If we were neck and neck with the Beatles, it made perfect sense for us to hire Derek Taylor as our new publicist. Born in Liverpool, Derek began his career as a journalist, and in 1963 he covered a Beatles show at the Manchester Odeon. His review so impressed the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein, that he hired Derek as a publicist. Derek accompanied the group on its first tour in the United States and helped craft some of the story lines that were fed to the press and contributed to the band’s renown. Derek left the Beatles after a few years and settled in Los Angeles, where his connections to fan magazines helped him promote the Byrds as well as Terry Melcher and Bruce Johnston. Bruce in turn introduced him to Brian, and the two became fast friends. We were all impressed with his Beatles’ pedigree, and the Beach Boys hired Derek in March of 1966 to be our publicist.
We’d never really had a publicist. Our music fit the early 1960s so seamlessly, no one needed to “package us.” That era, however, was over. Derek himself was a quick study, and his connections paid off immediately. When Bruce took Pet Sounds to London, it was Derek who lined up interviews for him. When we toured in Europe in October and November, it was Derek who made sure that the British music magazines had plenty of stories about us. But his most ambitious effort focused on Brian, who felt his music skills were underappreciated and was bothered that some rock critics dismissed our music, particularly our hits, as unsophisticated. How could they be taken seriously if they’re about surfing, girls, and hot rods?
These critics were never my biggest concern. If our songs were so simple, why didn’t everyone do them? (The answer is, the songs weren’t simple, the harmonies far too complex for most artists to even attempt.) I always thought this critique of the Beach Boys was elitism at its worst: because so many people loved our music, there must be something wrong with it.
I cared about what our peers thought, but mostly I cared about what our fans thought—were we reaching them or weren’t we? That concerned all of us. Brian and I both craved hits, but he also seemed to need the approval of the critics, of the illuminati, and it was Derek’s job to spread the word, create the buzz, and make sure he got it. He just needed the right story line, and he found one.
Brian’s a genius.
A genius, Derek pointed out, who could be compared to Lennon, McCartney, and Dylan, but even these comparisons understated Brian’s virtuosity. Profiles on Brian would compare him to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven. The campaign began in August of 1966, and it was definitely a change. Compared to the Beatles, who were known on a first-name basis, the Beach Boys had been more famous as a group, in part because we had a revolving cast of performers. Now Brian was the star. As far as I was concerned, Brian was a genius, deserving of that recognition. But the rest of us were seen as nameless components in Brian’s music machine—or, as the British publication Melody Maker asked, “Are the five touring Beach Boys just puppets for sound genius Brian Wilson?”
This frustrated all of us but infuriated Carl, who after Brian was the most musically gifted of the group. As he told the press in London: “No, we are not just Brian’s puppets . . . Brian plays the major creative role in the production of our music, but everyone in the group contributes something to the finished product. It’s not like an orchestra translating the wishes of the conductor. We all have a part to play in the production of the records.”
Carl as well as Dennis felt this challenge acutely. How do you emerge from the shadow of a “genius” who is also your oldest brother? How do you forge your own musical identity? My challenge was even more complicated: How do I, as the cowriter of our most successful songs, receive recognition when I had not even been given credit for most of those songs? How do I even demand credit when we were all just “Brian’s puppets”? We all wanted Brian to get his due, but it was also true that Dennis, Carl, Al, Bruce, and I were the ones on the road, at the airports, on the buses, playing three or four shows in two or three nights, generating the tour revenue, showcasing the music so that the DJs would play it and the people would buy it and the royalty checks would keep coming in . . . and then returning home, jetlagged, and spending long nights in the studio trying to lay down the vocals for the next record. It didn’t feel to us as if we were just riding on Brian’s coattails. We thought we were all working pretty hard to keep the operation going.
But if the “genius” campaign gave the other Beach Boys short shrift, the real damage was to Brian himself. It put even greater pressure on him. It made him even more driven and caused him to fear failure all the more. It was hard enough to match the Beatles, but now he had to keep up with Mozart? Years later, one of Brian’s psychiatrists, Dr. Garrett O’Connor, disclosed what Brian once told him: “I love being a genius,” he said, “but I hate the responsibility.”
Or as Brian told one of our fan magazines (Beach Boy Freaks United) in 1985, “I was thrilled to see some of the stuff that happened to us. It was great . . . [but] it was a little disturbing on the central nervous system . . . You go through a shock, and if you fail at something, it hurts ten times worse . . . And then you fall down and you are just a human being, like everyone else. It’s like, that’s the hard part. Playing the two roles. The legend and the person.”
