel in the Beach Boys’ crown, a whole album laden with Parks– Wilson gems, a breathtaking masterpiece that would leave all supposed competitors reeling in their tracks.

This project already had a title. At first it was supposed to be Dumb Angel, but that was quickly changed. Finally it was decided: the next Beach Boys album would be entitled – simply – Smile.

A cover had even been conceived for it: a primitive child-like drawing of a ‘Smile Shop’, and by December 1966, there was also a full track listing. Side one was to begin with a track entitled ‘Do You Like Worms?’, while the final track of side two was another unreleased piece called ‘The Old Master-Painter’. Sandwiched between these cuts were the titles ‘Vegetables’ (spelt ‘Vega-Tables’), ‘Surf’s Up’, ‘Wind Chimes’, ‘Cabinessence’ (again spelt ‘Cabin Essence’), ‘Who Ran the Iron Horse’, ‘The Grand Coolee Dam’, ‘The Elementals Suite’, ‘Our Prayer’, ‘Heroes and Villains’, ‘Good Vibrations’, ‘Bicycle Rider’, ‘Wonderful’ and ‘Child is the Father to the Man’.

And where is it now?

In his piece ‘Goodbye Surfing, Hello God’ Siegel refers constantly to music bound by ‘entire sequences of extraordinary power and beauty’ that were ultimately to be ‘sacrifices to the same strange combination of superstitious fear and the God-like conviction of his [Wilson’s] own power he displayed when he destroyed the Fire Music sequence of the “Elementals Suite”.’

Michael Vosse is more explicit about the actual form that Smile was trying to take in the mind of its increasingly demented creator: ‘I would say without a doubt that Smile, had it been completed, would have been basically a Southern California non-country-oriented gospel album – on a very sophisticated level. Because that’s what Brian was doing: his own form of revival music.

‘Also, Brian’s other preoccupation was the need for humour . . . which is almost the key to his whole scene. He told me that he felt laughter as one of the highest forms of divinity and that when someone was laughing, their connection with the thing that was making them laugh made them more open than they could be at just about any other time.

‘You can find that in all art forms: the minute you inspire laughter you also make that person vulnerable, which means either you can shock them, make them laugh more, or, at that moment, you can be totally honest with them. And Brian felt that it was time to do a humour album.’

On the one hand, Wilson was about to expose his audience to the gargantuan heaviness of the Van Dyke Parks collaborations, and on the other he wanted the project to weigh in with this new concept of his: Smile as the great cosmic humour album. The guy was always biting off more than even he could chew.

Let’s see, there was Brian’s healthfood fetish demanding to be eulogized on the album, plus the whole health kick which set Wilson to blubbering orders to Taylor, Vosse and Anderle about building sauna baths and a gymnasium in the recording studio. Next, business meetings started being held in the swimming-pool. Brian’s theory here, according to Vosse, being that ‘if you take a bunch of businessmen and put them in a swimming-pool with their heads bobbing out of the water, then they really get down to fundamentals. Because nobody can bullshit when they’re in the water.’ If they did, Brian would dunk them. And if it got boring, he would just start splashing about. Then came the sand-box. Vosse again:

‘In what had been his dining-room Brian had a guy build a partition about four feet off the ground into a box shape. Then he put his grand piano in it and filled it with sand up to about two feet, so he could play the piano with his shoes off in the sand. And then he got into having meetings in the sand-box because you could roll around and cover yourself up to here.

‘He would bring these things up at meetings at the office. He would come in and everybody would sit around a table – and have lists . . . Brian was always making lists. And they were just classic . . . like, you’d look and see “Monday March 23rd. – Vitamins/Studio Time at Western/Sand-box”. “Ah the sand-box. We have to start meeting more in the sand-box.”’

Everything started spinning much too fast at around this point. Wilson had also discovered that Capitol were trying to stymie the band with an outdated clause known as the ‘breakages’ amendment. And so he immediately sued the company, an act destined to throw the forthcoming release of his ongoing masterpiece into serious jeopardy. According to Derek Taylor:

‘Ah yes, this was all concurrent with Brian’s spectacular eccentricities, wasn’t it? He decided that Capitol were ripping him off and instigated a whole campaign against them. He’d employ people just to audit Capitol, sue Capitol. . . hate Capitol.

‘The breakages area dated back to 78 rpm records . . . it was simply a redundant clause that Capitol were using to extort more money from the band. Brian actually employed a young lawyer guy – Grillo, Nick Grillo – as the overseer to this campaign and was spurring him on every-which-way.

‘Actually I always thought that Capitol took pretty good care of the Beach Boys. That was only my own opinion though.’

Probably the high-point of the whole Smile era was reached around November 1966 when CBS set about filming a TV documentary on Brian Wilson and his new music. This was not going to be just another dumb pop show: the programme was to be introduced by Leonard Bernstein and be overseen by David Oppenheim, a middle-aged director of high-brow documentaries who’d recently filmed an award-winning documentary on the composer Stravinsky. Brian naturally saw this as being ‘very heavy’ and full of portent.

The show’s actual peak occurred after a frankly disastrous Beach Boys recording session when the young composer performed a live preview of ‘Surf’s Up’ on the piano in his living-room – and it sounded quite perfect. So perfect, in fact, that Bernstein himself broke down afterwards and made some ecstatic claim that the song was the most brilliant piece of contemporary music he’d ever heard. Bernstein’s frenzied gushing really moved Brian. It horrified him.

Of course, Brian should have been over the moon but he wasn’t. He broke down there and then. Freaked right out and ended up phoning his astrologer, a woman named Genevlyn, who told him to beware hostile vibrations. So he stayed in bed for five days, eating candy bars, smoking pot and brooding to the sound of his wind chimes.

There was always something wrong now, something not quite right. There was dog shit in the sand-box. Marilyn was getting hysterical more and more often. Brian would still stand in front of mirrors for hours at a time, playing with his hair, but it never looked good anymore, and he felt suddenly old, fat and kinda washed out. Even his precious Rolls-Royce with the cooky smoke-screen windows had been broken into. Brian sensed it was all the work of ‘mind-gangsters’ plotting against him. ‘This new music I’m making is going to scare a lot of people,’ he’d keep claiming in his most puffed-up, ego’d-out moments. But those moments were getting few and far between now. Meanwhile this new music was really starting to scare him more than anyone else. The drugs he’d been relying on to give him all that limitless energy and creative vision now only gave him cold sweats, stomach cramps and chronic paranoia. And worst of all, the ‘Boys’ were back from Europe, and once again, there were fist-fights in the studio.

The guys – and in particular Mike Love – all mistrusted and resented Van Dyke Parks and his ‘weird’ druggy lyrics, and Parks was consequently to be the first of Brian’s new allies to be ousted from the new gang. According to Vosse:

‘What ultimately happened was that Warner Bros, made him an offer for his services as a solo artiste that he couldn’t refuse, and the day Van Dyke signed, he put his head back into his own music again and became less and less available to Brian. And Brian suddenly became less and less sure of what he was doing with the album.

‘You see, where I had always seen a musical co-operation going on was definitely in the studio, and particularly when they were cutting tracks. In the studio together, they had a very happy relationship going . . . That’s where Van Dyke had this great respect for Brian. And for his part, Brian wanted him there all the time and when problems developed, he would call him; and the two of them together in the studio was just a joy.

Without the other guys, that is. And I think that while the Beach Boys were in England touring and while Brian was doing the tracks for the album, Smile was a totally conceived entity.’

Or, as David Anderle would bitterly observe only a year after Smile’s cancellation:

‘I think the major problem from Pet Sounds onwards has been the Beach Boys themselves. The Beach Boys as a musical instrument and the Beach Boys always being negative towards Brian’s experimentation. They were generally very aware of the commercial market when Brian really wanted to space out and take off . . .

‘He’d have to go through a tremendous amount of paranoia before he would get into the studio, knowing he was going to have to face an argument. He would come into the studio uptight, he would give a part to one of the fellas or to a group of the fellas, say, “This is what I would like to have done,” and there would be instant resistance.

‘And it just wouldn’t be happening. And so there’d be endless takes and then he would just junk it. And then, maybe after they left to go on tour, he would come back in and do it himself. All their parts. But it was very taxing and it was extremely painful to watch. Because it was like a great wall had been put down in front of creativity.’

In the midst of the Beach Boys’ latest punk rebellion there were all the other little breakdowns occurring, cutting him down, pricking into his once mighty ego bubble. He was totally at the mercy of these utterly vicious mood swings now, jerking him back and forth from giddy elation to frantic sobbing sometimes in the space of a single minute. He was getting these scary acid flash-backs too, as well as these voices inside his head. They weren’t saying anything too distinct yet, just making this dark, ghostly murmuring sound back there in the lower recesses of his brain. At one session for ‘Heroes and Villains’ he’d tried to capture this latest ghoulish sound taking up squatter’s rights in his head by taking a tape of some acappella Beach Boys vocal horse-play and slowing it down until it was just this vast swamp-like groan of terror. It was the scariest sound of anything he created for Smile, but it wasn’t as scary as what the voices in his head were starting to insinuate. Jules Siegel chronicled one chilling outburst:

‘Van Dyke Parks had left and come back and would leave again, tired of being constantly dominated by Brian. Marilyn Wilson was having headaches and Dennis Wilson was leaving his wife. Session after session was cancelled.

