The Beach Boys were about to enter a new era, what I call the fracturing—fractures in the band, in our families, in our marriages. For a group that often shattered in place, this period had more sharp edges than most.
Our personal lives took the biggest hit. Carl and Annie separated in 1978, in one of the lowest points in Carl’s life. Like all broken marriages, this one had a number of issues, but drugs were one of them. Carl had been in a downward spiral, much of it from cocaine, which by the mid-1970s had cut a wide and devastating swath through the entire music industry. Carl was the most stable of the three Wilson brothers, but even he reached a point where he was squandering money on drugs, hallucinating, or acting irrationally. On September 1, 1977, before an afternoon concert in New York City’s Central Park, Carl was so dazed that several guys had to put him in a cold shower just to bring him around. He made it onstage but sounded terrible. As Annie later said, “When you’re talking to your drug dealer more than your friends, that’s a problem.”
Dennis, meanwhile, ended up marrying Karen Lamm in 1976, which made both their lives even more combustible. There were the drugs, including Dennis’s first use of heroin. There were the fights. And there was recklessness. Karen once shot Dennis’s Ferrari with a pistol. Dean Torrence was with Dennis in Hawaii during this period, and as soon as Karen arrived, all hell broke loose. As Dean later said, “To feel loved, Dennis had to be in turmoil.” Seven months after Dennis and Karen got married, they divorced. One year later, they remarried; that lasted two weeks before Dennis filed for another divorce.
After Landy was fired, Marilyn rehired my brother Stan to be Brian’s bodyguard. Stan was joined by Steve Korthof, Brian’s first cousin who had previously worked as a Beach Boy roadie, and by Rushton “Rocky” Pamplin, a friend of Stan’s who had tried out for professional football teams but was probably more well known as a model, including a nude centerfold for Playgirl. (Rocky also gained notoriety in Beach Boy circles for his affair with Marilyn while he was Brian’s bodyguard.) Even with three minders, Brian didn’t change, his craving for drugs as great as ever. Stan moved in and resumed his tough love, yelling at Brian about how fat and lazy he was and how he had to get his life in order. But while Stan was in the shower, Brian would sneak out in his robe and hitchhike in search of drugs; one time he was picked up by Merv Griffin and brought home. Marilyn complained, argued, and begged, all of which Brian increasingly hated. They separated in 1978 and later divorced (presided over by Judge Wapner, before his television fame).
Reflecting on these experiences years later, Annie believes that none of us was prepared to handle the pressures and temptations of the era. “It was too much too soon. Success. Conflict. All in intense doses. You’re barely a teenager, and you’re in another world. I think the drugs were all about escape, to have a different experience, to get away from it. But it’s a lie. You can’t get away from it.”
Annie took drugs with Carl, including LSD once or twice, and considers herself fortunate. “I marvel at anyone from that era who came out of it unscathed,” she said.
As for me, drugs had nothing to do with my life, and they had everything to do with it. I saw the wreckage, not only of my cousins but many in the business. Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Jim Morrison were among the highest-profile casualties, all dead at twenty-seven. Guitarist Tommy Bolin, Brian Cole (the Association), and Danny Whitten (Crazy Horse) never saw thirty. Elvis was gone by 1977, and neither Keith Moon nor Sid Vicious made it out of the decade.
So I turned inward, isolating myself further from my bandmates while going deeper into Eastern spirituality. After becoming an instructor of TM, I learned more about Ayurveda, which combines the Sanskrit words ayur (life) and veda (knowledge). It represents a system of ancient Hindu medicine that includes health remedies, astrology, and spiritual ceremonies to bring your life greater balance. That growing awareness led me to attend, in 1977, an advanced training seminar, called the TM-Siddhi program. With Charles Lloyd and others, I spent three months in Vittel, France, and three months in Leysin, Switzerland, changing venues to take advantage of off-season hotel rates. As in Rishikesh, we attended lectures and seminars and also meditated, but it was all done with greater purpose. Siddhi means paranormal powers or abilities, and the program’s entire thrust was how to use these siddhis to develop human potential. This can be done through the practice of sutras, or aphorisms, compiled around the second or third century CE by Patanjali and now introduced to us. While you are meditating, the sutras develop qualities of the mind and body, honing your intellect, refining your senses, and nurturing your soul. The process is spiritual as well as physiological. It is also aspirational, whether to improve your vision, heighten your intuition, or broaden your sympathies—it’s about how to improve yourself and the world around you. What has generated the most attention over the years are the flying sutras, or levitation. Perhaps saints or yogis have defied gravity, but for mortals like me, I can only practice, cultivate these attributes of personal improvement, renew my energies, overcome my fears, push forward, and with the grace of God, transcend.
