The Biographical Dictionary of Popular Music

Excerpted from The Biographical Dictionary of Popular Music: From Adele to Ziggy, the Real A to Z of Rock and Pop © 2012 by Dylan Jones. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Picador. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or printed without permission in writing from the publisher.

Brian Wilson

Over fifty years after inventing the Californian Dream, Brian Wilson is finally living it. In his primary-coloured Hawaiian shirts and standard-issue Ray-Bans, he can be found cruising along Mulholland Drive, high up in the hills above his sprawling adobe-style Beverly Hills home, listening to oldies stations, and wallowing in the security of the present and the serenity of the sunshine. Having survived half a lifetime of drug abuse, drug damage, psychoanalysis, and stultifying medication, Wilson is now trying to enjoy all the things he espoused when he first started making music with the Beach Boys fifty years ago. He still suffers from a schizoaffective disorder, a mental condition that means he hears voices in his head and suffers terrible bouts of depression… So he lives day to day, trying to replace all his bad old memories with bankable new ones. He rarely listens to his old records, as he’s unsure what sort of memories will cloud his mind. But when the good ones come, and when a record comes on the radio he likes, he embraces them: “Each one brings back a different kind of memory,” he says. “Sometimes sadness, but most of the time it brings back a good feeling – sunshine and ocean. The Beach Boys were all about sunshine and ocean.”

The ocean was such a defining trope of Wilson’s songwriting that he has all but abandoned it – “I don’t need to think about the ocean” – and sunshine is the thing that keeps his dark moods at bay. He rarely visits the beach, as he doesn’t know what it holds for him, unsure of his ability to cope with it. Instead, he embraces terra firma, his car, and the Southern California sunshine, visiting the past only when he feels like it, in his imagination. Wilson is a big man, six foot four, with broad shoulders, but the gentle giant has a weathered face that makes him seem critically vulnerable. He has full salt and pepper, Jeff Bridges hair, but again this is incongruous; he is about as emotionally fragile as a seventy-something-year-old man can be.

“He needs a real comfort level,” said his second wife Melinda. Not only is she responsible for his new spiritual well being, she’s also the one largely responsible for his creative rebirth, and for getting him back into concert halls ten years ago. Melinda and Brian share their Beverly Hills home with their adopted daughters, Daria Rose and Delanie Rae, and a son, Dylan, as well as an assortment of dogs. The past doesn’t exist here, only the now, and there are no mementos from the past, no reminders of the life he knew before he started coming back to the relative normality he enjoys these days. And instead of gold discs or photographs of the Beach Boys, there are Toby jugs, Victorian dolls, and twee shop-bought paintings (Wilson was always criticised for having poor taste in this respect – he was always too bound-up in himself and his art to worry about what paintings might be on his wall).

When he’s interviewed these days he tends to sit bolt upright, as though he’s there under duress, and walks in and out of rooms as though propelled by remote control. Wilson can appear absent-minded at the best of times, although there is always a strange logic underpinning his actions. He was having dinner in the Wolseley, in London, a few years ago, eating steak with a famous friend of his, and their respective spouses. Having finished his meal, he simply stood up, announced he wanted to go, and started walking towards the door. Once he got there, he stood, implacable in his own way, and waited for his companions to finish their meal. Having spent half his life at the beck and call of others – his father, his band, carers, doctors, dealers, therapists – Brian Wilson now tends to do things his own way.

“Brian Wilson’s psyche is now a fragile and uncertain thing, stabilised on a variety of legally prescribed mood-dampening and -altering drugs,” wrote GQ’s Mick Brown when he interviewed Wilson for the magazine on the release of Smile in 2004. “In profiles he is sometimes described as ‘child-like’ – an apt description. Wilson lacks the easy felicities of normal conversation: he has the child’s way of replying to any question with no more than the question demands – talking with him can be like navigating a map of cul-de-sacs. It can sometimes seem as if he is not quite in the present; yet he remains capable of pulling the most surprising recollections from his past.”

He now plays more concerts than he’s played since the early Sixties, and the songs that nearly killed him are now keeping him alive. “I sit down on stage because I feel more comfortable sitting,” he said. “I move my hands around to try and look alive. I’m looking at the front row and I’m looking up in the air, but I can’t see without my glasses and I don’t remember any faces.”

But he’s enjoying himself.

While it is true that Brian Wilson helped invent California – a neo-Polynesian paradise conjured up by an overweight, puppy-faced adolescent – up until recently he had never been able to fully enjoy its spoils; trapped, seemingly, in an internal – and eternal – world of foreboding, panic, and insecurity. The only thing that has saved him from true madness is his awesome talent for sweet music.

