How Brian Wilson Changed American Music and Fought to Find His Voice Again

00:00:10
Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people, coming to you from the city where the West begins, Fort Worth, Texas.

00:00:22
Speaker 2: On June eleventh, twenty-five, songwriter, producer, and Beach Boy Brian Wilson passed away. He was eighty-two. Here to tell the story of Brian Wilson is David Leaf, close friend of Brian and the author of Smile: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of Brian Wilson. Let’s get into the story.

00:00:43
Speaker 3: The Beach Boys were, in a sense, an accident. It wasn’t like the Beatles where John had his group and Paul joined it, and then George joined it, and they spent five years trying to get a record deal and, you know, really honing their ability to play great rock and roll music and starts to write great music. The Beach Boys didn’t spend five years doing that. It was more like five months. Brian Wilson was this incredibly gifted kid. Brian loved music, and he loved to sing. From the time he could basically stand up. He remembers hearing Gershwin’s Rhapsody and Blue when he was very young, and that became sort of his theme song in life.

00:01:43
Speaker 4: He’s into rock and roll, you know. George Gersher is into rock and roll.

00:01:47
Speaker 5: Bop up.

00:01:53
Speaker 2: Best rock and roll.

00:01:54
Speaker 6: When you hear back, what do you heard?

00:01:57
Speaker 3: Where?

00:01:57
Speaker 7: Do you think that is caliboying?

00:01:58
Speaker 3: Girl?

00:02:00
Speaker 6: I have the California being from back himself.

00:02:03
Speaker 3: What is it in your life that makes a piece like Rhapsody in Blue go into your soul? It’s a beautiful piece of music, but it’s not a joyous piece of music for the most part. I believe it’s because he was an abused child, and he needed the beauty of music. He connected with the beauty of music. Feeling was what was most important to him. He wanted his music to express a certain feeling, and once he found that feeling, he could then write a song that would do that. Anyway. My mom.

00:02:35
Speaker 4: Was an organism, and Dad was a pianist, and then he would write songs that she would play along with him, and it was like a husband-wife team. But it was just a really great. He was an impression to melody, like his melody ca real prettiant. You know, they really got to me very deeply in my soul.

00:02:49
Speaker 3: When he’s about eight or nine years old, his father teaches him how to play a little boogie-woogie at the piano. Then he realizes that he has a gift. His uncle teaches him how to write music on sheep, and most significantly, he hears two jazz vocal groups: the High-Lows and the Four Freshmen.

00:03:14
Speaker 8: Oh.

00:03:14
Speaker 4: I immediately took to the sound of their voices, and I started learning their harmonies.

00:03:18
Speaker 3: And he literally spent maybe a year or more at the piano with a tape recorder by his side, learning how to dissect their vocal arrangements so that he could teach his brothers and then the Beach Boys how to sing in multi-part harmony.

00:03:37
Speaker 9: And there moments when we’d be seeing harmony together that my father would just fall down crying with joy. Actually, that’s a birth of the three brothers sing together.

00:03:50
Speaker 10: It sounds simple, but it wasn’t. Kind of blew my mind that Brian had that capacity, that ability to hear all those parts simultaneous and be able to deal him to the different individuals who could handle that range. That he was quite gifted in that way.

00:04:09
Speaker 3: It was devotional.

00:04:10
Speaker 11: It’s like building a household. It isn’t laid foundation.

00:04:14
Speaker 9: He build it. Yeah, yeah, that’s right.

00:04:16
Speaker 12: You know, he took a little bit of Chuck Berry, a little bit of before Freshmen put him together.

00:04:20
Speaker 11: It’s like composing is like architecture, a thing with the own music, I think it is.

00:04:24
Speaker 3: Yeah, even if the lyrics would be about surfing, cars, and girls, there was something in the melody and the vocal arrangement.

00:04:31
Speaker 2: Now, I was quite impressed with what I heard.

00:04:33
Speaker 12: I thought the arrangements that they were doing were kind of sophisticated.

00:04:36
Speaker 5: Now, you know.

00:04:37
Speaker 2: It was the rock and roll Mozart, man, you know.