—
If Eastern spirituality set me on a better path in most areas of my life, it did not help in my relationships with women. I knew that the family household my mom had created was something that I wanted, but I continued to plunge headlong into commitments that I hoped would fill gaps in my life but ended badly.
In 1977, I married Sue Oliver, a divorcée whose first husband was wealthy, who had a wide circle of friends (Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford), and who was one of the most socially adept women I’d ever known. I went with Sue to the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port, mingled with Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia in Washington, and met Senator Ted Kennedy’s teenage son, Edward M. Kennedy Jr., who lost his right leg due to bone cancer. I had never been part of that world, but I found it fascinating, and I thought Sue could show it to me while providing a home as well. She even traveled to a meditation course on her own. When we got engaged, she asked me for a diamond ring and a fur coat. That should have been a red flag, but I looked past it. Sue was attractive and fun, but I learned that you can’t marry someone because you want to improve your social skills, particularly when you place different values on material wealth. The marriage was annulled after six months.
My next relationship couldn’t have been more different, in every possible way.
On a swing through Jacksonville, Florida, I visited Dr. Batchelder, the surgeon who had operated on my grandpa years ago, and he introduced me to Patricia DePadua, who came from the Philippines and was part of a family of doctors. Innocent, romantic, and beguiling, still in her early twenties, Trisha played the guitar and loved to sing, and I was swept up again. Her father had died, and she was still mourning his loss when I met her. Her devotion to him was affecting, and I found in Trisha a purity of motives and spirit that was refreshingly at odds with the world in which I lived. We took a romantic vacation to Hawaii, and then Trisha stayed with me for several months in Santa Barbara. When I had to leave for my TM-Siddhi course in France and Switzerland, I sent Trisha back to Jacksonville to live at her home until I returned to the states. Once I was abroad, we spoke on the phone on a regular basis.
Immediately after the course, I was in London for a Beach Boy gig at a CBS convention, as we had just signed a $2 million contract with CBS Records/Caribou. I received a call from Trisha’s brother-in-law, who told me that she had been involved in a horrific car accident, in her Volkswagen, on a rain-slick road. She was now on life support. The news just froze me. She wasn’t dead. She wasn’t alive. She was, for the moment, in some netherworld, and only a miracle could bring her back.
I fulfilled my obligations at the CBS convention, and between concern about Trisha’s fate and the effects of my last six months in meditation, I was in a state of extreme sensitivity, all of which came out onstage. Brian was with us, under Stan’s care, and he had lost some weight. But when we were onstage, Brian was at the piano, just drifting in and out. Melody Maker wrote that Brian “looked totally zomboid and completely unaware of what was happening around him.”
I was steamed, and not just at Brian. I really wondered what the hell I was doing up here. For the past six months, I’d been surrounded by people who were determined to increase their knowledge and advance their personal development; and now I was surrounded by people who thought they were hot shit because they could get into a limo and do a lousy show while the only thing they really cared about was their self-indulgent drug habit. So during “Fun, Fun, Fun,” I walked over to Brian’s piano, lifted up one side, dropped it, pushed it, and knocked over his mic. When the song ended, Brian, horrified, stood up and left the stage.
Trisha died when I was still in London, and I flew to the funeral in Jacksonville with Stan; but I was so distraught that I stayed to myself as much as possible. I believe my relationship with Trisha would have grown and flourished, and I spent many long nights wondering how things could have been different had I not sent her back home. There are no answers to such questions, no way to heal that wound; all I can do is accept that some things in life cannot be explained or understood.
At least there is music, and I wrote and later recorded the song, “Trisha,” with Carl on the backup vocals. The track, which has been available on bootlegs for decades, has a yearning, bittersweet quality throughout.
Oh darling, Trisha.