Like Burt Bacharach, Brian Wilson had the ability to mix euphoria and melancholia in the space of a single song, often the same melody, and occasionally the same note. Given his history of personal problems (an aggressive and belligerent father, a dysfunctional family, a fragile mental state, addictions, weight problems, and a long-standing over-bearing therapist), it’s hardly surprising that Wilson’s best music always had an innate sadness, a tender quality which can be found in such diverse Beach Boys songs as “Our Prayer”, “Wind Chimes”, “The Lonely Sea”, “Melt Away”, “Caroline, No”, “Surf’s Up”, “The Warmth of the Sun” (written in response to the JFK assassination), and his greatest triumph, “Till I Die” (a version of which appears on their 1971 LP Surf’s Up, though a vastly superior extended instrumental version was released on Endless Harmony in 1998). As legendary rock journalist Nick Kent has so eloquently written, Wilson wrote “harmonies so complex, so graceful they seemed to have more in common with a Catholic Mass than any cocktail a capella doo-wop.” Wilson called his work “rock church music”, while every one of his classic songs contains a “money chord”; Mark Rothko, eat your heart out.

The remarkable thing that Wilson achieved was to create a world that wasn’t there before, a world that not only celebrated a Californian dreamworld, but also invented an inner world where Wilson – and anyone who ever listened to a Wilson record – could go and be comforted. In this case his music acted as medication, therapy, or in Wilson’s case, a piano standing in a box full of sand. The other remarkable thing is the way in which Wilson’s world connected with so many millions of people. The awful irony of Wilson’s fabulous invention was his complete inability to enjoy it, even though it gave so much enjoyment to so many others. In Barney Hoskyns’ gripping book Waiting For The Sun: Strange Days, Weird Scenes And The Sound of Los Angeles, the songwriter Jimmy Webb says, “I don’t think that the Californian myth, the dream that a few of us touched, would have happened without Brian, but I don’t think Brian would have happened without the dream.” Wilson fuelled a fantasy and surf pop was born.

When Wilson was at his very lowest ebb, in the late Sixties and early Seventies, having suffered more than one nervous breakdown, and having taken far too many illegal drugs, his behaviour was so strange it soon became legendary. In the grip of one of his many mental breakdowns he would regularly insist that business associates attend meetings in the deep end of his swimming pool, where, he believed, it would be impossible for anyone to bug them (a true paranoiac, he believed he was being listened to all the time). And because he wanted to recreate the feeling of being at the beach, and wanted to feel the sand beneath his feet when he was composing, Wilson had a huge sandbox built in his living room and a truckload of sand shovelled in to fill it up. This ruse worked – “Heroes and Villains”, “Surf’s Up”, “Wonderful”, and “Cabinessence”, were all written in it – although Wilson’s dogs started using it for their own purposes, and it soon began to stink of faeces. For a while though, “It created a mood that was magic,” says Wilson. There was also an Arabian “inspiration” tent pitched in an adjacent room, where he went to smoke dope. Every day. And having achieved a temporal state of nirvana, he would then trundle off to record a backing track at the bottom of his pool.

For much of the Seventies, the bloated musical genius was “brain-fried”, in a world of his own. So much so that he’s spent a good portion of the last forty years being discussed in the past tense: “I was a useless little vegetable. I made everybody very angry at me because I wasn’t able to work, to get off my butt. Coke every day. Goin’ over to parties. Just having bags of snow around, snortin’ it down like crazy.”

Wilson was so strung-out on drugs that he basically went to bed for four years. And what did he do in bed for those four years? “Beat off. Watched TV. I didn’t read. I couldn’t see, my eyes [were] too bad. I could have gotten a pair of glasses. That would have helped me. I stayed in my room and wouldn’t see anyone. I reclused, definitely. I don’t know how, but I somehow got into weird stuff in my head. All mind and no activity.”

And how did it feel to be a recluse?

“Pretty powerful. I felt power, but I didn’t know what it was about. I couldn’t relate it to anything. Maybe it wasn’t my power. I could have been feeling somebody else’s power.”

When the near-legendary British publicist Keith Altham represented the Beach Boys as the Sixties turned into the Seventies, he was initially kept away from Wilson. On one visit to LA to see the band, he asked brother Dennis to take him to see Brian. The following day he was taken to a health food restaurant called The Radiant Radish that Brian had an interest in. As Dennis and Altham sat in their car in the car park, waiting for a visitation, eventually Brian shuffled into view, a huge, bloated figure dressed only in a bathrobe and a pair of dirty slippers.

