"A Song About Surfing"
(and a further intro to Dennis Wilson) Part 5 of A History of Brian Wilson.
Special preface to Part 5
With this post, the narrative will begin to turn to the formation of the Beach Boys (which happens gradually, then suddenly) and their quick rise from a state of unpracticed anonymity to commercial success and eventually national stardom.
Please note that Murry Wilson will figure prominently over the next several posts in the History of Brian Wilson series, and that, as already indicated, my view of his involvement in both the fortunes of the Beach Boys group and the overall lives of his sons is very bleak. Murry Wilson is bound to be a very subjective matter, and opinions will vary greatly, but in my view, the available information establishes that he was an immensely destructive force in his sons’ lives; that whatever redeeming contribution he made was vastly outweighed—to the point of negation—by the destruction. Accordingly, the tenor of these Murry-intensive posts will often be, unavoidably, negative. The story told in these posts is unpleasant, because what was occurring during these (and later) years of Brian Wilson’s life was, as I see it, a protracted pattern of abuse. Brian Wilson’s collaborator on Smile, Van Dyke Parks, once looked back over the decades and commented (to author Domenic Priore) that Brian spent much of his life “getting beaten up in connected episodes of child abuse." What Parks was referring to (among other things) are the same matters that are frequently at issue in the early chapters of A History of Brian Wilson.
As Beach Boys fans already know, the good news is that Brian manages to put just enough daylight between himself and his father to enable him to lead the Beach Boys on the music for which he and the Boys are most celebrated today. The bad news is that this now-legendary period of Brian’s musical flowering in the mid-1960s was for a number of reasons unsustainable, and therefore short-lived. Brian’s break (if it can even be called that) from Murry will finally occur in April 1964. (Murry’s firing is first addressed in the second half of Part 17 of A History of Brian Wilson, and is the exclusive subject matter of Part 18.)
For additional commentary on the choice between “negativity” and “positivity” in Beach Boys study, see Part 3 and Part 4 of the post-series Brian Wilson in Perspective.
For readers who are interested in additional commentary on the topic of Murry Wilson, see “Murry,” an essay posted in four parts, starting with Part 1, which can be found here, in the Appendix. My purpose with this essay is to be open about my subjective understanding of the Murry problem, hopefully providing readers with some of the reasoning behind the anti-Murry stance that is (and will continue to be) presented here in the History.
Thanks,
—JH
The two preceding entries in the History of Brian Wilson series (Part 3, Part 4) sketched an outline of Brian’s personal development and his high school years during the 1950s. They touched on particular aspects of Brian’s musical life during this time: his informal musical education and experimentation with vocal harmony arrangements, his father’s aspirations and modest success as a pop songwriter, and a local pop-music scene in which ambitious local youth were relatively well-positioned to fast-track their way to the independent recording studios of Hollywood.
Here, in Part 5 of Brian’s History, we are in the 1960-61 time frame. The Beach Boys have yet to form.
Continuing:
While not the tightest buddies with Brian Wilson during their years at Hawthorne High, Al Jardine was close enough to have learned that Brian’s father had achieved some success as a songwriter, and knew some people up in Hollywood. (It’s reasonable to speculate that Murry’s musical accomplishments had been a point of family pride for Brian; that he hadn’t hesitated to tell his classmates about it.) In 1960, during the summer after high school graduation, Al and a couple of friends wanted to get something going with the “Tikis,” their fledgling, Kingston Trio-inspired folk group. As recounted in Becoming the Beach Boys 1961-1963, Jim Murphy’s meticulously researched and annotated 2015 book about the Beach Boys’ earliest years, Jardine and his partner in the Tikis, Gary Winfrey, went over to the Wilson residence in Hawthorne and just knocked on the door. (It was in many ways a simpler time.)
Brian’s mother, Audree Wilson, answered the door. Neither Brian nor Murry were home at the time, but Audree was kind enough to provide Al and Winfrey with the contact information for Hite and Dorinda Morgan of Guild Music. But this may have been an act of naïveté on the part of Mrs. Wilson, if she did this without her husband’s knowledge or permission. Using Murry and Audree Wilson as a reference, Al then reached out to Guild, securing an audition. The Morgans passed on Al’s group, which was probably little more than a competent but unremarkable Kingston Trio knock-off. Nevertheless, the personable, well-mannered Al had now established a relationship with the Morgans that could develop independent of the Wilson family.
And the relationship did indeed develop, for approximately one year later, in the summer of 1961, it was the Morgan family who reached out to Jardine, calling him back to their studio. Hite and Dorinda’s son, Bruce, had penned a western-style tune called “Down by the Rio Grande,” and they needed singers and/or an acoustic guitarist to record the demo. But once Al and his singing partners went to work, the performance wasn’t coming together. Perhaps the vocals were the problem. It was Al Jardine—not the Morgans, let alone Murry Wilson—who took the next step by calling in Brian Wilson, who may have already earned a reputation among his peers as a singer and arranger of vocals.