—
Derek Taylor wasn’t the only newcomer in Brian’s life. Once he stopped touring, Brian expanded his circle of friends and collaborators who thought they could help him ascend to new heights musically. Brian wanted the approval of the “hip intelligentsia,” as they were called, or leaders of the emerging counterculture. That role was played most notably by David Anderle, an artist, record producer, and manager who had met Brian years ago through a family connection. Described as the “mayor of hip,” Anderle became the Beach Boys’ would-be business partner, persuading us to establish a record company (called Brother Records) while also pressing a lawsuit against Capitol to renegotiate our contract. With his contacts in the media, he may have been most responsible for the mystique surrounding an ambitious new album that would be known as Smile. Brian saw it as our follow-up to Pet Sounds and “Good Vibrations” and envisioned it as a “teenage symphony to God.”
The music writer Jules Siegel, sent by The Saturday Evening Post, visited Brian to document the Smile effort as well as to determine if Brian was a “genius, Genius, or GENIUS.” Richard Goldstein, the first rock critic for The Village Voice, also arrived at Brian’s doorstep and, as he later recounted in his memoir, ended up getting stoned with Brian in the California desert, with Marilyn shouting at her husband, “Pick up your pants!” Other visiting journalists included Paul Williams of Crawdaddy!, which was founded in 1966 to write critically about rock and roll, and Lawrence Dietz of the more mainstream New York magazine. Then there was the film crew from CBS News, shooting scenes for a rock and roll documentary produced and narrated by David Oppenheim. A classical musician himself, Oppenheim had worked with such highbrow figures as the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, the Spanish cellist Pablo Casals, and Leonard Bernstein (who would appear in the documentary). Oppenheim thought that Brian was their equal.
Still others came into Brian’s orbit, whom I’ll call the hipsters. There was Anderle’s friend Michael Vosse, who was put on the payroll to scout out TV opportunities. There was Danny Hutton, a young musician who was managed by Anderle and who became one of the lead vocalists for Three Dog Night. Then there was Van Dyke Parks, an erudite young songwriter also managed by Anderle who became Brian’s lyricist for the Smile tracks.
We were on the road touring, but when we stopped by the house, we knew things were getting weird. Brian had a tent—red and maroon with a heavy gold brocade—built in the den, with huge pillows on the inside and hookahs for the marijuana. Brian had removed the dining room table and chairs and had a carpenter build an eighteen-inch-high sandbox around the grand piano. A truck poured in eight tons of sand, allowing Brian to feel as if he were writing music at the beach, which was strange, because Brian didn’t like the beach. Meanwhile, he removed the furniture from his living room and put down workout mats, which were good in theory if not in practice—Brian’s weight continued to balloon. According to Marilyn, when Brian was writing the song “Love to Say Dada,” he asked her to buy him a baby bottle and fill it with chocolate milk, which he would drink as he wrote.
Brian’s increasingly erratic behavior was chronicled by Siegel (whose article was rejected by the Saturday Evening Post but published in the premier issue of Cheetah). The most notorious incident centered on the so-called “Fire” track, in which Brian tried to record a song, at Gold Star, that evoked the sound and fury of a blaze. It was titled “Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow,” after the cow that started Chicago’s deadly fire in 1871. To get the musicians in the mood, Brian had them play their instruments wearing red fire hats (I wore one also), and he burned wood in buckets so everyone smelled smoke. Musically, Brian got what he wanted. According to Siegel: “A gigantic fire howled out of the massive studio speakers in a pounding crush of pictorial music that summoned up visions of roaring, windstorm flames, falling timbers, mournful sirens and sweating firemen, building into a peak and crackling off into fading embers as a single drum turned into a collapsing wall and the fire-engine cellos dissolved and disappeared.”
A few days later, a building across the street from the studio caught fire and burned down, and Brian panicked. He investigated fires across the region, determined the area had experienced an unusually high number, and concluded that his recording had caused the outbreak. As Brian later told Rolling Stone, “We thought maybe it was witchcraft or something. We didn’t know what we were into. So we decided not to finish [the song]. I got into drugs, and I began doing things that were over my head.”
Siegel described Brian’s growing paranoia. Brian wanted to see the science-fiction movie Seconds, but when he walked into the theater, he said, “The first thing that happened was a voice from the screen said, ‘Hello, Mr. Wilson.’ It completely blew my mind . . . That’s not all. Then the whole thing was there. I mean, my whole life. Birth and death and rebirth. Even the beach was in it.” He theorized that “mind gangsters” were involved, and he identified Phil Spector as the possible outlaw. “He could be involved, couldn’t he? He’s going into films.” At another point, one of Brian’s friends came by the studio but was not allowed to enter. “It’s not you,” Michael Vosse told him. “It’s your chick. Brian says she’s a witch, and she’s messing with his brain so bad by ESP that he can’t work.”