“There,” said Dennis, pointing excitedly. “There he is.” Brian was now in the store, manically taking tins and bottles of honey from a shelf, and Altham wanted to pounce. “Great,” he said. “Let’s go and talk to him.”

“Talk?” said Dennis. “You don’t talk to Brian. No one ‘talks’ to Brian. I thought you just wanted to see him.”

One day Wilson turned up at drummer Hal Blaine’s house – the same Hal Blaine who had played on many Phil Spector and Beach Boys records – and forced him to take his gold discs. Wilson didn’t want anything in return, just wanted rid of the memories. And if Blaine didn’t take them, he figured they could easily just end up in a ditch.

The Beach Boys myth, however, is an enduring one, even though it has been disproved time and time again. And while any history of the group must now include sibling rivalry, domestic violence, appalling drug abuse, death, madness, and internecine lawsuits, the popular images of bronzed beach babes, hot-rods, and roller-skating carhops at the Wilshire Boulevard Dolores Drive-In have become as iconic as those grainy black and white photographs of the Cuban-heeled, black-clad Beatles rushing through the streets of London pursued by hundreds of screaming schoolgirls; none of it was particularly true, though now it’s almost too late to deny.

The songs, though, are as true as anything cast in vinyl: everything from “Surfin’ USA”, “California Girls”, and “Spirit of America”, to “Fun, Fun, Fun”, “God Only Knows”, and “I Get Around” epitomising all that was once white and willing about American youth – real sonic sunshine. The success of the Beach Boys’ early records – all of which eulogised life on the California beaches – encouraged the rest of America to vicariously enjoy this new “layabout” lifestyle. “The records would have been effective advertising jingles for mail order catalogues, for surfboard hire companies, or for travel agencies looking to attract the nation’s youth to Santa Monica,” wrote Charlie Gillett in his definitive history of the early days of rock’n’roll, The Sound Of The City. The West Coast idyll of “two girls for every boy” was apotheosised in a catalogue of extraordinary songs that celebrated happiness, and happiness only. Initially, at least. Wilson’s reaction to living in a world without love was to write and inspire some of the loveliest songs ever recorded: “In My Room”, “Don’t Worry Baby”, “Please Let Me Wonder”, “And Your Dreams Come True”, and dozens and dozens more, songs that managed to say so much with so little. (John Peel once wrote that a lot of groups write songs that have revolution in their lyrics but not in their music, although where the Beach Boys were concerned, the opposite was usually true.)

Leonard Bernstein once called Wilson one of the greatest composers of the 20th Century, while Bob Dylan said Wilson’s one good ear should be donated to the Smithsonian Institution. Paul McCartney has famously acknowledged that it was Pet Sounds that “was probably the big influence that set me thinking when we recorded [Sergeant] Pepper.” At the ceremony inducting Wilson into the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame, McCartney called Wilson “one of the great American geniuses” and paid succinct tribute to his friend by saying, “Thank you, sir, for making me cry.” He’s been called rock and roll’s gentlest revolutionary, a songwriter whose body of work contains real humanity – vulnerable and sincere, authentic and unmistakably American. “What Brian came to mean,” said the Velvet Underground’s John Cale, “was an ideal of innocence and naivety that went beyond teenage life and sprang fully developed songs –adult and childlike at the same time. There was something genuine in every lyric. And it was difficult for me not to believe everything he said.” He could write instant epiphanies (using a sound as big as Niagara Falls), sad songs about happiness, and most things in between. According to Art Garfunkel, his voice was “this unique, crazy creation, a mix of rock and roll and heartfelt prayer.” He wasn’t so much the nabob of sob, as the nabob of male neuroses.

Brian Wilson’s more obvious influences have been well documented (the Four Freshman, Phil Spector, mid-period Beatles), though a lot of his orchestration and arrangements owe much to Martin Denny and Les Baxter (and in particular tracks such as “Misirlou” and “Voodoo Dreams/Voodoo”) as well as other exponents of exotica, like Yma Sumac (Amy Camus) and Tak Shindo. Even Wilson’s most innocent and naive melodies have a hint of pathos about them, and using exotica’s bizarre array of references (eerie choral repetition, jungle noises – “Pet Sounds” – staccato keyboards), he found himself able to conjure up the most sublime parables of hope and desperation (Pet Sounds, in the words of GQ journalist Peter Doggett, “conjures up the volatile ecstasy and despair of teenage romance within the context of loss, love and self-awareness that can only come from the experience of adulthood”); music which seemed like it had spent a thousand years 20,000 leagues beneath the surf. The Beach Boys became teenagers when the teenager was suddenly something, when teenage emancipation was big news. They inspired generation envy: how colourless were their parents’ times – born too early… too early to be a Beach Boy. If you believe that the adolescent environment as represented by the comfort of pop music is little more than the prolonging of childhood, then the world imagined by Brian Wilson was the epitome of that – a self-contained club that took care of its members. At their core the Beach Boys really represented Fifties’ ideals, and although the imagery surrounding them was quintessentially Sixties, they were reassuringly old-fashioned; which made the lurch from their Beach Blanket Babylon early days to the drug-induced weirdness of their post-1965 period even more pronounced.

