BRIAN WILSON: MUSICIANS & COMPOSERS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (Salem Press)

A piece that I wrote in 2007 for Salem Press's Musicians and Composers of the Twentieth Century encyclopedia....
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Musician's name as best known: Brian Wilson
Index name: Wilson, Brian
Pronunciation: BRI-ihn WIHL-suhn
Full name: Brian Douglas Wilson
Nationality: American
Musical identity: Rock-and-roll composer, singer, bassist, keyboardist, and producer

Born: June 20, 1942; Hawthorne, California

Influence: Wilson combined the intricate vocal harmonies of the Four Freshman, the simplicity and energy of early rock-and-roll, and the “wall-of-sound” production techniques of Phil Spector with lyrics evoking the seductiveness and fragility of youthful utopianism to create one of the most enduring aural and emotional templates in American popular music. 

The Life: Brian Douglas Wilson (BRI-ihn DUG-lihs WIHL-suhn) was the oldest of three musically talented sons born to Murry and Audree Wilson in Hawthorne, California.  A typical middle-class child in many ways, Wilson distinguished himself at an early age with the ability to memorize and recreate the sophisticated jazzy harmonies of his favorite vocal groups.  It was at his insistence that his younger brothers Carl and Dennis and his cousin Mike Love -- three-fifths of the future Beach Boys -- learned to sing the rudiments of what would become Wilson’s trademark Beach Boys vocal arrangements.  

Wilson’s outwardly gregarious nature (he was a popular high-school athlete and a natural leader) masked inner turmoil, particularly a tumultuous relationship with his father.  Wilson himself would later describe his formation and prolific activity on behalf of the Beach Boys as a struggle both to assert his independence and to earn the approval of his father.

From 1963 to 1965, the Beach Boys placed nine songs and eight albums in the top ten.  Finding himself at twenty-two a millionaire responsible for maintaining and continuously improving the nation’s top hit machine, Wilson began to manifest the symptoms of mental illness.  By the time he oversaw the elaborate recording of the group’s seminal Pet Sounds album and “Good Vibrations” single, he had quit touring with the group and begun seeking solace in marijuana and LSD.

Upon his inability to complete the ambitious Smile album, Wilson withdrew from public life and became as famous for his drug and paranoia-fueled eccentricities as he had been for his prodigious and inventive music.  Although nominally a Beach Boy, his contributions to the group’s music dwindled.  

From 1975 to 1985, Wilson was an overweight, often incoherent caricature of his former self.  Even his partial recovery at the hands of the controversial therapist Eugene Landy was scuttled when Landy, largely because of the questionable nature of his treatment of Wilson, was ordered by a medical board to surrender his license to practice in 1989.

Wilson began a genuine personal and professional renaissance in the mid-1990s, marrying his second wife (Melinda Ledbetter) and finding in the Los Angeles rock band the Wondermints and the musical director-guitarist Jeffrey Foskett musicians with whom he could resume not only touring but also recording.  With this ensemble and the help of the lyricist Van Dyke Parks, Wilson finally released a complete version of Smile in 2004, which was released to strong sales and rapturous critical acclaim.  

Musical Career 
Although it was Wilson’s youngest brother Dennis who gave him the idea to write about  the southern-California surfing fad and the other Beach Boys (plus a rotating stable of lyricists) who helped bring his compositions to life, it was Wilson’s inventive combining of 1950s-vocal-group harmony, rock-and-roll, painstaking production, and, in the Beach Boys’ first five years, frequent lead singing that made his songs an indelible fixture in American pop culture.  The California of Wilson’s imagination was less a tourist attraction than a state of mind representing the transient innocence of youth and the tragedy awaiting those who cling to it.  Ironically, it was by clinging to it that Wilson found himself adrift for most of his adult life, depressed by his inability to match the quality or quantity of his early output and emotionally and psychologically depleted by his self-destructive attempts at coping with this failure.  That he continued composing during even his bleakest decades testifies to the durability of his talent; that he recovered from his self-inflicted wounds, returning to public performing in the late-1990s and completing his long-unfinished “masterpiece” SMiLE in 2004, testifies both to the durability of his will and to the inspirational power of his music.

