I certainly knew about the Beatles, who had already released two albums and four singles in the United Kingdom, breaking sales records in the process. “She Loves You” sold 750,000 records in a month. Though Beatlemania had swept the United Kingdom, none of us in America—neither the Beach Boys nor most anyone else in the recording industry—recognized how the Fab Four would transform American rock and roll. British rock groups simply hadn’t had much success here. I know our label didn’t see the Beatles as a revolutionary force. Capitol’s parent company in the United Kingdom, EMI Records, signed the Beatles in early 1962, but Capitol refused to pick up their option for more than a year. Capitol did not release a Beatles’ single in the United States (“I Want to Hold Your Hand”/“I Saw Her Standing There”) until the last week of 1963, and only then under pressure from its British parent. It didn’t take long for Capitol to realize what it had been missing. By February 1, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was No. 1.
We knew the Beatles had a good sound, and any uncertainty about their appeal—could four “mop-tops” from Liverpool make it in America?—quickly vanished. When they flew in to New York on February 7, they were met by an estimated 3,000 fans at John F. Kennedy Airport, and then two nights later were watched by nearly 74 million on The Ed Sullivan Show, appearing there again the following week. Ed Sullivan had yet to invite us. To varying degrees, all of us in the Beach Boys were rattled, but most of all Brian, who saw the Beatles as a challenge to his emerging position as a leader in pop music. It didn’t help any of us that Capitol launched a huge promotional campaign for the Brits (“The Beatles Are Coming!”), including newspaper ads that touted albums from the Beatles but not the Beach Boys.
Personally, I loved the Beatles’ music and saw, at least in the early days, similar themes between them and us in our boisterous songs about teenage life. Whether you wanted to twist and shout or load up your woody, you were living in the same carefree world. Neither band was about a single performer but about an entire group and the countries they represented. Though I knew the Beatles had changed the competitive landscape, I never felt threatened or resentful. I thought they would make us better.
What is often overlooked about the Beatles is how smart they were in their marketing, merchandising, and publicity, and in that regard, they ran circles around us for the next several years. I’m not suggesting their music wasn’t superb—it was—but they also knew how to exploit its commercial value. They understood film in ways that we did not: A Hard Day’s Night, starring the Beatles and released in 1964, at the height of Beatlemania, became one of the most influential music films of all time. On the other hand, the Beach Boys in 1965 played backup to Annette Funicello in The Monkey’s Uncle, a Disney film about college kids and a chimpanzee. The Beatles had the long hair, the dark suits, the boots, the glamorous publicity shots, the creative album covers, all of which evolved with the times. The Beach Boys, in 1964, began wearing candy-striped shirts. (In interviews, we said, “We accidently picked up the Kingston Trio’s dry cleaning.”)
The Beatles knew how to merchandise, not just with T-shirts, stickers, and posters but with lampshades and lunch boxes and pinball machines. The Beach Boys? Uncle Murry made buttons that read “I Know Brian’s Dad.” On Ringo’s Ludwig Oyster Black Pearl drums, the Beatles had their name, with the drop T, emblazed boldly across the bass drumhead—a suave modern logo. Our bass drumhead was just a bass drumhead.
We lacked management. We had no one who could do for us what Brian Epstein did for our counterparts, nor could we compete with their irreverence, charisma, or wit. In November of 1963, when the Beatles played at the Royal Variety Performance in London—attended by Queen Elizabeth, among other luminaries—John Lennon said, “For our last number, I’d like to ask your help. Would the people in the cheaper seats clap their hands? And the rest of you, if you’ll just rattle your jewelry.”
We could not rival that. But musically, that was a different story.
Our two-week tour to Australia and New Zealand confirmed that our act traveled to other countries. That shouldn’t have been surprising, as the cultural overlap between these Pacific nations and America (including surfing) is significant. Our tour’s headliner, Roy Orbison, the shades-wearing country-pop singer who was at the peak of his career, had one of the finest voices I’ve ever heard; I was spellbound when he sang “Crying.” After three shows in Sydney, we flew to Melbourne and were met midday at the airport by 3,000 teenagers. We did four shows in Melbourne, four in Tasmania (an island off the coast of Australia), and then sixteen in New Zealand, including five in two days in Auckland. Packed houses were the norm.
