Brian Wilson: The Genius Behind The Beach Boys | Amplified

for most of the 1960s brian wilson had been at the height of his powers penning and producing hit after hit for the beach boys but by the end of the decade disheartened by the reaction of both his band and his record label to his more ambitious material he began to withdraw there was a lot of pressure on brian from the record company give us a hit give us a hit and you know you don't turn that on and off like a faucet i think he felt really alone i mean i think that he felt like the record company didn't like him his band didn't like him so now brian is feeling this pressure coming from two sides everybody's invested in brian continuing to work and be brian wilson of the beach boys but the only guy that didn't want that to happen was brian wilson of the beach boys suffocated by his past success and isolated within his own band in the 1970s wilson's mental health began to deteriorate and the songs he did compose for the beach boys during this period expressed his inner anguish brian clearly is in a very bad state people just didn't know what to do about guys who are in that sort of state this is still very early days in terms of knowledge about addiction depression mental problems people aren't going to rehab people are just being left to flounder nobody really knows what to do but after years in the wilderness by the second half of the 70s brian would triumphantly return yet the artist who reemerged was a changed man with new musical ideas brian's a creative guy he had no thoughts at all about being a beach boy no he didn't want to be a beach boy no he didn't want to do surfing songs for sure he was most comfortable being an artist [Music] when the beach boys emerged in 1961 their blend of intricate vocal harmonies upbeat rock and roll melodies and lyrical themes capturing the spirit of west coast youth culture quickly propelled them to the top rank of popular music and at their center was brian wilson an astonishingly prolific writer and producer who composed the majority of their outlet a very visible presence at the start of the band's career by 1965 his antipathy for life on the road led him to bow out of touring and to solely concentrate on studio work having already utilized the talents of phil spector's legendary studio musicians the wrecking crew on several of the band's hits he began producing and arranging albums predominantly featuring these players while the beach boys toured with the musical landscape changed forever by the british invasion a new climate began to develop in which artists previously concerned with penning hits started to bring increased sophistication to their work and focused far more on the album rather than individual singles following the examples set by the beatles rubber soul brian wilson aimed to be at the forefront of this musical revolution the beach boys groundbreaking 1966 lp pet sounds saw him drive the band into new territory yet where this secured it a huge audience in the uk and europe the band's record company capital were not so prepared for the shift and released without their full confidence it failed to ignite the us charts it is as great as pop music gets uh and it is as sophisticated intricate and harmonically extraordinary arrangement-wise texture-wise it is as great as you know as western pop music has ever got wouldn't it be [Music] nice to live together in the kind of where we belong you know it's gonna make it that much better but it was not a record that the pop machine could understand and work with in that sense and that is why capital so quickly rushed out a greatest hits album they kind of panicked he just thought well this these are not this is not three minute pop nirvana of the kind that we we understand and the teenagers want and i think that's that's the problem you know capital couldn't get behind it they didn't really understand what it was it was not the beach boys as we had known [Music] [Music] i think the record label in america really let him down really let him down and i i think this all of a sudden this can't do anything wrong guy was made to feel or probably felt that he'd done something wrong and he probably started losing a little of his confidence yet that lack of confidence was not evident in the work that followed wilson's drive and artistic ambition remained unaffected by the relative failure of pet sounds domestically and ignoring the demands of both band mates and record label executives that he returned to churning out hits he instead began work on even more adventurous projects the first was the single good vibrations a track that eventually took months to complete establishing a new method of operation wilson composed and recorded several sections of music that were later edited together to produce a distinctive whole the experiment worked both critically and commercially and the beach boys first million selling number one single confirmed wilson as a peerless innovator the next project however was to consume him working at an even greater distance from the band wilson had welcomed a host of new collaborators into his fold most significantly the lyricist van dyke parks and through an atmosphere of great levity and experimentation began creating the album's smile in keeping with the times drugs played a major part in the increasingly zany proceedings with session players dressed as firemen and brian composing songs with his piano in a sandbox the sandbox was just a box that he had made it was full of sand that he could sit in feel like he was at the beach mine was not to ask why nor to reason why this was his house and his sandbox writing song a song like surfs up and he's got his shoes and socks off and he's there's a piano there and he's got his feet in the sand shut your eyes and you're writing about surfs up i mean how perfect you know i just thought it was silly it was all in fun it was just silly stuff and as long as we were making records and and getting wealthy off of it all i don't think anyone was going to complain i don't think that anybody had any idea that that it would end up in the problems that brian would have emotionally even eventually in terms of not being able to get out of bed and the sand and the house and i don't think anybody you know we didn't really look at that as something really crazy it was just it was just so typically nondescript which really fit the pattern that brian was sort of in at that time the things he was doing was really was surviving through the pressure of the record company trying to say give us hit songs he was kind of finding this other place where he could survive without writing for the band another in my room or 409 or something he was he was just making music that he heard in in his head which was probably one of the scariest things but wilson's ability to capture and structure the music that he was hearing in his head was becoming impaired as his drug use increased he became more uncertain of how to arrange the various musical segments he had composed and when the beach boys arrived to begin recording the eccentric vocal arrangements wilson's control in the studio was filtering the band worked so hard with brian to try and to make this happen but i just know brian was you know a very tense and it wasn't the brian that i'd worked with you know i just think his success was so big he might have just been thinking well how am i going to do this despite his uncertainty the music recorded during these seemingly endless sessions was revolutionary unlike any work ever to emerge from a mainstream artist i think we would have had a one-two punch as far as people let's forget about selling stuff just think of it as pure art brian would have had a one-two punch it would have been great yet the creation of pure art was of little importance to some of his bandmates singer mike love in particular was fiercely opposed to this new work totally uninterested in progression and innovation he saw the beach boys as entertainers not artists and his distaste for van dyke park's contributions led the lyricist to leave the project unwilling to fight his corner unable to control his vision brian wilson began to decline i remember one night uh we were at the house and brian would be in his that he had a king-sized bed in this room and he would lay in bed and there he was getting a little bit harder on himself and he was a little overweight there was no doubt that he had was eating poorly and then there was a seriousness about brian there was something happening that was a lot deeper going on and and you saw there was a lot of illness in the room and there's a lot of illness around the whole you you begin to sense the uncomfortableness of the sand in the room and the piano city in the sand which one you first walk in is like okay that's that's funny and then if you really think about it it's not so funny and then brian and the separation with the band and not being able to kind of go to mike or go to carl and trust their opinion and their opinion was always pretty much the same which is this is not good i mean this is not a beach boy record and you've gotta you've gotta you've gotta and that's all brian heard i think is that that pressure and that pressure was you've gotta this is not us this is not a beach boy record when in brian's mind this was totally a beach boy record the combination of doubt and pressure finally forced wilson to surrender and smile was abandoned the unreleased album immediately entered popular folklore the last masterpiece of a troubled genius yet its creator's energy was also lost and the artist who had been the dominant and sometimes sole creative force within the beach boys went into a slow retreat he had to pull back he had to withdraw he was using the music as kind of a fortress that it was the place you know he he could put all his energy there that was and a lot of that was kind of i think dark energy that was coming from the fact that he was losing his fight with trying to hold his you know maintain his his sanity to a degree that the demons that had tracked him everywhere um inside his head but couldn't get into the music had now gotten into the music the other beach boys still needed brian however but they decided that they couldn't allow him the total control over their output that he had previously exerted contractually obliged to deliver an album in place of wilson's shelved magnum opus they quickly released the smiley smile lp which revisited and reworked many of the abandoned songs recorded on basic equipment at brian wilson's home the album marked a watershed for the group with the entire band not only playing the majority of the instrumental parts but also credited as producers yet the critics and the public expecting so much from the now legendary material were bitterly disappointed by the rushed and underproduced results and it continued the band's commercial decline the summer of love and the psychedelic era had changed the face of popular music and where smile may have seen the band welcomed by the counter culture their reputation was further damaged by their failure to perform at the historic monterey pop festival with the emergence of a new sensibility and heavier more serious music the band were left stranded unsure of their once reliable figurehead and uncertain how to proceed the beach boys started to disappear basically i mean we had the old baseball team the new york yankees who were a dynasty for many many years and then suddenly they stopped winning and everybody used to ask the question are the yankees still in the league and kind of that's the way the beach boys became too you know we just even know where did well are they're still here somewhere right they were kind of like out of the picture they might have been doing some of their best creative stuff but dj's definitely in america did not understand it as the decade came to a close the beach boys fortunes continued to decline having strained their relationship with capital records in 1967 with a lawsuit for unpaid royalties the marketing behind their recent releases had been disappointing and the band began to look for a new label with the 1968 album friends which failed to reach the top 100 their stock hit an all-time low and even though brian wilson was still contributing strongly to the material and the production they lacked a clear sense of direction unable to see any promise in the future they looked to the past for salvation because friends had tanked so terribly in the united states i think it hit number 2 126 on the billboard not 100. you know they kind of like scrambled and they said well let's go back and do some basic beach boys sound and this might have broken brian's heart a little bit but he went and he did a full-on version of it that single was do it again and despite its nostalgia the song's returned to roots approach proved very current [Music] i think do it again does fit into a general trend that is you could argue reactionary and nostalgic in other words pop music went so far out in 66 67 you know by the end of 67 you know there's a sort of meltdown of structure and form and i think there was almost in the sense of the kind of jungian collective unconscious there was a need to reign it back in you know suddenly there was a sort of hankering for the the form and precision um of the the classic three-minute pop or rock and roll single you know let's get back to to basics i suppose you know the beatles with lady madonna as an obvious example and the stat the stones reacting to the relative disaster of their satanic majesties by getting back to the sort of gritty blues bass that that they'd started with you know jumping jack flash and in the same way do it again is a statement literally in the lyric and the arrangement and production it's a statement that we you know we're getting back to basics we're going to do it again [Music] the lyrics tell one story but then there's stuff going on in the music that are just sort of like of the now in 1968 and it wasn't like even the boomers the baby boomers or people that age didn't have their moments of nostalgia too and the thing is the songs you know whatever the lyrics say the song sounds so cool like that very wickedly cool sort of compressed drum sound that runs through it that's that sort of announces the start of the song it's a very distinctive very cool sound that does not occur on any other song it's just in that song [Music] the distinctive production techniques were the brainchild of young engineer stephen desper whose creative input would become essential to the band's growth in the following decade i came up with the sound for do it again the drum sound at the beginning of do it again it's a series of delays they they all went to lunch and i worked this sound out and i played it for him when they came back saying you know this is pretty neat i sound it could be and they liked it and uh that pretty much was the the point in time where they decided that i would be their mixer the single saw the band return to their former chart glory taking the beach boys back into the u.s top 20 and hitting the number one spot in the uk if their aim had been to recapture their old style and increase their appeal then they had succeeded but it provided no clear roadmap for progression and as they prepared to compile a final album for capital brian wilson's commitment to the band was wavering and his mental state deteriorating where rudimentary recording equipment had been set up in his bel-air house for sessions on all of the post-smile albums it was now decided that this should be developed into a fully functioning studio the home studio came about to entice brian to become more involved in recording because at that time he was ill and he was falling into depression more and more and it was taking him and his creative talents away from what needed to be done decisions have to be made from a business point of view as well as an artistic point of view and it became very important to get brian involved so management and the beach boys made the decision that they would with marilyn with her cooperation would convert his informal living room which had very high ceilings sound proof it and make it into a studio and within about a week we were in business as far as actually being involved in the physical creation of the studio brian wasn't involved in that his wife was because it was really her house that she was giving up and her privacy but brian came down one day and he wanted to paint everything i thought he was gonna paint it like a beige or something but he came in and it turned out to be bright red here and bright green there and blue here and it was very uh stimulating the colors were stimulating they weren't aesthetic so much but it was fun place to be in for brian wilson the studio didn't prove to be so enticing instead of working on new compositions he remained confined to his bedroom listening to the ronettes be my baby on repeat and recorded endless versions of the showboat musical number ol man river not only had he lost his enthusiasm the partial hearing he had suffered in his right ear since his youth was also now proving an obstacle in approaching modern recording techniques with the introduction of the beach boys going into stereo brian was kind of lost for brian to listen to the stereo he told me what he would hear would be a double sound always and it threw him off so in order to get away from that he had a single loudspeaker in the studio and many times he would come in and make judgment calls that were right on even though he wasn't hearing it like we were his judgment was right on yet capital expected brian wilson's full involvement with beach boys product and as their main songwriter and producer retreated it was up to other band members to step in and take the helm there was a lot of pressure on brian from the record company give us a hit give us a hit and you know you don't turn that on and off like a faucet and so brian uh he's a sensitive guy and uh he had a hard time with all this pressure and and his approach was to stay away and during this time he was unavailable the record company is calling hey we've given you advances come on let's go get in the studio do something all right so carl took over as a leader not only because uh he volunteered but because he was the closest to brian and even though brian wasn't directly involved he was indirectly involved with production through his brother carl upon its release in february 1969 the songs that comprised the album 2020 heralded a new era for the beach boys with carl wilson overseeing production and brother dennis contributing significantly as a songwriter their final collection for capital records although it still failed to ignite the charts in the us it was a major hit in europe boosted by the success of the album's second single carl's arrangement of the phil spector classic i can hear music [Music] i always dreamed it would be the way that it is [Music] point was the beach boy who had the most invested in kind of taking brian's achievements forward so that it didn't just all kind of peter out his first production the first track was where carl kind of takes control i can hear music it's still i think an example of sort of regressiveness it's it's carl uh uh emulating brian emulating phil spector so in that sense it's kind of playing it safe but i think there's more than enough evidence as time goes on that carl holds things together i mean a just in terms of his personality in terms of the fact that he was you know the best singer by far and that he cared [Music] despite the accomplishments of the other band members capital was still expecting a wealth of new brian wilson alongside do it again with the older aptly titled compositions time to get alone and i went to sleep but with the once prolific songwriter unwilling or unable to contribute fresh material it was finally decided that the smile vault should be reopened what was left well there was all the stuff brian had been working on that nobody knew how it went together only brian did and he wasn't saying so carl would bring the uh tapes into the studio and we would listen to them and i made copies of everything and a game plan would come together and we would splice things together and figure it out as far as cabin essence was pretty far along the way as my prayer was quite well recorded we sweetened it as it's called we added thickened it up added some parts essence was finished um some more or less with brian's guidance through carl but you you cut as carl would say yeah gotta work with what you got [Music] is [Music] 2020 was lacking in brian's personal involvement to a great degree but he had left so many cool things in the can that it wasn't going to be hard to pull some great music especially counterculture music with cabin essence you know which was one of those great smile van dyke parks brian wilson songs and that particular song made the group a bit relevant i remember reading some underground magazines late 69 some rap magazine from detroit saying well the beach boys have something going on here because look they got this song cabin essence and that's some real stuff anything that was going to leak from smile even if people didn't know was from smile still worked and still communicated to the growing woodstock audience [Music] the astonishing thing was you could put a smile track on the back of an album and