The problem, of course, was the drugs, and the people who persuaded Brian to use them. As Brian told Mike Douglas in 1976, “Well, a lot of people—a lot of hippies in the sixties said, well, the great Messiah is supposed to come in the sixties, and it came in the form of drugs. Which I agree, there’s a certain amount to be said for that. But in my personal story, I have to tell, it really didn’t work out so well, so positively.”
Marilyn saw the repercussions, not just from the LSD, but from the large amounts of marijuana and hashish as well as the amphetamines. As she later told the BBC’s Radio 1, “I think the drugs he was taking had started to confuse him. He had met a lot of strange people who had encouraged drugs and told him that they would expand his mind. I think he was caught up in experimenting and finding out who he was as a person.” She was frightened too. “I slept with one eye open because I never knew what he was going to do,” she later said. “He was like a wild man.”
To be sure, many of us were taking drugs. At the time, I was smoking weed and drinking as well, but my work wasn’t affected. That was also true of Dennis and Carl. Though I didn’t know it, Dennis later said he was taking acid during the Smile sessions. But we all saw how the drugs were affecting Brian, and I don’t think any of us knew what to do. I became painfully aware, however, that addiction affects not only the addicted but those close to them, and I felt that I was losing my best friend.
When the Beach Boys returned from Europe in late November of 1966, Brian had recorded the instrumental tracks for a number of Smile songs, including “Wind Chimes,” “Wonderful,” “Our Prayer,” and “Cabin Essence.” They were unlike anything we’d ever heard—bizarre, yes, but also beautiful. It was obvious that Brian had taken what he’d done with Pet Sounds and “Good Vibrations” but added more layers and complexity. The problem, for me anyway, was the lyrics. I didn’t understand many of them and thought they had been influenced by the drugs. I called them “acid alliteration,” or something that had been taken out of a Lewis Carroll poem. They were often clever and subtle but virtually inscrutable in a rock song.
There was, in “Surf’s Up,” Columnated ruins domino! Or in “Cabin Essence,” Over and over, the crow cries uncover the cornfield/Over and over, the thresher and hover the wheat field. Or in “Heroes and Villains,” the double entendre dude’ll do—for “dude will do” as well as “doodle doo,” but who would catch those nuances in a galloping rock song?
The lyricist Van Dyke Parks, born in Mississippi, worked as a child actor and studied music at Carnegie Mellon before moving to California and immersing himself among the beatniks. Brian ran into Van Dyke at Terry Melcher’s house and was impressed with his literary sensibilities, but that wasn’t his only appeal as a collaborator. As Van Dyke told Crawdaddy! in 1976, “Brian sought me out . . . At that time, people who experimented with psychedelics—no matter who they were—were viewed as ‘enlightened people,’ and Brian sought out the enlightened people.”
I’ve always admired Van Dyke’s intellect and like him personally as well. But we had different views about drugs, and we disagreed about lyrics.
I once asked Van Dyke, “What do these lyrics mean?”
He said, “I haven’t a clue, Mike.”
Well, if he doesn’t know, how would our fans know? He was like a painter whose individual brushstrokes were masterly, but the picture itself was an abstraction. That’s great if your audience is relatively narrow, but what if you’re trying to appeal to the masses?
I always thought that our lyrics should connect with the largest number of people possible. I used to think, How will our fans in Peoria react to this song? My position as the front man informed my views. Every performance was like convening a very large focus group—I knew which songs resonated. I acknowledge that I have always been the most business-minded member of the Beach Boys, but I would call that being the most practical. The question facing any rock band is, How do you survive? You survive by creating and performing music that people want to hear. That’s tough to do. Most rock bands flame out after a few years. Many don’t even make it out of the garage. For the Beach Boys or any other band, there will always be tension between art and commerce. I believe you can straddle both worlds, but I know you can’t have art without commerce.
I had never hesitated in telling Brian what I thought about the words to a particular song or about anything else; but he was acting so strange, I couldn’t have any conversation with him. My concerns about the lyrics, however, offended the hipsters, who saw the Beach Boys as a bunch of hopelessly square yahoos in striped shirts and white pants, removed from the youth revolution brewing in the streets.