Surfer Girl.  The third Beach Boys album (and the second to appear in 1963) was also the first on which Wilson was given production credit.  Although the high-energy hits “Little Deuce Coupe” and “Catch a Wave” were typical beach-crazed anthems, the title song and “In My Room” unveiled the vulnerability, introspection, and harmonic sophistication for which Wilson would ultimately become best known.      

Summer Days (and Summer Nights!!).  The highlight of this 1965 album was “California Girls,” a song that found Wilson achieving creative heights that he wouldn’t surpass until he constructed “Good Vibrations” over a six-month period one year later.   

Pet Sounds.  More attention has been paid to this album, the instrumental portions of which Wilson recorded with a studio ensemble in 1966 while the rest of the Beach Boys were on tour, than to any other album in rock-and-roll history.  And it wasn’t even all that rock-and-roll, with some of the music nearly qualifying as “easy listening.”  The Beatles, nevertheless, found it so impressive that they recorded Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in an effort to compete.  Confusing though Pet Sounds’ moody tone was to Beach Boys fans at the time, it made the top ten on the strength of the singles “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “Sloop John B.,” and “Caroline No”--and “God Only Knows,” possibly the most sophisticated and gorgeous song in Wilson’s entire body of work.      

Smiley Smile.  Released in the wake of Wilson’s abandonment of SMiLE, this 1967 oddity documented Wilson’s (and the rest of the Beach Boys’) collapse into disarray in general and drugs in particular.  Were it not for its inclusion of “Good Vibrations” and “Heroes and Villains,” neither of which would be available elsewhere for years, it undoubtedly would have sold even fewer copies than it did. 

Spring.  Spring (known as “American Spring” in the U.K. to avoid confusion with the British act of the same name) was a female duo consisting of Wilson’s then-wife Marilyn and her sister Diane Rovell.  Their eponymous 1972 album features Wilson’s only serious work as a producer during the early 1970s.  

15 Big Ones.  Accompanied upon its appearance in 1976 by a massive “Brian’s Back” promotional campaign, this best-selling album consisted largely of covers of 1950s and 1960s hits and was actually a group Beach Boys effort, albeit one that included more participation from Wilson than any other Beach Boys’ album in a decade.    

Love You.  Released in 1977, this album (also known as The Beach Boys Love You) became a cult favorite on the strength of its playfully catchy melodies--in other words, despite the fact that Wilson’s lyrics revealed him to be the dysfunctional eccentric he had long been suspected of being.   

Brian Wilson.  Lavishly produced, this album appeared in 1988 to high praise from most critics.  The masses, however, found the only partially rehabilitated Wilson’s heavily assisted attempt at recapturing his youthful glories cumbersome.

I Just Wasn't Made for These Times.  This 1995 soundtrack to the Don Was-produced documentary of the same name represented an important step in re-introducing Wilson to serious performing and audiences to the finally rehabilitated Wilson.   

SMiLE.  By the time Wilson and his touring Jeffrey Foskett-led Wondermints band recorded this finally completed version of what had been for almost forty years the most famous “lost“ album in rock-and-roll history, they had already become proficient at presenting it on stage.  So it was that what had in 1966 and 1967 been so difficult to construct that Wilson left it unfinished was in 2004 completed with relative ease.  Although there was pre-release apprehension about whether the new SMiLE would live up to the promise of the pieces of the original that had been released pell-mell over the years, the work’s high quality dispelled doubts among fans and critics alike.  Perhaps the biggest surprise was Wilson’s use of Tony Asher’s original lyrics to “Good Vibrations” instead of the Mike Love lyrics with which fans had long been familiar.  

Musical Legacy
Wilson’s impact on American popular music cannot be overestimated.  Besides writing, arranging, and singing and playing on more than two dozen of the rock-and-roll era’s most popular singles and single-handedly launching the surf-music craze, he pioneered a technologically sophisticated style of production that would influence not only the Beatles but a generation of post-1960s acts as well.  Long after Wilson had retreated from public life, echoes of (and in some cases outright homages to) his style and approach could be heard in the recordings of acts as diverse as the Electric Light Orchestra, the Carpenters, Chicago, Todd Rundgren, Three Dog Night, and the Raspberries.  “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the six-minute signature song of the British hard-rock band Queen that became an international top-ten single in both 1976 and 1991, was in many ways a direct descendant of Wilson’s “Good Vibrations,” consisting as it did of several separately recorded and stylistically diverse sections edited together into a dazzling whole.  

