The recording and release of “I Get Around” precipitated a period of subtle creative transition for Brian Wilson, signified by the August 1964 single “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)”/“She Knows Me Too Well.” Preceding posts (here, here, and here) have dealt with the significance of these tunes in the overall context of Brian’s creative and personal development during the critical year of 1964. The introspection of “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” and the adult character of “She Knows Me Too Well” were appropriate to these times—during which surfing and car songs were becoming stale, the “British Invasion” was underway, and the Beach Boys had fired Murry Wilson as band manager.

If the new single indicated that Brian was going to “grow up” (as man or musician) did it mean the Beach Boys would necessarily do the same? Did Brian’s idea of maturity or “manhood” line up with that of his bandmates? Did growing up require the Beach Boys to dispense with some of the old themes that were unlikely to fit with Brian’s evolving conception of the group and its music? As discussed below, the answer to the last question appears to be yes—at least for a brief moment in the middle of 1964.

Part 26:

First released on August 24, 1964, “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” entered the Billboard singles chart on September 5, the same week the previous Beach Boys single, “I Get Around” (released back in May), made its exit. “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” momentarily became the sole Beach Boys record on the chart, but not the only Beach Boys song: during those weeks in September and October when “When I Grow Up” made its way into the Top 10, “Little Honda,” a Brian Wilson-Mike Love composition founded on the current popularity of Honda motor scooters, was also climbing up the chart—but as performed by a new group called the “Hondells.”

It wasn’t the first time another group scored a hit with a Brian Wilson song. The previous year, Jan & Dean had a No. 1 with “Surf City,” written by Brian and Jan Berry. But with “Little Honda,” circumstances were different, and maybe a little strange too.

On “Surf City,” Brian strayed from the Beach Boys to collaborate separately, as a writer, with Jan & Dean on a new song that never properly belonged to the Beach Boys. In contrast, “Little Honda” was not only written in-house by Brian and his fellow Beach Boy Mike Love (who received formal credit at the time), but also recorded by the Beach Boys, and then released under the band’s name as an album track on All Summer Long in July. Moreover, the Beach Boys’ version was easily superior to the Hondells’. It had better vocals and production, notable for its fuzzy, distorted guitar and the classic Phil Spector-styled “Wall of Sound” effect.

Yet it was the Hondells, not the Beach Boys, who took “Little Honda” all the way into the Top 10. By the end of October, their cookie-cutter rendition peaked at No. 9, thereby matching the chart performance of the Beach Boys’ more difficult “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man).” Along the way, the Hondells appeared on the TV program Shindig, lip-synching “Little Honda” while straddling the mini-bikes. [Watch here.] But as it was originally a Beach Boys album track written by Brian Wilson and Mike Love, shouldn’t it have been the Beach Boys out there on TV, fake-singing their hit while humping (figuratively and literally) those little toys?

Maybe yes, maybe no. The answer varies in accordance with one’s opinion as to what the Beach Boys were about, and what they should have been doing in the late summer and fall of 1964.

Three years earlier, 16-year-old Dennis Wilson innocently suggested that the barely-formed Beach Boys (then calling themselves the “Pendletones”) could sing a song about surfing. Music publishers Hite & Dorinda Morgan recognized the marketability of the idea, and the Beach Boys were born. Still, nobody could have foreseen the extent of what was to occur; that somebody would think of blending Chuck Berry, the Four Freshmen and surf-lyrics; that by 1963 a national craze would be in full swing, with beach and surfing songs forming the basis of an entire (albeit very short-lived) sub-genre of pop music. The Beach Boys and Capitol Records had smartly capitalized on the opportunity, but the whole phenomenon was founded on an element of dumb luck.

It was only after the Beach Boys broke through and the money started pouring in that people would be motivated to reverse-engineer the band’s success, break it down to its component parts, and then try to replicate it. As Brian Wilson himself explained (or at least implied) in an interview in August 1964 (in the trade publication Music Business), the trick was to identify with “the young people” who comprised the teenage record-buying market. Brian specified two distinct ways through which a songwriter might do this: (1) identify with what teenagers do; and/or (2) identify with what teenagers think about. (He humbly left out the part about exceptional songwriting, production, and vocal talent.)

On the internal, thought-driven “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man),” Brian chose the latter strategy, and tried to connect with (what he hoped were) the inner thoughts of the audience. But up until that point, he and the Beach Boys had most often opted for the first method, on stuff like “Surfin’ Safari,” “Shut Down,” “Be True to Your School,” “Fun, Fun, Fun,” and most recently, “I Get Around”—songs that were based on the (presumed) lifestyle and physical activities of America’s teenaged Baby Boomers.

A song about having fun on one of Honda’s popular 50cc motorbikes was therefore consistent with the standard Beach Boy song concept, and as originally done by the Beach Boys, “Little Honda” was quite good. It succeeded entirely on the terms it set for itself. It’s hard to imagine a record that could better communicate the thrill of riding around on a Honda scooter. In fact, the recording itself was probably more exciting than the real thing. As a Honda sales pitch or radio commercial, it was outstanding—American Honda Motor Company, Inc. should have been delighted, especially if the Beach Boys weren’t paid for their promotion.1 However, for that very same reason, “Little Honda” was (and remains) sort of ridiculous if judged not as a commercial recording, but as a song, or piece of music outside the frame of commerce.

While Dennis Wilson’s original idea for the “song about surfing” had been honestly naive—Dennis himself was a surfer who had a genuine sense of what was happening at the South Bay beaches—“Little Honda” was more calculated. Without a doubt, it was conceived from the very beginning with an eye toward pumping, and then capitalizing on, a potential recreational craze. It was particularly crass too, marking the first time the Beach Boys went so far as to flag an actual consumer product—by name—in the song itself. It was as if “Little Deuce Coupe” had name-checked Ford, or if “409” specified that it was about a Chevy, while trying to make even the trip to the dealership sound like fun (as “Little Honda” does in the lyric about “going down to the Honda shop”). Or if “Catch a Wave” had specified a particular brand of surfboard that was best-suited for the new coastline craze.2 It’s possible that no Beach Boys song to date had been so purposefully formulaic.

Since the beginning, the Beach Boys had worn their commerciality on their sleeves, projecting an element of salesmanship in their songs—come on down and catch a wave, and you too can be sitting on top of the world! The band’s records succeeded not only as popular music, but also (even if people didn’t think of them like this) as advertisements for a semi-imaginary Southern California lifestyle. But that’s apparent mostly in hindsight. In the Beach Boys’ defense, they couldn’t have been too aware of what it was they were doing; that for whatever reason, they were good salesmen. Rather, they were just making the music they wanted to and getting on the charts the only way possible. Theirs had been an honest, uncynical commercialism. Still, at some point, somebody—perhaps a member of the Beach Boys group itself—was going to notice what they had been doing, and be concerned. And maybe try to do something about it.

But that person would have been a member of a very, very small minority. Few would have cared about the prospect of the Beach Boys becoming overly commercial—and therefore creatively insincere. As the Hondells would prove, in 1964 “Little Honda” was solid product. It was what American teenage music was supposed to sound like. (British teenage music was a separate matter; during the ‘64 “Invasion” it was sort of its own separate sub-genre.) It was a good song because the Hondells could get it to No. 9. It was a bad song insofar as it couldn’t reach No. 5 or No. 1. “Little Honda” fit comfortably within the Beach Boys’ established image, and nobody would have batted an eye if the Boys had kept it for themselves and released it as a single.

It’s not just that “Little Honda” could have been a Beach Boys single, but that it sounds like it was written expressly for that purpose. However, the group declined the chance to follow “I Get Around” with another dynamic record on the youthful theme of motorized fun & recreation. Instead, the Beach Boys put out the unique and inward-looking “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” (with “She Knows Me Too Well” on the B-side), while “Little Honda” migrated over to Brian’s friend and former songwriting partner Gary Usher, the producer who basically fabricated the Hondells, putting together a band whose very name was welded to the Honda brand.

In the end, the Beach Boys missed the opportunity to put out a single that would have outperformed the lesser version by the unknown Hondells—meaning also that the Beach Boys would have bested their own chart performance on “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man).”

Something was going on here. Considering that Brian maintained significant, if not total authority to choose the recordings the Beach Boys released as singles, it seems obvious—though not absolutely certain—what occurred. Brian might have understood how something like “Little Honda” was okay for the Hondells, an unknown group that was looking for a break (just as the Beach Boys had been in 1961-62). But in mid-1964, in the midst of the British Invasion and after the crowning achievement of “I Get Around,” the Beach Boys had to distance themselves from yet another fad—especially one that was still more childish and regressive (and frankly, feminine) than surfing or cars.3 It was better for the Beach Boys to move up and out, as indicated by both “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” and “She Knows Me Too Well.”

Yet Brian and Mike were the guys responsible for bringing “Little Honda” into existence in the first place. They wrote it. Moreover, they did good work—Brian took care in the production and arrangement while Mike’s lyrics are excellent for what they are. But they did this in service of a dumb, transparently commercial idea.4

Does the fact that Brian and Mike wrote the song automatically mean that they came up with the original concept? It seems possible that the idea didn’t originate with them, but somebody else. Maybe Gary Usher. This could explain why it was Usher and his Hondells who took “Little Honda” onto the hit parade.5

From a strictly short-term business perspective, the Beach Boys missed out on a good score when they let “Little Honda” go. Because the Hondells’ hit version was on the Mercury label, Capitol Records missed out too. Capitol was, at best, ambivalent about this turn of events. Somebody at the Tower really wanted to see the Beach Boys up on those little Hondas, for at some point a studio photo shoot was arranged in which the Boys posed astride the scooters in a manner similar to what the Hondells did on Shindig (or for that matter, what Capitol had done two years earlier, when the Beach Boys were photographed with a surfboard and “woodie” station wagon for the cover of Surfin’ Safari).

Soon after the Hondells entered the Billboard singles chart with their version on Mercury, Capitol tried playing catch-up, releasing “Little Honda” as the lead track on a quickly-assembled Beach Boys EP called Four by the Beach Boys, which Capitol marketed as a four-song, 45-rpm single.

Only then did the Beach Boys’ “Little Honda” appear on the Billboard chart. But it was too late. As of the time the Hondells hit No. 9, the Beach Boys’ original was languishing at No. 73. It would get no higher than No. 65. From Capitol’s perspective, a missed opportunity.

For whatever reason, as things played out, Brian and the Beach Boys remained at an arm’s length distance from “Little Honda”: album cut—yes; single—no.6 The Hondells’ unfortunate appearance on Shindig (and the Beach Boys’ silly Honda photo shoot) indicates what could have happened had the Beach Boys thrown in with the scooter-fad. Fortunately, they didn’t. With knowledge of the difficulties Brian would later experience in getting the public to take the Beach Boys more seriously, it would appear that the band dodged a bullet—one they themselves had fired off by writing and recording the song in the first place. However, doing that may have come at the cost of creating a little tension between Brian Wilson and Capitol Records.

Here in the fall of 1964 there is evidence that Brian and Capitol are not seeing eye-to-eye. “Little Honda” flattening at No. 65 was not good. Something like this had never happened with the Beach Boys. Although their forgettable second single, “Ten Little Indians,” had stiffed back in 1962 (peaking at No. 49), that was before the group had established its commercial reputation and fully-defined identity as a surf/teen/fad band, and in any case, failure could then be attributed to the poor quality of the song. In the case of “Little Honda,” the release of a surefire Beach Boys hit was, for whatever reason, just botched. It’s possible to see how, from Capitol’s perspective, the young man with the magic touch—the one who had just delivered “Fun, Fun, Fun” and “I Get Around”—picked the wrong song. What was up with Brian Wilson?

More ‘64 in Part 27 (not yet posted)

Back to previous entry, Part 25

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Selected References for Part 26

Doe, Andrew. “Shows and Sessions 1961-2024.” Bellagio10452.com. At: www.bellagio10452.com/gigs.html

Grevatt, Ren. “The Beach Boys Ride the Trends.” Music Business, August 15, 1964.

Tiegel, Eliot. “4-in-1 Single to Be Bowed by Capitol.” Billboard, September 12, 1964.

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Recent posts have spent time on the Beach Boys’ single of August 1964, “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)”—a relatively overlooked song in the Beach Boys’ 1960s discography, but a very important one in the story of Brian Wilson.

Part 23 looked at the uniqueness of the song itself—as judged by the standards of early ‘60s teenage-pop, and in comparison to what was typically expected from the Beach Boys in those days. Part 24 noted how Brian would have wanted to “grow up” in both life and music, and then suggested that a song on this theme would have been especially relevant for him in the months after he fired his abusive and controlling father as Beach Boys manager.

The post below continues with still more commentary on “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man),” focusing more closely on Brian’s subjective state of mind at the time of its release, and the creative constraints he faced as a songwriter working in the demographically segregated (but lucrative) field of teenage-pop.

The post concludes with a look at the B-side of the “When I Grow Up” single: the song “She Knows Me Too Well.”

Part 25:

In July 1964, the Beach Boys triumphed with “I Get Around”—the culmination of the car-song concept that dated all the way back to 1962 and “409.” For Brian Wilson, success on this level may have justified a move toward newer and fresher ideas. By mid-August he was quoted in a music trade publication called Music Business, stating that Beach Boys songs shouldn’t, and wouldn’t, be restricted to cars and beaches.

Yet at the same time, Brian continued to accept the unshakable premise that underlay all Beach Boys music to date: the songs would continue to be tailored for the teenage sensibility. “As far as the Beach Boys are concerned,” he said, “we just want to keep on identifying with what the young people like to do and like to think about.” Brian then asserted that the band’s new single, “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man),” “certainly touches what every guy is thinking about.”

These comments provide a window into Brian’s thoughts at the time: since “every guy” thinks about what his future will bring, “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” was sufficiently teenage. It was therefore acceptable for the marketplace. In other words, Brian was justifying the new single not on its artistic merit or substantive content alone, but on commercial grounds—as viable product consistent with “Fun, Fun, Fun,” “I Get Around,” “Surfin’ U.S.A.” and all the rest.

As previously suggested (in this post), Brian was probably overselling the universality of “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man).” It isn’t really true that all teenage boys (or even most of them) think about whether they’ll want to marry early or play the field (“travel the world”), or be able to stay in love forever with their future wives. Nor is the average kid very apprehensive about the rushing onset of adulthood and the quick passing of years. It seems more probable that “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man),” gave voice to the inner thoughts and anxieties of Brian himself, more than the typical teenager.

As it so often does, the question turns to Brian’s internal state of mind. In private, how confident was he that the average American teen would relate to “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)?” Was he aware of just how solitary, intellectual, and inward-looking the song really was? How it differed from just about everything else in the field of teenage pop music? And while he certainly wanted to produce this record, and wanted to put it out as a single, could he fully appreciate how its subject matter related to his own personal background and the challenges he faced in becoming an adult? Did he know he was writing about himself?

It’s hard to say; over the years, Brian has given little indication of what he was thinking at that moment in the late summer of 1964. As critic Paul Williams wrote with respect to the naive brilliance of “I Get Around,” it’s possible Brian wasn’t thinking so deliberately at the time, working instead with a degree of “unselfconsciousness.” It is possible, in other words, that Brian wanted to write and record “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” but didn’t think too much about why he wanted to do it.

If, on the other hand, Brian knew that he had purposefully conceived the tune as an expression of his own thoughts and anxieties, he would have kept it to himself. He wouldn’t have told anyone. Not in 1964.

This was a business of course, and in these days, the pop songwriter or producer—Phil Spector, Bob Crewe, Brian Wilson—made records for a large but still very circumscribed teenage audience. The records were made for kids as kids (teenagers or “teeners”), not adults or even young adults. There was scarcely any “adult” audience for the Beach Boys or their genre of popular music. Most people Brian’s age—the youngest members of the “Silent Generation” now in their late teens or early twenties—were not fans of the Beach Boys, or Phil Spector’s records, or even the Beatles.1 This was before the changes of the mid- and late-1960s; before Bob Dylan transferred his lyrical sensibility from “folk” to the genre of post-Beatles rock ‘n’ roll; before the Beatles themselves began to mature in their music; before the audience grew up and started to experience life. Properly understood, in 1964 the job was simply to treat the young audience as customers, and give them what (was assumed) they wanted.

Brian was very good at this. For people in the business, his “genius” in the early 1960s was his ability to read the teenage mind, not his compositional skills, and certainly not his lyrical content. Brian Wilson was known to have the magic touch—he somehow knew what the kids wanted to hear in terms of sound and theme and had given it to them. And in the process, he and the Beach Boys generated a lot of money—for themselves, and a lot of other people.2 The reward was financial, and for somebody like Brian, also to be found in the satisfaction of chart success and the sense of purpose gained from the music-making process itself. Thinly-disguised personal self-expression rarely, if ever, had anything to do with it.

Accordingly, in the Music Business article in August, Brian left the impression of a pragmatic songwriter-producer working in alignment with commercial expectations, fully aware that his audience was teenage, and that he was not. He was an adult. And because he was an adult (albeit still quite young), it was his job to first “identify” with the less-mature record-buying public (whom he referred to as “the young people”) and then express their interests and concerns on hit records. Not his own.

And so he refrained from doing that. Or so it seemed. At the time, it’s doubtful anyone heard “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” as having anything to do with Brian’s own life. And even if someone was to confront Brian with the accusation that he had made a weird record about his weird anxieties instead of a fun, relatable song for America’s teenagers, Brian could have easily deflected it with the commercial rationale he outlined in Music Business: the song isn’t about me, it’s about them.3

With the passage of time, “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” shows itself to have been honest, creative, “alternative” to commercial expectations, and written with a dash of naiveté, or unintentionality. Brian created a musical feeling of adolescent uncertainty for a song that is lyrically about adolescent uncertainty. Although it wasn’t the best record the Beach Boys had put out, it may have been their most artful up to that point.

Still, it was an artfulness that was less-than-mature; not fully realized. There is an awkward incongruity between music and lyrics in “When I Grow Up” that Brian may not have intended: the music is fun and light, while the lyric is uncertain. The underlying message is foreboding. This was unavoidable though, for when Brian decided to write and produce the song sometime in the middle of 1964, he gave himself the task of making sincerity, introspection, uncertainty, and the inexorable slippage of time sound “fun” and “teenage,” suitable to be presented in concert for a howling mob of pubescent Baby Boomers. No matter how good the song might be, Brian was working at cross-purposes with himself.

Just as Brian himself originally intended, “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” can be grouped among all the other teenage Beach Boys songs. It remained consistent with earlier Beach Boys material—“Surfer Girl,” “Don’t Worry Baby,” “In My Room”—that delivered a heavier payload only when accompanied by references to the beach, cars, and teen scenes. But if Brian was to “grow up” for real, his music would have to do the same. (And vice-versa.) Therefore, he would have to strip away the formulaic teenage and fad elements and let the songs stand on their own.

And as it so happens, this is what Brian did on the B-side of “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man).”

When (if) the kids flipped the single over, they got another new song, the ballad “She Knows Me Too Well.” This was an advancement of a different sort. It was recorded at the same sessions as “When I Grow Up,” and can likewise be assumed to have been conceived and written during the period shortly following the firing of Murry Wilson. Like “When I Grow Up,” it was internal—dealing with a girl’s ability to read a guy’s thoughts and feelings without his being able to properly express them—but since it involved the romantic relationship between two young people, it could never be as solitary or purely thought-driven. Nevertheless, it had something that “When I Grow Up” lacked: an adult, or young adult quality.

In hindsight, the significance of “She Knows Me Too Well” is in how it dispensed with the faddish tropes that had always been present in even the best Beach Boys songs. There was no explicit reference to the age of the subjects, no indication they were in high school or, “going together.” It wasn’t summer vacation. There was no reference to living at home (in a kid’s “room,” or under parental restriction). There was no explicit reference to the ocean or beach as in “Surfer Girl” (or the lesser-known “Lonely Sea”), nor even an implicit allusion to the beach, as in “The Warmth of the Sun.” While “She Knows Me Too Well” bore a general musical similarity to the ballad “Don’t Worry Baby,” the drag-race setting was absent. 

“She Knows Me Too Well” could very well be the Beach Boys’ first non-teenage song because it isn’t, by its own terms, “teenage,” or associated with a fad. The listener may choose to hear it as a high school or teenage love song, but isn’t required to. It doesn’t sound like it’s about “boys” and “girls” at all, but young men and women of non-specific age, arguably at least 18 if not older, like the Beach Boys themselves. (If there is a younger sensibility in the song, it’s attributable to the character of Brian’s vocals.) The urgent sexuality that informs a number of early Beach Boys songs is gone—there’s no leering or teasing between girls and boys, and no need to hook up “in the parkin’ lot” or at the drive-in movie theater.

The singer is instead thinking about the relationship with his girl in terms that are emotional and psychological—though thankfully not in such a way that the song becomes tangled, wordy, and abstract. Thoughts and feelings are communicated to the listener with an intimacy and depth of feeling that is largely absent from other, more well-known pop hits of the same vintage—Temptations, Four Tops, Four Seasons, even the Beatles’ lovely ballads of mid-1964, “And I Love Her” and “If I Fell.”

With those records, the listener is first and foremost hearing a piece of pop music—a song—that then reveals itself to be about male-female relationships. On “She Knows Me Too Well,” it’s as if the singer is first telling you something very specific about himself and his life—as if he’s talking, thoughtfully—and only after are those preexisting thoughts and emotions set to music. “She Knows Me Too Well” isn’t better than “My Girl” or “If I Fell,” but it does sound more specific, closer to an actual human situation or emotional reality. For that reason the song might be a bit more serious too.

How Brian did this is a bit of a mystery, but it was not on purpose. It probably just happened naturally, the outcome of his personality and his internal approach to songwriting, where the listener is often drawn inside an enclosed musical space and made to feel what the song is really about. As time passed and he attempted to pull the Beach Boys away from the teenage model, Brian would lean further toward this type of songwriting, with the Pet Sounds album becoming its most famous and well-regarded expression.

Indeed, when everything is viewed historically, the point at which Brian produces “She Knows Me Too Well” in the middle of 1964 is when the landmark accomplishment of Pet Sounds begins to assume form somewhere on the distant horizon: it’s well-understood that the quality of Pet Sounds is attributable to its themes, production, arrangements, lyrical honesty, vocal quality, and professional studio musicianship. Written and recorded in the first half of 1966 (placing it far into the future from August 1964, if viewed through the lens of the ‘60s music scene), Pet Sounds is now recognized as major step forward—or sideways—for the music Brian Wilson was then creating for the Beach Boys. Yet as music fans have long recognized, Brian had already demonstrated the Pet Sounds style in a small set of four songs on Side Two of the Beach Boys Today album from March 1965. “She Knows Me Too Well” was one of the four.

“She Knows Me Too Well” may not be as pristine or fully-realized (arranged) as the later Pet Sounds tracks, but it’s not hard to imagine an updated version sitting alongside “You Still Believe in Me,” “Don’t Talk,” and “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times.” In some sense, therefore, Brian first adopted his Pet Sounds stance not in 1966 nor even 1965 at the time of Beach Boys Today, but earlier still, in the middle of 1964, during the height of Beatlemania.

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The next post, Part 26 of A History of Brian Wilson, will look beyond “When I Grow Up” and “She Knows Me Too Well” to a third song of mid-1964—”Little Honda”—which the Beach Boys notably did not release as a high-profile 45-rpm single. 

Go to Part 26 (“Groovy Little Motorbike”)

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Selected References for Part 25

Carlin, Peter Ames. Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson. Emmaus, PA: Rodale, 2006.

Grevatt, Ren. “The Beach Boys Ride the Trends.” Music Business, August 15, 1964.

Leaf, David. The Beach Boys and the California Myth. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978.

Sharp, Ken. “Love Among the Ruins: The Controversial Beach Boy Speaks His Mind.” Goldmine, September 18, 1992.

^__________ . Mike Love of the Beach Boys: One-On-One.” Rock Cellar, September 9, 2015. At: https://web.archive.org/web/20180612170213/https://www.rockcellarmagazine.com/2015/09/09/mike-love-of-the-beach-boys-one-on-one-the-interview-part-1/2/ (last accessed May 24, 2024)

Wilson, Brian, and Ben Greenman. I Am Brian Wilson. Boston: Da Capo Press, 2016.

This post continues on the subject of the August 1964 Beach Boys single, “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)”—a significant turning point in Brian Wilson’s creative evolution during the early- and mid-1960s. To summarize the previous entry:

(1) Although “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” was written for the typical teenage Beach Boys fan of the early ‘60s, it was deceptively sophisticated, expressing an outlook on life more likely to be appreciated by adults than the average teen;

(2) “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” marked the first time Brian wrote about the inner life intentionally—knowing he was doing so and wanting to do it. Moreover, it was the first time he took the fairly bold step of showcasing this kind of introspective material on a Beach Boys A-side.

The post below looks at the special significance “When I Grow Up” (To Be a Man)” would have had for 22-year-old Brian Wilson specifically, as an individual.

In his 2016 book I Am Brian Wilson, Brian flagged “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” as “one of the most important songs” from 1964, but didn’t explain why. Was it the musical arrangement? The fact that it wasn’t about a fad? Brian didn’t say, but only a few paragraphs later he offered the following, in the course of recounting his evolving approach to songwriting in the weeks and months after his nervous breakdown in December of that year:

When I came off the road after I freaked out on the flight to Houston, I spent lots of time in my apartment, thinking about the perfect songs for the group. We had done so many surfing songs and so many hot-rod songs by that point, and wanted to branch out. I wanted to write songs about relationships. I was growing in my normal life and I wanted to grow up musically.

In this passage, Brian was referring to his post-breakdown music of 1965—songs like “Let Him Run Wild” and “California Girls”—not “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man”) in 1964. Still, his comment points to the sensitivity he had to the importance of “growing up” as both musician and human being. Notwithstanding the fact that Brian was significantly older than the typical Beach Boys fan (by about 6-8 years), he himself was still growing up.

If Brian was to grow up in real life, shouldn’t his music grow up too? And for that matter, if Brian was growing up in his music (progressing as a producer and composer) shouldn’t he start growing up as a person? The answer, as Brian recalled it, was yes. The two spheres, life and music, would go together. They had to, for what would happen if they didn’t?

One possibility was the situation in which Brian evolved toward adulthood while dutifully cranking out teen-focused songs on fairly unserious and often fad-oriented themes. He had done this since the beginning, was still doing it very well, and it was easily conceivable that he could continue. After all, Bob Crewe was in his early thirties while writing and producing teen hits for the Four Seasons; Roger Christian was pushing thirty when he wrote stuff like “In the Parkin’ Lot” and “Car Crazy Cutie” with Brian. (Murry Wilson was then in his forties and trying to write teen music for the Sunrays.) In other words, Brian could become an adult in his role of businessman, while remaining a teenager as a songwriter.

However, Brian wasn’t this kind of musician. Time proves that he was a “visionary”—somebody who conceives new musical ideas, feelings, and sounds, and has the ability to bring them into existence. Of course he wouldn’t have been comfortable with typecasting, and as of the middle of 1964 he was well aware of the threat it posed to his and the Beach Boys’ career. That August, Brian was quoted in the trade press, saying, “I’m a little afraid of limiting our subject matter too much.”

Even less appealing was the prospect of the reverse scenario, in which Brian would be free to break new ground musically while failing to develop as young man, living outside the studio only as a kind of regressed man-child. Still worse than that was the possibility of being thwarted or stunted on both fronts, growing as neither musician nor human being. If that future was presented to Brian in 1964, he would have certainly rejected it.

As Brian implied in I Am Brian Wilson, the best way for someone like himself—a young, artistically-inclined musician—to handle this was to grow up in both music and in “normal life” together, bringing them into synch. “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” would seem to perfectly encapsulate Brian’s effort to simultaneously grow up both inside and outside of music. If you’re a songwriter who’s growing up in your personal life, why not write a song about the process (or prospect) of growing up itself?

From any rational point-of-view, as of August 1964 Brian would have seemed very mature in terms of physical stature, professional accomplishment, and personal deportment. Brian was hard-working, creative, knowledgeable about the business, and aware of his responsibilities. After two years of consistent success under his leadership, the Beach Boys had proven themselves to be more than just a fluke. Brian was the primary breadwinner for his entire family. He had earned the respect of Capitol Records, which gave him a virtually unprecedented level of creative license.1 In his personal life, Brian wasn’t reckless, neither an alcohol or drug-abuser, nor a skirt-chasing horndog. Nor is there any indication that wealth, notoriety and success had made him into an egocentric jerk.

Nevertheless, despite appearances Brian had internal problems that were not noticeable to the casual observer. His personal background had been especially harmful and was potentially crippling in the long-term. What Brian referred to as the “normal life” outside of music hadn’t been very normal at all.

Brian’s dad, Murry Wilson, was (and remains) the most visible and easily identifiable embodiment of the developmental challenges Brian faced. Murry’s noxious mode of parenting Brian had consisted of three main components: (i) an extreme level of physical violence, perversity, and punitiveness; (ii) oppressive, suffocating parental involvement and control; and (iii) moralistic instruction that framed all of it as a righteous form of love and protection. Within this alternate reality, Murry was a paragon of fatherly decency; a self-described “intelligent,” “strong,” and “honest” man who would say things to Brian like, “I’ve protected you for 22 years against many people that have tried to hurt you.”