January was the summer in these countries, which allowed us to spend plenty of time on the beach, though that was just one of many diversions. We had an opening act called the Joy Boys, a popular Australian surf band whose members were a bit older than we. They had a rapturous effect on young women and liked to invite their most attractive groupies to something called a Shalomanakee. The same invitation was extended to us (including our backup singers, roadies, and managers). At a hotel suite in Sydney, we entered a dim, smoky room, with sheets covering table lamps. Music played softly in the background and the Australian beer poured freely. Shalomanakee implied an exotic ritual or even something spiritual. But there were the Joy Boys and their lady friends, all in various stages of undress. We had walked into our first Australian orgy. I personally had no interest in group sex (neither did Carl), but it must be said, the Joy Boys were true performers. A naked Joy Boy rolled up a newspaper into a funnel, lit the big end on fire, and stuck the other end in his buttocks. Then he started waltzing around the room—they called this “the dance of the flames.” The other Joy Boys did this as well and even some of the groupies. They were fearless. You just don’t see buck-naked men and women romping around a darkened room with flames shooting out of their asses all that often. I thought it was a miracle.
Well, Dennis and I absolutely had to bring the dance of the flames to America, and we believed that the Hawaiian Islands were the perfect locale for such an original import. So along with others in our group, and with the help of a mai tai or two, we did our own interpretation of this unique jig, though not without a fire extinguisher nearby. A few lamps were knocked over, but no one got burned.
Brian sat out most of these escapades. While we were in Australia, he spent much of his free time in his hotel room talking on the phone to Marilyn. We knew he didn’t like being on the road, but his loneliness and discomfort became even more evident on our first trip abroad. He would talk to Marilyn in his hotel room before our concert began; then he would go to the arena and perform onstage; then he would return to his hotel room; and Marilyn would still be on the phone!
The trip was noteworthy for one other reason: Uncle Murry accompanied us. He was still upset by some of our high jinks from the last midwestern tour, and he may have been concerned that as we became more successful, we had more to lose. Whatever it was, he hovered over us with moralistic zeal, prowling the corridors of our hotels in his largely hopeless efforts to ensure that we hadn’t broken curfew or were not with a date. He fined us up to $200 if we used profanity near reporters or fans. Given that cursing came pretty easily to all of us, that seemed unreasonable. I later found out that he tried to get Nik Venet to fire me because I swore within earshot of some fans. Well, fuck him. That’s how I talked.
Brian actually had it worse, his father still trying to exert control over the music at the very time that Brian’s skills were blossoming. Uncle Murry walked right onstage in Sydney and turned down Brian’s bass—Brian liked the low-end distortion, while his father didn’t. At other times, my uncle stood side stage and made a T signal for “treble up,” or more highs on the bass. Brian resisted.
Murry had bullied Brian for years, but he increasingly called into question his manhood.
“If you were a man, you would tell Mike to stand closer to the microphone.”
“If you were a man, you would tell Carl and Dennis to brush up on their harmonies.”
“If you were a man . . .”
“If you were a man . . .”
Man came up all the time, which probably influenced Brian’s idea behind our 1964 song, “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man).” (I cowrote the number and most of the lyrics.) Murry’s focus on what it meant to be a man, or masculinity, also hinted at one of his great fears for his sons. “I don’t want any of my boys,” he would say, “to end up being one of those Hollywood fags.”
—
Enough was enough. After we got back from Australia, Brian and I got the guys together, and we took a vote on whether Murry should remain as our manager. Even Carl, who might have been most reluctant to fire his father, knew it had to be done. It was five-zero to dismiss. Brian and I drove to his parents’ house, and Brian told him straight out: “Look, we can’t deal with you anymore. We’ve got to get a new manager.”
