Brian Wilson: Good Vibrations again

Brian Wilson walked into his manager’s Beverly Hills office looking fit enough to be hanging 10 on a surfboard, something he immortalized in the old Beach Boys songs.

He was halfway through a yearlong, 24-hour-a-day psychiatric program that he hoped would mark his final liberation from a drug-aggravated emotional retreat in the late ‘60s and ‘70s. Wilson was so whacked-out for part of that period that he never heard about Watergate, a friend said. He had to be re-taught the words to his own songs.

Wearing jeans and a polo shirt, Wilson had come into town from Malibu to do his first full-length interview since a short-lived comeback attempt in 1976. He was down from 311 pounds to 190.

Classic stories from the Los Angeles Times’ 143-year archive

More from L.A. Timeless

As his psychiatrist, his manager and his publicist sat by, Wilson spoke about his ordeal. At times he was morose: “I’ve walked a lonely path for 15 years. There were times when not one human being (seemed to be) my friend.”

But he was generally upbeat, looking forward to writing and recording again.

“I want to say something good, positive in my music,” he said. “I’ve had a lot happen to me. I’ve learned a lot about good and bad things in life. But I always carry something along with me as a goal that I can always look forward to. Otherwise you don’t want to live.”

When Wilson left for lunch with two of the medical aides who are with him around the clock, those remaining in the room seemed jubilant about the way Wilson had handled himself in the first of two scheduled interviews. Exclaimed publicist Sandy Friedman, “Brian wasn’t capable of doing an interview like this in ‘76!” Replied psychiatrist Dr. Eugene Landy: “1976? Brian wasn’t capable of doing an interview like this in January.”

The Beach Boys’ story began in Hawthorne in 1961 when Brian Wilson, his younger brothers Carl and Dennis, cousin Mike Love and high school chum Alan Jardine decided to form a band. They fooled around briefly with different group names and pop-rock styles until Dennis came up with the idea of doing a song about surfing.

Though big in Southern California, surfing wasn’t yet part of the national teen consciousness, a fact that led their record company to later put this description of surfing in the liner notes of the first Beach Boys album: “A water sport (where the surfer) attempts to remain perpendicular while being hurtled toward the shore at a rather frightening rate of speed on the crest of a huge wave.”

The first single, titled “Surfin’” and released on a small independent label, was a smash in Southern California and attracted enough national attention for Capitol Records to sign the band. Brian was just 19 the next summer when Capitol released its first Beach Boys single, “Surfin’ Safari.” It reached the national Top 20.

Over the next five years, the group had more than a dozen other Top 20 singles, most of them written, arranged and produced by Brian Wilson. Unlike the rebellious music that characterized rock in the ’50s, the Beach Boys’ songs were full of sunshine and good times: “Fun, Fun, Fun,” “I Get Around” and the classic “Good Vibrations.”

However, three things happened during that period to change the future of the Beach Boys. One was Brian’s decision to stop touring. He had pushed himself to the point of a nervous breakdown by the constant traveling and his need to write and produce new material. Another problem was Wilson’s obsession with upgrading the Beach Boys’ music—a desperate drive that some say was tied to his desperate desire to outdo the Beatles.

But the third factor probably had the greatest effect on Brian Wilson during that period: He took LSD.

“He did acid; the acid freaked him out,” Landy said. He was sitting in a Malibu restaurant a few moments after Wilson’s second interview session. “Then he just wanted to withdraw. “It happened long before I knew him, so you know as much as I do about what really took place (during that period).

We’ve all heard those stories.

The “stories” are almost as well-traveled in rock as Wilson’s songs: the time Brian put his piano in a giant sandbox in his living room; the time Brian didn’t step outside of the house for nearly two years; the time Brian destroyed the tapes to a track he had recorded because he feared its “bad vibes” made it responsible for a rash of fires around town. Some even said Brian had lost his mind, that he was little more than a vegetable.

Wilson continued to work in the studio and sometimes even went back on the road with the Beach Boys, but his role was limited after the tortured late-’60s when he struggled to come up with a “masterwork” that would match the artistic ambition of the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s” LP.

Over the years, a series of doctors, psychiatrists and “handlers” worked with him. One of the psychiatrists was Landy, 48, a powerful, aggressive personality who pioneered an unusual (and expensive) “24-Hour Therapy” approach.

Unlike conventional therapy that involves limited (usually 50-minute) sessions in an office setting, Landy’s method involves total contact with patients in their own environment as part of a program to break down the “facades” that patients adopt in public to mask their inadequacies and/or fears.

According to Landy, he and his associates “totally disrupt the privacy of their patient’s lives, gaining complete control over every aspect of their physical, personal, social and sexual environments”. To help defray the expenses of the program, the Beach Boys are earmarking the net proceeds from one concert a month to Brian.