In other words, the official Wilson narrative was that Murry had never tried to, and never had, hurt Brian. (As Murry’s infamous 1965 letter to Brian illustrates, it was basically every other human being on earth who wanted to do that.) If Murry had his way, his special brand of fatherly guidance and protection would continue in perpetuity, so that he could continue to subordinate and exploit Brian under the pretext of guidance and security, and appropriate Brian’s success as his own. Were this to occur, the adult Brian might appear to be a man in physical appearance, but in substance he would remain a compromised figure—at best, a satellite forever in orbit around the all-powerful and domineering protector.

In his own quiet way, Brian endured, resisted, and pushed back throughout childhood. Later, he successfully held the line against Murry’s aggression in the early years of the Beach Boys. And just recently, in April 1964, Brian took the landmark step of firing Murry as Beach Boys manager. This was a very big deal for the Beach Boys and especially the members of the Wilson family of Hawthorne. The real significance of the act wasn’t so much that Murry lost the formal title of “manager” (he would continue to maintain standing in the organization) as the fact that for the first time, Brian asserted authority over his father, effectively treating him as an employee subject to at-will termination.

It can be assumed that after doing this, Brian had some awareness that he had accomplished something significant. After all, this was probably the first time anybody in the family had drawn a line in the sand and said NO to Murry Wilson. (And Murry was stunned, retreating to his bedroom before rising again to write anti-Brian songs for the Sunrays.) Was it a mere coincidence that Brian conceived “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” in the weeks or months after standing up to his father like this? Could a Beach Boys song on the theme of incipient manhood/adulthood ever have been made while a father like Murry Wilson was manager and unofficial co-producer in the studio? Would Brian have even conceived the idea for “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” while he was still being formally “managed” and “protected” by the person who beat him throughout childhood as a matter of course?

The middle of 1964 was a period during which Brian would have been better able to imagine a real future for himself as an adult. He had at last taken an overt stand against Murry. Murry then retreated. Brian had stood fast, taken responsibility for his own well-being, and survived. And the world did not come to an end. He had earned a little more freedom with which to move forward with the music he was making with the Beach Boys. He was freer to move forward in life, too. He was growing up—“becoming a man”— and had to have known, or felt it on some level. After all, “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” does not ask, “will I grow up” but instead assumes that adulthood will happen.

What “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” does not take for granted is the specific character of that adulthood. “What will I be?” it asks. In the song, the future is uncertain and undefined, just as it would have been for Brian in his new, potentially Murry-free life. If Brian had indeed won a measure of personal freedom, that was good. But he would have to pay for it with a reduction in certainty. The exchange of parental security for increased autonomy is certainly a big part of growing up. And for poorly-raised people like Brian, it is essential that it occur—the sooner he puts some distance between himself and the thuggish security of abuse and suppression, the better. 

Subsequent history proves that Brian Wilson would never really be able to emancipate himself from the past. Whatever autonomy he earned in late adolescence and with the Beach Boys in his early twenties would gradually evaporate, starting in the mid- or late-1960s. The reason this happened has, for decades, been the subject of a very bitter private and public debate. Eventually, Brian would forfeit all agency over his own life, leaving himself vulnerable to all manner of mistreatment and exploitation—often administered by people who, like Murry Wilson, professed undying love for Brian.

In the end, “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” can be heard as a song delivering heavy concerns about the future that, tragically, proved to be well-founded.2 Like “In My Room,” it dealt with introspection and emotion with a solitary, internal voice—the song never falls back to the more settled ground of male-female romance. “When I Grow Up” was in fact an up-tempo variation on the “In My Room” theme, for when this sort of kid—a kid like Brian—is in his room, alone with his thoughts, one of the things he’s thinking about is what kind of person he’ll become in adulthood. And if he’s Brian Wilson himself, he might be wondering if, when, and how he will become a monster like his father and grandfather.3

More commentary in Part 25 of A History of Brian—click here to continue

Selected References for Part 24

Beach Boys, The. “Help Me, Rhonda” session recording. March 1965. At: WFMU’s Beware of the Blog. At: https://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2005/10/im_a_genius_too.html (last accessed September 5, 2023).

The Beach Boys. Directed by Frank Marshall and Thom Zimny. Kennedy/Marshall Company/White Horse Pictures/Disney+, 2024.

Carlin, Peter Ames. Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson. Emmaus, PA: Rodale, 2006.

Felton, David. "The Healing of Brother Bri." Rolling Stone, November 4, 1976.

Gaines, Steven. Heroes and Villains: The True Story of the Beach Boys. New York: Dutton/Signet, 1986.

Grevatt, Ren. “The Beach Boys Ride the Trends.” Music Business, August 15, 1964.

Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books, 1997.

Leaf, David. The Beach Boys and the California Myth. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978.

Sharp, Ken. “Love Among the Ruins: The Controversial Beach Boy Speaks His Mind.” Goldmine, September 18, 1992.

^__________ . “Mike Love of the Beach Boys: One-On-One.” Rock Cellar, September 9, 2015. At: https://web.archive.org/web/20180612170213/https://www.rockcellarmagazine.com/2015/09/09/mike-love-of-the-beach-boys-one-on-one-the-interview-part-1/2/ (last accessed May 24, 2024)

Williams, Paul. Brian Wilson & The Beach Boys: How Deep Is the Ocean? New York: Omnibus Press, 1997.

Wilson, Brian, and Ben Greenman. I Am Brian Wilson. Boston: Da Capo Press, 2016.

Wilson, Murry. Letter to Brian Wilson. May 8, 1965. Collection of Hard Rock International/Hard Rock Memorabilia.

Winnicott, D.W. The Family and Individual Development. New York: Routledge Classics, 2006.

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In the middle of 1964, positive changes were in the offing for Brian Wilson. In April he took the landmark step of sacking his father Murry as formally-titled Beach Boys manager. Meanwhile, with “Fun, Fun, Fun” and especially “I Get Around,” Brian and the Beach Boys were proving they could stay competitive and innovate during the height of the Beatle-craziness. The group was unified as a band both on the road and in the studio. Brian was rapidly evolving as a producer, learning to synthesize Phil Spector’s methods with his own unique sensibility. Released in July, All Summer Long was the most well-produced Beach Boys album to date.

The latter portion of the previous chapter (Part 22) attempted to set the stage for the next offering from the Beach Boys: the “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” single in August 1964. In short, for somebody raised the way Brian had been, the process of “becoming a man” was no simple matter. Part 22 left off with the idea that the 21- or 22-year-old Brian would have been feeling the need to grow up, and that music would be the way for him to do it.

As of August 24, 1964 it had been about 3 months since the release of the Beach Boys’ most recent single, “I Get Around,” and only a month-and-a-half from its ascension to No. 1. The All Summer Long album—featuring about 10 new songs in addition to “I Get Around”—had appeared even more recently, in mid-July. Having given the group’s young fans more than enough time to take in all this new music, it was time for Capitol Records and the Beach Boys to put out the new late-summer A-side single, “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man).”1 On this tune Brian steered clear of high school imagery, teen scenes, custom rods, cruising, and summer fun. The song instead finds a teenage boy alone with his thoughts, asking himself specific, pointed questions about adulthood and the future, as time hurtles forward.

“When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” entered the charts in early September of 1964 and by the middle of October had gradually peaked at No. 9. Although a hit (or modest hit), the song never attained the standing of other well-known Beach Boys recordings of both earlier and later times. Arguably, it’s not well-suited for either fun, radio-friendly listening or live performance. It was musically and thematically complicated by the pop standards of the era. The song asked questions and gave no answers. While Mike Love sang the verses in what sounds like a purposeful attempt to sound accessibly “teenage,” his vocals don’t enter until after the song has already taken the listener unawares with the dissonant harmony tag/refrain.

In his 2017 book about the music of Brian Wilson, Christian Matijas-Mecca wrote that Brian arranged the harmony parts to “sit high in the band’s vocal register and it sounds somewhat strained, not unlike a male prepubescent voice that has not yet dropped but cannot easily find where it is supposed to sit.” Brian himself has disparaged the “whiney” quality of his own high-pitched vocal.

Meanwhile, throughout the song, a background vocal motif conveys the relentless passage of time, as the Beach Boys count off the years flying by, one after the other. Author Philip Lambert writes that the tune’s overall effect is to look “ominously and curiously into the future.” That sounds about right; the problem is that curiosity and ominousness make for a very disturbing combination, a pairing that forms the basis for suspenseful, grisly scenes in horror movies. “When I Grow Up” was not intended to horrify its young listeners, and of course didn’t, but with the passage of time, and with greater knowledge of Brian Wilson’s life story, a strain of anxiety and foreboding is undeniable.  

This is all to say that “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” communicates the sense of a young life in transition, with the potential to achieve a state of being in the future, accompanied at the same time by a fear of not becoming something, or becoming something undesirable—all while the sands of time run out. At the time he wrote it, Brian seems to have convinced himself that such subject matter was commercial, claiming in the press that the song “certainly touches what every guy is thinking about.”

Maybe some guys think about the future like this, but certainly not every guy. Oddly enough, the depth of this two-minute number is most likely to be appreciated and understood not by young guys, but old(er) men who have learned that life does not in fact turn out as imagined; that years fly by mercilessly. An old man tells a youngster to spend the time he has wisely, because it will soon be gone, but the boy—the very person “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” was made for—doesn’t quite understand. He’s not able to grasp the power of time on that level. Yet Brian was sensitive to it at age 22, conceptualizing beyond his years. Maybe too far beyond. This is an old man’s song, written by a 22-year-old, intended for 15-year-old boys.

The subtlety of “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” is obscured by its frisky musical arrangement, its brevity, and the boyish vocals of the Beach Boys. Childlike the song may be, but not childish. It has a level of insight and intelligence that distinguishes it from similarly-themed songs—for example, the Four Seasons’ “Walk Like a Man,” which had fairly recently (in early 1963) established a precedent for teenage songs on the theme of being or becoming a man. Brian’s approach to the question was quite different, at least upon close examination.2 “Walk Like a Man” had focused on only one specific issue—what it means to behave like a man in the context of the young narrator’s current girl-problem. And the matter was resolved in two verses, as the father passes down the tenets of manhood to his son, who successfully applies them to a satisfying conclusion.

In contrast, “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” looked at manhood across the span of an entire life, while raising some pretty sophisticated questions: will I marry young? What kind of father will I be and what will my kids think of me? Will I have regrets later on? The song perceives that girls and women are not the same—that girls grow up too—and asks if the things that make girls attractive are the same as what will make a woman attractive. (Again: this is a song for middle-aged and old men to reflect upon.) And will the young singer be able to love his wife for the rest of his life?

The song answers none of these questions. It can’t answer them because they’re not answerable. And there’s also no father-character in the song to provide guidance. Neither Brian Wilson nor co-writer Mike Love were the type of son to seek dad’s counsel and dutifully follow his advice or direction, and it’s hard to imagine them injecting that element into a Beach Boys song. (The last time a father figured prominently was in “Fun, Fun, Fun,” where he comes off as a punitive buffoon.)

In 1964, nobody would have expected or wanted something like this from any popular teen-focused group. And even if, for the sake of argument, there was a place for such unsettled questions somewhere on the hit parade—as there was in the mid-1950s with Doris Day’s whimsical (and annoying) hit “Que Sera, Sera”—it’s not what anybody wanted from the Beach Boys, a group whose songs (ballads aside) leaned toward the extroverted physicality of surfing, car culture, and youthful sexuality.

It has never been said that anybody inside or outside the Beach Boys organization was bothered by “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” or otherwise gave Brian any grief about recording the song and then submitting it to Capitol as the new single. It came out, reached No. 9, and was more or less forgotten as everybody moved on.3 But even if nobody noticed it at the time, “When I Grow Up” signified a sharp left turn for Brian Wilson as songwriter and creative leader of the Beach Boys.

Still, “When I Grow Up” was not entirely unprecedented, necessarily. This wasn’t the first time the theme of a Beach Boys song diverged from commercial (audience) expectations. Back in the summer and fall of 1963—at which point the Beach Boys were widely celebrated as beach-surf-car band, and when that material was still fresh—they went sideways by putting out “In My Room” and “Be True to Your School.”

Appearing first as an album track on Surfer Girl, “In My Room” was a solitary, introspective ballad dealing with a teenager’s internal and unexpressed feelings, with not one nod to surfing, the beach, sunshine, car culture, or the outdoors. “Be True to Your School” might have been even stranger when it first appeared on the car-focused Little Deuce Coupe album in October 1963: seemingly from nowhere, amongst a collection of car songs (with a hot-rod on the cover), the surfing, drag-racing Beach Boys included this brassy production number evoking high school football games, cheerleaders, and lettermen jackets.

“In My Room” had been something of a happy accident. Writing the tune with Gary Usher back before the Beach Boys fully merged with the surfing fad, Brian did not really intend to do something so inward, expressive, and personally meaningful. The goal in these days, as Usher would later remember, was rather to write songs like Carole King and Gerry Goffin, whose “Up on the Roof,” as performed by the Drifters, first entered the charts at the end of 1962 and whose theme and lyrics could very well have inspired “In My Room.”

With “Be True to Your School,” Brian again turned away from tried-and-true Beach Boys themes, but with more awareness and conscious purpose than he had on “In My Room.” It’s unlikely he just stumbled into that extroverted “school spirit” concept and its massive studio production, and then decided to release it as an attention-seeking single in late October 1963 (with “In My Room” on the flip). It seems that Brian the teen-pop craftsman was then searching for new “fun” teen themes, and lit upon school spirit as something Beach Boys fans might be able to get behind.4 But he himself was unlikely to have cared about school pride any more than whitewall slick tires or “shooting the pier” at Huntington Beach. It was just something to make a record about.

And now, in the late summer of 1964, another unusual offering with “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man).” Like “Be True to Your School,” it was an A-side that unabashedly turned from typical Beach Boys subject matter, but this time the song hit closer to home, with Brian returning to the theme of solitary teenage introspection for the first time since “In My Room.”

All told, with “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man),” Brian was starting to stick his chin out as an artist. He was (1) writing from an internal perspective; (2) doing so with an increased level of awareness and purpose; and (3) leading with this material by putting it out as an A-side. He had never done anything quite like this before.

Keep reading about Brian Wilson and “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” here, in Part 24 of A History of Brian.

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Selected References for Part 23

Benci, Jacopo. “Brian Wilson: Jacopo Benci Lets the Beach Boys’ Troubled Genius Have His Say.” Record Collector, January 1995.

Carlin, Peter Ames. Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson. Emmaus, PA: Rodale, 2006.

Felton, David. "The Healing of Brother Bri'." Rolling Stone, November 4, 1976.

Gaines, Steven. Heroes and Villains: The True Story of the Beach Boys. New York: Dutton/Signet, 1986.

Grevatt, Ren. “The Beach Boys Ride the Trends.” Music Business, August 15, 1964.

Lambert, Philip. Inside The Music of Brian Wilson: The Songs, Sounds and Influences of the Beach Boys' Founding Genius. New York: Continuum International, 2007.

Matijas-Mecca, Christian. The Words and Music of Brian Wilson. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2017.

Sharp, Ken. “Mike Love of the Beach Boys: One-On-One.” Rock Cellar, September 9, 2015. At: https://web.archive.org/web/20180612170213/https://www.rockcellarmagazine.com/2015/09/09/mike-love-of-the-beach-boys-one-on-one-the-interview-part-1/2/ (last accessed May 24, 2024)

This post finds Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys in the midst of the turbulent year of 1964. The last several posts have focused on the unavoidable subject of Brian’s father, Murry Wilson—dealing with Murry’s opposition to “Fun, Fun, Fun,” at the end of 1963; his conduct during the Beach Boys’ January ‘64 tour of Australia and the group’s desire to fire him as manager; his confrontation with Brian during the April recording session for “I Get Around” and his actual firing; his brief stint of depression and his marital troubles. And also, as detailed in the preceding post, Murry’s return as manager and songwriter for the Sunrays with the “Car Party”/“Outta Gas” single. Though forgettable as music, these songs survive as evidence of Murry’s orientation toward Brian, and what Brian had been coping with: a controlling, jealous father who was opposed to Brian’s success, maturity, and independence.

Having left off in the last chapter with the Sunrays’ debut in the fall of ‘64, Part 22 now backtracks to the spring, for the first in a series of posts focusing on some of Brian’s musical decisions in 1964, in the wake of Murry’s dismissal.

The “I Get Around” single first entered the Billboard chart in May 1964, ascending steadily toward No. 1 throughout the month of June (around the same time Murry Wilson started to work with the Renegades/Sunrays). That same month, the Beach Boys recorded songs for their Christmas album, slated for release at the end of the year. And on June 22, in the midst of the Christmas sessions, they recorded a song called “Don’t Hurt My Little Sister.”

Back in 1961, Elvis Presley recorded the classic hit “Little Sister.” That was mid-tempo rock ‘n’ roll with a country-twang, paired with a borderline-skeezy lyric that maybe only Elvis could pull off. Brian Wilson’s “Don’t Hurt My Little Sister” in 1964 was written from another standpoint entirely. It recounted a scene of domestic teenage drama, in which the singer isn’t a seductive lothario but the little sister’s older sibling, who wants to protect the girl from being emotionally misused by an insensitive, unromantic boy.

The music (melody, chord progression) certainly isn’t bad, and the backing track is well-produced, but when voiced by the Beach Boys, “Don’t Hurt My Little Sister” somehow goes awry. Upon first impression, the song seems lyrically and vocally juvenile—even when judged according to the then-current teenage-pop standards of 1964 or ’65. Were it included on the Beach Boys’ All Summer Long (which was awaiting release within about three weeks), it would have stood out as the most childish track on the album. In retrospect, the unavoidable point of comparison would be the early Beatles, who could get corny now and then but would never do something like this.

So why did Brian do it? Especially in these important weeks following Murry’s firing and the recording and release of the “I Get Around” single? Wasn’t “I Get Around” a sign of personal and/or artistic growth? Did Brian go through the trouble of firing his father just so he could do stuff like “Don’t Hurt My Little Sister?” After all, the song was in a way regressive; the scene it depicted seems like something a guy Brian’s age might have experienced as a high-schooler back in the 1950s.

Brian probably had two motivations. First, the song actually meant something to him—or it at least was relevant to his personal life, being rooted in his experience dating his high-school-aged girlfriend (and soon-to-be wife), Marilyn. Apparently, Marilyn’s older sister (maybe after seeing Marilyn get upset about something Brian said or did) told Brian to watch himself, saying something like don’t you hurt my little sister, Brian. In that warning, Brian heard the raw material for a song. But what kind of song? And for what audience? And who was supposed to sing it? The answer to that question points to Brian’s second—and probably more significant—motivation.

Notwithstanding the relevance of the song to his own romantic life, Brian conceptualized and wrote (with lyrical input from Mike Love, probably on the parts of the verses that Mike sings) “Don’t Hurt My Little Sister” in a mature, business-frame of mind—it was a knowing attempt to connect with the all-important teen-girl audience, in the manner of Phil Spector’s popular girl-group singles with the Crystals and Ronettes. Though Beatlemania was at a fever pitch with the kids, at this point Brian himself wasn’t nearly as affected or inspired by the Beatles’ recordings as he was Spector’s. Brian went so far as to submit “Don’t Hurt My Little Sister” to Spector, hoping the studio master himself would produce it for the Ronettes.

It seems Brian really wanted the Ronettes (or maybe another Phil-produced lineup) to sing the tune, not the Beach Boys. But Spector waved Brian off. In the end, the Beach Boys’ recording of “Don’t Hurt My Little Sister” would surface as “album filler” on Side One of Beach Boys Today in March 1965.

The fact that this recording sat on the shelf for nine whole months while other Beach Boys singles came and went indicates that Brian was aware of its girly inappropriateness. (Its tone is not unlike “It’s My Party” or “My Boyfriend’s Back.”) In other words, maybe the problem with the song wasn’t so much that it was childish, but feminine—the Beach Boys were young men singing a lyric naturally suited for girls or young women, and it made no sense for the Boys to sing it. Had a girl-group recorded it, “Don’t Hurt My Little Sister” would have been just fine; the singers would have even sounded a little gutsy doing a song about sticking up for your kid sister.

In the end, Brian’s concept and basic lyric for “Don’t Hurt My Little Sister” was honest and true to the source—he set the words of Marilyn’s older sister to music. But in doing so, was Brian being entirely true to the Beach Boys band for which he was songwriter, producer and creative leader? When the group cut the song on June 22, Brian was physically present in the studio—as a Beach Boy, working as band-member and Beach Boys record producer—but his musical mind was in Spector-land, at Gold Star Studios with Phil, the Ronettes, and the “Wrecking Crew” session musicians.1 For that reason alone, this forgettable Beach Boys recording survives as a harbinger of the conflict that would flare up between Brian and the Beach Boys in 1966-67, those controversial days when Brian would be writing and producing for the Beach Boys in name, but not substance.

Anyway, while “Don’t Hurt My Little Sister” would have been suitable (if not a sure-fire hit) for one of Phil Spector’s groups, it wasn’t what Brian really wanted for himself and the Beach Boys in the middle of 1964. And if that was the case, the question turns to what Brian did think was appropriate. For this, we have to look to the next Beach Boys single, the one to follow “I Get Around.” This was “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)”/“She Knows Me Too Well,” released in August 1964.

With this single, the import of Murry Wilson’s firing comes into greater focus. To understand why, it’s necessary to first return to Brian’s childhood and family life, and try to get a sense of what the concepts of “growing up” and “manhood” would have meant for Brian specifically, as a person raised by Murry and Audree Wilson in Hawthorne, CA.

It should again be noted that Brian did not benefit from a sufficiently humane upbringing. He was savagely abused, with unpredictable regularity, throughout his childhood. The mistreatment went far beyond the boundaries of common “corporal punishment” methods or any reasonable (and necessary) parental discipline. Judged according to either the American cultural standards of 2025 or those of the 1940s and ‘50s, Murry Wilson’s actions were outrageous. Notwithstanding the rationalizations of his various champions, defenders, and apologists, Murry Wilson was not just like any other gruff, “old school” father of the postwar era. This is what Dennis Wilson—himself hardly a delicate little flower—was trying to convey when he told a reporter in the mid-1970s, “I don’t know kids who got it like we did.”

Yet at the same time the Wilson home remained firmly intact. With the possible exception of Dennis (the wayward child who failed to quietly acclimate himself to the brutality and was repeatedly punished for it), the family was close-knit. Their interpersonal bonds somehow coexisted with the violence, and may have actually been strengthened by it (but not in a positive way). In other words, this was not one of those “broken homes” routinely associated with the underclass, the mean streets, the deadbeat fathers and drug-addicted mothers. What it was, rather, was a seemingly upstanding family that functioned, privately, as a domestic tyranny.

It could be that this type of family is historically common, and that it will always remain so; that what we now consider to be a reasonably normal or “healthy” family is in fact a freakish (and unsustainable) anomaly. But to justify such treatment as Murry did—as a moral and loving form of “security” for which the boys should be grateful, as children are “sometimes disappointed when they are not punished”—is only a pretense.2 The true underlying purpose is to inculcate a reflexive obedience in children through the use of cruel and capricious force. To inculcate a fear—that then provides the foundation for the family’s “morality,” “stability” and “love.”

In the end, Murry did provide “security”—but only for himself, not the brothers. By beating and controlling them—by “scaring the hell out of his boys,” as Beach Boys publicist Derek Taylor came to understand during his time with the band in the mid-1960s—Murry remained secure in his self-image as a strong, capable, righteous, and loving father. (When the Beach Boys fired him, his long-held sense of security suddenly evaporated, and he retreated to bed.)

It is of course entirely proper that a father have an eye on the future, be concerned about the type of man his son will grow up to be, and then parent accordingly. With a father who is not just a drill sergeant but a mad tyrant, a male child such as Brian Wilson is expected—by the father and anybody aligned with him—to remain wretchedly dependent and subservient (at least until the father dies, at which point the son is at last free to carry forth the tradition and become god-emperor to the next generation of the family). In short, the young male’s progression toward a healthy manhood is stunted, thwarted, misshapen. It is no coincidence that Murry’s tune for the Sunrays, “Car Party,” concludes with the chastened teen-narrator declaring his dependency on his father—that is, his subordination. Likewise, by seizing control of Brian’s songs via the Sea of Tunes publishing company back in 1962 (see Part 9), Murry acted to restore what he believed to be the proper natural order between father and son: the fruit of Brian’s labor and creativity belonged to Murry.3

In this mode of child-rearing and family relations, a growing child’s maturity and independence—physical, intellectual, financial, sexual—is fraught with tension and conflict. Growing up can be viewed (or felt) as an ethical and moral transgression, something that threatens and destabilizes the family itself. A child’s increasing capacity to recognize, feel, and navigate complex emotions is similarly contentious, as it too signifies impending maturity and individuation. During Brian’s childhood and adolescence in Hawthorne, the normal and healthy expression of human feeling had been, at best, risky—practically forbidden under severe penalty. The fact that Murry would beat the boys, and then beat them more if they cried (again, as remembered by Dennis) indicates that they were not supposed to feel anything real.

Murry did not want Brian to express himself, just as he did not want him to be a real adult. However, music was permitted.4 As a youth, Brian naturally adapted and began to channel his emotional existence, or humanness, into music. His engagement with music and in particular, Four Freshmen-style vocal harmony, was like oxygen in an otherwise suffocating atmosphere. But at the same time, Brian’s non-musical development—socially, as a normal person in the everyday world—probably lagged behind.5 Although by 1964 Brian was progressing toward “genius” status in terms of music, he was not necessarily on track to become an autonomous, adequately responsible adult—a man.

He wanted to get there, however. And he would, of course, use music to do it.  

Continue reading in Part 23 of A History of Brian Wilson

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Selected References for Part 22

Beautiful Dreamer: Brian Wilson and the Story of Smile. Directed by David Leaf. DVD: Rhino Home Video, 2005.

Fromm, Erich. Greatness and Limitations of Freud’s Thought. New York: Harper & Row, 1980.

Gabler, Neal. “The Beach Boys: Riding a New Wave.” New Times, April 2, 1976.

Gaines, Steven. Heroes and Villains: The True Story of the Beach Boys. New York: Dutton/Signet, 1986.

Greven, Philip. Spare the Child: The Religious Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Physical Abuse. New York: Knopf, 1991.  

Mead, Margaret. And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1965.

Miller, Alice. Banished Knowledge. New York: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1990.

Perry, Bruce D. and Oprah Winfrey. What Happened To You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing. New York: Flatiron Books, 2021.

Williams, Paul. Brian Wilson & The Beach Boys: How Deep Is The Ocean? New York: Omnibus Press, 1997.

Wilson, Brian, and Ben Greenman. I Am Brian Wilson. Boston: Da Capo Press, 2016.

Wilson, Murry. Letter to Brian Wilson. May 8, 1965. Collection of Hard Rock International/Hard Rock Memorabilia.

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In April 1964 the Beach Boys fired Murry Wilson as band manager. In May, “I Get Around” came out as a single, ascending the national chart throughout June and reaching No. 1 by July 4. With “I Get Around” as the anchor, the Beach Boys’ album All Summer Long was released in mid-July, in the midst of the band’s summer tour.

It is commonly said that Carl Wilson was the “peacemaker” in his family—a thankless (and impossible) job he may have intentionally taken on as a personal responsibility or one that he just assumed naturally, as a matter of his personality. Among the Beach Boys, Carl was the member who was most able to empathize with Murry’s plight. And so (as mentioned at the end of the previous post) it was Carl who helped Murry connect with a new, upstart rock ‘n’ roll band to manage. That band was then calling itself “The Renegades.”

The following chapter in A History of Brian Wilson looks at what transpired once the Renegades partnered with Murry Wilson.

The Renegades were a pretty decent band. Though perhaps untutored in the finer aspects of the music business, they had been knocking around for a while, had done some recording, and were well-practiced. They were good enough in any case to impress Murry Wilson, and more importantly, Carl Wilson—Carl wouldn’t have set them up with his father if he thought they were no good. Carl was the “rock ‘n’ roller” in the Beach Boys—the youngest member, the guitar player, the one who really dug Chuck Berry, and now, the Beatles. (In 1964, Brian admired and respected the Beatles, but Carl was an outright fan.) Carl was likely to have been receptive to the Renegades’ rock ‘n’ roll stance—they probably leaned more toward instrumental chops than vocals, and their R&B-influenced sound was somewhat rare for a white (i.e., non-Chicano) Los Angeles youth band of this period. (They had covered Willie Dixon and had a noticeable Ray Charles influence on a song or two.) Arguably, the Renegades were reasonably well-positioned to make some noise in the new post-Beatles scene, when papa-doo-run-de-run-day was being replaced with yeah-yeah-yeah.

