Inside a tortured mind
In this exclusive extract from his new autobiography, Beach Boys founder relives how the pressure of topping the charts led to his lost years of mental illness, drug addiction, and his bizarre relationship with psychologist Eugene Landy.
How do you know when a problem starts? Did it start in 1964 on an airplane to Houston, when I freaked out and decided that I couldn’t tour with the band anymore? Did it start in the 40s when my father whacked me because he didn’t like how I was acting? Did it start in the 70s with drugs or long before that with the beginnings of mental illness that no one knew how to handle? What did it matter when it started? What mattered was that for a while it wouldn’t end. I was scared at the time [the 1970 album]
Sunflower came out. I felt like the band was slipping away from me. I felt like I was slipping away from myself.
I couldn’t have known that almost 50 years later I’d be in a mostly stable and happy place, still dealing with those things but having learned so much about how to do it. I also couldn’t have known that before things would get better, they would get worse.
A few years after Sunflower it was much worse. I was worse. My body was filled with drugs and alcohol, and my brain was filled with bad ideas. The bad ideas came from the rest of it and caused it, too. Back then, like I said, mental illness wasn’t treated in a straightforward way. People wouldn’t even admit that it existed. There was shame in saying what it was and strange ideas about how to deal with it. Back then, I wasn’t going anywhere most days, and when I was in the house I didn’t even move around much. I felt stuck because I was depressed, and that caused me to gain weight, and then I felt stuck because I had gained weight. I got up to over 300 pounds. I wasn’t going onstage with the group. I could write songs, but I did it less and less. I needed help desperately, and people close to me were desperate to get it for me.
And so the doctor came. My wife at the time, Marilyn, called for him. It was right around the United States Bicentennial and everything was red, white, and blue like the Sunflower album cover. It felt like Independence Day all year. But Dr Landy didn’t believe in independence. He wanted me to get the weight off and develop healthier habits, and the way he decided to do that was to put himself in the middle of everything in my life. He called it 24-hour therapy. When friends came to see me, Dr Landy interviewed them to make sure they passed his inspection. When I was allowed to see friends, it was never on my own. Dr Landy always sent someone to monitor me, sometimes more than one guy.
It would be a lie to say that he didn’t get results. He took the 300 pounds and brought them down to about 185,
which is the weight I should have been. I was a football quarterback in high school and that was what I weighed back then. I hadn’t appeared with the band onstage in about a decade, except for a few shows.
Dr Landy’s stay with me was pretty brief in 1976. He got some results, but then he went too far. He was getting too involved, and then I found out what he was charging. I confronted him about it. I was pretty angry. I threw a punch and he threw one back and that was the end of it — that time, at least. Brian would balloon back out to 311 pounds, be admitted to a mental hospital and ask Marilyn for a divorce, and have an onstage breakdown, causing the rest of the band to send him a letter firing him, then asking Landy back to treat him again:
This time it was the Beach Boys who called Dr Landy. It was a group decision, except for Dennis. I don’t think they knew what else to do. At first Landy took me right to Hawaii. When we were there, he started me on an exercise regime, no more drugs, no nothing. I had to kick it all. It took me about a week, but I did it. That week cleaned me up, but it was hard. I was rolling around in bed. I was screaming, clutching at the sheets. I never felt so f ..... up.
When Dr Landy came back, he had the same idea as the first time around, which was that the people near me were part of the problem. That meant that everyone had to go. Caroline, my girlfriend at the time, was one of the people who had to go, even though she was doing nothing wrong. It was sad. But soon I was pumped so full of what Dr Landy was giving me that my memories of her just faded away.
The first time through, Dr Landy had succeeded a little bit. His method was never perfect, but it gave me relief. The second time through, there was no relief. Relief would have been a kind of freedom, and he didn’t believe in freedom. He gave me more and more pills and called them vitamins. He sent girls to keep me company. He played games with me where he put his hand on my leg to see if I had feelings for anyone. He had barbecues at my house, but instead of inviting my friends or family, he invited his family and other doctors. He made big plans, like going back to Hawaii and then to London, but then the plans disappeared without explanation. He let me have a margarita every once in a while. He screamed so loud it made me cry.