‘One night a studio fall of violonists waited while Brian tried to decide whether or not the vibrations were friendly or hostile. The answer was hostile and the session was cancelled at a cost of 3,000 dollars.

‘Brian seemed to be filled with secret fear. One night at the house it began to surface. Marilyn sat nervously painting her fingernails as Brian stalked up and down, his face tight and his eyes small and red.

‘ “What’s the matter, Brian? You’re really strung out,” a friend asked.

‘“Yeah, I’m really strung out. Look, I mean, I really feel strange. A really strange thing happened to me tonight. Did you see this movie, Seconds?”

‘ “No, but I know what it’s about.”

‘ “Look, come into the kitchen; I really have to talk about this.”

‘In the kitchen they sat down in the black-and-white houndstooth-check wall-papered dinette area. A striped window-shade clashed with the checks and the whole room vibrated like some kind of op-art painting. Normally Brian wouldn’t sit for more than a minute in it, but now he seemed to be unaware of anything except what he wanted to say.

‘ “I walked into that movie,” he said in a tense, high-pitched voice, “and the first thing that happened was a voice from the screen that said, ‘Hello, Mr Wilson.’ It completely blew my mind. You’ve got to admit that’s pretty spooky, right?”’

‘ “Maybe.”

‘ “That’s not all. Then the whole thing was there. I mean my whole life. Birth and death and rebirth. The whole thing. Even the beach was in it, a whole thing about the beach. It was my whole life right there on the screen.”

‘ “It’s just a coincidence, man. What are you getting so uptight for?”

‘ “It’s Spector . . . Phil Spector . . . I mean he has shares in movies, right? He’s behind these things, right? I think he’s after me, I mean, I think he set that whole thing up – really. He’s out to get me. I mean he’s uptight about the way I took his sound and . . . It’s no coincidence, man. Spector’s out to get me. He set it all up”’

‘Oh God, the Spector thing,’ laughs Derek Taylor. ‘Yes, indeed, there was a time when Brian thought Spector actually had people following him, therefore he had people following Spector. Then Murray was having Brian tailed and so Brian got someone to tail Murray and it just went on and on. All of it complete insanity.

‘By that time . . . well, it was just all hell breaking loose. It was tapes being lost, ideas being junked – Brian thinking, “I’m no good,” then, “I’m too good” – then, “I can’t sing! I can’t get those voices anymore.”

‘There was even a time back then when there hardly seemed to be a Beach Boys at all.’

The venerable scouse publicist visited his mind-blown employer one final time towards the end of April 1967 and wrote about it for a teenage magazine shortly afterwards:

‘Up at Brian’s house there is considerable reconstruction . . . the place is becoming a structural symphony western in origin with eastern overtones.

‘Come in through the front door and you are welcomed by a four-track recording studio with wrestling mats and a vibrating table. Close by, Wilson has a sauna bath and, a few feet away from that, he has his room of sand . . . a room within a room, with a grand piano set in the sand.

‘ “The sandroom has got to go,” Brian says sadly. “There’s sand everywhere, in the food, in the bed, in our clothes. The dogs have scattered it all over the house. I can’t stand it.”

‘But there are still compensations, for the gold and scarlet meditation tent remains and so does the office lined with purple drapes.

‘Inside the tent, Brian, the Beach Boys, their wives and friends sit on pillows, eat carrots, and think about things and talk and occasionally laugh and sometimes spray each other with chocolate cream and frosting from aerosol cans.’

By that time Smile was well and truly jinxed to death. All of Brian’s gang had been exiled from their master’s presence for paranoid, frankly insane, reasons. Meanwhile the key problem blocking the album from being completed was that Brian had forgotten how all the pieces – all these weird ‘feels’ he’d recorded – actually fitted together. There were seven different versions of ‘Heroes and Villains’ for example, with numerous little orchestrated motifs of the main theme also recorded and given separate titles, but where they were all supposed to go, Brian simply couldn’t remember anymore.

The vocal sessions with the Beach Boys had proved so disastrous, most of the Smile vocal tracks weren’t complete while many contained half-finished run-throughs often ruined by the vocalists exploding into crude giggling fits for no apparent reason. There were some dazzling sections too, of course. There was an almost-completed ‘Surf’s Up’ with Brian providing a remarkable lead vocal, ‘Cabin Essence’ with its eerie Aaron Copland-like segues into ‘Who Ran the Iron Horse’ and the Zen-like ‘Have You Seen the Grand Coolee Dam’ sections and a version of ‘Wind Chimes’ with just the sound of two vibraphones, and electric piano and Brian’s aching soprano navigating the gorgeous melody-line, that overwhelmed the few fortunate enough to hear them. There were some mellow healing chants and a special Beach Boys prayer too, but there was also all this weird spooky music stuff, like this long atonal extract from ‘Heroes and Villains’ where it sounds like Brian’s mind is being ripped apart, or the dark, booming reverb-drenched blur of sound that was ‘Mrs O’Leary’s Cow’ a.k.a. ‘The Fire Suite’. Even Brian’s Swiss-cheese memory would be able to recall the facts surrounding that piece of music and its place in causing the untimely cancellation of Smile, a full twenty-six years after they’d happened:

‘At the session I brought a bucket of firewood and put it right in the middle of the room, and I said, “This is supposed to get you guys in the mood.” We were all messed up on drugs. We were doing witchcraft, trying to make witchcraft music. I was stoned on hashish and grass and I got a little too much into this one tape called “Fire”. Then, a place down the street burned down the same day we did the song. And I said to myself, “Somehow we must have burned that building down.” And I threw the tape away and erased all the tapes, except . . . I erased “Fire”. All the rest that we kept, they were just like twenty-second little pieces, trying to imitate Phil Spector, and not getting anywhere near him. I was crazy then, I was a crazy person.’

By May, Taylor had terminated his employment with the Beach Boys, to take on the organization of the now legendary Monterey pop festival held that same year, but he was still to cross paths with the group in circumstances once more to be highlighted by Brian’s infuriatingly erratic behaviour:

‘The Beach Boys cancelling Monterey at the very last minute undoubtedly set the band in a very bad light. They were certainly very heavily criticized at the time for it. It seemed rather like an admission of defeat. And well, yes, I presume it had to be down to Brian. Those sorts of decision were always his, really. I know, for example, he’d said “Yes”. And so he must have have said “No” as well. It was certainly very much in keeping with his character at the time.

‘Also, you’ve got to remember by this time he was completely out of circulation. He’d vanished seemingly off the face of the earth. In fact he didn’t re-emerge or come back into circulation again until long after I’d left LA. It got very depressing at times – after I’d returned to London – hearing the stories about him being in some wretched club in some equally wretched condition.’

In September 1967 a two-week series of recording sessions involving the Beach Boys and Wilson that had taken place in the latter’s new Spanish Mission estate in Bel-Air using make-shift home recording equipment two months earlier were edited down and released by Capitol as an album trading under the title of Smiley Smile. There were several Smile compositions featured but all in versions that undersold their worth considerably. There was a lot of silly shit as well: dumb pot-head skits, so-called healing chants and even some weird ‘loony tunes’ items straight out of a cut-rate Walt Disney soundtrack. Twenty-five years after its release it would become regarded as a top-rate ‘chill-out’ album for those looking for something a bit spooky and other-wordly to float down from, after a long lysergic exploration of the senses. At the time of its release, though, it appeared like the single most underwhelming musical statement of the sixties, the work of a bunch of doo-wop singing acid casualties. What was it that Murray had screamed at Brian that day back in early ’66 when he’d stormed into the house and thrown his son’s secret pot stash all over that hideously coloured carpet in the living-room?

‘Y’know, Brian, the one thing God gave you was a brain. If you play with it and destroy it, you’re dead, you’re a vegetable . . . There are going to be people killed and people in sanatoriums and insane asylums because they played with God.’

In January 1968 the Beach Boys released another new set of Brian Wilson tunes, Wild Honey, this time with the ever-winning Mike Love providing the lyrics. The songs were simple, homey and a bit eccentric with squeaky, righteous harmonies and big chunky chord changes that reflected Brian’s love of Motown-styled rhythm’n’blues. Several of the best ones he hadn’t even written for the Beach Boys. He’d written them for Danny Hutton, the promising young singer that David Anderle managed, and these two other guys – great singers, all three of them. But Mike had somehow hijacked the whole project and here he was, back at square one, banging out these chirpy ditties with the guys again. But the whole reason he’d written them was as a favour to Danny. In fact, Danny would go on to return the favour to Brian very quickly; he would introduce him to cocaine. The first time Brian snorted some he felt he was kissing God, just like he had on his first acid trip. But as the weeks spun by, the more he snorted, the less the melodies appeared. Only the voices in his head increased in volume.

In 1969, after more consecutive flops, the Beach Boys released Friends, their first album in which they pretty much went it alone creatively speaking. First of all Mike Love had tried to become the leader, pushing transcendental meditation down the other members’ throats and organizing an elaborate tour of the States with the Maharishi so sparsely attended it almost bankrupted the group. Mike got so into the whole meditation trip he’d go out to the desert and fast for weeks at a time, until he was having all sorts of godawful visions. Just like his cousin, he’d gone completely crazy at one point and had had to be hospitalized.

