Brian Wilson

Surrounded by a small legion of musicians, and wearing what looked like an expensive variation on a blue and cream striped rugby shirt, Brian Wilson, stumbled uncertainly, in tight little steps, on to the stage of London’s Royal Festival Hall this week. 
          There, taking his seat at a keyboard, the former Beach Boy stared seriously ahead, somehow unmoved, mentally distant it almost appeared, as, when the lights went up, the overwhelmingly middle-age and middle class audience erupted in a standing grateful welcome.
As the woman sitting next to me observed. “If I’d thought thirty years ago that I’d be sitting here in 2007 watching a member of the Beach Boys on stage, the last one I would have expected it to be would have been Brian Wilson.”
          But Brian it was, because, at 65, through schizophrenia, depression, nervous breakdowns, auditory hallucinations, deafness in one ear, psychological manipulation, bullying by his father and later on by the other Beach Boys, LSD, mountains of amphetamines, and even greater mountains of food, and one legal fight after another, he is the great survivor.
          All this week he’s been appearing in London to sell-out performances with a new suite of music, based on the old song Lucky Old Sun---as well as two hours of Beach Boys hits. Seven more concerts are scheduled around Britain during the rest of the month. So if you still love God Only Knows, California Girls and I Get Around, you know what to do. There aren’t many like Brian Wilson. 
          Actually, there aren’t any like him. There he sits throughout the performance, staring at a screen as he sings, somehow looking like a cross between a preoccupied but stern, junior school teacher and a clever, but puzzled little boy. While the nearest he gets to stagecraft is his habit of using his arms as though he’s signalling in semaphore, or the occasional rub of his chest, as though it’s itchy, whenever he sings the word “heart”. Yes, he’s eccentric, all right.
          But the music he created all those decades ago for the little band he formed with his two brothers, a cousin and school friend, but which is now played by a gleeful eighteen piece rock and roll orchestra, those harmonics of youth, optimism, innocence California and eternal sunshine just keeps on getting better.
          And how uplifting it is to see a man who has defeated his internal demons, overcome, no doubt with much medical help and patience, pushed aside his disabilities, and has been able to continue doing what he was born to do---that is, make music.
          With hindsight it’s possible to see that right from the beginning Brian Wilson, a prodigiously talented child in the suburb of Hawthorne, Los Angeles, would have problems. His father, Murry, was a small time player on the outskirts of the music industry, but a man destined by his own meagre talents to be disappointed in life.  He also had a bad, violent, temper, and, wary of it, the young Brian was too scared to ask for piano lessons. So he taught himself by memorising the chords his father played on the family piano.
          What his father did offer, though, was good taste in music, and it was through him that the Brian became interested in the jazz-based harmonies of the Four Freshmen. And when, in his late teens, those harmonies were fused into the rock and roll songs that he began to write for his brothers and cousin to sing, a new style of American music was created.
          Murry Wilson was also useful at getting the group contacts and bookings, although even he was shocked when their first record, Surfer, one of Brian’s songs, was released under the name the Beach Boys. No-one at the record company had consulted them. They’d recorded it as the Pendletones. The Beach Boys’ name stuck, however. As did the association with surfing, which was brother Dennis’s hobby, not Brian’s.
          Success was pretty well immediate, and by the time Brian was twenty the Beach Boys were high in the American charts with a reworking of a Chuck Berry song with new lyrics, Surfin’ USA. But, though he worked hard to promote his sons, Murry was increasingly bitter.
          Not only did they not want to record any of the songs he’d written himself, and which he thought were better than theirs, Brian had also generously given away a million selling number one hit to his pals Jan and Dean called Surf City. He’d even helped them arrange it and had sung on it.
Suddenly Brian’s influence was everywhere. You heard it in commercials, radio station identification jingles and in the records of hundreds of other Sixties groups, even those of the Beatles.
          But even at this early stage, he was coming under increasing pressure. As huge worldwide Beach Boys hits like Fun, Fun, Fun and I Get Around, followed, he found it increasingly difficult to tour as well as write, arrange and produce their albums. The record company always wanted more product. Inevitably, at the age of 22, while on a flight between gigs on a Christmas tour, he had his first nervous breakdown. The rest of the group had to hold him down until the plane landed. The following day he just couldn’t stop crying.
          The group, the biggest in America at the time, had to finish the tour without him. His days of touring were, for then, pretty well over.
Back in Los Angeles he retreated into the electronic womb of the recording studio using the best session musicians in Los Angeles and only working with the other Beach Boys when, back from touring, they joined him to provide the vocals for records which were by then pretty well completed.
It was the height of the Sixties and while on the surface still the clean-cut, sunshine group in candy-striped, short-sleeved shirts, cousin Mike Love and brother Dennis had become infamously promiscuous, while Dennis even becoming involved with the notorious Charles Manson “Family” who murdered, along with others, Sharon Tate.
          But as some of the Beach Boys played, Brian, now married with two daughters, just worked and worked, kept going on amphetamines. He had to. He was the musical and sound engineering boffin, and everyone else in the band and their families depended on his magic gift for turning out melodic hits and ever more elaborate harmonic arrangements. Added to that, he could never resist helping other musicians as new ideas were put him.
