To the Beach Boys, Dennis’s death was a reminder that we were not indestructible. To many of our fans, he was the performer who embodied the spirit of the band, the one true surfer who could still elicit screams from teenage girls. But we never considered shutting down the act. From our earliest days, we had been a rotating cast of performers. None of us was irreplaceable, and Dennis’s involvement had been erratic for years. One of the tragedies of his death was that in his final year, he saw the beginning of another unlikely Beach Boy resurgence but passed away before its fruition.
Back in April of 1983, I was in a hotel room in the small Canadian town of Moncton, fast asleep, when an early-morning call jostled me awake. I picked up the phone, and the guy on the other end introduced himself as a DJ from Cleveland.
“I just wanted to know your reaction to James Watt’s comments.”
“My reaction? To what?”
The DJ said that Watt, the U.S. secretary of the interior, had decided that the Beach Boys could not perform on the Washington Mall this year on the Fourth of July. The band, Watt claimed, played “hard rock,” which “attracted the wrong element,” and the nation’s capital was not going to “encourage drug abuse and alcoholism as was done in years past.”
The DJ wanted to know if I had a comment.
I was still half asleep, but, yes, I had a comment.
I knew about Watt. I knew that he wanted to drill for oil in federal waters off the California coast, including Santa Barbara, and he wanted millions of acres of undeveloped land to be opened for drilling. He was on the cover of Newsweek with the headline “Digging Up the Last Frontier?” He was all about drilling, not protecting; I figured he would drill in his grandmother’s backyard if he could. I also thought it was idiotic that Watt would associate the Beach Boys with anything un-American. I couldn’t resist.
“Someone ought to drill his ass for brains,” I told the DJ, who fortunately did not repeat it on air.
The controversy, I thought, would be over by day’s end: just another stupid comment by a gaffe-prone cabinet officer. How wrong I was. Moncton is about 260 miles from Bangor, Maine—pretty much in the middle of nowhere—but we found ourselves in a jammed press conference before our performance. Carl tactfully defended the honor of the Beach Boys.
“Beach Boys’ music represents joy of life and joy of living,” he said. “I don’t think [Watt’s comment] applies to us.”
Phone calls came in from all over the United States and abroad, and after the press conference, I was told that I had one more call. The White House was on the line.
The White House?
I went to a private room and picked up the line.
“Mike, this is Nancy Reagan.”
“Hello, Mrs. Reagan.”
After Watt’s remarks had hit the papers, the president and first lady had brought him into the White House for a scolding, and Watt then told the press that he didn’t realize “the Beach Boys were fans of the Reagans.”
That prompted the call from Nancy Reagan, whom I had met at the Inauguration, but we weren’t exactly on a first-name basis.
“I want to apologize for what James Watt said,” she told me.
“What was that?”
“He said that the Beach Boys were fans of the Reagans. No, no, no. I told him, ‘Ronnie and I were fans of the Beach Boys.’”
“I appreciate that,” I said, “but it’s not the first time and won’t be the last time that he said something that wasn’t quite correct.”
“Well, Ronnie and I would like to invite you to the White House.”
Publicity is a tricky thing. A rock group can hire the industry’s most creative marketing team, spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a lavish campaign, and end up with nothing. Or a band can spend a whole year on a single album, release it, and see it disappear into the void. At other times, publicity—the good kind—just falls from the heavens. That’s what happened to us in 1983. We hadn’t had a hit song in seven years, and what little media coverage we did receive usually focused on our status as an “oldies band,” the disarray within the group, or Brian’s health. But James Watt delivered the Dis Heard ’Round the World, and we were now deluged with support. DJs, editorial writers, music critics, and even politicians rallied to our defense. We received invitations from all over the country to play on the Fourth of July, including one from Senator Robert Dole to perform in his home state of Kansas. “The group seems to be available,” he said.
It didn’t hurt that our adversary was the most unpopular figure in the Reagan administration, an easily recognizable bureaucrat with a shiny pate and an uncanny ability to offend. He once described Indian reservations as “failures in socialism.” U.S. News and World Report, marveling at his job security, published the headline: “Watt: A Light That Never Dims.”
