Life’s a beach again for Wilson
Brian Wilson makes his way back personally and professionally
It is the 50th anniversary of 1967’s famous Summer of Love. A year earlier, The Beach Boys — Brian, his brothers Dennis and Carl, cousin Mike Love and friend Al Jardine — had been at their zenith. Brian recalls, “The Beatles had the top five singles in the U.S., but something changed and I couldn’t believe it ... People made us out to be the next great act. It made me happy but dizzy ... we got big, it was scary.”
The bad times that followed for Wilson — drink, drugs and personal chaos — are well-known and not ones he wishes to dwell on. “One of the hardest things was overcoming the fear that I’d never make music the same way again.”
In 1966, Wilson would release an album, Pet Sounds, so full of subtlety and emotional depth it is still hailed as one of the best of all time.
By the mid-’60s, he had stopped touring with the band to concentrate on songwriting, famously installing a sandbox in his living room so that he could wiggle his toes in it while composing. “It was too much pressure from all sides: from Capitol, my brothers, Mike, my dad, but most of all from myself,” he recalls.
The Wilson house had always been alive with music, the three brothers joining in when dad Murry played the piano and mom sang. It is also well documented that his father would terrorize his sons, often physically assaulting them. Today, the 75-year-old Wilson says, “He could guide me, but also belittle me.”
Rumour had it that the partial deafness Wilson suffers was caused by his father, but he says not.
“A kid hit me in the head with a lead pipe. I can’t hear out of my right ear, but I can hear out of my left ear pretty good,” he tells me. For Wilson, one ear was enough, one so good that Bob Dylan joked, “He should donate it to the Smithsonian.”
The overbearing Murry managed The Beach Boys in the early days, organizing demos and getting them signed to Capitol Records. But despite his volatile temperament and constant badgering leading to his eventual sacking in 1964, Wilson says he stayed in the background.
“He tried to convince me we still needed him.” In a video on YouTube you can hear Murry interrupting a rehearsal of Help Me Rhonda with unwelcome suggestions.
Another shock was to come in 1969 when Murry sold off The Beach Boys’ publishing company, including Wilson and Love’s copyright.
In his memoir, I am Brian Wilson, he writes: “He had taken the only thing we knew would last, our songs, and sold it off like he was running a garage sale.”
It was when his father died in 1973 that Wilson entered his darkest period: two decades of reclusivity, drugs, mental hospitals, drinking, over-eating and chainsmoking. His first wife, Marilyn Rovell, with whom he had two daughters, Carnie and Wendy, coped as long as she could before divorcing him in 1979.
“I was taking speed or coke or coming home drunk and hug the kids,” he recalls.
There was a brief chart revival in the ’70s, but sales were nothing compared to the ’60s heyday of The Beach Boys, and Wilson continued to fight his demons.
In 1982, things came to a head and the rest of the band fired him.
Today, he lives with a diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder, but it was a mental condition that went unrecognized for years and it was in this vulnerable state that he had met controversial therapist Eugene Landy, a man who would exert an unpleasant hold on him for 17 years.
“He was a tyrant who controlled where I went, what I did, who I saw, what I ate ... by spying on me, screaming at me and stuffing me full of drugs that confused me.”
After the split with The Beach Boys, Wilson released a solo album, but it was meeting Melinda Ledbetter, a former model turned car salesperson, in 1986 that really saved him.
The couple dated for three years before Landy put an end to it. But after they got back together in 1992, Landy was eventually expelled from Wilson’s life for good. In 1995 he married Melinda and they went on to adopt five children.
As if making up for lost time, his four-month world tour has now been extended from 67 to 88 shows.
Today, Wilson lives a sober and settled life in Beverly Hills with Melinda and their children, aged between seven and 20. He starts a typical day “by watching the news” before heading to the deli for breakfast.
“I can usually get myself calm with a good walk ... Some days I find my way back up to the piano.”