Accordingly, my complaints were ignored. The lyrics didn’t change. So our next job was to provide the vocals, and while the songs were difficult enough, Brian asked us to do bizarre things. In the studio, he had us lie on our backs, with a microphone above us, and make strange guttural sounds. He drained his swimming pool, put a mic at the bottom, and had us sing while on our backs. For “Heroes and Villains,” we sang through our noses, in four parts. These are not pleasant memories for any of us. In 1995, Bruce told Mojo magazine, “The music was cool, but it’s always tinged with the reality of making it. Brian degraded us, made us lie down for hours and make barnyard noises, demoralized us, freaked us out. I can’t tell you a lot of it, it’s really fucked up. He was stoned and laughing . . . [but] we didn’t really know what was happening to him.”
We all had questions, but we did what Brian wanted, and we worked harder on those vocals than on any others in the history of the band.
—
Brian had originally promised Capitol that the album would be done by Christmas. Cover art was created, and Brian gave Capitol the list of songs in the middle of December. But he began to burn out. He brought together an entire orchestra, did one take, then sent everyone home. Sessions were canceled. Brian stopped working on all the songs except “Heroes and Villains.” At one point, Carl said to me, “Brian’s not well.”
As the New Year rolled in, we had other things to worry about beyond the new album. We filed a $2 million lawsuit against Capitol, which meant that whatever records we might have completed might not even be released. Eventually, however, we did reach an agreement with the label: the Beach Boys would record on our own Brother Records label in the United States, while Capitol would press and distribute our work.
A more urgent problem confronted Carl. On January 3, he was ordered to report for induction into the Army, but he refused. Carl wasn’t political and was not opposed to the Vietnam War per se. But he wouldn’t touch a gun under any circumstance. He was opposed to all wars, all killing, driven by a deep spirituality that infused his music as well. On April 5, he was indicted by a federal grand jury, and he planned to fight the charge as a conscientious objector. But on April 26, prior to an evening show on Long Island, FBI agents arrested Carl for evading the draft. It was just a publicity stunt by the feds, and they got the news coverage they wanted. Carl posted bond in time to play the concert.
In four days we flew to Dublin to begin a European tour, but Carl had to appear in federal court in Los Angeles. I was pissed. If the conscientious objector status applied to anyone, it was Carl. But if convicted, he faced up to five years in prison as well as a $10,000 fine. Our immediate concern was reuniting Carl with the band. At a press conference in Dublin, I said, “For our part, we are hoping that the big, strong U.S. will find it in their hearts to let him come.” In Los Angeles, Carl pleaded not guilty. A federal judge ordered Carl to return on June 20 for his trial but allowed him to leave the country, after posting a $25,000 bond.
On May 2, we had two shows at the Adelphi in Dublin and hoped Carl would arrive in time. Except he was 5,200 miles away. He and his wife, Annie, flew to Chicago, where they chartered a ten-seat Learjet for $5,000. They were the only passengers, bound for Dublin, but when a cap fell off one of the fuel tanks, they had to make an unscheduled stop in Newfoundland. Carl loved to fly, but I don’t think he loved it that much. By the time we were supposed to take the stage, Carl hadn’t arrived, we hadn’t heard from him, and we had no idea what had happened. Fearing the worst, we began the concert and did our usual songs, but the crowd was chanting, “We want Carl! We want Carl!”
Hell, so did we!
Bruce sang Carl’s lead on “God Only Knows” but forgot some of the words. “Sloop John B” drew boos. Others shouted for their money back. We finished the show but did not give any interviews or allow our picture to be taken. We thought about canceling the second show.
Twenty minutes before that performance, we were told that Carl’s tiny jet was crossing the Irish coastline. He and Annie were safe. He still hadn’t arrived by the time the show was to begin, so we trudged back onstage. But at some point in the first set, Carl’s taxi pulled up to the stage door. Disheveled and unshaven, having traveled for about twenty hours nonstop, Carl walked right on the stage, grabbed his guitar, and started playing. We were just grateful he was alive. And when he gave a flawless rendition of “God Only Knows,” it must be said that truer words were never sung.
Carl’s opposition to the draft took courage—he was willing to go to prison rather than go to war. I didn’t have to make that decision because, as a father, I was deferred. But if I had been drafted, I would have returned to the land of my forefathers and would now be fluent in Swedish. Bruce, meanwhile, did receive his draft card. He too strongly opposed the war, though he took a more creative path to avoid service. He had a slender surfer’s body, and he bought a pair of jeans, washed and dried them several times so they were extremely tight, and wore them when he went to his draft board for induction. He also borrowed a girlfriend’s blouse, applied a touch of makeup, and found opportune times to bat his eyes and shake his hips. The draft board disqualified Bruce as a homosexual—or, in the vernacular of the day, he “fagged out.”