it would blow your mind like where did this come from you know what is this because it sounds so distinct from you know in any year you released it it sounded fresh and new because even though it had been recorded years earlier it was recorded in a style that no one had ever worked in and continued to not work in these songs were sort of like of no time they were out of the sort of cultural continuum of what you expected shortly after the album's release the beach boys once again issued a lawsuit against capital and with only one more single owed to the label the band and their management focused their attention on attracting new record companies yet in may just before signing a lucrative deal with the european label deutsche gramophone the reclusive brian wilson emerged at a press conference declaring that the band were facing bankruptcy he didn't want to have to go back to work which was essentially what all these contracts were calling him to do you know by then he'd had enough and i mean and he could read and understand when they told him like you will be responsible for like x percentage of these albums i think there were contractual obligations brian wilson will write and produce x percent of the songs he had become the provider not just for his immediate family but for his extended family you know for his cousins and for their friends and for their lawyers and colleagues everybody's invested in brian continuing to work and be brian wilson of the beach boys but the only guy that didn't want that to happen was brian wilson of the beach boys as the band headed out to europe for a successful tour in territories where there was still big business the reluctant brian wilson was nevertheless cajoled into working on the final capital single by his father murray this domineering figure who'd exerted so much pressure on his children during the early stages of their career when he oversaw their business affairs was a presence that brian had long since attempted to avoid yet convincing his son that the band needed a hit before moving on from capital together they composed breakaway [Music] is i mixed it and played with it i mixed it a lot and i came very familiar with the song and i played it a lot and brian would hear it because his bedroom was above the studio and he would hear it and uh eventually it came down and eventually started working with it and uh he worked with it a lot [Music] [Music] as my life turns he was never satisfied with it it seemed like he was always changing and erasing this or adding that eventually it came out but even after it came out he was still working with it and he just loved that song wilson's efforts went unnoticed by domestic audiences however and the single failed to break the billboard top 40 and to raise their profile in europe the band were playing packed venues in front of an audience who truly appreciated the post-smile material but at home the beach boys had lost their appeal desperate to improve the situation the band contacted their old concert promoter fred vale to help them reconnect with their lost audience carl called me and he said we're making some management changes out here you said your name came up and we'd love to have you considered rejoining the organization because it was a tough time for the beach boys all was not great all was not you know what it had been it was the best of times it was the worst of times and it really was brian he was taking a little bit of a back seat but he was also becoming much more reclusive so when i finally come back out and it's june of 1969 you know there is a little bit of a change in brian he's more withdrawn and a little bit more i i honestly felt he was a a little bit more insecure you know greed and the money versus personal ambition and personal passion and wanting to move on i'm it was you know it was a you know the perfect storm with wilson's link to his muse severed by the financial concerns of the beach boys his more ambitious and less commercial interests found an outlet elsewhere young poet stephen kalanich who had been signed to brother records back in 1967 had since become close to the wilson family and with the band busy touring brian developed a new project with this writer with the home studio at hand for these experiments they began recording kalanich's spoken word poetry with wilson's original compositions and backing vocals i think that brian wanted to do alternative things i also think and i don't mean this unkindly because i've become friends with him i think that there probably was pressure to stay with commercial kind of beach boy things and i i probably was not an artist that was very commercial but i think he was genuinely stirred and moved we never talked about a hit or i mean obviously this is not the kind of thing but we were excited with this with the galactic poems with the symphonies with america and doing things and it was it was such a joyful experience america i know you i feel your open spirit i roam in your open meadows i taste the oranges from your orange tree i smell the blossoms of your pear america i feel you i feel your restless spirit is a part of myself i see you in your snow-capped mountains that like a child's finger touch the sky and america i know you far away from smog and cities full of grime america i know you're open air and open field i fly into your arms there's so much about this this time precious dear brian not thinking commercially being artistic being spiritual being open to life almost recognizing that whatever we were doing felt like a gift he helped me organize it weed out what didn't need to be there he was an active part in the in this thing and he gave me the support and we did it together when brian sang lonely man in the studio with that high falsetto and i let me tell you of a lonely man and he got me to go my natural voice who lived it sounds like the middle ages to me or the the renaissance and he oh and he did those high notes and a lot of it's cut out the way they mixed it down my god like i get chills in my body are you an egomaniac no it's just it's almost like we didn't write it let me tell you of a lonely man who lived many many years ago [Music] and he searched for a love in a distant land and he didn't know where to go [Music] he's a lonely man he starts here and there and everywhere it's kind of like brian the love he could not find he searched in canada and spain and in italy around gibraltar near the red sea and the love was there was everywhere and the love he did not see it was in the flower in the meadow the brook running by the sea the apple and the orchard the cherry on the tree you know i mean the lonely man is no long and the heavens laid it open the light came shining down and there's no longer any lonely man around he was excited he liked listening to me recite he was so into it he was calling everybody the heads of record companies mo austin to try and help me get a replacement he had a real passion for it and i think he went with his own gut and probably no one not didn't not get much support unable to generate any interest in the project it was eventually abandoned resurfacing decades later yet at a time when he was without a clear sense of purpose these experiments highlighted that as an outsider in his own band the composer still needed others for inspiration and encouragement i think brian artistically hungered for a quantum leap of spirituality that because sometime all the material success and people loving you if you don't feel right within yourself i think brian was still searching for the road to himself i think he was wanting to feel needed wanting to feel appreciated wanting to know that what he was doing had purpose brian would call me up at 10 11 o'clock fred what are you doing oh i'm watching tv getting ready to go to bed oh i got a song i want to run it by you you know and come on out you know there's nobody here i want to i want to play it for you i want your response want your reaction you know want your input whatever so i'd hop in the car and drive out to bel air which was i don't know 20 25 minutes or so away and brian would talk and play me some songs and then just kind of just fiddle around and you know and all of a sudden it'd be one it'd be two o'clock in the morning and brian had gotten up at four or five and you know he was just you know reaching his peak you know and i've been up since seven o'clock in the morning you know and i had i knew i'd had to be up in the next morning at seven and you know by the time i finally would say well brian i gotta i gotta get home i gotta get some sleep and i gotta lock my plate tomorrow and you know i didn't to leave them but at the same time i was you know a couple nights i was exhausted yet these compositions that brian had been working on would form a major part of the beach boys next release at the end of november 1969 after struggling to find a suitable deal the band eventually signed to reprise records a subsidiary of warner brothers immediately after negotiations were complete they performed a short north american tour and in keeping with their recent domestic fortunes it was dismally attended yet the band were excited about their new label had begun working on a clutch of new songs and brian himself got caught up in the enthusiasm surrounding him unable to shake off their outdated image while on capitol with their first warner's release the band knew that expectations were running high and that they had to move into the new decade as a reinvigorated unit i was keenly aware of the importance of this album the beach boys are looked at as the establishment i mean they're still looked at as that that group that wear the white pants and the striped shirt even though they weren't wearing white pants and striped shirt they were still considered the band of the establishment and they're going up against the culture and it was a basically a little bit of a of a battle so to speak you know do they continue to pump out the very establishment very commercial hits that they had had you know 63 to 67 or do they go forward do they uh start to take on new you know new musical challenges reinvent themselves so to speak it was a time of growth a time of evolution for the beach boys it was a very creative time and uh brian was right in there too all the experimenting the fact that they were coming into their own as musicians and as writers the whole thing blossomed not only did the new sessions see an increase in brian wilson's contribution in terms of songwriting it also saw him step back into a more hands-on production role working with brian was exhausting because brian was fast it was all i could do to keep up with brian i was amazed at how few takes brian used for himself or others he was it he was a one or two takes and that was it and it was all he needed he was so good at singing he didn't need to keep doing it over and over and punch in and everything but um he would do that with other people if necessary especially instrumental tracks to get it right but if he was adding a part if he was playing a guitar if he was playing the organ or something it pretty one or two takes was all he needed a finished album was quickly delivered to warner reprise yet despite brian's increased presence the label were unable to hear clear hits and insisted that the band returned to the studio to strengthen the record one song however a composition by wilson and mike love did strike them as strongly commercial add some music to your day was rush released in late february 1970 as a taster for the forthcoming album but for all the high hopes of everyone involved that this would secure them a return to the top flight the single underperformed [Music] i don't think the media was too gung-ho on the record because there were so many outside artists and the whole era the whole counterculture thing uh they were you know they were up against that and it was a very very difficult task [Music] [Applause] [Music] it's kind of interesting as to why the song add some music was originally going to be the sunflower album title i mean everybody really really believed in this particular song at the same time this is a period where lyrics are the most important thing in a song and you know the lyrics are nice too nice it's just you know it becomes a bit saccharine anybody who had long hair down to their shoulders and a beard and is thinking about stopping the draft in the vietnam war is thinking that's dentist office music so what i don't understand is these guys who are running warner brothers records at the time who are managing the jimi hendrix experience and the grateful dead and all these other groups thinking that that was going to be such a big deal maybe brian wilson believed in that as being a big big deal maybe he didn't recognize what was going on the kind of song that had lyrics that might have communicated at that time was this whole world which brian had written it's about time which dennis had written these are sentiments the beach boys are expressing the same sentiments the counter culture was expressing [Music] and when i go [Music] this whole world is a good example of a really solid brian wilson song that would be good in any period by any standard this whole world is also a good example of him really experimenting with keys in a way that he did much earlier like in pet sounds and other things it starts in c and now somehow we're at a now we get to c-sharp or d-flat and then we get a descending base now we're in b-flat and we're back in c somehow we got from c to a to d flat to b flat and finally back to c if i play the keys like that they sound like they don't belong together like you couldn't actually make a song that uses those keys and and sounds coherent but um as always he the way he gets from one to the other is just masterful that wilson was back on form was seemingly confirmed by the clutch of other songs that he contributed to the album and on the surface sunflower promised a new period of productivity from a reinvigorated artist [Music] you have a sense that this guy is back at work i mean certainly if you view it through the limited lens of what seemed to be going on in 1970 you could pick up that album and you would think to yourself brian wilson is back on you know is back on the ball it's a different band it's a new era but brian is definitely first among equals here and that's a very heartening thing to think in 1970 and people you know certainly critics and people who are hip to that kind of sound you know or into that kind of music at the time were were overjoyed because it was a and remains a really really good album brian to a degree was back but he never was back a hundred percent because they'd all taken on new roles both in songwriting both in conceptual ideas in the studio in the control room behind the desk i mean you know the whole thing had changed you know it was no longer 1963 1966 it was a whole different era in keeping with these new roles when at the close of the sessions carl wilson and engineer stephen desper went back to the smile vaults to salvage the track cool cool water brian was barely involved yet the other band members were key in building and redeveloping the track carl conferred with brian as to how to put the song together and to some extent brian had an idea but he hadn't really finished it in his mind then the beach boys themselves including uh alan and bruce and michael and carl all contributed ideas that built on brian's foundation and built up the song that eventually got released on [Music] sunflower is [Music] brian's contribution was basically at the beginning in the smile sessions uh he did come down and and sing some parts mostly parts with carl saying a little fugue area with carl but it was it was a lot of hard work issued in august 1970 sunflower was perhaps the band's most coherent and exceptional album since pet sounds a confident step into a brave new world with all members contributing strongly yet despite glowing reviews upon its release it was the beach boys biggest commercial disappointment to date it was like the world had passed them by i was calling promoters who had made hundreds of thousands of dollars off the beach boys and they wouldn't return my calls i mean this was to me it was yeah i just couldn't believe it you know i was i was hurt i was deeply hurt because i knew the boys were still a great band and it was just a bomb that album was only on the charts four weeks it only made it to 151 on the national charts it was a dismal failure so a lot of um you know disappointment um a lot of head scratching a lot of doubt about their future a lot of finger pointing they were still the same beach boys and really not necessarily at the creative peak but certainly at one of their most creative eras or periods so it was pretty disheartening they had to decide were they going to break the band up and each member go their own way including brian or were they going to stick together and continue along those lines they decided to stay together despite the bitter blow of sunflower the beach boys pressed on determined to make their voice heard in a changing america ditching their previous management they installed young dj jack riley to oversee their affairs and he immediately brought a fresh insight into how they could become relevant again in october 1970 they played the big sur festival reconnecting with the countercultural audience and earning strong reviews in november the band played four shows at the most iconic club on the sunset strip the whiskey a gogo the former stomping ground of the doors and frank zappa the key draw was the appearance of one brian wilson who riley had convinced to return to the live arena yet the ailing composer left the stage on the second night and didn't return for any further performances the tides seemed to be turning however and in 1971 the beach boys continued to raise their profile with concerts at new york's carnegie hall and central park and at the fillmore east alongside the godfathers of the counterculture the grateful dead at the same time the band returned to the studio fueled by positive press and riley's guidance and keen to keep developing their sound brian wilson however was no longer so prepared to contribute leaning more heavily on a variety of drugs and isolating himself in his bedroom he shared none of the drive propelling his bandmates onward the whole group and including brian wilson had their heart inside of the sunflower album and brian i think put a lot of great effort into that record because no matter what anybody says you just hear brian's voice all over that thing the angel is singing everywhere all over that album he's got great vocal arrangements on that and some great brian wilson originals but also he's sharing work with his brothers too and it's all cohesive and then that just like goes nowhere that had to break brian wilson's heart and had to make him feel what do i have to do the way i would have handled brian would have been to hire a studio fill it full of musicians transport brian into the studio and just let him alone and just let him alone let him do whatever he wanted to do eventually you'd get something i think but uh he they tried to micromanage him a lot not not the beach boys so much as it was the management but you had all these factors you had all the whole band is is now coming into their own and of course his involvement with drugs didn't help the situation so it perhaps wasn't exactly the best time for brian all around and this was strongly reflected in the original songs he brought to the sessions unlike his sunflower compositions wilson himself had provided the lyrics to these new pieces and they clearly indicated his tortured psyche if his developing tendency to walk around in his bedclothes and to self-destructively consume drugs and fast food didn't highlight his clinical depression strongly enough these new works underlined it a day in the life of a tree co-written with manager jack riley was wilson's greatest departure so far from the surf cars and girls image that he had been fleeing since 1965. with the band uninterested in this new oddity wilson persuaded riley himself to provide the lead vocal and called in smile partner van dyke parks to add further touches that was a big creative song for brian we had a lot of discussions about that song he and i did the group at that point in time didn't understand this day in the life of the tree bringing the maid in to sing spanish having jack riley and van dyke parks and all of them in hindsight perhaps this was brian sort of saying i want to produce other people not the band because he definitely was but for me it was a great song because i saw the internal visualization that you would get from hearing the song and now how could i contribute to making that happen because brian had this whole idea of a tree aging and telling a microcosm of life through a tree and the story unfolded and brian was the brian was quite involved in that [Music] was full of life my son was rich and i was strong the central image is a tree that's being killed by pollution you know and it ends with this beautiful richly harmonized kind of coda that revolves around the word or the phrase trees like me weren't meant to live if all this world can give is pollution and slow death which on the one hand yes that parses as a song about the environment but on the other hand it's also a song about a guy creative