The Beach Boys were a huge part of the soundtrack of the '60s, and even people born decades
after they reached their height of popularity are bound to know their music.
"Good Vibrations," "California Girls," "Surfin' Safari"... great Beach Boys songs aren't exactly
rare.
Despite their huge successes and enduring legacy, however, their story isn't exactly
a happy one.
Murry Wilson was the father of Beach Boys Brian, Dennis, and Carl - as well as their
first manager - and, put simply, he was a pretty horrible guy.
In I Am Brian Wilson: A Memoir, Brian spoke about the abuse they suffered at the hands
of their father.
He wrote:
"My dad was violent.
He was cruel."
How cruel?
Well, the Beach Boys' songwriter and composer became deaf in one ear thanks to a blow from
a lead pipe delivered to his head as a 3-year-old.
As children, Brian says they were all on the receiving end of abuse - he himself was once
handed a beating with a 2-by-4, for example, but it was only Dennis who ever fought back.
The psychological abuse was there, too.
When they were children, Murry would pull out his glass eye and make the boys stare
into the empty, gaping hole of his socket.
"Did you live in fear of our father?”
“Yeah.”
“How did you get away from that?”
“Well, when the Beach Boys came along."
Murry also constantly berated them during his time as their manager: he told them that
they were losers, they were worthless, and they were failures.
In 2010, The Guardian reported on the discovery of a letter, handwritten by Murry and addressed
to Brian.
Dated May 8th, 1965, a time when the Beach Boys were enjoying chart-topping success,
it read:
"It has become very apparent to me that the family cannot exist under the worrisome and
trying conditions that have been going on for the last five or six years.
[…] No matter how many hit songs you write or how many hundreds of thousands of dollars
you may earn […] you are going to suffer remorse."
Over the course of his life, Brian Wilson became more and more reclusive, even as he
continued to write songs for the band.
According to The Independent, his preferred place to write was at his L.A. home, sitting
at a grand piano he had put in a homemade sandbox so he could feel his feet in the sand.
There, he composed and arranged the music for nine consecutive gold albums.
In fact, he did pretty much everything except write the lyrics.
But Wilson was also frequently partaking in amphetamines, LSD, and morphine, and topped
it all off with alcohol, too.
Brian became obsessed with the idea he was being bugged, and would only meet with people
from what he perceived as the safety of his pool.
When a rash of forest fires coincided with him writing the song "Fire," he started to
believe his music was influencing real-world events.
He started to hear voices too, and while some of them loved him, others promised to kill
him.
Wilson retreated even further into himself, and was only 25 years old when he largely
dropped out of the public eye.
Since then, Wilson has been diagnosed with a schizoaffective disorder, but it was still
a long time before he got the help he needed.
The entire saga of Charles Manson, his Family, and the murders perpetrated by them is a strange
one indeed, and it's made even more bizarre by an incident in which his story had a bizarre
crossover episode with the Beach Boys.
It was the summer of '68 when drummer Dennis Wilson hooked up with the Manson clan and
spent a few months completely lost in drug-fueled debauchery.
It all started after Dennis picked up a few hitchhiking Manson devotees, and continued
because of Charles Manson's own musical aspirations.
"On our way back to the studio at Brian’s house, where we were recording, I said ‘Well
Dennis, you really have an interesting character on your hands now.’"
Once Manson started showing Dennis how to play guitar, the hooks were in.
They even lived together - on Dennis' dime - until things suddenly went sour.
Dennis offered Manson the opportunity to hit the recording studio, but when the producers
tried to make some changes to his music, Manson pulled out a knife.
"They came to the ranch, lady.
I didn't go to them, they came to me, you're stealing my music every day, you're writing
my songs, you're playing my game."
The entire episode left a lasting impact, however, as did the legendary events that
took place soon after.
Even though Dennis vowed to never speak of his time with Charles Manson, Mike Love mentioned
the episode in his memoir, Good Vibrations.
He wrote:
"The guilt was devastating.
Dennis [was] shaken to the core.
[He] carried that guilt with him for the last 14 years of his life."
Pet Sounds was an iconic album, and that cover is pretty iconic, too.
It was shot at the San Diego Zoo, and the San Diego Tribune reports that the cover was
rumored to be a direct message to their rivals, The Animals.
Whatever their motivation was for shooting the cover at the zoo, however, the whole thing
didn't go too well.
“We went ‘WOOOOAH!’
Couldn’t believe it, great title.
So a couple days late, we hauled ass down to the San Diego Zoo.”
Ultimately, the Beach Boys were banned from ever setting foot in the zoo again, and there's
a long list of bizarre shenanigans that went on during their visit.
Names aren't named, but someone thought it was a brilliant idea to bounce a carrot off
a tiger's head, someone else tried to manhandle an antelope, and somehow, they got hold of
a few puppies and baby chicks, leaving them in strategic places around the zoo.
Meanwhile the band claimed that they were the ones really suffering - with the goats
that made it onto the final album cover said to be particularly awful - but those puppies
probably felt differently.