The Orson Welles of Rock

Wilson’s CV has been truncated into legend: after a difficult childhood, the shy fat boy creates a hit factory, then produces the best record ever made (Pet Sounds), takes drugs and goes mad, living in a vegetative state for thirty years before an unlikely creative comeback. What this version of his life fails to acknowledge are all the little masterpieces he made during his hiatus, all the little anguished missives, the fragile sketches of a better life buried on mediocre Beach Boys albums and solo records. No rendering of Brian Wilson’s life is complete without a soundtrack that includes the likes of “This Whole World”, “Sail On Sailor”, “Still I Dream Of It”, “Love and Mercy”, etc. The extraordinary thing about Wilson’s most successful work is the unnerving way he manages to evoke physical landscape while at the same time painstakingly exploring his interior world. How to describe Wilson’s music to someone who’s never heard it before? Well, how about you imagine you’re dreaming about paragliding over Big Sur – and really, really worrying about it. Many have written songs about being mad, and some have written songs while actually being mad, but none have done either with as much finesse as Wilson.

Up until a few years ago, Wilson’s official releases tended to sound unnervingly like nursery rhymes (particularly some of the more arcane material on Orange Crate Art, his 1995 Van Dyke Parks collaboration), and for a while his legacy was in the hands of people like the High Llamas, who once had a remit to finish the album he found himself unable to complete until 2004, Smile (back in the Seventies Wilson said that attempting to finish Smile would have been like “raising the Titanic”). A decade ago Wilson was all washed up, an empty Coke bottle on Venice Beach, and there was little hope that the tortured genius would – with the help of some descending minor chords, some cascading strings, soaring horns, and the fat twang of a cheap guitar – ever finish Smile himself; but then with the help of Scott Bennett and the Wondermints, the LA-based Beach Boys’ style band he accidentally hooked up with in the mid-Nineties, in 2004 he did just that. I have an ungovernable appetite for the Beach Boys, and like many, I had spent thirty years collecting the various bits and pieces required to build a decent version of Smile – an honourable task, I thought, and one that had occupied considerable amounts of my time; but having got there, having achieved my goal, when Wilson finally released his rerecorded interpretation, all I felt was a massive sense of deflation. It was all right, I thought to myself, but a) It’s not quite as good as the original, b) Now everyone’s got it, and c) What do I do now?

Brian Wilson’s Smile is a remarkable achievement, but when I first heard it in 2004 I almost felt like a light had been turned on in a basement I had been very happy to wander around, in the dark, for over twenty years. But this wasn’t about me, or any other Beach Boys obsessive, it was about Brian Wilson.

Like many Beach Boys obsessives, I’ve spent hundreds – maybe thousands — of hours immersed in their music, seeking out bootlegs and alternative versions, looking for those maudlin little songs that are the true reflection of Brian Wilson’s psyche (even at the height of punk, when everyone else was searching out rare Stooges releases). These days, unsurprisingly, the internet is where Beach Boys obsessives like to hang out (where did you think you’d find them, down at the beach?), and you can get lost in all the noise made by these cyber cicadas, noise made almost exclusively by men. On one site’s message board I found the following tag: “Why don’t women like the Beach Boys?” posted by “Jeff” on Saturday, September 25, 1999, at 11pm. Three hours later he got a carefully considered response, from one “MCP”: “One possible reason is that the early BB stuff was male focused, surf, cars, etc. Then there is the Pet Sounds period… singing about what all young men go through. Thirdly, women are inferior to men.”