Inducted as a Beach Boy into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988, Wilson would, upon his return to mental stability and public performing in the 1990s, become the recipient of other honors as well, including inductions into the Vocal Group Hall of Fame (with the Beach Boys) in 1998 and the UK Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006.  On December 1, 2007, he was recognized, along with Steve Martin, Leon Fleisher, Martin Scorsese, and Diana Ross, at the prestigious annual Kennedy Center Honors ceremony for the excellence of his contribution to the culture of the United States.       

Further Reading: 
Carlin, Peter Ames.  Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall and Redemption of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson.  New York:  Rodale, 2006.  A serious, well-written, and comprehensively researched biography that combines the best of Steven Gaines’ Heroes and Villains (an unflinching examination of Wilson’s psychological, chemical, and familial problems) with the best of Timothy White’s The Nearest Faraway Place (the citing of the westward migration of Wilson’s Midwestern forebears as a metaphor for Wilson’s artistic ambitions) in a briskly moving narrative.  Completed after Wilson’s successful return to the stage as a touring performer and the 2004 release of Smile, Catch a Wave is the only Brian Wilson/Beach Boys book to end on a note of optimism.

Gaines, Steven. Heroes and Villains: The True Story of the Beach Boys.  New York: Da Capo, 1986.  The first book to de-mythologize the Beach Boys by detailing the bandmembers’ real-life turmoil, decadence, and tragedies.  Suffers from a tabloid-like focus on the scandalous that gives short shrift to the music without which the scandals would be of no interest.

Granata, Charles L.  Wouldn’t It Be Nice: Brian Wilson and the Making of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds.  Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2003.  A painstaking, 256-page investigation of the making of what many consider to be Wilson’s finest moment–as a singer, a songwriter, a producer, and a pop cultural force. 

Leaf, David.  The Beach Boys and the California Myth.  New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978.  The first extensive treatment of Wilson’s music as significant cultural phenomenon. 

White, Timothy.  The Nearest Faraway Place: The Beach Boys and the Southern California Experience.  New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1996.  A reasonably well-written and entertaining Wilson/Beach Boys narrative that has been accused of putting too much emphasis on the role played by Wilson’s ancestors in his artistic and temperamental development..

Williams, Paul.  Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys: How Deep Is the Ocean?  London: Omnibus Press, 2003.  Several decades’ worth of essays on Wilson and the Beach Boys by the much-published rock critic and the founder of Crawdaddy magazine. 

SMiLE: The Rest of the Jeffrey Foskett Q&A (2004)

Shortly after the release of Brian Wilson's SMiLE in 2004, I got the opportunity through WORLD magazine to interview Jeffrey Foskett, who, besides having enjoyed a long-running stint in the Beach Boys' touring band, had played a prominent role in SMiLE's recording and was serving as the musical director on Wilson's SMiLE tour.

The specific reason for the assignment was that Foskett had just released Stars in the Sand (a compilation of his best solo work featuring cameos by Marshall Crenshaw, Chicago's Robert Lamm, the Knack's Doug Fiegler, and Brian Wilson himself) on the Pop Collective label. As people could guess from Pop Collective's first release--Making God Smile, an album of Brian Wilson songs as covered (and covered well) by contemporary-Christian musicians--the label had what might be called Christian leanings. So it was that its CEO, Steve West, had contacted WORLD and that WORLD put him in touch with me.

The published Q&A of my Foskett interview concentrated on Foskett’s Christian faith and his experiences with the Beach Boys. It can be found here.

What follows--aside from a little more about the Beach Boys--is what Foskett had to say about Stars in the Sand, the making of SMiLE, getting to know Marshall Crenshaw, working with Robert Lamm, and performing uncredited all over a Beach Boys-covers album I’d loved for almost twenty years but had never realized he was on.