Meanwhile Dennis was starting to write songs and, though they weren’t anywhere near his brother’s, they weren’t too bad either, offering a refreshingly sensitive counterpoint to such an otherwise thoughtless, rough-neck exterior. What was it Mike had told that limey journalist in an unguarded moment back in late 1968 about the drummer? ‘The first thing you’ve got to understand about Dennis is that Dennis doesn’t understand.’ This was after Dennis started blabbing to the guy about this new discovery he’d found, this creepy little guy with a herd of syphilitic-hippie girls to do his bidding for him. Rave magazine, a British fashion monthly, went on to print his remarks:

‘Fear is nothing but awareness. I was only frightened as a child because I didn’t understand fear – the dark, being lost . . . It all came from within. Sometimes “the Wizard” frightens me. The Wizard is Charlie Manson who is a friend of mine who thinks he is God and the devil. He sings, plays and writes poetry and may be another artist for Brother records.’

They even wrote a song together – ‘Cease to Exist’ – that the Beach Boys recorded and released on their follow-up to Friends – 20–20.

Dennis’s connection with Manson went on to earn him death threats and a front-page profile straight after the Wizard masterminded a murder massacre at Sharon Tate’s mansion during the early summer of 1969. When reports of Manson’s and Dennis’s socializing hit the evening news after the former’s arrest, Carl became so frightened he drove the wife and kids over to stay at Audree’s the night the news broke for fear of reprisals from the Manson ‘family’. ‘I don’t know why you brought them here, son,’ whispered his mother through a dull whisky haze. ‘Those Manson people are bound to know our address too.’

1969 was also the year good old Murray decided to drive yet another knife into his eldest son’s back. Reckoning it was all over for the Beach Boys, he sold Sea of Tunes, the publishing company that owned all of Brian Wilson’s timeless songs. In his ghosted autobiography Wilson now claims he was practically destroyed by the news, but Tony Asher remembers it another way:

‘Chuck Kay, who runs A&M publishing, phoned me up one day clear out of the blue. He sounded pretty concerned and straight off he says:

‘ “Listen, I’ll be frank with you, Tony, I don’t know if our buying up all the Beach Boys publishing off the old man was really such a good idea. I mean, some of the melodies are great, sure – but take this song ‘Don’t Worry Baby’, for example. A great set of changes, but I just checked out the words and I suddenly discover that there’s all this shit about hot-rod racing in there. I mean, how can we get an artiste – an established artiste, someone like Wayne Newton, say – to cover a song with dumb lyrics like that? We’ve got a real problem here, Tony. Anyway I was wondering whether you’d consider perhaps re-writing the lyrics to some of the songs all over again so they wouldn’t sound so . . . dumb.”

‘Well, first of all, I said, “OK. Sure,” y’know. It sounded like easy money. And then I got to thinking, “Why the hell would I want to be rewriting something like ‘Surfer Girl’ all over again? I mean, what’s the point?” So I declined the offer.

‘But the really weird thing was Chuck actually had got in touch with Brian beforehand – very apprehensively, mind you – to kinda check out whether he’d mind too much if the lyrics to his songs were rewritten . . . made more sophisticated, if you like. I mean, I would have thought Brian would have gotten really upset at the very idea of his songs being altered in any way but no, he just went ahead and said, “Sure” – y’know – “Do whatever you want.” Chuck said it was like Brian just couldn’t give a shit about it either way. He’d just given up on his music at that point altogether.’

*

Just as the sixties turned to the seventies it became Carl’s turn to take the helm. In 1970 they’d left Capitol and signed to Warner Bros, but the first album – Sunflower, more ‘olde worlde’ Beach Boys pop – sold wretchedly. This prompted the youngest Wilson, whose former youth and puppy fat were now hidden behind an ample beard and the perpetual look of a disoriented monk, to bring in a manager called Jack Rieley, a terrible old fraud who got them to go political and address ‘contemporary issues’ in their songs. Mike and Al went for this ‘awareness’ shit in a big way and scribbled out some atrocious texts to order but Brian skulked even further back inside his bearpit of a bedroom. Finally Dennis came to tell him the big news. After Warners had rejected the original track listing and title (Landlocked), the next album was going to be called Surf’s Up and Rieley and the guys had dug up the old Smile track and just touched it up here and there. Brian’s bloated open-shirted frame was hunched on a child’s swing when he heard the news and he doubled over, sobbing frantically. He couldn’t bear the idea of that bedevilled Smile music being let out of the vault to haunt him and send him spinning back to those god-forsaken times when everything seemed like it was on fire. He pleaded for hours that the track should not come out. But to no avail. As a result of this act of fraternal treachery, the Beach Boys started selling records again.

But not for long. The next one, Carl and the Passions, was a real loser and Brian’s big contribution to that was this bizarre song –‘Marcella’ – about a masseuse he knew who worked at a parlour just off the strip called Circus Maximus, who treated him nice and who’d let him stay and talk to her even though she was aware most of what he said was crazy bullshit. Brian felt close to her because, in most of the other sex joints he’d wander into, something weird would always happen. He’d start acting clumsy and a girl would turn real cold on him and, the next thing he’d know, some guy with muscles on his muscles and hot sweaty palms would be all over him, dragging him out of the building and on to the hard, grey sidewalk. Once or twice he wondered to himself if Phil Spector ever let himself get into that kind of situation. Then the thought would swerve from his mind like an auto accident about to take place, leaving him to pick himself up from the cold concrete and shuffle off into the uncertain night.

Then there was . . . oh god, this clown Rieley somehow persuaded the Beach Boys to decamp to Holland in order to make their album for 1973 and whole endeavour quickly turned into a very costly disaster indeed. They returned with their album but Warners refused it yet again and despatched Van Dyke Parks – a company man himself – over to Brian’s lair to coax a song out of him. He returned the next day to the office with a cassette tape which began with the sound of Wilson screaming to Parks, ‘Tell me I’m not crazy, Van Dyke! Hypnotize me! Hypnotize me into thinking I’m not crazy so I can write a song.’ Parks keeps telling Wilson to ‘cut the crap’ until finally the Beach Boys’ troubled genius’s hands start playing these rolling portentous chords that quickly slide into sublime changes as the melody motions from verse to chorus. The finished song ‘Sail On Sailor’ – as recorded for the album Holland turned out to be a brief return to earlier glories but it also bore composer credits from three other sources, one of whom, a little-known LA songwriter called Ray Kennedy, still claims he wrote the whole thing alone.

Something else happened that year, something that mother Audree would recall in heart-rending detail to a journalist from Rolling Stone three years later:

‘I went into the kitchen to make cereal for him, and all of a sudden I heard him yelling for me. I started dashing down this long hallway. He was in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet. And he said, “Nitroglycerin,” so I grabbed it and said, “Put it under your tongue.” But he just sat there, very pale . . . I realized he was really in bad trouble. By that time his face looked very flushed and his eyes . . . I knew he didn’t see me, because I went like this [pats her cheek] and said, “Baby, baby.” All I said to him was, “Baby, baby, I love you.” I ran into the bedroom and called the fire department. I never went back in that bathroom.’

Murray was gone, leaving three numb, emotionally stunted boys to grieve in their own respective ways. Carl was the first to let the tears and sorrow overwhelm him. Dennis brooded: he and the old man had got strangely close in the last few years – truth to tell, their excessive volatility made them a lot alike – and his father’s death made him even angrier, more irrational and more driven to get fucked up on drink and drugs. Brian just stayed in his bed with his dazed largactyl eyes and that thick knot of fear twisting ceaselessly around his bloated intestines. He didn’t go to the funeral and, apart from a couple of flat-out screaming sessions berating his father, it was hard to tell exactly how his parting had registered with him. But then again, what with all the voices in his head now interrupting his thoughts like static on an ill-tuned radio forever muttering, ‘You’re finished, you’re washed-up! You’ve lost the plot, asshole, and you’ve lost your mind! You played with God and messed with forces that can only destroy you’ throughout most of his waking hours, it’s not as though he’d escaped the stinging taint of his father’s presence and influence.

Now it was 1975 and Warner Bros, were at their wits’ end. ‘The Beach Boys hate us,’ said Dave Berson, the troubled soul whose job it was to mediate between the two enterprises. Every record they’d handed in had been initially rejected. Berson could go on for hours about the obnoxiousness of Mike Love and Al Jardine, the selfishness of Carl Wilson, the shiftlessness of Dennis. And the heartbreak of trying to connect with Brian Wilson. That’s why Berson had taken this godless assignment. He wanted to work with Brian Wilson. And what does he get? Mostly an evasive silence, punctuated only by the other Beach Boys and their ego-bullshit. But every now and then there’d be these phone calls. Like the one late last year when Brian phoned excitedly to tell Berson he’d written and recorded a special new Christmas song called ‘A Child for Winter’ he wanted to release as soon as possible. There was only one slight problem. It was already mid-December and far too late to capitalize on releasing such a record. Actually there were two problems. It was a lousy track, badly recorded and worryingly bereft of a decent melody, but Warners were so happy to have any kind of product from Brian they went ahead and released it anyway in a very limited run on 27 December 1974. Berson thought putting it out might shake something more palatable out of Wilson’s on-going creative fog. But it had not proven to be so and now he and his staff were grasping at straws in their search for the stimulant that would finally restore Brian Wilson to some semblance of his former creative grace.