          He was, however, difficult to work with. And, mercilessly critical of himself, and those who sang or played with him, in that he could hear faults or flat notes no-one else could, he would record and rerecord parts of the same song for days on end.
          Thus the Beach Boys biggest hit, Good Vibrations, was recorded over nine months in four different Los Angeles studios (they all had different acoustics, he said) and cost more than most albums to produce.
          In popular music terms it was the golden age, as the Beatles and Beach Boys each influenced each other in a healthy rivalry. But while Lennon and McCartney could bounce ideas one to the other, as equal, if different, talents, there was no counterweight for Brian Wilson with the Beach Boys. Even brother Carl would admit that the sound of the Beach Boys was really Brian.
Things finally came to a head after the recording of their album Pet Sounds. Now reckoned to be a classic and one of the greatest popular albums ever made, it didn’t sell particularly well in America on its first release in 1966.  He was disappointed, but more musically ambitious than ever.
          Never as interested in the lyrics as the harmonies, he now began to write with a folk musician and writer called Van Dyke Parks. The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band the following year showed how an album could be more than just a collection of songs, and Brian, rising to the creative challenge, set about writing a  symphonic piece called SMiLE. With lyrics mainly added by Van Dyke Parks, all the songs would be part of the whole.
          Months and months of recording went by, but when the other Beach Boys got back from touring and heard the fragmentary results they were dismayed. Only the song Heroes and Villains sounded like a hit to them, and that was miles too long.
          Cousin Mike Love, who earlier had contributed lyrics to many songs and who saw himself as the lead singer of the band, was particularly angry. This was Brian’s “ego music”, he complained, bluntly telling the composer not to wreck the formula which had served them all so well.
The problem was Brian Wilson had already left the formula behind. He’d moved on, even if the rest of the band wanted to stay with teenage rock and roll. Between themselves they thought that the drugs he was taking were driving him crazy. And they resented the influence of Van Dyke Parks.
In the end SMiLE wasn’t released by their record company who had already announced it and pre-pressed 400,000 sleeves in anticipation of a big hit. And from then, until three years ago, when Brian Wilson first performed it in London, it was rumoured to be a great lost masterpiece.
Putting sentiment aside, I actually don’t think it was, but the rows within the group which erupted over it had a profound effect on its composer’s already fragile mental state. His weight ballooned to nearly twenty stones, he stayed in bed suffering from increasing depression, and he took a lot of drugs. He also heard voices saying “I want to kill you.”
          Everything was going wrong. The Beach Boys sued their record company, and Mike Love sued Brian for his share of the songwriting royalties for some of their hits. Uninterested in money Brian had always left all business matters to his father to sort out.  But it was Brian who got blamed in the disagreement. Even a health food store, the Radiant Radish, he opened in Los Angeles had to close after a year.
          After so much promise, disappointment was everywhere, and when he tried to work with another group of musicians, one of them reported how he watched the other Beach Boys reduce Brian to tears for wasting his time and not producing Beach Boys music.
By the Seventies it was feared that he would soon be yet another rock and roll casualty of drugs, and eventually in 1983, his first wife, finding him in possession of heroin, enlisted the help of a controversial therapist called Eugene Landy.
          Landy’s methods involved drugs and isolating the patient, and at first they seemed to work, helping Brian lose weight and take care of himself physically again. But, as he explained to Larry King on CNN, as time went on Brian became a virtual prisoner of the therapist.
          “I wasn’t allowed to call my family or my friends for nine years,” he says.  “He kept me doped up so I couldn’t resist what he told me to do. He was a control freak.” Landy also became involved in the star’s songwriting, which would seem to imply, at the very least, a conflict of interest.
In his own defence Landy has said that if he is accused of brainwashing the composer, it could be said he washed out “all the drugs, all the obese characteristics he had, his eating problems, his smoking problems (and) all the trouble he had in his much publicized prior life”.
          Whatever the full truth is, in 1992, with the help of the woman who would become his second wife, Melinda Ledbetter, Brian broke with Landy and sought different professional help with UCLA doctors. With different medication the results have been amazing.
          He still hears the voices, and still gets periods of depression, but now with three adopted children, and a new career in which he’s finally being celebrated as the brain behind the Beach Boys, he has, he says, “a happy life”. He doesn’t even get stage-fright anymore.
No longer involved with the Beach Boys, who with different personnel  continue to tour occasionally, and who pay him a royalty for that privilege, he’s working with a whole new range of musicians, including Burt Bacharach, Elton John and  Paul McCartney.
Sadly both his Beach Boy brothers died young, Dennis, the surfer, in a swimming accident in 1983, and Carl, the boy with the beautiful voice who sang God Only Knows, from lung cancer in 1998.  But           Brian, the unlikely survivor, just keeps on working.
Watching him on stage this week, surrounded by an ever encouraging troupe of musicians, was like seeing a man reborn, as he seemed to live again, albeit in a world of his own, every  melody and chord progression he ever composed.
          Was he hearing voices, I wondered, when he wasn’t actually singing.  Or was it just the beautiful harmonies he created, despite all those problems, all those years ago, that he was listening to.

September 2007

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