guy working in a toxic environment [Music] brian clearly is in a very very bad state and and we know that now we also know that people just didn't know what to do about guys who were in that sort of state this is still very early days in terms of knowledge about addiction depression mental problems you know there are a lot of damaged people already by this relatively young point in the rock and roll story and yet people aren't going to rehab people are just being left to flounder nobody really knows what to do should one sort of blame people on the beach boys camp for not doing more to help brian at that point it's difficult to say you know is brian flagging up his trauma and extremely depressed state of mind in songs like a day in the life of tree yeah but he probably doesn't even know he's doing it himself in some senses that song could be heard in the context of their growing eco awareness and um therefore i don't think when i heard that track as a as a teenager it wouldn't have occurred to me that it was a cry from the heart so it might not have occurred to mike love or al jardine you know i think so you probably have to say that but if the anguish of this track was hidden by its imagery his other major contribution to the album till i die was more transparent written during the sunflower sessions its forlorn despair proved too much for some of his bandmates he brought it in and it was counterintuitively beautiful and lovely and brings light into the world even as it describes a world without light it's a neat trick if you can do it and you know mike love's reaction was it wasn't positive enough and he wanted him to change the lyrics which brian tried to do and they actually performed and i've i've heard the song and it's ridiculous you know he's saying it's like the capping lines of every for you know instead of like these sort of perfectly rendered images of somebody sinking and vanishing have been replaced by you know the ocean doesn't suck you up it like it holds me up he says it's like completely contradicting the spirit the sound and the spirit and the nature of of his message but fortunately brian and and whoever else who had the backbone said that doesn't work at all we're never going to do that we're going to go back to the original version and you know and and it you know worked beautifully [Music] that's probably one of the strongest commentaries on his state of mind at that time i'm a cork on the ocean just words of despair and musically i think it supports that too because you get these chords that just don't go anywhere just the tonality floats back and forth just like this court on the ocean these are just a bunch of chords we don't know what key we're in yet then finally we get a little more sense of key but then we're right back to this this goes on for a while through three verses matching again this idea that's in the lyric then finally at the end it says these things i'll be until i die and then at that point you get a really strong sense of key it finally does anchor itself [Music] these two there's this sense of arrival the sense of stability that you have only when i die if you're a creative person and you're working from your heart of hearts how could you you know how could it be tolerable to work with somebody who's telling you that what you're saying and what you're feeling isn't commercial enough you're not in a mood to you know to do that that's not how artists work they work in the opposite way they work with you know what they feel and what they're thinking becomes commercial because they say it in a way that's that's that's that's unique and beautiful and to tell somebody that your unique and beautiful work isn't going to be on the charts so you got to change it it's like if you especially if you're a fragile type of creative person like brian you're like you know what i'm out of here like this just is not working for me this and yet when you get yourself into a position where you're painted up against the wall like that there's nowhere to go except to disappear so brian's choice you know the the i think a self-preservational choice was to say i'm done yet he would be involved one final time with the album only two months before it was due for release the band again returned to the smile vaults resurrecting a track that was already known to some fans wilson at first aired surf's up on a cbs special inside pop the rock revolution broadcast in early 1967 and this legendary performance had left the beach boys community eagerly awaiting a complete version [Music] wilson had shelved the track in an unfinished state yet incomplete recordings remained and together carl wilson and steven despera began piecing the various elements together this was a very special song also a song that carried with it a mystique brian was afraid of the song he didn't want any part of it he didn't even want it finished until it until they began working with it it was i think part of the smile area where the fire was and the uh across the street and there was a stigma attached to it and we would work on the song and brian and hear brian get in his car and leave that was how much he was afraid of it surf's up [Music] come about heart and join the young and often spring [Music] at the end brian could hear all the things that were going on in the studio he could hear him through the floor because his bedroom was above the studio once in a while he would come down and say no no no i can't no it's got to be this way and then it would take a whole new direction everything would stop brian was in the studio everything would stop and it would all take a new direction surf's up became the title track of the album and combined with jack riley's impressive campaign to modernize the band the song's inclusion helped the beach boys achieve their greatest commercial success in years yet if brian wilson's original compositions on the album suggested a broken man he was in fact far from a spent force as the group celebrated their return to the u.s top 30 he focused his attention on other projects since the sessions for sunflower wilson had been sporadically spending time and composing material with the young musician david sandler who had been introduced to him by bandmate bruce johnston he was also looking for the right opportunity to work again with his wife marilyn and her sister diane revell who he'd previously composed material for and produced as part of the girl group the honeys in the early 60s while the other beach boys had focused on the serf's up album he decided to combine both of these outside projects and sander was called in to begin work alongside wilson as co-producer and songwriter for a new band spring with marilyn and diane on vocals and steven despera behind the desk i just think that he needed to sort of stretch his legs a little bit i think he's calling me and wanting to produce something that was not a beach boy project would be an example of that brian was definitely a person who would try things he was it was amazing how little resistance there was between him and something new brian was happy to have an outlet a creative outlet the idea was to do it inexpensively uh by using old tracks that that were borrowed from the beach boys and then adding to them the studio was there the engineer was there you just as well use it i think that he was searching you know he was he said i've done this and i'd like to take a look at all this and see what the next step is or if there is a next step [Music] convinced this was the next step as well as recording a clutch of familiar cover versions wilson also began working on new material with sandler this was a notable collaboration because unlike mike love or van dyke parks the young songwriter was first and foremost a musician rather than a lyricist he'd be playing and then he'd get up and i'd sit down and play so yeah there was that you know two people were basically musically oriented and when i was writing at that time i'd riff and i'd get a riff going and then get a melody and and words to go with it i think there was a burst of energy in it an album can be a place where chemistry takes place and it's inexplicable it's an intangible people come together and they don't even know it's happening it's just taking place and it happens over time and then at some point during the process they say hey you know something's happening here that was definitely i think an experience for brian in the midst of his reassessments [Music] [Music] wonderful [Music] creatively spring was where brian got to do his own thing he did only four songs on that he did sweet mountain and you know tennessee waltz and a few other things you know but desperate had a great hand in creating that album too and david sandler too that's a collaboration but it also gives brian the chance to feel his way through new kinds of sounds and new kind of things you know spring is one of his great moments you know he actually is a member of the spring group he's the third voice ginger blake is no longer part of the honeys it's diane revell and marilyn wilson brian wilson's the third voice and on four tracks a production element [Music] he was thirsty for some kind of inspiration maybe it was spring maybe it wasn't and uh you know he'd done the beach boy thing for six or seven years and they were touring and you know it was a business so i think he just wanted he wanted something to inspire him and i was always worried that when i worked with him that you know that i would be seen as somehow taking him away from what was for them bread and butter you know so i just tried to keep my distance from anything had to do with his relationship with him i don't think it was a big enough endeavor for brian brian needed he needed to form his own band is what he needed to do he wasn't in charge anymore so maybe that was more of a psychological weight for him to bear than we all realized at the time and in hindsight wonderful thing hindsight but maybe it would have been best for the beach boys to break up who knows by the time the album was released to little fanfare in july 1972 wilson's other band also had a new lp completed and in the stores with a recently purchased recording venue at their disposal brother studios in santa monica the beach boys had worked for the first time at a real distance from brian carl wilson still at the helm they strengthened their sound with new recruits blondie chaplin and ricky fattar and by early 1972 had completed a new collection of material yet after the positive performance of surf's up karl and the passions so tough failed to connect with either the public or critics i tend to think that carl and patrons is rather underrated it is generally sort of slagged off over the years but i think the beach boys at this point are coming together as a sort of cohesive ensemble in a new way directed by carl augmenting the lineup with blondie and ricky and i think it kind of works i think it's as close as the beach boys came to being a kind of californian rock band we all spend so much time sort of lamenting the decline of brian's genius that we tend to uh miss the upside of that which is that the others do you know come out of the woodwork and and produce work that's maybe not as great as pat sounds but but it's credible brian wilson was involved as a songwriter on two tracks however you need a mess of help to stand alone and marcella yet as a performer he was all but absent [Music] [Music] there's enough of him there where you know he kind of sends his presence but in an un you know equally unexpected is the fact that a lot of the other songs on the album are better maybe or more you know or are just as good let's put it that way i don't think you need a mess of help standalone stands out particularly as a brian composition i mean you know if you compare carl the passions to surf's up some of the peak moments on surf's up definitely are the brian wilson tracks you know serves up itself of course until i die i mean those are the those are the peaks of that album i don't think on carl the passions you can say the same thing [Music] yet understanding that the reclusive composer was still the main draw for the band's fan base warner's not only chose both of wilson's compositions as singles but also ensured that despite his disinterest he still appeared to be a member of the group the photo on the cover of carl and the passions is striking for a few reasons first of them the addition of ricky fattar and blondie chaplin south african musicians who carl had really developed a deep relationship with and and had them join the beach boys and they brought a whole new and i think in many ways a very welcome addition to the sound because they were both good performers they good musicians and they kind of added some grit to the beach boys sound so you have that and you also have brian who seems to be there but actually has been very craftily edited into this photograph that is actually an image of him from a completely different place in time they have to find an artificial way to reintroduce him into the community and that community still wanted brian wilson to play a more active role in their music in june 1972 the beach boys headed for holland to begin working on their next album a radical relocation of their studio enabled them to write and record in a new environment one which the band hoped would fuel their inspiration yet as they tried to coax wilson out of his isolation to join them he had already found inspiration elsewhere randy newman was a new breed of singer-songwriter a piano-based performer and composer with major critical appeal and his 1972 album sail away reignited wilson's interest in contemporary music he hadn't really come out vocally about any rock and roll for a long time since rubber soul which is like december of 1965 and here it is 1972 when he embraces randy newman's sail away well why does it even why is he even opening his ears to that because people he knew and people he was involved with were making that record you got russ heidelman lenny warnicker who was tight with van dyke parks van dijk was you know very involved with randy newman's career at warner brothers so he hears about it because his friends are into it you know and randy newman was obviously an incredibly skilled songwriter and a piano based songwriter right and the kind of sound that's on that record brian gets it he just makes total sense to [Music] through the him and scuff up your feet you're just saying about jesus and drank wine all day it's great to be well it's a very disconsolate album in a lot of ways it's very dark and it has the feel of a circus sideshow you know and also this weird sort of uh old homey feel to the title track which is a hugely ugly recitation by a slaver you know telling these spinning these fairy tales for these you know the enslaved people being shipped off to the us you know and how everything's going to be perfect for them when you know everything's going to be hell for them you know and would continue to be thus not just through slavery but also through the terrible you know segregated years and you know and even now to a degree every man is free [Music] sail [Music] to my mind brian's connection to that album and it was a deep and abiding connection was you know it sort of resonates to the core of his tragedy that that he could identify with this godless world that randy newman was was was describing i think by the time that they were getting ready to record holland i mean he was feeling thoroughly and utterly bereft of light the other guys in the band and his wife and the kids had all shipped off to holland and he's sitting there and he's supposed to fly out and he ain't going and he ain't going and what he's doing is that he's staying home listening to sail away when wilson did finally cross the atlantic and contribute to the album the major composition he labored on showed little of newman's influence the epic musical fantasy mount vernon and fairway seemed to rise from the same creative impulse that had forged a day in the life of a tree and again the other band members were baffled in january 1973 the result of the beach boys european experiment was issued the lp holland and it was decided that brian wilson's lengthy anomaly was simply too incongruous to fit on the album it was instead included as a bonus ep musically it's fantastic it's strange it's got a lot of spoken word pieces in it which are again are voiced by jack reilly but also again speaking from the heart from the essence of his soul about his experience with music and it's all about you know because that mount vernon in fairway is a direct reference to the street corner outside the teenage mike loves house where he and brian would sit up and and sing you know harmonize on songs like in cars outside outside the house and so i think at that point you know he was definitely ready to kind of a not only romanticize the beauty of that but then also delve into you know you know that there was always someone not far away ready to take it away from him there was a mansion on a hill but deep in a secret kingdom where a young prince lived he had four sisters and four brothers the prince had a special bedroom on the ground floor with a window that looked down into a deep deep forest he could see distant lights from other castles in the kingdom from his window during the day he went to school when it became night he stayed by himself usually in his secret hidden bedroom one night while nearly everyone was asleep he took out of the attic a radio and he decided to listen to it when you bought holland you played that ep once probably and you never played it again and it just seemed um a strange sort of footnote or indulgence and what did it really mean i mean now you kind of look back and it's almost like brian as michael jackson and neverland or something it's sort of regressive as a sort of fantasy of his childhood and the magic of the transistor radio and the land to which he travels through hearing this music on the airwaves so it does seem to sort of hanker for some magical time in his memory that he can't he can't really access anymore it's pretty sad rather than magical dancing back and forth the magic transistor started moving down his path he could hear the sound coming out like nothing he had ever heard before the trees were getting closer together and flowers glowed with tinges of magic light as he followed thinking to himself what's going on it's odd it was not something that was designed or ever could have been commercially successful it was edit it was a it was very long it i think it would have taken up most of a side of an album uh if not the entire side it was an eccentric work from an eccentric guy describing his eccentric life so on one level it's hugely successful on another level it can't exist on a rock and roll record in 1973. and that record on which the other members of the beach boys continued to grow as songwriters and performers proved a notable success hitting the u.s top 40 and remaining in the charts for seven months i don't think holland is vastly superior to carl on the passions but it probably is a better record contract for track i think it is definitely an album that suggests maturity regardless of the agendas of each of them and the internal politics you know they do pull together they take the music music seriously you know they're not just hacking it they want to make a great album [Music] holland is oddly the least brian wilson album that they have and one of my favorites these are the works of the other beach boys to a great degree to some extent working along the lines of what brian had created but to a to a i think a bigger extent being themselves and writing about their lives and their experiences and using their own distinct sort of sounds and influences and it was hugely satisfying for a time i mean holland was i mean in rolling stone magazine i remember it was just you know wonderfully reviewed as one of their better albums yet once again warner reprise had been dissatisfied with the original master when it was delivered and sail on sailor a track that van dyke parks had composed with brian wilson back in may 1972 was resurrected and recorded it became the album's lead single and its lyrics showed a strain of optimism absent from wilson's recent work the reason why i think ceylon sailor is an even more important song for brian wilson than till i die is the despair and and hopelessness and and just i want to get away from it all and out that till i die is about is then a new birth with sale on sailor because i'm going to continue i'm going to deal you know like the lyrics of sale on sale go on about rebirth and rediscovery and just getting through those hard times and then coming out of it [Music] there's no wonder wow [Music] when brian wilson did the smile to her in 2004 he did sail on sailor and he totally reclaimed the song as he reclaimed the smile album it was kind of an amazing thing for all of us to look around and say he's actually singing this and he's saying all the words and he knows those words and he feels those words that's why that's such an important song because he's going to carry on this guy outlived dennis he outlived murray he outlived carl he outlived the entire jimi hendrix experience who said surf music is dead sale on sailor shows where brian's personality really was he was going to survive in 1973 however that was far