Landy, whose other show-biz clients have included Alice Cooper, Richard Harris and Rod Steiger, met Wilson in 1975 after being called in by Brian’s wife, Marilyn. Wilson himself later asked Landy to help him. They were to work together only a few months in their first relationship.

Landy admits he’s a controversial figure. Where most psychiatrists refuse to discuss clients’ cases publicly, Landy believes he and celebrity clients have a duty to speak out. He feels such testimonials can help others who share similar problems. But Landy did ask Wilson in the presence of a reporter for permission to discuss the case.

What was Wilson like in 1975 when Landy first met him?

The psychiatrist replied: “What I saw was a man who was very frightened, scared and hiding in his room. He did not wish to talk to anybody. (He) did not want to have any demands placed on him. (He) had regressed into an infantile kind of state.

“He had to overcome a father who was completely explosive and unpredictable. When you never know what you’re going to be either hit or praised for, you have no base line. You (can’t say), ‘If I do this, I’ll get hit. If I do that, I’ll get stroked.’ One day you get hit for it, the next day you get stroked for it. That’s a little schitzy.”

When he did acid, he expanded the whole thing.”

But what about all those happy songs Wilson wrote in the beginning?

“All that good feeling was his way of experiencing something he didn’t have,” Landy speculated.

“It was inside, but it wasn’t around him. It was an inside desire that he didn’t have. It was like a cry for help: ‘I want this, I want this.’ Other people enjoyed it because they thought he had it.”

Under Landy’s supervision, Wilson improved enough for the Beach Boys to showcase their leader in interviews and on record in 1976 as part of the group’s 15th anniversary campaign. But things were still quite fragile.

During that campaign, Wilson spoke to Rolling Stone magazine’s David Felton. He described the effect of drugs on his life, saying they made it almost impossible for him to socialize.

“I was a useless little vegetable,” Wilson said in the interview. “I made everybody very angry at me because I wasn’t able to work, to get off my butt. Coke every day. Goin’ over to parties. Just having bags of snow around, just snortin’ it down like crazy.”

Then Wilson startled the writer. Out of earshot of Landy, Wilson asked Felton if he had any drugs he could have.

Landy stopped working with Wilson after a few months because of a dispute with the group’s then-manager, Steve Love.

According to various people involved, Wilson began to withdraw when Landy was no longer around. He continued to go on stage with the Beach Boys at times, but his presence was more symbolic than active. At some shows, he would simply sit at the piano and stare into space, or get up after a few songs and wander backstage.

Recalling the break with Landy, Wilson said: “I felt a void . . . like a lot was taken off my shoulders all at once and I felt a little nervous. I started taking drugs again because I couldn’t handle the freedom that I had all of a sudden.”

Still, the group clung to every sign that Wilson would improve—that the distant gaze would leave his eyes and that his concentration span would lengthen.

As Wilson’s weight headed toward 300 pounds and beyond late last year, Tom Hulett, who began managing the Beach Boys in 1981, felt strong action was necessary.

Sitting in his office, Hulett said: “I got very scared. I worked with Elvis and saw what he went through. I also helped bury Hendrix. I told the other guys in the band that if we didn’t do something Brian was going to be the next headline (death) in Billboard. I heard rumors of drug dealers showing up and I knew we had to take action.”

With attorney John Branca, Hulett contacted Landy again and asked for help. Landy welcomed the reunion. “It was like an artist finishing a painting,” he said of working with Wilson again. “We had stopped in the middle of something and here was a man who had the potential to (reach) a certain place emotionally that he hadn’t gotten to.”

As part of his therapy program, Landy insists that the patients ask for help. Wilson didn’t hesitate. With his weight up to 311, he knew he needed assistance. Indeed, Landy suggests that Wilson was in such bad shape that he wouldn’t have lived longer than two more years. His lung capacity was down to 40%. He was smoking four packs of cigarettes a day. His system was full of toxic chemicals.

Looking back on that period, Wilson said: “I went through a lot of suffering because I was so overweight. It’s tough being over 300 pounds and getting along with people to any degree. Every time I would look down at my belly, that would be the end of my day. It just bummed my whole life to have to carry this 150-pound sack on my back.”

How could someone as wealthy and famous as Wilson allow himself to get into such a situation? How could he have so little self-respect? The issue, Landy countered, wasn’t self-respect, but control.

“Acid regressed him and frightened him,” Landy said. “Then the standard treatment for it for a number of years was . . . all kinds of (tranquilizer) drugs. What they (doctors) did was calm him down. The problem with most medications is they are really to help the people around the patient, not the patient.”

Wilson was sedated so heavily, Landy charged, that onstage he couldn’t even remember the words to some of his songs.

