The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson

New York (NY), USA – Rodale has published
Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Beach Boys’
Brian Wilson by Peter Ames Carlin.

The following is an excerpt from the book.
Published by Rodale; 1-59486-320-2.
Copyright © 2006 Peter Ames Carlin

Chapter 1

Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys’ original songwriter, producer, and visionary, is
in his sixties now, a man of age and wealth and almost no discernible interest
in the world as it existed before him, particularly with regard to his family
and their own journey across the continent to the golden coast where he was
born. “We never talked about that stuff,” Brian says. It is the spring of 2004,
and he’s in one of his favorite restaurants, a bustling hillside deli in a mall
down the street from his home on the crest of Beverly Hills. “That’s the one
thing they never did, never talked about our ancestors at all.” Now, it’s hard
to know if Brian is saying this because it’s true or because he just doesn’t
remember any such conversations. Or, more likely, he just doesn’t want to
address the issue. He’s an intimidating man, both for all he’s achieved in his
life and for all he’s suffered along the way. And given the remove of his
celebrity and his psychic torment, it’s hard to separate the humor from the
horror in his eyes when he does recall something his father did like to say.

“Kick some ass!” Brian is smiling now, in his silly, sad way. “Exactly, that’s
what my dad said. Kick ass! Kick ass!”
 
 Murry Wilson was a big guy with a big personality and even bigger dreams of
glory. That he would attain them through the work of his sons was a source of
great pride and outrage from the old man. “My relationship with my dad was very
unique,” Brian says. “In some ways I was very afraid of him. In other ways I
loved him because he knew where it was at. He had that competitive spirit which
really blew my mind.”
 
 “Don’t be afraid to try the greatest sport around.” That’s the story of Brian’s
life. But also the story of his brothers, his cousin and friends, and all of the
ancestors whose ambitions, fears, hopes, and determination delivered them to
this land beneath the unyielding sun. California, here we come. Right back where
they started from. “Catch a wave and you’re sitting on top of the world.”
 
 As described by Timothy White in his intricately researched The Nearest Faraway
Place, the story of the Wilsons in America begins in the late eighteenth
century, when the first Wilson to venture to the New World settled in New York.
The first American-born family member, named Henry Wilson, was born in 1804 and
eventually moved west to Meigs County, Ohio, where he worked as a stonemason.
His son, named George Washington Wilson in the spirit of the times, was born in
1820, and he and his family farmed a plot of rich, river-fed land in Meigs
County for more than six decades until his own son, William Henry Wilson,
decided to pursue fortune west to the wide-open plains of Hutchinson, Kansas. So
west they went, with patriarch George in tow, settling onto a large, if
relatively arid, farm that William Henry soon abandoned in order to go into the
industrial plumbing business. Contracts to work on the state’s new reformatory
system, along with the many opportunities afforded by the modernizing world
around them, provided a decent working-class living and a solidly built
clapboard bungalow on one of Hutchinson’s nice residential streets. As the
nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, William Henry began to think again
of chasing fortune into the western horizon.
 
 California! At the dawn of the new century, this was the setting of every
ambitious man’s dreams. The real estate flyers papering the town painted in the
details, describing the valley soil as every bit as rich and fertile as the sun
was warm and the breezes gentle. Thus inspired, William Henry scraped together
the cash to buy, sight unseen, ten acres of prime farmland in the southern
California village of Escondido. William Henry loaded up his wife, kids, and
even his eighty-five-year-old father into the family jalopy; they arrived in
1904 and spent the year laboring on their new vineyard. And though the sun did
indeed shine, and the water flowed as promised, and the vines did erupt with
fat, juicy fruit, the farming was every bit as hard as it had been back in
Kansas, and the money not nearly as vast as previously anticipated. By 1905,
William and family were back in the plumbing business in Kansas. Still, memories
of the California sun and the dreams of ease and fortune that had once stirred
William Henry’s soul came to rest in the imagination of his teenaged son,
William Coral “Buddy” Wilson. As the boy grew, so too did his visions of the
golden future that awaited him in the Golden State.
 
 Dark-eyed, heavy-browed, and thick-featured, Buddy Wilson took off for
California in 1914. Then in his early twenties, the young man — already married
to Edith Shtole and the father of a child or two — fairly seethed with
ambition. Surely, he imagined, a man with his drive and appetite could find an
untapped stream of gold somewhere in that rich, open economic frontier. Leaving
his family back in Hutchinson, Buddy would spend months at a time searching for
his place in the sun, looking increasingly in the oil fields of the southern
coast. Guys could make a fortune if they latched onto the right rig, and so
Buddy used his plumbing skills as his entrée, working as a steamfitter on the
pipes that channeled the gushers out of the ground and into the pockets of the
rich men whose example he was desperate to follow.
 