Finally Gene left. There were lots of reasons why he left. But the final straw was when I started seeing Melinda [Wilson’s second wife] and she got enough looks into my life to see what Gene was doing, and that even if he had helped me once, he wasn’t helping me anymore. Thanks to Melinda calling my mom and brother and helping them get the goods on Landy, Carl and his lawyers started working on freeing me from the situation and I started feeling more courage.
When Gene finally left that second time, it felt like a tremendous weight was gone from my shoulders. My steps were easier. Still, there were days when I was too depressed to do anything. I couldn’t go to a restaurant or to the movies. I could deal with it by getting angry, but I wasn’t sure what was making me angry. I could throw a can in the air or kick something, but that didn’t solve the problem really. I slowly got back to being me. It took me a while. After all, it was nine years of bullshit.
Or was it 30 years of bulls...? I don’t know how far back to draw the line that led to Landy, but I do know one point the line passed through.
That was in 1964, at Christmas time. I was with the band on an airplane going to Houston to play a show at the Music Hall there. Just a few days before, we had returned to Los Angeles from Tulsa, where we played their new arena. In the airport I started to feel like I was slipping away a bit. At first I thought it was about my marriage. Just a few weeks before, I had married Marilyn. I was a young husband, only 22, and she was an even younger wife, just 16.
I was happy we were married, but I was worried, too. My thoughts about love and romance were all confused. How do you ever know if you’re the right person for someone or if someone is the right person for you? A few months before, we were all hanging out and I noticed her talking to my cousin Mike Love in a way that I thought was a little too friendly. That night I couldn’t stop thinking about it. ‘‘Do you like him?’’ I asked. ‘‘Sure,’’ she said. ‘‘He’s a great guy.’’ ‘‘No. I mean do you *like him?’’ ‘‘That’s ridiculous,’’ she said. ‘‘Is it? Be honest with me.’’ She tried to calm me down and eventually did, but the thought was still there at the airport.
But that was only a small piece of a bigger puzzle that was falling apart faster than I could put it together. The band was huge. We were more than famous.
In July, the top song wasn’t by the Dixie Cups or Mary Wells or The Beatles. It was by us. I Get Around was No 1, right above My Boy Lollipop.
It made me happy, but it made me dizzy also. When I started, I just wanted to make music with my brothers and my friends and leave the business to my dad, who was managing us. We were a family band in every way. But that year we got big, things changed. It was scary for me. We got going really fast. I was kind of a dumb little guy. I didn’t really acknowledge we were famous. Every now and then I would, but I was so busy cutting records, writing songs, and going on tour that I didn’t have a chance to sit down and think about it. So instead there was just this exciting feeling that was sort of sickening. We were climbing, but what was up there when you went even higher? And what if you fell? That made me nervous and afraid, and I closed my eyes and tried to feel brave.
That December, at the gate in the airport before we flew off to Houston, nothing was working and my bravery was gone. ‘‘I don’t want to go on that plane,’’ I told the band.
‘‘I don’t know how else we’re going to get to Houston,’’ Mike said.
‘‘I can’t be on it. I won’t be on it.’’ I called my mother and told her to come pick me up. She laughed a little and told me not to worry. But that worked about as well as closing my eyes.
We boarded. The plane went faster and faster down the runway, lifted off, and started climbing.
My thoughts swarmed and I blacked out. To me I blacked out. To everyone else it looked like I was screaming and holding my head and falling down in the aisle.
When we got to Houston we went straight to the hotel. In my room I quieted down, which didn’t mean that I calmed down. Mike and Carl visited me. I stared straight at the window like it was a wall. I had so much going on inside my head, but I couldn’t make sense of any of it.
The next day I flew right back home to California while the rest of the guys went and finished the dates. Glen Campbell replaced me the next night in Dallas, and then they went on to Omaha, Des Moines, Indianapolis, and Louisville. When they came back to LA, I called a band meeting. ‘‘I’m not going to play with the band anymore,’’ I announced. ‘‘You’re quitting?’ Carl said. ‘‘No. I just mean that I’m not going to play onstage. I want to stay home and write songs.’’