I just love you so
Oh, so much more
Than you’ll probably ever know.
The band’s lifestyle divide had been present for years, but now a deeper schism emerged—between the meditators (Al and me) and the partiers (Dennis and Carl). The terms smokers and nonsmokers were also used. When Bruce Johnston rejoined the band in 1978, he joined our group. He didn’t meditate, but he didn’t take drugs either. The split was so intense that when we traveled, we chartered two planes, the costs be damned, with the partiers usually including a number of our roadies. When Brian traveled, accompanied by Stan or his other bodyguards, he usually flew on our plane. When we had to take one plane, one camp sat in the front, the other in the back, and the middle was Switzerland. Other issues came to a head over the management of the group, its musical direction, and disputes involving our record labels (we signed the deal with CBS/Caribou while we still owed Warner/Reprise two albums). Our dysfunction could not be concealed. The day after the Central Park concert in 1977, on the tarmac of the Newark airport, a red-faced argument broke out above the din of our idling planes. I was sitting in one of the aircraft, but a Rolling Stone reporter who saw the debacle compared it to a scene out of Casablanca.
That movie, at least, ended with the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Those kinds of bonds were increasingly rare in the Beach Boys, even among those of us who sat on the same plane. Al and I, for example, were spiritual partners and shared strong interests in the environment. We wrote several songs together, and his soothing, bendable voice was the perfect fit in our harmonic stack. His country rock rendition of “Cotton Fields,” an international hit, showcased his talents, and his arrangement of “Come Go with Me,” turning a golden oldie into a Beach Boys’ special, became a surprise Top 20 hit in 1981.
But Al and I weren’t close personally. He was always in an odd position—within the original band, he was the one non–family member. Then he quit the Beach Boys, and when he returned in 1963, my uncle Murry, in retribution, made him a salaried employee. He didn’t become a shareholder in Brother Records until 1971. Perhaps he felt he was never given his due, financially or artistically. Whatever the case, he could be prickly and rude, particularly to staffers or subordinates, with a grating sense of entitlement. I’m sure he had his bill of particulars against me as well.
—
Our next several albums reflected our dismal state. The Beach Boys Love You LP (April 1977) was written almost entirely by Brian but was not what his fans were expecting. Sparsely produced and relying heavily on analog synthesizers, it was undeniably original but fragmented and just plain odd. No one knew what to make of it when it came out, and Warner/Reprise did little to promote it.
Our next LP, at Al’s and my urging, was recorded at Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa. By the winter of ’77, we had grown increasingly concerned about Carl and believed that a healthier environment might pull him out of his spiral. We thought it’d be good for Dennis as well. If nothing else, we figured there were fewer temptations in the middle of Iowa. But while the meditative life might have once appealed to my cousins, it didn’t now. They took the whole experience—living in dorm rooms at a midwestern college in the dead of winter, recording in makeshift facilities on rented gear—as a personal affront, and they came and went with little interest in the music. Brian was with us but miserable throughout. The album bombed.
My guess is that everyone who’s ever played in a rock band has wanted to do a solo album. It’s only natural to ask—how far can I fly on my own wings? Every Beach Boy has done at least one solo album, and it’s not surprising that Dennis, of the original five members, had the first. He wanted it the most. Dennis also had the support of Jim Guercio’s Caribou Records, and he had the perfect place to record new songs. In 1973, the Beach Boys purchased a former porn theater on 5th Avenue in Santa Monica and remodeled it into Brother Studio. Dennis and Carl became the co-owners, and it was, for Dennis, a musical haven.
Dennis wrote most of the songs for the album—to be called Pacific Ocean Blue—in collaboration with Gregg Jakobson, but he asked me if I would write the title song. I accepted gladly.
Dennis’s music was a reflection of his life—the longing, the sadness, the moodiness, all drawn from his own experiences, all evident in his lyrics and melodies. Even his love songs were plaintive, including his most popular number, “Forever.” (So I’m goin’ away/but not forever/I’m gonna love you any ol’ way.)
