Murry (Part 4 of 4)
Brian Wilson on Murry Wilson.
Reminder: a comment on the overall purpose of this essay was provided in Part 1. See the Note to reader / Preface. — Thank you for reading.
The previous sections of “Murry” (see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) tried to trace how the issue of Murry Wilson’s abusive parenting has evolved over several decades of Beach Boys reportage and critical commentary. During the height of the Beach Boys’ popularity in the 1960s, the problem was almost certainly unknown to family outsiders, being only hinted at in the vaguest sense if at all, in Crawdaddy magazine in 1968. It wasn’t until 1971 when Murry’s violence was first referred to in the print media (as a “rumor”). By 1976, the matter could no longer be treated as mere rumor. It had become, more or less, public knowledge, due in no small part to things Dennis Wilson said in the press.
Part 3 revisited David Leaf’s careful, judicious, and influential commentary from 1978 as a way to get inside the problem and unpack the difficulties inherent to the Murry question. In short: in a case of severe child abuse, middle ground is scarce; it could very well be impossible to be truly “fair” to both Murry and at the same time the kids he battered so severely. Part 3 ended with the suggestion that neither Murry nor Dennis were amenable to compromise on the issue of what had occurred back in Hawthorne. Murry held fast to his beliefs about his behavior, calling it love. To Dennis, it was hate.
Assuming (for now) that Carl Wilson’s virtual public silence amounts to an abstention, that leaves one brother to look at: Brian Wilson (1942-2025). Where did Brian stand on the question of how he and his brothers had been treated?
Part 4:
viii.
The problem with asking where Brian Wilson stood on the matter of his father is that Brian didn’t really “stand” anywhere. He floated—as he himself sang on “Til I Die,” like “a cork on the ocean.” In that song Brian was writing about his state of depression, egolessness and passivity. Moreover, while still only in his late twenties, Brian was making the tragic prediction that this was how it was going to be for the rest of his life, a prophecy that more or less proved accurate. Notwithstanding his various accomplishments, triumphs, and ultimate redemption, “Til I Die” accurately encapsulates the character of Brian’s life as a man: a certain passivity in the face of overpowering circumstances which may very well have been beyond his control.
The injurious phases of Brian’s life—the abuse and betrayal in childhood, the exploitation and theft of his songs, the lack of recognition, the rejection and suppression of his best music, the symbolic or literal retreat to “the bedroom”, the drug addiction, mental illness, continued exploitation and abuse (this time of the “therapeutic” variety)—demonstrate both the reason for Brian’s retreat and the enormous price he paid for it. In the ancient philosophy of the East, passivity, non-attachment, and withdrawal are steps on the path to enlightenment, and ultimately, God. In the popular movie The Big Lebowski, an amiable stoner’s ability to “abide” the incomprehensible human madness swirling about him is presented as a charming virtue. And in that movie, “The Dude”—very much a cork on the ocean himself—emerges from the chaos as a heroic slacker no worse for wear. Brian wasn’t as fortunate.
However, Brian’s passivity was not the same as powerlessness, regardless of how things might have seemed at times. Nor was it the same as weakness or “fragility.” And, notwithstanding the fear and anxiety he lived with all his life, it mustn’t be confused with cowardice. It was not failure either—certainly not in the long run, as Brian’s life story also demonstrates. Brian’s mode of withdrawal cannot be held up as a viable strategy for dealing with life, but considering the situation he was born into and how its unique circumstances began to unfold by age 19 or 20, it could be that along with all the damage, the passive, cork-on-the-ocean existence yielded a benefit: survival. As Brian observed in his 2016 book, “My body had taken a beating. My brains at times took a beating. But I tried to keep my spirit going. I was a survivor.”
In the years during which Brian survived, he made a number of public statements about Murry. The volume of his commentary far outweighs that of Carl and Dennis combined—a result of Brian’s longevity as well as the fact that he’s the brother at the center of the “Saga,” the main man, the one we write books and make movies about, the one whose opinion matters the most. And Brian delivered on this important issue. When asked about his father, he answered, time and again, often insightfully and authoritatively, saying what he thought.
However, taken as a collective whole, Brian’s commentary on his dad does not fully cohere. There are inconsistencies and in some cases, outright contradictions. To some degree, this is to be expected because, like any other man, Brian’s perspective on his own life is bound to change over time. And in Brian’s case there’s the added element of his uncommonly tumultuous life. If it’s true that Brian lived much of his life as a cork on the ocean (or leaf on a windy day), it makes sense that his attitude toward his father would be similarly inconstant and to some extent unpredictable.
