And he was a better lyricist than he’s given credit for — not so much for the words’ poetic meaning as for their sonic qualities. In one of his book’s more revealing passages, Mike explains how he rewrote Brian’s lyrics, “There’s only so much to do in a little town; I get around from town to town” to the more rhythmically charged “I’m getting bugged driving up and down the same old strip … Round, round, get around, I get around.” Again and again he organized the sound (though rarely the meaning) of the words to enhance the music.
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Occasionally the meaning would add something too — especially on his superb lyrics for “Warmth Of The Sun” — but more often it would detract. The book is filled with Love’s best and worst lyrics, as if he can’t tell the difference. But Love makes a persuasive case that he was cheated out of credit — and money — for many of the lyrics he wrote. His arguments that he was justified in turning the Beach Boys touring band into a money-making nostalgia machine that had no room for the other original members is less convincing.
There’s renewed interest in the Beach Boys, thanks in large part to Bill Pohlad’s 2014 movie Love & Mercy. There are some wonderful scenes in the film, especially the depictions of Brian working in the studio with the Wrecking Crew musicians on the sessions that became Pet Sounds. And Nine Inch Nails producer Atticus Ross was so successful in imagining the sound of Brian’s aural hallucinations that the resulting sound collages from the film are an important addition to the Beach Boys story.
The movie’s story, however, was told from the perspective of Brian’s second wife Melinda Ledbetter, and much like Mike Love, she spins the tale to make her enemies — Love, Brian’s father Murry and Brian’s therapist Eugene Landy — look like monsters. All three have done monstrous things, but to focus solely on that and ignore all the positive things they did is to distort reality.
The most remarkable thing about Brian’s memoir is the more balanced presentation of these three alpha males. As the book tells it —and as my extended interviews with Carl confirmed — each one provided invaluable help to the gifted songwriter at crucial junctures. But each one tried to capitalize on that help by taking control of Brian’s creativity — always with disastrous results.
You don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to recognize a pattern here. A sensitive young boy, who is enabled by his father’s own musical knowledge and ambitions even as he suffers from that same father’s verbal and physical abuse, continues to seek out similar relationships as he grows up. Without Murry’s help in renting and buying instruments and contacting record companies and live promoters in Southern California, the Beach Boys might never have gotten out of the Wilsons’ garage in Hawthorne, but without Murry’s browbeating, Brian might never have suffered lifelong self-doubts.
Without Love’s lyrics, rock and roll instincts and innate showmanship, Brian’s beautiful, jazzy music might never have found a large audience, but without Love’s resistance to music that seemed uncommercial, Brian might have been more creative for a longer time than he was; Without Landy’s two different 24-hour therapy interventions, Brian might have died from his agoraphobia, ballooning weight and self-medication, but without Landy’s micro-management of both Brian’s personal and professional life, Brian wouldn’t have wasted years of his life as a virtual prisoner of his own doctor. The movie doesn’t acknowledge these paradoxes, but the memoir does.
“It would be a lie to say that he didn’t get results,” Brian writes of Landy’s first intervention in 1976. “He took the 300 pounds and brought them down to about 185, which is the weight I should have been … He got some results, but then he went too far. He was getting too involved.” The pattern was amplified with the second intervention in 1983. Once again, Landy got the bloated, coke-addicted Brian healthy and sober, but then took such total control that he claimed co-writing credit on Brian’s songs and made sure Brian’s first autobiography, 1991’s Wouldn’t It Be Nice: My Own Story, was really Landy’s story.
If oldest brother Brian is the Beach Boys’ traumatized victim, first cousin Love its carnival barker and middle brother Dennis Wilson its sybaritic surfer (so guileless that he befriended Charles Manson), the youngest brother Carl Wilson was the band’s island of sanity. That comes through in the Crowley biography and it jibes with my own close-up observations of the Beach Boys. Crowley’s low-budget indie-press volume is obviously a labor of love, and despite some clumsy writing and lax editing, it does offer a much needed different perspective on the band.