Finally, over in Warner Bros.’ London HQ, Derek Taylor has a chance to stretch back on the office couch. His wife has just rung off – ‘Listen dear,’ he’d just asked her, ‘I’m talking about Brian . . . Brian Wilson. Do you remember anything? Ah yes! Always demanding too much. He was, wasn’t he?’ Downstairs maybe five people are waiting to see him. His secretary keeps appearing with these memos. A final tug on the old memory wires, then. Another cigarette is lit.

‘I could never deliver what Brian wanted, really. Personally I was frightened of him. He made me nervous and uncomfortable. I didn’t know if he wanted criticism. Criticism was hell for him because you can only say it’s great one more time and he’d never leave you in peace. He was like another Brian, come to think of it. Brian Epstein. Another man of whims, surges, arrogance, manic depressions and long periods of silence. Another man who was always demanding too much.

‘Bloody good company when he was all right, mind. But there was always this terrible need of people. And it all turned against him. He couldn’t go all the way with his genius, because there were all these people he had to look out for.

‘There was a family to look after. A mother he adored, and a father he periodically hated. Two brothers. Two cousins. His wife’s good Jewish family. All the friends and hangers-on.

‘It’s funny because only a couple of weeks ago he phoned me up for the first time in years. I was frankly astonished because naturally I’d heard all the stories. But there he was, Brian Wilson, telling me he wanted to come to England for a holiday and if he did, would he be welcomed. And I immediately said, “Of course you’ll be welcomed, Brian. You’re Brian Wilson, for God’s sake. Everybody loves your music here.” But it wasn’t enough. And he started getting this strange petulant quality to his voice, like a little boy who can’t decide what to do.

‘There was always that sense of regret, you see. “Am I in too deep? Tell me I’m not in too deep? I can’t do this. Make me!”

‘He may, in very simple terms, just be completely crackers.’

Part 3

‘When you work in my business, it’s all scary.’

One day in the summer of 1980 I awoke from a deep disorienting dream to hear my letter-box rattling. Through it had been placed a telegram on which the following message was written. Epic records’ publicity department had received word from the Beach Boys’ new manager, Jerry Schilling, that Brian Wilson was very much on a personality upsurge, had rid himself of the various quirks and kinks previously bedevilling his troubled temperament and was ready to talk at length about himself, his music and his problems. The interview would take place at Wilson’s home where intimacy was assured. Was I interested in firing the questions? Yes, of course . . . I suppose.

It had been almost five years to the day since I’d last set foot in Los Angeles, back in 1975, determined to turn the city upside down in order to find out what really happened to Brian Wilson. What I discovered wasn’t pretty. Banished from his sprawling mansion to live in a small changing-hut by the pool because his degenerate behaviour was having too negative an effect on his two daughters, Wendy and Carnie, Wilson would spend his nights snorting cocaine, sometimes mixing it with heroin, as well as boozing to horrific excess. Wilson’s family had finally to freeze his bank account in order to curtail his drug-spending. Consequently he took to wandering the streets of LA, spending much of his time getting thrown out of massage parlours, when he wasn’t closeting himself away with drug-buddies.

When allowed in his own house he would stay in his room for days on end, lying in a huge bed surrounded by pornography and junk food. He’d reached the point where music no longer held any interest for him. Though he would fitfully work up scraps of melodies on the piano, he’d almost always fail to complete them. Then in ’76 the protective wall around Brian Wilson was suddenly demolished. The previous year the Beach Boys’ career had suddenly encountered a dramatic lift-off owing to the success of a compilation album of oldies released by Capitol (the label they’d left five years ago so they could instigate what subsequently became a stormy liaison with Warner Bros.). Endless Summer sprinted to the top of the US charts and scored platinum sales on the strength of four sides of classic sixties Brian Wilson songs finding favour with a new generation of American teenagers. An EMI compilation, 20 Golden Greats, released in Britain at the same time was similarly successful. The Beach Boys’ commercial renaissance was finally coming to pass. Yet all those new-found converts wanted to know just one thing: where was Brian Wilson?

In other words, the Beach Boys needed Wilson to truly cement this rediscovered fervour. To this end a psychiatrist was employed to draw him out of his shell and get him back to the piano, where it was presumed he would again bash out new compositions as if all those years lost in some psychic twilight zone had never really existed. This psychiatrist, Eugene Landy by name, thought he’d achieve all this by instigating a programme of bullying tactics. He bullied Wilson into acting the role of ‘responsible member of society’; bullied him into writing songs; bullied him into going on stage with the group (even though Wilson’s natural shyness of live shows had originally triggered the first of a number of nervous breakdowns); and bullied him even into performing humiliating solo performances on network US television. To get full mileage out of this specious ploy, Brian was also made to do interviews. Most of them were farcical.

One of the most revealing appeared in Oui, where Wilson – who is nothing if not candid – stated, ‘Today I want to go places – but I can’t because of the doctor [Landy]. I feel like a prisoner and I don’t know where it’s going to end . . . he would put the police on me if I took off and he’d put me in the funny farm . . . I’m just waiting it out, playing along. That’s what I’m doing. [Pause.] Do you have any uppers?’ (In most of these interviews Wilson would deliver maybe twenty minutes of badly remembered facts before asking his interrogator for cocaine or speed and then suddenly claim to be feeling ill before skulking back to his room.) His presence on stage with the Beach Boys was equally painful to behold. Terrified, he couldn’t sing properly and his piano playing and occasional bass work were rarely in sync with the song. The band simply and corruptly used their extremely confused former leader in order to make themselves more money.

The public was briefly fooled into going along with this whole sick charade, but soon enough it back-fired on the group, 15 Big Ones, the album around which the whole ‘Brian’s Back’ campaign was constructed, went gold but was such a wretched piece of product it turned innumerable Beach Boys fans – old and new – against this shoddy, over-promoted soap opera of a group. Utterly uninspired and weary-sounding, the album was clearly intended only as therapy for Wilson’s long-dormant production talents. Through pressure and greed it was released, resulting in both Carl and Dennis publicly airing their grievances and criticisms.

The superior 1977 follow-up, The Beach Boys Love You, was what the record should have been in that it actually contained twelve new Brian Wilson songs. Unfortunately, bad feeling within the group meant that Brian Wilson and Carl were the only two Beach Boys featured on the record at all; and to compound misfortune, the group’s plan to leave Warners and go with Epic/CBS was discovered just before the release of Love You and so the record consequently got negligible exposure, condemning it to meagre sales.

The group’s inner relationship quickly deteriorated into two rival factions: Mike Love and Al Jardine’s grotesque transcendental meditation versus the increasingly spaced-out Carl and Dennis with the hapless Brian as prized pawn in the middle. This back-stabbing antipathy reached its climax in ’78 when Love and Jardine tried to sack Dennis and so make Carl’s clout within the group ineffectual. Somehow a compromise was reached, but the dreadful M.I.U. Album – the band’s final Warners release – was instigated by Love and Jardine. Both critics and the record-buying public alike ignored the product’s pitiful contents.

In 1979 there was an uneasy truce with the release of the LA Album beginning the band’s contract for Epic. With this record Bruce Johnston returned, having been ousted eight years earlier, and took on the producer’s mantle to juggle together a collection of songs spotlighting all five members in equal portions. In other words, it was more mediocre pop, even including two extended disco re-jigs of ‘Wild Honey’ and ‘Here Comes the Night’ that the group felt obliged to apologize for whenever they performed them live.

After the group had experienced the terrible wrath of CBS president Walter Yetnikoff (‘Gentlemen, I think I’ve just been fucked’ was his opening remark to them at the meeting), they went in to record Keepin’ Summer Alive, another album mostly given over to new Brian Wilson songs, but the critics had become so irritated by the group and their constant, tacky bickering that most reviews slammed it more out of instinct than anything else.

At least Schilling and the record company seemed finally to be facing up to all these prejudices. Consequently a vigorous promotional push had begun, with everything from Carl Wilson’s earnest claims in Rolling Stone (‘Remember that slogan, “Brian’s back”? Well, Brian wasn’t back then. But now he’s really back!’) to a TV special entitled Going Platinum, a grotesque and fawning documentary of the Keepin’ Summer Alive sessions about to be broadcast all across America. Needing to attract an audience for several huge concerts set for Britain that autumn, Schilling was craving some serious column inches in the UK media. That’s where I came into the picture.

Not that I was feeling too comfortable with any aspect of the up-coming journey. Back in 1975 I’d written a 30,000 word profile of Brian Wilson for the NME, using much of the information and many of the quotes gathered in these preceding pages. The Beach Boys had hated it and had instigated a long drawn-out communication breakdown with the paper lasting a number of years. Bruce Johnston even went so far as to state in a rival music paper that Brian Wilson had read the articles in question and had become suicidally depressed as a direct result. So did the group know I was coming over to do this interview, or was it some sort of set-up?