Having been sacked by the Beach Boys in April of ‘64, Murry was probably working with the Renegades no later than summer, shaping their musical sound and negotiating a recording deal. Murry’s contacts were of course with Capitol Records, which always had to exercise caution in its dealings with the man who was strategically positioned as the overbearing father of cash-cow Brian Wilson. Capitol would of course agree to release the Renegades’ music—but only on its newly-formed “Tower” imprint, a down-market subsidiary.1

The Renegades’ debut single came out in September. By then, under the guidance of Murry and the label, the somewhat rough, R&B-tinged band had become “The Sunrays,” a lineup that would soon mutate fully into a five-man vocal harmony group wearing Kingston Trio-style striped shirts while singing about sunshine and cars. In his book The Nearest Faraway Place, Timothy White observed that the name “Sunrays” is basically an anagram of “Murry Wilson.” (Mur-ray Wil-sun.)2

What Murry had not been able to accomplish with the Beach Boys he would now do with the Sunrays: use the band as a vehicle to further his own songwriting career. The new Sunrays single boasted Murry Wilson compositions on both sides. Promotional ad-copy in the trades (e.g., Billboard) stated that Murry was not only manager of the Sunrays, but also provider of music and lyrics.

If that isn’t enough to clarify Murry’s state of mind with respect to Brian and the Beach Boys, there is the substantive content of Murry’s songs themselves. Anyone doubting that Brian Wilson’s success threatened and offended his father should listen to Murry’s “Outta Gas” and “Car Party,” as recorded by the Sunrays in 1964. When heard in their proper historical context, these obscure recordings defy belief.

It comes as no great shock to find that neither “Outta Gas” nor “Car Party” are very good. “Outta Gas” is flat and musically unremarkable; whatever garage-band chops the Sunrays had are awkwardly shoehorned into Murry’s faux-Beach Boys pastiche. “Car Party” (the A-side) is a bit more interesting; the dynamism and creativity of “I Get Around” may have inspired Murry to push himself. Just as Brian did on “I Get Around,” here Murry experimented with musical “texture”—the time signature shifts from 2/4 in the verses (bringing to mind Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Three Little Maids”) to 4/4 in the chorus. Murry answers Carl’s “I Get Around” guitar solo by having one of the Sunrays play a matching eight-bar break, which is followed (at about 1:00) by a two-bar transition lifted from the intro of Elvis Presley’s “Jailhouse Rock.” The song then returns to the square-dance feel of the verse.

Nevertheless, it is the lyrics of both “Outta Gas” and “Car Party” that are most important. Back at the tail end of 1963, the new Wilson-Love tune “Fun, Fun, Fun” had stirred things up with its playful element of defiance. This was probably what motivated (at least in part) Murry to obstruct its creation by canceling its first recording session (as mentioned previously in Part 16). A few months later, “I Get Around” communicated something about adulthood, independence, success, and the prerogatives of youth—particularly during the chorus on which Brian soared, singing about mobility, steadiness, and “good bread.” It was that very bread—Brian’s money—that was the focus of “Outta Gas.”

As suggested previously (in Part 18, “The Firing of Murry Wilson”), Brian was by now making good bread not only for himself, but the entire Wilson clan. He had supplanted Murry as provider and had therefore implicitly challenged the power Murry had always held in the family. Murry was in denial of that humiliating reality, telling himself (and probably anybody that would listen) that he was responsible for the Beach Boys’ success.3

If that was true, it meant Murry was not receiving handouts from his son but had instead duly earned his newly-acquired song-publishing wealth. It meant Brian and the Beach Boys had been insufficiently grateful for the gifts Murry had selflessly bestowed upon them. And it meant Brian and the Boys had benefited from a windfall that rightly belonged to Murry. All around, it was a great injustice. Accordingly, “Outta Gas” was focused on the issue of money, reflecting Murry’s wish that Brian didn’t have so much of it, and/or Murry’s belief that Brian hadn’t worked hard enough or otherwise deserved his wealth.

The teen narrator of “Outta Gas” does not make good bread, nor does he get around. He’s sort of a loser—off the scene with no money and no car, striking out with the girls at school:

Outta gas (outta gas)

ain’t so funny

outta gas (outta gas)

havin’ no money

outta gas (outta gas)

ain’t so cool

it’s a drag losing out with the girls at school (wah-ooo)

As the song ends, the poor guy has taken on menial jobs (“serving pizza and washing trays”) and is working hard to make money, but it’s clear he still hasn’t made it.

Murry didn’t write this as a gag. It wasn’t one of those comedy songs in which the very premise is a joke. (Like for instance, the Beach Boys’ “No-Go Showboat,” a song about a custom-rod that was all flash and no engine; so slow it loses a street race to an ice cream truck.) Murry intended “Outta Gas” to be fun listening, but the underlying message was sincere. The song effectively told Brian he was a loser—or at least that Murry would have preferred to see him mowing the lawn in Hawthorne or sweeping the floor at a pizza parlor.4

When “Car Party” begins, the kid-narrator is “having some fun” cruising with his friends (in a deuce coupe, it seems) and “nothing is wrong.” Then the cops pull them over and the fun stops. In the second chorus Murry’s oafish lyrics reiterate the element of “Fun, Fun, Fun” he approved of, as the singer comes to realize:

Car party / isn’t so cool now

car party / I’ve been a fool now

car party / like the Beach Boys say

yes my dad’ll take my keys away!

The morality tale reaches its climax as the kid is humiliated before a court of law while the Sunrays sing, “I gotta call my dad so he’ll pay the fine” several times over the fade-out.

The message of “Car Party” differed from “Outta Gas.” “Car Party” was less about money than Murry’s opposition to Brian’s personal freedom and independence. Once the boys in the song start “cruisin’ the town,” they’re quickly “flagged down” by the “red light” of the police car, leading ultimately to the courtroom denouement and the singer’s acknowledgement that he needs his dad’s help.

This was an authoritarian pop song whose prime concern wasn’t money but control for its own sake. Heard in this light, Murry’s musical quotation of “Jailhouse Rock”—which ushers in the punitive part of the song and the courtroom sequence—seems rather sinister. (And perversely clever, even if Murry did it inadvertently.)

In his 2016 book I Am Brian Wilson, Brian looked back and observed that his cruising songs “were about getting in the car with your buddies and driving around with the top down and getting burgers and looking at girls.” This was true for the normal teenage listener, but for Brian and Murry, “Fun, Fun, Fun” and “I Get Around” were freighted with deeper, symbolic meaning. Those two Beach Boys hits, together with Murry’s “Outta Gas” and “Car Party,” constitute a secret dialogue on 45-rpm vinyl, in which father and son send coded messages to each other. Brian’s message was I’m leaving and I’m going to be free. Murry’s response: No—you’re not going to “get around.” You’re “outta gas” and you’re not going anywhere—not without me.

In the end, we are left with an unanswerable question: did Brian and Murry have any awareness that they were communicating with each other in this manner, or was it unconscious?

Brian Wilson biographer David Leaf has observed that once the Sunrays started releasing singles, Murry and Brian were in direct competition. This is true, but Murry had always competed with Brian. The difference was that it was now occurring openly, in the public arena of the record business.

While it is doubtful that Brian ever took Murry or the Sunrays to be genuine musical competition, the situation was awful for him because his own father was out to prove that he was nothing. Brian was now too big to be forced to defecate on a newspaper, but if the Sunrays—dressed the same as the Beach Boys, singing about the same things in the same musical style—could overtake the Beach Boys on the charts for even one week, Brian’s humiliation would have been sufficient. Those were the stakes. As always, the one-way competition between Murry and Brian was not so much about music as basic human dignity. 

Meanwhile, the Sunrays took a shine to Murry. They would literally sing his praises the following year with a song they wrote and recorded especially for him called “Our Leader.” Harmonizing in Beach Boy-style, on this track the Sunrays prostrated themselves before Murry, honoring him as “a very great man.” (This was recorded as a private token of gratitude and not originally intended to be heard by the public.)

The Sunrays were young and naïve. They had no way of knowing the underlying depravity of Wilson family politics or the unfortunate role they were now playing. Still, they were everything Murry wanted Brian and the Beach Boys to be: humble, pliant, willing to sing Murry’s songs (and unsuitable cover tunes of Murry’s choosing), and so honored by the opportunity to bask in Murry’s radiance that they are moved to write songs in praise. This is what had been expected from Brian—to use his talent not only to make his parents rich, but genuflect while doing so.

Brian had indeed made some concessions, but he had so far refused to hand over his music. He kept his balls, and instead created some durable rock and pop. And the Sunrays never made it, of course. In later years some of them would make public statements in defense of their “leader,” whose reputation they believed to have been impugned by false or overblown stories of child abuse.

The 2015 motion picture Love & Mercy portrays Murry’s Sunrays gambit as a hurtful betrayal of Brian, and indeed it was. Which is to say, it was business as usual for Brian, consistent with the only life he had ever known. Yet there was a potential upside. If it is assumed that Murry would not have remained bedridden forever after being fired, and that he would rise again to pursue and harass Brian, it was better that his challenge came externally than from within. The more distanced Murry was from the Beach Boys’ spiritual and creative center, the less damage he could inflict; the less likely he would be falsely praised as a stalwart protector and supporter of the Beach Boys; the less likely it was he could seize credit for the group’s musical quality or success.

In short, it was better that Murry destroy the Sunrays’ career (for instance, by directing them to record garbage like “Car Party”) than that of the Beach Boys.

Seen in this light, it would appear that Carl Wilson’s intra-familial diplomacy smoothed things out for the Beach Boys in 1964. Murry had been marginalized (though not fully put out of commission) and his corrosive effect on Brian could now perhaps dissipate. Hopefully Murry would channel his destructive energy toward the hapless Sunrays while the Beach Boys could forge ahead with more breathing room, as a unified, five-man group that could exercise greater autonomy over itself.5

The Beach Boys now had about two years of professional experience under their belts. Collectively, the group could write, produce, and perform its own material, and, as now demonstrated by “I Get Around,” reach the very top of the national singles chart with a record that had nothing to do with the beach. Everything pointed to the possibility that the Beach Boys could not only survive, but improve and evolve—and do so with reduced meddling from both the label and Murry Wilson.

Of equal if not greater importance were the implications for Brian Wilson as an individual. He would never really be able to liberate himself from either the past or the crippling situation that had long been forming, which would eventually solidify and encircle him. Awful as it is to recognize, Brian would indeed be “outta gas”—defeated, in a sense—by the end of the decade, as the intractable realities of his life subsumed him and short-circuited his career.

As of the middle of 1964, however, Brian had successfully stiff-armed his father, creating some much-needed space between himself and the noisiest, most readily identifiable source of negativity, suppression, and illness in his life. To better appreciate what this portended for Brian, the Beach Boys’ music of 1964 should be explored in further detail.

A closer look at the musical and personal changes of 1964 starts in the next chapter, Part 22 of A History of Brian Wilson

Back to Part 20 of A History of Brian Wilson

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Selected References for Part 21

Brian Wilson: A Beach Boy's Tale. Directed by Morgan Neville. Peter Jones Productions, 1999.

Bündler, David. “The Pageant of Richard Henn.” 21^st Century Music, Vol. 7, No. 2, February 2000.

Carlin, Peter Ames. Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson. Emmaus, PA: Rodale, 2006.

Crowley, Kent. Long Promised Road: Carl Wilson, Soul of the Beach Boys. London: Jawbone Press, 2015.

Ear Candy Mag. “Interview with Eddy Medora (10-28-03).” At: https://www.earcandymag.com/sunrays.htm

Gaines, Steven. Heroes and Villains: The True Story of the Beach Boys. New York: Dutton/Signet, 1986.

Leaf, David. The Beach Boys and the California Myth. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978.

Murphy, James B. Becoming the Beach Boys 1961-1963. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2015.

Stebbins, Jon. The Beach Boys FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About America’s Band. Milwaukee: Backbeat Books, 2011.

White, Timothy. The Nearest Faraway Place: Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys and the Southern California Experience. New York: Henry Holt, 1994.

Wilson, Brian, with Ben Greenman. I Am Brian Wilson. Boston: Da Capo Press, 2016.

Wilson, Murry. Letter to Brian Wilson. May 8, 1965. Collection of Hard Rock International/Hard Rock Memorabilia.

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By reaching Number One in 1964, “I Get Around” demonstrated the Beach Boys’ ability to stay alive—and even thrive—during the height of Beatlemania. Unlike a post-Beatles No. 1 like, say, the Four Seasons’ “Rag Doll,” the Beach Boys accomplished this with a record that pushed the group’s sound beyond identifiably 1950s-rooted forms. The kids loved “Fun, Fun, Fun,” but they had heard it before. “I Get Around” was something else entirely—evidence that, like the Beatles, the Beach Boys could innovate and make pop records that projected sounds that couldn’t have been on the radio in 1958 or even as late as 1963.

The song’s significance goes beyond its musical sound. While on the surface it was yet another car song, the lyric communicated boredom with routine (“the same old strip”) and foreshadowed changes for the Beach Boys. As discussed in the previous entry in the series, Part 19, “I Get Around” was a song in which a competitive Brian—who was fully aware of the challenge posed by the Beatles—celebrates confidence, forward drive, and independence. It is not a coincidence that it was the recording of this particular song that brought a long-simmering father-son conflict to a boiling point, resulting in Murry Wilson’s ouster as manager. (But not Murry’s termination as “father,” which as suggested in the previous chapter, would have been impossible.)

And so the Beach Boys forged ahead without Murry for the rest of 1964. As for the fortunes of Murry himself, read on:

“I Get Around” was released in May 1964 as a single, and again in July as the lead-off track on the Beach Boys’ All Summer Long album. The album was another good collection of songs, probably the group’s best so far. It found the Beach Boys subtly moving into new creative territory, in a way that didn’t call attention to itself—the album was still, on its face, happily and uncontroversially associated with teenage life at the beach (during summer, of course).

One lone track, the forgettable “Don’t Back Down” was the last Beach Boys surfing song. “Girls on the Beach” was the last of their creamy, Four Freshmen-meet-R&B ballads. “All Summer Long” and “Wendy” had the entire group harmonizing the lead vocal; the latter also featured a spacey, modern-sounding intro. “Little Honda,” featuring the Beach Boys in five-piece garage band format, was good, though yet another example of the group straining to hawk something other than their own music. A song called “Do You Remember” was a nostalgic filler track that sounds strange coming at the height of Beatlemania, when the music was moving forward. (The tune dated back to the pre-Beatles days of 1963.) Brian looked backward and forward at the same time with “Hushabye,” a ‘50s cover song on which he experimented with his evolving arranging and production skills.  

In the first half of 1964, Brian was still producing songs for his girlfriend Marilyn’s singing group, The Honeys, as well as some other artists, and by the middle of the year he had co-written and produced a song called “Sacramento,” for release as a Gary Usher solo single. It’s not too surprising to find that within weeks after Murry’s firing, Usher and Brian reunited to write a song for the Beach Boys. Usher later remembered that they intended to write a new song “like we used to.” The result was “We’ll Run Away,” which was included on All Summer Long as a relatively unnoticed album cut.

Like their earlier collaboration “In My Room,” “We’ll Run Away” was a fine ballad that was at once accessible to the listener and (perhaps unintentionally) personal for Brian. Written to be heard simply as a teenager’s lament, this two-minute song covers young love, parental restriction, a yearning for freedom through marriage, and in a disarming twist, the way that children’s lives replicate those of their parents. It commented on Brian’s life and the earlier lives of his parents. It also prefigured Brian’s immediate future, as he himself would be married by the end of the year. It could be strange that a successful, soon-to-be 22-year-old was writing (and singing) about the need to “run away,” but with Murry fired, Brian was only just now belatedly embarking on the process of becoming independent.

Meanwhile, getting sacked had drawn the wind from Murry’s sails. He was a terminally self-absorbed man with little or no awareness of who he was, where he had come from, or why he did the things he did. He was unable to appreciate the reasons why he had to step (or be pushed) aside. To Murry, it was an unprovoked ambush—after all he had done and “sacrificed,” something he rightfully possessed had been cruelly snatched away. For some period after being fired—weeks, some say—he retreated to his bedroom and stayed there, unable to fully function. For Murry, it was very sad. Very unfair.  

1964 was a rough year for Murry. Around the time the Beach Boys ended his formal tenure as manager, he also got into some kind of hot water with wife Audree. She demanded a separation. It is unclear if she issued this decree before or after Murry’s firing. However, once the Beach Boys fired Murry, the balance of power in the family was in flux, and the time may have been right to reposition oneself.

Another question is what Murry possibly could have done to get his woman so angry. A cursory glance at unchallenged facts indicates that Audree was an accommodating spouse who had given her man carte blanche, including the leeway to do whatever he wanted to her children. Yet Murry believed she had in fact not been loyal enough, and that her undermining ways caused (or at least contributed to) his loss of standing in the eyes of his sons (and therefore within the Beach Boys organization).1 

As Murry saw it, the entire world (including his family) was unfairly aligned against him—not because of the way he treated people, but simply because he was Murry Wilson. Because of his very existence. There was nothing any person ever could have done or said to disabuse him of his delusions.2

Later this same year Murry crafted a will in which he addressed his difficulties with Audree. Author Mark Dillon discussed the will in his book Fifty Sides of the Beach Boys. Apparently, in this document Murry promised that Audree would receive 25% of the assets of the Sea of Tunes publishing company upon his death, but get 50% if she stayed married to him. Murry and Audree never divorced. (Murry would sell the publishing catalog in 1969, a few years before his death; the eventual distribution of the proceeds remains unclear.) She would stick with him, right through the last moments of his life, and defend his reputation in death. But it seems that as of some point in 1964, she refused to live with him under the same roof.3

This could have posed problems for the couple, but fortunately Brian’s talent provided enough cash to (later in the year) buy a new house each for his mother and father. The houses, located in the city of Whittier in Los Angeles County, were spacious dwellings situated on separate lots of 20,000 square feet and within five-minute walking distance from each other. Murry and Audree would also, for the time being, retain ownership of the humble Hawthorne dwelling in which they had raised their sons. The old house would remain unoccupied.4 

Whittier—in these days staid, Nixonian turf—would have been a sedately appealing place to live, but for a wealthy song publisher who fancied himself a player in the ‘biz, it was nowhere. It could have been mere coincidence, but Murry’s decision to settle in Whittier aligned with his contempt for the Hollywood showbiz scene and its people, whose respect and validation he nonetheless ached for.

Murry certainly wasn’t done with the music business. By this time Carl Wilson had for at least a year maintained a friendship with a hungry young band from the Westside called the Renegades. The Renegades needed help breaking into the big time, and at some point they spoke with Carl about getting an introduction to Murry. The Renegades had somehow come to believe that Murry was a maestro of showbiz management—the man who had made the Beach Boys successful. The Renegades’ hope was that Murry would conjure his managerial wizardry on their behalf.

The possibility of Murry adding a second group to his roster may have in fact already been floating around; previously (or perhaps around the time he got fired) Murry even flirted with erstwhile Beach Boy troublemaker David Marks. At 15 years old, David was looking to make it as the leader of a new lineup called the “Marksmen.” Murry produced the Marksmen on a handful of songs including some written by Murry himself. Murry and David clashed once again, and David thereafter seems to have walked away from Murry for good—but at a cost. According to journalist and researcher Timothy White, Murry used his connection to the Beach Boys as leverage to keep subsequent Marksmen singles off local radio playlists.

Details aside, as of the first months of 1964, Murry still only had his one client: The Beach Boys. Then the “I Get Around” session happened and he suddenly had no client. As Murry sank into a funk, Carl took pity on him. Carl had a soft touch, and at age 17 his skills as family mediator were well-honed. He later remembered that during this difficult period, he approached Murry in the bedroom (at this point Carl still lived at home in Hawthorne with his parents, who had yet to move to Whittier) and gently explained, “they really, you know, don’t want you to manage the group anymore.” Carl perhaps had already, by this time, introduced the Renegades to his father. If on the other hand, he hadn’t, he would now broker the relationship.

The Renegades had talent, and they got along with Murry. A new partnership began to form.

Murry’s work with the Renegades in 1964 is the subject of Part 21 (click here to read it)

Click here to go back to the previous chapter of A History of Brian

Selected References for Part 20

Carlin, Peter Ames. Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson. Emmaus, PA: Rodale, 2006.

Crowley, Kent. Long Promised Road: Carl Wilson, Soul of the Beach Boys. London: Jawbone Press, 2015.

Dillon, Mark. Fifty Sides of the Beach Boys: The Songs That Tell Their Story. Toronto: ECW Press, 2012.

Felton, David. “The Healing of Brother Bri.” Rolling Stone, November 4, 1976.

Gaines, Steven. Heroes and Villains: The True Story of the Beach Boys. New York: Dutton/Signet, 1986.

Lambert, Philip. Inside The Music of Brian Wilson: The Songs, Sounds and Influences of the Beach Boys' Founding Genius. New York: Continuum International, 2007.

Love, Mike, with James S. Hirsch. Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy. New York: Penguin/Blue Rider, 2016.

Rusten, Ian, and Jon Stebbins. The Beach Boys in Concert: The Ultimate History of America's Band on Tour and on Stage. Milwaukee: Backbeat Books, 2013.

Stebbins, Jon. The Lost Beach Boy. London: Virgin Books, 2007.

^__________. The Beach Boys FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About America’s Band. Milwaukee: Backbeat Books, 2011.

White, Timothy. The Nearest Faraway Place: Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys and the Southern California Experience. New York: Henry Holt, 1994.

Wilson, Murry. Letter to Brian Wilson. May 8, 1965. Collection of Hard Rock International/Hard Rock Memorabilia.

So Murry Wilson is no longer the Beach Boys’ manager. (see previous post.) What did that mean for Brian?

Following Brian Wilson’s heated in-studio confrontation with his father Murry, the Beach Boys went on to finish “I Get Around,” the basic concept of which was an improved iteration of “Fun, Fun, Fun.” In “Fun, Fun, Fun,” the Beach Boys used the Chuck Berry template to tell a story about having fun in the car. This time, Brian constructed something that was having fun in the car; what the kids were only hearing about second-hand in the earlier song they would now experience, or feel, for themselves.

“I Get Around” kicks off with a bass-note pickup that replicates the sound of a key being turned in a car’s ignition—the engine turns over and starts. The four-bar vocal introduction (conceived by Mike Love and apparently inspired by the Regents’ “Barbara Ann”) follows in the tradition of earlier tunes like “Surfin’ Safari” and “Catch a Wave”—it “hooks” the listener with a declarative vocal statement of the theme. The rest of the song features the classic Chuck Berry rhythm, trademark group harmonies, featured vocal parts for Mike and Brian, some well-placed handclaps and a guitar solo from Carl Wilson.

The song somehow transmits the feeling of acceleration, as the arrangement transforms a street race into music—the vocals in the chorus shifting through the gears from first to fourth, with the car hitting top speed and winning the race. The song pulls up short a couple of times at the stoplight—enough time for some good-natured boasting—then speeds off again when the light turns green. The overall arrangement purrs along seamlessly, so that listeners experience the song as a logical, inevitable whole.

With this one record, the Beach Boys both responded to Beatlemania and updated their sound. Yes, it was a car song, but a very sophisticated and smart one. Brian was doing something new with the Beach Boys’ strengths and basic style. “I Get Around” was released as a single in May (with “Don’t Worry Baby” on the B-side) and by July would become the Beach Boys’ first No. 1 hit. 

On “I Get Around,” life and music seem to have been in synch. The song takes place in the same cruising milieu of “Fun, Fun, Fun” but this time, the father-character doesn’t even rate a mention. The female protagonist is gone too; the chick in the Thunderbird challenged her father in “Fun, Fun, Fun” whereas the boys of “I Get Around” have already won before the song even starts. “I Get Around” is how to do a car song about freedom-seeking guys. And for Brian, it turned out to be a song that offended his abuser-manager.

Brian might not have ever viewed the concept and lyrics of “I Get Around” as having any special relevance to his life. In later years, he would remember the song as simply being “about going places, making good money, going around from town to town.” At the time he produced it, all he was trying to do was make the best record he could, expanding the creative boundaries of the car-song while remaining true to the Beach Boys’ image and the precepts of “teenage music.”

And he succeeded. “I Get Around” was great, and as of the time of its recording, everybody—the other Beach Boys, Capitol Records, and Murry too—had every reason to be delighted with the tune and optimistic about is prospects. Yet the song stuck in Murry’s craw. Murry took its lyrics and message more seriously than anybody else.

Even though lead vocalists Brian and Mike adopt the first-person singular on “I Get Around,” the normal listener doesn’t have to believe they’re singing about their own lives. It would have been a rare person who actually believed that the Beach Boys frequently piled into Mike’s hot rod to cruise the boulevard or go from town to town, winning races. But what Murry heard was his son Brian singing about himself, boasting about his current standing in real-life. On the chorus, Brian confidently celebrates his mobility (“I get around”), composure (“I’m a real cool head”), and independent financial success (“I’m makin’ real good bread”). In short, the song openly celebrated three things about Brian that Murry would never accept.

From Murry’s viewpoint, “I Get Around” was an attack. Threatening, at the emotional level. So he tried to block its creation, ordered Brian to cancel the recording session, and otherwise tried to undermine Brian’s confidence. Murry did what he had to, but he couldn’t help himself. He overreached, and ended up forfeiting the managerial position.1

And so, Brian prevailed: Murry was stripped of his “manager” title, and he was no longer welcome in the recording studio. (At least for the time being.)

Was that all? Was it that simple?

In 1976, after the Beach Boys’ star had fully ascended, fallen and then risen again, a New York radio disk jockey asked Dennis Wilson a good question: How do you fire your dad?

Dennis deflected: “You say, ‘Dad, I’ll see you later,’” was his reply. Maybe it would have been too complicated for Dennis to explain. Or too personal a matter to be discussed on the radio. Or maybe, there was in fact no answer to the question at all, because the Beach Boys in fact never fired their dad. At most, what they had done was fire a manager who also happened to be their dad. “Firing their dad”—as father, not just as manager—would have been an entirely different thing. And also, practically impossible.

In this pie-in-the-sky scenario, Brian would steadily expunge Murry from all facets of his life: as a musician, businessman, and human being. Given how Murry had treated Brian, this would have been a morally defensible outcome, for what had occurred between them over the years was far outside the bounds of reasonable parental discipline; easily distinguishable from the natural and often unavoidable conflict that typifies father-son relationships.

For Brian to do this properly—to adequately break free from Murry—would necessarily have been grim, arduous and painful. And tragic. It would likely have destroyed the Beach Boys and ripped the Wilson family apart. Therefore, in the real world there would always be a place for Murry somewhere in Brian’s life.

As Brian has acknowledged, life in Hawthorne was the only life he (and Dennis, and Carl) ever knew. Murry’s version of fatherhood and Audree’s version of motherhood were therefore all they ever had; there was no other reference point. Like everyone, the brothers entered the world requiring care, protection, and respect and were naturally oriented, as a matter of biological practicality, to remain attached to their parents. During the formative years of their childhood, running away from home was not a viable strategy. Coping, adapting and rationalizing were the more realistic options. Now, as young adults, it would have been miraculous if the brothers could turn on a dime and suddenly recognize that they no longer needed to follow the rules of childhood in order to live. The Wilson boys owed Murry nothing, yet they had been raised to feel indebted to him, even as he repeatedly beat the hell out of Brian and Dennis and raised Carl as a powerless witness to unpredictable violence.

And even if the brothers wanted to drop their father (they didn’t), Murry was already lodged, like a cancer, within the Beach Boys’ inner circle. Brian’s personal finances were tethered to Murry via the Sea of Tunes publishing company, which Murry controlled. Indeed, one of the reasons Sea of Tunes existed in the first place was because Brian shared a very strong bond with his father. There had been two decades of ceaseless oversight, suppression, musical growth, sadism, “favored treatment,” limits on freedom, special gifts, obscene boundary violations, guilt-tripping and other mind games. The result was a psychological merger of father and son; a kind of codependency. Murry was planted in Brian’s psyche; the only question was how deep.

And finally, Murry was the husband of the boys’ beloved mother. Murry and Audree were a package deal, as parents tend to be. If the brothers wanted a relationship with the angel, they would have to accommodate the demon.

The Beach Boys’ day-to-day bookkeeping and tour management once handled by Murry was passed on to the accounting firm which also handled the books for Murry’s Sea of Tunes publishing entity and the machinery business that he owned (and was soon to officially retire from). Murry retained his role as song publisher, and continued to pull other business levers behind the scenes. He kept his audience with Brian and would continue to offer advice, opinions, and put-downs about Brian’s evolving music, the commercial success of which provided Murry’s considerable wealth. Murry would even maintain his presence in the recording studio from time to time.

Normally, getting fired means you’re out on your ass and have to find another way to feed yourself. This never happened to Murry. So when Brian said, “you’re fired,” it amounted to little more than a shot across the bow—a warning that from now on, Murry had to be more careful about how he behaved. Considering the vast territory Brian would need to cover if he was ever going to be free, this didn’t amount to much.

Nevertheless, it was better than nothing. The studio control that Brian once had to share with Capitol Records and his father now belonged to him exclusively. “I Get Around” was a harbinger of what he would be doing with this additional measure of creative license.