from obvious in june murray wilson passed away and losing the volatile anchor that was both damaging and stabilizing brian spiraled out of control first fleeing to new york and avoiding the funeral by the end of the month the composer returned to his bel-air home and retired to his bed where he would remain on and off for the next two years cast adrift from his old band and without any new projects to focus on brian wilson disappeared from public life the beach boys on the other hand were about to see their fortunes change popular culture had reached a turning point and with america exhausted by the disaster of the vietnam war the watergate scandal and failed revolutionary politics a new wave of nostalgia swept across the nation heralded by the release of george lucas's hit film american graffiti which painted an idealized romantic image of early 60s youth culture this collective yearning for a more innocent time hugely benefited the beach boys whose early work exemplified this era capitol records were quick to notice this new trend and rush released a cleverly compiled best of album endless summer in 1974 a selection of the band's material from 62 to 65 it sold more than a million copies and elevated the beach boys to a popularity they had hardly known in their heyday there's no doubt the compilations were helped by a huge undertow of nostalgia and recycling and return to pre-psychedelic pre-experimental pop innocence if you like you know it's the days of hamburger stands and milkshakes and drive-ins and everything that american graffiti represented very important and everybody's going back to that it's certainly it's certainly not just the beach boys endless summer i suppose ultimately it vindicated the mic love camp it said you know come on guys let's just be pragmatic here let's not [ __ ] with the formula the formula is that the people want those old hits they want to hear them in the summer fairgrounds and they want to hear them in the arenas and the bowls and that's that's what they want the fact that this beach boy's early music makes his comeback via the endless summer just changes the whole picture and the band starts to do a set list that basically remained until this day i think you know how does it the concert starts out with california girls it ends with surfing usa they come back with good vibrations for the encore and barbara anne and finally end with fun fun found whoopi we're home you know instead of doing ride on sell block number nine and student demonstration time you know it just becomes a completely different thing it just changes overnight the trajectory that had seen the band free themselves from their past and establish a more modest fan base with the mature sounds of carl and the passions in holland was at an end jack riley was sacked blondie chaplin and ricky fattar soon left the band and the focus was on capitalizing on the new nostalgia audience in 1975 the band toured relentlessly while further compilations hit the shelves yet the composer who had written the majority of the classics that audiences wanted to hear was nowhere to be seen by this time brian wilson was a changed man mentally and now physically the years of fast food drugs and inactivity having visibly taken their toll finally in late 75 a radical therapist dr eugene landy was called in to bring brian wilson back to the land of the living i don't think they were really in a position one way or the other to really want to acknowledge that he had some mental problems a lot of people and i think particularly from their background are very determined to not do that because at which point you begin to admit something very scary and something that's very stigmatizing but he was really not well and in order to try to make him well uh that's when his wife marilyn and long-suffering wife by the way she hired this the psychologist gene landy who was suspiciously enough very tied in you know to show biz people but he had a very strict kind of fascistic style of practice where you you just tear you know you take these people and you essentially re-parent them and you uh you know people who have drug habits people who have antisocial habits usually these things come together high functioning super successful weirdos that you take and re-kind of raise into functional creative people he sort of became the anchor that brian had with his father in his life telling him to get up off his ass and do his work and brian kind of needs that and i think that once he developed a little motivation you know a little momentum and sort of the new bounds of his life were you know were sort of created for him he could work by 1976 wilson was showing signs of improvement under landy's regime not only was he out of bed and exercising but he was also starting to write songs again at the therapist's insistence this presented an opportunity for the beach boys as warner reprise were desperate to see brian involved in the band's next album despite work already completed by the other wilson brothers dennis and carl had worked for the full two years probably most days that they had free working on albums and trying to get the best possible beach boy songs that they could and it wouldn't fly without brian's name on it i mean i i heard that literally from business people you know until you get brian in there it's not gonna happen you know and then you know it doesn't matter what terrible song it would be that would be the single and that would be you know the sales point brian's back you know so they had to do whatever they could to get brian in the studio to do something they managed to get brian and the various people from the wrecking crew and so on and from universal audio over to record with brian and finally did it you know finally got it together to do the 15 big ones albums the sort of scheme they came up with was this great sort of brian is back mythos this this idea that brian wilson after all these years has finally gotten up he's ready to work he's going to produce an album for us so this guy who produced and wrote all those great hits that you just bought in mass quantity with endless summer is producing writing and producing you know work that you can now newwork that you can now buy in mass quantities and not only that he's going to be a performing functioning member of this band a one a two a one two three go i've stayed off the drugs and come back into my own and the in between my wife the doctors and my brothers and my mother and a couple friends they all convinced me to get out of my room get back in there in the studio and get to work i won't say that brian wasn't nervous on the 15 big ones album because that was that's you know brian is back but brian doesn't want to be back was it might be the catchphrase for that album and so even though all the people in the room were his friends from the old days uh he he just couldn't wait to get out of the room he wasn't ready to come into the studio but i suspect that if you left him alone and waited for him to get ready he would never get ready you know so uh he needed a push so he seemed uncomfortable not because he wasn't used to what you do in a studio but just because he was out and away from his bedroom that was frightening to brian i truly believe and you know but getting him into brother's studio even with the only two or three very friendly people around him he was still very nervous to deal with people that he didn't know so that went slowly but when it came to actually recording that was in a way i believe his refuge he could sit down into piano and play comfortably he could even be in front of the console and mixing comfortably he had he knew exactly how he had done it that he knew just how to do it and the more times he stuck to his regimen the more things got done the music that brian was interested in working on was a source of conflict however despite the wealth of new material he'd been writing under land his instruction he was less comfortable developing these tracks and instead chose to feel his way back into the recording process by producing versions of rock and roll standards sessions broke down more than once with the other wilson brothers adamant that the original songs were far more vital and in the end the album 15 big ones was a compromise a mixture of covers and new compositions despite a tepid critical reception the first new beach boys lp in three years was their biggest seller since the mid sixties fifteen big ones was promoted bigger than any beach boy record had been for a long time if it had been a real beach boy album it would have been i would have been happy it would have been wonderful if it had had that type of promotion i think the beach boys if they hadn't gone back on top they would be at least up to the level of all the other you know popular bands but you know it was just a album full of oldies that you know brian tossed out and so uh the fact that it sold well i think meant that the songs weren't offensive and that the promotion was incredible [Music] is [Music] is [Music] 15 big ones feels a little more like batting practice you know to use an american image of baseball he's there you know he's he's taken swings at stuff and sometimes he whacks it really hard and sometimes it's satisfying and sometimes it just sort of like thumps into the catcher's mitt it is not you know a record that comes from very deep within him but it was a hit i mean it was a big hit and it had a big hit single in his sort of arrangement of rock and roll music which was a distinctively new kind of arrangement you know and bore his mark but a lot of the other songs were rearranged in ways that i think people found like unsettling or off-putting and certainly the band did and they really didn't like the way that he was you know hit the sort of sound he'd come up with this next song we're gonna do is a brand new from our album also it was written by uh brian wilson for sure [Music] is [Music] [Music] the revelations kind of come when you least expect them they come uh you know i mean he wrote a song called it's okay which is a very do it again kind of thing it's it's nice i i like that song actually uh had to phone you sort of has it but it's a very light frothy or record with this [Music] it's okay might be the one thing he did on 15 big ones right that actually there was some effort behind i mean i listen every time i listen to that song it ends up engulfing me in the joy that the intent is it's like do it again part two you know it really that particular track works quite well but off the top of my head i can't think of anything else on 15 big ones that really you know kicks my butt the original brian wilson songs on 15 big ones are i think pretty ordinary nothing special it's okay as a good example which is just okay i mean the vocals are really nice and you know it's a nice production but it's you know it doesn't just dazzle you i think uh one song that's really telling is the one called that same song which is a song about looking back on the songs that you grew up with and that you remember and they even go back in music history to gregorian chant and talk about the whole history of back in music with just a rhythm and rhyme gregorian chants were a real big thing they took that genetic harmony it was a different sound but had the same meaning [Music] singing that same song we're still singing songs [Music] i can imagine what a song like that might have been like if brian wilson had done it in the mid 60s when he was at the height of his creative powers you know he might have found some musical way to demonstrate this sense of a historical sweep within the song whereas the way they do it in 15 big ones in that same song you know it's all in the same style the music is all in the same style it's a perfectly pleasant little song typical of the other originals in that era and on that album but but the there's no real organic connection between the message that the lyric has and the music itself but the public couldn't get enough of the beach boys or the return of their enigmatic leader with the brian's back campaign in full swing wilson was thrust into the public eye like never before it kicked off this ginormous tour in the summer 76 where the beach boys are back and guess what now brian's with him and he's playing on stage he's got this big silk bathrobe which sort of both alluded to and satirized his bedroom years you know and i remember seeing that show in 1976 up in seattle and feeling like this was awesome like this was exactly what i had hoped for and they're playing massive amounts of oldies now the new stuff is maybe 25 but brian was way off his game he barely sang when he did sing it was this kind of very rusty croak it was a weird kind of moment but if you squinted just right and blocked off certain things it kind of worked you know a recluse who was suddenly pushed into the media spotlight wilson's discomfort was often all too evident yet for the beach boys the record label and the audience the main thing was that he was there he hit the interview circuit made public appearances and took part in an nbc special featuring a comedy routine with saturday night live stars dan aykroyd and john belushi all celebrating the return of a great american composer [Music] but others were keen on digging a little deeper including rolling stone scribe david felton who spent unprecedented time with wilson and his publicity hungry therapist eugene landy in his seminal article the healing of brother brian he documented a return to the limelight that was far more complex than the one the marketing machine was selling i think the question to me was not so much about what's he going to be like but it was what is he like after i met him like is this the real brian rules and how much have i seen uh of him i never could tell for example i mean eugene landy his his shrink turned uh public exploiter or whatever uh the villain of the piece he said brian doesn't have that much sense of humor and i never could i have never knew the answer to that does he or does he sometimes i thought he would had a very wry sense of humor and other times i felt he talked almost like a robot or somebody sort of not programmed but just stiff and and without emotion without affectation he does what he's told and he doesn't do much else he answers your questions but he doesn't offer too much and i don't think that was being difficult i think he really was waking up waking up and i don't think he exactly knew what to do other than what people sort of showed him to do there were certain things he knew a lot about but how he should act he just didn't act very much you know and that way he kept out of trouble he was having to learn to have a good time without all the things that previously allowed him to have a good time it's pretty difficult so he i think he had felt he had a big pressure to behave and to cooperate and you know and if he didn't he'd hear about it from landi often in front of everybody else felton's article presented brian in a very honest forthright way he clearly hit it off with the guy brian welcomed him into his inner sanctum so he's getting brian's thoughts but he's also getting this kind of not so vaguely poisonous thing happening with landy because landy one of landy's great flaws is that he was a complete attention [ __ ] that he needed the attention and the moment he got his hooks you know the moment he got into a relationship with somebody like brian he wanted to stand up with him and be kind of like you know his partner landy makes you tell that kind of story i mean he's such a performer and just from the very beginning of his interview i mean you knew you had a character you had to you couldn't you couldn't stop him i mean he he he to him he was the star of the story and i let him be one of the stars you know he was full of himself and you know i always thought he was bad-mannered and that he was exploiting his work with brian at the expense of brian and i mentioned that he was not an uh ethical guy i don't think and you know he did so many other things that you thought the whole thing might have been a scam however one way to keep a person from taking drugs is having a guard there to keep him from taking drugs it's called prison but it was in his home they were putting him out to be gone over you know they shoved him back and he kind of became the locust of their image the great brian wilson and felton's story for all the kind of you know the facets that he brings in including these kind of dark horrifying facets sort of ends on a kind of a note of of hope brian's writing songs you know he's got a bunch of stuff he's playing new songs for felton which felton seems to like a lot and it seemed to bode well but it really didn't by the end of the year with his fees having doubled since taking charge of brian landy was fired by the beach boys new manager steve love yet his techniques had apparently been a great success and wilson entered the studio in october 1976 to begin recording the new tracks that he had played to feltham his confidence growing he also made two television appearances without the band behind him on the mike douglas show and saturday night live and the public was given a far more intimate performance than the live shows had allowed sat behind a piano his voice gruff the randy newman influence was now clear but it left beach boys fans disheartened this is a song that comes off our current album and the album is called 15 big ones and it's called back home [Music] [Applause] [Music] brian appeared on saturday night live america just said this guy ain't back you know if you've heard him sing back home and i'm not going to do my impersonation but you know in private maybe sometime but come on man that's not brian wilson's voice [Music] brian wilson at the time said that he was influenced by louis armstrong but when you have the gift of the voice that brian wilson had and then you cut to louis armstrong you just got to ask why this is a guy who 10 years earlier would stop the vocal sessions in the middle of a song because he didn't think there was enough emotion in the ooze and you get to a point ten years later where not only is he i think consciously singing in this gruff rough randy newman tom waits ask kind of voice but he's kind of not caring or paying too close attention i mean he's mostly in tune but he doesn't care that much anymore [Music] and for somebody who is bad about vocals and vocal arrangements that's where it begins to feel a little self-destructive or at least as a kind of self-destructive gesture yet brian was pursuing very different artistic aims and simply satisfying his core fan base and this new voice would be prominent on the material that he was developing with the rest of the beach boys otherwise engaged he was left to his own devices in brother studios with engineer earl mankey and having rediscovered his enthusiasm for recording he began to experiment with a passion that had been absent for the best part of a decade if 15 big ones was to get brian comfortable in the studio by working with all of his friends from the old days then as brian came into the studio each day to work on new songs i think the idea at that point was let's bring in the guys one at a time as brian needs them you know given that structure brian ended up playing a whole lot more of his own instrumentation than he did and no offense to brian but uh given that it tended to be a lot more amateurish and a lot more what brian played the songs had a similarity because he had just learned how to work a synthesizer and he had his he had his favorite drum pattern that he always played and his favorite bass lines that he always played so in the end it was much more a brian wilson thing i think than even anyone might have hoped because of the preponderance of brian playing all the instruments it was basically a brian wilson home home recording wilson's personal input into these songs was not just musical landi had also encouraged him to write lyrics to get his thoughts onto paper and to take inspiration from anything around him no matter how insignificant not only did this lead to a wealth of material being quickly written but it also created a catalogue of very personal work detailing both the commonplace concerns and the inner life of its author with song titles including bring your own comb and quit using my toothpaste they may have seemed left field or odd i do think that they are totally autobiographical and the same as it's a lot easier to walk over and grab the synthesizer instead of you know calling in a string section it's a lot easier to write the words than to try to get together with a lyricist and i'm sure that that would have been the easiest out for brian and uh you know and he brian did work write songs it's not like he had ever never written any lyrics but uh brian wilson lyrics maybe weren't as familiar to the public as those other lyricists were and so the beach boy love you songs might have seemed odder because nobody really knew what brian was really like you know and some of his bandmates wanted to keep it that way by the end of 1976 wilson had recorded enough tracks for two albums and his initial intention was to release the most personal material as a solo album entitled brian loves you yet when the other band members heard the results of his labor they were far from impressed and although the resulted lp would bear the name the beach