 But Buddy would never join them in the gilded halls of the powerful. Moody and
scattered, plagued by searing headaches and a self-destructive thirst for
whiskey, Buddy wandered from job to job to long stretches of unemployment, which
he passed grumbling into a glass in a dim barroom. When Edith and the kids
finally joined him in 1921, taking the train to the elegant-sounding village of
Cardiff-by-the-Sea, he couldn’t afford to lease an apartment in town. Instead,
the family spent their first two months living in a snug eight-by-eight-foot
tent with all the other squatters on the beach.
 
 Edith took a job pressing clothes for a garment manufacturer, and eventually the
family moved to a small home on an unpaved road in Inglewood where the eight
Wilson kids attended school, worked weekend jobs, and marched the thin line
dictated by their sour father and stern, demanding mother. Escape, such as it
was, came in the occasional afternoon bike rides to the open, breezy expanse of
Hermosa Beach.
 
 Escape was a necessity for Buddy Wilson’s kids. Buddy, now in middle age and
resigned to his life of small prospects and severely limited horizons, had long
felt his ambition curdle into resentment. Often awash in alcohol and self-pity,
Buddy’s bile regularly boiled over into violence, directed most often at Edith.
But he could also turn his fists on his children, once beating the school-aged
Charles so savagely (for mistakenly shattering his glasses) that Murry, then a
teenager, had to come to his brother’s rescue, shoving the old man out of the
house until he sobered up. And this wasn’t the only time Murry had come to blows
with his father. Increasingly, the family’s second-oldest boy found himself
thrust into the role of his mother’s protector, raising his own fists against
the father he loved but who seemed unable to love him or anyone else in the
family.
 
 As in most abusive families, the physical and psychic violence that ruled their
home became an unacknowledged presence, a force that both dominated their lives
and forced them into silence. But if they couldn’t talk about their problems,
the Wilsons could always sing their way to a kind of amity. Indeed, group sings
had been a Wilson family tradition dating back to Kansas and beyond, as an
eighty-seven-year-old Charles Wilson (an uncle to Brian, Dennis, and Carl) would
tell Timothy White, describing nights on the Kansas plains when “we’d have shows
on Saturday nights, with three of the oldest brothers on guitars and mandolins.
This was at home, with the windows open to the street, and people would stop and
listen.”
 
 Even Buddy, a man with no discernible instincts toward paternal tenderness,
loved to sing with his kids. He’d long since come to admire the sound of his own
tenor voice anchoring the family blend. But even more important, weaving his
voice together with those of his wife and kids was as close as Buddy could get
to actual emotional intimacy with his family. And perhaps this was why Murry,
the son who had come to be the family’s last line of defense against their
drunk, vicious father, came to love music so very much. He taught himself to
play guitar, too, and he picked up piano from his big sister. And when the
living room radio picked up broadcasts from the elegant nightclubs of Hollywood
or downtown Los Angeles, Murry sat in front of the speaker and soaked it in, his
face glowing happily. What he was hearing was an entirely new vision of the
world. Here, life was filled with luxury and ease; a place where careers could
be made and fortunes earned, all by the grace of a clever new song. Sitting in
front of the radio, aloft on the arc of a pretty melody, Murry Wilson had come
to realize something: More than anything else in the world, he wanted to be a
songwriter.
 
 But if Murry could be just as dreamy as the next aspiring pop star, he was also
a realist who had grown up knowing exactly how important — and difficult — it
could be to buy the bare essentials of day-to-day life. He was a mediocre
student at George Washington High School, but the rock-jawed youngster left
school in 1935 armed with a steely resolve to find work. And though the rest of
the nation was still mired in the teeth of the Depression, Murry landed a job as
a clerk with the Southern California Gas Company. He was still employed there
when he met and, in 1938, married Audree Korthof, the sweet-natured daughter of
a stern, hard-working baker who had moved his family west from Minnesota when
Audree was a schoolgirl. Murry and his new wife settled in southern Los Angeles,
reveling for a time in Murry’s ascendance from the gas company office trenches
to a junior administrative post. When Audree became pregnant in the fall of
1941, Murry’s determination to succeed and to outdo the sad, bitter legacy of
his father only grew more intense. The couple’s first son, Brian Douglas Wilson,
was born on June 20, 1942, bearing the same blue eyes, dark hair, and prominent
brow that had followed the family across the generations.
 