00:04:39
Speaker 3: And so he’s a great athlete. He’s the quarterback of his high school football team. He’s the center fielder of his baseball team. He wanted to be Mickey Mantle. As he Brian said, he couldn’t hit the curveball. So music became his life. When they walked into Capitol Records and got their deal, Brian was nineteen years old. It’s amazing that in that short period of time, sixty-two, sixty-three, sixty-four, he is churning out, I mean, one year, the Beach Boys put out four albums. I mean, it was just an insane output of music. Within four years, Brian has the most remarkable year that anybody ever had in popular music. He composes, arranges, and produces the Pet Sounds album. He composes, arranges, and produces the Good Vibrations single, and then he composes, arranges, and produces the music of Smile, all in nineteen sixty-six. And there was nothing about him in nineteen sixty-two that would let you know that was going to happen except for one thing: Brian believed that music was the voice of God. He believed that he was following in the footsteps of people like Bach, and he wanted to share this spiritual beauty that he felt with the world. Anyway, he’s going on tour with the Beach Boys, although he’s not a happy tour member of the group. He wants to stay home and focus on making records. That’s his focus now. Gershwin, the Four Freshmen, the High-Lows were big influences before he started making music, but once he started making records, it was, how do I make a record that’s going to get on the radio? And his biggest influences in the sixties were Phil Spector and The Beatles.

00:06:29
Speaker 7: Phil Spector, he was everything, the biggest inspiration in my whole.

00:06:34
Speaker 11: What do you think is the greatest popes I’ll ever written?

00:06:36
Speaker 6: I’ll probably be “My Baby” by the on ed.

00:06:38
Speaker 7: See, I was in my car with my girlfriend, and we were driving around, and all sudden this guy, Wig Martindale, a discocke. He goes, “All right, here we go!” And “Be My Baby” by the run. “D you gonna start playing?” So, all sudden they got into this part.

00:06:58
Speaker 10: And I wanted.

00:07:02
Speaker 7: I pull over.

00:07:02
Speaker 13: I pull over to the sight.

00:07:04
Speaker 7: Of the street, of the curb, and my gosh, where, in no way! Actually, in a way, it wasn’t really get your mind on tip and skinning, like your mine revamped. Like, once you’ve heard that record, you’re a fan.

00:07:23
Speaker 1: And when we come back, more of this remarkable story: the life story of Brian Wilson here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here, and I’d like to encourage you to subscribe to Our American Stories on Apple Podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, Spotify, or wherever you get our podcasts. Any story you missed or want to hear again can be found there daily. Again, please subscribe to the Our American Stories podcast anywhere you get your podcasts.

00:07:54
Speaker 2: It helps us keep these great American stories.

00:07:58
Speaker 1: Coming. And we returned to Our American Stories and the story of Brian Wilson with his close friend, David Leaf. Let’s pick up where were the last left off?

00:08:25
Speaker 3: He made a bunch of great records. There’s no question about that.

00:08:37
Speaker 12: Phil Speck was a very, very talented, crazy. He had this layered sound thing.

00:08:42
Speaker 13: Most people used the four-piece rhythm section. He had four guitars or six or seven. There were four pianos, always, one upright bass, one Fender bass, fifty people playing percussion instruments in a very small room.

00:08:59
Speaker 3: Because Brian is death in one ear, and Phil recorded in mono, having all those players together and recording in mono was perfect for Brian.

00:09:08
Speaker 12: But Brian took that and used it in a delicate way, so it became beautiful.

00:09:14
Speaker 2: Phil’s thing was anger.

00:09:15
Speaker 12: Brian was always looking for love.

00:09:17
Speaker 3: Brian saw how Phil was doing it, how he was using these A-list musicians, and he started using those musicians, and they could give him sounds in his head that the Beach Boys weren’t capable of playing. He wants to make music that’s going to touch us deeply, and when he hears Rubber Soul. In December of nineteen sixty-five, and, as he says, he was smoking pot, and he hears it.

00:09:44
Speaker 4: Oh, when I first heard, I flipped. All the songs seemed to be like a collection of folk songs.