By this point Brian had already heard the Phil Spector production style on girl-group singles such as “Be My Baby,” performed by The Ronettes. After hearing that and other Spector productions, Brian became a lifelong champion of the enormous, overwhelming sound of Spector’s recordings. Phil Spector took snappy and relatively simple pop tunes with teen-oriented lyrics and pumped them up by blending guitars, drums, horns, percussion, etc. to create an orchestral feel. He employed seasoned studio musicians to get the sound he wanted. It was rock ‘n’ roll, but might be more accurately described as symphonic pop; Spector wasn’t producing songs so much as creating song productions—the song wasn’t really finished until it was produced and had become a record.

Notwithstanding the talent of the singers, musicians and other collaborators, Spector, as producer, was star of the show. His recordings were monophonic, which meant that Brian, with his one functioning ear, could fully absorb everything as Spector intended it to be heard. 

Although Phil Spector had attended Fairfax High School and was now recording in Hollywood, he was born in the Bronx and lived his formative years there. He was a creature of New York’s “ethnic” borough culture (hence his natural affinity for the Ramones later on) and it might be said that his finished recordings comprised a stew of Black, Irish, Jewish, Italian and Latin ingredients. His records transmit the feel of crowded spaces and hard city surfaces. Spector’s female vocalists urgently belt the songs out as if they were singing from an open apartment window, needing to be heard over the street noise. (All this could be why Spector’s records seem naturally suited for use in movies like Mean Streets and Goodfellas.)

What Phil Spector could not provide is delicacy, lightness, and a sense of space. There is joy in his records, but beauty is more scarce. Nor did Spector have at his disposal the one-of-a-kind vocal lineup of the Southern California-bred Beach Boys. And as a man, Spector was warped and tormented, unable or unwilling to convey introspection, respite or a feeling of sanctuary in music.

Brian Wilson, however, could do all of these things. The Beach Boys’ Shut Down Volume 2 album had already shown the Spector influence in places. And recordings like “Don’t Worry Baby” and “I Get Around” may have been the earliest indication that Brian was taking the Spector method and doing something different with it.

Continue reading here: Part 20 of A History of Brian Wilson

Go back to preceding chapter in series, Part 18

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Selected References for Part 18

Brown, Mick. Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector. New York: Knopf, 2007.

Cohn, Nik. “Phil Spector.” In Anthony DeCurtis, James Henke and Holly George-Warren, eds. The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll. New York: Random House, 1992.

“Dennis Wilson—Pete Fornatale Interview 1976.” At YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVItbEJBkJM (posted by “steel7866”)

Endless Harmony: The Beach Boys Story. Directed by Alan Boyd. VH1 Television/Delilah Films, 2000.

Granata, Charles L. Wouldn’t It Be Nice: Brian Wilson and the Making of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. Chicago: A Cappella Books, 2003.

Hoskyns, Barney. “The Making of ‘I Get Around.’” Rolling Stone, July 9, 23, 1998.

Lambert, Philip. Inside The Music of Brian Wilson: The Songs, Sounds and Influences of the Beach Boys' Founding Genius. New York: Continuum International, 2007.

Leaf, David. The Beach Boys and the California Myth. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978.

Lloyd, Robert. “Sea Changes: Brian Wilson and the Cosmic-Baroque Doo-Wop.” L.A. Style, November 1987. Available at: http://houseofhere.com/features.html (last accessed September 8, 2014)

Stebbins, Jon. The Real Beach Boy: Dennis Wilson. Toronto: ECW Press, 2000.

^__________. The Beach Boys FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About America’s Band. Milwaukee: Backbeat Books, 2011.

White, Timothy. The Nearest Faraway Place: Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys and the Southern California Experience. New York: Henry Holt, 1994.

Williams, Paul. Brian Wilson & The Beach Boys: How Deep Is The Ocean? New York: Omnibus Press, 1997.

Wilson, Brian, with Ben Greenman. I Am Brian Wilson. Boston: Da Capo Press, 2016.

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APRIL 2, 1964—Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys are at Western Studios in Hollywood to begin sessions for a very important album, the one whose music will demonstrate what the band can do in this new post-Beatles reality. “I Get Around” is the song scheduled for this date. Although by this point Murry Wilson has worn out his welcome as the group’s manager, he is present in the studio to participate in the session. He is in particularly fine form, as his contemptuous demeanor, words and actions obstruct his son Brian’s efforts to record the new song.

Would it have been sensible for John Lennon and Paul McCartney to allow Brian Epstein to manage them if Epstein had beaten them with boards during childhood? What if Albert Grossman had burned Bob Dylan’s fingers with matches when Bob was little? Or if Andrew Loog Oldham had force-fed food to Keith Richards to the point where Keith puked? Would it have made sense for Pete Townshend to work with, rely upon, and trust Kit Lambert if Kit had tied Pete to a tree? No. But it seems Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys are a special case. Brian is the only major figure in rock ‘n’ roll history who is commonly said to have benefitted from having a manager who did these things to him and his brother Dennis.

Part 18:

Mike Love has said that he and Brian, together, fired Murry Wilson: “Brian and I fired him as our manager after a couple of years. He was insufferable.”

The band couldn’t take it anymore. And they had taken enough. Because Murry was father and uncle, the Beach Boys had tolerated more mistreatment, mismanagement, and abuse from him than they would have from anybody else. The group had accommodated Murry in his role as manager (though drawing the line at letting him be a Beach Boys songwriter), going back to the very formation of the group in 1961, when he belatedly discovered them in practice/rehearsal, reacted negatively, and then had to be “calmed” or “soothed” by the band.

In the two-and-a-half years since then, the Boys had given Murry plenty of rope with which to hang himself, which it seems he finally did during the Australia tour. For Brian and Dennis, Murry’s transgressions dated back much farther than Australia.

Brian Wilson’s 1991 autobiography is not inconsistent with Mike’s recollection that firing Murry was a joint Mike-Brian effort. That book says that even before the fateful “I Get Around” session, Mike had been the first to suggest canning the old man, and the other Beach Boys agreed. The book says that the group eventually wrote and sent a formal letter of termination. In his own 2016 memoir, Mike mentions no letter, but claims that he and Brian showed up at the Wilson home where Brian informed his father verbally, in person, that he was fired and that “nasty words were exchanged between father and son.”

Whatever form this initial salvo (which would have occurred before the studio confrontation over “I Get Around”) took, Murry ignored it. If it is true that a letter was sent, Murry brushed it aside; he could never respect a gesture so laughably civilized. Murry only understood jungle law. He and his wife Audree had raised their sons under the authoritarian, physically violent principle of might-is-right. Unseating Murry as manager would require an act of real force, and it had to come from the only Beach Boy who was positioned to stand up to him for control over the band.

Brian had to do this. It couldn’t have been anybody else. Mike Love had taken the critical step of being the first Beach Boy to openly voice the truth: Uncle Murry—Dad—had to go. This couldn’t have been a decision to be made lightly, by either Mike or the Wilson brothers. Murry was Mike’s uncle—not only the husband of sweet Aunt Audree, but the brother of Mike’s mom, Emily Glee Love. Having grown up with Murry and witnessed how he had tried to protect their mother from their father’s violence, Glee adored Murry (or at the very least perceived him through rose-colored glasses). She wouldn’t hear a bad word spoken of him. And Glee was not, necessarily, a mother to be trifled with. What would she think about her son pushing Murry out of the managerial seat? Did Mike think at all about what his mother would say? Did he care one way or the other?

Even if Mike wasn’t concerned about blowback from the Love side of the family, his hands still would have been tied. As much as Mike might have wanted to just fire Murry back in Australia (or even earlier), it was inconceivable that he alone could square off with Murry and say “you’re fired,” while Murry’s three sons silently observed from the sidelines. If the brothers were to allow that, it would have meant the Beach Boys was Mike’s band—which in 1964 it most certainly was not.

It was a family band, and while Mike was a member of that family, he was outsider to its nucleus. The core of the Beach Boys was the Wilson Family of Hawthorne: Murry, the three brothers, and Audree Wilson too, the mom who always maintained exalted status as the Beach Boys’ patron saint, positioned high above any factional strife. If Mike was to be so audacious as to take the lead in firing Murry, he would be overstepping his bounds as they were defined in 1964. And who knows, he may have even risked expulsion from the group—in effect falling into the trap fate had set for young David Marks.1

Nor for that matter did Dennis Wilson carry sufficient weight to fire his dad unilaterally. Dennis was the crazy middle brother nobody took seriously.

Brian had to do it.

Brian was the one driving this whole thing from the beginning, and it was time for him to act in accordance with his de facto status as group leader. And to his credit, it seems he had tried to do so. With Mike backstopping him, Brian had either signed a letter of termination, or told his father in person, verbally, that he was fired. (Or done both?) Whatever he had done didn’t work. Murry wasn’t going anywhere. What were the remaining options? Calling the police? Petitioning for Audree Wilson’s intervention? Going on strike and bringing Capitol’s corporate power to bear on the situation? Just surrendering and letting Murry have his way with the band?

Or how about some good old fashioned physical violence? Considering how he had treated Brian since childhood, Murry had earned, at the barest minimum, a severe ass-kicking from Brian. Brian, however, was not the type of person to throw punches—not at his dad, not at anybody.

Still, this did not mean that Brian was a wimp or a beatific, spaced-out naïf who could effortlessly turn the other cheek. Some people who are abused the way Brian was come to abhor sadistic, capricious cruelty and are determined to carry themselves with the modicum of dignity their predators lack. Rather than capitulate to their abusers’ world view by becoming boorish, ignorant, and disgusting, they develop a peculiar sense of pride that does not permit violence, meanness, chest-beating, and egotistical theatrics.

At a deeper level, nonviolence is a way to maintain control, self-possession and even a sense of personal responsibility: I could be like my father if I wanted, but I won’t, because it’s my choice not to. At an even further inward region of semi-consciousness there is fear—not of the aggressor necessarily, but of the violent and destructive feelings that have accumulated over time and lie coiled within oneself.

Meanwhile, from the point-of-view of the deranged parent, the child’s ability to absorb the assaults with what seems to be aplomb—while still continuing to achieve—is vexing, threatening and infuriating. That too gives the abuse target a sense of control over his attacker. And further, it is a way to exert power through an act of omission: you fight the abuser by refusing to fight him.2 It was not only as a songwriter, but overall human being, that Brian was vastly superior to his father. And they both knew it.

Unlike his brothers, Brian posed a difficult challenge for Murry. Carl didn’t rock the boat. He had never threatened the status quo so it was needless for Murry to go after him. Dennis fought Murry, but was sloppy, needy, and self-defeating about it, and Murry would always hold the upper hand. Brian, however, had been able to quietly drive a shiv into the tyrant: Brian could hold it together while continuing to triumph in the very business in which Murry had for the most part failed. This had been the truth of the situation, formally unacknowledged but understood on some level between father and son.

From Murry’s standpoint, it was painful to be so easily outclassed by Brian in the music business, but the injury went beyond that. Murry’s competitiveness with Brian went back to the very beginning, to Brian’s birth. In 1965, about a year after the pivotal “I Get Around” session, Murry would write a candid letter to Brian in which, among many other things, he claimed that his wife Audree had “transferred” her love from Murry to the boys after their birth. This wasn’t true, but Murry believed it so. Simply by being born, Brian had been guilty of a very serious crime: as firstborn son, he had stolen Audree’s love from Murry. For Murry, that was bad enough, but the fact that the boy had then grown and achieved great musical success cut even deeper, and was simply unbearable.

It is commonly assumed that the Beach Boys formed as family venture in which father, sons, and nephew-cousin were unified in pursuit of the common goal of musical success. However, the presumption that Murry selflessly ran interference for his sons in the music business—willingly and generously brokering the critical relationship with Hite and Dorinda Morgan of Guild Music in 1961—is not well-supported by the (current) evidence.

It would appear more likely that the Wilson brothers, led by Brian, inadvertently executed an “end-run” around Murry’s tyrannical control: without Murry’s knowledge or permission, Brian and his bandmates naively exploited Murry’s connection to the Morgans to get the group going with the “Surfin’” single. Perhaps it can be seen how, from Brian’s perspective, Murry was several different things: a father to be loved, hated, needed, and feared, and also carefully accommodated or circumvented as dictated by prevailing circumstances. In short, father and son had never really been all that chummy.

Even in those early days, the relationship was one of mistrust, conflict, and parental competition. Murry probably never wanted Brian to succeed in music. Perhaps it would have been okay for Brian to be a performer only—a beautiful singer of ballads, including some written by his father—but certainly not a songwriter-producer, for that was Murry’s exclusive territory, in which he still maintained an ambition. During these early years of the Beach Boys’ success, Murry still believed himself to be in the game; he hadn’t given up on his goal of being a successful songwriter in his own right. Yet Brian had quickly and easily outperformed him in that field. And moreover, Brian had then refused to share the songwriter-spotlight with Murry. Sure, Brian had stepped aside and let his father enrich himself financially via the Sea of Tunes publishing company, but he had refused to allow the Beach Boys to be exploited as a platform for Murry’s songwriting. Murry had been shut out.3

All this helps explain Murry’s antagonism toward Brian as of the “I Get Around” session in April 1964—a point at which Murry would otherwise seem to have very little to complain about.4 Over the course of the preceding 2 ½ years or so, something like a revolution had taken place in the Wilson family—if not recognizable in outward form, then in substance. Murry remained father, Brian remained son, but their roles had reversed. By forming the Beach Boys and then succeeding with them to such an extent, Brian had first bucked his father’s authority and then supplanted him as family provider.

Even a good, decent man might understandably feel a sting if his 21-year-old son was to surpass him like this, but Murry was neither good nor decent. He was a man whose sense of identity and self-worth had been tied up with his horrible treatment of his sons. (The worse he treated them, the better a man he became—stronger, more “protective,” more “loving.”)

In the case of Brian and Murry, the son’s musical success resulted not just in the father’s injured pride, but his abject humiliation. While the cash Murry raked in from Sea of Tunes improved his financial situation (enabling him to retire from the machinery business while in his forties), it was a mere consolation prize. All that money didn’t do a thing to assuage his jealousy and shame.

If all this is accurate—if it is true that Brian had effectively superseded his father’s predominance in the family—did that mean Brian was family “leader?” And if so, did he therefore have to start behaving differently, in accordance with his true status?

Easier said than done. As of the time of the “I Get Around” session it had never been Brian’s place to push back against Murry directly, head-on. Overt rebellion had instead been Dennis’s “role” in the family—it was expected of him. In contrast, Brian had always been expected not only to excel (and now, provide wealth) but do so while passively absorbing abuse and exploitation without complaint and without openly fighting back. Over the course of Brian’s life, each time his father beat, degraded, or insulted him, it was (among other things) an implicit challenge for Brian to absorb it, maintain stability, and then succeed—all while remaining a dutiful son, subordinate to his father’s authority.

Brian had been locked into this existence for most of his life. It wasn’t fair or just, but Brian had handled it so far. As of mid-1964, he had never broken down, never capitulated, never shown defeat. Neither did he resort to violence or other forms of delinquent behavior, nor did he emulate his father’s narcissism and become an insufferable horse’s ass. All he had done was get better and better at his craft and generate gobs of money for his parents.

But getting from June 1942 to this point in the first half of 1964 had been punishing and exhausting. Brian had been dealing with Murry all his life, and had been battling him over the Beach Boys since Day One: that early practice session in the Wilson home when Brian, and no one else, was the one Murry fixated on and threw across the room.

Brian could have, and maybe should have, pushed back on that fateful day in 1961. He didn’t. But now, in April 1964, as Murry battled him over “I Get Around,” Brian acted. Having been pushed to his limits, he grabbed Murry, shoved him backwards and summarily fired him as manager of the Beach Boys.

This event almost certainly marks the first (and presumably last) time Brian laid aggressive hands on his father in an act of physical self-defense. It was a shove, or a push, or maybe something a little more forceful, but nothing more. After so many years of malicious violation, there would have been—there must have been—an inferno of murderous rage inside Brian. But he kept a lid on it. If he hadn’t, things could have gotten rather messy. It was a shove only, and Murry responded with his true cowardice: he retreated from the studio. Brian had used the minimal amount of physical force necessary to get the job done.

Back in 1962, when Murry drafted a contract declaring that Brian would be the “leader” of the Beach Boys vested with the power to fire any of the Beach Boys at his discretion, this was not the outcome Murry had envisioned. Yet there it was. This was leadership.

A History of Brian Wilson continues in Part 19, with a discussion of the song “I Get Around” and a further look at the implications of Murry Wilson’s dismissal. Click here for Part 19.

Back to Part 17

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Selected References for Part 18

Beach Boys, The. “Help Me, Rhonda” session recording. March 1965. At: WFMU’s Beware of the Blog. At: https://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2005/10/im_a_genius_too.html (last accessed September 5, 2023).

Brian Wilson: Songwriter 1962-1969. Produced by Prism Films, Chrome Dreams Media. Sexy Intellectual Productions, 2010.

Endless Harmony: The Beach Boys Story. Directed by Alan Boyd. VH1 Television/Delilah Films, 2000.

Gaines, Steven. Heroes and Villains: The True Story of the Beach Boys. New York: Dutton/Signet, 1986.

Granata, Charles L. Wouldn’t It Be Nice: Brian Wilson and the Making of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. Chicago: A Cappella Books, 2003.

Love, Mike, with James S. Hirsch. Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy. New York: Penguin/Blue Rider, 2016.

Mones, Paul. When A Child Kills: Abused Children Who Kill Their Parents. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.

Stebbins, Jon. The Beach Boys FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About America’s Band. Milwaukee: Backbeat Books, 2011.

White, Timothy. The Nearest Faraway Place: Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys and the Southern California Experience. New York: Henry Holt, 1994.

Williams, Paul. Brian Wilson & The Beach Boys: How Deep Is The Ocean? New York: Omnibus Press, 1997.

Wilson, Brian, with Todd Gold.  Wouldn't It Be Nice: My Own Story. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.

^__________, with Ben Greenman. I Am Brian Wilson. Boston: Da Capo Press, 2016.

Wilson, Murry. Letter to Brian Wilson. May 8, 1965. Collection of Hard Rock International/Hard Rock Memorabilia.

From Brian Wilson’s point-of-view, the arrival of the Beatles in February 1964 demanded that some changes occur. For starters, Brian’s music with and for the Beach Boys had to evolve in some way. As discussed below, the Beach Boys’ Shut Down Volume 2 album—in terms of both its concept and music—concisely summarizes the problem facing the group. Were changes necessary in any other respect?

It seems they were. No later than the Beatles’ February appearance on Ed Sullivan, the Beach Boys had come to understand that retaining Murry Wilson as band manager wasn’t going to work out. If the Boys hadn’t already sensed this for a while, Murry’s conduct during the Australia tour in January made it obvious: the man had to go. But how to get rid of him?

The Beach Boys’ first album of 1964, Shut Down Volume 2, was a post-Beatlemania release: it came out on March 2, a month after the Beatles shot to No. 1 with “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and three weeks after the landmark Ed Sullivan performance. Yet Volume 2 was, in substance, a pre-Beatles album. The writing of some of the songs went back to 1963 and the meat of the album was recorded in January, before “I Want to Hold Your Hand” entered the singles chart. In other words, the Beach Boys recorded (most of) Shut Down Volume 2 while blissfully ignorant of the imminent Beatle invasion.

As of the time Volume 2 was conceived, written, and recorded, the Beach Boys had ceased to be just a “surfing” group. They had established a secondary identity as a car band. During the Surfin’ Safari era of mid-1962, “409” had been the group’s first car song, but the Beach Boys didn’t really establish their car-cred until the spring of 1963 with “Shut Down,” the popular B-side of the “Surfin’ U.S.A.” single that was distinguished by lyricist Roger Christian’s vivid description of a drag race.

In June 1963, Capitol Records leveraged the success of “Shut Down” by slapping together an entire compilation album—titled, naturally, Shut Down—that was presented as a sampler of car songs and instrumentals from a variety of performers. The Beach Boys were represented on the album with reissues of the title track and “409,” which at that point were the band’s only car songs.

Beach Boys cuts aside, the Capitol Shut Down compilation (aka “Vol. 1”) was pretty much crap. Yet by August it managed to reach No. 7 on the album chart, an improbably strong performance made possible only by Capitol’s exploitation of the Beach Boys’ name and the title of one of the band’s hot new songs.

Luckily for the Beach Boys, their inclusion in Capitol’s Shut Down hustle didn’t seem to do them much harm, for at the same time Shut Down was peaking on the album chart, the Beach Boys’ new car song, “Little Deuce Coupe” was doing quite well as the flipside of the “Surfer Girl” single. The Boys followed up by going back into the studio to record still more car-themed tunes that would eventually appear on the Little Deuce Coupe album in early October. Then came the anomalous “Be True to Your School” single (through which, as suggested in this post, Brian Wilson may have been trying to break out of the surf-and-car rut), followed at year’s end by the classic Christmas single “Little Saint Nick”—basically a revamped “Little Deuce Coupe,” in which the band reimagined Santa’s sleigh as a hot rod.

All this goes to explain the conceptual presentation of Shut Down Volume 2. If it had made sense for the Beach Boys to pose as surfers while singing about the beach, why couldn’t they pose as drag-racing grease monkeys while singing about cars? Here, in the waning days of their pre-Beatles existence, the Beach Boys (with Capitol’s encouragement and/or guidance) were presenting themselves as a tough car club—with matching jackets—ready to “shut down” any musical competition (such as the Four Seasons). Shut Down Volume 2 bore the same relationship to the Little Deuce Coupe album that Surfer Girl had to Surfin’ U.S.A.: it was an album that intentionally built on the theme introduced by its predecessor, solidifying the Beach Boys’ connection to the prevailing musical fad.

This didn’t mean there wasn’t great stuff on the album. In addition to “Fun, Fun, Fun,” Volume 2 featured two notable songs that have proven to be among the Beach Boys’ very best: “The Warmth of the Sun” and “Don’t Worry Baby.” The first, written by Brian Wilson and Mike Love, was another fine ballad with a traditional triplet cadence, an arresting chord progression, and mature, writerly lyrics. With “Don’t Worry Baby,” Brian (with Roger Christian credited as co-writer) repurposed the shopworn drag-race concept to craft what has proven to be a very significant song that deals with competition, fear, doubt, and how love provides a sense security.

“Don’t Worry Baby” was a complete inversion of Wilson-Christian’s “Shut Down.” In effect, the very same drag race described in the earlier tune was revisited—but this time, from the racer’s internal, emotional perspective. Of course, the listener needn’t (and maybe shouldn’t) dissect the thematic elements of “Don’t Worry Baby” to enjoy it; the main thing was that it sounded good. As with “In My Room,” the deeper meaning of the song is felt by the listener, not shoved into his consciousness.

In spite of these advancements, as an overall collection Shut Down Volume 2 was barely an improvement (if at all) on the Surfer Girl and Little Deuce Coupe albums. “The Warmth of the Sun” and “Don’t Worry Baby” were at this point presented only as low-profile album cuts, alongside lesser stuff like the blown-up rearrangement of “Louie Louie.” There was Brian’s Phil Spector-influenced reading of the ‘50s nugget “Why Do Fools Fall In Love”—more grandiose than the original, but certainly not any better. “This Car of Mine” paired the shuffle-groove of “Little Deuce Coupe” and “Little Saint Nick” with the sentimentality of “Ballad of Ole’ Betsy.” The replacement of Mike Love’s swaggering vocals with Dennis Wilson’s cuddly sincerity made it kind of endearing, but the song was filler and Brian didn’t put much care into it. Two high-school portraits, “Pom Pom Play Girl” and “In the Parkin’ Lot” were musically inventive, well-produced, and probably not as embarrassing for the teen fan of early 1964 as they would be for listeners of later years. Still, those tunes were forgettable, surviving today as evidence why Brian Wilson needed the Beatles to kick him in the ass.1

Notwithstanding the album’s shortcomings (which are in any case most apparent only in hindsight), it was still the individual recording—the single—that really mattered as a group’s most important musical statement. During the week of March 21, the irresistible “Fun, Fun, Fun” reached its peak at No. 5. The Beatles occupied the top three slots with “She Loves You,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “Please Please Me.” (The Four Seasons had No. 4 that week with “Dawn.”) The confident young car-clubbers pictured on the cover of Shut Down Volume 2 had unwittingly been on the brink of extinction; they were the very sort to be eradicated by the invasive British species. However, the solid performance of “Fun, Fun, Fun” kept the Beach Boys in the game during the first blast of Beatlemania.

Fast-forward a couple of weeks to April 2, 1964: with Shut Down Volume 2 in the stores for only a month, it was time to start sessions for the follow-up to be released in about three months’ time, during summer. This would be the Beach Boys’ first batch of songs to be written and recorded within a post-Beatles reality, and the group had to deliver.

The early sessions were for “I Get Around,” a song that would be the showpiece of the album and the main summer single. Brian had sketched it out on the upright piano at his girlfriend Marilyn’s family home in the Fairfax district and had an idea in his head of what the finished product was going to sound like. To do the job, Brian was going to use the Beach Boys singing and on their respective instruments plus a few studio pros adding critical percussion, guitar, bass and horn parts. And of course, Murry Wilson would be present in the studio for the session—not only in his formal capacity of business manager, but also that of unofficial co-producer and father-protector-controller.2

Whatever it was that occurred between Murry and Brian during the recording of “I Get Around,” it was ugly. As Brian tried to lead the session, Murry taunted, insulted, and attacked him verbally. A mawkish, Father-Knows-Best reflex dictates that Murry did this to “drive” Brian and get the best out of him, but everything that is known about Murry Wilson shows that he was not a dad who merely “criticized” his son, constructively or otherwise. In reality, Murry was driven to compete with Brian, fight him, abuse him, control him and exploit him. Alternatively—or preferably, even—he would break Brian decisively and simply destroy him. Obstructing Brian’s creation of music was the most effective way for Murry to accomplish these goals.

Murry hadn’t liked “Fun, Fun, Fun” and he now had problems with “I Get Around,” a song that offended him.3 Murry chipped away at Brian’s confidence, denigrated the music, and ordered Brian to cancel the session. Mike Love has reported that Murry went into the studio control booth and ordered Brian to “get out of the way.” Brian refused. 

A number of witnesses (e.g., Mike Love, session drummer Hal Blaine) have recalled hearing Murry insult Brian and his music during this era, but what these people couldn’t know was that Murry’s cut-downs, as bad as they were on their face, also had a subtext reaching back to Brian’s childhood. Whatever emotions Brian was experiencing during this confrontation were not simply the immediate result of Murry’s actions at that particular moment; this wasn’t just some disagreement that flared up about the proper way to record a song. Rather, it was everything—what this man had been doing to him his entire life.

Between Murry and Brian, there was an intimate and secret personal history of grotesque parental violation that was always implicated in their current-day interactions. Recalling the fateful “I Get Around” conflict in his 1991 autobiography, Brian said that Murry specifically warned him to “remember who you’re talking to.” This is a believable account. If a third-party outsider ever heard Murry say those words to Brian, it would have meant something like, “don’t talk to your father that way.” But in this case, “remember who you’re talking to” translates to, among other things, remember what I did to you. I made you shit on a newspaper, so don’t ever forget what you really are. Some accounts of the session depict Murry shoving Brian and jabbing him with his finger, which too would have been a way of sending Brian back to childhood—like Biff Tannen in the movie Back to the Future, still rapping his knuckles on George McFly’s head after thirty years, in McFly’s own home.

It would have injured and enraged Brian to be denigrated by his father, particularly during an important session taking place in the midst of Beatlemania, when Brian’s career, and that of the Beach Boys, was on the line. And it wasn’t just Brian who was feeling it. Murry took aim at Dennis too, driving Dennis to punch a hole in the studio wall in a spasm of frustration and impotent rage. (It’s possible Dennis was actually taking a swing at Murry and missed.)

Murry needed to be shut down, with merciless finality. That was theoretically possible, but in practice extremely difficult if not impossible, for a bunch of reasons. We can idly speculate that there was a part of Murry—festering somewhere deep within his tormented psyche—that sought this from his firstborn son all along: do something to put me out of my misery, please.4 Yet how to make him go away? After all, Brian wasn’t even going to put Murry on the deck as Gary Usher had once counseled him to do.

Something had to be done. At the barest minimum, the time had come for Brian to assert dominance within the physical space where music was being created. For Brian, the professional recording studio was the adult version of the humble music room back in Hawthorne. The studio was his optimal environment, his “room,” the place where he expressed the healthiest and most capable part of himself. Murry was not going to relent until he either conquered that territory, or wrecked it completely.

This continues in Part 18

Back to Part 16

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Selected References for Part 17

Brian Wilson: Songwriter 1962-1969. Produced by Prism Films, Chrome Dreams Media. Sexy Intellectual Productions, 2010.

Doe, Andrew. “Shows and Sessions 1961-2024.” Bellagio10452.com. At: www.bellagio10452.com/gigs.html

Gaines, Steven. Heroes and Villains: The True Story of the Beach Boys. New York: Dutton/Signet, 1986.