His dad was shocked. How could he be fired? This was his band!
Some nasty words were exchanged between father and son, and then we left. My uncle was only forty-six years old, but the episode sent his life into a spiral. He already had an ulcer, and he had sold his leasing company to devote all his energies to the Beach Boys. Aunt Audree later said that his dismissal “destroyed” him—he stayed in bed for weeks. A couple of months later, in April of 1964, he appeared at a studio session, inflamed and inebriated, and approached Brian, who was at the control board.
“Get out of the way,” Murry huffed. “Get out of my way for a minute.”
Brian had a hard time standing up to his father, but this time he did. “No! You get out of my way!” Then he shoved his dad, who went sprawling backward. That was the only time I ever saw Brian defy him physically, and Murry, defeated, left the studio.
That summer, Audree and Murry sold their house in Hawthorne and moved about twenty-five miles east to Whittier, a town founded by Quakers but mostly known, in years to come, as the childhood home of Richard Nixon. Though his role with the Beach Boys had diminished, my uncle still managed the Sea of Tunes catalog, still controlled our song credits, and could still influence the future of the band. He was also entering a period in which his grievances only deepened. A letter he wrote on August 7, 1964, surfaced years later on the Internet. Titled “Last Will and Testament,” it spelled out his bill of particulars against Audree.
Regarding their sons, he wrote, she was “too lax, too indulgent, too soft,” which undermined his authority. “The result of this is that I am a very unhappy and broken hearted man.” It got worse. “When [Audree] told me on this date, August 7, 1964, that she did not enjoy intercourse with me anymore, although she would pretend to be my wife and even sleep in the same bed with me, this proved to my satisfaction that she did not love me any more.” Murry preferred the appearance of a marriage and laid down this threat: “If Audree Wilson, my wife, is not legally married to me at the time of my death, I ask the court handling my estate to see that she receives only one half of any said monies.”
The letter showed, beyond resentment and self-pity, my uncle’s desire to impose financial hardship on his wife in case she ended the marriage. Vindictiveness came naturally to him. I’d find that out personally soon enough.
—
On February 3, 1964, even as the Beatles were sweeping America, we released a new single, conceived in rather spontaneous fashion. The previous September, Brian and I were in a taxi in Salt Lake City, Utah, heading from a Holiday Inn to the airport. I told Brian that I thought we should write a song about that teenage experience of getting your driver’s license, borrowing your parents’ car, and then driving to see and be seen. It was a rite of passage. But instead of a teenage boy doing it, I had this image of a great-looking girl in a hot car, and she tells her father one thing to borrow the car but then does something else. We unspooled the idea further. We thought it should be up-tempo, with a Chuck Berry opening guitar riff (like that in “Johnny B. Goode”), and because we were in Southern California, the girl should not be taking her “father’s car” but her “daddy’s car.” Brian wrote the music, and I wrote most of the lyrics.
Well she got her daddy’s car and she cruised through the hamburger stand now.
Seems she forgot all about the library like she told her old man now.
And with the radio blasting,
Goes cruising just as fast as she can now.
And she’ll have fun, fun, fun,
Till her daddy takes the T-bird away.
Showcasing Brian’s falsetto, “Fun, Fun, Fun” reached No. 5. I always felt that any time you had a Top 10 song—a hit—you’ve done well. But we didn’t get any higher because the Beatles occupied the top three slots (“She Loves You,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and “Please Please Me”) while the Four Seasons held No. 4 (“Dawn [Go Away]”).
Capitol wanted our next album out immediately, so on March 2 it released the oddly titled Shut Down Volume 2. The previous year, the label released an album called Shut Down, a hot rod compilation of various artists that included the Beach Boys’ “Shut Down” and “409.” In Shut Down 2, however, fewer than half of the songs mentioned cars. Though it included some of our finest originals (“Fun, Fun, Fun,” “Don’t Worry Baby,” “The Warmth of the Sun”), plus some quality covers (“Why Do Fools Fall in Love”), the whole thing was rushed to keep up with the Beatles. It also included one of our more unusual collective efforts: “Cassius Love vs. Sonny Wilson.” Cassius Clay and Sonny Liston were to square off in a title match days before the release of the album. Our song was a mock fight between Brian and me, with the guys joining. It was all in fun, but it captured part of my relationship with Brian: We showed our respect and love for each other through sarcastic gibes and clever put-downs.