boys and feature the involvement of the entire group like pet sounds before it the album bore the mark of one very singular creator my opinion of the love you album is that it's a brian record and i guess it's because i know how it went down it was a bryan record he had no thoughts at all about being a beach boy no he didn't want to be a beach boy no he didn't want to do surfing songs for sure and he was just being he was most comfortable being an artist you know being whatever popped out of his head [Music] is [Music] oh [Music] but nobody had confidence in that when my canal heard it as not being the beach boys things that they could do live on stage and promote you know the beach boys live show they thought it was crap but you know brian was doing what he had always done [Music] i think that brian could have used a lot more support not just from business people that you would expect wouldn't ever give you the support they never have any sensitivity but especially uh mike and al uh if they if there was there it wasn't just a lack of support support it was an antagonism towards them you know they'd brian would play something he'd be been working on that and he was proud of and uh you know they'd look at each other and you know give back you know they'd you know alan would say to to dennis you'd give him the finger underneath his palm you know when you hear the thing playing you know where brian was trying to do his best you know and i felt like that was just a total lack of support and i suspect it's still that way and i don't see how brian is going to produce in a situation like that [Music] [Applause] the most divisive album in the beach boy's entire catalogue la view was released in april 77 and polarized both fans and critics suffering from a lack of support from warner reprise and with no obvious singles to entice the nostalgia market after all the brian is back height this bizarre record failed to match the success of 15 big ones this music was unlike anything you'd ever heard before and not in the good way you know i mean not immediately anyway it was so different and it was played almost entirely on synthesizer and you listen to it the first few times and it's like how weird and off-putting is this but it had a magic because it came from this guy's heart and this was his imagined world and you get in there and it's weird but it's engagingly weird it could only be made by one guy what do the planets mean and have you ever seen sunrise in the morning it shined when you were born saturn has rings all around it i searched the [Music] it did sound childlike it sounded very childlike it sounded like cosmic nursery ditties in a way and which i think it sort of is there's a faux naive quality to it or maybe just a naive naivete to the record it just it sounds like a man who hasn't grown up an outsider artist may be there are moments where you sort of think about a daniel johnston there attracts by daniel johnston sort of have the same strangely child-like beauty and innocence to them and so i think one almost does have to hear the album in that in that context but at the end of the day it feels like quite a happy record it's not it's not sort of troubled i think it's one of the best speech boys albums really i think it's up there uh in its strange ways [Music] [Music] make this wish come true i take pride in it because it shows something that you would never see of brian in your typical corporate presentation of brian you have to nail down your expectations of a beach boys song you know is it the old surf and fun thing with the you know rock and roll lyrics is it uh is it the production of pet sounds is it the simplicity and honesty of beach boys love you you know uh if you're looking for a more arty record then uh beach boys love you is gonna be that and if you and if and if you also know the back story oh here's brian this crazy guy has been in his bedroom forever and now he's coming out and doing some songs about watching johnny carson on tv well you don't want to hear the big pet sounds production and external musicians doing complex parts you want to hear brian wilson's voice crack while he tells you the story of johnny carson you know that's that's art uh i don't know if brian knew it was art but but i recognize it he sits behind his microphone he speaks in such a manly tongue one of the high points is a student called johnny carson which is about the tv you know the tonight show host johnny carson who at the time was a huge institution you know it was like he was the american late night talk show host there were no others i mean nobody could you know dick cavett tried couldn't knock him out mike douglas could not mock you know knock him out mur and all these guys sort of had their turn and you know and johnny was the guy [Applause] [Music] he's singing the song about this guy and he's talking about how manly his voice is the listener says what you know man like that's not the first thing you think of with johnny carson he's got a nice gruff you know he's got a a a grown man's baritone voice and he smokes a lot so it's a little rough on the edges but you know and how he just keeps it up and he never stops and the network makes him break his back but he ain't going anywhere you know he's rough and tough and he's the guy that we admire you know he's smart he's funny he's gutsy you know and he can do this night after night after night and you know wow [Music] this guy is like a factory of of brilliance as far as he's concerned johnny carson what a genius he just cranks it out cranks it out cranks it out which is what brian has been told to do for his entire adult life crank it out crank it out crank it so he's giving it up to the guy that can really do it without losing his mind and he's right and he's written and performed the song which sounds like a fac a musical vision of a factory [Music] because you like brian wilson so much you know his voice on beach boys love you is this acquired taste kind of thing you have to kind of force yourself to go into that you know as opposed to the way the beach boys records really used to hit you was boom you liked it right away you know it wasn't this like weird challenge to kind of like it the guy can really write songs still obviously but the way he chooses to present himself as a singer just loses me you know and i think loses the public despite its many merits the public didn't warm to this new exposed brian wilson failing to hit the top 50 in the u.s it was deemed a misstep by a band eager to continue generating substantial touring revenue and to get out of their contract with warner reprise still riding on the wave of creativity that dr landy's therapy had inspired since january 1977 wilson had been busy working on more new material for the proposed lp adult child yet the lack of sales for the beach boys love you meant that this album would never materialize adult child was really brian wilson's starting to develop and brian wilson's starting to get good again life is for the living he goes back and he uses dick reynolds from the christmas album and who helped him with orchestration to the point where brown was able to make pet sounds he goes back and gets dick reynolds and does the arrangement on life is for the living and the song the lyrics mean something to people at that [Music] that time went out a long time ago [Music] there was a definite move towards you know exercise consciousness and health food consciousness and the growth of that culture brian was right on the cutting edge of that also he tried to write this song still i dream of it for frank sinatra and it was a really good attempt to write a song that sinatra could have sang and it was great this is really good brian wilson music and you know what he's starting to lose that kind of bad edge to his vocals and his vocals are actually starting to sound of that doable day when i can say i fall in love [Music] and it haunts me so like a dream that somehow lived to [Music] it was really the next step in brian wilson's development because i think he's starting to write a little bit more about things that matter to people and i think brian was starting to grow he actually had started to slim down he looked better and then gone the whole thing is just a very eccentric collection of styles and songs and ideas at which point they heard that and they said game over buddy we're taking back you know we're taking back the reigns you know it's like get away from the vehicle keep your hands or we can see him and we're going to take this somewhere else and at the time maybe brian was just as happy maybe that kind of affront to his creativity was too much like smile for less than two years brian wilson had apparently been back yet in a repeat of 1967 the result of his labor was considered too distant from the band's original template and a threat to their mainstream popularity and another album was abandoned this time however a rift opened up at the heart of the beach boys carl wilson and dennis wilson are the vote here saying we need to stay creative at the same time mike and now goes no no no no we need to focus on this stadium rock stuff we're our our success is because of our old songs so this psychic split happens and what does brian wilson do he tries to avoid it as much as he possibly can and he ends up voting with mike and l i think brian knew that mike was going to work harder and be a little more safer bet to keep the band alive than carl who was still getting messed up on drugs and dennis who obviously you know was still getting messed up on drugs too so i think brian voted with like the safer thing but the thing is the public grows tired of repetition you know and this is what led them down the path of you know playing anaheim stadium to playing county fairs today even if mike love may have seemed the safer bet as the leader of the band his finger was typically far from the pulse of popular taste dennis wilson had already been channeling his creativity into solo projects and when sessions for the group's last warner reprise lp began neither he nor his brother carl attended true to his vote brian wilson joined his remaining bandmates to record what will become the beach boy's worst performing release in sunflower the mru album these guys like workmen decide well what's worked lately surfing songs car songs girl songs and so they write this album worth of like lukewarm half-hearted crap and sometimes with brian's participation which is really sort of the tragic part you see brian's compositional credit on these things and hear his voice on the songs on this album and it's just like oh it's like it's like a nightmare vision it's been my [Music] kona secret in hawaii [Music] for years i saved my pennies and planned it the great pacific ocean was [Music] both those guys al and mike have written songs that i like a lot and produce stuff that i like a lot none of it's on this record you know it's a completely cynical attempt to be commercial and it's completely wrong and it was a huge disaster all the way around i can't say it better than the fact that dennis wilson's pacific ocean blue album the first solo album by any member of the beach boys went to number 96 it hit the hot 100 and meanwhile the contemporary beach boys album at that time miu album went number 151 so dennis had done better on the album charts than the beach boys did in in 1978 you know that says a ton it just doesn't communicate you know it doesn't really mean anything to people it's just so bland the album's failure was insignificant compared to the deteriorating condition of the group's returned prodigal son with landy gone his marriage falling apart his brothers losing interest in the band and the beach boys themselves selling out arenas but stagnating artistically brian wilson once again began to decline back in 1977 the beach boys had signed to cbs records and after the release of miu wilson was enlisted to produce the first album for the label yet no longer in a fit state to work he abandoned the sessions and by the close of the year was admitted to hospital due to his fragile mental state although the resultant record la light album was a moderate success wilson's presence was minimal by the end of the decade back at home with 24-hour care and with his marriage to maryland now over the celebrations only three years beforehand seemed premature brian was back but at what cost he was neither willing or able to be a functioning recording artist you know the cruel irony is that that was when they really had locked him into the touring party and he was going out on the road playing these shows and it was just kind of getting worse and worse you know he just was getting bigger again he was smoking chain smoking on stage uh and then take a cigarette out of his mouth long enough to like take a stab at singing god only knows or or good vibrations or something and it was not fun to hear i think a lot of the times they either weren't miking the piano or they turned him way down because he would at times play other songs you know he was doing his own thing out there and sometimes he was hooked up and he'd play stuff and sometimes his mind would drift and he just clearly didn't care the extent to which he was willing to be on stage or would stay there all day and seem to be in the band was just like okay i have to sit here for a couple hours i can sit here for a couple hours everybody knows that brian was you know the genius the creative force the the guy who essentially wrote all that incredible music it then does become important to sort of wheel him out from time to time and you know um with us almost like we all know about brian's problems don't we thank our beloved for writing all that beautiful music and making this evening possible let's hear from brian wilson almost a kind of slightly patronizing like sort of wheeling out your eccentric uncle albert or something they can't really quite cut themselves loose from what brian represents ladies and gentlemen brian wilson [Music] together [Music] in [Music] he becomes a carnival bear which dragged him out and like say here he is here's the guy here's the guy behind it all and and it was just so bogus and so phony and just so misguided for many years you would look at him and think like this is the saddest thing i've ever seen because you have this genius the stone cold american genius being made to play the part of himself with zero interest zero pleasure and you know and and and it was just a tragedy unfolding before your eyes as this tragedy played out month after month in front of huge audiences the turn of the decade saw any hope of the beach boys returning to their creative best disappear as the moral majority and the rise of the new christian right helped launch an era of conservatism through the presidency of ronald reagan the ban dismissed by the counterculture in 1967 suddenly found a new place in a new america come the 80s you look at the beach boys and they absolutely seem to sort of stand for patriotic white republican american values the number of times they've pitched up at the the white house is bad enough and then playing for reagan and i mean it's it's it's horrible it just sticks in your craw how can it not and you see pictures of the beach boys in the 80s in their puma socks and shorts and golfing attire and you know you realize they've just become these semi-retired santa barbara millionaires and it just got nothing to do with rock and roll or pop culture anymore it's just a business one of the parts of this and i think it was actually one of the saddest most pathetic parts of it to me was when suddenly they began to brand themselves as america's band so it's sort of like oh i get it it's like a it's like a a patriotic thing you know it's like they're trying to confabulate themselves with the idea of america and they were sort of like so which makes it even easier because it's like well you know they're like a national utility you know they're a national uh you know uh resource in a sense they needed to be popular and however they could possibly prime the pump to make more money come through it was what they were going to do yet although it was financially rewarding this path was a dead end for the more creative elements of the ensemble in 1981 while developing a solo career carl wilson left the band while brother dennis found himself sporadically dismissed due to his unruly lifestyle the only constant representative of the once dominant wilson clan was brian a broken man without any purpose by 1982 his health rapidly deteriorating emergency measures were taken dr eugene landy re-entered the life of his most famous patient and within months he persuaded the beach boys to fire their most hallowed member brian wilson was heading back into the wilderness it was wonderful at first brian suddenly lost about 150 pounds and he went from being morbidly obese to being in the best shape anyone had ever seen him in but landy's reemergence in his life was as with so many things a mixed blessing he domineered every aspect of the guy and kept him from seeing the people he wanted to see kept him from doing the things he wanted to do landy again saved brian's life without a doubt saved his life and then nearly killed him across the next two decades wilson's output was sporadic with his attempt to launch a solo career both encouraged and hindered by landy while his health was being compromised in private yet in the new millennium free from his band and his psychiatrist the last of the wilson brothers would make a triumphant return to the world stage and a new generation would witness the rebirth of an american legend [Music] [Music] in the latter half of 1964 with the recent influx of british invasion bans dominating the american charts brian wilson was working to a frenetic schedule the overwhelming popularity of british acts had presented him with a formidable artistic and commercial challenge and he had sought to meet it head-on the beach boys all summer long was followed by both a live lp and a christmas record in a single year the band had released no less than four albums the pace started to bite and it was the hated live performances that provided the final straw on a flight from houston during the group's winter tour brian suffered a fully fledged panic attack in the aftermath it was decided that he would no longer appear on stage with the beach boys that he would receive the long-sword freedom to remain in the studio and complete his work unfettered and that a permanent replacement in the form of bruce johnston would join the touring band brian had all these jobs he had to melodically write it [Music] arrange it go produce the tracks vocally arrange what everybody sang sing often you know the high lead part parts or don't worry baby all these jobs right and then go on the road the guy uh you know if he had kept up that pace he wouldn't be alive today so somehow he gets glenn campbell to fill in for three months and then i i come along i just probably got in there and he didn't have to go the road anymore and he could be uber prolific and work with the wrecking crew and so the band now came home to tracks without the burden of those those jobs and especially being on the road he made some great recordings he was you know finally given that the leeway to be the the studio guy to be just in control of the music and the writing and the recording and the arranging and the producing that that was all him now even to the extent that he was being talked about it was on his own terms from this point on because it was about him as a creative artist you know not as a smiling pop moppet you know or sensation so he could uh you know he was in control to a great extent and as long as he continued to make hits then he was allowed to be in control and brian instantly applied himself in the studio with all the fresh energy of a liberated man new sessions commenced in january 65 and the years spent in study and experimentation saw brian arrive at a level of control room proficiency that could match and indeed deliver the further reaches of his compositional vision he started like a kid you know and reached a lot of kids and he was able to use that success to grow up in the studio musically quickly you know and and instead of the piano the recording process became his piano the songs got better and better and and the music got better and better with with uh with brian you know as he felt more comfortable with us and you know as the years rolled by there's no question brian was becoming more sophisticated he wasn't afraid to talk to musicians you know he was a young kid he realized that he could get up and say you know i want you to do this and you do this and you do this which is kind of the way he would tell his brothers and his cousin and they would you know sometimes say now he didn't want to do you know they were kids but all of a sudden brian was now with all these pros and he was getting what he what he wanted brian was in control this was brian's date you know that there was no doubt about that that's why i say when people say he was fragile i said are you kidding that's not brian brian was in in total control and he felt that way at that time too brian was the guy he was the designated producer you know this great creative guy with the authority of general patton he was so clear sounding it was a pleasure to work with them and know him in those days from my point of