Trying to make amends, Watt reversed direction and asked the Beach Boys to play on the Mall on the Fourth. But he had already invited Wayne Newton, the dark-haired crooner known as “Mr. Las Vegas” and a heavy contributor to the Republican Party. We declined the offer. As I told reporters, “We’re not going to do anything that would upstage another entertainer.”
We did, however, accept the invitation to the White House. We were in Washington on June 12 for a previously planned concert at RFK Stadium, so we also performed on the South Lawn of the White House for a fund raiser on behalf of the Special Olympics. President Reagan thanked us with a quip: “We were looking forward to seeing them on the Fourth of July. I’m glad they got here earlier.”
We were able to renew our acquaintance with Vice President Bush, who happened to be celebrating his fifty-ninth birthday. He invited us to his residence at the U.S. Naval Observatory, where we had a little party for him in the backyard and sang “Happy Birthday” to him. As a tribute to his wife, he joined us in singing “Barbara Ann,” but he kept flubbing the opening lines.
Dennis told him, “Don’t give up your day job.”
The president owned a ranch in Santa Barbara County, and he did so much work there it became known as the “Western White House.” When I chatted with Mrs. Reagan, I told her we were practically neighbors. “Whenever you go to the Western White House, the helicopters go right by my place, so I know when you’re shopping.” She laughed, I think.
The nice showing at our Fourth of July concert that year in Atlantic City surely benefited from the controversy. An estimated 200,000 people gathered on the beach and packed the Boardwalk; they climbed on the rooftops and sat on windowsills and lounged on a couple of hundred boats just offshore. It rained on Wayne Newton in Washington, and things only got worse for James Watt. In September, in an effort to mock affirmative action, he said of a government panel, “I have a black, a woman, two Jews, and a cripple.” He resigned soon after.
In 1984, we were invited back to Washington for the Fourth, and we accepted knowing full well that the brouhaha had turned this into a cause célèbre—what the Washington Post would call “the rebirth of rock-and-roll music on the Mall.” Fans came from all over the country and began assembling in the predawn hours, and the Monument grounds had so many people that the performers could reach the stage only by chopper; that included the Hawaiian Tropic Girls, who danced onstage as part of a sponsorship with the tanning lotion company.
If everything about the day was improbable, the biggest surprise was Brian. He had played with us last August and a few times since then, so we knew that Landy’s extreme therapy in diet and exercise was taking effect. But by July 4, 1984, in the nineteen months that he’d been with Landy, Brian’s physical transformation seemed nothing short of a miracle. He had lost about a hundred pounds, his belt size shrinking from a 55 to a 36. His hair and beard were neatly trimmed, and he spoke clearly.
“Brian, you look fantastic,” I told him.
“Yeah, Landy’s got me swimming a mile a day.”
Prior to the performance, we had a media gathering under a tent, and Brian seemed eager to resume his career as a Beach Boy. “We’re a very small family, but the family that sings together stays together,” he said. “We love each other. We don’t see each other very often, but when we do, we really get down and sing good . . . It’s a time where we need to be strong and face up to our responsibilities, and come through. We started out as babies and grew up to be the Beach Boys. It’s a very dramatic story, you know?”
It was sunny, hot, and hazy, and helicopters from various news stations circled above. We were able to recruit some of the world’s top headliners, and I invited the entertainers who reflected my original goal of representing the broad sweep of pop music. (My pitch: first I teased them that they needed to get off their lazy asses, then I said the event would be all about celebrating our country’s values of freedom and liberty.) The opening act, America, had both the iconic songs (“Ventura Highway,” “A Horse with No Name”) and the very name to begin the day. Next came the R&B group the O’Jays—to hell with any possible prohibitions on black artists. Dressed in white pants and white shirts, they sang “For the Love of Money,” spinning and grooving across the stage. They were followed by country-western star Hank Williams Jr., wearing an unbuttoned red, white, and blue shirt, who took center stage and announced, “I just got back from Japan, and I don’t want Japan to outsing the biggest crowd in musical history!” (Hank’s time onstage was productive; he met a Hawaiian Tropic Girl whom he would later marry.)