Brian Douglas Wilson was born on June 20, 1942 in Hawthorne, California, a barren, treeless, and smog-filled sprawl, an hour from LA (“The City of Good Neighbors”) and more than a world away from the Malibu surf, a suburban backlot that was also the home of Marilyn Monroe, singer Chris Montez, and Olivia Harrison, Beatle George’s second wife. Hawthorne was not and never will be La Jolla. Sixty years ago the only thing to do here was go and watch the planes take off at LAX. Decades seldom start on schedule, yet Brian Wilson ushered in the American Sixties in 1961 by forming a garage band in Hawthorne with his two brothers Dennis and Carl, his cousin mike love, and family friend David Marks (soon to be replaced by another friend, Al Jardine). When the brothers were lying in bed at night, having been scolded again by their father for some minor misdemeanour, Brian would lead his brothers in three-part renditions of famous hymns. The songs were learnt at Sunday services where they were taken by their mother, and maybe the reason Wilson – who was at heart a suburban misfit – used to describe his Beach Boys songs as “modern hymns”. Wilson was the songwriter, mixing the tried and tested rock and roll of Chuck Berry with the production style of Phil Spector and the harmonies of the popular vocal group, the Four Freshman. They started singing about cars and girls, until Dennis Wilson inadvertently stumbled across the focus of their sound, brought alive by his experiences surfing the waves down on the coast. (Brian would never surf, and when, years later, John Belushi “arrested” Wilson for not even climbing on a board in the classic Saturday Night Live sketch, the sight of the whale-like Beach Boy being forced into the sea was more than a lot of fans could bear.)

The Beach Boys were the most important American band of the Sixties, reinventing the music industry in the way that the Beatles would soon do in Britain. They wrote their own music, they produced their own music, and they had a keen idea of exactly what they wanted to be.

The biggest influence in Wilson’s life was his overbearing father, Murry, a frustrated musician who would live vicariously through his sons’ success. From a very young age, Murry insisted the boys follow his orders with rigid precision. Confronted by a child who had violated one of his orders, he would yell “I’m the boss”, before whacking them with his belt. He had an artificial eye, and would regularly remove it, forcing his sons to stare into the jagged inside of the socket. He actually had two glass eyes – one for normal use and a special bloodshot model for when he was hungover. Dennis once stole the bloodshot model after Murry had spent the evening drinking, and took it to school the next day. Unsurprisingly he was soundly beaten on his return. Stories of the tensions between Brian and his father are legion, including one apocryphal tale of Wilson defecating on his father’s dinner plate – at Murry’s behest, to punish him for some small misdemeanour. “No, that’s absolutely not true,” Murry told Rolling Stone in 1971. However, it appears to have been Murry who was responsible for ruining his son’s hearing: Murry once hit him so hard that he destroyed all the hearing in his eldest son’s right ear, and consequently Brian only ever heard his records in mono. One of his father’s most brutal acts of cruelty was to “appropriate” the copyrights to Brian’s songs, selling them in 1969 for $700,000, a pitiful sum. Twenty-one years later, the younger Wilson won millions of dollars in back royalties after arguing in court that he was a casualty of drug abuse at the time. When Wilson senior finally died of a heart attack aged only fifty-five in 1973, neither Brian nor Dennis attended his funeral. As dysfunctional families went, the Wilsons were in a league of their own. (A decade later, Dennis was also dead, drowned while diving off the side of his boat, his body ruined by alcohol. Carl followed him in 1998, stricken by lung cancer.)

Wilson suffered his first nervous breakdown in 1964, just a few years after his band’s first success, so unable was he to cope with the pressure of recording and touring. And so the dense forest of Wilson’s professional history began, the damaged genius using alcohol, food, and drugs to try and alleviate his emotional pain. He started taking acid in 1965 at the age of twenty-three, and it changed him forever. As Nick Kent wrote in his classic 1975 piece in the NME, “The Last Beach Movie”, “His personality, always as fitful as it was fanatical in any given direction, was supposedly weighed down by brooding hermetic traits, and he was often erratic, paranoid, crazed – cursed by a weight problem that had ultimately got out of all proportion and which consequently seemed to be reinforcing his numerous complexes.”

By 1966, Wilson had moved from surf, cars, and beauty queens to a less specific absorption in sensation, what the exotica specialist David Toop once called, “the magic of nonsense, the power of the elemental”.

He was only twenty-four by the time he’d finished Pet Sounds, but when Wilson heard Sgt Pepper he abandoned Smile and went to bed for two years. He spent years laying inert in his bed, his weight ballooning up to twenty-four stone. He admits he was a child during these years, unable to cope with even the most ordinary, menial day-to-day things. Shy and socially awkward as a boy, Brian’s battle with his demons and insecurities grew more acute with age. Smile was meant to be a celebration of Americana, a panoramic commentary on America’s tangled past: “I was there to support his ‘dreamscape’,” says Wilson’s collaborator on the project, Van Dyke Parks. “He wanted to make the American saga a legitimate currency in this new global music market that had just defined itself since 1964.”