Granata, Charles L. Wouldn’t It Be Nice: Brian Wilson and the Making of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. Chicago: A Cappella Books, 2003.

Love, Mike, with James S. Hirsch. Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy. New York: Penguin/Blue Rider, 2016.

Williams, Paul. Brian Wilson & The Beach Boys: How Deep Is The Ocean? New York: Omnibus Press, 1997.

Wilson, Brian, with Todd Gold.  Wouldn't It Be Nice: My Own Story. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.

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The preceding chapter left off with the oft-repeated notion that as of late 1963, American culture was safely ensconced in a “Fifties” mindset. With the No. 6 hit “Be True to Your School,” the Beach Boys would seem to have been comfortably situated as leading stars in a teen-scene that was still tied to the Fifties. In these days, the band found success by pairing various teenage-friendly themes with an innovative blend of 1950s musical forms.

The following chapter begins in the last days of 1963, with the Beach Boys ready to record a new Chuck Berry-derived tune about teenage life. Within a month or two, the Beatles arrive in America for the first time.

Go back to Part 15

Part 16 below:

Sometime in the latter portion of 1963, Brian Wilson and Mike Love put together the basic concept, music and lyrics for the song, “Fun, Fun, Fun.” It was a straight-ahead rock ‘n’ roll song that again borrowed heavily from Chuck Berry in the intro, rhythm and lyrical style. It told a teenage story in classic three-act form: a girl uses her dad’s property—his car—under the pretext that she’s going to the library to study; unbeknownst to him, she’s using it to have fun on the boulevard, where she’s the boss chick behind the wheel. Dad’s authority always looms however, and he at last puts his foot down and takes the car keys away. The song concludes, as it must, with the assurance that the girl can have just as much fun (fun, fun) without her dad’s car.

Like “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” this is a fine Beach Boys signature tune from the early days. While still technically a car song, it helped the Beach Boys move into the slightly less restrictive thematic territory of the teenage lifestyle (where it was an improvement over “Be True to Your School”). The fact that it was about a girl was fortuitous if not necessarily a calculated choice. It made the song relatable to girls and boys alike. And it helped the parent-child drama go down smoothly: “Fun, Fun, Fun” would not have worked if it had been a boy who was trying to do an end-run around daddy’s rules, only to have his wings clipped. A girl could do that and still be cool and rebellious. Had it been a boy, the song would be a downer; the kid would have been shut down and emasculated by his father.  

Arguably, “Fun, Fun, Fun” said more about where the Beach Boys were coming from than what appeared on the surface. A specific parent-child reality that for the Wilson brothers (especially Brian) had been horrific and would prove crippling in the long run was inadvertently reframed by Mike and Brian with light, Chuck Berry-styled whimsy. (It’s been said that Brian’s original title was “Run, Run, Run.”) It’s unlikely anyone knew this, including the Boys themselves. And what did manager Murry Wilson think when he heard a lyric that made light of a girl’s defiance of her father’s authority and unauthorized use of his property?1

Murry took exception to “Fun, Fun, Fun,” as evidenced by (among other things) his effort to obstruct its recording: exerting his authority as father-manager, Murry unilaterally cancelled a session for the tune that Brian had scheduled. Figuratively, by doing this Murry was indeed trying to take Brian’s “set of keys” from him. Brian had to take a long breath, push forward, and schedule another session for New Year’s Day 1964 so the Beach Boys could record the song.   

Within a couple of weeks, the Boys were off to Australia for a big package tour featuring a number of popular acts. They found themselves on the other end of the world (where it was summer), about as far away from home as they could get, but they brought a little keepsake from Hawthorne in the person of their dad-manager.

The Australia tour is said to have been awful for the group. Murry raged, enforcing his selective version of morality and propriety. He forbade drinking, profanity and contact with females, and even stationed himself in the hallway outside the hotel rooms and conducted surprise bed-checks in an attempt to block any illicit assignations. When the group wasn’t on lockdown, Murry dog-and-ponied them before the press, fans, and autograph seekers. He monitored their deportment to ensure they carried themselves with sufficient humility. The fines he levied for single infractions have been said to be as low as $200 or as high as $1,000. (Who knows where this money went.) Murry went on stage while the band was performing and turned down Brian’s bass. He of course continued to berate and insult the Boys, with different sources reporting that he slapped favorite targets Brian and Dennis in public. Carl presumably kept his head down and toed the line.

Even if these stories are only partially true, what it means is that the Beach Boys—or at least the brothers, who were now working professionals at 21, 19 and 17 years old—were in position to live their young adult lives very much as they always had: battered, under Murry’s heel. Mike Love was a mere nephew, but going on 23 years old, this couldn’t have sat well with him either. With Murry as manager, things were in place to continue like this indefinitely. It was degrading, embarrassing, and soul-killing. Mike Love has said that after returning home from Australia, he and Brian called a meeting at which the group unanimously decided that they would give Murry the boot.

Meanwhile, as the Beach Boys toured Australia, the Beatles—who up to now had been virtually unknown in America—shot to U.S. No. 1 with “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”

Years later, a musician from a different band on the Australia package tour recalled sitting with the Beach Boys— while still in Australia—as they watched a film of the Beatles’ Royal Variety Performance from the previous November. He told writer Kent Crowley that the Beach Boys were not very impressed with what they saw and heard.

This isn’t too surprising. The Beach Boys would not have been predisposed to take any rock ‘n’ roll coming out of Britain seriously. At the time, the reasonable presumption would have been that British rock ‘n’ roll was inherently second-rate. Even without such prejudice, the Royal Variety performance didn’t present the Beatles in their best light. It was given in London for a fusty audience that gave nothing back to the band, who seem to be performing in a vacuum. The music was removed from its proper setting, and the Beatles—as evidenced by John Lennon’s famous “jewelry” comment on stage —knew it.2

Soon after returning home from Australia, the Beach Boys got another look at the Beatles when they tuned in for the American television program The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9. The Sullivan studio audience was packed with enough kids (girls) to ratchet up the energy and place the Beatles’ performance in proper context. The TV camera work was crisp, the stage design was attractive, and the Beatles were by now a seasoned rock ‘n’ roll band that was at ease in the spotlight. Their sound—notably their sharp, Scouse-inflected vocals—was totally unique to American ears.

They looked different too. The Beatles were not proper adults, but neither were they kids or teenagers, nor were they trying to be. They weren’t American, but embodied something that appealed to American youth. Part of this was the boy-band effect; it’s said that Beatles manager Brian Epstein tarted them up a bit. But as Beatlemania took off, the band projected an attractive combination of youth, self-assurance, and worldly intelligence. They seemed beholden to nobody but themselves, and their sly, deadpan mockery of the older generation (in interviews) would have contrasted with a hit like “Fun, Fun, Fun,” which, after all, rubber-stamped parental authority.

The Beatles were emancipated young people. They were doing something that had not been done before, and doing it well: even at this stage, their records were awfully good.

The Beatles had already hit No. 1 back in January—clearing the stage for Beatlemania but not quite launching it in full force. It was the televised Ed Sullivan performance in February that is said to have really changed the American recording industry, literally overnight. For the Hollywood record producers, it was like a standing eight-count. Men who ran busy recording studios said that the morning after the broadcast, the phones stopped ringing—the labels and producers were not calling to book studio time, because they were still absorbing what they had seen, and figuring how to respond.

It might be said, however, that Brian Wilson was responding immediately, in real time, for he was working on “I Get Around”—a new, exuberant song of youthful freedom—on the piano as the Beatles’ Sullivan performance flickered on his TV set. Still, Brian and the other the L.A. hitmakers never could have predicted that the new craze to succeed surfing and cars would be “Britain,” nor the fact that it wasn’t going to be a short-lived fad at all.

The Beatles, and the “British Invasion” that followed, thundered through the American music scene, effectively ending careers and depleting the commercial viability of entire musical genres. The Beatles and their British contemporaries basically took various American forms and—naturally, without an excess of self-awareness—added other influences to shape it into a new version of rock ‘n’ roll that could only have come from over there. In the future, everything would eventually get blended up and there would be American groups influenced by earlier American groups who had tried to sound like British guys who themselves had wanted to sound American. But just as Bob Dylan established the template for the modern singer-songwriter, the Beatles were now defining what the self-contained rock ‘n’ roll group does, or wants to do. Virtually every post-Beatles group in the typical rock ‘n’ roll record collection is influenced in some way by the Beatle model, with most of them musically influenced by the Beatles in one way or another.

The Beach Boys occupy an interesting space in the 1960s rock ‘n’ roll canon because their presentation and sound (and image) bears scarcely any Beatle influence. They achieved initial success in a pre-Beatles setting, and their foundational stance as a “vocal group” dates back to the ‘50s and earlier. At the same time, the Beach Boys continued to maintain a presence in popular music during the Beatle-era when so many other performers and styles dropped away. The time during which the Beach Boys performed in a punchy rock-band format was passing, and to their credit, the Boys had little interest in sounding like the Beatles anyway.

Like the Four Freshmen, The Beach Boys had always been a vocal harmony group that could play instruments. They would, for the time being, remain true to that form. The ability to sing in four and five-part vocal harmony was something the Beach Boys had over everybody else. But Brian Wilson now understood that whatever they had been doing with their talent was not going to work in the future. Something had to change. 

Keep reading A History of Brian Wilson here, in Part 17

Return to Part 15

Selected References for Part 16

Crowley, Kent. Long Promised Road: Carl Wilson, Soul of the Beach Boys. London: Jawbone Press, 2015.

Felton, David. “The Healing of Brother Bri." Rolling Stone, November 4, 1976.

Gaines, Steven. Heroes and Villains: The True Story of the Beach Boys. New York: Signet/New American Library, 1986.

Kubernik, Harvey. Turn Up the Radio! Rock, Pop, and Roll in Los Angeles 1956-1972. Solana Beach, CA: Santa Monica Press, 2014.

Leaf, Earl. “Brian Births a New Song.” The Teen Set, Vol. 1, October 1964.

Love, Mike, with James S. Hirsch. Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy. New York: Penguin/Blue Rider, 2016.

MacDonald, Ian. Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2007.

Marcus, Greil. “The Beatles.” In Anthony DeCurtis, James Henke and Holly George-Warren, eds. The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll. New York: Random House, 1992.

Menand, Louis. The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.

Sharp, Ken. Sound Explosion! Inside L.A.’s Studio Factory with the Wrecking Crew.  Woodland Hills, CA: Wrecking Crew LLC, 2015.

The Wrecking Crew! Directed by Denny Tedesco. Wrecking Crew LLC, 2014. DVD: Magnolia Home Entertainment, 2015.

White, Timothy. The Nearest Faraway Place: Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys and the Southern California Experience. New York: Henry Holt, 1994.

Wilson, Brian, with Todd Gold. Wouldn't It Be Nice: My Own Story. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.

Wilson, Brian. Foreword to Paul Trynka, ed. The Beatles: 10 Years That Shook the World. London: DK, 2004.

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The previous chapter dealt with the Beach Boys’ mastery of an intentionally “teenage” and fad-oriented model of record-making. This mode of business differed from what was to occur within a couple of years, by which time a new kind of artistry was finding its way into the youth-driven commercial pop scene.

What qualifies as “art?” As of 1962 and 1963 (their heyday as purveyors of good surf and car songs) were the Beach Boys “artists?” Was Brian Wilson born an artist, or did he only become one later in life? If the latter, how and when did it happen?

Though Brian was talented, clever, and creative, the primary impetus for his earlier songs was most often commercial success, not self-expression. He made good records about things that meant absolutely nothing to him: Brian didn’t surf, didn’t like the beach, and didn’t customize hot cars in his spare time. If he didn’t already know it when the Beach Boys first stumbled into success with “Surfin’,” Brian would soon learn that pop records, regardless of quality, were conceived and crafted to meet preexisting consumer preference. And that was okay—whatever artistic ambitions Brian had in the early days were adequately satisfied by the record-making process itself.

The next several installments of A History of Brian Wilson examine Brian’s transition from record-maker to artist in the mid-1960s.1

In 2002, a journalist asked a 60-year-old Brian Wilson if he would have become a musician without his “dysfunctional” family background. Brian’s reply was semi-contradictory. “Probably not,” he said, and then followed with, “but I was definitely born to sing, to be an artist.”

Picasso said that “if a work of art cannot always live in the present, it must not be considered at all.” An exacting standard, but if true, the artist creates something of lasting worth; something that will outlive him and successfully communicate with people in the future.

Insofar as Brian had artistic impulses in 1963, he would have been facing a quandary. He would have been feeling the need to create durable work while nevertheless wanting to remain a hitmaker. He would have to figure out a way to reconcile these two goals. The performer who’s in it just for the dough doesn’t have to deal with this challenge, nor does the maniacal purist toiling anonymously in the basement. On the Little Deuce Coupe album in fall 1963, Brian’s musical ideas and the Beach Boys’ fine harmonies were put to service in celebration of “Naugahyde bucket seats.” In the future, that wasn’t going to cut it.

The tension was embedded in the grooves of the Beach Boys’ main 45-rpm single of the time frame between fall and Christmas 1963. The A-side was “Be True to Your School,” the only non-vehicular song on the Little Deuce Coupe album. It was a big, orchestral production that sought to convey energetic high school spirit while lecturing listeners in the value of loyalty to one’s school (or at least to the school’s football team). While it’s not wholly inconceivable that Brian really felt this way about high school, “Be True to Your School” comes off as one of the most insincere and pandering pieces of music ever to bear his name.

The song seems to have just come out of nowhere, in the midst of the Boys’ surf-and-car era, which had been purring along nicely. What was going on?

It could be that in middle of 1963, following “Surfin’ Safari,” the inauguration of the surf-craze with “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” the release of the surf-heavy Surfer Girl album, and the writing and recording of the car songs with Roger Christian, Brian was searching for non-beach and non-car song ideas. The implied question: is there anything else we can sing about?

If Brian was motivated to move beyond surfing and cars, his instincts were sound. However, there was a catch: any new song concepts had to be purposefully tailored for the Beach Boys’ teen and pre-teen fans. Brian would have been aware of this reality.

An imaginary internal dialogue:

Q: What’s going on in the lives of teenagers that would work for a Beach Boys single in 1963?

A: Surfing! Kids are really into surfing right now, and they want to be surfers.

Q: No. Something besides that. We can’t do beaches and surfing forever.

A: Are you sure about that?

Q: Look—

A: The kids are into cars. Hot rods, racing.

(pause)

At least the boys are into that stuff.

Q: No, not that either. We just wrote and recorded a bunch of songs about cars—hot cars, fast cars, slow cars, “cherry” cars, girls who like cars, car clubs, custom-rods, drag racing, even a car crash ballad—and we’re gonna put those out soon. I mean besides surfing, pretending to be a surfer, or fixing up a cool car. Something kids can relate to.

A: Well, kids go to school, don’t they? Do a song about school.

Q: But going to school isn’t fun. The Beach Boys are supposed to make happy, fun music.

(pause)

At least on their A-sides.

A: “Surfer Girl” was the last A-side. That was a ballad. Was it “fun?” Was it “happy?”

Q: It had the “surf” thing going for it. Even though it wasn’t really about surfing, we could get away with it because it had surf imagery. Also, it’s great.

A: Then do another ballad. Just make sure it’s as good as “Surfer Girl.”

Q: We could put out a ballad last time because we were coming off “Surfin’ U.S.A.”/”Shut Down.” We were hot. We had leverage. And by the way, “Surfer Girl” was buttressed by a very strong B-side. But we can’t do two emotional ballads in a row. This is a business, you know.

A: Not even a car ballad?

Q: We already did one. Literally—“Ballad of Ole Betsy.” And it’s not hit single material. Good tune, nice, a bit corny and old-fashioned.

A: Then write a car ballad that is good enough. Challenge yourself! Is it possible to write a song about cars or drag racing that is nevertheless honest, sensitive, and meaningful?

Q: Yes, and that would be “Don’t Worry Baby,” but I’m not aware of that yet. This is still the middle of 1963.

A: I’m telling you, look to school for song ideas. Chuck Berry made school sound fun—just listen to “School Days.” It can be done, you know.

Q: Hmm. You’re right.

(pause)

Uh, I think I’ll go back and listen to “School Days” more carefully to see if Chuck was really saying school was fun, or whether the fun started after—

A: Forget that! It’s a good idea to put out a single that’s not about beaches or cars, but we’re on a tight deadline. The Beach Boys can do this! All we have to do is figure out a way to emphasize the fun parts of school—the part of the school experience that the kids like.

Q: And what part would that be?

Of course, it’s impossible to know Brian’s actual thought process, but the decision to make “Be True to Your School” had at least something to do with these sorts of concerns.2 With Mike Love’s lyrics clarifying the general concept, “Be True to Your School” went all the way to No. 6 on the singles chart—higher than any Beach Boys single to date except “Surfin’ U.S.A.”—suggesting that the song did not conflict with American youth culture as it existed in fall ‘63, and that Brian’s commercial instincts were sound. There’s also the possibility that with the previous A- and B-sides being “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” “Shut Down,” “Surfer Girl” and “Little Deuce Coupe,” the Beach Boys had accrued a level of credibility and trust from their fans, who bought “Be True to Your School” out of habit or reflex, resulting in an inflated chart performance.

Regardless of its success and the reasons for it, “Be True to Your School” had an expiration date shorter than any surfing or car song the Beach Boys ever recorded. It’s just a bad song; one of the most backward hits ever recorded by a great rock ‘n’ roll group. While the Beach Boys subsequently recorded many great songs (hits and non-hits alike) as well as some clunkers, “Be True to Your School” lingers as an example of the group’s retrograde tendencies and a subtle indicator of the punitive authoritarianism that was baked into the group and constrained its creativity.

As such, the song eventually earned its place alongside the various other millstones round Brian Wilson’s neck. When asked about it approximately 10 years after its release, an effectively-retired Brian said he wished people would ignore the words and just listen to the music. Although later versions of the Beach Boys would become more purposefully associated with conformity and authoritarianism, from Brian’s perspective as a creator, “Be True to Your School” was a self-gifted Trojan Horse through which the group symbolically, and in Brian’s own words, “blew their career” back in the fall of 1963. In short, Brian would come to recognize that he had made a mistake.

If listeners flipped the single over, they would hear “In My Room,” a song that dated back to the partnership with Gary Usher and the days when Brian was still writing songs in his parents’ house. Murry and Audree had previously converted the Wilson garage into a music room, and that is where Brian studied, played, and eventually began to write music. At some point during his teen years Brian moved out of the cramped bedroom he shared with his brothers and started sleeping in the music room too.

Later, during one of the writing sessions in which Brian and Usher batted ideas around, the topic turned to the very room in which they were writing, and Brian’s relationship to it. Their discussion eventually resulted in “In My Room.”

At the literal, outermost level, “In My Room” is about a teenager’s bedroom. Underneath, it’s about the actual music room in the Wilson home. At its truest core, however, the “room” is a metaphor, as the song deals with the process through which Brian used music to safely express himself without fear of assault and persecution by his father. Beach Boys fans certainly didn’t know this at the time, nor did Brian even; it was only later that he came to understand he had written about the reality of his own life.

It therefore seems that at age 20 in late 1962 (which was probably around the time “In My Room” was written), the creative process had liberated Brian’s unconscious to tell him things about himself that he wasn’t fully aware of at the time. It appears that Gary Usher could be a sympathetic and non-judgmental collaborator, willing to write words that acknowledge not just tears, but isolation, worry and fear. Conceptually, the song was well off the beaten path for 1962 or ‘63.  

“In My Room” boasts one of the great group vocals from the Beach Boys. Still, because it says so much about Brian, it belongs on the short list of his signature songs. At the same time, it remains as accessible as any of the other teenage songs that the Beach Boys were doing in these days. Any young person should be able to relate to “In My Room.” Its placement on the flipside of “Be True to Your School” helps explain why. The same youth who spends his days penned with the herd in the Pavlovian environment of high school might value a little time alone to actually feel like a living person. As would a kid like Brian, one who is struggling with an impossible situation at home.

The “Be True to Your School”/”In My Room” single presented two sides of the teen (and adult, for that matter) experience: on the A-side there was falseness and doing what they tell you to do with a smile on your face. On the flip, there was realness. The distinction was also between group identification and individual self-awareness—that is, individual self-respect.

This one single, with its A- and B-side, illustrates how as of late 1963, Brian was already approaching a vaguely-defined crossroads. In one direction there were songs purposefully conceptualized for the teen and pre-teen market, which included surfing and hot-rod/street-rod songs, and now perhaps, the high school song. In the opposite direction was unspoiled territory where Brian could choose to write music that came directly from his heart and life experience, with no regard for sales. Somewhere in the middle was a narrow path along which he (and by extension, the Beach Boys) could make relatable, commercial music that still meant something to him as a person. “In My Room” was that kind of song, and so was “Surfer Girl,” a romantic love ballad that—as Jim Miller of Rolling Stone once noted—was “tied to surfing in name only.”

Every artist who wants to make a dime with his work has to deal with commercial reality, but for Brian, the divide between business and creativity would become a vast chasm, resulting in lovely “art” songs on one hand and on the other, second-rate “commerce” songs that often rang hollow. 

Over the long run, it would be impossible for all these songs to comfortably coexist under one banner, but for a brief time in the mid-‘60s, Brian would figure out a very elegant method through which to handle the art-vs.-commerce issue. He would do this not just because he wanted to, but because he had no choice. For as the year 1963 came to a close, the life that Brian lived as a young American working in the L.A. rock ‘n’ roll business was on the precipice of change.

On November 22, 1963, the President of the United States was murdered and a couple of days later Americans watched as the prime suspect was gunned down (or if you prefer, “whacked”) on live television. This was a shared, collective trauma, which is why Americans remember it and where they were when it happened. As with the countless atrocities and obscenities that are now recorded for daily public absorption on our “devices,” we didn’t really understand what we were looking at. California historian Kevin Starr writes that the “the assumptions of the 1950s” had been firmly in place up until the assassination, but were now coming dislodged; that the decade of upheaval now recalled as “The Sixties” didn’t really begin until after the Kennedy assassination.

This view is commonly accepted by those that lived through the era, and the Beach Boys’ music of ’61-’63 correlates with it. Stylistically, the Boys’ early songs are rooted in 1950s sounds like doo-wop, rhythm & blues, the Four Freshmen vocal blend and Chuck Berry’s rock ‘n’ roll. Thematically, they were perhaps more contemporary as surfing and car songs were fads of 1962 and ’63. Conceptually, “In My Room” was modern and forward-looking, while “Be True to Your School” could not have succeeded commercially without a prevalent “Fifties” culture.

The Beach Boys were on top in 1963. Surfing was cool, car songs were cool, and the Beach Boys had seamlessly merged different musical styles within a fresh West Coast packaging. As a rock ‘n’ roll group, they were unchallenged in America. As a male vocal group, they were rivaled only by New Jersey’s Four Seasons, a lineup of much older guys with a good in-house writing team. However, the Four Seasons’ Italian-American street-corner/social club vibe was even more of a ‘50s throwback. While still respecting the Four Seasons, the Beach Boys could happily view them as competitors.

Meanwhile, the real threat to the Beach Boys’ preeminence was on its way from points farther east than New Jersey. During 1963 the Beatles had been releasing hits in the UK, but only by the end of the year was their American label, Capitol, ready and willing to promote them in the United States.

1964 would prove to be one hell of a year for the Beach Boys and Brian Wilson especially. Whatever path Brian was going to take, one thing was expected to remain constant: Murry Wilson would be right there with him indefinitely, as both father and manager. Murry was going to lead Brian, or more likely, follow closely on his heels. He could instruct or obstruct him, or do both at once. He could compete with Brian, “protect” him, and above all, continue to be the same kind of man he had always been.

1964 would start with yet another conflict between father and son—the point of dispute this time being the Beach Boys’ new single. The year would end with Brian wobbling at the brink of psychological collapse.

A History of Brian Wilson turns toward the critical year of 1964 in Part 16.

Go back to Part 14

Selected References for Part 15

“Brian Wilson: 1974 Interview (The Beach Boys).” At YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEeqwNl17YM (last accessed September 13, 2023)

Leaf, David. The Beach Boys and the California Myth. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978.

Love, Mike, with James S. Hirsch. Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy. New York: Penguin/Blue Rider, 2016.

Marcus, Greil. “The Beatles.” In Anthony DeCurtis, James Henke and Holly George-Warren, eds. The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll. New York: Random House, 1992.

Pewter, Jim. “Brian Wilson Tells Jim Pewter All About the Early Days!” Bomp! Winter, 1976-77.

Riley, Tim. Lennon: The Man, The Myth, The Music—The Definitive Life. New York: Hyperion, 2011.

Simon, Alex. “Brian Wilson: Good Vibrations.” Venice, October 2002.

Starr, Kevin. Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance 1950-1963. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Whitmer, Peter O., with Bruce VanWyngarden. Aquarius Revisited: Seven Who Created the Sixties Counterculture That Changed America. New York: Citadel Press, 1991.

On the Pet Sounds album of 1966, Brian Wilson would sing, “I keep looking for a place to fit in / where I can speak my mind.” If such a place ever existed for Brian—in the concrete, physical world— it was the professional recording studio. Pet Sounds itself would be evidence of that.

And looking back retrospectively, it appears that in 1963, three full years prior to the recording of Pet Sounds (and “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times”), Brian was gravitating toward that place, and away from life as a touring musician performing live across the country. For Brian, it was a matter of both personal well-being and creative necessity.

By mid-1963, as the Beach Boys were riding the first wave of nationwide success, circumstances had evolved to benefit Brian in two ways. First, Brian had (unconsciously, or instinctively) devised a sly way to exempt himself from touring with the Beach Boys: just don’t tell anybody that you’re not going to show up for duty and instead invite Al Jardine back into the band to perform in your place. Second, Brian was winning greater autonomy in the studio as the Beach Boys’ record producer.

Although Brian’s father Murry Wilson strongly objected to Brian’s reluctance to tour, he was willing to help liberate Brian from Capitol’s studio oversight. (Murry would never be so willing to do the same with respect to his own control over Brian.) These developments were discussed in the preceding entry of A History of Brian Wilson.

By the end of summer 1963, the constant intra-group turbulence manifested itself in a dispute between Murry Wilson and young rhythm guitarist David Marks. By October or so, Marks was out of the band, and Brian was forced back out onto the road. For Brian, this was an unwelcome turn, but the good news for him at this time was that Capitol Records was willing to allow him, at age 21, to be sole producer of the Beach Boys’ records. The band’s second album of 1963, Surfer Girl, had been the first to bear the credit, “produced by Brian Wilson.”

Part 14:

The Beach Boys’ third album of 1963 would be called Little Deuce Coupe. Sessions had already begun before the previous album, Surfer Girl, was released, and Capitol Records would quickly put out Little Deuce Coupe less than a month after Surfer Girl. The fact that these two albums would appear within about three weeks of each other shows that Capitol had no qualms about saturating the market with Beach Boys “product.” The fear was what would happen if the label didn’t do that.

The Beach Boys had proven to be a good investment for Capitol, but it could only be in the short-term. Anyone could see that no matter how talented, this was a fad group, and as such, its lifespan would be short. The label’s natural strategy was to pump-and-dump, extracting maximum revenue before the kids got sick of the Beach Boys and either grew up or moved on to something else. The group had successfully sold itself as “Beach Boys”—boys from the beach—and had lived up to the name. Surfer Girl had been their best-sounding collection of songs to date, and it relied heavily on the beach hook. Most of the album’s tracks evoked beach culture, with five of them using the word “surf” in the very title.

In these days, Brian would have openly admitted that the Beach Boys made “teenage music.” He never had a problem with that, and was probably even proud of it; a few years later he would exalt the idea of youth music with his description of Smile as a “teenage symphony to God.” What Brian in 1963 may have been less willing to admit was that he was making fad music. However, notwithstanding the Beach Boys’ talent and the quality of the records, he basically was. And that was perfectly okay, at the time. It was even to be expected.

As of 1963, the Beach Boys-Capitol team was purposefully working according to the fad model, and doing so quite shrewdly: even before reaching the heights of the surf craze with “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” the Beach Boys had already brought lyricist and car-aficionado Roger Christian into the organization for the express purpose of writing car-themed songs with Brian. In other words, as of early 1963, Brian, Murry, the Beach Boys and Capitol were aligned under a general plan of action: a bunch of beach songs, the sameness of which to be mitigated by the occasional car song. Or, alternatively, the plan was more bifurcated: a barrage of beach-and-surf tunes to be followed by a barrage of car songs, in effect replacing one fad with another. Within the fad-model of songwriting and record-making, this is what constituted creativity, flexibility, and variety.

So it might not have been only Capitol’s corporate shortsightedness that prompted the release of two Beach Boys albums within one month. Maybe it could have been justified as a rational strategy for the marketing of a fad group like the Beach Boys—whose success was seen as attributable not just to the talent of the members, but the trends and crazes they sang about. The general idea: before the kids in the audience can take even a moment to realize that the Boys had been hawking the same theme over and over (and on Surfer Girl, running it into the ground), strike while the iron is hot, hitting ‘em with a bunch of fun records about cars. Maybe. In any case, it seems that sound business judgment dictated that it was time for the Beach Boys to get off the beach and into the auto-shop, as others were doing, even surf guitar king Dick Dale.

