Brian Evolves
Part 10 of A History of Brian Wilson.
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. 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.