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ORTEZA: What's the story behind Stars in the Sand?
FOSKETT: It’s my U.S. debut, but it's also kind of a compilation. I have some new songs on there that haven’t been released, and Steve [West] really liked the songs that I’d had on other CDs, and he said, rather than re-record a bunch of different things and release a new album where you are now, let's introduce people to where you’ve come from, and then our next record can be a totally new album.

ORTEZA: What other CDs of yours had he heard?
FOSKETT: I had nine discs before this one, and they were all released on New Surf, which is my own label. Steve liked a lot of those songs, and I gave him a choice of thirty, I guess. Or he gave me a choice of thirty. Then I gave him ten or twelve that I liked the most out of those, and the three guys involved in that label picked ten or twelve that they liked, and then I gave them two previously unreleased songs.

ORTEZA: Which two are those?
FOSKETT: “Living Alone” and “The Mystery of Moonlight.”

ORTEZA: The two co-written by Robert Lamm.
FOSKETT: Correct. Yeah.

ORTEZA: I'll come back to those. But first, as someone who spent a lot of time with the California “Jesus Movement” musicians in the 1970s, did you ever know Chuck Girard [the former lead singer of the Jesus-rock band Love Song and the '60s surf band the Hondells]?
FOSKETT: Oh yeah.

ORTEZA: He had some early Brian Wilson interaction, didn’t he, back when he was in the Hondells?
FOSKETT: Oh yeah. I think there was another guy’s name in front of the Hondells, like “Buddy Randall and the Hondells.” But obviously it was Chuck Girard’s band. He was the lead singer and everything. But somebody else probably had the mother who rented the equipment or something.

ORTEZA: Speaking of renting equipment, how long was it after Mike Love saw your band [the Reverie Rhythm Rockers] perform that he hired you?
FOSKETT: Two or three days. His manager called and asked our band if we wanted to go out on the road to support his solo project.

ORTEZA: Which was Looking Back with Love?
FOSKETT: Looking Back with Love and some of the Almost Summer stuff. We said, “Yeah, sure, we’d love to do it obviously.” And from there he hired me to be in the Beach Boys when Carl left to do his solo tour.

ORTEZA: So you were Carl Wilson’s official replacement?
FOSKETT: Myself and a guy named Adrian Baker, who, strangely enough, I’m still very good friends with--and in another band with.

ORTEZA: Were you ever in Papa Doo Ron Ron?
FOSKETT: I’m in them currently. I don’t say I’m a full-time member. The keyboard player and leader is my former brother-in-law. And as he says onstage--the way he introduces me--“Yeah, Jeffery married my sister. Then she divorced him. So we decided to remain brothers-in-law, and I no longer have a sister” (laughs). It’s kind of a cute thing. We’re very good friends, and he’s a very sweet guy. So that’s my relief and my fun. It’s what I do with them because I don’t have any responsibility in that band. I show up. I hang a guitar around my neck, and away we go, whereas in Brian’s band, you know, everything falls to me.

ORTEZA: Are you on the Papa Doo Ron Ron album that came out on Telarc in 1985?
FOSKETT: I’m credited in the “thank you”s, but I actually sing all of the voices on eight of the songs and lead on eleven of the songs.

ORTEZA: I’ve enjoyed that album for almost twenty years.
FOSKETT: “Don’t Worry Baby” and “In My Room” and “The Warmth of the Sun” were all my voices. The liner notes wouldn’t say that because they didn’t want people to think that it was anyone other than Papa Doo Ron Ron doing it.

ORTEZA: That was a tremendous record.
FOSKETT: It really was. It’s not that accurate, looking back at it, but it sure was a lot of fun.

ORTEZA: It was accurate enough.
FOSKETT: Yeah. In 1985 there was no digital recording of the Beach Boys. So, I mean, that was it.

ORTEZA: You performed with the Beach Boys for a decade. Are you still in touch with them?
FOSKETT: I’m still good friends with everyone in the Beach Boys. There are no hang-ups or animosity towards anyone or anything. I was just at LAX on Sunday and saw Al Jardine. And I’m friendly with Bruce [Johnston]. I call him a couple of times a month. And, obviously, I see Brian all the time. Michael and I don’t speak all that often, but we’re friendly when we see each other.