view i like his production better than if he could do it now starting as a young guy because it was so musical he had to get it it actually sounded like the finished product on its way to getting finished when you'd be in the studio because without the technology he was more on the floor he'd have instruments leaking into other mics i mean that was part of the accidental production you know and you just go in there and in the booth and you go wow that sounds pretty good and then chuck brits would have things ready brian what do you think of this what do you think of this you know he auditioned tape delays and you know all kinds of really interesting things if a musician wasn't getting it you know over the talk back he would go out there and he would either show them or guide them he was able to communicate well with the other musicians who were a bit older than brian and it had been around a bit longer you know this is old stuff for them but with with brian's writing it was actually new stuff for them brian would sometimes work for 20 minutes say thank you gentlemen and leave and sometimes we would work the full three hours or maybe longer an entire weekend sometimes he never accepted it unless he called me in and had me sit and listen to the song they say what do you think it feels good to me it feels great you got a great track say okay thank you gentlemen or let's try another song recording on his own terms brian was particularly industrious he completed the beach boys today by the end of january 65 and had finished sessions for a subsequent album summer days and summer nights by july though a high volume of output was nothing new it was the character of both records that suggested a landmark had been reached much of the work particularly on the second side of beach boys today departed from the scope of brian's previous sound while even the more familiar pop heads included unusual augmentations and sonic faints the impression was that of a rigorous thoughtful artist undergoing an important transition it was exciting because brian had his act together so no one had to suffer through the tracks of course some of us loved playing on tracks and things you know carl really loved to do that so it was fun you're red hot you come off the road and you're getting used to brian having some great melodies and mike's like a runaway fax machine for lyrics he began to have different kinds of experiences experimenting with marijuana becoming a very enthusiastic pod head experimenting with lsd to a small extent not nearly as much as ultimately people would say his you know the doors of perception swung open and suddenly you know everything was up for grabs suddenly there were no boundaries whatsoever whatever he had been told about the limits of pop music he just ignored all together and that really began to come out in the early months of 1965 i mean the tunes that you can hear on the beach boys today that suite of love songs on the second side that are very pensive and poignant and musically sophisticated he takes side two of the beach boys today album and totally dedicates it to balance but really strong ballads that have a thick sound with his bass playing especially being prominent he takes the vocals and he does all kinds of jazz layers on it like a song kiss me baby which is really more of a jazz tune than a rock and roll tune you know but it's one of those real interesting early fusions of jazz on rock and roll you know he takes that four freshmen thing and spreads it out [Music] let me argue anymore [Music] [Music] in the introduction to kiss me baby you start to hear this in the vocals okay and then the melody starts and you hear this it's a simple little four note pattern just going down a scale but if you listen carefully you start to hear that in all different ways you hear it in the instruments you hear it in the melody you hear it in the backing vocals and so it becomes this little little idea that is the organic glue that ties everything together [Music] this is the kind of thing that people talk about you know when they talk about great songs from all periods in all styles and pretty much all the songs in these albums of 1965 do something like that in one way or another they're just really artfully constructed and they show an imaginative musician really thinking about what he's doing and coming up with some just outstanding results [Music] [Applause] were you [Music] you can also feel yourself on the headwaters of the pet sounds era where the perspective really becomes grown up in lyrically but you know and musically as well but you know more and more exotic instruments are are creeping into brian's songs more and more unexpected chord changes and more and more lush settings and lush vocal arrangements pet sounds is coming there's a very disturbing yet interesting uh song in there uh called in the back of my mind it's it's kind of all messed up that's great uh not as a song it's just great sonically and and you could hear you could it's kind of before you kind of organize all the pieces of it uh it's you hear pet sounds coming in that probably no one ever talks about that you gotta listen to that track [Music] blessed with everything a world to which [Music] [Music] this is really dark but it's interesting and it's not quite a song to me and i think dennis sang it but you know you just listen to the orchestrations of pet sounds and you hear a little of in the back of my mind [Music] [Music] there's a lot of fear and there's a lot of anguish about things that have been done wrong and guilt it closes with the strings and the orchestral instruments getting increasingly dissonant clashing against one another as dennis sort of reaches for these very high you know stirring uh notes saying that what'll i do if she leaves me it'll always be in the back of my mind and you think like you know and then the instruments kind of meander off into the darkness these strings and and bells and things and it's like the the orchestra is falling apart [Music] it'll always be [Music] in the back of my mind is about the guy's wife and the most intimate relationship you can you can ever have it really i think radiates the the complexities in brian's inner life and how that comes through in his music how he expresses that in [Music] music wilson's desire to experiment improve and refine perhaps found its clearest expression in his treatment of help me ronda inspired by a harmonica riff from buster brown's fanny main the song first appeared on the beach boys today by the time of the album's release however bayern had recorded an alternative arrangement of the track and the reworked version became the band's second number one single the original version of help me ronda kind of shows where brian's direction was going you know and getting a large big sound and especially using the harmonica and the accordion in it which became real important part of pet sounds later but she let another guy come between his head [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so what happens is they take this one song from beach boys today help me rhonda which was more of a production piece on on beach boys today and they turned it back into more of an old-fashioned rock and roll hit i like the second version of it i love the bass part in it it seemed like uh that version hit the ball out of the park in american baseball uh you know the first one maybe got you to second base somewhere between brian and mike they have the good sense to re-record it and it really deserved it i come in late at night [Music] out of my heart [Music] get her out [Music] i remember talking to brian and i said why don't we take the recording of help miranda and put it in summer days and summer nights well well you know we just had it in the last album ryan you you didn't have this recording that was number one let's put it in there it should just be there you know so that was a more of a straight ahead uh you know verse chorus kind of album but but if you listen to wrecking crew they're doing some really great stuff in it although many of the idiosyncrasies of today were absent from summer days and summer nights it still exhibited features of brian's figuring out process and elements that prefaced his later pet sounds work the album centerpiece was yet another installment in the relentless train of hit singles and went on to become one of the definitive beach boys tracks california girls lyrically silly basically just a guided tour of chicks from different regions but set into this alarmingly cool um you know sort of sonic setting you know which begins with this sort of orchestral opening which you know seems to be seems to come from aaron copeland's book of tricks which establishes kind of like a country in western rhythm california girls okay i'm gonna play the body of it [Music] see them tumbling down [Music] now you've heard that tune right see so he he probably got the idea of the bass line from that style of music you know okay i played that when i had to do some tapes for the i mean for the emt music museum in seattle you know i started playing this line it was on the tape and the guy said oh yeah country music i said no it's not country music that's from that's brian wilson's baseline i remember going to columbia studios and hearing uh the start of the song i went wow and it was uh uh california girls the very opening part of that song before they come dude that that's actually if you listen to it that's pet sounds that's the start of pet sounds i think [Music] so [Music] well east coast girls are hip i really dig those styles they wear [Music] the midwest farmers feel all daughters [Music] and the northern girls with the way they kiss they keep their boyfriends warm at night [Music] if you listen to recording you've got karl playing 12 string part and you hear the band go and then a big chord not beating over the head so so it's like a theme i mean it could have been anything classical like beethoven's bum bum bum it's great and then the rhythm starts all this stuff you know heralding the fact that you should pay attention to this cool song and a great chorus fantastic perfect pocket symphony single [Music] you're not even hearing a specific instrument you're hearing the sweep of the record it's more about the whole and so music isn't coming from a band so much it's coming from a creative idea that's translated onto tape via instruments but the instruments specifically aren't the important part you're not listening to somebody jamming you're listening to people making sounds and and that's how brian wilson started to become a really unique not just record producer but a musical entity you know [Music] though summer days and summer nights peaked at number two on the billboard chart clustered around it were the icons of the burgeoning american counterculture along with the beatles beginning their journey toward the left field the rolling stones represented the rebel edge of the british invasion and an electric dylan the prophet of the bohemian youth with the nation's young dispatched to war in vietnam civil rights clashes in alabama and a growing politicization of art and culture airy californian beach fantasies seemed far from relevant the famous jimi hendrix quote you'll never hear surf music again that embodies a kind of dismissal of surf music and in many ways the dismissal of the beach boys that was in the air you know as the 60s moved along there was something about the the early beach boys music that seemed adolescent in a way this didn't take into account the complexity of what the music was the complexity of the vocals the vision that the that the songs represented i mean things were changing very rapidly and nobody was nobody was accounting for all that it's only later that people would go back and realize how great those early songs were i think naivete is a perfect word to describe the lyric content of most of the or certainly early beach boys records but it's also very very true and heartfelt and i think the reason that it was so successful is that people who listen to it recognized the truth of it the idea that the the early beach boys songs were anti-intellectual is probably true i mean it's it was a vision of california that was sensual that was the that was the appeal of it whether it was shallow i mean i don't think the thing is at that time in in in pop culture and rock music the beatles were you know becoming more sophisticated they had found in their own way a more sophisticated world view and that is really i think in a lot of ways the headwaters for the transformation of the vocabulary of rock and roll and pop culture youth culture because you know john lennon could sing about paranoia in conscious terms whereas your average uh beach boy song or your average pop song was more you know you know iu surfer girl type stuff but on the other hand i mean just given who brian is and the complexity of his emotional state even these songs that people think of as very sunny fun songs are far away from that are much more complex than that there are definite strains of anti-intellectualism within the group but a lot of that was just based i think on the traditional sort of pop showbiz conservativism of you know you've got a formula it works don't mess with it though messing with the formula was to become the guiding principle of brian's approach in the latter part of the decade [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] whether or not the mid-60s cultural milieu had presented the beach boys with something of a quandary it had certainly liberated their chief songwriter from the record industry's infatuation with the hit single the release of the beatles rubber soul in december 1965 had further expanded the frontiers of popular music suggesting that the album could represent a complete work beyond simply being a vehicle for singles naturally the record and all of its implications made a huge impression on brian wilson the movement from singles to albums represented a major cultural shift in terms of how artists would be treated the fact that you would call them artists i mean nobody was calling chuck berry an artist nobody was calling buddy holly an artist you know but now you know there's this moment where because of the beatles and bob dylan you know you have an environment in which it was possible to make an entire statement in an album that an album was a coherent body of work that wasn't just hanging on a hit single that was revolutionary at the time so when brian wilson heard rubber sole what he heard was a suite of songs what he heard was a way in which you could be considered that way to be thought of that way as an artist and brian wilson wanted that and so when he heard robert sull that's what he wanted to do and an artist is what he wanted to be i think brian in his competitive world thought he could probably maybe make a better album in terms of front to back little did he know he did brian's response to robertson was to conceive an album consistent in sonic identity and lyrical narrative with all the ebbs flows and movements of a single song running across the order of its tracks to achieve the task he once again looked beyond the beach boys for a writing partner and established a collaboration with young advertising executive and lyricist tony asher as the project took shape in the early months of 66 the band occupied with the demands of a far east tour had little notion of the radicalism that was afoot back home carl used to tell me he said brian's doing something that'll blow your mind bruce brian and carl were really close uh i i just figured i just took it for granted brian would be the greatest because he was and i'd come home and hear some really cool stuff and i did you know but i didn't realize it was going to be that there were no limits whatsoever he was going to just throw open every cupboard there was in the studio pull out all the the most exotic instruments from banjos to early synthesizers like the uh the theremin uh made that high ghostly whale you know every weird sort of percussion thing and and if they couldn't find a percussion thing to you know to make the right sound then he would just figure out a way to to use a water jug you know he did he didn't know any better he just said well this let's do this let's do this let's get the two accordions for godly nose let's you know let's try this so he was so open because he didn't have formal training or he wasn't a big band guy or a jazz guy he just heard music and loved it so much and that's the way he kind of assembled the blocks and plus you know they were going to sing these songs about essentially a concept record about about the the arc of a love affair from wouldn't it be nice the sweetness and innocence of that to all the way to the end of caroline no where he's looking at this you know older harsher version of the young woman he had met at the beginning of the album and saying you know plaintively where did your long hair go where's the girl i used to know and all the stops in between with songs about living away from home trying to invent your own character uh songs about uh you know this deepening love affair that moves from wouldn't it be nice to you still believe in me to you know god only knows well as as brian said uh that album was was marijuana so that's what's going through it there's that just this deep restful sonic echoey marijuana the consequent album pet sounds was recorded with all the fastidious energy that typified brian's post-touring work he completed all the instrumental tracks with the wrecking crew in advance of the band returning from tour to be promptly drilled through the vocal parts when he'd be in the studio he'd be so focused he he was a he would like a drill sergeant nope do it again but he wasn't it wasn't uh where i think you see some producers some producers come in and they'll jingle money and they're well hey how you doing and make everybody feel good they don't know what the hell they're doing they're just live in the room and some guys go in and they're really engineers they can injure they'll they'll do it up and down so he had the ability to do all of that stuff but he never worked in the studio uh trying to do a thing of authority of uh intimidating people he he accidentally did it just because of the intensity uh and his knowledge no do it again come on speed you slow down and watch your note on the on the fourth bar there you're sliding too much give it a little more breath these studio guys go holy crap this guy's hearing everything take it from that spot please [Music] hey wow just that one spot right dad no just the one spot octave lower uh don please and watch that [Music] let's make it real tight okay somebody lags or screws up in the first half of that thing all the time let's go i don't think he's the kind of guy that wants to be in charge but he has to be he's young enough to know that the only way he's going to get this done is to just be in charge but i don't think that's in his personality to be you know a drill sergeant but sometimes he really had to control his wild boys you know young guys you know with the great cars and some dough and you know and want to go out with their girl the restaurant the session's running late i mean you know come on just sit there we've got to finish this vocal you know [Music] it be nice if we were older than we would have to wait so long and wouldn't it be nice to live together in the kind of no one's gonna make it that [Music] it be much together [Music] but happy times together we've been spending i wish that every kiss [Music] [Applause] pet sounds is a song cycle in my opinion in the tradition of the great song cycles of earlier periods art songs of the romantic period for example we talk about winterize by schubert or dixter lieber by robert schumann and in my opinion pet sounds is the 20th century version of that clearly what they ended up with is something that is as cohesive as any great song cycle and has a story to tell just like any great song cycle in the future when people look back on music of the 20th century pet sounds will be considered a landmark in that approach to songwriting pet sounds is a highly personal record in a way in its fascination with sound and its fascination would sound almost almost beyond the sense of what a song was it's very much i think where brian wilson lived emotionally when he did the track the god only knows i was i was just amazed at the track but he i had i had not heard the vocal i hadn't heard the title really so when i heard this track the track was so beautiful but then when i heard the the melody it was so far removed from the track i blew my mind it was so incredible and then at the end of the song how blane does like at the end of the song the song two four and then it goes what is this drummer doing it's wacky and then when you hear it when you hear the final version he just that was there because the voices all there's only three voices on that and it sounds like it's an amazing amount of voices i think he did actually two of them on at the end and it all just fits like this but when i heard the track it was hard to figure out why is he doing that just amazing i may not always love you but long as there are stars above you you never need to doubt it i'll make you so sure about [Music] god only knows i think it's a great song for lots of reasons it has everything you want in a great