Pacific Ocean Blue’s title song was about the environmental threats to this great body of water, a rabid concern that Dennis and I shared. We grew up on the edge of the Pacific, and we were the ones who went to the ocean as teens to catch the morning swells, so it was part of our history together. Musically, Dennis collaborated far differently than Brian. Brian was interactive: I typically sat with him at the piano as he tinkered with the melodies and chord progressions while I provided the hooks and suggested the rhythms and syllables in the background. The lyrics emerged organically in this process. Dennis, on the other hand, wrote out the music entirely, gave it to me, shared his thoughts about the wording, suggested a few phrases, and then had me write the rest. Brian, I think, enjoyed having company when he worked and was codependent on most of his lyricists. Dennis was the ultimate free spirit.
Either way worked, and I thought “Pacific Ocean Blues,” as part of a thematically tight album on the impossibility of love and the transience of friendships, had a poetic, melancholy grace:
We live on the edge of a body of water,
Warmed by the blood of the cold-hearted.
Slaughter of the otter.
Wonder how she feels, mother seal.
It’s no wonder, the Pacific Ocean is blue.
The album, released in September of 1977, was cheered by critics as another Wilson brother’s finding his voice. It was a tougher sell commercially, charting at only No. 96, but strong enough that Dennis began work on another solo album. I think we were all hopeful that Pacific Ocean Blue would open doors for Dennis, musically and personally. A false rumor from this period was that Dennis wanted to promote the album on a solo tour, but I told him that if he did, he couldn’t return to the Beach Boys. That was not true. In fact, I was looking forward to writing more songs with Dennis for his solo efforts. We may have had different musical styles and sensibilities, not to mention lifestyles, but our love for the environment bridged that divide and would have allowed us to collaborate for years to come.
Unfortunately, none of it came to pass, not the environmental songs or the second album or the solo career. Even Brother Studio was lost, sold in 1978. It was expensive to maintain, and when Carl decided to sell his stake, Dennis couldn’t afford it on his own.
—
Ever since the mid-1960s, Brian had been surrounded by people who have wanted to help him or, as the case may be, claimed to want help him but have had other agendas. I’ve usually been able to discern who’s had Brian’s best interests at heart and who were the frauds. But I never would have anticipated the events that took place in January and February of 1978, when those supposedly closest to Brian led him astray.
We had a three-week tour in Australia and New Zealand, promoted by the English talk-show host David Frost. The tour itself, if it is recalled for anything, is known as the time when a drunken Carl fell on his ass on a stage in Perth, and he apologized on national TV the following day. It was the trip on which Carl, now almost as heavy as Brian, truly bottomed out. An unsteady Brian was with us, along with all three of his bodyguards (Stan, Steve Korthof, and Rocky), and so was Dennis. As a group, we often stumbled through our sets, though that didn’t seem to bother the large crowds. Our bigger problems were offstage.
Brian’s bodyguards did all they could to keep the drugs away, inspecting his hotel room drawers and closets to intercept any contraband. They were also supposed to keep Brian in sight at all times. But one night in Melbourne, one week into the tour, we were staying at a Hilton, and Brian slipped away and was later found vomiting in his room. When Stan, Steve, and Rocky investigated, they concluded that Carl had purchased $100 of heroin from an employee of David Frost’s entertainment company, and that Carl gave the heroin to Dennis as well as to Brian.
Heroin was relatively new to the band. Over New Year’s back in the states, Dennis had apparently taken it for the first time with Karen Lamm. As narcotics go, heroin has few equals for its destructiveness, and the rest of the group, including our tour and business managers, were all outraged when we learned that Brian had gotten hold of the stuff, apparently through his brothers. We also had contractual obligations. In our negotiations for the tour, Frost required that Brian be onstage.
After Brian’s bodyguards found him in his room sick, they sat down with him and tried to warn him about his brothers.*
ROCKY: You have to know better next time. There can’t be a next time on that shit.
STAN: I can’t believe you let your brothers drag you down like that . . . They’re trying to put you back where you were ten years ago.
STEVE: Here we are trying to treat you like an adult, and this blows it apart.
Rocky and Steve also talked about my feelings for Brian, which was something I could never do myself.
ROCKY: Look how much Mike Love loves you. He can’t even sleep at night because he thinks they’re trying to give you heroin, and he wants to strangle Dennis—that’s how much you mean to him. That’s love.
STEVE: Do you know that Mike cries when you do a good show?