In the song, I tell Brian, “When I’m singing, it doesn’t sound like Mickey Mouse with a sore throat.”
He later responds, “Man, at least I don’t sound like my nose is on the critical list.”
He got me on that one.
After three consecutive Top 10 albums, Shut Down Volume 2 stalled at 13, which was disappointing. We didn’t want to fall further behind the Brits, and our next record ensured that we didn’t. In April, Brian invited us to his office on 9000 Sunset in Hollywood and played us some new tracks, which revealed how much he was progressing as a composer. He employed unusual chord progressions to create “fake modulations,” when you think a song is moving into a different key but it stays in the same key. Brian also combined chords that do not occur naturally in the same key, which was rarely done in pop music, yet they fit together beautifully.
The lyrics, I thought, needed some work. I was never shy in expressing my views about the wording, and Brian was not reluctant to tell me when my vocals had fallen short. These exchanges—sometimes tense, at times crude, but never disrespectful—usually produced a good outcome. In this case, Brian had written lines about a guy looking for a new place to hang out. The opening was:
Well there’s a million little girls just waitin’ around.
But there’s only so much to do in a little town.
I get around from town to town.
I thought it meandered, without a strong beat.
“Those are pussy lyrics,” I said. “I went to Dorsey High, and I’m not going to sing them.”
I had another idea. “Why don’t we do it like this? Remember ‘Barbara Ann’”—performed by the Regents and released in 1961. “It goes, ‘Ba ba ba ba Barbara Ann.’ How about, ‘Round, round. Get around. I get around.’”
“Whoa,” Brian said. “Terrific.”
I didn’t know that we would cover “Barbara Ann” the following year. It was just a song that I really liked, particularly the hook.
I also tinkered with Brian’s first verse, which was about this bored kid driving around but was really about our own experiences: how we had this instant fame, some fortune, had traveled all over the country, but did any of that bring us happiness? Maybe we needed to find a different kind of place.
I’m getting bugged driving up and down the same old strip.
I gotta find a new place where the kids are hip.
My buddies and me are getting real well known.
Yeah, the bad guys know us and they leave us alone.
Brian rearranged the vocals and had us sing the opening a cappella, which we did again in the latter third of the song. The opening hook became the recurring chorus, some handclaps were added; so were bongos and an organ and specific guitar parts instead of just chords; and Brian’s falsetto soared across the top of the melody.
It was an unbelievable arrangement; the song just jumped out of the radio. “I Get Around,” released on May 11, became the Beach Boys’ first No. 1 single; it also reached No. 7 in the United Kingdom, making it our first Top 10 hit there, and hit No. 38 in Germany. The B side was “Don’t Worry Baby,” which was modeled after the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby.” It was one of Brian’s strongest vocals and had a great vocal counterpoint: Brian sang Everything will be all right, and Al, Dennis, and Carl backed him up with Don’t worry, baby, while I sang a moving bass part Now don’t you worry, baby.
To have two classics—“I Get Around” and “Don’t Worry Baby”—on one single was pretty good, but we discovered what all pop artists discovered. As exciting as it is to see a record climb the charts, it inevitably falls, sometimes quickly. “I Get Around” remained No. 1 for two weeks. So it was all about the next new song, recording it, getting it on the radio, getting it charted, keeping the ball rolling.
Our next album, All Summer Long, was released in July, with “I Get Around” as the lead, and it reached No. 4. Capitol wanted a “live LP,” so we obliged with Beach Boys Concert, which drew from our live performances and was released in October. Led by “Fun, Fun, Fun” and including covers of “Little Old Lady from Pasadena” and “Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow,” that album was our first to reach No. 1. October also saw the release of our first Christmas album, which charted at No. 6. We released three other singles as well, including “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” and “Dance, Dance, Dance,” which Carl and I cowrote with Brian, reaching No. 8.