Anyway, as an illustration, here is a jumble of Brian’s statements on Murry, grouped together in non-chronological order, without additional context or citation:
I didn’t like the feeling of, uh… being hit. It bothered me. I didn’t like it.
It bothered me because it made me feel like I was goofing up, that I was inferior, it made me feel worthless and a number of emotions like that.
We needed to express ourselves musically because of a bad childhood. A bad, bitter childhood.
He was the one who steered me and my brothers toward singing and playing, and who made it easy for it to be more than a hobby.
My dad taught me perfection.
He even wrote songs himself, and not as a total amateur.
I’m a perfectionist. Just like my dad was.
My dad yelled at or beat me so often that all he had to do was look at me and I’d flinch. I was always looking over my shoulder, expecting the worst from everyone.
He scared me so much I actually got scared into making good records.
He was a bad musician. I learned nothing from him.
My dad was a very inspirational person in my life, but he was also the worst person I ever met in my life.
You go through your childhood and you have a mean father that brutalizes you, that terrorizes you… He'd take his belt and he would double it over and he'd have maximum control and power and... Boom... boom... boom... boom…
…when you’re a kid, you have no defenses against your dad, or your mom… you’re totally dependent on them. And if they whack you around, you’ve got nothing but pain, and sorrow… that follows you around, you know?
When your father tells you to do something, you do it, because all you've ever known since you were a little baby was that he was boss.
I was partly my dad. I could sense things in me that were things in him.
The way my dad treated me was tough, and it made me tougher.
He taught me how to be tough. He showed me a way to be the kind of person who has to forge ahead.
He was also the main force behind the early years of the band. He brought us from the garage to the Pendletones to the Beach Boys. We were just kids. We were his kids.
My relationship with him was very unique.
I am fortunate to have parents who are interested in the way I develop my character, and how I act.
I’ve come to understand him as a man, who, despite words to the contrary, hated himself, resented the world, and took out terrible feelings on his family.
I don’t like making the discussion all about how terrible my dad was, even if that’s true. The way he brought me up made me more focused on getting things done.
In some ways I haven't gotten beyond my dad… in some ways I was very afraid of my dad. In other ways I loved him because he knew where it was at. He had that competitive spirit which really blew my mind.
He always has had a problem of understanding people and their feelings.
Dad instilled in me a predisposition to mental illness that left me a cripple.
I was never scared of my brothers, but I was scared of my dad, though, I'll tell you that.
I can understand intellectually [why he hit me], but my feelings won't accept it. He got beat to hell all the time by his dad and he attacked me, assaulted me with this tremendous amount of aggression . . . boom!
He could be generous and guide me toward great things but he could also be brutal and belittle me and sometimes even make me regret that I was alive.
Brian doesn’t quite sound like Dennis, does he? There isn’t one reference to a “motherfucker” or “asshole” in the entire batch. Why not? Nor did Brian ever say (in public) that his father “beat the shit out of him” or that Murry’s punishments were sick. Instead, it’s boom… boom… boom. How come? It’s yet another complicated question, whose answer would at a minimum have something to do with the differences between the two brothers.
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In hindsight, it’s clear that when he wrote “Til I Die,” Brian was consciously assessing his current situation (“I lost my way”) as well as the fact that his existence as a passive, acted-upon object would be permanent (“until I die”). But along with that, Brian was inadvertently predicting his long-term survival. Because after all, a cork on the ocean will not sink under the waves.
However, Brian’s brother Dennis did go under, quite literally, a long time ago. Brian and Dennis of course had several things in common: similar background; similar physical treatment at the hands of their father; a shared creative and artistic temperament; both became subsumed by addiction in their thirties. But there were critical differences between them too, not the least of which was the stance each adopted toward the world; the way they confronted the problems and challenges of their lives. When Brian found himself on the “raging sea” of his life, he withdrew into nonaction, sacrificing his personal agency and subjectivity to instead become an object to be fought over by competing factions. In contrast, when Dennis found himself on the raging sea, he raged back. He fought.