song it has sensitive text it has a melody that matches the text perfectly and it has all these brian wilson touches that are really that really raise it to a whole new level that melody at first when you hear that in the introduction you're not really sure what it's connected to but then at the end when all the voices are layering each other that's the melody that brian wilson sings above all the other parts that are going on it's also a really nicely crafted chord progression [Music] you don't really know what key it's in it sort of moves around sounds like e at first then it sounds like a it never really stabilizes on a particular key [Music] i need to do [Music] that to me is the most completely developed and most intelligent and most beautiful of all the songs that he ever wrote it's perfect in every way melodically it's a little bach invention the arrangement is perfect lyrically there's not a wrong word in the song and then there's the spectacular fugue at the end so it's kind of a teen record but it when i heard it i thought this is something that that that i'd never heard before that i didn't think anyone in the genre was capable of doing pet sounds did however contain one song that was not a wilson original a leftover from the summer days and summer night sessions entitled sloop john b although a number three hit as a single sloop john b has often been cited as an anomalous feature of pet sounds an unnecessary interruption to the love affair concept and the album's lyrical narrative al gave him this idea who al left the kingston treehound folk music said brown we have we've got to record sloop john b which was in the public domain which means you've kind of become the writer you're the arranger but you become the writer adapted by so a couple days later during summer day summer nights sessions he comes in with a complete track and i don't know why it never got into summer day summer nights uh it somehow does when in the pet sounds doesn't fit but we're used to it [Music] my grandfather and me around nasa drinking all night [Music] home [Music] here it is all this angst and stuff you know lyrically in this album and then suddenly uh we're doing a folk song about the salute john b you know unless it's some kind of some kind of dream sequence just doesn't fit i don't even know other than capital thinking well we need a hit on that album you know i think that was more of a record company thing to slide it in there uh i think it fit on uh summer days and summer nights i mean i don't i think that's the flaw and the ointment on pet sounds it just doesn't make it's brilliant it doesn't make any sense being on that album [Music] probably the most controversial thing about the album is the inclusion of sloop john b in the context of the narrative of the album i think it's easy to look at that song and say it has no business being there since he didn't write it it's a sort of exotic journey down to the what sounds like the caribbean these guys drinking rum and getting arrested when i listen to it and you think about the sense of displacement that the narrator describes who constantly is saying i want to go home i want to go home you know i feel so breakup i want to go home this is the worst trip i've ever had people see it as out of place i see it as a pivot point sloop john b was preceded as a single release by the closing track on pet sounds caroline no the record only made a modest impression on the charts peaking at 32 but significantly it appeared with brian wilson and not the beach boys as the named artist given that pet sounds was such a personal statement the fact that its lead single was issued as a solo sat uncomfortably with some in the band maybe pet sounds kinda was brian's solo album but there we are so we're part of the album and and i have no idea whose idea it was put caroline no out which i love i don't think it was i think maybe beach boys as the artists build artists even though there are no vocals on it yeah okay fine uh maybe it could have had more chart impact but uh i never got why it was a brian wilson why it was actually why it was released as a single [Music] where is the girl i used to know how could you lose that happy glow oh caroline [Music] i remember how you used to say you'd never change but that's [Music] pet sounds in a weird way it is a solo record but in the same way that beach boys today is kind of a solo record because they didn't really have a lot of creative input into the record they didn't play on it you know they didn't they came in and sang the parts he told them to sing you know literally they were touring japan when he was writing and recording pet sounds and then they came in and he said okay here are your parts sing these songs and uh it was a huge departure for them and there was a lot of controversy within the group and within the family about the the turn that brian the creative turn that brian had made brian doesn't have a mean bone in his body he's a sweetheart he's a wonderful guy he was always trying to uh to to make everybody happy in the band he was getting so much flack from certain people in the group about doing it that he that he went overboard to make it like a group album but it was it was all him it was it was basically a solo album and i would think if you asked uh the guys in the group reluctantly they might say yeah and i think there was also some fear that you know he was getting farther and farther away from the band and as a result he was going to leave the band to do his own thing at which point everyone's sweet living this whole family industry was going to fall apart because brian was going to say you know screw you guys i'm going to do my own industry. so the fact that he ended up releasing caroline noah as a solo single was like a shot across the bow and kind of made him freak out a little bit more than a little bit given the distance that he's traveled from the traditional uh settings and narratives of beach boy songs that i think probably they began to put two and two together and think that this was not moving in the direction they wanted to go indeed on returning from tour to be presented with the pet sounds instrumentals some in the band expressed reticence over the sound of the material with mike love cautioning brian not to carry the beach boys too far from the tried and tested yeah don't [ __ ] with the formula was really he said that straight up tony asher attests to that um having heard it uh and but there was but mike was by no means the only one who didn't want you know who felt you know like the record was not the record that they needed to make at that time the brothers were bitching and moaning too they didn't like how complex the arrangements were they didn't like the fact that brian was was listening to them so closely and would brook no bum notes at all i don't really think that that's true about the band i i think the band uh they trusted brian and he made great tracks i think we were more of one mind than you would think i mean we all have pretty good ears you know and and we we're smart enough to know there's a song on top of those tracks to come you know and it always does work out with brian in those days i was there when brian mastered it he puts on the first tape wouldn't it be nice and it starts playing the first side and it's going through and i'm thinking how how great it sounds and brian looks over at me and says well fred what do you think and i said brian man great great record it's really good i like it i really like it he said do you really like it i said yeah i really like it and then he then he asked me the tell-all question he said what do you think the guys will think meaning what do you think the other beach boys will think and i said you know i don't know brian but i'm proud of you it's a great record i don't know what they think but i think it's a great record i think he did a great job and he says man i sure hope they like it well as we know a couple of them didn't capital didn't with capital records showing little enthusiasm for the sonic invention of pet sounds the record became the lowest selling beach boys release in years while brian became discouraged by the muted response to his grand artistic statement the label delivered the ultimate slap in the face just weeks after the release of pet sounds they issued the best of the beach boys compilation surf music and all capital was a little confused by pet sounds you know and and they were kind of thinking okay wow brian nice work uh get volume one best of the beach boys ready everybody marketing staff yeah we'll look for some singles you know they were just getting ready to write the band off i think you know he was working within the context of the the music industry and the music industry that was just beginning to feel uh its possibilities for major sums of money and so they were not interested in the the beach boys of all people breaking new ground and they saw the beach boys as hit makers like go make hits you know a song called you know hang on to your ego that's not gonna wash and in many ways you know mike love probably agreed with the critique these you know complicated strange uh very beautiful but not necessarily contained songs i mean they didn't really provide mike love with much of a platform and you know there you have the origins of difficulties that went on for decades after that you know that was the moment you know i mean pet sounds was the moment it's sad though in a lot of ways i mean it's something that drove brian deeper into isolation it was something that in a more nurturing atmosphere he might have had a happier time and even a more productive time they didn't believe in it you know and then here you know the records end up selling off of it the 45s off pet sounds did well so brian wilson must have been very frustrated by that i'm i'm certain of it but because wouldn't it be nice and guy lana knows had such a good successful run in the summer of 1966 and then brian wilson works that summer on good vibrations and that becomes number one in america and in england capital just does a complete about face and they throw money into the next beach boys album which would have been smile [Music] the project that would eventually become known as smile started life during the lengthy gestation of good vibrations that ran throughout 1966. initial recordings for good vibrations had taken place as part of the pet sound sessions but the song had taken on a life and logic of its own with brian moving between studios to rework the material while pet sounds had come and gone he was still torturously fashioning a final version of the track and running up a ballooning studio bill in the process i got my info from carl and he would just give us little progress reports you know and brian would just like a great filmmaker you know shoots a scene several different ways edited several different ways and and i'm just going to guess brian wasn't ready he probably wasn't thinking well we need this to drive the marketing of pet sounds i don't think he was thinking of it that way i think he was totally pure wonderful once in a lifetime artist mode and and it just didn't make the cut we did many many sessions not as many nearly as some of the other people have stated but it was true that we you know he'd call me and say can you get the crew in we're gonna work at five o'clock or something like that you know and nobody wanted to miss that so whatever we were doing we were there at five o'clock and we would sit down and brian would play something at the piano and then he'd say forget it i'm out of here and he'd leave so we worked for 15 minutes if that we wondered at the time and said she sure is spending a lot of time but we knew it was a hit he was trying to achieve something righteous and something artistic was something pretty simple it was simple the simpler tombs are the are the toughest ones to to make into a hit record that sounds yes great wonderful if we had uh included the version you heard we all heard uh in mono i had to add mono of uh good vibrations be a different beach boys story [Music] i'm picking up [Music] i was wondering how was he going to put these little pockets of music they're all they're done at different studios and in those days how is he gonna how he's gonna match the ambient room sound of one studio to another studio a month apart different and it was just amazing how he put it together it's not just the studio as an instrument that's a vague saying no he knows the tone and the pitch like a string you know or like like like you tune a guitar well you could tune echo in this room so it'll sound this way and he took the diversity of those rooms and played them that big studio is his guitar you know it's it's real specific when they say the studio as an instrument and brian wilson was the only guy who ever really utilized this in such a way and three different studios at least on good vibrations [Music] vibrations [Music] [Music] it was a cultural watershed it changed the entire musical vocabulary of of pop music just because of the way you know the way its sections clearly were separate from one another the way that just the lightest sort of veneer held them all together and yet the song flowed perfectly from you know churchly kind of organ sounds to full on like fuzz guitar and synthesizer again with the theremin whale as intelligent and as creative that song is uh it was a little more clinical to me a little drier it didn't it he was moving from marijuana to a little speed i remember when i heard the final mix i remember saying to the band this is probably number one or our career is over you know it was there was do or die with that and and i you know i mean it was so radical it could only be one of the two thanks when the single finally appeared on the 10th of october 66 it proved to be a huge hit landing at number one on both sides of the atlantic smile under the working title of dumb angel had been developing fitfully over the preceding months collaborating with a new lyricist in the form of van dyke parks wilson had envisaged an album that would match the coherence of pet sounds yet stretch even further in sonic and narrative ambition [Music] capital enticed by a whole album that promised to replicate the sound and success of good vibrations were now ready to hand brian a blank check the label mobilized a formidable marketing campaign promising smile by the end of the year making grandiose statements about the albums like the impact smile is the name of the new beach boys album which will be released in january 1967 and with the happy album cover the really happy sounds inside and a happy in-store display piece you can't miss we're sure to sell a million units in january for the first time the beach boys had had beaten the beatles at their own game and you know in their own backyards essentially as the most popular rock and roll band on the planet and everyone at that point expected nothing but more triumphs from the beach boys they found themselves suddenly at the leading edge of pop culture at a time when pop culture meant more than ever before and uh so you know brian was was going great guns at his next you know this the album he said was going to flow from the exact same sort of headwaters creative headwaters that that good vibrations did you know the concept for smile is sort of threefold there was a life suite there was a western suite and there was an element suite they started thinking about an approach to writing a song and writing an album that started in good vibrations which is to think of modules of ideas that could be put together ultimately into this album that they were calling dumb angel and they wrote four songs initially heroes and villains cabinessence wonderful and surfsop especially those four songs i think show that brian wilson had an idea that would have surpassed pet sounds in its artistry and its storytelling and its conception as a whole thing a whole concrete musical idea portrayed over two sides of a record [Music] oh [Music] brian and van dyke's primary efforts took place in an atmosphere of unbridled enthusiasm and with the beach boys on tour the la songwriting division began to resemble something of a carnival [Music] surrounded by a coterie of friends and associates brian's reveries extended to constructing a large arabian tent indoors holding meetings in the swimming pool and perhaps most famously sighting his home piano in a giant living room sandbox [Music] though such eccentricities would later be pointed to as symptoms of excessive drug use they were more likely the imaginative leaps of a young rich musician fully possessed by creative energy indeed the sessions in the sandbox yielded a group of compositions that formed the basis of smile the sandbox was just a box that he had made it was full of sand that he could sit in feel like he was at the beach um mine was not to ask why nor to reason why this was his house and his sandbox i think it was very practical it was uh you know he would he's writing song a song like surfs up and he's got his shoes and socks off and he's and he's there's a piano there and he's got his feet in the sand and shuts your eyes and you're writing about surfs up i mean how perfect you know and then uh louie and banana his dog started crapping in it and that kind of blew that people who are talented like to have fun you know and and they like to enjoy all kinds of strange things that we not nine to fivers don't know anything about you know so recording in the in in in a swimming pool that that the water had been taken yeah that makes sense because the sound has to be great down there you know so you know but they use these things to try to say well well brian is crazy i said yeah i mean crazy like a fox a lot of people have said that drugs were a problem but from what we find out that drugs were a problem later on after smile collapse because you can hear in the session tapes that brian wilson is in control and on the money and making incredible music that no one has ever done before he's not out of control he is totally in control of those sessions though brian's idiosyncrasies fast became a feature of the studio work the modular recording style and unorthodox compositional turns mystified many of the session players and often accompanied by his entourage brian encouraged a mood of levity and experimentation this was his baby and we were just working little parts [Music] these are things that he wanted done and we were doing them and they'd say thanks that's enough in other words he heard something at home he drove to the studio he wanted that three four six eight bars he wanted to hear it once he heard it okay i'm gone that's enough and then he'd go home i guess and work on whatever else he was working on for us it was amazing we never saw this with other producers or directors they said here's the song we played it with brian he'd say here's the intro ending take three [Music] with the spiral album that was cut in pieces you know and and so i thought well that's strange but you know you have to remember when we do film scores we we cut film scores and pieces too when you go to a film score date you might do the middle part first and then the ending next and then the the theme of the song you you jump around with different pieces of a film score and so i just i just thought that that's the way he's thinking these days you know to cut record dates you accept the way he's because he he he was a fine writer you know and and every time he cut something it was a big smash hit so you trust him okay one more that's very gonna be very good okay don't worry about how it falls apart at the end of the verse that's generally what it's supposed to do hey but don't worry about it kyra you mustn't worry okay here we go yeah i'm kind of the i mean the worrywart of the studio musicians right being a woman you know yeah i'm going to worry about you kids yeah it was just parties these were all parties you know with the fireman's hats and all the things that the guys were doing i don't think anybody was taking anything serious [Music] he brought in some firemen's helmets and and so somebody started a fire in a waste paper basket or something there was um a helper assistant guy called brother julius with a big bucket put wood in it light it and he brought it he brought it into the studio while they were playing fire miss o'leary scout [Music] but again the beach boys were on tour and they came home and they found these songs that he wanted them to sing that bore absolutely no resemblance to anything that seemed like you know normal life heroes and villains and van dyke parks wrote these songs that were just oblique to say the least [Music] the famous line that caused mike love to blow his top was in the song cavenesses which is a sort of a impressionistic portrait of the wide-open frontier and the procession of pioneers moving further west and describing this vision of a worker on the railroad a chinese worker who sees a bird fly up in the air looking down at him and see suddenly you're seeing the world through the bird's eyes as he's saying over and over the crow flies uncover the cornfield [Music] [Music] my glove was like what the hell is this like what could this possibly mean there's a very famous story about mike love coming in the studio and sort of point blanking van dyke parks as to what the lyrics meant i wasn't close enough to the