Five singles and four albums—by any measure, an extraordinary year. It did nothing to slow down the Beatles, who had nine Top 10 singles and six albums that charted either 1 or 2, but both commercially and artistically, we were doing our best to hold our own.
—
After Uncle Murry was fired, I became more involved in touring strategy. It was something that fascinated me. How do we maximize our time on the road? What’s the best itinerary to reach the most fans in the fewest number of days? I wasn’t satisfied with getting telephone updates from the William Morris Agency; instead I visited the office a couple of times a week and tried to figure out this part of the business. What I learned was that it wasn’t a very good business for the artists. The big cities were controlled by individual promoters, who would take a significant percentage of the take in exchange for securing a venue and handling the security and the publicity. The promoters were local power brokers, and if circumvented, they could block artists’ access to the best sites or deter radio stations from playing their music. The artists themselves had little recourse.
My response: We’ll capitulate when we have to, but let’s also play in secondary or tertiary markets. For a gig in Philadelphia, we followed it with concerts in Harrisburg and Hershey. If we were booked in Seattle, let’s also play in Hoquiam and Spokane. And why settle for only one performance a day? We once played two concerts in Canton and two in Akron on the same day.
To pull this off, we hired our own promoter, Irving Granz, whose older brother, Norman, was perhaps America’s most famous jazz producer. Irv also had an impressive client list, including Peter, Paul and Mary, the Righteous Brothers, and the Kingston Trio, not to mention a fast-rising black comedian named Bill Cosby. In our arrangement with Irv, we covered his costs for finding the concert venue, publicity, and security, and then he took 10 percent of the gross. It was a great deal for Irv; one of his assistants later wrote a book on the Beach Boys, which included a chapter, “How to Make a Buck on Someone Else’s Dime.”
But we wanted to perform as much as possible, and I’ve always liked playing in smaller markets. It’s not that fans in New York or Los Angeles don’t enjoy good concerts, but I think that fans in, say, Wichita or Tulsa, who are often ignored by top acts, appreciate you even more. In July of 1964, we embarked on a thirty-three-day tour across America, playing forty-two concerts. We weren’t a hit everywhere—support was a bit tepid in Amarillo—but we were mostly well received, regardless of market size. Our concert in Davenport, Iowa, according to news reports, almost started a riot. In Worcester, Massachusetts, we did have a riot. We performed at Memorial Auditorium on the night before Halloween, a Friday, so maybe that contributed to the mayhem. We were on for less than fifteen minutes, and right at the beginning of “Fun, Fun, Fun,” a bunch of girls climbed onto the stage and began to mob us. The cops were there but couldn’t stem the tide. We tried playing one more time, but when the stage was about to be stormed again, the curtain fell, and the concert was canceled. Meanwhile, outside the auditorium, kids without tickets had gone on a rampage. A newspaper reported a roving gang of two to three hundred boys was breaking windows and doors to try to enter the building, and the police had to use clubs to keep them outside. It was one of our most memorable nights, for all the wrong reasons.
For the most part, I believe, we always delivered what the crowd came to see, and we kept up this touring pace for several years. For me, it was never a hardship. I much preferred being onstage over being in a studio, which I thought was cramped and claustrophobic. I also liked being the front man and seeing the response of the audience. That part of the job never gets old. How could it? I loved as well many of our opening acts. One of the most flamboyant was Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, who hit it big with “Wooly Bully”; their lead singer was Mexican American, even though the group itself was Egyptian-themed (they wore turbans and drove a hearse with velvet curtains). We had opening acts with colorful names: the Tulu Babies, the Peanut Butter Conspiracy, the Strawberry Alarm Clock (whose big hit was “Incense and Peppermints”). We had opening acts that were either already stars or nearing stardom: Buffalo Springfield, the Byrds, Paul Revere and the Raiders, Neil Diamond, the Righteous Brothers, Sonny and Cher, the Kinks, Billy Joel, and Dino, Desi, and Billy, just to name a few.
