A Mystery of Southern California
Brian Wilson in Perspective, Part 3.
Part 2 of this series ended with the suggestion that Brian (1942-2025) not only knew how to ask questions, but often asked the right ones. And that he didn’t quite answer the questions, at least not with definitive clarity. And that Brian didn’t “interpret” the facts of his own life in lucid, unambiguous terms.
Below, Part 3:
Brian Wilson left the task of interpretation to anybody else. Anyone remains free to first decide if Brian’s story is worth examining at all, and then try to determine its meaning. For more than half a century, writers and researchers have been doing just that.
The substantive literature on Brian started to appear in the mid-1960s with a couple of interesting magazine articles, and by the end of 1967, rock ‘n’ roll critic-journalist Paul Williams and Brian’s former business consultant David Anderle were already psycho-profiling Brian and placing the recently-terminated “Smile-era” under the microscope. Williams and Anderle were probably the first commentators to recognize that something complicated was occurring within the Beach Boys—that is, among the band, or family members. Anderle’s observations about Brian have proven to be especially insightful and prescient.
With Tom Nolan’s in-depth profile of the Beach Boys in 1971, Rolling Stone magazine coined the term, “California Saga.” In 1975, at the height of the group’s triumphant resurgence as a stadium-filling nostalgia act, Nick Kent penned a caustic, unflattering article for Britain’s New Musical Express which is said to have offended the Beach Boys organization. Rolling Stone followed with another long-form piece in 1976, contemporaneously with several notable articles in other publications. Two magazine journalists, Steven Gaines and Timothy White, later expanded their research into books, published in 1986 and 1994. Along with David Leaf’s The Beach Boys and The California Myth (1978), these books formed the basis of Beach Boys/Brian Wilson knowledge for a reading public through the 1990s.
In more recent times, additional information has been researched, reported and interpreted by Domenic Priore (focusing on the Smile album), Jon Stebbins (approaching from the separate perspectives of Dennis Wilson and “lost” Beach Boy David Marks) and James B. Murphy (providing an objective, factual account of the group’s earliest, pre-British Invasion years). Informative video documentaries about Brian have been made by Don Was, Morgan Neville, David Leaf and most recently, Brent Wilson.
What these and other people have tried to do is shape a sprawling, ever-transmuting phenomenon into a coherent, sensible narrative. Not an overnight job, but achievable. What may very well be impossible, however, is making that story reliably factual as well, so that the reader (or documentary-watcher, or movie-goer) can sit back and passively absorb what he reads, hears, or sees as “truth.” The challenge arises from the fact that Brian Wilson and the other figures in the Beach Boy universe are real-life individuals. Beach Boy historians and interested fans are therefore confronted with the uncertainty endemic to all biography and non-fiction—plus a few additional constraints.
In this case, a number of factors conspire to prevent a complete, factually verifiable telling of the great California Saga: journalistic standards of verification, the law of libel and defamation, attorney-client confidentiality, doctor-patient confidentiality, the inaccessibility of sealed (or destroyed) court records, Brian Wilson’s status as a “nonverbal human,” the Rashomon effect, the complexities of human psychology, and miscellaneous Beach Boy mischief. The scientifically-rooted method of verification and falsification under controlled conditions is of little help. Legal standards of proof are also less than satisfactory; while a preponderance-of-the-evidence standard of “fact” has been applied to the Beach Boys in civil court, it has only been for the purpose of reallocating money, not the determination of historical (let alone artistic) truth.
Therefore, the Beach Boy saga will never accommodate the sort of truth that is most readily found in fiction, where foundational questions of what did and did not occur are determined with finality, within a writer’s imagination. An author of fiction—Dostoyevsky, Mario Puzo, S.E. Hinton—may invent a story structured around three brothers, and readers may have faith in what is written about the lives of those characters. Those stories really happened as told. They are true. Nobody could ever exercise such definitive authorial control over the lives of Brian, Dennis and Carl Wilson. That is, there is unlikely to be anyone who can provide air-tight answers to the myriad questions, some of which Brian Wilson himself asked in his last autobiography.
