Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson Book

I saw the Beach Boys in 1976. In fact, I saw two of them, Mike Love and Carl Wilson, up close. That summer the Rolling Stones and Beach Boys played within about a week of each other at the Capitol Center in Landover, Maryland. As the Stones concert was ending, Love and Wilson came down from their seats (probably a sky box), and stood at an exit close to where I was sitting. I had seen their band play about a week before, and truth be told, big Stones fan that I am, when it came to singing, the Beach Boys put on a better live show. The main reason being that Jagger's voice, not the greatest live instrument in the first place, was shot, while the Beach Boys were all clear as a bell. I also had the added benefit of seeing the very iffy Brian Wilson, who at that time was a hulking figure behind a piano (I think he played about three songs).

At that time the Beach Boys were still trying to make it as a viable creative band. I think not too long after this tour - or maybe even during it, they released 15 Big Ones, which I thought kind of sucked. On the cover of that album there was Brian, again being rolled out as the center of the band. Maybe, but he was at best, according to author Peter Ames Carlin, a disinterested and fragile center. What in fact was keeping the band going was the country's slide into nostalgia, as it benefitted from new exposure in the soundtrack for American Graffitti, their own outstanding greatest hits album, Endless Summer, and, later, the Reagan and Fonzie years. But when it came to new albums, the Beach Boys just couldn't seem to get out of the middle 50s on the charts. People wanted the old hits.

The band would eventually cave to this reality, and by the mid 80s, they had become, according to Carlin, an act that was little more than self-parody:

To watch the Beach Boys perform now - chauffeured across baseball infields in woody station wagons, performing on stages crowded with unironic surfboards, and of them dressed in clothes that had come to resemble an eccentric cross between high school letterman's garb and geriatric leisure wear - was to see a group of musicians who no longer had any idea what their songs meant or why they were still so important to the people who came to hear them sing. (p. 250)

Carlin, to his credit, does remember, and he does an admirable job in 300 or pages recounting a story that probably needs over a thousand pages to tell. I was at first surprised at how things started out, with Carlin going back to the Wilson's (and Love's) grandparents' time, around the turn of the century. For a few pages there I found myself recalling The Grapes of Wrath, as these transplants from the mid-West made a go of it in California, living initially in tents, working (and drinking) hard, and yet finding some relief in sing-alongs around the fire.

Jump forward to the Eisenhower years, with the post war boom really taking off. At this point, the Wilsons were a typical blue collar suburban family, but one that retained a love of music, as the patriarch of the bunch, Murry, who worked at Goodyear, would dabble in music writing. Murry was abusive and controlling, but he also could see there was something unusual, when it came to music, about his oldest child, Brian. (He also may have contributed, due to a blow to the 6 year old's head, to Brian's deafness in his left ear.)

By the time Brian was out of high school, he showed every sign of being a prodigy. The band, originally constructed as a family affair by Murry, would turn out hit after hit. They even, to some extent, weathered the Beatles storm once it arrived. Part of the reason for this was they were more than a surf band - at least that's how Brian thought of them. Brian liked what the Beatles were doing, and as result dropped the surf formula of cars and girls for something more complicated and beautiful: Pet Sounds, which to my mind stands shoulder to shoulder with Sgt. Pepper. The other members of the band were uncomfortable with the effort, thinking it a bit weird, straying off the Beach Boy message. But it was with this effort, one where Brian still retained enough control of the band, where we hear his genius on full, album length display. Carlin does an excellent analysis of album, even making a strong argument (that I totally agree with) for the necessity of "Sloop John B." Sadly, and it's only 1966, this would be the high water mark for Beach Boys albums.

As much as Brian admired the Beatles, thinking they were showing him new possibilities with his own music, it was Wilson that probably showed the Beatles which way to go, since Pet Sounds preceded Sgt. Pepper. (The Beatles were in awe of Pet Sounds.) Once the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper, Brian seemed to feel he had to answer with yet another masterpiece, which lead to the Smile album effort. This was the end. The band was pulling in one (commercial) direction, Brian, creatively, wanted to go in another. And then there was the late 1960s, with drugs drugs drugs becoming the new Fun Fun Fun. Brian essentially suffered a nervous breakdown, as the "Smile" effort was shelved on the eve of its release.


What follows next, with still over half the book to go, are Brian's ups and mostly downs. His weight would balloon up over 300 pounds, lots of drugs, lots of food binges, while only occasionally dabbling with music for a band he no longer seemed to like. The other members of the band would struggle on with their own problems: Dennis would meet the Manson family, and even join in an orgy with the Manson chicks, Love would keep getting married, Carl would become an alcoholic, and Murry would rage over being cut out from managing the band. This all gets to be pretty sordid stuff that can match the Stones, the Doors, or the late Elvis in rock and roll decadence any day. The low point, I thought, was when the drunken Dennis Wilson "introduced" Mike Love to his new girlfriend - who just happened to be Love's illegitimate child. Wilson was trolling for yet another fistfight with Love (who is a major dick himself).

Throughout this story Carlin dutifully covers each album, which is perhaps overkill, and weighs the merits of the songs - most of which I find second rate compared to those shimmering pre-1969 efforts. Carlin tries to make this a triumphant story, with Brian Wilson eventually recovering. On a personal front this may be true, but I don't think the music, those "Good Vibrations," has never come back in quite the same way.