Wolfman Jack was the emcee. His paeans to rock music, in that distinctive gravelly voice, had made him the most famous DJ in America, enhanced all the more by his star turn in American Graffiti, in which he played, flawlessly, himself. His introduction of us boomed out over the masses. “Ladies and gentlemen!” he cried. “What you’ve been waiting for! The legendary Beach Boys!”
Brian, waving to the crowd, a completely new man, wore a white short-sleeve shirt and white shorts. Al, who seemingly hadn’t aged, wore a short-sleeve orange shirt and bright yellow pants. Bruce—tan, lean, and crisp—wore a blue shirt and very short white shorts. And then there was Carl, who always took pride in his well-groomed beard and professional attire. Despite the heat, he wore a long blue suit with a white dress shirt, the collar buttoned. I was clean shaven, having gotten rid of my beard two years ago, and opted for a patriotic ensemble—a red, white, and blue button-up shirt, white pants, and a blue beret. We were not exactly color coordinated, but for a group of guys ranging in age from forty-three (me) to thirty-seven (Carl), we appeared more physically fit than we had in years.
We walked on the stage, and more than half a million people, across this long, triangular expanse of land, stood and began cheering. (It’s always nice to get a standing ovation before you play a single note.) American flags waved. A few beach balls were batted in the air. A “Surfin’ USA” sign was held aloft. It was a blur of jubilant humanity. We always wanted our concerts to be celebrations, but this was completely different—gleeful defiance of James Watt, yes, but also an expression of gratitude for what the Beach Boys had meant to the country.
I stepped to the microphone: “Thank you, all you undesirable elements!”
We played our set list, including “California Girls,” “Help Me, Rhonda,” and “Little Deuce Coupe.” I was dripping with sweat by the second song but had never felt more energized, and was thrilled to see Brian pounding the keys of a white piano, in sync with everyone else. Landy, on the other hand, was an awkward presence, standing on the side of the stage, wearing an orange shirt emblazoned with the phrase “The Perfect Nut.”
We needed an exquisite “surfer girl,” and I believe we found one in La Toya Jackson, who had distinguished herself separate and apart from her famous brothers. I introduced La Toya as a “member of the first family of music,” and she was radiant in a white jumpsuit, gold belt, and gold necklace. I then brought out Julio Iglesias, the Spanish heartthrob who was at the height of his American popularity and had flown all night on his private jet from South Shore Lake Tahoe to join us onstage. The Beach Boys had a good thing going with Julio. He had invited us to sing background on “The Air that I Breathe,” which was included on his 1984 album 1100 Bel Air Place, and that record had put him on the map in English-speaking markets. (Julio gave each Beach Boy a Patek Philippe luxury watch as a token of his appreciation.)
Now on this steamy Independence Day, Julio was joining us onstage. He hadn’t quite mastered the words to “Surfer Girl”—the lyrics were on a crumpled piece of paper that he held in his hand—but it didn’t matter. He had his left arm around La Toya, and his was the sexiest version of that song I’ve ever heard.
Other headliners included Three Dog Night and the Moody Blues, but the biggest name was Ringo Starr. The irony of a Brit helping America celebrate the Fourth was not lost on Ringo. “Everyone say, ‘Happy Birthday,’” he told a reporter backstage. “Sorry we lost.” He came out onstage to a raucous ovation, now a middle-aged mop-top with a shaggy beard and shades, and took his place behind the drums. Some of our speakers temporarily went down, so the crowd could hear our instruments but not our voices. We had to play something, and with Ringo sitting there holding his sticks, Carl asked the band, “Do you know any Beatle songs?”
They did. They played “Day Tripper,” which the crowd loved, even without the vocals. When the speakers were revived, Ringo played twenty minutes with us, including “Back in the U.S.S.R.”