But the making of the original Smile literally sent him mad: one night, while recording a section of his “Elements” suite about fire, called “Mrs O’Leary’s Cow”, Wilson distributed plastic fireman’s helmets to the orchestra and lit a small fire in the studio to feel the heat and smell the smoke. When Wilson learned that later the same night a building near the studio had burned down and that there had been several other fires across Southern California, he abandoned the entire project. The music was just too powerful. Wilson was scared of his talent, scared of what he could produce, scared of the reaction his music caused in other people. To understand the tragedy of Smile, you could maybe try to imagine Paul McCartney, say, having a nervous breakdown after recording “Yesterday”, scared that having created something so perfect, he might never be able to match it, and then withering on the vine, unable to cope with the burden of topping it. “I’m getting there,” Wilson said, back in the mid-Nineties, from the one side of his mouth that still seemed to want to talk to the world. “I’m forcing my way out. It’s almost as though I went into an egg and just had to poke my way out of it.” *

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*(The actual “sound” of Smile has become something you try to approximate when you run out of ideas in the studio – just listen to the hash of it that R.E.M. made on their Up album in 1998 – which made it even more strange when Wilson did the same thing when he eventually rerecorded it. Its influence is all over the place – a glockenspiel here, an oboe there, a theremin thrown in for good measure over there in the corner, plus marimbas, wind chimes, and jewellery percussion. It’s there in the intro – Wilson is the intro – to “This Life”, track six on Bruce Springsteen’s Working On A Dream; there’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s an unnecessary homage. The post-Pet Sounds “sound” has become a template, a trendy cliché: I was watching a Tina Fey film on a plane to Hong Kong a few months ago and one of the “sequence-blending” songs was little but a Beach Boys song full of glockenspiel and trippy organ, an atmospheric melange that sounded as though it had been made by a bunch of Japanese high school kids with access to little but Beach Boys records and their parents’ collection of loungecore. It’s difficult to imagine Nicholas Stoller’s film Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which is set in Hawaii, without some mention of the Beach Boys, and it doesn’t take long – thirty minutes to be exact – for there to be one.)

* * *

Wilson’s excessive drug taking often ended with him wandering semi-comatose down the highway dressed only in his bathrobe. “The big disappointment I feel about my life is that I didn’t have more wisdom when it came to taking drugs,” he said recently. “Drugs laid me out for years.” Asked once if he’d prefer to come back free of his mental handicaps but also free of his talent, or spend his time again with the same mix of musical genius and mental anguish, Wilson said, “You know what? It would take me a year to answer that question…” When pushed he answered, “I would take being a songwriter with the handicap. I wouldn’t be able to live without music.”

By the early Eighties, Brian weighed over twenty stone and was consuming a dozen eggs and a whole loaf of bread for breakfast. He refused to wash or dress and rarely rose before six in the evening. With his children and first wife Marilyn gone (they were divorced in 1979), there was little to distract him from his demons.

In desperation, his family gave him over to a psychiatrist called Eugene Landy, a man who appointed himself as Brian’s unofficial “creative” father. Like Murry before him, Landy had no intention of letting go once he had a hold of Brian. For eight years he milked his charge of millions of dollars, controlling his every move – even down to choosing which women he was allowed to date. It eventually took a judge to remove the psychiatrist’s grip from his life. Life became more stable for Wilson when he met Melinda Ledbetter in a Cadillac dealership in the mid-Nineties (she was trying to sell him a car). They married in 1995.

The Orson Welles of rock still has anxiety attacks, but he has learned to walk between the raindrops. “I’ll tell you something I’ve learned,” he said not so long ago, “It’s hard work to be happy.”

The Wilson brothers’ boyhood home in Hawthorne was demolished in the late Eighties during the construction of the Century Freeway, although it was eventually honoured by the dedication of the Beach Boys Historic Landmark (California Landmark 1041) in May 2005. The monument is somewhat underwhelming, being little more than a small wall of bricks with a rectangular white stone in its middle, featuring a carving of the boys carrying a surfboard (inspired by the cover of their Surfer Girl album). It sits exactly where the curb of their front lawn used to be, and looks as surreal as it looks drab.

