Brian Wilson is stuck between good and bad vibrations
BRIAN WILSON speaks softly, as if alarmed by the sound of his own voice. There are lots of pauses, occasionally he lapses into silence and doesn’t talk again until you prompt him. Wilson, the songwriting force behind The Beach Boys, seems melancholy, a little confused at times — a person with one foot in this world, one foot somewhere else.
“I’ve been working on my autobiography,” Wilson, 71, tells me. “I do interviews with my book writer. It brings back bad memories. There are good memories too. But lots of tough ones. I have to get through that, so I can move onto talking about something happy.”
None of this will come as a surprise to Beach Boys fans. Wilson could have put the ‘tortured’ in ‘tortured genius’. In the early ’60s he created, from thin air essentially, the template of the modern pop song: iridescent hits such as ‘California Girls’ and ‘Surfin’ USA’ showed that popular music could be catchy yet smart and artful too. Then, by way of second act, he ripped up rock’s users’ manual and reinvented the form all over again, on singles such as ‘Good Vibrations’, a gorgeous, ethereal folly that somehow came within a whisker of topping the US charts.
He was the Beatles’ greatest rival — but there were four of them, only one of him, and he buckled under the strain. What followed was rock biography meltdown writ large: madness, drug abuse, lost decades. Some of the rumours were truly lurid: he was said to have spent an entire year in bed; to have temporarily moved into a sand-pit in his living room, because he found the environment inspiring. More than Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett or Fleetwood Mac’s missing-in-action guitarist Peter Green, he was the great rock casualty of his age — a gentle soul ill-equipped for the cynicism and casual cruelties of the modern world.
But that was then. Today Wilson lives quietly in Los Angeles, with his wife and puts out a new record every few years. He maintains a frosty distance from the rest of The Beach Boys (a much diminished entity since the death of his brothers Carl and Dennis, with whom he started the band). He goes on the road every so often, performing songs from his catalogue and looking frail and a little lost on stage. It’s a simple existence, the kind he’s craved all his life.
Still, the demons have not completely gone away. He remains intensely shy, reflexively wary of the spotlight. Sharing his music with fans brings immense pleasure. And yet, touring can be traumatic.
“I get really nervous before a show,” he says. “Oh yes, of course I do. As soon as I hear the band strike up, it’s okay. I get my ‘cool’ out. I love to play the early Beach Boys stuff — the ‘classics’. I wrote those songs and I’m proud of them. It’s great that we can take stuff from that period and weave in recent stuff, from my solo albums.”
It’s extraordinary that nobody ever thought to make a movie about Wilson’s life. There is a little of everything: overnight fame, familial angst, love, death, drugs — and surfing, though not by Wilson who, famously never got on a board in his life.
He was born in 1942 in a suburb of Los Angeles and suffered an unhappy childhood. His father Murry could be physically abusive — it is believed that the loss of hearing Wilson suffered in his right ear resulted from a blow from Wilson senior. Still, his love for music sustained him; by the time he finished school he was writing original songs and had started a band, The Pendletones, with Carl and Dennis, cousin Mike Love and friend Al Jardine.
They were still The Pendletones when, in 1961, they recorded their first single Surfin’. However, their label changed their name without their knowledge and they became The Beach Boys (“I always thought the name was a little confining,” Jardine later complained. “The form we took early on was the fantasy of the romantic California coast, the sunshine, surfing, cars, girls. Somehow our voices encompassed all of that.”).
With Murry installed (at his own insistence) as manager, they secured a deal with Capitol Records (they’d started out on a local independent, Candix) and were soon America’s favourite pop group or, more accurately, the country’s favourite American pop group. Their biggest rivals were ‘British invasion’ outfits such as The Rolling Stones and, especially, The Beatles, towards whom Wilson felt an immediate kinship, though the empathy would eventually turn to rivalry.
“We worked our asses off,” Wilson recalls. “We pushed ourselves to get all those songs written. We were so young and creative, we could write a song every day. One song a day — that’s how much creativity there was going on.”
Wilson enjoyed neither the perks nor pressures of stardom. Shy and lacking in confidence, by 1964 the responsibility of leading The Beach Boys (in the studio at least) had become onerous. He experienced anxiety attacks on the road. After a meltdown on a flight from Los Angeles to Houston that December, he informed the rest of the group he could no longer tour (their shock and sadness didn’t stop them immediately replacing Wilson with a young Glen Campbell).