One of Dennis’s earliest memories, if not his earliest, was being punched by Murry. That was how the world greeted him (as it did Brian), and it probably wasn’t too long before Dennis began to fight back. As it always is in cases like this, he wasn’t fighting just to protect himself, but for love, and for that reason he was at a tremendous disadvantage. It would never be a fair fight. Having been acclimated to violence by his father, Dennis quickly developed a physical, externalized fearlessness. He fought in school, and later scrapped with the other Beach Boys, and other musicians in the backing band and on the touring circuit. He brawled in restaurants and bars. According to a story related by Jon Stebbins in his book The Lost Beach Boy, after an early Beach Boys gig in Santa Cruz, a 17 or 18-year-old Dennis single-handedly took on a group of young men, quickly incapacitated one of them, and scared the rest away. (Anecdotally, it seems a lot of these incidents involved territorial disputes over women.) Equipped with a hair-trigger fight reflex formed in childhood, Dennis would fight anyone, it seems, at the drop of a hat. In the end, this can’t be said to have been any more beneficial to him than extreme nonaggression had been for Brian.
But it was this same Dennis—the fighter—who, before spiraling down, made those blunt statements to press in the 1970s not only about what he and Brian had endured at Murry’s hands, but what it all meant, qualitatively: hate.
Dennis was wrong to think he could get away with saying something like this. Wrong if he thought anybody (who mattered) would really take him seriously; wrong to think anybody (who mattered) would really care; and finally, wrong to think that anyone would ever believe for a second that a demanding and protective old-school father like Murry could ever hate one (or two) of the sons for whom he had sacrificed so much. Murry as a “motherfucker” or “asshole?” Sure, and to some who knew the man, maybe even a “sick fuck” too. Undoubtedly, Murry was a true piece of work. But hate? Nobody except crazy Dennis Wilson would ever go so far as to invoke hate when talking about Murry.
Nobody, that is, except one other commentator: Brian Wilson. What Brian said (in David Leaf’s 2005 Smile documentary Beautiful Dreamer) was:
My dad was a very, very hostile, messed up man, with a lot of hatred in him.
That was it. At first pass, it’s a fairly uncontroversial statement, given all that Brian and many other people had already said by that point. But the word “hatred” stands out here, for it is extremely rare to locate any Beach Boys commentary in which the quality of hate is ascribed to Murry Wilson so directly, as a plain fact. It can’t be stated with absolute certainty, but it could very well be that the only two people who have used the words hate or hatred to describe Murry are Dennis Wilson and Brian Wilson. And if that is the case, the reason is obvious. It’s because they were there. They know.
Yet the brothers apply the concept of hatred differently. Dennis says that “the motherfucker hated us”—that Murry’s appalling actions, in the end, prove that Murry hated him and Brian (and maybe Carl too). Brian might agree, but only to the extent that a man who is already assumed to hate his kids must necessarily have hatred inside him. But did Brian assume, as Dennis came to believe, that Murry hated them?
No. According to the late-era Brian who in 2016 spoke through the book I Am Brian Wilson, Murry did not hate him and Dennis. To the contrary:
But my dad loved me. He loved all of us.
It is common to see the word “love” used in connection with Murry, certainly much more common than “hate” or “hatred.” Many commentators in the journalist and critical community have opined, or assumed (or relayed the opinion of observers and insiders who believe) that Murry loved his sons. Yet it was quite rare to hear Brian Wilson say it. In fact, this 2016 statement may very well have been the first time Brian publicly stated that his father loved him. That Brian loved Murry? That the son loved the father? Yes—Brian had said that before. But this is something different, and the fact that Brian said it (maybe for the first time) so late in life is significant.
Because Brian must be taken seriously, it should be assumed that he knew what he was saying here and that he meant it: that, as Brian sang around the same time, “there’s only one kind of love”—unconditional love—and this must have been the kind Murry gave to Brian. Does this then constitute Brian’s retraction of his words of 2004-05, when he said Murry “had a lot of hatred in him”? Not necessarily. The phrases my dad had a lot of hatred in him and my dad loved me are not contradictory.
What it means is that the older Brian of the lateera and the Dennis of the mid-1970s (and up until his death1) agreed on certain important matters, but differed on how to think about it. Dennis had reached a point in life where he could feel that Murry hated him and Brian. Brian may have felt the same at various points but did not say that Murry hated him or Dennis.2 What Brian said was that hate was something inside Murry. Dennis uses the word as a verb, while for Brian, hate is a noun. For Brian, hate is its own thing, a distinct entity separate from human beings like his father who for whatever reason are afflicted and infected with it in excess.