It’s somewhat ironic that the Wilson family home – a home where Brian first crafted those teenage hits about surfing and hot-rodding – should have made way for eight lanes of the I-105 freeway, where many of the cars will be tuned to oldies stations pumping out Wilson’s songs… about surfing and hot-rodding. “If you tip the world on its side,” said Frank Lloyd Wright, “everything loose will end up in California.” This, everyone now seems to agree, is how the Golden State turned out the way it did, how it became North America’s repository for the eccentric, the esoteric and the extravagant… the larger than life. To live in California means to live in italics. It’s difficult to write about the state without compiling a list of the absurd and the fanciful: the pet cemeteries, gaudy museums, and beachfront fashion parades – the wicked kitsch of the West. Eventually, everything in America becomes entertainment, and often the celebration of hyper-consumerism seems the metier of the whole country. In his essay, “Travels in Hyperreality”, Umberto Eco pinpointed the appeal of America’s seemingly unquenchable thirst for the extravagant and the preposterous: “American imagination demands the real thing,” he wrote, “and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake.” And in their own way the Beach Boys were as fake as anything else here, because not only were they the first American boy band, but underneath the classic karaoke pop hits was a world of heartache, a dark underbelly of disappointment, thwarted ambition, violence and madness. With the Beach Boys the revelry was always countered by a tragic back story, a duality highlighted by Brian Wilson’s inability to surf. Ironic? At the time, at the birth of the Sixties, when Wilson was the man most able to articulate the teenage dream, this handicap was like discovering that Mick Jagger was impotent.

But Wilson’s music, like much of California itself, is breathtakingly beautiful. The Californian coast is a celebration of fantasy, a Pacific kingdom of sunshine, sand and surf, a reconstructed world of wonder where plastic palm trees sway beneath artificial moons, and where David Hockney paintings come to life. This post-industrial landscape aspires to being a terrestrial paradise, a near-tropical dreamland where vistas of magnificent natural beauty vie with car parks full of neo-Mexican shopping malls; where giant redwoods and valleys of golden poppies surround the state’s popular cathedrals of kitsch. This is a life of abundance, where anything is possible, and little is real. A lot of California looks like a grandiose campsite, a frontier state, where much looks as though it was thrown up overnight. Here, little looks permanent, making the landscape look as untamed as it looks manicured. But there are few things more enjoyable than hurtling down the Pacific Coast Highway in a rented convertible, few things better than the California sun hitting your Ermanno Scervino sunglasses, the spray from the surf hitting your windscreen, the wind rushing across your face, and the sound of the Beach Boys blasting through the in-car stereo. For California, Brian Wilson always had unlimited praise.

As it leaves Carmel, Route One climbs up through Big Sur. The highway soars high into the sky, and you’re rewarded with eighty miles of stunningly beautiful coastline: sharp, sheer drops where mountains hit the water in dramatic fashion, where the rocks are so high you feel as though you’re driving through cloud, as sea otters and grey whales thrash about in the Pacific below. The route is surprisingly tortuous, a narrow winding road that follows the wild and underdeveloped coast up and down the Santa Lucia mountains, in and out of canyons, like the oldest, slowest rollercoaster in the world. It’s easy to see why the Beach Boys wrote a hymn to the Big Sur hills: “Cashmere hills filled with evergreens flowin’ from the clouds down to meet the sea/ With the granite cliff as a referee…”

But then the Beach Boys wrote so much about California, a state that wouldn’t have existed in its current form unless Brian Wilson had reinvented the American Dream, moving it from New York just a few years after the Brooklyn Dodgers uprooted their team and moved themselves to LA. Eventually everyone comes to California, in the short term looking for fun, perhaps in the long run for rebirth, to be creatively born again. Brian Wilson has certainly had a rebirth, and his God-like genius is not quite as diminished as you might think it is, as anyone who has seen him perform at London’s Royal Festival Hall in the last few years will know. Having seen him perform Pet Sounds there in London in 2002 (it was like seeing J.D. Salinger turn up for a recital, as though Robert Johnson had suddenly descended from the Gods in his button-down and braces, and yup, I blubbed like a baby), and Smile two years later (how did he do that?), two of the best concerts I’ve ever seen, two performances so heartbreakingly perfect, so moving, both left me sort of numb for days afterwards – when it was announced that he’d been specially commissioned to write a piece to be performed there, my heart sank. After all, it’s all very well reproducing “Girl Don’t Tell Me”, “Lay Down Burden”, “I’d Love Just Once To See You”, and “She Knows Me So Well” live on stage – the extraordinary thing about “the Brian Wilson Construct” is the way in which the music is replicated with such precision without it sounding in the least bit hokey-karaoke – but could he write a modern-day song cycle that lived up to (or at least wasn’t embarrassed by) the various high bars set by Smile, Land Locked, and all the rest? Was That Lucky Old Sun going to be any good?