“I started telling people I’m not getting off the plane,” was how he recollected the fateful breakdown in a 1971 Rolling Stone profile. “I was getting far out, coming undone, having a breakdown, and I just let myself go completely. I dumped myself out of the seat and all over the plane. I let myself go emotionally. They took care of me well. They were as understanding as they could be. They knew what was happening and I was coming apart. The rubber band had stretched as far as it would go.
“I felt I had no choice. I was run down mentally and emotionally because I was running around, jumping on jets from one city to another on one-night stands, also producing, writing, arranging, singing, planning, teaching, to the point where I had no peace of mind and no chance to actually sit down and think or even rest. I was so mixed up and so overworked.”
No longer obliged to tour, his songwriting grew increasingly experimental. From this came 1966’s Pet Sounds, and its accompanying single ‘Good Vibrations’ — music that laid down the gauntlet to The Beatles (“I was trying to top Rubber Soul,” he commented in 2012. “I wanted to beat the Beatles. I don’t know if I did.”). Nearly 50 years on, these works remain vastly influential, demonstrating that pop can aspire to the greatness of art.
“People say I’m a genius — it’s a compliment,” says Wilson. “Having that [pressure] on me goosed me to want to make something really special. As soon as we finished ‘Good Vibrations’ I knew we would have the number one record in the nation. In the end it went to number three — well that’s close to number one. I was happy. There isn’t a [note] on that record I would change.”
Wilson, it is worth noting, does not buy into the idea that he is a talent for the ages. He sees himself as building on the work of others. “I learned everything from Chuck Berry, Phil Spector, The Four Freshmen — those were the people that turned me onto music. It didn’t come from nowhere.”
GOOD VIBRATIONS should have been the start of a new chapter. Instead it was the beginning of the end. His emotional instability exacerbated by the drugs he was taking as a creative aid, Wilson’s hold on reality began to slip. He fell to pieces completely working on the Beach Boys’ next album Smile (finally released, as a solo project, in 2004). The catalyst, he explained to Rolling Stone in 1971, was “two thousand dollars worth of hashish”.
“The music was getting so influenced by it, the music had a really drugged feeling,” he said at the time. “I mean we had to lie on the floor with the microphones next to our mouths to do the vocals. We didn’t have any energy. I mean you come into a session and see the group lying on the floor of the studio doing the vocals.
“The drugs got us into it, let’s put it that way,” he elaborated in 2005. “The drugs got us into it, but we got into it so deeply, the drugs, that we had to stop them, because we were way, way ahead of our time for that album. That album was like 30, 40 years ahead of its time. We could have put it out, but again, it was very, very ahead of its time. And the drugs took us very deeply into it, so we had to pull out of the drugs, out of the project…”
By the ’70s he was a cameo player in his own band. The Beach Boys would eventually split into factions, Dennis and Carl Wilson on one side; Mike Love and Al Jardine in the other, with Wilson in the middle, reluctant to fall out with anyone. In 1983, Dennis drowned swimming off Marina Del Rey in Los Angeles and Wilson’s relationship with The Beach Boys, by then a mostly touring entity, unravelled in earnest.
By the time of their last significant hit, 1988’s ‘Kokomo’, he had officially left The Beach Boys and did not tour with them again on an ongoing basis until 2012, when he was persuaded to reconvene for a series of concerts marking their 50th anniversary. They also recorded a new LP, That’s Why God Made The Radio. Not that any bridges were mended during that time. Wilson remains deeply estranged, from Mike Love especially, and does not expect the situation to ever change.
“I said ‘yes’ on the spot. ‘Fiftieth anniversary? I’ll do it’. I don’t really talk with the guys. With Al Jardine sometimes. It was a breeze to go on stage with them. But I just don’t understand where they are coming from.”
He sits at the piano and plays every day. But, at 71, the songs don’t come as easily as they used to and his two most recent solo records were covers’ projects (he re-arranged songs by George Gershwin and ballads from Disney movies).
“I’ve said it before… writing songs is a lot more difficult than it used to be. Let’s face it- all the good ones have already been written. Where do you go from there?
“People say I’m a sad person,” says Wilson, addressing his history of depression and mental illness. “Well, the songs are sad. Pet Sounds [The Beach Boys landmark 1966 LP] is a sad album. Caroline No... that is a very sad song. Generally I would consider myself a mellow individual. I like playing to crowds of three or four thousand. I’m not like Paul McCartney, who can play to 20,000 people. I’m not that sort of person.”
Brian Wilson headlines Live at the Marquee, Cork, Friday, July 4.
