For decades, promiscuity and excess have been the gold standard for rockers running in terror from the middle age slump. But there’s a less commonly utilized strategy that can also be effective: regress farther. Past adult, past teenager, past kid. Go full baby. Wear only a bathrobe. Write a song called “Ding Dang.” Build a sandbox in your bedroom and put your piano in the middle. Who’s laughing now, Rod Stewart? This return to an infantile state of development, was more trauma side-effect than deliberate strategy. For Brian Wilson, it allowed him to circumvent the pitfalls of trying to recapture his peak. Like turning the odometer back to zero, he sort of beat the system. You don’t need to be a Beach Boys’ expert to take one listen to “The Beach Boys Love You” and see that only Brian had anything to do with this one of a kind, deeply personal, bat-shit Beach Boys in name only album.

“There was a fire, and I don’t have that fire anymore and I wish I could get it back.” If that confession from Brian Wilson doesn’t make you ache a bit, you’re in the wrong essay.  During this period Brian was completely under the control of his shrink/life coach Eugene Landy who managed every hour of the musicians day. Brian was not in decline. He was half-dead. He had the kind of drug-induced, large scale mental breakdown where they take your big-boy keys away and you are no longer in charge. He was essentially committed in his own house. He went from productive workaholic genius to full time bed-ridden casualty. His family and management had pulled him out of bed and gotten him up on his feet for participation in the last Beach Boys album “15 Big Ones,” but the title is overcompensating for what is really only a couple of decent Wilson compositions.

“The Beach Boys Love You” was made to keep Brian up, active and alive and, where the last album had ten covers on it, “The Beach Boys Love You” is 100% uncut Brian Wilson.  It’s amazing this was released as a mainstream product — it’s a deeply eccentric album, the kind of thing that should be stumbled upon under a mattress in an alley, on a cassette with a little hand-drawn cover and a note inside that says “milkshakes are yummy.” But Brian was starting to stir and he wanted to do something fresh and original. So his brothers went to his home studio, surrounded him with minimoogs (early synthesizers) and gave him free rein. Even Mike Love, the most punchable Beach Boy, let him do his thing.

Brian’s brother Dennis, the most beautiful Beach Boy, takes the lead vocal on “Mona,” an innocent song about getting a girlfriend to go to dinner and a movie. From Dennis’ first line, you see Brian is not the only one ravaged by whatever happened between “Surfin USA” and 1977.  Dennis’ once angelic voice sounds like sand and cigarettes. Tragically, he’ll be dead in six years, but the song itself is fresh as a pre-teen crush.  Instead of “Mona’s” sentiment being undermined by the bleeding rasp of its fallen singer, the tension between these poles of optimism and despair takes us someplace new. “Mona” is not a pale imitation of their “Barbara Ann” past; it’s a transformation. 

Brian used the group’s voices as instruments in his compositions. Three of the Beach Boys — Mike Love, Carl Wilson and Al Jardine — had retained their tone and trademark harmonies, a sound so familiar from all their hits — but so distant by this point — that you almost forget how beautiful it is. Mike, Carl and Al conjure the sky — what we aspire to. Brian and Dennis’ voices conjure the earth — the struggle of living. On this album, Brian chooses Dennis and himself for the most heart-wrenching material. On “Is he Nice,” Brian and Dennis trade verses on a brutally honest song about losing your woman to another man.  

I'll bet he's nice

I'll bet he's twice

As nice as me and it makes me cry

Because I remember you and I

Please don't tell me if it's true

Because I'm still in love with you

On the bridge, Brian brings in Carl’s golden pipes, and in the contrast, Brian conjures the reality of the love pined for in the song. Brian’s worn vocal then takes us back to Earth like a fall from grace. Enter the sunlit wash of harmonies that heal the rift...that take us back to the sky and beyond. Brian was not even allowed out of the house to pick up a newspaper, but from inside his constraints, he processed his despair into art, using his own tragedy as an instrument.

The Beach Boys 1968 album “Friends” has a domestic quality, like hanging out in the backyard. “The Beach Boys Love You” is built from absolute confinement, and in that respect, it’s even more cause for celebration. Brian writes a message of love and slips it under the cell door for us. He’s like the Nelson Mandela of music. Nowhere are the prison walls more evident than in “Johnny Carson”, nominally a tribute to the talk show host, but also quite possibly born from the “name the first thing you see/I love lamp” school of songwriting. At the very least, we can say  “Johnny Carson” is not a product born from an active lifestyle.   

He sits behind his microphone

John-ny Car-son

He speaks in such a manly tone

John-ny Car-son

You get the idea. This song is the deal breaker for people who can’t get into this album.  What stuns me is that a song spun from such sedentary channel-filpping origins is actually not depressing. Instead of channeling the actual lethargy of sitting in bed watching TV, out comes joy. How did he do that?

Brian was always an innocent. He had childlike quality in his prime. If you truly hate Brian’s music you probably hate babies. In his peak he said he wanted to write a teenage symphony to God. Some combination of his sensitive nature, a physically abusive father, and growing up in the sunny optimism of California, arrested Brian’s emotional development at around sixteen.  That freeze and the subsequent post-breakdown regression, had the bi-product of insulating him from the dumb decisions past prime artist make to keep themselves relevant.  At the very end of his peak Brian collaborated with lyricist Van Dyke Parks on the legendary unreleased “SMILE” album, and Parks came up with lyrics like: 

Hung velvet overtaken me

Dim chandelier awaken me

To a song dissolved in the dawn (Bygone, bygone)

The music hall, a costly bow

The music, all is lost for now

To a muted trumpeter swan (Bygone, bygone)

Columnated ruins domino

That’s from “Smile’s”’ wordy but gorgeous leftover “Surf’s Up.“[1]  It’s a very deliberate attempt to separate The Beach Boys from songs about girls, cars, and summer by hiring a groovy poet/lyricist and referencing old ruins. Thankfully, the inspired music of the finished “Surfs Up” masks most of the pretension, but had Brian kept going in this direction, would it have worked? On “The Beach Boys Love You” Brian writes the lyrics himself, and you can tell:

Honkin' honkin' down the gosh darn highway

Tryin' tryin' to get past them cars

He got simple. Real ding dang simple. He was a master of a basic approach because he could barely write a lyric. This approach can’t possibly rise above ridiculous unless you mean every word. And Brian meant it. Does a child needing food or love try to sound smart?  

My favorite track on “The Beach Boys Love You” is “I Want to Pick You Up, ” a song about what it feels like to do simple things with your child, like put them to bed. Dennis’ throaty sorrow once again comes to the rescue to balance out a potentially saccharine subject. The song is to a child but it is not for a child. It is for you. Brian’s trying to fix whatever made you lose your way from the garden. The last lines are: 

Pat pat pat pat pat her on her butt butt

She's going to sleep be quiet

Pat pat pat pat pat her on her butt

She's going to sleep

Little baby go to sleep

The album’s original title was “Brian Loves You.”  

Love you too, Brian.  Pat pat.  

by Steve Collins

[1] “Surf’s up,” too gorgeous to vanish, showed up on The Beach Boys 1971 album of the same name.  “The Smile Sessions,” an approximation of Brian’s lost album, was released in 2011.