I finally boarded the plane to Los Angeles a day late (but that’s another story). Fifteen arduous hours later I was just checking into the hotel when the English press officer approached me with bad news to report. Two other writers had already done interviews, not at Brian’s house, but at the Beach Boys’ offices. There, a wild-eyed and anxious-looking Wilson had been surrounded by brother Carl, manager Schilling and about five other record company people silently scrutinizing his every nervous twitch. One guy from a British Sunday paper got twenty minutes of halting, stammered quotes punctuated by an array of embarrassing silences. Another from a music journal got maybe five minutes, most of them catatonic, before Wilson jumped up and ran out of the room, never to return. Both journalists still claimed to be fans of his music, but both were quite adamant they never wanted to find themselves in the same room as Brian Wilson again for as long as they lived.

Now the press officer was apologetically explaining that it was looking unlikely that Wilson would in fact do that promised ‘definitive’ interview with me. As I’d suspected, Bruce Johnston had not been alerted to my arrival until the very last minute and was now apparently in hysterics, berating manager Schilling with terrible warnings about the possible consequences of my encountering Wilson. So what was I supposed to do? Well, first thing tomorrow there was to be a screening of a new Beach Boys promotional film. And then, later in the day, I too was to be ‘screened’.

‘Hey, honey, do you remember the time that guy at the airport said to Brian, “Don’t you get tired of being referred to as a genius?” Brian just stared at him, shrugged his shoulders and said “No.” ’ Carl Wilson looks at his girlfriend for confirmation. ‘Oh yeah,’ she laughs back. ‘Uh, didn’t he say, “Nah, it doesn’t bother me”? Something like that anyway.’

At four in the afternoon Carl Wilson has been talking for – well, goodness gracious, it’s been almost two hours about the Beach Boys. Just one hour later singer Mike Love will storm into the office and scream in a very loud voice to Schilling and the girl at the switchboard (who’s actually Priscilla Presley’s younger sister and who can’t tell one Beach Boy from another – ‘It’s the beards,’ she tells me) that, goddammit, let the press get a good look at all the group’s dirty linen. Hell, let them see for themselves that Brian’s a vegetable, that Dennis is a drugged-out no-talent parasite (who weVe sacked) and that the only guys on the ball here are clean-living talent-free Al Jardine. And Mike of course. But this kind of outburst . . . Well, it’s just not Carl’s style at all. Dubbed ‘the Henry Kissinger of the group’ by Schilling, he understands the power of diplomacy. In fact, he’s a master at the art of the inscrutable understatement. Most of the time he fields questions – some innocuous, some rather more weighty – using his natural technique of ‘Gee, yeah. I can see your point but you’ve got to understand I’m just an easy-going kinda guy and hey, that’s just the way it is’ self-effacement. Very occasionally he lets the mask slip a little and an utterly cynical chuckle slices through the veneer.

Carl and I are playing a game called ‘tactics’, or more specifically ‘How do I prove myself inoffensive enough to get a shot at interviewing Brian Wilson?’ The judge is Jerry Schilling, who sits quietly at his desk just a few feet away, well within earshot. Both he and Carl exercise that precious right of access to the eldest Wilson brother who, although officially ‘suffering from a bug . . . he’s pretty sick’, will be wheeled out if the conditions prove conducive enough. I play my role close to the chest with three fairly innocuous questions to one actual ‘relevant’ query. The latter category involves thorny issues like the uneasy truce ‘twixt the two Love/Jardine and Wilson factions, the reasons for Dennis Wilson’s current absence (too much cocaine, but Carl doesn’t tell me that) and, of course, the subject of Brian Wilson.

The dialogue always returns to Brian. The recent Rolling Stone quote regarding his eldest brother’s full creative resurgence with the music on Keepin Summer Alive is mentioned, along with a reference to the dreaded Dr Landy. Carl dodges the latter topic altogether, remarking with a certain strained nonchalance that ‘Back then [1976] maybe it should have read “Brian’s almost back”.’ He smiles to himself, then quickly adds, ‘No, but Brian’s real well now. I mean, he’s totally into playing live. Don’t you recall’ – he turns to his girlfriend again – ‘Brian saying, “Being on the road is my real home. It’s my whole life now”?’

She nods. ‘Yeah, right ! Brian’s so into touring. He’s always there in the office asking Jerry when we’re playing.’

Had this new attitude towards touring come about because of Brian’s recent separation from his wife Marilyn? After fifteen years the marriage had just recently collapsed, with his former spouse filing for divorce and taking their two daughters with her.

Carl simply evades the issue yet again. It’s hard to say just how that’s affected Brian, y’know. But Marilyn brought Wendy and Carnie to a gig in San Diego not long ago.’

Talking about what’s emphatically known as ‘Brian’s problem’, Carl continues, ‘He’s coping much, much better. I don’t know. Maybe it was a bad acid trip he took that caused all this inner turmoil. That’s what I figure, y’know. But, like I said, he’s so much better now. He’s back into his music and he’s . . . he’s on this big health kick. He’s got these hot tubs in his new house, a Jacuzzi, sauna . . . you name it.’

Finally, our two hours have passed. ‘Wow, that went really fast. Enjoyed talking to you,’ Carl remarks, ever Mr Sincerity. Schilling hovers and I request a short interview. And so he talks in a somewhat disconcerting whisper mainly about himself. Previously he worked for Elvis Presley, first as a stuntman and stand-in when Elvis couldn’t make it on to the set and later working for Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker. He remarks that Parker and he are still close – that the latter’s offices are a mere two doors away.

‘I figured when Elvis died that the Beach Boys were the next biggest legend in American music,’ he opines. And he talks about re-establishing the Beach Boys ‘as a real contemporary American music phenomenon . . . I think the Colonel’s mistake was to keep Elvis too cloistered away from his audience.’

Also, there’s the idea of movies. Schilling is really into film production and is currently working with Parker on an Elvis tribute. The final touch comes when Schilling mentions that he also wants to do a film of the Beach Boys. Even now a script is being written by the same guy who wrote the Elvis film.

‘Nothing’s certain yet but we were thinking of maybe getting Jeff Bridges to play Brian.’

Fade. Cut.

We leave the Beach Boys’ office at five in the afternoon. I’ve played every wild card I can pull out of my sleeve. Schilling just nods silently. He’ll see what he can do, he promises. Two hours later I’m informed that we’ll be driving over to Brian Wilson’s house in half an hour. Schilling simply asked to keep the interview short as Brian needs to get to bed early to be fresh for a business meeting the next day.

In the final years of the hellzapoppin’ sixties, when he was the hermit recluse living in Bel-Air with his sand-box and purple meditation tent, Brian Wilson wrote and recorded an absurd little song entitled ‘Busy Doin’ Nothing’ in which he gave the listener exact directions to his house: just drive down Santa Monica, take a left on Sunset, a few more detours and there he’d be, waiting for you standing by the gates of his mansion. Times and locations change. It takes us an hour to find Wilson’s new house. An emergency stop at a country club up in the hills finally gives us the right direction and we duly arrive at a small, unimpressive two-bedroom Spanish-style building located well off the beaten track out past Santa Monica.

From the car you could already make out Brian Wilson’s bulky silhouette through the bay windows. A black woman with fiery eyes opens the door to us (us being the press officer, a photographer and myself) and we walk into a totally unfurnished living-room. Right away, something is very wrong here. Wilson, who must weigh at least 280 pounds, is eating a vegetarian salad, a fork in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He awkwardly begins trying to play the genial host. He apologizes for the starkness of the house and clumsily goes around shaking hands. Obviously ill at ease, his discomfort is instantly contagious.

‘Uh. . . yeah, now who’s doin’ the interview? Oh, you! Oh! [Laughs self-consciously.] OK, man. . .uh [he stops to look at me]. Say, how old are you? Twenty-eight . . . Wow, I’m thirty-seven. Maybe I should interview you. You look more like a rock star than me.’ He lets forth a disconcerting bellow, then checks himself.

For my part, at this precise juncture I’m willing to strike up any sort of rapport with Wilson, whose sense of discomfort is becoming ever more imposing. I remark that Carl just mentioned that this new house is fitted out with hot tubs, a health spa and a . . . (I start stammering out the word) Jacuzzi.

‘Jacuzzi?’ The word seems to totally unnerve him for an instant.

‘Jacuzzi??’ He looks first mystified, then quite horrified.

‘Jacuzzi???’ Then suddenly he leaps up off the couch on which he’s been slumped. He is a very, very big man.

‘Hey! I’ll show ya something really great about this place. Wanna see it?’ He immediately motions towards the large bay windows. ‘This is really neat,’ he says, sounding like an excitable little kid about to show his parents a brand new party trick. Then he simply opens the windows and gestures out at the night.

‘See? Air! Fresh air! Ummm! Healthy!! Let’s keep ’em open, yeah?’ He breathes in and out, vigorously. ‘Ummmmm . . . Neat! Outasight!. . . Healthy!’

Brian slumps back on to the couch, and it’s only then that I suddenly notice the presence of a third party in the room.