Wilson’s life has been so tragic, so fractured, that even the giddiest of Beach Boys’ songs now seems to have a dark, maudlin underbelly, every silver lining we now know to have some sort of cloud. Wilson literally suffered for his art – suffered because of his art –which is obviously one of the reasons we revere him so much. And one of the reasons we expect everything he records these days to be tinged with the same sense of pathos, even though we almost always expect to be disappointed (his 2004 CD Gettin’ Over My Head wasn’t exactly his finest hour). The Festival Hall concerts underscored the great pathos in his work. There was something joyous about watching a man emerging from a long night of the lost soul. There was a sense that when he wrote and performed a lot of his songs the first time around, that he was anticipating loss, wallowing in heartache; now, as he approaches his dotage, that loss, that heartache, has become part of his legacy. The most pertinent quote I’ve ever read from Wilson is one he gave just before his first performance at the Royal Albert Hall in 2007. It says all you need to know about an introverted teenager who would rather commune with the elements than go surfing, a boy in love with sensation: “When I was sixteen, I had a Woolensack tape recorder and I taped the wind. I lost it and those tapes. I don’t know where the hell they are.”

Surprisingly, rather wonderfully, Wilson and his band of upward managers (last time, there seemed to be twenty of them on stage) somehow pulled it off, with at least half a dozen of the songs on That Lucky Old Sun (which was released last summer) being worthy of inclusion on your Big Sur iTunes playlist (mine is a hundred and forty-nine songs, just over seven hours, 471.2 MB). Written with his old sparring partner (when you say that these days people automatically assume you’ve been to a spa together) Van Dyke Parks and Wilson band member Scott Bennett, That Lucky Old Sun evokes – once again – his deep love of Southern California, and at times you can almost feel the mid-afternoon sun bouncing off your forehead (and at Brian Wilson concerts, there is always a lot of forehead in the audience). And if you ask me “Midnight’s Another Day” and “Southern California” are two of the best songs Wilson has written in the last twenty years. One critic suggested that the listener could have been forgiven for thinking Wilson had been meddling with a computer randomiser, because the album is essentially a “treasure trove of Beach Boys buzzwords and almost-familiar melodies rearranged into a meticulous suite about – what else? – California.” It is always with trepidation that lifelong fans listen to another Brian comeback, because for so long his albums have been curate’s eggs, only offering glimpses of his former genius. But these songs are life affirming. Nowhere can you hear the resigned indifference of old age, nowhere can you sense he’s going through the motions. These songs are wistful reminders of what went before: there is so much pathos attached to almost every song written and performed by Wilson after Pet Sounds, and these new songs are no different; however because he has been through such a fundamental rite of passage – one that has taken up pretty much his entire adult life – these latest songs appear to suggest some sort of genuine redemption (just listen to his heartbreakingly cracked melancholy voice). If a Brian Wilson song has ever touched you, then you should go back and buy That Lucky Old Sun. If you’re disappointed, then you probably never understood the Beach Boys in the first place. And should be banned from driving in California. For life.

Twenty years ago, the day I left California for the first time, I thought back to the afternoon I arrived. Climbing into my rented black convertible Mustang at San Francisco airport, groggy from twelve hours of travelling, I pushed a button to drag back the top, and turned on the radio. In a moment of unprecedented giddiness, I pushed myself deep into my seat, smiled at the sinking, squinting sun, and pondered the road ahead. As Billy idol, then the prince of plastic pop, poured his tiny heart out of my dashboard speakers, I sat there, just wallowing in the moment, listening to song after song after song, until, inevitably, after about fifteen minutes, the DJ played the Beach Boys. “Well she got her daddy’s car, And she cruised through the hamburger stand now, Seems she forgot all about the library, Like she told her old man now…” This, I thought to myself, is it. This is most probably it…

It still is for Wilson, too. He’s working on ideas for yet another stage in his rehabilitation, this time a concept album called Pleasure Island: A Rock Fantasy. “It’s about some guys who took a hike, and they found a place called Pleasure Island,” says Wilson. “And they met all kind of chicks, and they went on rides and – it’s just a concept. I haven’t developed it yet. I think people are going to love it – it could be the best thing I’ve ever done.”

Photo (partial) by © Richard Young /
Rex Features – courtesy of Picador

Dylan Jones is the editor in chief of British GQ, where he has won the BSME Editor of the Year Award seven times during his tenure and was recognized for the Innovation/Brand-Building Initiative of the Year award for the annual GQ Men of the Year Awards. Jones has a weekly column in The Mail on Sunday’s magazine supplement and writes regularly for The Spectator. His other works include Jim Morrison: Dark Star; Paul Smith: True Brit; and iPod, Therefore I Am.

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