In Carl’s case, his trial occurred in June in Los Angeles, and at one point he told the judge, “We were put here to live—killing is very evil and destructive and results in human suffering. I love my country very much, but I won’t take part in the destruction of people.” Judge A. Andrew Hauk ruled in favor of Carl, though he was acquitted on a technicality over how the draft board handled Carl’s induction papers. The judge asked Carl if he would consent to a noncombatant role, such as working in a hospital, and Carl said, “Most definitely—I just want to do something good.” Carl still wasn’t out of the woods. Because he had won on a procedural issue—not because he was a conscientious objector—his draft board could still induct him. The threat hung over Carl for years.
Brian’s troubles with Smile continued. In February of 1967, Van Dyke left the project, forcing Brian to continue without his collaborator. More deadlines were missed. In April, Derek Taylor, in a press release, tried to put a positive spin on the delay but just created more confusion. “Wilson’s only concern is that when the music is ready, it is also good. And the very power which enables them to take time is based on a greatness of their past product. So there is a logic in this situation. So much logic that one goes in a circle. But not a vicious circle. Rather a commercial/artistic infinite curve in which fine music makes great money in good time.”
Well, okay then.
Brian and Marilyn needed to start over. They sold their house on Laurel Way and moved into a Spanish-style mansion on Bellagio Road in Bel Air, taking with them little else besides the grand piano. They built a high brick wall with an electronically controlled gate around the property. The Beach Boys installed a studio in the house so that Brian would have fewer distractions. Most of the hipsters were gone or would soon be gone. The journalists had left.
On April 17, CBS aired Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution, in which Leonard Bernstein, in his silver mane, expressed his amazement for the “strange and compelling scene called pop music.” It was the first time that a network had investigated rock as a cultural phenomenon. Interviews with Frank Zappa, Graham Nash, Tim Buckley, and others described how the music was creating a more loving, peaceful America. Janis Ian even sang “Society’s Child,” about the then-taboo subject of interracial romance. But the show’s highlight, filmed in December, was Brian’s haunting performance of “Surf’s Up.” He played it at his piano, the lights dim, a candelabra in the foreground, his falsetto reaching every note.
“There is a new song,” David Oppenheim told his viewers, speaking solemnly over the chords, “too complex to get all of the first time around. It could come only from the ferment that characterizes today’s pop music scene. Brian Wilson, leader of the famous Beach Boys and one of today’s most important pop musicians, sings his own ‘Surf’s Up’ . . . Poetic, beautiful even in its obscurity, ‘Surf’s Up’ is one aspect of new things happening in pop music today. As such, it is a symbol of the change many of these young musicians see in our future.”
Whatever Brian was looking for—validation from both the mainstream media and the alternative press, recognition that he was in the cultural vanguard, separation between himself and the Beach Boys—he now had it. He was at the pinnacle. All he had to do was finish Smile and bask in the glory.
Then it all collapsed. Just two weeks after the CBS documentary, Derek Taylor announced that Smile had been scrapped. “As an average fan of the Beach Boys,” he said, “I think it is bitterly disappointing.”
Smile didn’t vanish entirely. “Heroes and Villains,” the centerpiece of the album, was released as a single. Also released was the album Smiley Smile, which included reworked, stripped-down versions of the original songs. Future albums included versions of “Our Prayer,” “Cabin Essence,” and “Surf’s Up,” the latter also distributed as a single. But for years to come, Smile would become legend as the greatest album never released. In February 2002, a reporter for Mojo, lamenting that all he could listen to were the album’s fragmentary “sound files,” wrote: “We’re left to ponder what kind of world it would have been if Smile had actually made it to the record stores.”
Others of us were more concerned about Brian. Every great artist, I believe, straddles a fine line between confidence and fear—confident that he can do something that no one else can do, but fearful of rejection, of being laughed at, of not being understood. If those fears are properly channeled, they can be motivating. But if not, they can be debilitating. Something like that happened to my cousin. His standards were so high, even he couldn’t attain them, and the genius campaign made the expectations that much higher. The drugs, meanwhile, offered deliverance, tempering his fears while making him believe that he could reach new creative peaks. And strictly speaking they did just that, at least for a while.
Industry-wide, there was a pre- and post-psychedelic era—from “I Want to Hold Your Hand” to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” The years 1965 and ’66 were more or less the dividing line, with the Beatles the most conspicuous agents of that transition. Paul McCartney told Life magazine in June 1967: “After I took [LSD], it opened my eyes. We only use one-tenth of our brain. Just think what we could accomplish if we could only tap that hidden part. It would mean a whole new world.”