Toward the end, Carl took the mic: “We’d like to dedicate this next song from all of us to all of you, and today, I want to include my brother Dennis. Dennis Wilson just really was a great guy, and we think about him a lot these days.” And above the cheers, we launched into the mystical opening of “Good Vibrations.”
Our return to the Washington Mall had been a triumph, and we could have returned to our hotel rooms, enjoyed the fireworks, and called it a day. But why do one show in one day if two shows were possible? We took a chopper over to National Airport, piled into a Boeing 727 jet (which Braniff chartered for us), and headed for Miami.
Not everyone could join us. The three singers from America (Dewey Bunnell, Dan Peek, and Gerry Beckley) had already agreed to play in Casper, Wyoming, so I suggested that they do what I was still hoping the Beach Boys would do: follow the sun. After their thirty-minute set on the Mall, they took a chopper to National Airport, flew 1,800 miles to Casper, and performed again at nine P.M. Beckley then flew 1,000 miles from Casper to Van Nuys, California, got a ride to his home in Sherman Oaks, and was in bed before midnight. “How was your day?” his wife asked.
Most of us went to Miami, including Ringo and his wife, the actress Barbara Bach. The flight was uneventful, except for the end. As we began our descent, Ringo was in the cockpit doing a live radio interview. Our concert would be on Miami Beach, and the pilot somehow got approval to fly very low right over the crowd—I mean, very low. We could practically see the coolers, and Ringo, doing the interview, spoke to the fans directly (at least to those with radios). By the time we landed, we were running late, so we got into a bus and were led down a highway by a phalanx of police motorcycles while patrol cars barricaded highway exits. Once we reached Lummus Park on the beach, we were escorted by a dozen tow trucks, whose job was to remove the many parked cars in our path. It was like something out of sci-fi movie. We reached the stage, only forty minutes past our scheduled nine P.M. start time, and did our entire concert again before more than 100,000 fans.
We made news everywhere. That evening, Nightline did a story on our Washington concert, interviewing fans who had traveled from St. Paul, Minnesota; Davenport, Iowa; and Houston. Ted Koppel introduced the segment by saying that “thousands of people showed up on Washington’s Mall for the re-emergence of the Beach Boys.” (The official estimate was actually 565,000, but who’s counting?) Film footage was used for a TV special titled D.C. Beach Party, and an album was recorded called Fourth of July: A Rockin’ Celebration of America.
The whole experience, one of the great publicity coups in the history of rock music, cemented our reputation as “America’s Band.”
The day’s events, however, still raised some concerns, for we knew that despite the outward signs of good health, Brian wasn’t entirely right. Wherever he walked, he was surrounded by Landy’s handlers, and if anyone got too close to him, they intervened. We knew he was receiving medication, but at times he seemed completely detached. We wanted to keep the band intact the entire day, but instead of flying with us to Miami, Brian took another plane to London, with Landy, so they could do studio work on what would become the Beach Boys’ next album. It appeared that Landy was not just Brian’s therapist but also his business and recording partner. This was not what he was getting paid to do. With Brian’s apparent improvement, I thought we might get together to write music again, and I assumed it was just a matter of time before Landy moved on. But that wasn’t happening. Landy had already extended his time beyond the agreed-upon eighteen months, and now no one was sure what his intentions were.
—
The success of the Fourth led us to an even larger effort the following year, in which we did Independence Day concerts in Philadelphia and Washington, joined by the likes of Jimmy Page, Christopher Cross, Joan Jett, the Oak Ridge Boys, and the histrionic television personality Mr. T, who played the drums for us. The day began at Washington’s Union Station, where the band rode a train up to Philadelphia. It was hot in the cars, and Mr. T was so rambunctious that he knocked out a window. After our performance in Philadelphia, we boarded a jet back to Washington, and Mr. T wouldn’t stop talking. Finally, Carl—who never raised his voice—turned to him and said, “Shut the fuck up.” The concerts themselves made it into the Guinness World Records for the most people that a single band had ever played for in one day—an estimated 1 million in Philadelphia and 750,000 in Washington. Of course, if Guinness kept such records, the Beach Boys might also be recognized for performing in front of the fewest number of people in one day. A long career keeps you grounded.