Taken as a whole, what Brian is saying is that “a hostile, messed up man with a lot of hatred in him” who treated his children with extreme cruelty can nevertheless love those children. It is itself a very loving and optimistic way of thinking not only about Murry but all people. In a nutshell, Brian is saying that hate is real, love is real, and that anybody—even people like his father who are filled with hate—can retain the faculty for love.
Is this true? Does Brian’s way of thinking make the matter of love too easy or too hard? What would Murry have said in response to Brian’s outlook? What would Dennis have said? What if Dennis had regained some measure of stability and gone on to live a long life? Would he have remained steadfast in his uncharitable view of Murry, or would he have come around to Brian’s way of thinking? Did Brian’s insight, fundamental optimism, and ultimate belief in Murry’s love aid his own long-term survival? Did Brian pay a price for thinking this way, and if so, what was it? What was the price Dennis paid for his way of thinking? And was it all worth it?
Who said it was easy.
Love is indescribable and unconditional. I could tell you a thousand things that it is not, but not one that it is. Either you have it or you haven't; there's no proof of it.
—Duke Ellington
Love, when you get fear in it, it’s not love anymore. It’s hate.
—James M. Cain
Selected References for “Murry,” Parts 1-4
Carlin, Peter Ames. Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson. Emmaus, PA: Rodale, 2006.
“Dennis Wilson—Pete Fornatale Interview 1976.” At YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVItbEJBkJM (posted by “steel7866”)
Edmonds, Ben. “The Lonely Sea.” MOJO, November, 2002.
Felton, David. "The Healing of Brother Bri." Rolling Stone, November 4, 1976.
Gabler, Neal. “The Beach Boys: Riding a New Wave.” New Times, April 2, 1976.
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.
I Just Wasn't Made For These Times. Directed by Don Was. Palomar Pictures, 1995. DVD: Artisan Entertainment.
Kent, Nick. “The Last Beach Movie, Part 1: 20,000 Leagues Under the Surf.” New Musical Express, June 21, 1975.
__________. “The Last Beach Movie, Part 2: Smile…” In Domenic Priore, Look! Listen! Vibrate! SMILE! San Francisco: Last Gasp, 1994.
Leaf, David. The Beach Boys and the California Myth. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978.
__________ . "Requiem for the Beach Boy." In Kingsley Abbott, ed. Back to the Beach: A Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys Reader. London: Helter Skelter Publishing, 1999.
__________ . God Only Knows: The Story of Brian Wilson, The Beach Boys and the California Myth. London: Omnibus Press, 2022.
“The Lorren Daro Thread.” Comment thread at The Smiley Smile Message Board. At Smileysmile.net/board/index.php/topic,19579.0.html
Matijas-Mecca, Christian. The Words and Music of Brian Wilson. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2017.
Nolan, Tom. “The Beach Boys: A California Saga." Rolling Stone, October 28, 1971.
__________. “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.
Pamplin, Rushton, and Ron Hamady. The Beach Boys’ Endless Wave: Inside America’s Band. Culver City, CA: Westcom Press, 2018.
Preiss, Byron. The Beach Boys: The Authorized Biography of America's Greatest Rock 'n' Roll Band. New York: Ballantine Books, 1979.
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.
Tune X Podcast. “Pretty Soon I’ll Be Blown Away.” November 30, 2022. Download via Apple iTunes. (hosted by dauberbumble)
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.
It is possible that Dennis said more about Murry in the years following the mid-1970s. Perhaps a reiteration, or qualification, clarification, or apology? If he did, I’m unaware of it. As far as I know, Dennis’s quotes from the 1970s are his last known public comments about Murry. If that’s true, then my assumption would be that he never changed his mind during the remaining years of his life. But I haven’t carefully researched this question.
The only person Brian has ever said Murry actively hated was Murry himself. In in his controversial 1991 autobiography Wouldn’t It Be Nice: My Own Story (a book widely assumed to have been unduly influenced by Dr. Eugene Landy), Brian said that Murry “hated himself, resented the world and took out terrible feelings on his family.” Regardless of whether the insight originated with Landy or Brian, it’s probably correct. Even so, this language was constructed so as to avoid the conclusion that Murry displaced his self-hate onto his kids. No—according to this framing, it was only Murry’s unspecified “terrible feelings” that he transferred, while the actual hate itself remained directed inwardly, at himself. This statement from 1991 is consistent with what Brian said in David Leaf’s documentary Beautiful Dreamer in 2005 and the book I Am Brian Wilson in 2016.