In October of 1964, we played at the T.A.M.I. Show (Teenage Music International) in Santa Monica. The event, which was filmed for a documentary, included Chuck Berry, James Brown, the Supremes, and Smokey Robinson, among other amazing performers. The Beach Boys played four songs, but hell, it was just an honor to be onstage with some of my heroes. I met Marvin Gaye there. Though Marvin was still early in his career—he would have two No. 1 R&B songs the following year and would record “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” (No. 1) in 1968—he was one of my favorite singers. We struck up a conversation, ended up smoking a joint outside during rehearsal, and maintained a friendship, sometimes seeing each other on tour and even sharing in a few harmless pranks. We were once staying at the same hotel in London, in which the guests set their shoes outside their doors at night to be polished. So we moved the shoes to different doors. It was silly, but so were we, and we’re sure that all the wing tips and pumps made it back to their well-heeled owners.
Marvin established himself as a Motown star, singing the timeless classic “What’s Going On” in 1971 and becoming a crossover sensation. But his chaotic personal life, caused mostly by drug addiction, tore him apart. Depression, divorces, and financial loss were all part of the mix; at one point he spent a year in Europe to avoid the IRS. But in the early 1980s, some promoters were going to help Marvin get his career back on track. They invited me to come to a meeting, at the Circle Star Theatre in San Carlos, California. That night, Barry Manilow was performing, and one of Marvin’s promoters asked Barry if he would acknowledge that Marvin Gaye and Mike Love were in the audience.
The word soon came back. “Barry feels this is his night,” the promoter said. “He doesn’t want to really bring attention to you guys being here.”
I didn’t think that was too generous of him, but then I thought about it. “Marvin,” I said, “that’s all right. I don’t think we really want people to know we’re here anyway, do we?”
After the meeting, Marvin and I went out to the limo and caught up.
“Hey, Love. I got a song to tell you about.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a song about a lady, and it’s called ‘Sanctified Pussy.’”
I howled. “Whew, Marvin. That’s one of the greatest titles I’ve ever heard!”
Marvin’s comeback succeeded, as he won Grammys for his 1982 releases of “Sexual Healing” and the album Midnight Love. But he couldn’t beat the heroin. In 1984, I saw him in his dressing room before a concert in Orlando, and it was obvious he had just shot up. He was leaning back in his chair and seemed nearly out of it. “Oh, Mike, I am so sick,” he said.
Incredibly, he went onstage about forty minutes later and did his set, and I don’t think the fans even knew how wasted he was. This was billed as the Sexual Healing Tour, but there wasn’t nearly enough healing.
Within a month or so, I got the news that Marvin, one day shy of his forty-fifth birthday, was dead. His father, after an argument, had shot him twice at point-blank range, once in the heart. Marvin Senior, diagnosed with a brain tumor, pleaded no contest to voluntary manslaughter. Marvin Junior’s autopsy revealed cocaine in his body. So much soul, so many demons. His ashes were scattered in the Pacific Ocean.
And what about the “sanctified” song? It was renamed “Sanctified Lady” and released posthumously, though I’m sure Marvin would be glad to know that if you listen to it closely, when the chorus chants “sanctified lady,” you can hear him murmur “sanctified pussy.”
—
Also at the T.A.M.I. Show were the Rolling Stones, whose first tour of the United States was in June of 1964 and, combined with the Beatles, represented the first salvo of the British Invasion. I wasn’t as enamored of the Stones as I was of the Beatles. They wanted to be white blues players. Call me a homer, but I preferred the actual blues players—the guys I had seen, like Bo Diddley and Bobby “Blue” Bland as well as James Brown and Marvin Gaye. The difference was clear to anyone who saw James Brown at the T.A.M.I.—the hurling frenetic dynamo who “died” onstage, only to be revived by a cape that was placed over his body. The Stones followed that performance, and Keith Richards supposedly said that following James Brown was the biggest mistake the group ever made.