—
We may have been America’s band, but that didn’t mean fans were rushing out to buy our records, and we weren’t producing many new ones to begin with. In May of 1985, CBS Records released The Beach Boys, which included “Getcha Back,” written by Terry Melcher and me. Released as a single, it recaptured the traditional Beach Boy harmonies, including Brian’s falsetto, and was supported by a campy video of an earnest but awkward young man trying to win the love of his childhood sweetheart. The song charted at No. 26, which was lower than I was hoping for but it did reach No. 1 on the adult contemporary charts and stayed there for a solid month. The Beach Boys, produced by Steve Levine (who’d produced hits by Culture Club), relied heavily on digital recording and included covers of Boy George and Stevie Wonder; it stalled out at No. 52. (It would be our last album for CBS.)
The LP was another example of our group competing against our former selves—our records, regardless of quality, did not meet the expectations or interests of our fans. Just three months before the release of The Beach Boys, David Lee Roth covered “California Girls,” now twenty years old, in conjunction with a wildly bizarre but entertaining video. (Imagine The Twilight Zone entering the Playboy mansion, with David Lee Roth as tour guide.) Carl as well as Christopher Cross provided prominent backup vocals, making it sound like the Beach Boys were on the recording. It reached No. 3 (just like the original), while the video became a cult classic.
With little success in the recording studio, we had to redouble our efforts as a touring band. Even when we were at our peak in the 1960s, I believed in doing smaller markets to maximize revenues, regardless of the long bus rides in the middle of the night. But by the 1980s, I started working with our managers (including Elliott Lott, Tom Hulett, and John Meglen) to do “doubleheaders”—two shows in two different cities in one day. We had done that over the years on the Fourth, but those were special events. I wanted to do them on a more regular basis. It was all about scheduling and routing.
On one summer day, we woke up in Los Angeles and flew to Chico, California, in the northern part of the state, and did a show. Then we got on a plane and flew to Park City, Utah, for a second show, and then we boarded our flight again and went to Denver, where we would perform the next day. Four cities in one day. Not exactly chasing the sun, but I liked the tempo.
At other times, we combined humanitarian needs with patriotism. On the morning of July 4, 1986, we performed at Farm Aid II in Austin, Texas, to raise money for family farmers. We then flew a commercial flight 1,500 miles—coach—to New York City, where we were picked up by a bus and hustled to the New York Harbor. It was all part of Liberty Weekend, in which the Statue of Liberty, under restoration for two years, was unveiled by President Reagan. Some of the country’s top entertainers performed over three days, and we had the honor of doing a show at night on board the battleship USS Iowa, where a stage had been built on top of the gun turrets. Al’s song, “Lady Lynda,” which was based on a Bach melody and composed for his first wife, was rewritten as “Lady Liberty.” Throughout our performance on the ship, we pointed our speakers toward the adjacent USS John F. Kennedy and, as the saying goes, blew ’em out of the water. We didn’t realize that President Reagan was giving a speech on that ship at that very moment. The Secret Service called our ship and asked us to stop, which of course we did, and when the president concluded his remarks, we finished our concert.
Even before our designation as “America’s Band,” we had corporate sponsorships. Companies assumed that we weren’t going to embarrass them onstage with profanity or stupidity, and the sponsorships gave us another revenue stream. But I wanted to go beyond the typical relationship, in which a company wires you a check and then slaps its logo on the stage. I thought a sponsorship could work both ways—the company gets exposure, but so does the band. So in 1978, we had an agreement with Sunkist Orange Soda, in which the company paid us $1.5 million to use “Good Vibrations” in its commercials and to put the phrase on its packaging and in-store displays. While I loved the campaign, I didn’t necessarily love the product. After our last concert in which we were promoting Sunkist, we had a reception, and a company executive approached me.
“Well, Mike,” he said. “I have to know. Do you drink Sunkist?”