 Murry and Audree welcomed two more boys into their family in the next four years
— the fair-haired Dennis Carl Wilson coming in late 1944 and Carl Dean Wilson,
another dark-featured boy, at the end of 1946. Moving his family to a modern, if
cozy, two-bedroom ranch house on West 119th Street in the blue-collar suburb of
Hawthorne, Murry rolled his sleeves up over his bulky forearms and set to
scratching out his own slice of the postwar economic boom. He’d already made
some progress, jumping to a junior administration job at the Goodyear Tire and
Rubber Company just after Brian’s birth and then, just as the war ended, to a
foreman’s position in the manufacturing plant of AiResearch, an aeronautics
company that made parts for Seattle-based Boeing Aircraft’s growing line of
civilian and military airplanes.
 
 By the end of World War II, the South Bay revolved around the thriving aerospace
industry. Borne up by the dual demands of a rapidly expanding civilian airline
market and the just-as-rapidly-growing tension with the Soviet Union,
aeronautics presented opportunities for hardworking men that were seemingly as
limitless as their own aspirations. But while Murry’s timing was spot-on, and he
was a tireless worker with a penchant for big ideas, nothing came easily for
him. A gruesome accident at Goodyear cost him his left eye, and that twist of
fate only emphasized an aggressive-to-bellicose personality that tended to
alienate him from co-workers and superiors alike. Stalled on the lower rungs of
management and increasingly frustrated with his flat career arc, Murry descended
into dark moods all too reminiscent of his own father’s. Still, unwilling to
resign himself entirely to the old man’s fate, he scraped together as much cash
as he could and opened his own business, an industrial equipment rental outfit
he called A.B.L.E. (Always Better Lasting Equipment) Machinery. From that point
on, Murry Wilson would be his own boss. The arrangement suited him just fine.
 
 So in the mornings Murry would dress in his pressed white shirts and skinny tie
knotted just so, his horn-rimmed glasses perched on his thick, bulldog’s face,
his suit jacket straining against the prominent belly and muscular shoulders
that testified both to his appetite for work and for the rewards awaiting a man
at the end of his day. Steering his Ford down the quiet, sun-washed streets of
mid-1950s Hawthorne, he’d see a hundred houses just like the one he shared with
Audree and his three boys: small but neat, with a lush lawn and a wide driveway
for the late-model Ford, Buick, or Chevy, its tail fins gleaming in the cool
morning light.
 
 These were the cars of men who were determined to get somewhere in their lives.
Like Murry, many of Hawthorne’s men were either born in the Midwest or were the
children of men and women who had made the westward trek sometime in the first
few decades of the twentieth century. “It was like a little Midwestern town that
just got moved right there to eighty acres of land,” recalls Robin Hood, who
grew up a few blocks from the Wilsons. “There were a lot of farmers from Kansas
and Missouri, a lot of Dust Bowl-era folks who settled in with their big,
extended families. Nobody was rich, but we didn’t know it.”
 
 But their parents certainly did. And if one belief held the community together,
it was the one about the transformative potential of hard work. No matter where
you came from, no matter what your people used to be or what anyone expected you
to become, in a working-class West Coast town like Hawthorne — which had been a
stretch of empty coastal flats and swamp a generation ago — you could work your
way into being anything or anyone you felt like being. This belief is
liberating, of course, but it’s also evidence of internal currents that can give
the pursuit an undertone of desperation. As Joan Didion would write, the
California of this era was a place “in which a boom mentality and a sense of
Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some
buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because
here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.”
 
 Eventually the Baby Boom generation would turn the very edge of the continent
into its own proving ground. But the impulse that propelled them there, that
restless need for deliverance and the intuitive belief that it could be divined
by your own hands somewhere out past the wild fringe of the western horizon, was
the same one that had dragged their families across the American frontier and
into the dreamy, bustling, sun-glazed cities they had built for themselves. And
this was where Murry’s sons, Brian, Dennis, and Carl, came to understand their
father’s need for them to kick the world in the ass. He wanted so much for them.
He wanted so much for himself. In the worst possible way, you might say.
 
 Reprinted from:

Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Beach Boys’
Brian Wilson by Peter Ames Carlin © 2006 Rodale Inc. Permission granted by
Rodale, Inc., Emmaus, PA 18098. Available from World Music Central
here or wherever books are sold.
 
 The author,
Peter Ames Carlin, is the television critic for The Oregonian in Portland,
Oregon. His award-winning reportage on Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys has
appeared in American Heritage, the New York Times, People, and The Oregonian.
Carlin’s work has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles
Times Magazine, and Men’s Journal. For more information, please visit
www.peteramescarlin.com.