Going back to “Rocket 88” and the beginnings of rock ‘n’ roll itself, the car-song (often written to capitalize on built-in sexual metaphors) has always been a natural fit for the music. Any number of well-known and respected popular artists—Chuck Berry, Bruce Springsteen, NRBQ, Joni Mitchell, Prince, Van Halen, Ry Cooder, Harry Nilsson, Neil Young and the Beatles—have done fine songs that trade in car & driving imagery. But only the Beach Boys did so many of them in so compacted a period, for during the early Beach Boys peak of 1962-63, car songs were indeed an outright fad. And again, the Beach Boys were then a fad group—seemingly well-positioned to both catalyze new teen fads and then capitalize on them with a batch of tunes written on the theme in a very literal manner.

With Gary Usher, Brian had already written “409”—not the best Beach Boys car song, but maybe the purest, or most honest. Brian also wrote a couple of car songs with Mike Love, and maintained a partnership with Roger Christian for songs—like the hit “Little Deuce Coupe”—that rolled off the assembly line outfitted with gearhead lingo. The boundaries of the Brian-Roger collaboration were more clearly delineated than those with Usher, and Christian seems to have gotten along well in the Beach Boys organization; he later remembered his song publisher Murry Wilson as “one of the finest men I’ve ever known.”

Over a period of maybe no more than six months, the Beach Boys would do as many as 15 car-themed tunes, including their widely-known Christmas variation, “Little Saint Nick.” 

This was the practical, business-driven model upon which the Beach Boys established their popularity. It would prove to be a problem for Brian Wilson, particularly between 1964 and 1967 when he would try, in fits and starts, to steer the Beach Boys toward a musical stance that could be taken more seriously. 1963, however, was a time during which fad songs still made sense. Indeed, the entire genre of rock ‘n’ roll itself could then be reasonably heard as a transient youth-fad (not unlike the way people would view rap/hip-hop in the mid-1980s). It’s worth noting further that drag racing, cruising, dry-lake speed trials and street-rod customization were, like surfing, very real aspects of Southern California boom-culture. As with the surfing songs, this inherently restrictive—and yes, financially motivated—subject matter sounded genuine when expressed through the voices of Southern California’s Beach Boys. In these days Brian and the Beach Boys had both the opportunity and ability to make commercial pragmatism sound utterly pure.

The Little Deuce Coupe album featured a bunch of car songs, some of which are fine examples of how musically inventive Brian’s music had become and how good the Beach Boys sounded on record in the fall of 1963. Still, most of these songs would never have the staying power of an “In My Room.” Any song that adhered to an obviously fad-driven car concept would have difficulty living and breathing for listeners of later years.

Yet nobody really cared about that. A normal, sensible person was unlikely to have given a thought to whether future listeners of say, 1966 or 1969 (let alone 2025) would be able to relate to songs like “Little Deuce Coupe” or “Custom Machine.” Brian Wilson took his music seriously, but that didn’t mean that it was, by default, serious music. It wasn’t.

Today, about 60 years onward, the Beach Boys’ music is well-respected; the band’s best records are commonly recognized as among the best ever made, their vocal harmony understood to be inimitable. In his later years, Brian Wilson himself received medals, was inducted into various Halls of Fame, and was name-checked with admiration by symphony conductors. People now consider him to have been a genius. In short, a time would eventually arrive when Beach Boys music could be a matter of serious inquiry, mainly because Brian Wilson himself would be seen to have done enduring work—some of it indeed very serious—worthy of study and historical recognition.

This time had most certainly not yet arrived in the 1960s, especially during the surf and car song-era of 1963. While the Beach Boys were then recognized as leaders in their class, the class itself was fairly circumscribed.

It wasn’t music, but success in the music business—the selling of records—that was serious. As it ever was or would be, the game was to “move units,” and no matter how well-made the recordings were, they were disposable. Capitol Records handled the Beach Boys not as art or even craft but a volume business; whatever the creative process might have entailed was irrelevant. The idea that someone like Brian Wilson would want to express something on a pop record—a feeling, an opinion, an insight—was scarcely conceivable. That was appropriate for someone like the serious young folk musician Bob Dylan out in New York, or better yet, Peter, Paul and Mary, who could take Dylan’s message on “Blowin’ in the Wind” and get it on the hit parade at Billboard No. 2.1

For their part, Brian and the Beach Boys wanted their stuff to sound better than the competition, but they had all entered the business with the goal of chart success. They were naïve in many ways but did seem to know from the start that this was indeed a business (which therefore did not differ entirely from their fathers’ trade in sheet metal, lathes, and drill presses). Brian had written as a musically creative businessman since the very beginning, and had struck out when he strayed from the beach or blacktop. The trick then, was simple to describe, but hard to achieve: stay ahead of the curve with next fad that the kids were going to be into, and then do the best work possible against that constraint.

Equipped with talent and good timing, the Beach Boys were able to do this in 1962 and 1963. They made the best surfing and car songs of the era. Yet for Brian, things were going to become more complicated than the already-challenging game of reading trends and scoring hit singles.

For more, see Part 15 of A History of Brian Wilson

Return to preceding chapter (Part 13)

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Selected References for Part 14

Hoskyns, Barney. Waiting for the Sun: Strange Days, Weird Scenes and the Sound of Los Angeles. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996.

Leaf, David. The Beach Boys and the California Myth. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978.

Selvin, Joel. Hollywood Eden: Electric Guitars, Fast Cars, and the Myth of the California Paradise. Toronto: House of Anansi, 2021.

As of mid or late spring, 1963, the Beach Boys were just beginning to enjoy the first flush of commercial (and cultural) success at the national level. As the band set out from California for a tour of the U.S.A., Brian elected to stay at home, off the road. The previous entry of A History of Brian Wilson, Part 12, looked at the method through which Brian managed to get away with this: by simply not showing up at the airport and, without consulting his father or the other Beach Boys, inviting Al Jardine to rejoin the group as his replacement on tour. Upon learning of Brian’s decision (belatedly), manager Murry Wilson was angry. But, as Mike Love recalled in his 2016 autobiography, “there was nothing Murry could do about it.”

Or so it seemed at that particular moment. As discussed below, within months, Brian would find himself pressed back into service as a touring Beach Boy.

Part 13:

By taking himself off the road in the spring of 1963, Brian was already expressing a reality that only became widely recognized much later: he was never suited to be a live performer or touring pop star—not even in ‘63, when he was young, strong, drug-free, and by all accounts not yet afflicted by serious mental illness symptoms such as major depression or auditory-verbal hallucinations.

Even at 21 or 22 years old, Brian seems to have already known that he was more suited to be a performer only in the studio, as a singer and record-maker—who was then only just beginning to habituate himself to his preferred working environment.

In 1963, Brian would never have removed his lead and harmony vocals from the Beach Boys’ recorded music, yet he was more than willing to do just that with respect to their live performances. Obviously, live shows just didn’t matter that much to Brian—at least musically. For him, record production was more important, with the craft of songwriting, arranging, and production taking priority over the commerce of entertainment and live performance of the records. Was Brian right or wrong? Subsequent Beach Boys history would help answer the question.

In any event, Brian didn’t want to come off the road just so he could take it easy. It was rather that he wanted to reallocate his workload—less time on the road meant more time to conceive and make music. In other words, Brian was reducing his touring workload at the very same time he wanted to assume more responsibility and control back home in the studio. So, right around the time he improved his personal situation by avoiding the touring grind (approximately the middle of 1963), he was also looking to make corresponding gains with respect to the Beach Boys’ studio-recording setup.

Since the Beach Boys recorded for Capitol Records, the natural expectation was that the group would record in Capitol’s own studios, under the oversight of a Capitol producer, who would receive the production credit on the label and album jacket. This was standard business practice. The artist—particularly a rock ‘n’ roll (or “surf”) artist who recorded for the kids’ market—did not produce the records. But while the Capitol studios were well-suited to record the likes of Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra and Nelson Riddle, or the Hollywood String Quartet, they were less than optimal for what Brian had mind for Beach Boys records. Some of the tracks recorded at the beginning of the year for the Surfin’ U.S.A. album had already been recorded at an outside studio—notably “Surfin’ U.S.A.” and “Shut Down”—and that summer, as the Beach Boys prepared to record their next album, it was time to leverage the recent success and push for more control over sound and production.

Murry Wilson did the pushing. He pressed the Capitol executives for more creative freedom and wore them down. Let us record how we want, and we’ll give the label more hits was the thrust of Murry’s pitch. Capitol agreed to give the Beach Boys control over the production of the records, which would now be made at the studios of Brian’s choosing, without Capitol’s interference. For the next four years, Brian Wilson would also be the sole credited producer on Beach Boys recordings.

The first of these, titled Surfer Girl (the Beach Boys’ third album), was a step forward in terms of sound, production, and studio-songcraft. Musically, the group turned away from the surf-rock sound of the previous album, while the song titles and lyrical themes remained surf-heavy. Mike Love turned in another unique SoCal-surfer vocal on “Catch a Wave,” and there were a couple of new “car songs” to follow “409” and “Shut Down” from the first and second albums. There was a set of fine ballads, including “Surfer Girl,” whose composition dated back more than one year earlier.

“In My Room,” a holdover from Brian’s songwriting partnership with Gary Usher, also made its debut. This song showcased the Beach Boys’ peerless harmony singing while also marking the first time Brian—unwittingly, or unconsciously in this case—used the Boys’ vocal harmonies as a tool to express his inner self. The main single from the album, “Surfer Girl”/”Little Deuce Coupe,” was successful on both sides. Professional independence from label oversight was paying off creatively and commercially. 

By supporting Brian’s exemption from Capitol’s studio control, Murry broke with tradition because here, he fought for Brian, not against him. Sentimentality tempts us to assume that Murry was displaying his good side and defending his son out of genuine fatherly protection (not to mention doing his job as manager). However, it was not that simple.

Up to this point, there had been three parties in the studio who influenced production: Brian Wilson, Murry Wilson, and Capitol’s staff producer. During sessions for the first Beach Boys album in 1962, there had even been a fourth party in the person of Gary Usher. However, Usher had been jettisoned (probably at some point during the run-up to the recording of the Surfin’ U.S.A. album), and the three remaining players didn’t necessarily agree on how best to produce a good, commercially successful Beach Boys recording.

Brian and his father shared a frustration with Capitol’s meddling, but for different reasons. Brian wanted to produce the Beach Boys’ music the way he heard it in his head, without the interference of a company man who was not invested creatively. For Murry, the problem was that Capitol threatened his ownership and control of Brian. Murry could not allow anybody—Capitol Records, Gary Usher, miscellaneous Hollywood players—to get between him and his most valued possession. Murry hadn’t even liked the fact that his own nephew, Mike Love, had innocently written a song for Brian to sing back at a family gathering in the early 1950s. (Murry quickly intercepted that little tune, rewrote it, and then instructed Brian to sing the Murryfied version.) Only Murry would ever tell Brian what to do.

This configuration of motives resulted in an implicit father-son alliance of mutual benefit, and it worked: Murry and Brian knocked Capitol Records out of the studio, with Murry assuming the role of loud, barking dog. Yet subsequent events would clarify that what was really happening here was a zero-sum contest of musical chairs. When the music finally stopped, there could only be one individual left in command of the Beach Boys’ recordings. That is, in command of their music. First Gary Usher, and now Capitol, was out of the running. It had come down to Brian and his father.

Of course, things were coming to a head between these two, as they had been for a long time. During the summer weeks in which the group recorded the Surfer Girl album, “Surf City,” the song that Brian had given to Jan & Dean, shot to No. 1 on the national singles chart. This was Brian’s first trip to the top, and he went there alone, as a writer, without the rest of the family. Moreover, he shared the honor with Jan Berry & Dean Torrence—a white, SoCal vocal duo with a clean-cut image who recorded for a competing label. Capitol wasn’t happy about this, and Murry was apoplectic for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that the lucrative publishing rights on the song had been assigned away from Murry’s Sea of Tunes.

Jan & Dean (especially Jan, the more musically creative of the duo) joined Gary Usher and Brian’s roommate Bob Norberg on Murry’s list of thieving outsiders. Murry would excoriate Brian for committing “an absolutely treacherous act” against the label, the financial welfare of the Wilson family, and “the combined integrity of The Beach Boys group itself.” Later, Brian would innocently defend his work with Jan Berry as an effort to merely build a reputation as a songwriter and create a “business foundation” in surf-themed songs.1 There is truth to this, as evidenced for example, by Brian’s business-driven work with The Honeys, through which he tried to pair the surf-pop concept with the East Coast girl-group model.

Still, Brian must have known that collaborating with a foreign competitor like Jan Berry was not going to play well at home. Maybe Brian simply decided that the benefits of allying with Jan & Dean outweighed the static he would receive from the man who at this point was his principal antagonist in the Beach Boys organization.

Or maybe it was something else. For Brian, Murry’s frustration may not have been just an unpleasant byproduct of the success of “Surf City,” but something like a cherry-on-top to be quietly savored. This was the opinion of Judy Bowles, Brian’s girlfriend of the ‘61-’62 era. As of the time of “Surf City” in the middle of 1963, Judy and Brian were drifting apart, though still remaining in contact. As quoted by Jim Murphy in his book Becoming the Beach Boys 1961-1963, Judy recalled that “[Brian] told me Murry was really mad at him for giving [‘Surf City’] away. Brian thought it was funny, kind of like a little dig at his dad.”

It took no more than a month for the field to tilt back in Murry’s favor. In August, the Beach Boys (without Brian) were playing shows in the northeast and Rust Belt. At the end of the month, Brian flew out to the Midwest to join the band for a road trip to New York City, where they were booked to play an important, high-profile show. Murry also flew out from Los Angeles; curiously enough, once Brian stopped touring, Murry too had been finding reasons to stay home. (A substitute road manager had been appointed.) While on the highway to New York, tempers flared between Murry and rhythm guitarist David Marks. Marks, who had recently turned 15 and was a bit of a wild kid, had become fed up with the touring grind, the hassles, and Murry Wilson’s strictures. As the story goes, he impulsively declared that he was quitting the Beach Boys.

Murry was waiting for this and pounced. As related by Marks and writer Jon Stebbins in the book The Lost Beach Boy, Murry quickly announced to the group, “remember this, boys. David quit, that’s it, he’s out of the band.” David also remembered that Brian soon pulled him aside and asked him to reconsider. However, David wanted to work in a group where he had more control, and, having known nothing but success with the Beach Boys since age 13, may not have appreciated what he was walking away from.

Even if he did think twice about leaving, the wheels of fate were already in motion. David, like others during this stage of the Beach Boys’ story, was merely a piece in a high-stakes father-son chess match. A few months earlier, Brian had secretly moved Al Jardine into a touring slot, thereby gaining for himself some distance from the road and Murry’s oversight. By impulsively declaring his resignation from the Beach Boys, David Marks offered Murry a perfect opportunity for counterplay.

Murry’s ongoing conflict with David had by now already spilled over into arguments with David’s parents over money; in the end David lingered for about another month, but by October 1963, he was out for good. Al Jardine, originally brought back on tour to replace Brian on bass, now became the permanent replacement for David on rhythm guitar. And the touring lineup was still one man down. Brian was forced to go back on the road, where he would remain for more than a year. It was a win for Murry.

Continue reading in Part 14 of A History of Brian Wilson

Return to Part 12 of the series

Share A Book of Brian

Selected References for Part 13

“The Artie Lange Show—Al Jardine (in-studio) Part 1.” February 4, 2014. At YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYjCU4-ub6E

Doe, Andrew. “Shows and Sessions 1961-2024.” Bellagio10452.com. At: www.bellagio10452.com/gigs.html

Leaf, David. Album Notes to The Beach Boys, The Beach Boys Today!/Summer Days (and Summer Nights!!). Capitol Records, 1990. (compact disc reissue)

Love, Mike, with James S. Hirsch. Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy. New York: Penguin/Blue Rider, 2016.

Murphy, James B. Becoming the Beach Boys 1961-1963. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2015.

Nolan, Tom. “The Beach Boys: Tales of Hawthorne" Rolling Stone, November 11, 1971. As republished in Kingsley Abbott, ed. Back to the Beach: A Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys Reader. London: Helter Skelter Publishing, 1999.

Rusten, Ian, and Jon Stebbins. The Beach Boys in Concert: The Ultimate History of America's Band on Tour and on Stage. Milwaukee: Backbeat Books, 2013.

Stebbins, Jon. The Lost Beach Boy. London: Virgin Books, 2007.

^__________. The Beach Boys FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About America’s Band. Milwaukee: Backbeat Books, 2011.

White, Timothy. The Nearest Faraway Place: Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys and the Southern California Experience. New York: Henry Holt, 1994.

Wilson, Brian, with Todd Gold. Wouldn't It Be Nice: My Own Story. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.

^__________, with Ben Greenman. I Am Brian Wilson. Boston: Da Capo Press, 2016.

Wilson, Murry. Letter to Brian Wilson. May 8, 1965. Collection of Hard Rock International/Hard Rock Memorabilia.

Looking back over a span of about 60 years, the Beach Boys are commonly understood to have reached their peak in the mid-1960s, during the era of “California Girls,” “Good Vibrations,” the Pet Sounds album, and the Smile sessions. That might be true in terms of record-making craft and, up to a point, singles-chart ranking. However, as an actual pop-cultural phenomenon, the Beach Boys arguably hit their peak a bit earlier, in 1963. The wave of “Beatlemania” in the U.S. in 1964 is well known; if there was ever an analogous period of “Beach Boy mania” for the Boys and their style of West Coast music, it occurred in ‘63.

As outlined previously in Part 11, early that year the Beach Boys scored a smash with “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” the song that kicked off a nationwide surfing and surf-music craze among America’s youth. 1963 was the year—the only year—in which the Beach Boys were virtually unrivaled on the national pop-music scene as a fun, fresh and innovative rock ‘n’ roll band (although they probably were not understood to be playing real “rock ‘n’ roll” as it was then defined, but rather a new and distinct derivation, “surf music”).

Here in Part 12, the focus turns to some of the internal, behind-the-scenes conflict for the Beach Boys during these heady days; the focus once again the relationship between Brian Wilson and his father Murry, the Beach Boys’ manager. Along with national success came a brand-new point of dispute between Brian and Murry: Brian’s ambivalence about being a pop star performing live on the concert stages of America.

With greater opportunity and success came more backstage tension between Brian and Murry. As it had been since the band’s formation (if not even earlier), the conflict centered on Murry’s efforts to control the Beach Boys as a group and Brian as a person. As father and band manager, Murry had various arenas in which to do his thing, one of which was the recording studio. Though Murry had failed to have the group record his songs, he could still try to influence how Beach Boys would sound on record.

As he did in other arenas, in the studio Murry made a lot of noise. Some of his ideas were bad, some might have been good, but even the good ones were unlikely to have been so outstanding as to justify his presence in the studio, where he was obstreperous and on occasion, physically confrontational. Brian, with his one functioning ear, was a more capable producer; although the Capitol Records staff producer got the credit on the Beach Boys’ first two albums, Brian was the de facto producer (or co-producer) on those records, and was already pushing for more independence from the label’s oversight. Brian also continued to work with other artists, including The Honeys, a three-girl singing group whose members included his future wife, Marilyn. The Honeys were conceived—by Brian, presumably—as a West Coast surfing variation on the East Coast girl-group sound of the early 1960s. Brian produced a snappy Honeys record called “Shoot the Curl” which was released on Capitol to little chart response. Around the same time, he began collaborating with the pop duo Jan & Dean on one of his partially-written songs that would eventually be released as “Surf City.”

The previous year, the Beach Boys’ live performances had been confined to modest Southern California locations, with some dates at the end of the year in other parts of the state. With “Surfin’ U.S.A.” ascending the singles chart, it was time to export the Southern California surf-pop concept to the rest of the country. At the end of April, the Beach Boys were booked for a tour of the Midwest. Murry was the band’s road manager and since the beginning had been keeping the boys on a short leash, directing their stage presentation, regulating and shaping the group’s publicity and deportment, and enforcing his moral code. (Murry levied fines for swearing and did his best to obstruct the Boys’ interaction with girls.) At some point before the group was to fly from Los Angeles to Chicago to begin the Midwest tour, Brian decided to drop out.

A number of reasons have been offered to explain Brian’s decision, including stage fright and anxiety. The major breakdown Brian would have at the end of the following year suggests that it was a matter of legitimate self-preservation. Another possible reason was that the noise at concerts strained his healthy ear. Also, Brian almost certainly never enjoyed being on stage anyway, and time would prove that he is not really a live, performing musician or dynamic, crowd-pleasing showman. Brian was inclined to instead do what he grew up doing, which was creating and recording music in a room somewhere, in the kind of secure environment that he would later refer to as “an atmosphere of calmness.” Brian may have also felt that his time was better spent back in L.A. writing for the Beach Boys or producing one of his independent projects, and that as musical leader/creator, it was his prerogative. But even if he felt so entitled, he knew that at least one person would object. Brian never told his manager, Murry Wilson, that he was staying home.

Instead, Brian told Al Jardine—last seen as a Beach Boy more than one year earlier, when he left the group shortly after the release of the local single, “Surfin’.” Brian now asked Al to rejoin the Beach Boys as a touring bass player and harmony vocalist. Al accepted the offer. But Al didn’t know that Brian had kept Murry in the dark, so when he suited up, he was stepping unaware into no-man’s-land. Murry was taken aback to suddenly see Al Jardine reporting for duty with the Beach Boys and of course, responded with hostility toward him. But it was really Brian, not Al, whom Murry was angry with. Murry denounced Brian for failing to fulfill his responsibilities, telling him he was obliged to appear on stage for the Beach Boys’ fans, who had paid good money for the records and concert tickets. Murry told Brian that since these good folks deserved the best performance possible from the very same fellas who were on the recordings, Brian was obligated to be out on stage.

If it’s hard to square Murry’s burst of altruism and fair dealing with his self-serving behavior of the past, present and future, it is because he in fact didn’t really care about providing the best value for Beach Boy fans. The nature of his relationship with Brian suggests that his primary motivation was twofold: first and most importantly, Murry needed to restrict Brian’s freedom, keeping him on the shortest leash possible. Second, Murry sought to appropriate Brian’s success—in this case, live performance for screaming kids—as his own. If Brian was not out on the concert stages of America (standing in his designated position at center stage) Murry could accomplish neither of these things.

To make matters worse for Murry, back home Brian was starting to interact more with outside players in the music business, the duplicitous Hollywood phonies that Murry loathed and envied. From Murry’s perspective, nothing good could result from Brian’s interaction with these outsiders. Murry couldn’t openly declare his true motivation (he may not have been entirely conscious of it), so he appealed to Brian’s better instincts toward third parties. But this time it wasn’t just the Wilson family that would suffer because of Brian’s alleged selfishness, but also the youth of America’s Midwest.

Brian didn’t fall for it, at least not entirely. He refused to go back on the road full-time but would still perform at selected shows over the next few months. The basic understanding, then, was that Brian would attend the shows that he was willing to attend, and miss those he wasn’t.

By taking himself off the road, Brian staked out a little more freedom and personal space within the Beach Boys organization. And he did so with a degree of subterfuge, for he not only contravened his father’s expectations but did so behind his back. Brian therefore accomplished a goal while avoiding a direct confrontation. Brian’s failure to be forthright about his intentions might fall short of the behavioral ideal for a soon-to-be 21-year-old American male. To ask why Brian went about things this way is to ask about his internal state of mind, and it is impossible for anyone except Brian to really know. However, it helps to remember that back in the 1940s and ‘50s, Brian and his brothers had no choice but to coexist with their father’s brutality. What Murry had offered them wasn’t discipline, security or love, but annihilation. The brothers developed as individuals sharing a common set of experiences: each of them would have needed to predict the violence (if possible), avoid it (if possible), brace himself for it, and above all, survive it. After that, each brother took his own path.

It is hard to imagine either Dennis or Carl Wilson trying to challenge his father’s orders by going behind his back the way Brian did. Carl was around 16 years old, a nice kid, dutiful, and it’s easy to picture him obeying Murry at this point. Dennis was confrontational, but openly and unambiguously—while being beaten as a youth he had tried to fight back, and by 1963 he had already exchanged blows with Murry in the presence of others.

Brian’s method of dealing with his father was subtle, cagey, and up to a point, effective: don’t make a lot of noise, absorb the abuse when it comes without breaking down, but if you spot an opportunity for a little forbidden freedom, seize it before your father can block you. Moreover, because you’ve been treated so abominably all your life, you are entitled to do things this way (and it may in fact be the only way to get things done). This type of parent-child interaction is detectable in the way the Beach Boys originally came together in 1961, behind Murry’s back. It is consistent with a certain pattern of “abused child behavior,” and should be recognizable to anybody who has experienced the type of twisted relationship that Murry and Brian shared—a relationship that Brian never consented to, but had simply been forced upon him. In the case of Brian’s decision to secretly come off the road in 1963, his evasion of Murry reflects his utter lack of faith in his father to do anything except obstruct, oppress, and destroy. There was no trust. 

Behavior that derives from the survival instinct does not lend itself to reflection and self-examination. Therefore, like his father, Brian was probably not fully cognizant of the choices he made, how he made them, and why. It was just how life operated and Brian knew nothing else. Avoidance had gotten him this far, and it worked again here, not only because Brian got the jump on Murry, but because Brian was gaining independence and control through passivity. That is, Brian got what he wanted by not doing something, instead of doing it.

Over the years, it had been easier for Murry to obstruct and thwart Brian when Brian was trying to do something, actively, that Murry didn’t want him to do. Murry could beat Brian with belts and boards, tie him to trees and so on. When Brian developed his partnership with Gary Usher, Murry could throw Gary out of the house or even shove him, literally. He could intercept Brian’s active plans to form a publishing partnership with Usher. If the boys wanted to hook up with chicks on the road, Murry could block that too, or at least try. But as the Beach Boys prepared for their first tour outside California, Brian was winning increased personal and creative freedom by not moving at all. All he had to do was stay put right where he was, in Los Angeles. Brian was wresting control from Murry simply by refraining from acting. The contentious issue wasn’t what Brian was doing, but what he wasn’t doing.

Continue reading in the next entry, Part 13 of A History of Brian Wilson

Return to preceding chapter (Part 11)

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Selected References for Part 12

Ford, Julian D. “Neurobiological and Developmental Research: Clinical Implications.” In Christine A. Courtois and Julian D. Ford, eds. Treating Complex Traumatic Stress Disorders: Scientific Foundations and Therapeutic Models. New York: The Guilford Press, 2009.

Love, Mike, with James S. Hirsch. Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy. New York: Penguin/Blue Rider, 2016.

Murphy, James B. Becoming the Beach Boys 1961-1963. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2015.

Rusten, Ian, and Jon Stebbins. The Beach Boys in Concert: The Ultimate History of America's Band on Tour and on Stage. Milwaukee: Backbeat Books, 2013.

Stebbins, Jon. The Lost Beach Boy. London: Virgin Books, 2007.

Wilson, Brian, with Ben Greenman. I Am Brian Wilson. Boston: Da Capo Press, 2016.

It is still 1962. Early in the year, the Beach Boys were hot (locally) with “Surfin’,” but that success was to fade fast. After meeting and befriending Gary Usher early in the year, Brian started a songwriting partnership with him that would soon yield a set of tunes that steered clear of the beach-and-surf concept that had not only worked for the Beach Boys on “Surfin’,” but was built into the group’s very name. (Brian wrote the sequel to “Surfin’,” “Surfin’ Safari,” with Mike Love, not Usher.)

At mid-year, the group secured a deal with Capitol Records in Hollywood. It was right around that time that Murry Wilson, who strongly opposed Brian’s friendship with Usher from the outset, managed to drive a wedge between them by blocking their plans to form a song-publishing company (as discussed previously in Part 9 of this series). Nevertheless, Brian continued to work with Usher on songs that were earmarked for the Beach Boys and others that were intended for some of Brian’s non-Beach Boys “indie” productions—none of which resulted in notable artistic or commercial success.

In 1962, Brian may have been dabbling in various side projects, and for various reasons, but the Beach Boys undoubtedly remained his most important endeavor. The Beach Boys were the most talented, they were the ones that Capitol had just signed, and it was time to make good records and sell them. As of the middle of ’62, the Boys were performing at high schools, college dorms and birthday parties. Capitol quickly released its first Beach Boys single, “Surfin’ Safari”/“409,” in June. It would steadily climb the charts over the next few months.

To follow up, the Boys went into the studio in August to record additional tracks for their next single and first complete album. The album would include several Brian Wilson-Gary Usher tunes and Usher would be present in the studio during the sessions. Murry Wilson was in there too, jostling with Brian and Capitol’s staff producer for control over the album’s sound. Murry objected to Usher’s presence in the studio and tried to have him removed; it got to the point where, to avoid conflict, Usher had to be warned when Murry was arriving. According to Brian’s 1991 autobiography, Murry got physical during these sessions, shoving Usher to the ground. (The book explains that in his effort to remove Usher, Murry pushed him, causing him to lose balance and then fall.) 