‘Oh . . . this is Diane,’ he mutters by way of an introduction to his blonde companion, who looks about sixteen. Actually, her real name is Debbie, but I won’t find that out tonight because she won’t bother to correct Brian, so absorbed is she in maintaining this vacant, bedazzled grin on her face, even during those excruciating moments when her beloved Brian’s own face is contorted with pain. She looks exactly like a Robert Altman version of an acid casualty waitress working in a health food restaurant, except Altman would probably end up naming her Starchild or Munchkin. This vision of inane serenity – all teeth and cut-off jeans – beams forth throughout the interview. I find myself wondering just what she and Wilson must talk about when they’re alone, and then shudder at the thought.

‘OK, fire away.’ Another awkward chuckle.

So I start by asking him about some of the songs he wrote just prior to Pet Sounds, but, before I get the first sentence out, Wilson is looking pained. Then he speaks.

‘Hey, emotional! Wow, all those are so emotional! Maybe too . . . No, I forget. . . Yeah, when you make music that emotional it can really get to you, y’know.’

Before I can ask another question, he starts going off on weird tangents. First, he wants to know all about Paul McCartney’s recent drug-bust in Japan, suddenly seguing into comments like, ‘Say, what’s the weather like over in England? Boy, I’m lookin’ forward to comin’ over. I haven’t been to London since . . . oh, wow . . . 1964! Yeah, wow! Long time.’ (I don’t bother to remind him that he and the Beach Boys played London in 1977 at a CBS convention.)

With a small transistor radio placed next to the couch – the only sign of music in this desolate room – blaring out some anonymous AM hit as we speak, I ask Wilson if he listens to the radio a lot. Does he check out new sounds?

‘No, I’ve only been listening to the radio for a week,’ he replies, sounding suddenly very melancholy. ‘Ever since the new album’s been out. Haven’t heard it played much. Don’t know why! Seems like we’re going through a real bad spell.’

Wilson keeps referring to ‘we’ constantly, presumably meaning the Beach Boys. Considering that he spent much of the seventies in exile from the group and at one point tried to break all ties with them, I enquire whether he still views his musical career in any terms beyond those of the Beach Boys. Once again he looks pained, then pensive.

‘No, not at all. It’s all I’ve got, y’know. The group.’

So what gives him the most pleasure in life?

‘Well, I’ll tell ya one thing,’ he blurts out aggressively. ‘I’m not into women anymore.’ Then he pauses. ‘Music probably. Yeah, definitely. I like to sit down at the piano, y’know. Playing those chords. I love the way they look.

‘Plus playing live . . . that’s the biggest thrill. It’s real spiritual.’

When I ask him to define the term ‘spiritual’ a little better, he looks at me as if I’m completely crazy. By now the pauses are getting longer and the photographer’s camera clicking is causing Wilson to flinch automatically as if torturous electric shocks were being triggered through his central nervous system. He keeps struggling to articulate himself but at the same time it’s so obvious he is in terrible psychic pain. Certain references to his past suddenly make him visibly shudder. I name a song from the new album that I particularly like and he literally screams.

‘I hate that song! I hate that song!’

So why did you put it on the record?

‘I didn’t,’ he stammers. ‘Bruce . . .’

This is becoming steadily more and more horrific. So we talk about ego – something Wilson once had in excess and now claims to be utterly devoid of.

‘Yeah, I used to be real competitive? he shudders. ‘Not anymore, though. Ego can be dangerous. All that drive can destroy you. It almost killed me. It almost drove me insane.’

Wilson is now chain-smoking, flicking the ash into his half-eaten salad. Occasionally he digs a fork into the mess of chopped vegetables and cigarette ash and puts it in his mouth. When he is coherent, he talks like a man drowning in all the sorrow that this world can visit on one lost and sorry soul. This is what he has to say:

‘I don’t see my mother much. She doesn’t like the Beach Boys. Not since father died . . . My father and I, we never got on. He used to come down really hard on me. We used to fight all the time. . . No, I don’t see anything for me beyond the Beach Boys. It’s like they’re all I got, y’know. . . No, I don’t want to make a solo record. I just don’t see myself making music as strong as most of the old stuff ever again.’

Why, I keep asking back.

‘Why? I don’t know why. You dry up, I guess. It’s like . . .’

Suddenly he shudders again, this time buckling over as if about to vomit violently. But nothing comes out. So instead he leaps up from the couch as though on fire and starts to stammer out an apology.

‘I-I-I . . . I’m sorry. I-I . . . I feel real tired. It’s late and I-I’ve got to see my psychiatrist real early tomorrow. M-maybe we can talk some more then.’

So, finally, I’ve got my Brian Wilson interview. All thirty minutes of it. Feeling numb, somewhat nauseous myself and desperate for fresh air, I walk straight out of the house to the waiting car. As I look back, I see the press officer standing staring at the house. He is quite speechless and will remain that way for the rest of the night. Meanwhile, the equally stunned photographer can’t stop himself taking useless shots of the empty living-room from the outside of the house. Seated in the back seat for the return journey, I start feeling like an utter parasite for having intruded upon Brian Wilson’s private hell. Then I snap out of it, go back to the hotel and start to write this story.

Part 4

‘That’s life: a constant challenge to perform, to punch in, and to have control over yourself. It’s a constant struggle to do that, and I do it all the time. I do it twenty-four hours a day.’

If you close your eyes and listen hard enough, you can almost feel the salty air gently tickling the hairs in your nostrils. For behold the mighty Pacific ocean gleaming in the morning mist under a tall and cloudless sky, splashing shiny white sprays of foam against a deserted stretch of beach, each wave undulating with the stoic grace of a classic Beach Boys harmony-line sung in perfect unison. That’s where Dennis was now: just a dusty speck on the water’s endless silvery surface. They’d buried him out at sea back in 1983, after he’d bottomed out on drugs and alcohol so badly he’d made himself homeless and penniless, the substance abuse equivalent of a washed-up punch-drunk old boxer. In his final months he’d got so grotesquely angry at everything and everyone: at all the dealers who no longer fronted him endless grams of dope, at all the dumb girls who wouldn’t fuck him anymore because he was losing his looks, at his dead sick father who he was forever cursing out and at the rest of the Beach Boys because they’d exiled him from the group he’d helped start. But, most of all, he was mad at the world because it seemed to have suddenly stopped turning as fast and as thoughtlessly as he always had. The fallen idol drowned accidentally while diving for some remnants of his squandered rock star past supposedly lying on the ocean’s bed.

Now, nine years later, Dennis’s eldest brother could also be sighted, casting his own slightly stooped 6 foot 2 inch shadow across the same liquid landscape. But there was one crucial difference, for Brian Wilson was not decomposing in a body-bag covered with starfish and surrounded by all manner of deep-sea dwellers. He was alive and jogging and, what is more, he no longer resembled the deranged Grizzly Adams look-alike who once terrified waitresses the length and breadth of Hollywood Boulevard. No, this was a different creature altogether. To begin with, all excessive weight and unsightly hair had been stripped from his body, as if by a miracle. Where once there had been only cushion-like layers of flab, there were now ample muscles. His face even boasted cheekbones and a rugged looking cleft chin. In fact, if you stood back just far enough so you couldn’t distinguish his various facial eccentricities, like the nervous tics, the look of stark terror occasionally penetrating his otherwise distracted blue eyes and the unsettling way his mouth sometimes drooped at the sides, you could imagine this suave-looking individual in one of his custom-made Armani suits meriting a passing resemblance to an old movie matinee idol like, say, Cary Grant or Rock Hudson.

‘I have my fiftieth birthday coming up on the twentieth of this month. Ah, that’s embarrassing. Now, what am I going to tell these girls? I’ve got a young face but they say, “How old are you?” – “I’m fifty!” That’ll ruin it! “I don’t wanna be with you, you’re too old . . .!” In a sense, it is a set-back. It’s not really the best point for a person that gets to the age of fifty and who still can relate to young music and young people, and all the young ideas that crop up in the recording industry. But I can’t do it. I don’t think I can handle my age.’

It’s funny too, because Rock Hudson was the star of that film Seconds, the one that caused Brian to freak out and think Phil Spector was after him when he viewed it back in late 1966. The plot centred on a dull middle-aged banker who gets the chance to start a whole new life by entering into a Faustian pact with a diabolical organization that arranges for people to be ‘reborn’ via plastic surgery. The banker returns as the elegant, dashing Hudson but doesn’t have the first idea of how to fit into his new image and lifestyle. Actually, when you think about it, it’s not too hard to draw a rather telling parallel between that little scenario and what actually happened to Brian Wilson in the 1980s.

Once that hideous decade was unleashed, the rest of the Beach Boys wasted no time in forcing their 340 lb cabbage of a composer to return to the ministrations of Dr Eugene Landy, the flamboyant ego-smitten psychiatrist whose constant bullying and complex mind games had managed to get Wilson away from drugs, losing weight and even writing songs briefly in the mid-seventies. Landy was duly given total control of Brian Wilson, who effectively became his prisoner, and positive changes started once again occurring. Wilson exercised and lost weight, he ate healthily, was unable to get near drugs (although Landy decided to issue him with ‘mood-altering’ drugs of his own prescribing, a move that was ultimately to lose him his medical licence in the State of California).