Brian has spoken often about his drug use as well. In a legal deposition in 1993, he said that by 1965 he was smoking three or four marijuana cigarettes a day and taking one LSD pill a day. In a Mojo article in January of 2007, he said, “For Pet Sounds, it was definitely LSD. That’s what led to ‘California Girls,’ ‘Good Vibrations,’ and Pet Sounds.” Asked if he would have written those songs anyway, Brian said, “No, LSD definitely helped me out a little bit. It helped me keep on top of that particular music.” In 2003, during a video interview at Capitol Records to promote the release of our Sounds of Summer compilation, Brian was asked what led him to write more introspective songs in the mid-1960s. Brian responded flatly: “I started taking drugs, marijuana and amphetamines.” Those drugs, he added, “opened up my soul,” and “the feelings came out in the music.”
But what served as creative ballast ultimately became sticks of dynamite, until Brian’s confidence waned, the paranoia set in, and the unraveling began. Musically, it was a defining trade-off. If Brian hadn’t taken the drugs, we might have had ten “Good Vibrations.” But if he hadn’t taken the drugs, we might not have had one “Good Vibrations.”
Whatever the artistic consequences, it took decades for my cousin to get his life back on track, and he was never truly the same. As Van Dyke Parks said of Brian’s drug use in the documentary Brian Wilson: I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times (1995): “You go to places where you don’t want to go. You discover the dark side of the moon. You’re lucky if you get back and don’t burn up on reentry.”
Doctors would diagnose Brian with a variety of mental illnesses, including depression, paranoid schizophrenia, auditory hallucinations, and organic personality disorder. Which diagnoses were accurate, I couldn’t say, and the causal relationship between Brian’s drug use and his mental illness is hard to document. What I know is that Brian was healthy before he took the drugs, and then he wasn’t healthy. And according to Brian himself, in an interview with the health magazine Ability in 2006, after he took his first LSD trip, “I knew right from the start something was wrong. I’d take some psychedelic drugs, and then about a week after that I started hearing voices . . . All day every day, and I can’t get them out. Every few minutes, the voices say something derogatory to me . . . But I have to be strong enough to say to them, ‘Hey, would you quit stalking me? Fuck off! Don’t talk to me—leave me alone!’ I have to say these types of things all day long . . . I believe they are picking on me because they are jealous.”
All of this had obvious implications for the Beach Boys. Brian could still create wonderful music, and he did, but not like before. Brian was twenty-four when he composed “Good Vibrations,” and that was his last No. 1 hit. Excluding one cover, he never had another Top 10 hit either. Something was missing. He lost that drive, that magic, that desire for immortality. After our banner year in 1966, it was not preordained that the Beatles would have four or five more years of commercial and critical success while we would drift off the charts. But Brian was our quarterback, and once he was out of the game, we could never keep up.
—
From my perspective, I didn’t know if or when Brian would pick up the Smile tracks again. Our focus, beyond Brian’s health, was on recording, performing, and keeping the band viable in what would be some lean years. But reporters kept asking us about the lost album, so we knew there was interest. Then in 1978, the publication of a book, The Beach Boys and the California Myth, laid out a narrative about Smile, Brian, and the Beach Boys that would take hold.
The author, David Leaf, described himself in a 1995 essay as a “Brian Wilson fanatic” who had listened to “Surf’s Up” in 1971 and believed that “the death of Smile was the public tombstone for the artistic repression of Brian.” Leaf said that Brian had been “submerged by insensitivity and greed . . . interrupted while traveling a brand-new path of popular music, and that was clearly a cultural crime.”
Brian’s Smile experience had been called many things, but this was the first time it had been called a “crime.” Every crime needs a culprit. So whodunit?
It was me.
Well, it wasn’t me alone. Brian’s brothers were also implicated. And his wife. And Al and Bruce. And Capitol Records. My uncle Murry was incriminated as well. Leaf’s theory, as described in the first paragraph of his book, was that “Brian created the California myth through his music. Ultimately, he became one of the myth’s most tragic victims.” A lot of us were responsible, but according to Leaf, I had emerged “as a villain.”
My villainy was alleged by the hipsters, most notably from the mayor of hip himself, David Anderle. (He was quoted by name. Others spoke bravely behind the veil of anonymity.) Anderle was our business partner for less than a year, but that was long enough for him to conclude that those of us who’d been with Brian his entire life were conspiring to sabotage his career. He made the charge as early as November of 1967, when he told Crawdaddy! that starting with Pet Sounds, Brian’s “major problem” has been “the Beach Boys always being negative towards Brian’s experimentation . . . Brian would come in, and he would want to do different things, and [the Beach Boys] would balk.” Anderle contended that “a great wall had been put down on [Brian’s] creativity . . . [and] a great reason why Smile wasn’t finished, the way Brian wanted it, [was] because of [the Beach Boys’] resistance in the studio.”