ROCKY: The more I look at, if your brothers are doing this to you in ’78, what have they been doing to you all along—
STEVE:—in ’66.
ROCKY: To fuck up your head and get you involved in drugs.
BRIAN: I’m not going to do it again, I’m telling you that. I’ll never do it again.
That night onstage, at the Myer Music Bowl in Melbourne, Carl was stoned, and Brian and Dennis disappeared so often that the Melbourne Herald noted: “It was like ‘Exodus’ gone wrong.”
Afterward, Frost heard that some of us were talking about sending Dennis home (our contract ensured that Brian stayed), and Frost held an emergency meeting with the group, but excluding Brian and Dennis.
Frost was an elegant Brit who was perhaps at the height of his fame, having just completed his blockbuster interviews with Richard Nixon, and the last thing he wanted was an international drug incident—or for Dennis to leave the tour. It was all about “truth in advertising,” Frost told us.* If Dennis wasn’t onstage as advertised, the insurance company that underwrote the tour (AGC) would be furious. AGC, Frost explained, wasn’t “a textile company or a food company. Their business is based on trust and always delivering what they promise . . . They have $2 billion in assets, and they might sue me, and they would certainly sue you for $50 million.”
“So,” I told Frost, “you’re going to use the threat of a $2 billion company—”
“No, no—”
“—which would blow out our brains financially, [so you can] save Dennis Wilson’s ass, for doing something unforgivable, in my opinion.”
“I appreciate the principle,” Frost said, but “we are all on this gloriously successful tour, a marriage that cannot be broken or splintered without terrible consequence to us all.”
Frost wanted to pretend that the heroin didn’t happen. I had seen this behavior for years—indulge the drug use and sweep it under the rug. The show must go on. I also don’t like to be threatened, particularly with $50 million lawsuits, and I didn’t like Frost placing his financial interests above all else.
“Maybe I’m emotionally overreacting to this,” I told him, “but you’re telling me I can’t throw someone off the tour, slap his hand, send him home, or something . . . A whole fucking group of drug addicts blowing their fucking brains out . . . I see this as condoning fucking bullshit. We aren’t the fucking Rolling Stones!”
I was actually pretty calm compared to Rocky, who had spoken to Frost’s employee, a guy named Merton. He had told Rocky that he had bought the heroin for Carl. Now Rocky demanded that Carl admit it, but Carl refused.
“I had nothing to do with it,” Carl said.
“Don’t lie to me, man!”
“I’m not lying.”
“Merton didn’t say a word today that wasn’t truthful. He gave the smack to you. You gave him a hundred dollars. Don’t fuckin’ deny it to me, Carl! Don’t fucking deny it.”
“Butthole—”
Carl said he flushed the heroin down the toilet.
“You didn’t flush it down the toilet soon enough,” Rocky said, “because Brian and Dennis both did it, and you bought it, Jack! And you own that! You can’t be a man, Carl. You’re a piece of shit!”
“Don’t call me a piece of shit, Rocky, or I’ll bury your ass.”
I asked Carl why he was “covering Dennis’s ass.”
“Michael, I know all about drug abuse. I abuse drugs. I do not condone it. I mean, what do you want me to tell you, Michael? I flushed it down the toilet.”
Rocky and Carl continued to argue until Carl finally said, “Fuck you!”
Rocky had heard enough. “Fuck me? Yeah?” He walked over to Carl and—wham!—struck him with a menacing right uppercut, lifting him off the floor and up against the wall, where he fell to the floor.
Someone yelled, “Look! One of the Beach Boys is on the ground.”
Someone else said, “I’ve never seen anything like that before.”
“I don’t care,” Rocky said. “He doesn’t tell me to get fucked.”
In about a minute, Carl regained consciousness and tried to say something, but Rocky told him, “The best thing you can do is be quiet.”
David Frost, surveying his embattled investment, said, “I believe Rocky owes Carl a vast apology.”
At the end of the meeting, Frost proposed that we all “make the necessary moral affidavits” to ensure that these drug incidents not recur. That way, he said, we can continue the tour and “plow on to glory.”