It was Christmas Day 1983 when, according to Rolling Stone, Dennis Wilson was turned
away from the detox unit at a California hospital - with one doctor allegedly claiming he was
just too much trouble to deal with.
Dennis was dead three days later.
Dennis drowned in the waters of Marina Del Rey, where he'd been hanging out with friends,
drinking and diving off a boat called Emerald.
He had a blood alcohol content of point two six when he made his final dive, and didn't
come up again.
He was 39 years old.
The years leading up to that day were rough.
As early as 1963, his spot at the drums was being filled by a studio drummer, but it wasn't
until 1979 that Dennis was finally kicked out of the band.
Prior to that, Wilson had started using heroin, and he was the abuser in a relationship with
actress Karen Lamm, whom he once nearly killed with a gun.
He torched a Ferrari, checked in and out of hospitals, and destroyed Christine McVie's
house, all while on alcoholic, drug-fueled rages.
Then there was the last straw: Dennis hooked up with his second cousin, the 16-year-old
daughter of Mike Love.
That went over about as well as you might expect, and restraining orders were issued
between the two bandmates.
After that, there were more drugs, more alcohol, and when Dennis died, the band announced they
wouldn't be disbanding - and only took a short break to mourn.
So, what about Mike Love, cousin to the brothers and lead vocalist on songs like "California
Girls" and "I Get Around"?
When he talked to Rock Cellar in 2016, they touched on what seems to be an apt description
of his dual personality: "the switchblade and the butterfly."
While Love admitted that he could see how his particular sense of humor could come off
as crass at times, a lot of what he's done has all been in good fun.
That's what he says, at least.
Given how many times he's taken Brian to court, you can see how people would be mistaken.
Love told Rock Cellar that his main lawsuit against Brian stemmed from a single place:
his claim that he wrote a number of Beach Boys songs - including "Surfin' USA" and "Help
Me, Rhonda" - but was never given a songwriting credit.
Love said:
"I'm not taking credit for Brian's brilliant arrangements or production or anything like
that, and I'm not saying I could have done it on my own.
I'm saying that there was not an accurate picture of who did what when it came to the
creation of these songs."
That 1992 lawsuit was just one of many, and one of the main reasons he's been labeled
the villain of the Beach Boys.
Love feels this reputation isn't deserved, and told Rolling Stone that, while he laughs
off all the hate most of the time, it does sometimes break him.
In 1988, "Kokomo" shot to the top of the charts - 24 years and four months after the Beach
Boys' first chart-topper, "I Get Around".
There's not much those two songs have in common, and there's a pretty good reason for that.
"Kokomo" was written for Tom Cruise's movie Cocktail - and it wasn't written by the musical
genius behind most of the Beach Boys songs, either.
According to Entertainment Weekly, you can blame a number of different writers and musicians
- including Mike Love - for "Kokomo," the song that's probably stuck in your head right
now.
At the time, Brian was under the constant supervision of the psychotherapist Eugene
Landy, and Landy forbade Brian's initial involvement with the song — although he did show up
in the video.
"Landy wouldn’t let Brian record with us, only if Landy could be the co-writer or the
co-producer of the record and stuff.”
It's also worth noting that there is no actual Kokomo, although one island was briefly renamed
after the success of the song.
Oh, and that it was once performed live at Mar-a-Lago.
Yes, that Mar-a-Lago.
Carl Wilson died in 1998, only a few months after touring with the band for their 36th
annual summer tour.
The official cause of death was complications from lung cancer, although he had also previously
been diagnosed with brain cancer.
Wilson was only 51 years old.
Obituaries, historians, and those who knew him remembered him as the group's heart, and
the one who grounded the rest through all the chaos.
Beach Boys publicist Sandy Friedman said:
"Carl was like a rock for the group.
He was the steady one.
He was the tiller."
Mike Love agreed, and told Rock Cellar in his interview that, of all the hard times
they'd been through as a band and a family, the hardest was the final tour with Carl.
He said:
"After his last concert with us in Atlantic City the year before he passed away, seeing
Carl Wilson take a look at all of us and saying goodbye for the last time to everybody, which
is basically what it was; that was really hard to think about again."
Even though their music inspired countless lifetimes of happy-go-lucky fun in the sun,
the Beach Boys didn't walk an easy road.
Brian Wilson and Mike Love have both talked a little about the early days of the band
with the benefit of hindsight, and perhaps most tragic of all is that their memories
are tinged with both respect and regret.
In his 2016 interview with Rock Cellar, Love said Brian had been gifted with, quote, "a
super-charged packet of genealogy that gave rise to his brilliance in music."
And, while acknowledging his rocky relationship with Dennis, he also gave credit where it
was due.
Love said:
"He […] was a very powerful drummer and he had that competitive spirit."
When Rolling Stone talked to Brian in 2016, he admitted there was plenty that he missed
about those days.
He missed "hanging with Dennis,” for example.
He missed Carl, too, saying:
"I miss hearing him talk, the things he has to say."
And Love?
Brian said he hoped that broken relationship would be repaired, someday.
He added:
"My favorite part of music is harmony.
That's the part of music I like the most.
I like the full harmony."
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