I’m not one to filter my thoughts. “If I was driving my Range Rover through the Mojave Desert and it broke down, I would first drain my radiator fluid and drink that before I had a Sunkist.”
That pretty much ended the conversation, but the company had no complaints. The “Good Vibrations” campaign helped launch the brand, and it became America’s No. 1 orange soda in 1980.
We also had a productive relationship with Chevrolet, which, among other deals, sponsored the Heartbeat of America Beach Boy Tour in 1988. At the time, we were grossing about $75,000 a show. Chevrolet guaranteed us $100,000. Anything over $100,000, Chevrolet kept. Anything under, it lost. Each side promoted the tour, and both brands reinforced the other. I don’t know what the ultimate financials were, but I think Chevrolet was happy, and so were we. As part of the deal, the company gave each of the guys a free Corvette.
In a perfect world, our music alone would have carried the day, but we were a group of middle-aged white guys trying to survive in a young man’s game. So we performed after college football games or Major League Baseball games. We invited cheerleaders from local colleges to join us onstage. We used props, including cars, surfboards, yacht flags, and palm trees. We had beach parties. We tried to make each concert not just a show but an event. Carl and Al didn’t favor all of these efforts, but they understood we had to broaden our appeal and reach new fans.
Perhaps the biggest boon was our three cameos on Full House in the late 1980s, invited by Uncle Jesse himself, John Stamos. John grew up in Orange County, not far from my parents, and he used to ride his bike past their house, catching a glimpse of the gold and platinum records on the wall. He met Jeff Foskett in the early 1980s, and Jeff introduced him to us. By then John had already appeared in General Hospital, but he could also play the drums, so we asked him to play at some of our gigs, including the Fourth of July concerts in 1985. And why not? He was young, popular, good-looking—kind of like us twenty years before. He was also a damn good drummer (and he told Jimmy Page in what key to play “Barbara Ann”).
More than anything, John was a fan of the Beach Boys. He wanted to introduce our music to kids of the day, and the best way to do that was through television. So in 1986, even before Full House, John invited us to appear on the show You Again? with John and Jack Klugman. Not long after that came the cameos on Full House, which was a Top 10 show, and when the sweet Olsen girls appeared on The Arsenio Hall Show and were asked who their favorite music group was, they of course said the Beach Boys. In one of our Full House episodes, John’s character sang “Forever,” a great way to revive Dennis’s best song, and John performed it as well on our album Summer in Paradise in 1992.
I became good friends with the creator of Full House, Jeff Franklin, who over the years has invited the Beach Boys to perform at his house for charity events and has had me stay over as a guest. What’s interesting is that Jeff bought the very lot on Cielo Drive where the Manson murders occurred. Jeff’s current home is magnificent, and he uses it to raise money for the needy, to host music jams, and to bring together friends and family. A great city is always reinventing itself, and in this case, thanks to Jeff, a site that was once associated with infamy is now a place of splendor, warmth, and life.
At any rate, Full House may have seemed trivial in the moment, but its impact on our legacy cannot be overstated. Not only was it popular at the time, but it’s popular to this day, living on through cable TV and DVDs. I’m amazed how often young people come up to me and say they first saw the Beach Boys when they bought the Full House box set (all 192 episodes).
The Beach Boys have long had two groups of fans: the music aficionados, who favored our more progressive work from the mid-1960s on, and the masses, who favored our hits. The aficionados ripped the Beach Boys for all these sponsorship and marketing efforts. Overt commercial initiatives, according to this critique, diluted the artistic integrity of our music. Actually, we were just ahead of our time, as the ties between performing artists and corporate sponsors have grown far beyond anything I ever imagined. Just visit South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, the world’s largest music festival, and you’ll see a long list of major companies, from Mazda to McDonald’s, underwriting the event as a whole or artists individually. This too may disappoint the purists, but singers and songwriters have never had it easy, and they are grateful for any support that comes their way. Even Bob Dylan did a Super Bowl commercial for Chrysler. I hope they gave him a new car.