The only other time we performed with the Stones was on May 7, 1965, at Legion Field in Birmingham, Alabama. The event drew 15,000 fans and included some other top-drawer acts, but the Beach Boys and the Stones were the headliners. There was tension in the dressing area. Their egos. Our egos. We thought they were interlopers. The good state of Alabama wasn’t exactly Beach Boys’ territory either, but I had some connections to it. Grandma Love once showed me a Bible from one of Grandpa Love’s ancestors, who had been a sheriff in Alabama before the Civil War.
The Rolling Stones preceded us at the concert, and I can’t deny it—they played well and did all they could to bury us. Then we came on, and I stepped to the mic. “Hey, that was fun, that was nice. But it’s about time we stand up for Alabama!”
The crowd went berserk.
—
If the British bands were given a hero’s welcome in the United States, it was gratifying that the Beach Boys were also embraced in England. On our first European tour in 1964 (with Brian), we landed in London on November 1 and were met at the airport by hundreds of teenagers. We spent eight days in England, mostly doing television and radio promotions while also taping several performances. Our first TV appearance was on Ready Steady Go!, a popular rock show, and above the din of screaming girls, we sang “I Get Around” and “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man).” When the host Keith Fordyce introduced us between songs, he called Dennis “Ringo” and asked Brian and me some questions, but our answers were mostly drowned out by the cheers.
For the Beach Boys, it was the beginning of a long and beautiful friendship with England, and on this trip, we bonded with the Brits in some unusual ways.
Late one night, Brian and I walked into a café looking for something to eat, and after we sat down, a young woman with auburn hair approached us. She asked if either of us would like a date. She was tall, slender, and attractive, but I didn’t engage in such activities—why pay for something that was abundant and free?—and neither did Brian. He was simply shy. Though no business was transacted, the woman was friendly and asked us where we were from and what we did. We told her we were from America and played in a band called the Beach Boys. A fan of American music, she asked us who our favorites were. At some point Brian mentioned the Four Freshmen and—wouldn’t you know it—she loved the Four Freshmen. We discussed their harmonies and lyrics, and one thing led to the next, and soon we were singing “It’s a Blue World” with a prostitute in London at an all-night café. And we sounded pretty good.
We also visited Paris, where I was mesmerized by the nightlife along the Champs-Élysées—the theaters, the cafés, the gardens, the artists, not to mention the ladies of the night. We were tourists more than anything else. We had one concert, at Olympia Hall, and I had this image of Parisians as aloof and sophisticated and not the ideal audience for our music. But the response in Paris was no different from that in London. As a reviewer in Melody Maker wrote, “It was the first time that I have heard Beatles-type shrieks at the famous Paris Theater. And though the sons and daughters of Paris’s large American colony were there in force, it was clear from the chants of ‘une autre, une autre’ [“another, another”] that the Beach Boys have a big following among French teenagers. Before they were halfway through their act, the kids were dancing wildly in the aisles and rushing the stage for autographs.”
We also went to Berlin and Rome and Copenhagen and Stockholm, and we tried to see the sights, but we also couldn’t help notice—or at least I couldn’t help notice—that no matter where we were, we saw beautiful women. That may not seem like a revelation, but it was on my mind the following year when I wrote the lyrics to a certain song about California girls.
My desire for those women, as well as my temper, almost got the better of me in Munich. I walked into a bar one night, and a pretty hostess invited me to buy her champagne, implying that she would come back to my hotel. When we finished the bottle, I left the bar and waited for her on a median outside. A Mercedes drove up, and the very same hostess jumped in. I assumed the driver was her boyfriend, and I’d been conned out of the champagne. The car stopped near where I was standing, and maybe they didn’t see me, as I was dressed in a black overcoat, black pants, black hat, and black gloves. Angry, I walked over to the car, made a fist with my gloved hand, and smashed in the driver’s window. That didn’t go over too well. The guy behind the wheel pulled out a Luger, pointed it at me, and said, “Son of a bitch, you’re not in Texas anymore.”