As fortune would have it, Brian, who had completed one year of junior college at El Camino, now found himself in a position at once auspicious and portentous. He was presented with an opportunity to get his toe in the door of the recording business by using his father’s showbiz contacts—but only through the buffering, intermediary personage of Al Jardine, not his father.
In other words, Brian had an opportunity to reap the benefit of Murry’s business contacts without Murry’s direct involvement and quite possibly without his knowledge. Brian could have been vaguely conscious of this on some deeper level. When he showed up at the studio, he introduced himself to Mrs. Morgan with the words, “I bet you don’t remember me.”
Brian was referring to an occasion more than three years earlier, when he was 15 and Murry brought him up to the Guild studio. The Morgans had received word that a local teen-scene impresario was putting together a youth-group and looking for new singers. They knew that their client, the aspiring songwriter Murry Wilson, had a kid who could sing like a bird. (Murry surely had been boasting about Brian’s abilities.) They called Murry to ask if his talented son would be interested in auditioning. Murry answered yes on Brian’s behalf, and father and son had come to the studio, together, to record a demo. Brian was told where to stand, what to sing (unless he got to choose), when to sing it, and perhaps how to sing it too. The boy sang, the demo was circulated, but the promoter passed.
Now Brian was back. In the interim he had graduated high school and grown to well over six feet tall. He appeared to be autonomous, pursuing a singing career free of Murry’s imprimatur. More importantly, he was there in the Morgans’ studio without Murry’s physical involvement or supervision—Murry was not present that day, which again points to the likelihood that Murry was not aware this was going on.
Things happened very fast. Al Jardine’s initial efforts with Brian bore no immediate fruit, but Al soon called Brian again, for another try with a different song. The scene turns here, for it is at this point when Brian’s brothers and cousin somehow become involved in the venture, at Brian’s invitation. However it may have happened, the five singers who would become the Beach Boys did find themselves together for an audition in the spare, semi-professional recording studio of Hite and Dorinda Morgan. And again, Murry was conspicuous by his absence.
As of the date of the audition, Brian was 19 years old, Al was a few months younger. Both were on track for a second year at El Camino College. Carl Wilson was not yet 15, had been diligently learning guitar for a couple of years, and was only now headed into high school. At 20, Mike Love was not only the oldest in years, but, in a certain sense, life experience. He had been a lackluster student in high school and college had not been an option. When Mike was 19, his girlfriend got pregnant and they were pressed into marriage. As of the time of the audition, he was the father of a newborn and working two jobs: as an apprentice in the family sheet metal business, and as a pump-and-squeegee man at a gas station somewhere on the L.A. grid.
This lineup sang for Mom & Pop Morgan, right there on the spot. Al Jardine’s earlier group had been derivative of the Kingston Trio. This new lineup, led by Brian, was probably a callow version of the Four Freshmen (or a Kingston-Freshmen hybrid). Once more, the answer was no. The boys had talent and sounded good, but the Morgans needed a better reason to justify the expenditure of time, money, and goodwill necessary to record a demo and shop it around. They wanted something different, something that could stand out in the marketplace.
And here is the moment that has since been carved into the tablets of Beach Boys history, having been recounted time and time again in articles, books, and interviews with the principals, including the group members themselves. It was at this juncture when one of the boys interjected with the claim that the group could write an original song about surfing. It was 16-year-old Dennis Wilson who said this.
My father resented the fucking kids to death… The motherfucker hated us, or he would have loved the shit out of us. It’s that fucking simple. That asshole beat the shit out of us.
—Dennis Wilson, mid-1970s
What does it mean when a person’s earliest memory is being punched by his own father? When that same father burns the child’s hands with flame, and beats him with a board? What does it mean for the young child when his mother does not protect him? As of his final days, Dennis Wilson (who drowned in 1983 at the age of 39) had gained some hard wisdom and understanding about his life. However, in the Hawthorne days he was just a kid absorbing the living conditions allotted to him by fortune.
Dennis’s little brother, Carl, added value to the home with his ability to soothe, mediate, and be a dutiful son. A special, lifelong closeness with his mother was Carl’s reward. And while older brother Brian was treated sadistically, he—as writer Kent Crowley has noted—was certainly not neglected (at least not by his father). Murry fixated on Brian and stayed very close to him. Murry pushed Brian, goaded him, restrained him, beat him, praised him, humiliated him, and let him play piano. Murry converted the Wilson garage into a special “music room”—ostensibly a space to be shared by the whole family, but really a special space where Brian alone would spend countless hours teaching himself music. In a very messed-up way, Murry bonded with his son Brian. With his enviable musical gifts, intelligence and physical stature, Brian was a fine vessel to which Murry could fasten himself and then achieve glory (provided Brian would remain subservient and controllable).