other guys i was in a position of defending my lyrics that went from ding woody pearl hang 10. i mean i didn't know that language to uh like columnated ruins domino mike love said to me one day he said explain this over and over the crow cries uncover the cornfield and it was an american gothic trip that brian and i were working on i said i don't know what these lyrics are all about they're unimportant throw them away and so they did you know mike wanted to have some kind of definitive answer as to what does it mean specifically and it's like you know environment i couldn't answer specifically because it was more about images the encounter concluded with the departure of van dyke parks from the smile project though expectations for the album remained excessively high and a buzz had developed amongst insiders privy to some of the material the early months of 1967 saw the pressure on brian and his as yet unfinished masterpiece begin to mount there began to develop the sense that brian was on the verge of a masterwork beyond all masterworks the only problem was the beach boys and i think to a great extent capital records were having none of it to the extent that they did sing the songs they did it under pressure and gave a lot of duress to brian along the way the vocal sessions were very tense and meanwhile brian you know is fraying internally i think the outside pressure of uh the beach boys then and and you know all of a sudden saying hey we can't we can't do how can we do that song live you know some of the lot usually they could do all of the whole album whatever songs they wanted they couldn't do some of those songs live i think he kept doing what he wanted to do but he kept getting more and more pressure i think brian probably got a little i hate this word but i have to use it he got a little paranoid about what his next move was you know and i think he probably over thought it out and mike love gets this horrible bad rap is trying to sabotage the smile album if you listen to the existing recordings of what was recorded for smile the band worked so hard with brian to make this happen but uh i just know brian was you know very tense and it wasn't the brian that i'd worked with you know i just think his success was so big he might have just been thinking well how am i going to do this further problems surfaced in the form of an untimely lawsuit between capitol records and the beach boys over contracts and royalties as the dispute rumbled through the courts brian was compelled to relocate to studios that would not be on the capital dollar a prospective release date for smile drifted further and further over the horizon of 1967 as brian buffeted by the various pressures and competing interests swirling around him struggled to complete the album when the new sound finally arrived in the summer it was not from the bright skies of california but the drizzly streets of liverpool the beatles sergeant pepper's lonely heart club band had given rock and roll its watershed moment and brian wilson capitulated finally abandoning his grand vision and consigning smile to the mythical realm of music's great lost work let's forget about selling stuff just think of it as pure art brian would have had a one-two punch it would have been great it was all there you've hear you you've you've heard the fragments you've heard some of the songs if if you linked them together it would have been a different respect for the beach boys a lot of people i think have done this legend thing in their head this fable that they've created and everyone wants to completely believe that this this whole thing happened a certain way and when i what i saw was different than what they're all thinking or what they all what they all say and keep repeating what i saw was after the pet sounds album nice he started doing cabin essence i'd go over to the house and he'd have a party done water you know child is the father of the man these little parts he almost got into a series of little pocket pieces like on good vibrations because that was kept on going and i i don't think he he'd lost the ability of the freshness of knowing which which part should go where he was like you know i don't know man i don't know maybe that shouldn't be the start maybe that and he was like started again into these puzzles of putting the songs together one of the great ideas of romantic art is the great unfinished work you know the you know people talk about you know the various you know samuel teller coleridge you know you know the poems are unfinished you know they're incomplete they're fragments and that that's that in and of itself is a romantic idea you know it's in some sense smile were it ever to have been finished back when it was supposed to be i don't think ever could have been remotely close to uh achieving what the emotions and aspirations that people imbue it with i think it you know it potentially could have been a you know a very great record but it was in many ways even greater as an unfinished idea what we miss is what people got to see on inside pop the rock revolution 1967 television special by cbs news where brian performs surfs up to close the show it's profound everybody who saw that special kept on asking about that song come about hard and join the young and often spring you gave what beautiful lyrics for 1967 the year of all universe love and you know the year that of the summer of love you know this is where where people are starting to say let's come together all that feeling was in surfs up and so profoundly written so profoundly sung and so profoundly spoken in those words and they heard it once on a cbs news special and that was it ether after that i think this music has something terribly important to tell us adults and we would be wise not to behave like ostriches about it here is a new song too complex to get all of first time around it could come only out of the ferment that characterizes today's pop music scene brian wilson leader of the famous beach boys and one of today's most important pop musicians sings his own serves up [Music] across [Music] last heart toast and eye the unbelief a broken man too tough to cry [Music] i've [Music] [Music] [Music] but she's still dancing in the night unafraid of what [Music] is though smile had been discarded a truncated version of heroes and villains the first song planned for the album appeared as a single in july 67. the band was however still obliged to deliver an album and that obligation had now become pressing they established a studio at brian's bel-air home where they embarked on a crash recording of a new lp but with their erstwhile producer much diminished by his tribulations the crafting of a beach boys record had now become a different animal entirely if you've got a hit song you can be as crazy as you want and everyone's perfectly okay with it but the moment there's some fractures maybe your last song wasn't a hit suddenly you're not cute and eccentric you're crazy and so brian began to veer toward crazy as far as those people were concerned and he began to kind of like step back i think he was exhausted i think his feelings were hurt that he had been that this resistance had cropped up and i think he had lost his patience with trying to be the sole provider for the beach boys you know if you don't believe in me then screw you you know that you do it i don't care i think he did lose his mind for a while you know because we moved up to his house we started recording up that they took a beautiful den and put a board over the fireplace that was magnificent up on the second story they kind of cut out a little hole so they could talk to the band and we would record but who was producing was mike love and the rest of the guys and it wasn't brian and it wasn't the same his bedroom was right above the studio and he would lie in bed all day not because he was spending his whole life in bed because he was going out at night and partying with all his buddies but he would lie there and listen to the record and if he had any suggestions or ideas he would either call them down from his phone or else he would put on his robe and shamble downstairs and suggest something and sometimes he would come in and roll up his sleeves and get things going if he felt excited about stuff but the time at which he was willing to you know shepherd a song from creation through arrangement through production through performance was over that he would he and he has never really done that again when smiley smiles surfaced in september it appeared to confirm the change in group dynamic in place of the previously ubiquitous produced by brian wilson credit the new record bore the legend produced by the beach boys they need to finish something really quick they get it done about two weeks with their tried and true soul root of the group their vocals you know and they record really a beautiful album um the only reason why people didn't like that album so much when it was first released because it wasn't smile accidentally because of that commitment smiling smile gets recorded but it's kind of cool that's the way a psychedelic album should sound that's all vocals this little hammond organ looks like a church organ that they had loaned brian i mean that's the beach boys as unplugged as you're ever going to hear the band and it's brilliant wind chimes police i mean even in this this abridged smile called smiley smile i think it's underrated i think people should take a listen to it it's really good [Music] in the late afternoon [Music] [Music] which [Music] the produced by the beach boys credit was the point at which the beach boys stepped up and said we're going to control this band as much as you are and it also to another extent maybe was brian saying okay if you guys think it's so easy then go ahead and do it it could have been them thinking that they were stepping up to be equals to brian but it was brian also saying you know go ahead that's fine i'm gonna go to my room and hang out i never understood that i always thought i should say anything should say produced by brian i don't know what the reasoning was to put the beach boys name as the producers brian still was in charge though it may sound watered down to you it's still brian can't help it but when he's good he just is he just is the rain was kind of given to the beach boys to uh to get credit on that album so he could slowly maybe wean himself over here good you guys i'm not deserting you look you're you're good on your own i'll come in and help but now this will give me a little time to uh to do some new things and given the course of recent events brian actively sought to initiate new projects outside of the beach boys context in a move reminiscent of his productions during the early 60s two songs were written for danny hutton and recorded with his band redwood brian displayed a keen enthusiasm for the work and discussed signing redwood to the beach boys new label brother records but just as murray wilson had closed the book on his previous collaborations so a new intervention was to strangle the partnership in its infancy i think he was really saying the beach boys have done their stuff i've really done what i think of some incredible stuff now i want to start doing stuff with other people other bands so we were we were the uh the bandit he thought you know we were we were a vocalist we could play guitars and stuff but we weren't a band that he had a fight he could bring in his crew of people and we could do blues hard-on blues so i think he felt that this palette could expand in areas where he hadn't uh kind of get into a little specter area but she couldn't kind of do with the beach boys and uh vocally sometimes you know that it was a different kind of sound and then the beach boys came in town and mike love hears a song called darling that brian had written and he was pissed off he said what are you giving them a hit song for and uh i can absolutely see his point but brian you know we had committed to doing it with brian brian wrote the song because i used to say darling he wrote it for me uh and it ended up with our voices being taken off and there is put on it carl doing it mike is the guy that comes up with these ideas he's very protective of the beach boys it's a great legacy and i i see his side of it but uh he he absolutely rubs a lot of people the wrong way [Applause] [Music] meant to be [Music] darling ended life as a hit single for the beach boys towards the end of the year an album followed in december and was a further step away from the large wilson productions of old though in many respects wild honey predicted the strip down back to woot's aesthetic that characterized much of [Music] in some sense it's brian wilson's burning out and cooling out as carl wills called it but another sense is trying to go back to basics and making a simple rock and roll record it seems during the period that wild honey is being made i think brian wilson becomes like the first person to burn out from that whole large production thing that was happening during the mid 60s you know the rolling stones went ahead and made satanic magicians request and they got knocked for it for example so you know meanwhile you're getting bob dylan doing john wesley harding birds do sweetheart of the rodeo and the band does music from the big pink i mean the beatles wanted to do an album called get back so people wanted to bring things down he really heard what he wanted to hear i mean it's not a piano sound that i would go looking for i mean some of it is is almost like a muffled piano in a and sort of a bass back there but but they're very true to the songs and they're very true to where he was at the time and it is a stripped down you know i think a couple of those piano parts might be from the little upright that we had in the studio [Music] [Applause] [Music] she's [Music] [Applause] [Music] is [Music] [Applause] [Music] wild hunting was great out uh you know wild honey was just kind of like you know when the fighters in the ring and they and they ring the bell and they get to go sit in the corner that was just you know we're just blown away off the planet listening to motown and stuff and that was a really fun album to me it was easy and simple and we made it at brian's house for the most part that was cool [Music] we kind of went ah pressure's off let's just do this that was a fun album to make and uh it gave everyone a chance to take a rest from being so tragically hip and cool it was it really pulled the band together [Music] but times were changing 1968 saw the united states descend into one of the bleakest periods in its history the assassinations of martin luther king and robert kennedy growing militancy amongst the youth and a series of political convulsions had pitched america into a divisive confrontational malaise amid all the ferment the beach boys summer album friends failed entirely to relate to the cultural zeitgeist and sank without a trace well by the late 60s they didn't seem to fit anywhere in the popular culture because in the post summer of love period particularly starting in 1968 when it was all riots and you know the anti-war movement had had become violent and to a great extent you know to some extent um and there were political assassinations back to back you know uh martin luther king and then bobby kennedy and a whole sort of dionysian kind of strain of pop music really came to the fore with the doors and heavy metal music or hard rocking music power trios and jimi hendrix the beach boys just were headed in the opposite direction [Music] they didn't really fit i mean the way maybe they would have liked to commercially and in the traditional business of it and i think they were a little bit lost in a little bit gee where do we go from here i mean didn't quite know what their image was didn't know where to go with it and so it was a difficult period i think for sure i do think that friends ended up being to me what is the most natural follow-up to the smile album there could have been this is an album that's bliss you know it's it's one of the best records the beach boys ever made it was like a low charter it didn't have hits it didn't matter years [Music] [Music] [Music] you would help me get out [Music] no that's a pretty lightweight album you know i mean i love friends i love the song friends i thought that was really great really great mike had been hanging out with maharishi and lennon and george harrison a lot in india so that's the album that has transcendental meditation in it where brian's saying all the vocal parts i thought it was kind of clever but the album i'm surprised it got to 126. maybe a thousand and 26 might be more appropriate it wasn't talked about no one cared what was happening in 1968 was the rolling stones sympathy for the devil that kind of street fighting man record that that the stones were coming out with that was a valid record in 1968 singing about bliss and and and floating on the inner tube of life and space and and love and meditation that wasn't what was happening at the twilight of the decade the beach boys fortunes continued to wane and brian bereft of all the inspiration from their earlier halcyon days demonstrated less and less interest in recording with the band or indeed working at all as the 1970s progressed he slipped into an ever-worsening depression and eventually retreated from public life altogether on the one hand he was living a kind of just a normal eccentric person's lifestyle but he had good times and bad times he had times when he was just sort of being silly and living this kind of weird young rich eccentric lifestyle and times when he seemed to be spiraling more into a darker kind of depression he became huge couldn't believe how big he became he would never believe that the beard that he had looked like santa claus we didn't see brian for the longest time we didn't know what happened um we you couldn't ask anybody he couldn't talk to anybody about it and i remember terry meltzer god bless him terry called me one day and said hell i want you to get the guys together we're going to do a session with brian i said really he said yeah now tell the guys no laughing no staring we hadn't seen him for a while be careful with the jokes no matter what okay this was it was a terribly sad day we'd all sitting there waiting the door opened brian came in and looked around a little bit strange walked over the piano and he sat down and he started playing the intro to one of the hits i forget what the song was and we knew exactly what the song was and brian was playing this and he kept looking at me he's saying like he didn't know me you know the song yeah brian i love that song man i love it ding ding ding ding do you know the song yeah brian i love this song it's a great song three four times he did this to me and after about the third or fourth time so you know the song yeah i love that song he closed it up got up and he walked in that was it we didn't see him again [Music] it's interesting as the years have gone on i think their reputation has only gotten better and better 40 plus years later you're more sort of avant-garde uh edgy alternative musicians i think to a person will acknowledge the importance and probably even a devotion to brian wilson's work the amount imagination risk taking the eccentricity of it is something that just resonates across the ages brian wilson is not just a songwriter he's in his early days thinking about the whole experience of the song the way it's presented the way it's recorded the way it's performed in other words he's not depending on someone else to be the producer or the arranger he's doing it all himself he's more than just a songwriter he's more of a composer in the great tradition of great composers the innocence that started off as the beach boys the music the innocence of the music the fact that it hit home and lit a spark and so many people around the world and made so many people happy that's the main thing the music made people happy and to this day you can go to a concert and you see children that know all the words to those songs and you see people in their 70s dancing in the aisles and that's brian wilson's legacy [Music] the fact that he managed you know 35 years later to dust himself off and not only reclaim the smile he had written but finish the work transforms brian's story it sort of takes us from the object lesson in america you know american greed and and you know commodification and snatched that away even in the shadows of all that there is still the spark of real genius and i think that's what people hear now these days when an old beach boy song comes on the air it's that same story that emotional story that same sense of daring and ambition and hope and fear that guides us all through our days [Music] you

Channel: Amplified - Music & Pop Culture Documentaries

Views: 230,880

Keywords: pop culture documentary, Amplified, music documentaries, art documentaries, documentary movies - topic, music documentary, full documentary, TV Shows - Topic, full length documentary 2022, old school music, brian wilson, brian douglas wilson, beach boys, the beach boys, pet sounds, smile, surfin usa, smiley smile, surfs up, dennis wilson, carl wilson, mike love, al jardine, good vibrations, david marks, bruce johnston, ricky fataar, blondie chaplin, american spring

Id: kWzIldASHmY

Length: 231min 51sec (13911 seconds)

Published: Thu May 12 2022