At this point in time, the game in the pop record business was getting hit 45-rpm singles high up on the charts. If an act was to go so far as to put out an entire album, it would be something of an afterthought—the album would be centered on the single, and filled out with tracks that were inferior to it in either musical quality or commercial appeal. The Beach Boys’ debut single for Capitol, “Surfin’ Safari,” performed well on the national charts and reached No. 1 on L.A. radio. The album, Surfin’ Safari, would do okay. The real commercial setback was the follow-up to the “Surfin’ Safari” single. It featured a Brian Wilson-Gary Usher tune on each side. “Ten Little Indians”/“County Fair” was not very good. Perhaps it was too cloying even for the kids of 1962, not to mention a little confusing coming from a new group called “The Beach Boys” who had just hit with a surfing song. It only reached No. 49 on the singles chart, a disappointment to all concerned.

Had a Wilson-Usher song reached the Top 10, who knows what would have occurred. Perhaps Gary would have stayed on longer, because there’s no substitute for (commercial) success—money talks. The co-writer of a failed single walks, however, and by now Gary had so many strikes against him that it was natural that he fade from the Beach Boys scene.

In the end, only a handful of released Beach Boys songs were co-written by Gary Usher, with more than half of them appearing on the group’s first album in 1962. Four more would appear on record in 1963 and ’64, and among those, it is likely (if not certain) that three were written during the initial collaboration with Brian in ‘62. So, as of the end of 1962, when the decades-long Beach Boys saga had scarcely begun, Brian Wilson was effectively finished with Gary Usher as a musical collaborator. If Usher therefore appears to be a minor figure in the story of the Beach Boys, he remains significant because he was the prototypical outsider to the Beach Boys family business.

There are quite a few well-known rock ‘n’ roll groups that included two brothers, but three is rare, and rarer still is a situation in which a cousin and a father-manager are thrown into it. The Beach Boys were a family, and thought of themselves that way. What they couldn’t recognize, however, was that they were a family afflicted by a tradition—going back who knows how many generations—of violent physical and psychological exploitation of its children. Three such children, Brian, Dennis and Carl Wilson, formed the spine of the group. Their deranged abuser from home had trailed after them into show business and was now their manager. One of the boys, the one who had the musical vision, was subtly attempting to establish a little freedom and independence for himself right from the beginning. 

This arrangement was inherently fragile. For someone like Murry Wilson, a man who needed to preserve the status quo in the family-business, there was no choice but to be wary of the alien—especially a go-getter like Gary Usher who didn’t know his place. Usher’s experience with the Beach Boys was the first instance of what would become a recurring pattern. Over the years, other outside collaborators would fall in and out of Brian Wilson’s orbit, each of them reacting differently to the situation. Some would be able to work within the boundaries. At least one would throw up his hands and walk away, and yet another—a lunatic—would catalyze an ugly family battle in the courts. Brian would have to respond also, and it was especially complicated for him because he had interests on both sides of the line. His life, career, and mental state was ground-zero for this conflict. 

Brian always had to choose his battles and in the early days, the pragmatic course of action was to quietly (and perhaps, in a sense, passively) disassociate from Gary Usher. Murry was rabid and wasn’t going to relent. He had conditioned Brian to fear him and had the concepts of family, honor, morality, mother-love, and guilt in his arsenal. The Usher co-write “Ten Little Indians” flopped (deservedly), and Brian and the Beach Boys had yet to earn a more secure foothold in the business.

Plus, Usher’s contributions were fungible. Brian could, and eventually would, find someone else to write lyrics for a song like “In My Room,” but who else could sing the parts? Only Carl, Dennis, and Mike (along with, in this case, Mike’s sister in playing a glissando on the harp) could create the unique family sound that would appear on the record that would eventually be released in 1963.

The stakes would increase for Brian as he began to mature and feel the pull to express himself individually. Perhaps the ideal arrangement would allow room for the Beach Boys to stay together and succeed, while permitting Brian a degree of creative independence. The group would try this, but the family/Beach Boys/Brian/outsiders configuration was too unwieldy. It would evolve to the point where it became a major factor contributing to the permanent rupture of the Brian Wilson-version of the Beach Boys.

That break would occur gradually, between the years 1964 and 1967. As of the beginning of 1963, the Brian-era Beach Boys was in its ascendancy. Murry’s issues with Usher would soon recede into the past, and Brian had by now learned something about what kinds of songs worked for the Beach Boys, and what kind didn’t.

Early in 1963 the group recorded songs for the next single. “Shut Down,” a song about a drag race, was the first recorded collaboration between Brian and lyricist Roger Christian, whom he had met the previous year. “Surfin’ U.S.A.” was straight-ahead rock ‘n’ roll, its music pinched from the Chuck Berry songbook. “Surfin’ U.S.A.” is not so much a cover of Chuck’s “Sweet Little Sixteen,” as Brian Wilson’s rearrangement of it. (In today’s terminology, Brian “reimagined” “Sweet Little Sixteen.”) At the time, it was more like theft, since Chuck wasn’t initially credited as writer. The basic structure of the song was the same as “Sweet Little Sixteen,” and the lyrical device of reeling off different geographical locations came from that and some other earlier hits.

With so much lifted from Chuck Berry, “Surfin’ U.S.A.” had no business being worthwhile, but it remains a great Beach Boys signature song of the early days. It was clever in the way it combined older concepts with the surfing trend, the way the guitars sounded, and most of all, the voices. The use of Four Freshmen-derived backing vocals in a rock ‘n’ roll song made the music sound new, and Mike Love’s lead vocal was something that may very well have been unheard of in rock or pop at the time. Mike didn’t sound like he was from the South, a New York street corner, or Texas; he sounded exactly like what he was: a young, white, Southern California native circa 1963. Mike’s vocal was exactly what the song called for, particularly because the lyrics name-checked turf in Los Angeles, Orange, and San Diego counties that had been (or would become) the stomping grounds of the Beach Boys, their friends and families. Even though the music was cribbed and the Beach Boys (save Dennis) didn’t surf, the record managed to convey realness. Listeners could believe it.  

With “Shut Down” on the B-side, the “Surfin’ U.S.A.” single was released in March. It became a smash; the song that launched the Beach Boys as national rock ‘n’ roll stars. In the words of California historian Kevin Starr, the Boys’ initial success would inaugurate “one of the most important mythic brandings of Southern California since the creation of the orange crate label.” More to the point, that brand would be burned into the hides of the group members themselves. The individual personas within the group and the accomplishments of its more creative members would be subordinate to a wider context—outside of music—that encompassed the ocean, sunshine, surfing, optimism and youth.

The Beach Boys’ music was always going to have a hard time standing on its own, as something apart from an idealized, post-WWII conception of “Southern California” which was not unlike that which had lured the great wave of migrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Neither the Beach Boys nor Brian Wilson created the “California Myth,” which, as of the time of “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” had existed in various forms for at least 100 years. But Brian and the Beach Boys had stumbled into a situation in which they could re-energize, or repackage the myth for a new postwar era in which there was relative economic prosperity, a new rock ‘n’ roll sound, the 45-rpm single, and a nascent youth culture made possible by the Baby Boom.

The pop scene of early 1963 offered a window of opportunity for the Beach Boys. The first-generation rock ‘n’ rollers from the 1950s seem to have fallen out of commercial favor (or they were dead, or locked up in prison, or being put out to pasture in bad movies), and though the Four Seasons and the Motown and Phil Spector groups were out there, none of those really seemed like a rock ‘n’ roll band.

Rock ‘n’ roll was in fact moribund at the time, but the Beach Boys were now bringing it back.1 The young group was self-contained as writers, musicians and singers and at this point were guitar-oriented in their instrumental sound. Beach Boys guitarists Carl Wilson and David Marks were very young, but that’s one reason why they were comfortable with the rock ‘n’ roll guitar styles of the time; rock ‘n’ roll was then a young kid’s form. (Carl and David had taken lessons from a local guitarist who was himself a teenager.) On the Beach Boys’ second album, Surfin’ U.S.A., Carl and David played lead and rhythm in the surf-rock style that was then enjoying peak popularity as an exciting new way to play rock ‘n’ roll. Surf was rougher and tougher than the Beach Boy sound, but also almost exclusively instrumental. This meant the Beach Boys could eclipse the surfers’ appeal because they had songs, with words—and the vocal firepower to put them over with listeners.

The Surfin’ U.S.A. album had the Beach Boys holding their own on the requisite surf instrumentals while also serving up vocal ballads and rock ‘n’ roll. The stage was set for the Boys to set the pace as a cool, trend-setting band.  

Keep reading in Part 12

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Selected References for Part 11

Crowley, Kent. Surf Beat: Rock ‘N’ Roll’s Forgotten Revolution. New York: Backbeat Books, 2011.

Gaines, Steven. Heroes and Villains: The True Story of the Beach Boys. New York: Signet/New American Library, 1986.

Rusten, Ian, and Jon Stebbins. The Beach Boys in Concert: The Ultimate History of America's Band on Tour and on Stage. Milwaukee: Backbeat Books, 2013.

Doe, Andrew G. “Shows and Sessions 1961-2024.” Bellagio10452.com. At: www.bellagio10452.com/gigs.html

Starr, Kevin. Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance 1950-1963. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Stebbins, Jon. The Real Beach Boy: Dennis Wilson. Toronto: ECW Press, 2000.

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Recent posts have revisited the problems that arose once Brian Wilson commenced his songwriting partnership with Gary Usher in 1962. The preceding post recounted how Brian’s father, Beach Boys manager Murry Wilson, blocked and effectively usurped Brian’s plans to form a music publishing entity with Usher. According to Brian’s 1991 autobiography, it seems that Usher’s proposed solution to the Murry problem was for Brian to just kick Murry’s ass. But things may have been more complicated on Brian’s side of it.

Part 9 left off on the issue of costs and benefits: what did Brian have to gain by defying his father, and what did he have to lose?

Consistent with his tyrannical nature, Murry had always portrayed himself as Brian’s selfless protector and defender. Everything Murry ever did to Brian—even the most barbaric abuse—was justified as being for Brian’s benefit. Which in turn meant that Murry was a giver, entitled to fair recompense for his actions.

In the mid-1970s, Brian recalled how his father “did gory things to make me feel sorry for him.” Forcing Brian in childhood to stare into his father’s hollowed-out eye socket was precisely that—just one of the ways through which Murry ensured that Brian knew how much he had sacrificed; how much he had suffered. If Brian kept his own publishing and continued to work with Gary Usher, he would appear to be morally compromised—a successful, coddled young man who takes from his poor, one-eyed Gepetto-like father without giving back. (Murry can be heard calling Brian an “ingrate” on a studio session tape from 1965.)

Layered underneath that was the welfare of the entire Wilson family. Murry was shrewd enough not to frame the matter as a simple son-vs.-father conflict. That would have been too risky for him. Working from the reasonable assumption that the Wilson family prospects would decline without Brian’s contributions, Murry told Brian that his collaboration with Usher would break up or otherwise injure the family. Whether this is true or not is debatable. But now the ante was increased, with Murry pulling the welfare of brothers Dennis and Carl into the picture. And by betraying and hurting his father and brothers, wouldn’t Brian also be doing the same to the woman who was his father’s wife and the mother of his brothers? How can Brian not have understood—or at least felt—what was at stake here.   

Brian’s dealings with his father always amounted to a battle for mastery and control over Brian’s very self. Even during childhood, Brian pushed back in some way. He had resisted—not overtly like Dennis, but more subtly, through his stubborn refusal to break under the strain of chronic child abuse. Brian had to have been a tough, obstinate little kid. If he had crumbled and paid the full obeisance his father demanded, the madman would not have had to commit his atrocities in the first place. (And if Brian had been the sort of person to fully bend the knee to someone like Murry Wilson, he would never have achieved what he did in music.)

The result was a situation in which Murry was unable to break Brian’s will, but could nevertheless bend—or beat—him into a certain shape. What was occurring in 1962 between Murry, Brian, and Gary Usher was the adult version of what had been going on between Brian and Murry since the beginning of Brian’s life: Brian expresses some degree of independence and maturity, and Murry hammers him back down, dictating the terms under which Brian was allowed to grow.

Of course, with Brian now physically a man, the hammering would have to be psychological. Brian would remain sufficiently free to write and create for the Beach Boys, but if Murry continued to have his way, there would always be restrictions on whom Brian could collaborate with, and therefore a limit on the kinds of songs that were acceptable.

Meanwhile, Gary Usher seems to have been finding (or stumbling into) new opportunities to poke the Wilson bear, this time not just with respect to Brian, but Dennis Wilson too.

Dennis’s relationship with his father had been evolving along a different trajectory, according to its own distinct characteristics. There’s scant evidence that Murry ever really demanded or expected anything from Dennis—except at most, a kind of dumb obedience (which Dennis did not give him) and willingness to get beaten (which he did). Nor is there any indication that Dennis ever exhibited the kind of talent and promise in childhood that drew Murry’s brand of jealous, suffocating attention. But Dennis had always been a convenient receptacle for Murry’s misdirected hate—a dog to roam the neighborhood and return home periodically to be fed and kicked. In an abusive family, it is not uncommon that one kid is implicitly singled out as the “bad child” or family scapegoat. It need not be a middle child, but in the Wilson home, it was indeed Dennis who was assigned this role, and he dutifully played the part.

In the middle of 1962, the unruly 17-year-old Dennis messed up again in some way, and Murry kicked him out of the house. Dennis had nowhere to go, and apparently spent some nights sleeping in a friend’s car. Eventually Gary Usher intervened and allowed Dennis to crash at his apartment. This enraged Murry. Of course Murry would come to view Usher as “an evil influence” because now Gary was interfering in not one, but two of Murry’s proprietary relationships. First, Usher had threatened Murry’s campaign to control, and eventually merge with and then subsume Brian. Now he was messing with Murry’s treatment of Dennis like trash to be expelled from the family home and left at the curb. (Or burned, as trash sometimes is.)

No matter what crimes Murry might persecute Brian for, he would never, ever, have considered throwing Brian out of the house, because Brian was never supposed to leave. If Brian was ever going to get out of there, it would have to occur of his own volition. Brian did leave right around this time, moving into an apartment with a friend. It was a baby step—the apartment was only a couple of miles away from the Wilson home—but the importance of this act of separation in Brian’s life cannot be overstated. Brian’s 1991 autobiography says that as he pulled his car out on the day of the move, Murry stood in the driveway “waving and crying.” It is entirely believable that Murry would react this way.

Brian was now embarking on period of change and growth. Gary Usher had introduced him to Roger Christian, an older man and radio disk jockey who was immersed in the local car culture, a scene that encompassed restoration, customized design and engine mechanics, and drag racing. Brian would begin to write with Christian, their songs to first appear on records the following year. (An alternate, not-inconsistent telling is that Murry contacted Roger Christian and instructed Brian to write with him in order to drive a wedge between Brian and Gary.) And right around the time he moved out of his parents’ house, Brian met—again via Usher—Marilyn Rovell, a young girl who would become his steady and whom he would eventually marry.

Marilyn lived at home with her parents up in L.A.’s Fairfax district, a Hollywood-adjacent neighborhood. The Rovell household was sort of a reverse image of the Wilsons’: three sisters living with a mother and father who were humane people. The Rovells were presumably close-knit like the Wilsons, and presumably had conflicts with one another, but there were no force-feedings or other baroque, sadistic punishments meted out. At the time he met Marilyn, Brian was involved with another teenage girl named Judy, but he gravitated toward Marilyn and her family and started hanging out at their house. Jim Murphy tracked down Judy while researching his book Becoming the Beach Boys. Recalling Brian’s attachment to the Rovell family, she told Murphy, “One day he came to me and said, ‘All I wanted was a family.’ That was the reason he went there. They welcomed him with open arms.”

Brian would eventually move in at the Rovell house, but for now had his new apartment, which he shared with a friend named Bob Norberg. Norberg and his girlfriend had their own fledgling pop duo called “Bob & Sheri.” Murry was of course threatened by Norberg too, but Brian started to collaborate with him, and they worked on a ballad written by Brian called “The Surfer Moon.” Brian also continued to work with Usher, partnering with him on a single they produced for an act they dubbed “Rachel & The Revolvers.”

These obscure singles didn’t go anywhere. And—who knows—Brian may not have really expected them to. However, as authors Jon Stebbins and Philip Lambert have recognized, their existence is evidence that Brian conceived of himself himself not just as a writer-performer, but a behind-the-scenes writer-producer. According to author Jim Murphy, Brian would eventually participate in 42 non-Beach Boys recording projects during this early stage of his and the Beach Boys’ career. 

Brian could have had a number of reasons for doing this: to develop a creative identity distinct from the Beach Boys; to stake out more personal space away from Murry; to test his skills in other contexts; to experiment with studio techniques which he could then put to better service with the superior vocal talent of the Beach Boys. Also, Brian was doing the very same thing he had done as a teenager at home in the music room—using available technology to assemble a piece of recorded pop music. Except that now he had more advanced hardware at his disposal. As he had done during his teen years, he was asserting some level of personal autonomy the best (and perhaps only) way he could.

Brian’s work with the Beach Boys did not provide this level of control and stability. These were the days during which pop performers ceded creative power to the labels, managers and publishers. If a performer wanted not just fame, but the control (and certainly the big money) it was better to hang back and pull the strings by scouting the talent, naming them, finding (or writing) the songs, managing, producing the singles and taking the publishing. It was unlikely that Brian could exercise a satisfactory level of control in a situation which included the likes of Capitol Records, Murry Wilson, and singers that were family and therefore his equals. It was too messy, so he was looking for outside opportunities in which to work in virgin musical territory that belonged solely to him from the outset. Over the next couple years, Brian would continue to do non-Beach Boys work in this vein but never to any notable success.

Continue reading in Part 11 of A History of Brian Wilson

Return to preceding post, Part 9

Selected References for Part 10

Gaines, Steven. “Brian Wilson Is Trying Hard to Catch Another Wave.” New West, August 16, 1976.

^__________ . Heroes and Villains: The True Story of the Beach Boys. New York: Signet/New American Library, 1986.

Hoffman, Lynn. Foundations of Family Therapy: A Conceptual Framework for Systems Change. New York: Basic Books, 1981.

Laing, R.D. The Politics of the Family. New York: Random House/Vintage, 1972.

Lambert, Philip. Inside The Music of Brian Wilson: The Songs, Sounds and Influences of the Beach Boys' Founding Genius. New York: Continuum International, 2007.

Lawson, Christine Ann. Understanding the Borderline Mother. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004.

Love, Mike, with James S. Hirsch. Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy. New York: Penguin/Blue Rider, 2016.

Murphy, James B. Becoming the Beach Boys 1961-1963. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2015.

Rusten, Ian, and Jon Stebbins. The Beach Boys in Concert: The Ultimate History of America's Band on Tour and on Stage. Milwaukee: Backbeat Books, 2013.

Shaw, Greg. “Brill Building Pop.” In Anthony DeCurtis, James Henke, and Holly George-Warren, eds. The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll. New York: Random House, 1992.

Stebbins, Jon. The Beach Boys FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About America’s Band. Milwaukee: Backbeat Books, 2011.

White, Timothy. “Still Waters Run Deep: A Child is Father to the Band, Part Two.” Crawdaddy, July 1976.

Wilson, Brian, with Todd Gold. Wouldn't It Be Nice: My Own Story. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.

Here in Part 9 of A History of Brian Wilson, it is still in 1962, and unfortunately, dad Murry Wilson remains firmly embedded in both Brian’s personal life and musical career with the upstart Beach Boys. The Boys have recently succeeded with the local hit “Surfin’,” but success is fleeting; if this group is to be anything more than a local one-hit wonder, it is incumbent upon them to write new songs and find a record label to put them out. With respect to the former, Brian was in these days beginning his career as a songwriter, composing “Surfin’ Safari” with Mike Love, “Surfer Girl” by himself, and a batch of songs with main partner Gary Usher (including “409” and eventually, “In My Room”).

As discussed in the preceding chapter, Brian’s partnership and friendship with the outsider Usher quickly became a flashpoint for conflict with Murry.

Moving forward with the story:

Notwithstanding the conflict brewing between himself and Murry Wilson, Gary Usher maintained a tenuous position within the Beach Boys’ orbit, writing with Brian and providing career guidance. (Usher himself was certainly poised to benefit too from his association with a young and promising Brian Wilson.)

At this point there was still just the one Beach Boys single on the small label, soon to be forgotten. In later years, Usher recalled that he urged Brian to get moving with new demo recordings in the hopes of getting another single pressed or another label interested. Usher claimed (credibly) that he advised Brian to not “sit around and wait for a company to come to you.” They booked studio time to record Wilson-Usher songs that were intended to promote Gary’s solo career, in addition to others that were set aside for the Beach Boys. The Beach Boys eventually recorded good demos of “Surfin’ Safari,” (a Mike Love co-write from early ‘62 that would prove superior to the Wilson-Usher tunes save “In My Room”) and “409,” among other songs.

Meanwhile, Murry was moving on another flank in the effort to keep the ball rolling. At the end of March 1962, he drafted a contract through which he attempted to secure the continued support of Hite and Dorinda Morgan, who had come through for the group on the “Surfin’” single. Murry’s contract—reproduced for viewing in James B. Murphy’s 2015 book Becoming the Beach Boys—essentially signed the Beach Boys over to the Morgans without obligating them to do anything in return. Notwithstanding Murry’s reputation as a hard-nosed, driven business leader, he approached the Morgans as a supplicant, in effect pleading, “don’t abandon us.” Hite Morgan would have had little reason not to sign the document. Murry was presumably motivated to keep the family venture alive (for his own purposes) but his acumen in the music business is questionable.

Murry’s true strengths lay in the fields of physical and psychological authoritarianism, where he was an auteur. His contract with the Morgans included the following as its final paragraph:

It is understood, that Brian Wilson, Leader of the ‘Beach Boys’, may hire or fire any one of the Beach Boys from time to time at his discretion, to keep the group together, or to improve same by adding a new member, or reducing the number of persons known as the ‘Beach Boys.’  

On its face, this clause confirmed a practical necessity: Brian Wilson must be the leader of the Beach Boys. And as such, Brian must be able to fire any of the group members. At this particular moment in 1962, a third party reading this language could have reasonably understood it as a father’s admirable effort to protect his son’s musical leadership from all challengers, internal and external. But that’s not what it was. The true historical import of the language is what it says only by omission.

First, the contract specifies that Brian could hire or fire band members at will, but only for the purposes of “keeping the group together” or “improving” it. In other words, the contract remained silent as to Brian’s authority to disband the Beach Boys, should he want to do that for whatever reason. (And who, exactly, would determine what constitutes “improvement” of the Beach Boys, should that question ever arise?)

Second and more importantly, the contact similarly (and conspicuously) omitted to grant Brian the authority to fire the group’s manager. Under no circumstances could that be contemplated; not even if Brian wanted to fire the manager to “improve” the group or “keep it together.”

Either intentionally or unconsciously, Murry crafted the contract this way because Brian was never really supposed to be the “leader” of anything. At most, Brian was to be the Beach Boys’ straw-boss while Murry governed autocratically from behind the scenes, leveraging his abusive history with Brian.1

In his 1986 book Heroes and Villains: The True Story of the Beach Boys, Steven Gaines speculated that Murry included the hire/fire clause “to keep Dennis in line.” However, if that was Murry’s motivation, why would he give Brian, and not himself, the contractual power to hire and fire band members? Gaines’s unstated assumption was that Murry would be giving Brian the order. If Murry wanted to fire Dennis (or anyone else) from the band, he would direct Brian to act in his Murry-assigned role of “leader” and Brian would obey. In the end, Murry’s contractual feint was intended to keep everyone in line, not just Dennis.

And, per the contractual language, none of it would work as Murry intended without two preconditions: first, that Brian would be the formally designated “leader” of the Beach Boys. Second, that Murry would give Brian orders behind the scenes, outside the view of third parties. Murry’s control over Brian, individually, was the key to his control over the whole band, collectively.2 It was Murry alone, more than anybody else, who at this relatively early stage understood that he who controlled Brian would control the Beach Boys.

Overall, Murry’s self-drafted contract with the Morgans had little to do with the Beach Boys as a music band. It was instead a quasi-legalistic expression of Murry’s internal psychology and Wilson family politics. Murry intended to run and control the Beach Boys as he had his family back in Hawthorne. This was what he was attempting to memorialize in writing, even if only to himself, in secret, or unconsciously. It was the nearest he could come to declaring outright: The Beach Boys is my band. And I, Murry, will control Brian and therefore control the Beach Boys.

Fortunately for the Boys (and Murry too), the contract remained only symbolically relevant. It may not have been enforceable in the first place, and anyway, Hite Morgan does not seem to have been as tenacious has he could have been in his dealings with the Wilsons. In Morgan’s world—that of the small, independent publishers, labels, and distributors—business was seat-of-the-pants. Profit margins were relatively thin, and legal and accounting practices were of course opaque. The little firms had difficulty meeting overhead. The concept of the big-time rock ‘n’ roll band simply did not exist, and the recording business was at least a couple of years away from recognizing just how much money could be made with youth music. The Beach Boys were nothing special—some kids who had scored locally with a derivative novelty single, and nobody was banging down their door or paying too much attention. It would be up to the Beach Boys to make something happen.

Here arrives the moment upon which Murry’s reputation as the Beach Boys’ fearless champion is heavily based. According to the common reading of history, Murry tucked the demo recordings of “409” and “Surfin’ Safari” under his arm and, like Larry Csonka on a 35-yard touchdown run, battered through the music-biz naysayers until major label Capitol Records surrendered and agreed to sign the Beach Boys.

This is not entirely false, but as the research of Beach Boys historians such as Jon Stebbins and Jim Murphy has clarified, Murry’s efforts were only one part of a more realistic chain of events in which a network of showbiz-connected people went to bat for the Boys, ultimately resulting in the fateful meeting with Capitol.

Murry was a maniac, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t have smarts. No, not at all—at a minimum, he was probably sharp enough to understand certain basic things about the business. However, it is less likely he possessed either the psychological stability or minimally agreeable personality that would be necessary to enter into sophisticated dealings with the likes of Capitol’s executives. Murry’s true métier was obstruction, destruction, and exploitation of weaker parties, not deal-making and bridge-building. (A review of the available sources reveals a number of witnesses who knew Murry personally and were repelled by him.) His connections were limited and he couldn’t have brokered a deal with the likes of Capitol all by himself.

But Murry was very noisy. People knew when he was around. And, as Brian Wilson could probably have confirmed, Murry was not the kind of man who just goes away. There is at least one recording industry figure who claimed to have “basically forced” his own contacts at Capitol to take a meeting with the Beach Boys just to get Murry off his back. In this instance then, Murry’s abrasiveness worked in the Beach Boys’ favor. His motivation and ultimate goals are of course separate matters.

In May 1962, three individuals representing the Beach Boys—Murry Wilson, Brian Wilson, and Gary Usher—went up to the Capitol Records tower on Vine Street to meet with a young Artists & Repertoire executive who handled the label’s youth music. Murry disliked Usher, so it can be assumed that he was there at Brian’s behest (or passive approval). The A&R man listened to songs like “409” and “Surfin’ Safari” and told his bosses that Capitol should sign this group right away.

During contract negotiations, the terms came around to song publishing. The Morgans at Guild Music Co. retained the publishing rights on the scattering of Beach Boys tunes written during their stewardship, but of course Capitol’s publishing arm would take the rights for all new songs going forward. This was standard industry practice; unestablished artists and performers did not retain their own publishing. But Gary Usher interrupted at this point, telling Capitol that it was too late—the publishing was already taken. In other words, if Capitol wanted these Beach Boys, they could only get them without the song publishing.

This was unorthodox. It could have killed the deal. Reportedly, the A&R man paused, but Capitol soon agreed to the conditions. In truth, Usher was bluffing—the publishing was available; he and Brian hadn’t set up their company yet. But now they would be free to do so independent of Capitol.

Years later, Usher remembered that after the meeting, Murry berated him in the elevator on the way down to the Capitol parking lot. But why? Murry would seem to have had every reason to be grateful for Usher’s contractual gamesmanship. After all, Usher saved the publishing. But Murry wasn’t grateful. He was furious.

It’s certainly possible that this initial Capitol sit-down had ended without a deal being hammered out, and Murry therefore assumed that Usher had ruined everything with his reckless impudence. And even if a handshake-deal had safely been made that day, Murry could still have been angered by how Gary could have cratered it all with his big mouth. But it is also possible that Murry’s ire had been triggered mainly by his belated discovery that Brian and Gary had been wheeling and dealing behind his back.

In other words, it’s possible that Brian had (purposefully, or instinctively, or conveniently) neglected to inform his father about his plans to form a publishing company with Gary Usher. And that Murry first became aware only when Usher spilled it right there in the midst of negotiations with Capitol. (If this reading is accurate, it would hearken back to the day in 1961 when Murry discovered the yet-to-be-named Beach Boys rehearsing in the Wilson music room.)