ORTEZA: How did you meet Marshall Crenshaw?
FOSKETT: I was in the Beach Boys, but I was still living in Santa Barbara, and when I heard his record--when I spun that thing for the first time--I was absolutely bowled over. And I was in a power-pop trio called the Pranks. The Reverie Rhythm Rockers was our club band, and the Pranks was the same personnel, but it was only original music. We tried doing it as the Reverie Rhythm Rockers, but people would yell, “Play ‘Nowhere Man’! Play ‘Twist and Shout’!” So we changed the name, and they knew it was only original music when we were the Pranks, and they knew it was only cover music when we were Reverie.

As the Pranks we were being courted by a couple of different record labels, one of them being Warner Brothers. This gal, Roberta Peterson, who was Ted Templeman’s sister, was really hot on us, but she was also really hot on another trio from the East Coast, and that happened to be Marshall Crenshaw’s band. She said, “I’m only going to sign one of you guys, so I’m bringing all the big wigs to your next concert.” Well, the big wigs didn’t even show up, so we figured that they’d signed the other band. And I’m really glad they did, because when I spun Crenshaw’s disc, man, I was flipped. I mean, that first record of his is the standard by which all power-pop records should be measured, in my opinion. And being that kind of fan, of the music and then the guy that wrote the music, I was in awe. So I read an interview with him where he said that the guitar he really wanted was an Epiphone Wilshire 12, which is a twelve-string guitar. And he said, “I saw a picture of one in a catalog, but I’m convinced Epiphone never made one because I’ve never seen one, and I’ve looked in every pawn shop and in every music store.”

Now, one strange thing was that I owned one. So what happened was, he was playing the home club that I used to play in Santa Barbara. I wasn’t in that band anymore, and they were now just having big-name acts come through and play. Crenshaw was playing, and I knew all the guys there. So I walked up onto the stage after his sound check, and I put the Epiphone Wilshire 12 on his guitar stand, and I wrote, “Merry Christmas from Jeffrey Foskett.” He didn’t know who that was, so he said, “Hey, is there a Jeffrey Foskett in the audience?” So I went up there, and I said “Yeah.” And he said, “Are you giving me this guitar?” I said, “Yeah” (laughs)!

ORTEZA: Now, that’s the way to make a good first impression.
FOSKETT: Exactly. So obviously we hit it off well, and we remain close to this day.

ORTEZA: I’m guessing that you came into contact with Robert Lamm through the Beach Boys since they and Chicago go way back?
FOSKETT: Yeah. We did a lot of “Beachago” tours, as they call them. We did several months, two or three times, with Chicago and the Beach Boys. And Robert and I, fortunately, always shared a microphone and always stood on the same spot onstage. And he loved my energy and loved the way that I sang. You know, if Jimmy Pankow didn’t write it [a Chicago song], Robert Lamm did. Pankow wrote a lot of the early stuff, and Robert’s the one that kept them going through the “lean years,” as I like to say. He’s such a talented guy, and to this day he’s just so--what’s the word I’m looking for?--so non-egotistical and so generous with letting other people sing his music. And I said, “Robert, man, you wrote seventy percent of those live songs, and the rest of the guys in your band are singing them.” And he said, “I don’t mind being the puppet master as long as we work” (laughs). And I thought, “What a cool thing!” So he was very cool. And he let me sing “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?” onstage when we would do that because he liked the way I sang it, you know? That was cool, and we got along very well.

And one day--I don’t know, a couple of years ago--he called me and said, “Hey, I’m looking for some new writing partners. You know, I like to just change things and change styles and get other ideas. Are you interested?” And I said, “Of course!” He said, “Great.” Well then--I mean, this guy is no nonsense. He said, “I’m free on the thirtieth at two o’clock. I’ll be at your house.” And I said, “Great” (laughs)! So, sure enough, at 1:55 up pulls Robert Lamm, takes his keyboard out of his trunk, comes into the house, and we hammered out three or four songs.