What benefit did Dennis bring to the family? Dennis was a rebel and outsider, anxious and aggressive. If he had any musical instincts, he was too restless to develop them the way Brian was doing with his Four Freshmen records, or Carl with the guitar. Dennis got into fights, shot at birds with a BB gun, set fires, crafted homemade explosives, and angrily chopped down trees. He performed poorly in class and wasn’t good at organized team sports. In a domestic culture of cruelty, conformity, stupidity, betrayal and rank hypocrisy, Dennis assumed the role of incorrigible neighborhood reprobate, and spent his formative years getting beaten for it.
Like Brian, Dennis was trapped in a virulent home environment. And like Brian, Dennis was instinctively motivated to escape on a spiritual level. For Brian, music was the way out. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s obvious that the early Beach Boys song “In My Room” describes not just the physical music room in Hawthorne, but Brian’s emotional retreat to the secure, impenetrable musical space within his soul. While Brian was thus oriented toward the inner life, Dennis ventured forth into the tactile, physical world. At some point his explorations led him to the beaches a few miles west of the family home. He learned to surf there.
It is unclear how good he was or how dedicated he was to the sport, but Dennis surfed for real and by choice. He was genuinely and naturally drawn to the water (as Brian was to music) and it’s fair to assume, the scene at the South Bay beaches, which as of the late ‘50s and early ’60s was countercultural. It wouldn’t be long before Dennis himself would help sell these shores as a happy-go-lucky locale where clean-cut kids surfed, tossed the football around, and romanced one another under the stars. But in these earlier days, it wasn’t like that, at least not around the surf spots. If it had been, someone like Dennis wouldn’t have gravitated there in the first place.
Surfing is an unconventional sport, with high physical and mental barriers to entry. It’s dangerous, but fair. If you get thrashed by a wave, it’s an honest beating, because the ocean doesn’t lie. In surfing, there are no scoreboards, coaches, parents, cheerleaders or letterman jackets. There is no opponent to be defeated. There is no clear, objective standard for winning or losing and “success” is a fluid concept that invokes harmony and balance. Some of the more well-known surfing figures of that time have since commented that the Southern California surf ethos repudiated mainstream values, and was viewed with suspicion by the establishment.
If this scene was ever captured in musical form, it occurred through the surf-rock genre of the early 1960s. At about the same time the future Beach Boys were auditioning at the little studio in Hollywood, local musicians (notably guitarist Dick Dale, who was a surfer) were gaining notice with a type of churning, amplified, guitar-driven music that—without lyrics—could evoke the adrenaline rush of riding a wave. When Dennis Wilson said that the group could write about surfing, he wasn’t talking about this kind of music.
But that was okay. To the Morgan couple, a song with lyrics about surfing sounded like a marketable idea. They sent the boys on their way, with the promise that they could audition again when they had the surfing song written.
Continue reading in A History of Brian Wilson, Part 6
Return to preceding post in this series
For extended commentary on Murry Wilson (as removed from the linear, historical context of A History of Brian), see “Murry,” the first part of a four-part supplementary essay.
Selected References for Part 5
Crowley, Kent. Surf Beat: Rock ‘N’ Roll’s Forgotten Revolution. New York: Backbeat Books, 2011.
__________ . 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.
Leaf, David. The Beach Boys and the California Myth. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978.
Leaf, Earl. “Swingin’ the Surfin’ Scene.” The Teen Set, October 1964.
Love, Mike, with James S. Hirsch. Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy. New York: Penguin/Blue Rider, 2016.
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.
Perry, Bruce. “Incubated in Terror: Neurodevelopmental Factors in the ‘Cycle of Violence.’” In Joy Osofksy, ed., Children, Youth and Violence: The Search for Solutions. New York: Guilford Press, 1997.
Preiss, Byron. The Beach Boys: The Authorized Biography of America's Greatest Rock 'n' Roll Band. New York: Ballantine Books, 1979.
Priore, Domenic. Smile: The Story of Brian Wilson's Lost Masterpiece. London: Sanctuary Publishing, 2005.
Riding Giants. Directed by Stacey Peralta. Forever Films/StudioCanal/Setsuna LLC, 2004.
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. “The Instrumental Groups.” 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 Real Beach Boy: Dennis Wilson. Toronto: ECW Press, 2000.
__________. 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.
Steele, Brandt F. “Psychodynamic and Biological Factors in Child Maltreatment.” In Mary Edna Helfer, Ruth S. Kempe and Richard D. Krugman, eds. The Battered Child. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997 (5th ed.)
Straus, Murray, with Denise A. Donnelly. Beating the Devil Out of Them: Corporal Punishment in American Families and its Effects on Children. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2001.
Webb, Adam. Dumb Angel: The Life and Music of Dennis Wilson. Creation Books, 2001.
White, Timothy. “Still Waters Run Deep: A Child is Father to the Band, Part Two.” Crawdaddy, July 1976.
__________ . The Nearest Faraway Place: Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys and the Southern California Experience. New York: Henry Holt, 1994.
Wolfe, Tom. “The Pump House Gang.” In The Pump House Gang. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968.