Nearly twenty years after he traveled to Los Angeles in the mid-1970s to investigate Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys, British music journalist Nick Kent looked back and recalled that his purpose had been to “discover what really happened” to Brian, the young man who had “somehow managed to tune his one good ear to connect with the music of the spheres until the awesome intensity of its sound finally drove him to insanity.” For Kent, it was sometime in 1967—the year the Smile album collapsed—when something happened to Brian that changed him forever. The outcome of Brian’s “insanity” (let’s call it his strangeness, psychological difficulties or “mental illness”) was for Kent a given assumption. The important and unanswered question was how Brian arrived at that state.
Kent viewed it as a mystery to be solved and exposed, and therefore compared his task to that of a private detective sifting through the “murky human debris” of the record business in order to discover a “deeper truth.” In making the comparison, he (rightly) chose not to invoke the jaded, hard-boiled sleuths of noir fiction—the likes of Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, Mike Hammer. Kent instead compared his task to that of “Lou Harper,” whom he identified as the detective in The Moving Target, a novel by the Southern California mystery writer Ross Macdonald.
Alas, there is no detective named Lou Harper in that or any of Macdonald’s other books. Kent (or his editors) must have been thinking of the movie Harper, Hollywood’s 1966 dramatization of The Moving Target starring Paul Newman, in which (for business reasons), the name of Macdonald’s detective, “Lew Archer,” was changed. The misnomer was a tiny error, but for the purpose of framing a Brian Wilson inquiry, not insignificant.
At the surface, it would be easy to situate Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys somewhere within Harper’s vibrant, mid-‘60s mise-en-scène—consisting of beaches, palatial Bel-Air mansions, a shady West Coast-styled religious cult up in the Santa Monica Mountains, the Sepulveda Pass, and in one scene, a bikini-clad, go-go dancing California Girl.
Harper is decent entertainment, but a bit trifling. The characters don’t always appear to take their own story seriously. It is hard to imagine Paul Newman’s glib Lew Harper navigating the Beach Boy thickets to reveal the deeper truths. Lew Archer, on the other hand—the detective that exists in the actual pages of Ross Macdonald’s novels—is an entirely different character.
Very much a writer of his time, Ross Macdonald (who began publishing in the 1940s and arguably hit his stride during the 1960s) used the genre of detective fiction as a means to explore the human social and psychological condition. Accordingly, he gifted his detective with insight into the interior lives of the troubled characters he encountered in the valleys, canyons, and coastal communities of Southern California. In these mysteries the questions “what happened” or “who did it” are not as interesting as why; what people do is not as interesting as who they are and how they relate to others.
Lew Archer is a private eye who understands fragmented memory, psychological regression, the subjectivity of personal experience, the inconstancy of mental health, levels of meaning in speech and communication, and the unconscious aspects of perception and motivation. The plots of these novels frequently concern the link between lost, traumatized children and suppressed family secrets. Intergenerational family dysfunction is a recurring theme, and older women—widows, aging mothers, grandmothers—occupy key roles, as manifested in the peculiar relationships they maintain with their sons. For whatever it’s worth, if back in 1975 Nick Kent had chanced to read what was then the most recent of Macdonald’s Lew Archer novels, he would have come across passages that pointed directly to the problems in the Beach Boys and the Wilson Family. Words that explained just about everything, in effect solving the great Brian Wilson mystery.
Kent confessed that he never quite cracked the case. Still, during the 1970s the juxtaposition of a troubled, mentally unstable Brian Wilson and the seemingly callous and venal Beach Boys machine left him with a sense of unease, even disgust. It is palpable in Kent’s series of acerbic, opinionated Beach Boys articles (wherein the post-‘60s Beach Boys are called out as a “shoddy, over-promoted soap opera of a group”) which have proven to be both influential and substantively accurate. It points to yet another issue complicating the search for clarity: the story of the Beach Boys will test the psychological and emotional fortitude of the researcher.
In 2021, Kent looked back and said it had been “heartbreaking” to see what was going on with Brian and the Beach Boys in the mid-1970s; both “horrible” and “very sad to write about.” David Leaf, who researched his book on Brian Wilson and the “California Myth” during the same mid-‘70s years when Kent was skulking around Hollywood, recalled that he unexpectedly discovered “an incredibly complex human situation.” “It wasn’t long before my journey went too far,” Leaf wrote. “My journalistic investigations and excavations discovered more human suffering than I really wanted to know.”