ORTEZA: Did it break down along lyrics-music lines, or was it more of a mesh?
FOSKETT: No. It was total fifty-fifty on everything, except for “Living Alone.” What happened was, he has an entire cache of lyrics and other things. And he said, “If you want to look through these, go ahead.” It was like looking through, you know, the Holy Grail, because this is stuff that he never lets anybody see. He said, “I‘m very hesitant to show my unpublished lyrics to anybody, but I want you to look at them.” So he had this song called “Living Alone,” and I said, “This is a very interesting song. How did you write these lyrics?” And he said, “I haven’t looked at those in almost twenty-five years. I wrote those the night after Karen Lamm left me.”

ORTEZA: For one of the Beach Boys, right?
FOSKETT: Yeah, for Dennis. I said, “Do you mind if I take a shot at writing some music for that?” And he said, “No. Go ahead.” So I only changed a couple of the lyrical things. I would say it’s ninety-nine percent Robert. I think I added one line. And then I wrote most of the music, probably ninety-eight percent of the music. And he made some chord changes in there that he thought would go better than what I had.

ORTEZA: The new SMiLE album is a completely new recording, right?
FOSKETT: It’s absolutely a new recording. We cut the basic tracks in four days at Sunset Sound, and then we did the vocals, and it took about a week to do the vocals.

ORTEZA: Was the original version anywhere close to being finished back in 1967 when Brian abandoned it?
FOSKETT: Well, as he did with “Good Vibrations,” he recorded everything in sections. So were the sections recorded and did we have a template to work from? Yes. But was it put in any kind of sensical order? No.

ORTEZA: So this sequence is the first official one?
FOSKETT: If you look at Brian’s quote-unquote handwritten sequence in a lot of the publications of what these experts think of SMiLE, first of all, it’s not Brian’s handwriting. I know that for a fact because obviously I would know. And secondly they had it ending with “Old Master Painter,” which doesn’t make any sense. “Old Master Painter” is that old folk song, you know, that is all of thirty-three seconds long or whatever it is. And obviously it’s just stuff that they had recorded at that point. It wasn’t an order. And, don’t quote me, but I think it’s Diane Rovell’s handwriting. And I think she was just writing down things that were recorded. The order makes no sense! So there was never a version cut together. And all the experts are like, “Oh, this is the definitive order! This is Brian Wilson’s handwriting!” Yeah. O.K. Whatever. No, there was never an order put together, but there were a lot of those songs, as I said, that we drew from to have our template, made and recorded already.

ORTEZA: It seems odd that this album that went unfinished for over thirty years finally came together so quickly.
FOSKETT: Well, we had been performing it live, which was a good move. We went out and took it on the road for four months before we recorded it. So we were very familiar with it. And we were able to do it almost live. As a matter of fact, we cut it section by section. We did basically the three full sections. And then, with the exception of a couple of the songs--like “Good Vibrations,” which we did as a totally separate entity.

ORTEZA: Why did he decide to go with "Good Vibrations"' alternate lyrics?
FOSKETT: Those are the original lyrics that Tony Asher wrote. Michael Love wrote the other ones because, quite frankly, he didn’t like Tony’s lyrics. And Brian always liked Tony’s lyrics better. So he wanted to use them because they were the ones that he wanted originally. Michael Love was also aware of publishing in those days, of songwriting credit and whatnot. And, quite frankly, Mike told me he wrote the lyrics on the way to the recording studio. It’s nothing that he sat down and thought about. He wanted new lyrics, and he wanted to impress Brian. So he wrote them on the way to the session. And he didn’t live that far from the studio, you know? He lived on Coldwater, and the studio was on Sunset. So it wasn’t that big of a deal.

ORTEZA: I’m guessing that serving as the musical director for the SMiLE tour must be enormously daunting.
FOSKETT: Well, actually, I really enjoyed every minute of it. When we talked about it originally, I thought, “I don’t know how we’re going to do this.” But I'll give credit where credit is due--obviously, Brian’s genius is in writing all that stuff, and then this fellow Darian [Sahanaja], who plays the keyboards in the band, deserves a lot of credit as well. He was the one that kind of put together and made sense out of all of the parts for us to learn to sing. So that was nice, because it saved me a ton of time. Darian is a very sweet guy and a very right-on musician, and he actually helped a great deal in that fashion.