Anderle was there to save Brian. “I think had myself and a few other people really gotten behind him, and been on his side against whoever he had to fight, [Smile] would have happened a year and a half ago.”
Anderle reprised his critique in a lengthy two-part profile of Brian in Rolling Stone in 1971. Brian was in terrible shape—he had begun taking cocaine in 1969 and had become increasingly reclusive—but his well-being didn’t seem to concern anyone in the article. A large part dwelled on Smile, and, according to the reporter Tom Nolan, “David [Anderle] really holds Mike Love responsible for the collapse. Mike wanted the bread.”
The profile inspired Leaf’s book, which explicitly cast Brian as a victim. His drug use is acknowledged, but, Leaf wrote, “If Brian sought refuge within drugs, in reaction to all the pressure, then everybody must share the blame—the record company, the family, the Beach Boys, and Brian’s entourage.”
Even Marilyn, who took care of Brian, ran the house, and raised their two daughters by herself, was thrown under the bus. Brian’s friends, quoted anonymously, depicted her as an ungrateful, profligate nag: “If Brian wanted to buy some musical equipment for one of his friends, that caused a big stink, but it was okay if Marilyn bought matching fur coats for herself and her friends. After all, it was Brian who made the money . . . She digs being Mrs. Brian Wilson and the money and the status that goes with that.”
The attacks weren’t surprising. Marilyn had called Brian’s new friends “users” because she saw how they exploited Brian for their own careers while bringing the drugs into her house. I was even more outspoken about the drugs and my contempt for these same opportunists, so I took the brunt of their scorn.
What was noteworthy about Leaf’s book was that readers never heard from Brian about Smile. It’s not as if his thoughts were secret. In the 1971 Rolling Stone article, Brian was asked why the album didn’t come out. “The lyrics,” he said, “were so poetic and symbolic they were abstract, we couldn’t . . . Oh, no, wait. It was, no, really, I remember, this is it, this is why. It didn’t come out because I’d bought a lot of hashish. It was a really large purchase, I mean perhaps $2,000 worth. We didn’t realize, but the music was getting so influenced by it. The music had a really drugged feeling. I mean, we had to lie on the floor with the microphones next to our mouths to do the vocals. We didn’t have any energy.”
In Crawdaddy! in July of 1976, the reporter Timothy White asked Brian why he didn’t finish Smile.
“Because a lot of that shit just bothered me—but half of the shit we didn’t finish anyway. Van Dyke Parks did a lot of it; we used a lot of fuzz tone. It was inspiring, ’cause Van Dyke had a lot of energy and a lot of fresh ideas, so that energy has helped me. But a lot of the stuff was what I call little ‘segments’ of songs, and it was a period when I was getting stoned, and so we never really got an album; we never finished anything!”
White again asked why.
Brian: “Why? Because we got off on bags that just fucking didn’t have any value for vocals. A lot of tracks just weren’t made for vocals, so the group couldn’t do it! We really got stoned! We were too fucking high, you know, to complete the stuff. We were stoned! You know, stoned on hash ’n’ shit!”
Even under oath Brian gave the same account. After Brian wrote his memoir in 1991, he and his publisher, HarperCollins, were sued for defamation in separate actions by Brother Records Incorporated, Carl, and me. Brian acknowledged that he had little to do with the writing of the book and disavowed much of its content. He did, however, grant interviews to a writer named Todd Gold, and those transcripts were used in Brian’s depositions. Asked by Gold about Smile, Brian said it was “an experiment with grass and hashish. I was smoking it. I got freaked out inside my head and started writing freakier songs. I was heavily influenced by marijuana and hashish. It was fun. It was a good trip.” Asked specifically why he junked the album, Brian said the “Fire” sequence so frightened him that he stopped taking drugs for a couple of weeks. “And I said hash and marijuana are fucking me up. I don’t think I’m going to make this, and I junked this album. I don’t like where I’m at on drugs.”
In a 1998 deposition of Brian regarding his memoir, Brian was asked if my opposition to some of the lyrics caused him to stop working on the album. Brian said, “No. There weren’t as many lyrics as there was just—see, Smile wasn’t a lyrical thing.”
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It’s understandable that Anderle and the other hipsters would not want Brian’s own account to be the accepted history of Smile. If it should be, then those who gave Brian the drugs, sold him the drugs, took the drugs with him—who convinced Brian that the Messiah was coming—then they would be complicit in Brian’s unraveling. And it wasn’t temporary. According to Brian, LSD “shattered my mind” (The Mike Douglas Show, 1976), and it “killed me. It ruined me. It put my mind away . . . [It caused] permanent damage” (Charlie Rose, 2005). And in a 1991 deposition, Brian said: “I was a rich person who could afford to buy a lot of drugs over the years, and the drugs have literally fouled up my head . . . No doctor in the world could cure me of the damage that I got, brain damage.”