The switchblade . . . and the butterfly.
I thought it might have been over for me right then, but he flagged down a cop. I spent a few hours in a German jail, was bailed out by our road manager, and had to pay for the broken window, but that was better than leaving in a coffin.
Trying to keep pace with the Beatles, trying to satisfy the label, trying to become a global band, we were all under a lot of pressure, but Brian felt it the most. He usually looked comfortable onstage and was meticulous in his physical appearance. But unknown to us, an internal storm was brewing. We already knew that he didn’t like the road, and his ongoing battles with his father took an emotional toll. And there were other concerns.
Earlier in the year, during one of our swings through Texas, I stopped by Brian’s hotel room. He was gone, but I saw a red light in his toiletry kit as well as a syringe and other drug paraphernalia. Exactly what drugs, I can’t recall, or maybe I wasn’t even sure at the time. But it wasn’t marijuana, which was prevalent on the road. Weed could screw you up; so could hash, which I had also tried. But we’d been touring for almost three years now, and those drugs were tame compared to the other stuff I had seen. LSD, for one. Heroin as well. Saw plenty of guys in clubs, dressing rooms, and hotel rooms who thought they were being cool and then just began freaking out. Didn’t need to read any of the literature (though in time I did). Didn’t need to hear any of the dangerous-drug lectures. In 1964, I was pretty naive about the emerging psychedelic movement and how that would influence the music world. All I knew was what I had seen, and what I had seen was quite straightforward: this shit fucked people up.
I didn’t know what kind of drugs Brian had, nor did I confront him. While I had a temper, my first impulse with other people was usually to avoid conflict for as long as possible. With Brian I might also have been in denial, as he was the last person I imagined getting involved in drugs. When we were in high school, he didn’t drink or smoke and disapproved of any girlfriend who did smoke. But Brian’s drug abuse would soon be evident to all of us. Eventually, it was also known that in Brian’s circle of new friends, a talent agent named Loren Schwartz introduced him to psychedelics. In 2012, Schwartz posted a blog in which he took credit for giving Brian his first hit of LSD in 1964. Schwartz wrote that he gave Brian “a clean, pure, and correct dose from the best source known,” and blamed Brian’s later descent on “food, tobacco, cocaine, speed, downers, more LSD, as well as many other drugs . . . as Brian related to me.”
If the immaculate purity and sourcing of Loren Schwartz’s LSD allowed him to maintain a clear conscience, more power to him. As noted, I had seen indications of Brian’s drug use in 1964, but I don’t believe any of his family or long-term friends knew that he had taken hallucinogens in that year. What we did know was that Brian’s travels abroad had heightened his longing for Marilyn and the stability that she brought to his life. Within two weeks after we returned from Europe—on December 7—Brian and Marilyn were married. He was twenty-two and she was sixteen.
Sixteen days later, on a flight from Los Angeles to Houston, where the Beach Boys had a concert, Brian had an extreme panic attack. I was in a different part of the plane and didn’t see it but was later told what happened. Brian began screaming and crying, then grabbed his pillow and yelled, “I just can’t take it! I just can’t take it!” Carl and Al tried to comfort him, and Brian soon regained his breathing and was able to relax. He performed with us that night in Houston but decided to return home the next day. His meltdown on the plane has often been described as a nervous breakdown, though I don’t believe it was a coincidence that it occurred within months of his taking drugs, including, evidently, LSD.
Curiously, Brian later said that the episode was triggered by his belief that Marilyn had her eyes on me, which wasn’t true but was revealing in its own way. I’ve never been competitive with Brian, but he grew up listening to his father rail against my family, with our sumptuous home and fashionable cars and fine vacations. Perhaps Brian still saw me in that privileged light, and that’s why he feared he was going to lose his bride to his cousin.
Regardless, when Brian flew back home to Los Angeles, he requested that he be picked up at the airport by the person whom he trusted most—his mom.