The guys didn’t believe it at first, but I said it enough times for them to eventually believe me. Glen pinch-hit for me a little while longer, but soon he wanted to do his own solo trip, so the band hired Bruce Johnston. Bruce was a staff producer at Columbia Records who had played in a group called the Rip Chords. He had a similar falsetto to mine.
I stayed at home and wrote. At first it was great. I had some songs I was working on that I thought would really stretch what music could do. Those songs turned into The Beach Boys Today! and Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!), and then they turned into Pet Sounds, and then Pet Sounds turned into SMiLE, and then SMiLE turned into nothing. Along the way the pressure started to pile up again and the blackouts happened again. The voices in my head happened, too, more and more often. I was trying to make this amazing music, and the band was rehearsing all the time, and I couldn’t handle the pressure. I didn’t know who to talk to. I didn’t really tell the other guys in the band. I might have said a word or two, but I could tell from the way they were listening that they didn’t really understand. Once I told my dad and he narrowed his eyes and said, ‘‘Don’t be a pussy. Don’t be a baby. Get in there and write some good songs.’’
And that’s what I did. I wrote some good songs. But through the whole thing, I was sinking.
When Dr Landy left, he left me to my freedom. I can’t say that I knew what to do with it right away. I had been on a routine for a while, and being off the routine was relaxing in lots of ways. I was kind of in a holding pattern, but not a bad one. I hung out with Melinda mostly. We would go to lunch and drive around. We would go to Hollywood Boulevard and the movies almost every night. Melinda used to laugh because I would spend hundreds of dollars on souvenirs like I was a tourist or a junkaholic. We listened to the radio sometimes. K-Earth 101. It’s an oldies station in Los Angeles with a huge broadcasting range.
Music circled me as an idea. One of the first people I called when Landy left was Andy Paley. Andy had a great history in pop music. He worked with lots of people and worked with me on my first solo record. If Landy was the bad part, Andy was the good part. When I started to get that feeling again about making music, I called him. ‘‘Let’s write some new tracks,’’ he said. We wrote a song called Soul Searchin’. We wrote a song called Desert Drive. We wrote a song called
You’re Still a Mystery. We wrote them with the Beach Boys in mind because Don Was, the producer and bassist, wanted to do a Beach Boys record. That didn’t pan out because Carl didn’t like the songs – I don’t know why. Then Sean O’Hagan, from the band the High ❚ Llamas, was going to do it. That didn’t happen either. The whole project just weirded out. Anyway, when we were writing, we didn’t use a big professional studio, and usually we didn’t even use the four-track in my house. We just sang and played and recorded on a boom box. When songs got better and they were ready to be picked off the tree, then we booked studio time for me. I would call friends like Danny Hutton, who sang with Three Dog Night, and he would come in and help flesh things out. It felt the way it sometimes did in the old days, and that was freedom. But it was hard to imagine doing any of it alone. I needed Andy there with me, or at least someone I trusted who would keep me encouraged. I was scared as hell to go and make new music. It was always a combination of scared and excited for me.
Sometimes I would play the new music for Dr Marmer. Steve Marmer – he was the doctor I went to after Landy left, and he was one of the people who helped me get my balance back. They say there are three things that matter when you are dealing with mental illness: finding the right support network, finding the right medication, and finding the right doctor. Dr Marmer was definitely the right doctor. Dr Landy had bullied me about music. He had bullied me about everything. Dr Marmer talked to me about it. If I said I was thinking about music, he told me that he thought it was a good idea. If I played him a new song or part of one, he was supportive. And even though sometimes we talked about my thoughts and feelings, sometimes we just talked about music.
Later on, Dr Marmer came to see a show of mine and he was so happy. He couldn’t believe that the onstage me was the same me in his office. He couldn’t believe that I could be in command that way. The truth is that I will never really be comfortable up there, but I know how to tough it out and get through it. And whether I’m comfortable or not, it’s a place where I can be what I am.
Reproduced from I am Brian Wilson by Brian Wilson with Ben Greenman with permission from Hachette NZ, $49.99 RRP on sale now.