By the mid-eighties Wilson was back in the Beach Boys, playing nostalgia fests for the Reagan Nation and looking better than he had in almost twenty years. However, Landy had achieved all this by insinuating his own rather sleazy personality into Wilson’s fragile psyche, bamboozling him with his specious therapy jargon and generally overwhelming his senses with a whole new thought-system. Also, the irritating little shrink’s ego endlessly delighted in exhibiting the hapless musician as some freakish Frankenstein-like invention of his. In due course, one by one, the Beach Boys and Wilson’s mother, ex-wife and daughters would all turn against Landy, ultimately banding together to denounce him publicly for taking unfair advantage of their troubled relative.

Still, the psychiatrist’s results clearly weren’t all negative, for by 1987 a rejuvenated-looking Brian Wilson had landed a lucrative solo album deal with Sire and Warner Bros. The heads of the company loved Brian’s old music so much they even got personally involved in a never-ending production job on his first solo endeavour which wound up costing over a million dollars. It turned out to be a grotesque and largely thankless ordeal for all of them, too, because of Landy, whose greed, egomania (he was now writing Wilson’s lyrics with his girlfriend, Alexandra Morgan, and taking 50 per cent of all Wilson’s earnings) and parasitical craving to control every aspect of his patient’s life – and then shamelessly to take most of the credit for whatever music he created – had them absolutely sickened. However, they were unable to do anything to get rid of the wretch because, well, without him standing over there doing his ‘Little Hitler’ act in the studio, Brian would just go blank and be unable to function.

One of the many fine composers brought in to collaborate on the album was a guy very much like Brian had once been, a shy brooding Californian with a sensitive heart and a remarkable talent for squeezing out heart-rendingly successful pop music from the most disparate of personalities. His name was Lindsey Buckingham and he’d masterminded Fleetwood Mac’s whole sound through their golden years in the seventies much as Brian had done with the Beach Boys in the sixties. He’d always idolized Wilson’s music too, and was over the moon about the prospect of working with his hero. Until they actually got down to work.

It was a very unsettling situation. If Landy wasn’t there, he’d have these two little surf Nazis who would not let Brian out of their sight. I know Landy did him a lot of good in the beginning with his radical techniques, but in my opinion there was a role reversal where Landy glommed on to Brian as his ticket to a glamorous world. Brian was not happy, and there was no way he’d grow into a full adult in this situation. Musically, Landy was keeping him doing this “Baby, let’s ride to heaven in my car” kinda stuff, when he really should have been getting into something a little more experimental, or adult at least. That was a little heartbreaking to watch.’

Anyway, the album flopped. It had got rave reviews and cover stories and God knows what else, but the general public generally preferred to keep their distance. It’s tempting to think they intuitively sensed Landy’s perverted puppet-master presence over everything and found the whole scenario too sordid to warrant further investigation. But maybe it’s simpler than that; for Wilson’s Beach Boys music has always epitomized only virile, healthy emotions for the mainstream nostalgia market who still teem to the group’s concerts. That kind of audience probably just found all the stuff about Wilson’s mental problems, solo projects and Beach Boys rivalries easier to ignore, mainly because it interfered too much with their cherished myth of endless summers, bronzed, wanton beach-babes boogalooing on burnished surf-boards and Ronald Reagan as the Great Provider.

They didn’t even get a chance to ignore the follow-up, another Landy–Wilson collaboration entitled Sweet Insanity. It sounded so embarrassing that Warner Bros, simply refused to release it. Landy next coaxed Wilson into putting his name to a ghosted autobiography, Wouldn’t It be Nice, written in the first person and forever employing words and phrases its subject was simply too unsophisticated fully to comprehend. Most of his memories came from other sources too, be they Al Jardine, Van Dyke Parks or Danny Hutton, but the most disturbing aspect of the text was the way Brian’s story was suddenly hijacked in the middle and turned into an unsolicited testimonial to the miraculous healing powers and all-round good guy qualities of flat-out genius Eugene Landy. David Felton, one of the older guys at Rolling Stone, got it right on the money when he wrote that ‘the autobiography reads like some slick parody of the end of Psycho, with the psychiatrist telling the police: “Brian was never all Brian, but he was often only Landy. Now the Landy half has taken over. Probably for all time.”’

Finally, Landy’s hold on Wilson seemed to slacken when the psychiatrist was forced to sign a separation order initiated by the composer’s relatives and former band mates, forbidding him from talking to, seeing or interacting with the musician’. Carnie Wilson, Brian Wilson’s outward-going daughter, who’d recently enjoyed a number one album of her own alongside her sister Wendy and friend Chynna, daughter of John and Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and Papas, was particularly radiant about the outcome. ‘Finally, the rat has fallen into the trap,’ she gleefully remarked to a journalist, indicating Landy.

But in the July of 1992 the spectre of Landy and his string pulling tactics still hung heavily over Wilson’s stooped shoulders. For example, there was this great dumb lunk of a human being with a stern, curiously immobile face and the physique of a heavy metal Rambo wanna-be watching over him all the time. His name was Kevin Leslie, but he was better known to the international media as the ‘Surf Nazi’, a term they’d employed with tireless zeal whenever referring to the narcissistic young man who’d long been Eugene Landy’s most cherished henchman. Every day Landy was getting up-to-the-minute reports on Brian via Leslie’s telephone calls and could monitor everything from his own little hidey-hole. And even when he was all alone, Wilson still talked about Landy with such sickening reverence it was hard to discount claims made by his family of the psychiatrist having brain-washed his former patient in some way. Wilson continually referred to Landy as ‘my master’, even adding at one numbing instant, ‘and a good dog always waits for his master’! He was also riddled with Landy’s therapy talk, suddenly blurting out these dopey buzz-words or else using corny lines about ‘life being a positive experience but we have what is known as “road-blocks”.’

Yet even with all the mental interference going on, it wasn’t hard to make out the various psychic remnants of the old pre-Landy Brian Wilson. For there were still the frightened child, the eccentric compulsive innocent, even the ego-besotted pop competitor still lost in an imaginary war with his old rivals of three decades past, Phil Spector and Paul McCartney, all lurking just below that dazed surface, bursting to come out.

‘Music was an obsession, because the Phil Spector regime was so powerful in my mind that I had to do something in order to amount to . . . anything! Generally I was a perfectionist that went into the studio with a certain amount of panic in my chest. If I failed, I’d have to feel real bad about it. The fear of being rejected or something drove me on to be doing something which was pretty good. It was just that I had felt so many outside influences, like the Spector regime, Paul McCartney and the Beatles. We felt a little bit. . . squashed by all that. Those Beatles guys totally stole the limelight. They stole the show in the recording business, and with the public . . . If Paul McCartney heard this interview, he’d be on the piano right now, trying to outdo us!

‘I think the sixties were a heyday for the music recording industry, as far as creating big music, great music. Like I said, I constantly refer back to Spector’s music as a way to understand what else is going on. My music . . . I don’t know, I never really realized what it was, I couldn’t tell if people really liked it a lot. I know that the introduction of “California Girls” is a good sound. It’s got a good sound, but I don’t know who liked it, you know what I mean? Phil Spector makes this record, everybody likes it! It’s not enough . . . We were his messengers, in a sense . . .

‘Gold Star studios burned down. That’s where Spector used to record, and I worked there too. I felt really bad about that ’cos I really thought I could do something there again, but I don’t know . . . I guess . . . [sighs] I guess you’ve got to take it on the chin. The Wall of Sound . . . I enjoy it, but I still don’t enjoy it when someone tells me I can’t do it . . . Then I get a little upset! [Laughs.] Hey, how come the Beach Boys don’t sound as good as Phil Spector? [Almost screams] I don’t know! I just live here!’

In truth he lives in Malibu, in a discreet little house, a kind of glorified chalet built from slats of dark timber overlooking a landscape of rock and sand forever being buffeted by the foamy surf of the Pacific Ocean. There’s a yellow Corvette parked out front – exactly the same model and colour of car that Landy drives – and a weird Japanese ‘fish’ mobile hanging by the front door. Inside it’s all very spartan. There’s a small kitchen with over twenty bottles of vitamins littering the draining board. In the living-room can be located a stereo system, a collection of approximatively fifty CDs, a few black-and-white photos framed to the walls alongside a poster from a museum, a chest of drawers and a modest couch. In the garden below stands a Jacuzzi, while a small terrace offers a breath-taking view of the pulsing sea.

He now keeps the piano in his special office, the quiet room where he goes to plan out his next musical assignment, another solo album to be produced by Don Was containing half new material and half-rearrangements of his old Beach Boys classics.

‘Not “Good Vibrations” though. Fffftt . . . out the window! Too arty for me! Too arty and edited! I’m doing “California Girls”, that’s our anthem . . . I’m putting the key right and I’ll sing the high notes without sounding like I’m trying to pass a gall-stone at the same time!

‘I compose every . . . month. I don’t compose as much, I’m not in a composing period right now, I’m more or less on arranging and co-production with Don Was. I go to work to my office. I play and sing a little bit of “Proud Mary” and then I’ll go do a couple of other things. And I jump off the piano, and I’ll pull back, and it’s enough for the day. So I say, “Look, you gotta know when to leave, you gotta know when to stop.” So I play for a while and say “Bang! That’s it! Time to stop!”