In Hawaii, they started by taking him off medication and getting his waistline down. By the time Wilson was back in Los Angeles, he had gone from a size 55 belt to 38. He’s now down to a 36.

But the physical side of Wilson was just half the therapy program: Landy’s goal is to “re-parent” Wilson.

The psychiatrist said, “I’m the good father. I’m re-parenting the way he perceives life. Children are born and are dependent. They know nothing. And you teach them. It’s the same with him. That’s why it’s re-parenting.

“He is dependent. I am teaching him ways, methods and functions to become self-sufficient, competent, adequate, logical and (capable of) decision making so that I can walk away and he can take care of himself. That’s the goal.”

Landy is also trying to get Wilson active socially and culturally. That’s why he takes Wilson to concerts, the ballet and museums. He also makes sure Brian watches some news and talk shows on TV. With the added input, Landy feels Wilson will also begin having more things to write about.

Wilson is a charmer. He’s got a warm smile and a puppy-dog exuberance when he pulls you over to the piano and plays a new song. He sometimes has trouble keeping dates straight and his attention sometimes fades, but he can snap back with funny and/or biting comments, playfully accusing the slightly built Landy (whom he sometimes calls Napoleon) of having a giant ego.

Wilson seemed anxious when sitting for a formal interview, sometimes adopting the stance of a man on the witness stand. He seemed much more at home when he could simply engage in informal conversation.

When he learned that the reporter knew one of Wilson’s early inspirations, record producer Phil Spector, his eyes lit up. “You know Phil? Well, tell him something for me, would you? Tell him Brian Wilson thinks he should make a record with Jerry Lee Lewis. Wouldn’t that be something?”

Once interested, he would continue to talk eagerly.

He spoke warmly about Spector and other early favorites like Chuck Berry, Little Richard and the Four Freshmen. He’s also extremely proud of the Beach Boys’ music. He was delighted that Randy Newman mentioned the group in his “I Love L.A.” single and he pointed out that Paul McCartney once called “Pet Sounds” his favorite album.

But he’s also quick to share the credit, noting the importance to the group of Mike Love, who co-wrote many of the Beach Boys’ hits, including “Good Vibrations”.

Discussing that landmark rock track, Wilson also poked fun at all the talk about his “genius” in the studio. “It was Carl’s idea to use a cello (on the record). So that takes away half my ‘genius’ right there. I’d call (the strength of the record) a song/arrangement combination rather than just the song.”

About his musical beginnings, he said: “My mother and father bought a piano and an organ one day and they’d play duets on it. When they weren’t playing, I’d go to the piano and learn how to plunk out the Four Freshmen songs and analyze the sound and the harmonics of it. The only lessons I ever took were accordion lessons for a month once.”

On the early direction of the Beach Boys, Wilson said: “The surfing trend was so strong in the early ‘60s that it was only natural we followed through on that trend. It was a big thrill having the first record.”

“I had a subconscious good feeling about the group and the possibility of our group becoming an institution . . . (it) became hard work right around time we went to Australia (in the early ‘60s). Took us 17 hours to get down there. It was so hard. Roy Orbison was with us. He was huge in Australia—bigger than we were.”

Did he worry about taking the drugs in the mid-’60s?

“No, I wasn’t afraid of something bad happening to me. I felt I had such a strong angel on my shoulder that I wasn’t going to worry much about that.”

Did he feel people were trying to help him?

“Yeah,” he said, “My wife (they are now divorced) and one of my best friends had a girlfriend who’d pat me on the back and say, ‘Brian you’re going to be OK.’ I wasn’t left out in the cold for 10 years to suffer.”

Part of Landy’s goal is to get Wilson into shape to write and record new music. He’d like to see an album of new songs ready by early next year. Carl Wilson, one of Brian’s two brothers in the band, says he, too, would love for Brian to write some new songs, but he’ll be delighted if his brother just regains his peace of mind

“As a brother, my heart really goes out to Brian,” Carl said by phone from a Beach Boys tour stop. “I love him dearly. There’s no doubt about it. He’s coherent. He is much calmer than he has been in a long, long time because there is no garbage in his system.”

During both interviews, Wilson seemed the most upbeat when he was at the piano. He’s especially keen on a new boogie-woogie song that he wrote. “I like the spirit of how I feel about songwriting again.” he said.

Anticipating the reporter’s next question, Wilson added: “Am I going to write another ‘Good Vibrations?’ I really don’t know how to answer it. Do I have another masterpiece in me? I don’t know. I (do know I) have a couple of simple ‘California Girls’ type of rhythm things.”

The competitive edge resurfaced briefly in Wilson. Asked about how he feels going back into the studio, he said: “There’s only one way to go (into the studio). You go in with the notion that . . . you really know your business, that you can’t make a wrong move.”