HOW THE MUSIC CAME
Brian Wilson explains in new book
What’s it like inside the mind of Brian Wilson? We know it as the birthplace of some of the world’s most heavenly pop music. We also know it hosts other, less welcome sounds: the voices, sometimes malevolent, that Wilson began hearing after his first LSD trip and still hears to this day.
Few figures in music have achieved anything close to the founding Beach Boy’s sonic originality, technical innovation and sheer influence. Surely, those angelic vocal arrangements, the frequency of top 40 singles and ingenious use of sound effects (water jugs, barking dogs, crunched celery) emanated from a psyche with a direct line to the divine. And at the height of his fame, Wilson was the classic romantic hero — isolated, tormented, misunderstood.
The years since the Beach Boys’ artistic peak in the 1960s have been scattered with notable attempts to demystify the genius behind the hits. Love & Mercy, the 2014 biopic starring both Paul Dano and John Cusack as Wilson, dives straight into his auditory world, literally ear-first. A 1991 book, Wouldn’t It Be Nice: My Own Story, was billed as an autobiography, though Wilson has since disowned it.
Wilson has released a new memoir, I Am Brian Wilson. In a recent interview, he was in fine spirits. A big man, well over 6-feet tall with a full head of silver hair and a neat button-down shirt, he’d celebrated his 74th birthday the day before. His tour, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds album, was going well. And the writing of the memoir — a process he characterized as “a very tedious, cumbersome, difficult thing to do” — was complete.
Yet Wilson, though genial and even enthusiastic, exhibited an uncanny knack for avoiding embellishment of any kind. When he had trouble hearing a question (his right ear was famously deafened in childhood, an event he remembers in his memoir as a blow from his father), he loudly but politely said, “Again, please.” His answers were delivered directly, almost automatically, in booming words that seemed to tie a knot on a conversational thread rather than unspool it.
When asked about the hardest part of his life to write about, his reply was instant: “The time I took psychedelic drugs.”
Wilson has been outspoken about regretting his drug use. It seemed a fruitful topic to pursue.
Why was this period so painful to remember?
“Because it scared me, you know. It made me a fearful person.” Was he still scared now? “Sure.” Of what? “I don’t know.” The song California Girls, with its unusual orchestral lead-in, which came to Wilson as he sat at his piano after an acid trip, was inspired by both cowboy movies and Bach. In his memoir, Wilson likens the music he’s made to a great building, with California Girls near the top (the epic Good Vibrations is the pinnacle). Could he imagine a life in which he hadn’t taken drugs and thus hadn’t written that song?
“It wouldn’t do me any good to wonder,” he said. “Problem is, I already took the drugs. So it doesn’t do me any good to say, ‘Wow, I wish I wouldn’t have taken those drugs.’ It just wouldn’t help.”
In the pages of I Am Brian Wilson, a more reflective attitude appears. Surely the help of co-author Ben Greenman, a journalist clearly up to the challenge of inspiring Wilson’s introspection, was invaluable. The book’s voice — plain-spoken, prone to both anxieties and boyish excitement — was true to Wilson in person, but more successful at capturing the nuances of his story.
In non-linear fashion, Wilson returns to the defining moments of his life: a boisterous family life in Hawthorne, Calif., shadowed by Wilson’s abusive father, Murry — but also full of music, much of it influenced by Murry, a songwriter for Lawrence Welk who produced the Beach Boys’ first albums — and the more positive lessons of Wilson’s mother, Audree.
The band began when brothers Carl and Dennis, and later cousin Mike Love and friend Al Jardine, got together to sing and play instruments under Wilson’s direction. Then there was the thrill in 1961 when the band heard themselves on the radio for the first time.
The Beach Boys’ star continued to rise, and by 1964, a pivotal year in Wilson’s telling, the band was all over the radio with hits including I Get Around and Don’t Worry Baby. Youth culture on both sides of the Atlantic seemed equally obsessed with the Beatles and the Beach Boys.
When the Beach Boys weren’t touring the world, they were in the recording studio. But the year culminated with what Wilson remembers as a “freak-out” on an airplane to Houston, the result of overwork and angst brought on by success. It marked the end of Wilson’s performing career with the Beach Boys.
Though his freedom to focus on songwriting and studio work would result in two of his bestloved masterpieces, the landmark Pet Sounds album and Good Vibrations, the voices and paranoia increased. Wilson’s erratic behaviour and the increasing in-band conflict led to the cancellation of Smile, Wilson’s most ambitious album yet, which was followed by lonely years of drinking, drugs and overeating — years Wilson famously spent lying in bed or, as he writes, roaming “the halls of the house like a ghost.” The crisis created an opportunity for Dr. Eugene Landy, the psychologist whose treatment of Wilson became controlling and abusive.
Eventually, through the help of his family and girlfriend (now wife) Melinda Ledbetter, Wilson freed himself from Landy ’s domination. The result was an impressive turnaround: a return to creative productivity and performance, and a stability Wilson had never known before.
“I gave myself a nickname that helped me realize every hard part was just a corner to turn: Brian Willpower Wilson,” he wrote. “It reminded me that the only way to go was forward.”
There is often a paradox in finding peace.
To use an appropriate metaphor, calm waters don’t make for very good surfing.
Perhaps Wilson’s finest music was conceived in the raging, roiling waves of intoxication and inner turmoil. But the best moments of I Am Brian Wilson were the wistful reflections on his father and deceased brothers, and the fascinating, yet wholly sober, attempts to understand the mysteries of creativity.
At one point, he brings us inside with all the voices, both the music and the mayhem:
“What made it worse, at least early on, was that the voices that were in my head trying to do away with me were in a crowded space.
“They were in there with other voices that were trying to make something beautiful. Voices were the problem but also the answer. The answer was in harmony.”