00:09:49
Speaker 5: You know.

00:09:50
Speaker 3: He loved the notion that the Beatles have made an album where everything has the same vibe. What that tells us is he was listening to the American version, not the actual, well, UK release, because it’s the American version that all sounds the same textually.

00:10:06
Speaker 4: I said, “I want to make an album like that.”

00:10:09
Speaker 3: I’m gonna make an album that’s better than this. I’m gonna beat the Beatles. And he sets to work on Pet Sounds, and to do it, he wanted a lyrical collaborator who he felt could express emotions level up from what he had done before, and just on instinct, he asks a guy named Tony Asher, and they write songs unlike anything that’s ever been released in popular music. “I May Not Always Love You.” “Good Luck, There.” “God Only Knows.” And yes, I know there was “God Blessed the Child,” but we’re talking about an American pop group having a single called “God Only Knows.”

00:10:54
Speaker 14: We did have this concern about using the word God and the lyric at that time. It was, you know, a relative controversial thing, and I think we would have given it up if we could have come up with absolutely anything else that would have satisfied us.

00:11:06
Speaker 3: And if you listen to Pet Sounds from start to finish, I believe what you hear is Brian’s emotional autobiography. He gets as close to the bone as he can. His feelings tore out on this record.

00:11:20
Speaker 5: Something very essence eric with him, like a family or brother has a secret, but allows you to note in an art form.

00:11:35
Speaker 12: That’s just a basic truth about music is: it’s an expression of spirit.

00:11:41
Speaker 4: I never really fully took credit for the songs that I wrote because I knew that a higher farcess wouldney when I was writing.

00:11:46
Speaker 3: It touches people deeply. It’s about what it’s like to feel alienated from life in the world and wonder what’s going to happen to you beyond the butt in the sun, you know, surfer girl-kind of songs that came almost naturally to him. Head Sounds is such a big deal in England that in the year-end polls they put Pet Sounds in Revolver’s co-number one Albums of the Year. When I interviewed Sir Paul McCartney about it, he said, “No one is educated musically till they’ve heard Pet Sounds.” When I talked to Sir George Martin about it, he said that Sergeant Pepper was the Beatles’ attempt, accent on “attempt,” to equal Pet Sounds.

00:12:36
Speaker 15: I was just like, “Wait a second, we aren’t even using like nine chords in major sevens yet, and here, you know, the Beach Boys are using them as if it’s like easy.” The Beach Boys were using voicings and chords that were way beyond what everybody else was doing.

00:12:51
Speaker 3: That’s how big a deal Pet Sounds and Brian Wilson are. In nineteen sixty-six, Brian is the single most advanced artist in pop music who’s having hit records. He follows that with Good Vibrations. And what he does with Good Vibrations is he creates a brand new way of recording where he records pieces of music and isn’t sure how he’s going to put them together, but he records a lot of pieces of music, and then he stitches them together. There are alternate versions of Good Vibrations that are wonderful, but the one that comes out is the result of months of his warships. She’s exactations. But he said, you know, “I’m going to put this one aside because I have a different idea for that.”

00:13:41
Speaker 16: Riyan got the sense and it’s happened in an incremental way than anything was possible.

00:13:46
Speaker 3: He says, “Our next album is going to be as advanced from Pet Sounds as Pet Sounds was from Summer Days and Summer Nights.” This is how confident he is as an artist. So he embarks on this adventure, pulled dumb angel it for, and eventually Smiled. The initial notion of Smile is, it’s going to be an album that tells the story. It’s going to be an American album, which is very important because the heat of the British Invasion, if you will. And the idea is, it’s going to be the story of a bicycle rider flying in the sky from Plymouth Rock to Hawaii, looking down on America and telling an American story. That’s the first idea. Then Brian starts to get really spiritual, and he says, “I want this album to be a teenage Symphony to God.” And he had a lyrical partner who could write words that equals the kind of inscrewability, if you will, of the music.

00:14:55
Speaker 16: Oh my God.

00:14:59
Speaker 8: I wrote with that Dyke Parks more than anyone else. He’s my favorite collaborative.