Brian’s Smile-era friends didn’t want that responsibility. Much better to blame me and the other Beach Boys as the mercenaries who snuffed out Brian’s creative light. And for Brian’s awestruck biographers (Leaf was only the first), the morality tale of the tormented genius who was undone by his own family—putting commerce ahead of art—that tale was too great to resist.
Anderle crystallized this theme, in the 1971 Rolling Stone article, by claiming that I told Brian, “Don’t fuck with the formula.” By the time Leaf’s book was published, Anderle told Leaf that my quote “was taken slightly out of context.” It was still used. Actually, the quote had no context, because it was never spoken. When Brian, whose memoir invoked the same line, was asked under oath in 1998 if I ever said, “Don’t fuck with the formula,” Brian responded, “No. No. Absolutely not.”
The line was absurd on its face. We’ve recorded hundreds of songs across virtually all genres. We have no formula. In 1967 alone, the year I supposedly made the comment, we recorded Wild Honey, an R&B album that was entirely different from anything we’d ever done, and I cowrote ten songs and sang three leads.*
All that didn’t matter. “Don’t fuck with the formula” has been repeated in book after book, in articles and on websites and on blogs. It’s the most famous thing I’ve ever said, even though I never said it. But the myth was too strong to be inconvenienced by the truth. And the need for absolution, among those who caused the hero’s downfall, trumped the facts.
Over the years, I’ve tried not to let the personal attacks bother me, as I learned long ago that if you’re going to be in the spotlight, either you develop a thick skin or you find another job. I also had faith that the truth about the Beach Boys’ role in the Smile era would come out, and it did.
Specifically, the claim that the Beach Boys torpedoed Smile was finally put to rest when the album was released as a box set in 2011. Brian had revisited the recordings in 2004, finished the songs, and released Brian Wilson Presents Smile with his own band. Until then, there was no album, just song fragments. But using the sequencing of BWPS, sound engineer Mark Linett and Beach Boy archivist Alan Boyd dove into the master tapes and slowly pieced them together. Brian, it turns out, had tried to take the modular format that he used for “Good Vibrations” and apply it to an entire album, creating a nearly infinite number of ways that it could be assembled. Everything was interchangeable with everything else—except Brian was using a razor blade to splice analog tape. Brian liked to push all musical boundaries, but as Linett noted, “Smile was a project that was begun decades before the necessary technology was invented.”
Linett and Boyd transferred seventy analog 4-track and 8-track session tapes to high-resolution digital tapes, and the final masters were ultimately encoded for HDCD on compact discs. They spent thousands of hours editing and mixing the sessions. I’m grateful for their efforts, as they exposed the lie that had long been told about Dennis, Carl, Al, Bruce, and me. Just listen to those CDs. Vocally, the Beach Boys were still at their peak, and the vocals were absolutely fantastic. Whatever reservations we had about Smile—and yes, I had them—we put them aside and did everything we could to help Brian realize his dream. It was no different from what we did for “Good Vibrations” or for Pet Sounds, no different from what we always did for Brian, going all the way back to my mom’s Christmas parties, when he gave us our parts, and we sang them our best.
I’ve long since abandoned trying to track the commentary about Smile. I know Brian is proud of his work, as he should be, but it speaks to the self-absorption of Brian’s hagiographers and sycophants who view Smile only as a musical event. Not me. The album is a reminder of a painful time in the history of our band and our family. I cannot separate the music from the man, and I cannot separate the man from the physical and emotional turmoil that befell him. Alan Boyd, asked about his experience in reconstructing the tracks, said it well:
“Putting Smile together was an intense process, and not a happy experience. I think it’s a brilliant piece musically, but it comes from a very dark place. There are parts that, to me, present a beautiful yet chilling portrait of a mind coming unhinged. Listen closely to ‘Cabin Essence’ and tell me that’s not severely bipolar in its extreme musical mood swings. Listen closely to ‘Fire’ and tell me that isn’t an expression of pure rage. Listen to the modularity and fragmentation of the whole album and tell me that isn’t the product of an artist whose psyche isn’t itself seriously fractured. It’s beautiful, it’s an amazing work of art, and it’s also disturbing. It’s like looking at Van Gogh’s later work. I will admit it got to me . . . and listening to every last bit of the session tapes was a trip down a rabbit hole I’d never want to take again.”