I don’t know what motivated Dennis and possibly Carl to give heroin to Brian. They both idolized their older brother. Maybe they thought that he would enjoy it, or maybe their judgment was clouded by their own drug use. Stan believed that Carl, frustrated by Brian’s endless struggles, wanted Brian off the stage and even out of the band, and figured the heroin would do it. Whatever their motives, the spectacle, for me, was a reminder of how vulnerable Brian was, trusting those around him, even his own brothers, to his detriment.
Dennis remained on the tour, and we finished in Sydney, playing before 35,000 fans and plowing on to glory.
—
We had less traction in our recording efforts. We had not yet delivered any music to CBS Records and were summoned to Black Rock, the company’s headquarters in New York. Joined by our tour manager, Jerry Schilling, we waited in the office of CBS Records president Walter Yetnikoff. When he finally walked in, bearded and rumpled, he leaned against his desk and said, “Gentlemen, I think I’ve been fucked.”
We all looked at Jerry, and he looked at us. Then Brian raised his voice and said, “Mr. Yetnikoff, I’ve got some ideas for some songs, and I want to do them at the Criteria Studios in Miami.”
“Okay,” Yetnikoff said. “We’ll be down there in two weeks.”
Brian defused the crisis, and we traveled to Miami. But when Yetnikoff came down a couple of weeks later, the tracks that we had been working on were unusable. That’s when we called back Bruce Johnston, and he ended up producing L.A. (Light Album). It was mainly a collection of solo efforts, including a remake of a disco song, “Here Comes the Night,” that Brian and I wrote for Wild Honey. As originally recorded, it was two minutes and forty seconds, but now it was nearly eleven minutes. By the time L.A. (Light Album) was released in March of 1979, the disco craze was over, and the LP charted at No. 100.
Stan, Rocky, and Steve were all eventually released, but it didn’t really matter who was trying to save Brian. He had reached the point where he could no longer function. He was hospitalized on two occasions in 1978, including November, when he was admitted to the psychiatric ward at Brotman Memorial Hospital and diagnosed with schizophrenia and manic-depressive psychosis. He stayed for three months, was released for a month, and then readmitted a third time.
—
Though the Beach Boys were a family band, I made a point never to tell my parents about the chaos among their sons and nephews. They were living quietly in Cypress, attending occasional concerts, and enjoying our music. My mom, however, had complained about back pain for several years, and the doctors didn’t know what was wrong. She finally had exploratory surgery, which revealed that cancer had wrapped around her spine. They suspected the cancer had begun in the ovaries. While she was undergoing chemotherapy and perhaps even before the diagnosis, I had encouraged my mom to visit the Hippocrates Health Institute, on the theory that a radical diet might help and certainly couldn’t hurt. But that idea didn’t have much support in the family. I do know that the cancer had spread too far to be reversed by Western medical science.
I can’t say that my mom and I drew any closer over the years. While she took great pride in the Beach Boys, I know she was also disappointed in my personal life. Once my marriages broke up, it was hard for her to accept my children—as if the marriages themselves didn’t happen. She shunned anything that violated her own principles or values. That’s who she was. My eviction from the house, however, probably served me well by forcing me to become independent and to take my music career seriously. It was also my mom, more than anyone else, who taught me to love music and to use it as an emollient for long-held grudges or as a canopy under which all could stand.
My sister Marjorie cared for our mom in her final months, an enormous burden for someone who had not yet reached twenty. But Marjorie’s love and compassion ensured that the end of our mom’s life would be filled with peace. Mom died young, at sixty, and I’m sure that part of her regretted that she was not able to pursue her own musical ambitions. Hers was a life of sacrifice, for her husband and her children, and those sacrifices were expected in her era. But she knew that everything was changing. Born one year before American women could vote, she saw the greatest expansion of women’s rights in history, and even as someone who was often uncomfortable with social change, she knew that future generations would not be constrained as she was.
“Since ‘women’s lib,’ the young women see a chance to do important things on their own,” she wrote in her memoir. “Not just living in the shadow of their husbands whom they feel are doing more worthwhile things than ‘just’ raising children.
“For me it was right. I have been rewarded many times for the years I spent home with my kids, but each woman should have her choice in a country like this . . . Old customs are hard to change, but thank God we live in a progressive country. Things are looking up for girls here. They can choose a career or marriage or both.
“Lucky girls to be born in this generation.”