Leaf wrote those words back in 1978. Suggesting, therefore, that there was already that much misery to the tale even before the drug nadir of Brian and Dennis Wilson, Eugene Landy’s therapeutic and pharmacological crimes, Dennis’s drowning, Carl Wilson’s sad, quiet passing, various public humiliations, at least one instance of barbaric intra-familial violence, the injured children, the lawsuits, and the final stages of the Beach Boys’ inevitable descent into cynical, anti-musical corporatism. More than anything else, it is the real-life human-suffering aspect of the Beach Boys—most readily observable in the lives of Brian and Dennis Wilson—that has made the story difficult to crack. Once confronted with it, writers, researchers, commentators, and fans are pressed to make some choices.
First among these is the worthy question implied by David Leaf: do we really want to know about these things? Some would say no. The principle that “only the music matters” permits fans to disregard any unpleasantness as peripheral gossip bearing no relation to the Beach Boys’ recordings, concert appearances and sunny, vibrational hum. This view, which is not wholly unreasonable or indefensible, has been adopted within the Beach Boys group itself by Mike Love. With Sisyphean grit, Mike has long promoted the view that the Beach Boys—as a whole, conceptual unit—signifies harmony and positivity, with the latter, in his view, somehow attributable to himself. But even he must admit that his cousin Brian Wilson was responsible for the harmony. With their collective vocal skill, the Beach Boys executed that harmony, but its source was Brian’s musical intellect and spirit. And therein lies the complication, for the story of Brian’s mind, body, and spirit is not one of peace and good cheer.
Although Mike Love might not be aware of it, his “positivity” pitch means he is asking people to ignore, or forget, the Brian Wilson story (or alternatively, understand only that Brian ruined himself with drugs) and just view the Beach Boys as they appeared 60 years ago, when they scored hits in an atmosphere of blind teenage innocence. Those were the days when the Beach Boys had captivated America’s youth with their fresh West Coast sound, when the positivity was as genuine as it ever could be for the group and its founding family. Back then, the public was ignorant of something that later became undeniable: the pop music of the Beach Boys came from a dark place.
How dark was it, exactly? In his 1971 song “Til I Die,” Brian Wilson essentially asked this question three times, once in each verse. For Brian, there was no answer and that was that. Regardless of the label assigned to it, Brian’s psychological condition was for Brian an elemental part of him that he would take to his grave. What Brian could not clarify in the song was why he felt such despair. How did that cork wind up floating on the raging sea in the first place? He has asked those questions in recent years, though, in the book I Am Brian Wilson. (And truth be told, Brian has provided answers—or at least clues—in some of his better solo material.) Writers, filmmakers, fans, and other interested observers who attempt to come up with their own answers must cast aside banal feel-goodisms like harmony and positivity. If they are unwilling to do that, the path will inevitably loop back to the same fork: blind, incurious positivity in one direction, knowledge and meaning in the other.
For example, here is how Mike Love concludes his account of Murry and Brian Wilson’s injurious 1969 agreement to sell (at a fire sale rate) the Beach Boys song catalog: “I’ve never asked Brian why he did what he did. Some doors are better left shut.” Mike doesn’t explain why it’s better to keep these doors shut. Is it attributable to his suspicion that there’s insufficient “harmony and positivity” back there? Or is it something else? Perhaps the stuff that awaits beyond the door is in some way negative, destructive and disharmonious, as distant from positivity and good vibrations as you can get.
This essay continues here in Part 4
That is probably the function of all good detective stories, to confront us imaginatively with evil, to explain it in the course of a narrative which convinces us of its reality, if possible to purge the evil.
—Ross Macdonald
Selected References
Harper. Directed by Jack Smight. Warner Brothers Pictures, 1966.
Hoskyns, Barney, Mark Pringle and Jasper Murison-Bowie. Rock’s Backpages Podcast: “Nick Kent on the NME.” February 8, 2021. Download via Apple iTunes.
Kent, Nick. "The Last Beach Movie Revisited: The Life of Brian Wilson." In The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music, 1972-1995. New York: Da Capo Press, 1995.
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.
Macdonald, Ross. “The Scene of the Crime.” In Ralph B. Sipper, ed. Inward Journey: Ross Macdonald. Santa Barbara: Cordelia Editions, 1984.
Nolan, Tom. Ross Macdonald: A Biography. New York: Scribner, 1999.
__________ . "Archer in Memory." In Ross Macdonald, The Archer Files. Norfolk, VA: Crippen & Landru, 2007.
Williams, Paul. Brian Wilson & the Beach Boys: How Deep Is the Ocean? New York: Omnibus Press, 1997.