00:15:03
Speaker 12: Van Dyke was working on Birds Records, and Van Dyke was a great esoteric and still is.

00:15:08
Speaker 3: But he and Van Dyke Parks go to work. They are bursting with creativity because there are no rules as to the kind of songs Brian is going to write with Van Dyke. There is indeed a sandbox in Brian Wilson’s living room into which his grand piano is placed, and he and Van Dyke Parks sit at the piano and write songs. Everything had to be perfect. It could be perfection in an eight-bar piece or just an instrumental sound. Don Randy tells a wonderful story of literally hours and hours just trying to get this one transitional note, and he got so tired that he put a pillow on the base pedal of the organ that he was playing on the session and lay down on the note. Finally, they woke them up a half hour later and say, “Okay,” Brian got what he wanted. I mean, there was nothing short of an obsessive perfectionism in what he was doing. That was beyond the understanding of everybody. What amaze the musicians, who they thought that, “Well, that milk doesn’t sound right.” They did not understand that he could hear the complete record in his head, and that when he combined what they were playing with the vocals, it would make perfect sense. Brian was hearing these incredibly complex arrangements in his head. And what Brian did that is inimitable is he had the ability to take two or three or four instruments together and combine them into another sound that was absolutely unique. I mean, he was doing stuff that just wasn’t anywhere else. They were going out of their minds. That, “What the heck is that?” And Danny Hutton tells a great story. He says, people were convinced that Brian had some magic box that only he had access to, that he could put his sounds through it. Again, these recordings done, which was of course absurd. The magic box was in his head, and so there’s no way to explain it. Even Brian today couldn’t explain it. Are there drugs? Well, I had crazy ideas.

00:17:13
Speaker 8: I was smoking hashish, and we were laying on the floor singing from laying on the floor and put the microphones down on our heads doing crazy things, and we got into a very strange bag. We came across a tape. It’s not called “Fire.” I had the musicians wearing fire helmets. I had a guy bring in a bucket for burning wood.

00:17:38
Speaker 3: The project collapsed.

00:17:40
Speaker 1: And when we come back, we’ll continue with the story of his teenage Symphony to God, his grand art project here on Our American Stories. And we returned to Our American Stories and the story of Brian Wilson with David Leaf. When we last left off, Brian embarked on his most experimental journey yet, the Smile album, which created a new genre, art rock. But the project would collapse dramatically. Let’s return to the story.

00:18:32
Speaker 3: Did he overuse drugs during the Smile sessions? Al Jardine tells a story of getting in the car with Brian at the William Morris Agency and Brian driving in circles twenty times while they were having a conversation. Brian’s documentarian at the time, Michael Vossi, says he thinks drugs is the biggest red herring in the Smile story. My sense is that Brian’s drug use increased in direct proportion to the resistance he was getting from the record company, his father, and within the group to the music that he had written with Van Dyke Clarks and recorded the backing tracks, and when it came time to do the vocals, Brian did not get one hundred percent support.

00:19:17
Speaker 10: I like Van Dyke. Parks is a nice person. But I asked him once, said, “Van Dyke, what does that lyric mean?”

00:19:24
Speaker 16: Columnated ruins?

00:19:31
Speaker 7: I was in a position of defending my lyrics that what went from Dingwoody Pearl, hang ten?

00:19:36
Speaker 6: I mean, I didn’t know that language, to like, “columnated ruins?”

00:19:40
Speaker 7: Domino Mike Love said to me one day, he said, “Explain this.”

00:19:44
Speaker 10: He says, “I don’t know.”

00:19:45
Speaker 2: I have a clue. I said, “Exactly.”

00:19:51
Speaker 3: The vocals the Beach Boys recorded for the Smile sessions are the most beautiful and glorious vocals anyone could ever have done. But it was not done with joy. It was done with, “What the heck is this?” And so Brian, who was extremely sensitive, begins to feel that this project isn’t going well. He told me he says, “I figured I needed a year to finish it,” and no one would give me a year, meaning the record company. The Beach Boys are putting out four albums a year, three albums in a year, all.