‘I don’t like to think I was gone long’
As Brian Wilson starts his world tour, he talks to John Wright about The Beach Boys, his recovery and why he’s glad to be back
Next week, Brian Wilson performs in the UK. Coincidentally, it is the 50th anniversary of 1967’s famous “Summer of Love”, when 100,000 people descended on San Francisco with guitars, long hair, no bras, peace banners and hippie clothes as those with beads tucked away in musty boxes will recall.
Forget the fact that these free spirits would soon be stockbrokers and shop assistants, and remember the mood of strict Fifties values being swept languidly away. A year earlier, The Beach Boys – Brian, his brothers Dennis and Carl, cousin Mike Love and friend Al Jardine – had been at their zenith. Looking back, Brian recalls, “The Beatles had the top five singles in the US, 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 as we meet ahead of his world tour.
Wilson’s emergence from selfinduced stupor certainly wasn’t sudden. “I didn’t like questions about why I’d been away. I didn’t think I had,” he says. “One of the hardest things was overcoming the fear that I’d never make music the same way again.” It’s his craft, of course, which has had Wilson heralded as a genius, despite his shy protestations today that he is simply someone who works hard to get his music right.
Fired up by The Beatles’ success with
Rubber Soul, in 1966 Wilson would release an album so full of subtlety and emotional depth that it is still hailed as one of the best of all time. Pet Sounds was praised worldwide, but I sense a frustration that it only made it to number two in the UK. “I was thinking it would be a number one record.” Two
wasn’t close enough? “Oh, no, I’m still very proud of the album,” he replies.
Pet Sounds was so exciting that the The Beatles attempted to top it in 1967 with Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts
Club Band. “John and Paul called me up and said they loved Pet Sounds,” Wilson says, “Paul said he started crying when he heard God Only Knows.” Yet with this new fame came pressure and constant demands that sensitive Wilson was ill-equipped to deal with. By the mid-sixties, he had stopped touring with the band completely 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.
Growing up in Hawthorne, California, the Wilson house had always been alive with music, the three brothers joining in when dad Murry played the piano and mum sang. Wilson remembers it as a time when he’d “listen to a lot of rhythm and blues”, but it is also well documented that his father would terrorise his sons, often physically assaulting them. Today, the 75-yearold Wilson is in a sanguine mood, just saying of his father: “He could guide me, but also belittle me.”
Rumour had it that the partial deafness Wilson suffers was caused by his father, but it’s something he now attributes to another childhood incident. “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, organising 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 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 chain-smoking. His first wife, Marilyn Rovell, with whom he had two daughters, Carnie and Wendy, coped as
Ilong 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 Seventies, but sales were nothing compared to the Sixties 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 unrecognised 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.
It was during this recovery period that he came across a group called the Wondermints playing Beach Boys songs in Hollywood. “I liked what they did. I asked them if they wanted to be my band and they loved the idea.” They played together for at least half of Wilson’s 11 solo studio albums that followed, including his breakthrough Brian Wilson Presents Smile, which debuted at London’s Royal Festival Hall in 2004 and reached number seven in the UK. As if making up for lost time, his four-month world tour has now been extended from 67 to 88 shows. There is no doubt Wilson is looking forward to being back. “We have always played well in the UK and Australia. They have more love for American music than American audiences do.”
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.” I wonder what would he have liked to have been, if not a musician? He muses, “I would have been a baseball player, you know.”