In any case, Murry acted fast to staunch the wound and soon decreed that there would be no song publishing partnership between Brian Wilson and Gary Usher. If Brian wanted to own his own publishing, he would partner with his father instead. To Murry, there was no injustice or dishonor in this reversal, for Brian had never been more than a piece of property belonging to Murry Wilson.3 The prospect of Murry handing over his possession—and its financial yield—to the likes of Gary Usher was preposterous. Even sillier was the prospect of Brian reaping the economic benefit of his own labor and creativity without his parents cashing in.

And cash in they would: Murry and Brian soon formed their own publishing company, to be named “Sea of Tunes,” with Brian thereafter providing the tunes and Murry controlling the sea. (In his book of 2016, Mike Love said that Murry was—or would eventually become—the sole shareholder of Sea of Tunes and that Audree Wilson was a co-director of the company.)4 Gary Usher remained in the picture for a while, continuing to collaborate and socialize with Brian. (The album on which most of their songs would appear, Surfin’ Safari, would be recorded after the Beach Boys signed with Capitol.)

According to Brian Wilson’s 1991 autobiography, Wouldn’t It Be Nice: My Own Story, during this period (mid- to late-1962) Gary Usher advised Brian to knock Murry on his ass. This could only mean that Gary himself wanted to deck Murry, but knew Brian had to be the one to do it. In the book, Brian says he was “gutless” in his failure to do that or otherwise intercede in the Murry-Usher conflict.

While that’s an unduly harsh term for a young man who by age 19 had withstood a lifelong stream of physical and psychological abuse, there is a receding, passive character to Brian’s behavior here, as there is over much of his life. As Murry railed at Gary, the ball was in effect being kicked into Brian’s court. Technically, the matter of publishing should have been Brian’s ultimate decision. And it may have indeed turned out to be just that.

At this point, Brian was around 20 years old. He was a capable adult in some ways, a dependent child in others. He still lived in his parents’ tiny house. He certainly hadn’t been pampered there, but a poisonous swaddling had occurred, effectuated through violence and fear, and it was still going on, even if Brian wasn’t fully aware of it. (In the earliest days of the Beach Boys, friends would drop by the Wilson home for social visits and were told by the parents that while Carl and Dennis were available to hang out, Brian could not be disturbed because he was writing.) In any event, because Brian was not yet 21, he was too young under then-existing law to enter into any enforceable business contract with his new pal Gary—a “guardian” like Murry would have had to sign on Brian’s behalf.

And even if Brian had been of legal age, he would still have to weigh the costs and benefits of defying his father. 

The narrative picks up on the issue of costs and benefits in Part 10 of the History of Brian Wilson series

Go back to preceding post in this series

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Selected References for Part 9

“Beach Boys: David Marks Guitar Clinic Part 1.” at YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=gk-HhvXO7O4 (posted by Megaknappster)

Carlin, Peter Ames. Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson. Emmaus, PA: Rodale, 2006.

Gaines, Steven. Heroes and Villains: The True Story of the Beach Boys. New York: Signet/New American Library, 1986.

Kubernik, Harvey.  Turn Up the Radio! Rock, Pop, and Roll in Los Angeles 1956-1972. Solana Beach, CA: Santa Monica Press, 2014.

^__________. “Kubernik: Beach Boys’ ‘Feel Flows’ Box Set.” Music Connection, July 2, 2021. At: https://www.musicconnection.com/kubernik-beach-boys-feel-flows-box-set/ (last accessed September 22, 2021)

Leaf, David. Album Notes to The Beach Boys, The Pet Sounds Sessions. Capitol Records, 1997.

“The Lost Beach Boy Part 1.” At YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZVWU-VITho (posted by Megaknappster)

McParland, Stephen J. Murry: The Many Moods of a Beach Boy Dad. CMusic Books, 2022.

Murphy, James B. Becoming the Beach Boys 1961-1963. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2015.

Rusten, Ian, and Jon Stebbins. The Beach Boys in Concert: The Ultimate History of America's Band on Tour and on Stage. Milwaukee: Backbeat Books, 2013.

Stebbins, Jon. The Lost Beach Boy. London: Virgin Books, 2007.

^__________. The Beach Boys FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About America’s Band. Milwaukee: Backbeat Books, 2011.

White, Timothy. The Nearest Faraway Place: Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys and the Southern California Experience. New York: Henry Holt, 1994.

Wilson, Brian, with Todd Gold.  Wouldn't It Be Nice: My Own Story. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.

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The previous post, Part 7, tried to get inside the unspoken psychological relationship between Brian Wilson and his father Murry. The relationship was strong, the bond was tight, but the whole thing was founded on violence and lack of trust. As such, the father-son relationship was inherently one of conflict; the only question was how the conflict would manifest itself as time passed and family circumstances evolved. Once the Beach Boys got going, what issues might Brian and Murry battle over? Could those conflicts ever be resolved, and if so, how?

Here, Part 8 introduces a new point of dispute into the story: the matter of the “the outsider” in Beach Boys and Wilson family politics. Those already familiar with Beach Boys history are aware of the recurring theme of the problematic outsider and the band-family’s frustration with—and ultimately, opposition to—Brian’s habit of looking beyond the family for sympathetic musical collaborators. The following post introduces Gary Usher, who in 1962 became the first significant outsider to write songs with Brian.

Part 8:

One day early in 1962, the Beach Boys were rehearsing at the Wilson home in Hawthorne. The music could be heard around the neighborhood and caught the ear of Gary Usher, an aspiring singer and songwriter who happened to be visiting relatives who were the Wilsons’ neighbors.1 Usher, an aspiring musician-songwriter who worked days as a bank teller, had been trying to establish a foothold in the L.A. pop scene and had already recorded a couple of go-nowhere independent singles under his own name. He dropped by the Wilson home and introduced himself. Within hours he and Brian had written a spare, moving ballad called “Lonely Sea.”

This collaboration speaks for itself. It says that Brian was, at the very least, receptive to writing with somebody outside the not-fully-formed Beach Boys. And that he believed it was his prerogative. It may very well have his preference too. Usher and Brian first met in January 1962, the same month Brian and Mike Love penned “Surfin’ Safari” (the natural follow-up to “Surfin’”), which would (after its eventual recording and release) become a staple of early’ 60s rock ‘n’ roll. In hindsight, it appears that once he connected with Usher, Brian was faced with a choice of collaborators, and that through his actions, he expressed a preference for the outsider: Brian and Gary would soon write a number of songs together and begin discussing the idea of starting their own company to publish them. Usher, who was 23 to Brian’s 19, had seen enough of the business to know that if a songwriter really wanted to reap the financial benefit of his work, it was in the publishing. That’s where the money was.2

Wilson-Usher was a commercial songwriting team that wanted to write hits. Today, rock ‘n’ roll music is enjoyed by very old people. But in 1962, making commercial rock ‘n’ roll—to the extent rock ‘n’ roll was a viable genre—meant doing something that adolescents (if not outright children) would like. The surfing theme had worked well for the Beach Boys their first time out but for some reason Brian and Gary stayed off the beach entirely. Their list of songs suggests that they got together and spitballed cute, frivolous themes: “Cuckoo Clock,” “Heads You Win, Tails I Lose,” “County Fair,” “Ten Little Indians,” and “Chug-A-Lug,” a song about drinking lots of root beer.

These tunes would eventually appear on the Beach Boys’ first album, Surfin’ Safari, later that year. Judged by later pop standards (or even those of the era) the songs are a bit empty, but as Beach Boy David Marks—a child himself when he played rhythm guitar on these recordings—once noted, they were honest and sincere. This is what Brian wanted to do with the Beach Boys in 1962. He was 19 or 20 years old and had only just begun writing in earnest. At this point, the main pre-conceived expectation regarding subject matter was just that the songs be kid-friendly; Brian wouldn’t have felt too pressed to write exclusively about surfing and the beach. (That would occur the following year). There is a naïve, youthful humor in the early Wilson-Usher songs—even a little teenage cleverness here and there—but not much else. 

Anyway, Brian and Gary did better when they stopped pandering and looked to their own lives for material. Usher’s interest in fast cars yielded the Beach Boys’ spare, garage-rock track “409,” while Brian’s emotions would become the source material for the classic “In My Room.” This song (which was probably written at the end of 1962 and would not appear on record until the latter portion of 1963) was unusual—a pop ballad that was wholly about the solitary, inner life, without reference to romance or boy-girl relationships.3 However, it’s doubtful anyone picked up on the song’s uniqueness at the time, or was sensitive to the unidentified source of the “fears” referenced in the lyrics.

“In My Room” is a lineal ancestor of Brian’s celebrated Pet Sounds album, and it was written the same way: Brian discusses personal issues with an outside collaborator who is neither a family member nor a Beach Boy. Brian then writes the music, and the outsider helps by translating Brian’s intentions into lyrics. Subsequent Beach Boys history shows that Brian would for a time be able to collaborate with cousin Mike Love on external, prefabricated concepts, sales pitches, teen-lifestyle songs, maybe even a boy-girl ballad here and there. That is, Brian and Mike could (and did) collaborate successfully as craftsmen and businessmen. But if Brian ever wanted to do work like “In My Room,” he would have to write the words himself or locate an outsider.

More than 25 years later, in his autobiography Wouldn’t It Be Nice: My Story (a less-than-100%-reliable work stained by Brian’s psychological merger with his Murryesque psychotherapist Eugene Landy), Brian remembered that he and Usher

told things to each other that we wouldn’t share with our families or our girlfriends, secrets we wouldn’t discuss with anyone else. We understood each other without having to explain. Both of us felt an urgent, panicky need to prove ourselves, believing that the acclaim of success would heal our wounds or at least make us forget them.

As of the time that book was published in 1991, Brian may have been motivated to idealize his past with Usher, contrasting their youthful bond with what he perceived to be his mistreatment and exploitation at the hands of his own family. But even taking that into account, the recollection is essentially accurate. What Brian described was the kind of relationship that could produce an “In My Room.” There was a baseline trust in the working relationship Brian had with Gary Usher. “In My Room” is proof of it. Brian would never share that kind of creative trust with any member of his family.

When “In My Room” was written, Brian could very well have still been living (and/or composing music) in his parents’ house. It will likely never be known what, exactly, Brian shared with Usher (who died in 1990) about his life. Usher could certainly sense the obvious—that Murry was an ill-tempered blowhard who had a messed-up relationship with his son; that he viewed Usher as an interloper in a family business. But Usher may not have been aware that Murry was not just another strict father on a power trip. Murry was a deranged man whose status as “father” had given him cover to commit atrocities against his children—things that had taken place in the very same house in which Brian and Gary had written (at least some of) their songs.

Usher is unlikely to have understood that Murry was threatened not just by him, but even more so by Brian. Murry was, at best, ambivalent about the idea of Brian having a career in music—especially as a songwriter. Given that Brian had nevertheless found his way into the business and was now developing a fledgling profile as a writer, it had become imperative for Murry to constrain Brian, reducing him to the lowly status of implement to be owned, shaped, and controlled for Murry’s own purposes. Usher’s meddling presence could only obstruct Murry’s efforts in this regard. From Murry’s perspective, the Brian Wilson-Gary Usher partnership existed between a disloyal, disobedient traitor and a thieving trespasser.

When the purposefully cruel treatment of children occurs behind the veneer of a healthy, intact nuclear family, the perpetrators will ensure that the family nevertheless remains close and tightly-knit. (In such cases, it is really the abuse itself that holds the family together. If the abuse truly comes to an end, the family is no more.) When the recipients of such treatment are still kids, the maintenance of strong intra-family ties ensures that the torment can continue without discovery by outsiders. Once the children are physically grown (as Brian was in 1962), the game shifts, with the purpose not only to preserve the status quo, but to ensure that the adult child never comes to understand what was (and continues to be) done to him.

Guilt, denial, and abject fear are commonly used to keep battered kids close to home, but there is also the child’s natural and otherwise healthy inclination toward family loyalty and pride. To this end, abusers will commonly instill distrust of the non-family member or outsider. The result is that the insularity of the violent or oppressive family system—as differentiated from the sufficiently healthy family unit that is the foundation of any civil society—mirrors that of death cults, bloodthirsty religious sects, chauvinistic racial-identity groups and oppressive, paranoid nation-states.

In Murry’s own words, Gary Usher was “an evil influence on our family.” And Murry was right—if “family” is code for the status quo whereby Murry reigned autocratically, free to abuse and exploit his sons (especially Brian) in perpetuity. In other words, when Murry characterized Usher as “evil,” he was acknowledging (unintentionally, of course) that Gary had been a good and positive influence on Brian Wilson the young man. And for Murry, that was intolerable.4

As had been the case months earlier when Brian and the boys surreptitiously formed the Beach Boys behind Murry’s back, Murry could not avail himself of his preferred methods of violent suppression. Notwithstanding Brian’s non-violent nature, it would have been too dangerous for Murry to assault him the way he used to. (As a chronic child-batterer, Murry was a physical coward, and Brian was now about 20 years old and stood 6’ 3.”) So Brian was now writing and bonding with the outsider Gary Usher, and Murry couldn’t put a stop to it as easily as he would have liked.

Given his warped subjectivity, Murry had no choice but to castigate Brian, badmouth Gary, and denigrate their collaboration. Usher was an older male who wrote songs with Brian while Murry did not. Usher had released his own singles, attained some business knowledge, and whatever contacts he maintained existed free and clear of Murry’s influence. He was handsome, confident, and ambitious—par for the course in Hollywood—and the kind of guy who would, of his own volition, knock on a stranger’s door and network. Usher had never been beaten, humiliated, or terrified by Murry during childhood, and Murry was not married to Usher’s mother. It was therefore easier for Usher, as outsider, to see Murry for what he really was.

Usher indeed made no secret of his dislike of Murry and his songs, even foolishly criticizing them while a guest in Murry’s home. According to biographer Steven Gaines (who interviewed Usher, perhaps multiple times), during a writing session Murry simply kicked Usher out of the house. As he walked back down the street to where his relatives lived, Usher could hear Murry screaming at Brian. Obviously, Gary Usher’s days as an adjunct Beach Boy were numbered.

The narrative continues in A History of Brian Wilson, Part 9—click here to keep reading

Return to Part 7

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Selected References for Part 8

Gaines, Steven. Heroes and Villains: The True Story of the Beach Boys. New York: Signet/New American Library, 1986.

Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books, 1997.

Lambert, Philip. Inside The Music of Brian Wilson: The Songs, Sounds and Influences of the Beach Boys' Founding Genius. New York: Continuum International, 2007.

Leaf, David. The Beach Boys and the California Myth. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978.

Love, Mike, with James S. Hirsch. Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy. New York: Penguin/Blue Rider, 2016.

McParland, Stephen J. The Wilson Project. Editions Berlot, 2012.

Murphy, James B. Becoming the Beach Boys 1961-1963. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2015.

Rusten, Ian, and Jon Stebbins. The Beach Boys in Concert: The Ultimate History of America's Band on Tour and on Stage. Milwaukee: Backbeat Books, 2013.

Sharp, Ken. “Brian Wilson: God’s Messenger.” American Songwriter, January 2, 2009. At: web.archive.org/web/20111225045200/http:/www.americansongwriter.com/2009/01/brian-wilson-gods-messenger/ (last accessed November 17, 2023)

Stebbins, Jon. The Lost Beach Boy. London: Virgin Books, 2007.

Storr, Anthony. Feet of Clay: Saints, Sinners, and Madmen: A Study of Gurus. New York: The Free Press, 1996.

Wilson, Brian, with Todd Gold.  Wouldn't It Be Nice: My Own Story. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.

As of this point, it is the fall of 1961. The Beach Boys (who have yet to assume that group name) are on the cusp of becoming a performing band. Hite and Dorinda Morgan have told the boys that their company, Guild Music, would be interested in publishing (buying) a song about the local surfing craze, with the goal of getting it pressed as a single on one of the local labels. The boys capitalized on the opportunity and wrote the simple but catchy “Surfin’.” Murry Wilson learned of these events somewhat belatedly (so it would appear), and after a momentary burst of anger, he lent his approval.

Continuing:

Things happened fast. The Morgans at Guild Music liked “Surfin’.” They agreed to publish the song and shepherd it through the appropriate channels. The group recorded the tune at a professional studio, the recording got shopped around to various contacts, and a small label agreed to release it.

The group had neither the credibility nor the autonomy to name itself. Needing a name that would stress the surfing theme of the “Surfin’” song, the record men thought long and hard and came up with “The Surfers.” That name was already taken, so then somebody came up with “The Beach Boys.” The group learned about this when the single came out with their new name on the label. Whatever irritation they might have felt dissipated when they heard themselves on the radio and the single began climbing the local charts. Kids liked the song; it was positive and friendly, with the group inviting the listeners to go surfing with them. By the end of 1961 the Beach Boys had joined the radio & T.V. performers’ union, and Murry Wilson had signed on in his predestined role as group manager. 

As 1961 rolled over into ’62, “Surfin’” was still gaining traction on Los Angeles radio and by February, the song would even gain a low spot on the national Billboard chart. At this point, “Surfin’” could easily have become just another one-time local hit, with the Beach Boys on the charts for a while and then vanishing. Al Jardine in fact left the group in early 1962. To him, it seemed that after one single, the thing had played itself out. Neither he nor his group-mates had made any money from the record, lending credence to the idea that they would never make decent money with this, let alone have a career for a few years. The sensible, cautious Al returned to the straight world, leaving the Beach Boys as a 100% Wilson-family endeavor: Brian, Murry, Dennis, Carl and Mike.

In early 1962, the Beach Boys organization had yet to take form. Certain things needed to be settled: who was in the group, who wasn’t, what would be the group’s musical approach, what type of songs would it perform, and where those songs would come from. Would the group have a leader, and if so, who?

The Beach Boys also needed to improve their musicianship. They of course had been singing all their lives, but had not honed their instrumental skills, or found a true, collective voice before getting a chance to put out their first record. Nor were they accustomed to performing in public for an audience of strangers. And they had leapt right past the crucial, character-forming phase during which a group, without a label and without a record, is repeatedly rejected, dismissed and ignored. This meant that when they first began to book live dates off the success of “Surfin’,” they weren’t ready.

Carl Wilson—generally considered the best instrumental musician in the Beach Boys—already had a couple years of guitar study under his belt, and could play lead. Brian was always more of a thinker and conceptualist at the keyboard than a technical performer, but he of course could play what he wrote. He was also teaching himself the bass guitar, picking it up quickly. Dennis was learning drums. Mike was not an instrumentalist, but had successfully performed as lead vocalist on “Surfin’” and, if needed, could blow some notes on a saxophone in the honking style of ‘50s R&B. After the departure of Al Jardine, they had to find a replacement on rhythm guitar. They drafted 13-year-old David Marks, a neighbor of the Wilsons who, like Carl, had already been playing a while and was familiar with the rock ‘n’ roll guitar styles of the day.  

The band also needed more original material. A little taste of success was good motivation, and by February of ’62, the Beach Boys had two new and notable songs written. Brian and Mike collaborated on “Surfin’ Safari,” which was basically a revamped “Surfin’”—a marked improvement on the idea of inviting the listener to surf with the Beach Boys. Brian had at some point also come up with the words and music to the ballad “Surfer Girl,” the first of his signature songs and one in which the surf hook was paired with the more universal theme of romance.1 And certainly Murry, the proven songwriter in the family, had material too. Not satisfied with his newly-acquired position as Beach Boys manager, he tipped his hand by directing Brian to have the group record Murry Wilson compositions—the Beach Boys to be a vehicle for Murry’s songwriting. Brian’s response: No.

It can’t be known how, exactly, Brian communicated his refusal to his father, but he obviously did: the Beach Boys never recorded any of Murry’s songs and Murry would have to wait a couple of years before he would find himself in a situation—amongst an entirely different group of young musicians—in which he carried enough weight to get his stuff recorded for the teen-pop singles market.

Brian’s refusal to sing his dad’s songs raises some questions. If, as it seems, Brian was able to stand firm and deny his father’s wishes in this regard, doesn’t it mean Brian held some degree of power in the father-son relationship? And if so, how was that possible? After all, if Murry the fearsome tyrant had governed and abused Brian for so many years, wouldn’t it have been easy to condition Brian to have reflexive fealty to Murry’s every whim? If Brian retained an instinct or faculty for defiance, does it follow that Murry’s treatment of him hadn’t really been as severe as has been reported (and argued here, in this very series of postings)? Maybe Murry never ordered Brian and the Boys to sing his songs, and instead merely requested, or asked, that they do so? But if that is so, why didn’t Murry press harder? How can a young man—now around 20 years old—who had been raised under a regime of strict and capriciously violent paternal oversight and control retain the fortitude to stand up to that father and effectively say no to him—at least on the specific issue of what kinds of songs he and his band would record?

Such questions cannot be answered with definitive, factual finality. Yet asking them provides an opportunity to get inside the intimate psychological relationship between this father and son.

There are certain universal constants common to every scenario in which the parent purposefully and repeatedly mistreats the child. Beyond these, there are countless variations and idiosyncrasies, not only between different families, but even within the same family. The Brian-Murry relationship was very special. The story of Murry forcing Brian to defecate on a newspaper in front of the family is outrageous in its depravity. (The inclination to disbelieve this story as the invention of an unethical journalist, a lie planted by a malicious family outsider, or a delusion of a mentally ill drug addict is natural but misguided.) A book could be written about the meaning of this one incident, but to start with, it expressed two of Murry’s overlapping goals.

First, to break Brian’s will and innate human drive, a feat to be accomplished by reducing Brian to a state of infantile helplessness. Second, to seize control of Brian entirely, at the level of both physiology and psychology. One human being’s control over another’s most basic, animal-level excretory functions is a time-honored method of destroying autonomy, individual power-of-will, and sense of self. Also, forcing a person to partake in a disgusting act creates visual, tangible evidence of what the aggressor internally wants and needs to be true: that the victim is a sub-human animal—and therefore deserves still more contempt and abuse. As an undiluted expression of authoritarianism and might-is-right ethics, this sort of thing occurs in the concentration camp, political prison, hostage situation, detention center, and abusive single-family home.

When he was a kid, Brian appeared outwardly normal, but in reality he would have been struggling to maintain psychological mastery over his being because there was always a deranged Murry Wilson to contend with. The only constraint on Murry’s behavior were the limits of his own perverse psychological appetites. But who knows what those limits were? Brian never knew what his father would do next and when he would do it. 

It is impossible for a child to grow in a healthy way under such circumstances. Yet to his credit, Brian managed to carve out a secure, autonomous space for himself with music. There, alone “in his room,” with the Four Freshmen and whatnot, Brian was master. To stop Brian from doing this, Murry could have easily employed a regimen of coarse, stimulus-response conditioning: every time Brian sat down at the keyboard, Murry could have bashed him with a plank. But Murry didn’t do that. He allowed Brian a circumscribed but free space in which to develop musically.

This selective freedom points to a particular type of implicit, reciprocal “arrangement” between parent and child that exists in chronically abusive but otherwise intact homes. Neither father nor son could ever voice it openly or articulate it intellectually, but the relationship was understood at a submerged, animal-level of knowledge and communication. On Murry’s end it translated as: I need to violate you, and I will continue to do so, but I acknowledge that you are special, and I will allow you this particular musical freedom. For Brian it was: we both know what you are doing to me, and that I have no choice but to absorb this treatment. But you will grant me this particular musical space, and I am entitled to certain dispensations from you. For both Brian and Murry Wilson, this also meant: I love you.

Why did Murry relent in this manner? The sentimentalist will attribute it to his idiosyncratic expression of paternal love (his “love language”) or the way Brian’s musical talent soothed his dad’s otherwise savage breast. That could be part of it, but there are other things to consider.

One is the surrounding environment in which the abuse took place. The Wilson home was an arena of chaos and immorality, but it was not what is commonly thought of as a “broken home.” The violence did not occur in the stereotypical setting of an urban tenement, the ‘hood, or some whiskey-saturated rural zone. In the home of Murry and Audree Wilson, extreme brutality occurred within the ostensibly stable framework of middle (or lower-middle) class propriety, during a time of regional economic growth, upward social mobility for the middle classes and an otherwise correct and proper respect for the nuclear family.

In this place, honesty, morality and a strong work ethic were exalted. Men and women got married, then had children, and then stayed together, come hell or high water. Murry therefore had cause to reconcile his acts with rectitude, so as to rationalize and justify them. His quotable statements in various interviews demonstrate his efforts to convince others (and himself) that he was a loving, protective father. Allowing, and at times facilitating, Brian’s pursuit of music was one way through which Murry could maintain his self-image as a good father and good person—an exemplar of respectable American manhood.

And there were additional incentives for Murry, derived from his egotism and need to sustain an inflated self-image. When Murry looked at his firstborn son he was not seeing a separate human being; he was instead looking in a mirror. It is common for parents to see their own reflections in their children—this is normal, even beneficial to the young child’s security and survival, provided the parent can gradually learn to respect the child’s individual identity as it grows up. A person like Murry Wilson hasn’t the capacity for this. So, there were those countless days during Brian’s childhood when Murry despised what he saw in the mirror and acted accordingly, in effect smashing the mirror out of hate and spite.

Yet there was another part of Murry that could swell with pride when Brian succeeded—but only insofar as the success was achieved not by Brian, but by Murry’s mirrored reflection. This was the part of Murry that could allow, and even encourage, Brian to develop his musical skills. Murry could then attach himself, appropriating Brian’s accomplishments outright as his own.

All that was required was for Brian to allow his father to do this; to allow Murry to stand on his shoulders, arms raised in triumph. Yet if Brian somehow expressed resistance, conflict would be unavoidable. 

When authoritarian governments rule their citizens through fear and capricious violence, it results in wars, revolutions and crackdowns. When you raise your child the same way, who knows what the end result will be, but you are raising him to be your enemy, whether or not the kid ever becomes aware of it. The parent and child may appear to share a close and therefore positive relationship, but there is a roaring undercurrent of hostility that can never be spoken of or otherwise acknowledged between them.

In the Wilson home, the concepts of cooperation and genuine respect between parent and child did not exist. They were anathema, and Brian never had any choice but to acclimate himself to the mode of human interaction that had been thrust upon him. From day one there had been parental authoritarianism instead of parental authoritativeness, coercion instead of cooperation, fear instead of trust.

By the time the Beach Boys got going in early 1962, what 44-year-old Murry and 19-year-old Brian had wasn’t teamwork but brinkmanship. Certain territorial boundaries were in place. Though invisible, the boundaries would manifest themselves behaviorally—in how one was allowed to act—and psychologically—in how one was expected to think and perceive. As long as the boundaries were respected by both father and son, a certain stability could perhaps be preserved.

There would be no such thing. Murry and Brian clashed immediately. Right from the jump, Murry tested the balance of power by pressuring Brian to record Murry’s songs with the Beach Boys. Murry was of course attempting to establish a precedent, whereby he would be a writer of songs the Boys would sing (if not the sole, or at least primary writer). Brian stood his ground though, and Murry backed off, as he had done at the legendary (but still somewhat mysterious) rehearsal session when the boys calmed him by playing “Surfin’.”

With that song and “Surfin’ Safari” too, the group may have actually been developing its own Murry-free writing team of Brian Wilson and Mike Love. On the other hand, maybe not. Maybe Murry could stomach the idea of a family insider—his own nephew, his sister’s kid—writing with Brian. Maybe not. Who knows what Brian thought about it, but one fact is fairly certain: it was not Brian’s initial preference to write songs with the assistance and input of Mike Love. Brian instead sought to do some boundary-testing of his own.

Keep reading in A History of Brian Wilson, Part 8

Go back to Part 6

Selected References for Part 7

deMause, Lloyd. “The Evolution of Childhood.” In The History of Childhood. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.

Fromm, Erich. The Heart of Man. New York: Harper & Row, 1964.

Gaines, Steven. Heroes and Villains: The True Story of the Beach Boys. New York: Signet/New American Library, 1986.

Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books, 1997.

Hillman, James: The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling. New York: Warner Books, 1996.

Kubernik, Harvey.  Turn Up the Radio! Rock, Pop, and Roll in Los Angeles 1956-1972. Solana Beach, CA: Santa Monica Press, 2014.

Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. New York: Vintage International, 1989.

Lifton, Robert Jay. Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1961.

McParland, Stephen J. Murry: The Many Moods of a Beach Boy Dad. CMusic Books, 2022.

Mones, Paul. When A Child Kills: Abused Children Who Kill Their Parents. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.

Murphy, James B. Becoming the Beach Boys 1961-1963. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2015.

Ochberg, Frank. “There Is Reason in Action.” In Charles R. Figley, ed. Mapping Trauma and Its Wake: Autobiographic Essays by Pioneer Trauma Scholars. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Preiss, Byron. The Beach Boys: The Authorized Biography of America's Greatest Rock 'n' Roll Band. New York: Ballantine Books, 1979.

Storr, Anthony. Solitude: A Return to the Self. New York: Ballantine Books, 1988

Wilson, Brian, with Todd Gold.  Wouldn't It Be Nice: My Own Story. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.

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