‘Sometimes you sit there, and it comes right to you. Other times you search round the keys, and you do this [hits his finger on the table] and TAHH! Now, wait a minute! [imitates a beat] Doo-be-doo/be-doo/be-doo . . . That’s a beat, right? OK, now, I take that beat [sings]. It’s all like that against the beat, see? First, I always go for the key, then I go for the rhythm, then I go for the melody, then I go for the lyrics, OK? That’s how I do it.

‘You get to the song, right? And then, of course, you start doing the arrangement: first, the rhythm, then the chord pattern, then the melody, then the voices. We got the harmonies through my thinking about the guys, and really relating to how Al would sing, or Carl would sing, or Dennis would sing, or Mike would sing, or I would sing. I give them the parts, right? I rule them out for the piano, then we go to the studio, and I give the Beach Boys the parts, for some of it. . . ’cos they never could learn parts more than just a little at a time . . . like, maybe eight bars at a time, OK? So, now, I give them eight bars of harmony, right? We get there around the microphone, and I oversee the vocal, the overall sound of it, but I do it unconsciously. I don’t try to make the sound better. Trying is not the way to do it. The way to do it is to find a medium by which you can create a sound through these other guys and myself by that medium. When I did the guys’ background parts, there was no doubt in the world that I was in control of those sessions. The guys knew. So I would try to get the sound down there on the microphone in a cohesive and harmonic medium that started up here in my head.

‘I find that search on every song we’ve ever made: that search for a lost sound. “Do It Again” was a record that I thought was the perfect example of how our vocals spread. We don’t have a real piercing masculine sound, right? The Beach Boys were basically feminine, except for Mike who was a very masculine singer. I was a more feminine singer.

‘See, I think the job we did on Pet Sounds was in some ways meant to help people understand that love is not . . . a word. What we did was . . . what I did, anyway, ’cos that was really my album, in that I wanted to impart something that I had. It was a childhood dream of mine, to make music that made people feel loved, OK? And I have a thing for making people cry. So, I took on that kind of karma for a while . . . But I couldn’t get that out of my blood. It was a very loving album, and a source of embarrassment for me. My masculine side had to take a bow, like a little hiatus, to get Pet Sounds to happen. But I did it. I did it ’cos I needed to. They say, “What about these high feminine parts, Brian?” – Well, that’s how I felt, man. I wanted to be a girl in my voice, so I did. I wanted to sing like a girl. Not consciously, but it was all figured out in my brain, waiting for me to do it. So I went in there, put some beautiful music on tape . . . That “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)” . . . That’s a lovely, lovely record.’

It seems incredible but somehow relationships between Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys reached an even lower ebb in the nineties than they had in the deeply acrimonious eighties. While Brian’s solo album was bombing on the charts, his old group managed to score a freak number one hit with a catchy retro-pop confection entitled ‘Kokomo’ primarily because it was the most featured song in the soundtrack to a smash Tom Cruise movie called Cocktail. As a result, Brian’s competitive side took a particularly vicious hammering and the whole experience seemed to have left him more paranoid than ever before.

‘Every now and then I’ll play maybe three or four concerts a year with the Beach Boys. Mike Love growled at me, like an animal. I said, “Can I borrow your mike? I’ll be doing the lead on this next song.” He said [snarling], “Get your own mike!” And when we start playing, I swear to God my instrument is not even loud enough to hear. I feel the whole time I’m up there saying things like, “Carl doesn’t like me . . . Mike’s mad at me . . . Carl’s pissed off. . . Al Jardine’s mad at me . . .” It’s obvious the guys are mad at me, it’s obvious. It’s all turned to anger now; the whole deal is anger. They feel I intrude on their peace of mind by creating such a monster. I created a monster called the Beach Boys, but amongst the Beach Boys, it’s an extremely hostile and cold relation that we have.

‘But, even in the midst of the fact I don’t like the Beach Boys, I have to make sure they’re OK. That job was invented by me, to keep things cool with the group, and I thought, “Oh my God, what a job! What a thankless job!” And I said, “No, no, the reward is in the giving, you don’t have to worry about rewards. The rewards are old-fashioned, it’s all in the giving . . .” That’s basically something I had to learn, because all of my life, I’ve been reward-conscious. It was always, “Hey! Good one, Brian! Good track!” And I had to do it to myself. But that’s OK, ’cos I’ve seen a lot of people totally vulnerable. There’s a vulnerability I had towards the Beach Boys.

‘They’re like little birds with their mouths open for a worm. They get that way, sometimes. They get insecure and they call me, and they want me to produce an album. But I didn’t respond, ’cos I was mad at them. I can’t understand where they’re coming from. They’re all so groovy, they’re real good at music, but they also know how to really fuck me over. Mike, Carl and Al are the three guys that stomped my head in. Over the years they managed to stomp my brains out. They knew the secret formula as how to fuck Brian Wilson over. And they still do it.’

And now Mike Love was finally suing his own cousin, claiming he was owed back-royalties for having helped write many of the Beach Boys’ classic songs. Brian had recently won something like ten million dollars from A&M publishing after his lawyers had succesfdlly shown that Murray’s sale of his son’s songs twenty years before had been fundamentally illegal, and Mike needed some of that cash to cover all those alimony payments he’d been building up over the years. As usual, he was fighting as dirtily and publicly as he could.

‘Because he is classified as a paranoid schizophrenic, Brian is scared of almost everything and doesn’t really internalize reality like an ordinary person would,’ Love tartly informed a British journalist in the summer of 1993. ‘He interprets things. He hears voices and imagines situations. Because he stole money and credit from me for all these years, he feels guilty. Until that is resolved and he feels absolved of guilt, he cannot engage in any meaningful act with the group.’

Where would it end? Two years before, it had been the turn of Love’s repugnant brother Stan to instigate a law-suit trying to wrest control of Brian, his affairs and, most of all, his money from Landy’s clammy grip. The whole demeaning process made the composer feel like a piece of cold meat on a slab being bartered over by a bunch of heartless scum-bags.

‘I’ve lived a life of scare. I’ve known some nice scares in my life. Some of them weren’t so nice though. It was like . . . I used to lay there, eating in bed and I could feel people grabbing my ankles. I could feel this . . . feeling! It was a fantasy. In fantasy, everything’s possible; you can slip out of reality into a fantasy.

‘It’s a satisfying feeling to withdraw, what can I say? I live inside my own head, so my head contains a lot of memories and a lot of ingeniousness. I consider myself to be a creative genius and the child in me, of course, tries to get away though the world around me keeps me from going too far. But the child is basically the expression of the ego, and I think this is why I want to be a child; because you can express ego, but, at the same time, you can be innocent. . .

‘The voices in my head’ve been happening for twenty years now. I couldn’t do anything. I didn’t trust anybody. It’s just a crazy notion but. . . I have a lot of heroes and villains in my life – a lot of villains, unfortunately. A villain walks in and destroys something. Unfortunately, the same people who are heroes are villains to me. And it’s hard for me, it’s very difficult. It’s been rough, too. I always thought, “Wow! Gee! Maybe we can resolve it.” But it doesn’t seem to resolve so good. Things have been going on like that for twenty-five years! If I told who I thought I was, you might print it and I can’t take a chance on that!’

Yet there were times when it seemed strangely worthwhile, this confounded ‘struggling on’ business. There’d be moments for instance, like sometimes at dusk, when the ocean breeze would rustle in from the open terrace window and suddenly it was like the waves below were singing one of his songs – only better, fuller-sounding and without those squeaky falsettos messing everything up – and he’d see God slowly rising up before him with his hand outstretched, pointing at him, indicating for him to have no fear. And deep in his heart he would sense that it was all OK, that all the pain and suffering had been just part of a higher design and that all he needed to do was breathe in deeply, relax and rejoice in the sounds he had already created.

‘Basically what I have done is I have freed myself, I’ve liberated myself into a position where I can talk to people, and not have to worry about what I’m saying. I never was sure of what I was doing to people. I think an artist will have to know that the reward is in the giving. That’s where it’s at: it’s called “unconditional love”. You can tell when things are cool and when they’re not. You say, “Waah! I think I’m going overboard! Aaah! I don’t think I want to make any more music, I quit!” You do that for a while: “Fuck music! Fuck people!” And then you come back all around . . . People are what I need, I need to make music for people instead of saying, “Fuck people!” I used to say that, but not anymore. You love the people. You give to people. You create music for people to hear, so that they can say, “Hey, yeah, that’s real. . .”

‘I used to go through things, and I wondered whether things were real or not. [Softly] I guess it’s just another stage of development, but I do hear and see magical trips that I can turn on and off. Most people don’t understand that. They say, “Why can’t you do something about it?” I don’t know! Because I took those drugs that made me search my soul, and try to see what I was all about . . . But the drugs back-fired. I took acid, and it squashed my ego down a little bit, and it hurt my feelings that I didn’t have what someone else might have had. When you go through too much of that, it’s like an attack you have inside your head. You won’t accept it like that. I want it to be perfect! Music is perfect!

‘But I never ever quit. See, I’m not a quitter. People say to me, “Brian, you’re not a loser, you’re a winner. There’s a difference between a winner and a loser. You’re a winner. You make good music.” If you put music out that’s spiritual, that has spiritual vibes in it, people are gonna hear it. But I don’t push my power around because, see, whatever happens, I know I’ll always have a spiritual power in this world.’