Catch a Wave

Excerpt The following is an excerpt from the book Catch a Wave by PeterAmes Carlin Published by Rodale; July 2006;$25.95US/$34.95CAN; 1-59486-320-2 Copyright © 2006 Peter Ames Carlin

Chapter 1

Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys’ original songwriter, producer, and visionary,is in his sixties now, a man of age and wealth and almost no discernibleinterest in the world as it existed before him, particularly with regard to hisfamily and their own journey across the continent to the golden coast where hewas born. “We never talked about that stuff,” Brian says. It is the spring of2004, and he’s in one of his favorite restaurants, a bustling hillside deli ina mall down the street from his home on the crest of Beverly Hills. “That’s theone thing they never did, never talked about our ancestors at all.” Now, it’shard to know if Brian is saying this because it’s true or because he justdoesn’t remember any such conversations. Or, more likely, he just doesn’t wantto address the issue. He’s an intimidating man, both for all he’s achieved inhis life and for all he’s suffered along the way. And given the remove of hiscelebrity and his psychic torment, it’s hard to separate the humor from thehorror in his eyes when he does recall something his father did like tosay.

“Kick some ass!” Brian is smiling now, in his silly, sad way. “Exactly,that’s what my dad said. Kick ass! Kick ass!”

Murry Wilson was a big guy with a big personality and even bigger dreams ofglory. That he would attain them through the work of his sons was a source ofgreat pride and outrage from the old man. “My relationship with my dad was veryunique,” Brian says. “In some ways I was very afraid of him. In other ways Iloved him because he knew where it was at. He had that competitive spirit whichreally blew my mind.”

“Don’t be afraid to try the greatest sport around.” That’s the story ofBrian’s life. But also the story of his brothers, his cousin and friends, andall of the ancestors whose ambitions, fears, hopes, and determination deliveredthem to this land beneath the unyielding sun. California, here we come. Rightback where they started from. “Catch a wave and you’re sitting on top of theworld.”

As described by Timothy White in his intricately researched The NearestFaraway Place, the story of the Wilsons in America begins in the lateeighteenth century, when the first Wilson to venture to the New World settledin New York. The first American-born family member, named Henry Wilson, wasborn in 1804 and eventually moved west to Meigs County, Ohio, where he workedas a stonemason. His son, named George Washington Wilson in the spirit of thetimes, was born in 1820, and he and his family farmed a plot of rich, river-fedland in Meigs County for more than six decades until his own son, William HenryWilson, decided to pursue fortune west to the wide-open plains of Hutchinson,Kansas. So west they went, with patriarch George in tow, settling onto a large,if relatively arid, farm that William Henry soon abandoned in order to go intothe industrial plumbing business. Contracts to work on the state’s newreformatory system, along with the many opportunities afforded by themodernizing world around them, provided a decent working-class living and asolidly built clapboard bungalow on one of Hutchinson’s nice residentialstreets. As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, William Henrybegan to think again of chasing fortune into the western horizon.

California! At the dawn of the new century, this was the setting of everyambitious man’s dreams. The real estate flyers papering the town painted in thedetails, describing the valley soil as every bit as rich and fertile as the sunwas warm and the breezes gentle. Thus inspired, William Henry scraped togetherthe cash to buy, sight unseen, ten acres of prime farmland in the southernCalifornia village of Escondido. William Henry loaded up his wife, kids, andeven his eighty-five-year-old father into the family jalopy; they arrived in1904 and spent the year laboring on their new vineyard. And though the sun didindeed shine, and the water flowed as promised, and the vines did erupt withfat, juicy fruit, the farming was every bit as hard as it had been back inKansas, and the money not nearly as vast as previously anticipated. By 1905,William and family were back in the plumbing business in Kansas. Still,memories of the California sun and the dreams of ease and fortune that had oncestirred William Henry’s soul came to rest in the imagination of his teenagedson, William Coral “Buddy” Wilson. As the boy grew, so too did his visions ofthe golden future that awaited him in the Golden State.

Dark-eyed, heavy-browed, and thick-featured, Buddy Wilson took off forCalifornia in 1914. Then in his early twenties, the young man—already marriedto Edith Shtole and the father of a child or two—fairly seethed with ambition.Surely, he imagined, a man with his drive and appetite could find an untappedstream of gold somewhere in that rich, open economic frontier. Leaving hisfamily back in Hutchinson, Buddy would spend months at a time searching for hisplace in the sun, looking increasingly in the oil fields of the southern coast.Guys could make a fortune if they latched onto the right rig, and so Buddy usedhis plumbing skills as his entr?e, working as a steamfitter on the pipes thatchanneled the gushers out of the ground and into the pockets of the rich menwhose example he was desperate to follow.

But Buddy would never join them in the gilded halls of the powerful. Moodyand scattered, plagued by searing headaches and a self-destructive thirst forwhiskey, Buddy wandered from job to job to long stretches of unemployment,which he passed grumbling into a glass in a dim barroom. When Edith and thekids finally joined him in 1921, taking the train to the elegant-soundingvillage of Cardiff-by-the-Sea, he couldn’t afford to lease an apartment intown. Instead, the family spent their first two months living in a snugeight-by-eight-foot tent with all the other squatters on the beach.

Edith took a job pressing clothes for a garment manufacturer, and eventuallythe family moved to a small home on an unpaved road in Inglewood where theeight Wilson kids attended school, worked weekend jobs, and marched the thinline dictated by their sour father and stern, demanding mother. Escape, such asit was, came in the occasional afternoon bike rides to the open, breezy expanseof Hermosa Beach.

Escape was a necessity for Buddy Wilson’s kids. Buddy, now in middle age andresigned to his life of small prospects and severely limited horizons, had longfelt his ambition curdle into resentment. Often awash in alcohol and self-pity,Buddy’s bile regularly boiled over into violence, directed most often at Edith.But he could also turn his fists on his children, once beating the school-agedCharles so savagely (for mistakenly shattering his glasses) that Murry, then ateenager, had to come to his brother’s rescue, shoving the old man out of thehouse until he sobered up. And this wasn’t the only time Murry had come toblows with his father. Increasingly, the family’s second-oldest boy foundhimself thrust into the role of his mother’s protector, raising his own fistsagainst the father he loved but who seemed unable to love him or anyone else inthe family.

As in most abusive families, the physical and psychic violence that ruledtheir home became an unacknowledged presence, a force that both dominated theirlives and forced them into silence. But if they couldn’t talk about theirproblems, the Wilsons could always sing their way to a kind of amity. Indeed,group sings had been a Wilson family tradition dating back to Kansas andbeyond, as an eighty-seven-year-old Charles Wilson (an uncle to Brian, Dennis,and Carl) would tell Timothy White, describing nights on the Kansas plains when“we’d have shows on Saturday nights, with three of the oldest brothers onguitars and mandolins. This was at home, with the windows open to the street,and people would stop and listen.”

Even Buddy, a man with no discernible instincts toward paternal tenderness,loved to sing with his kids. He’d long since come to admire the sound of hisown tenor voice anchoring the family blend. But even more important, weavinghis voice together with those of his wife and kids was as close as Buddy couldget to actual emotional intimacy with his family. And perhaps this was whyMurry, the son who had come to be the family’s last line of defense againsttheir drunk, vicious father, came to love music so very much. He taught himselfto play guitar, too, and he picked up piano from his big sister. And when theliving room radio picked up broadcasts from the elegant nightclubs of Hollywoodor downtown Los Angeles, Murry sat in front of the speaker and soaked it in,his face glowing happily. What he was hearing was an entirely new vision of theworld. Here, life was filled with luxury and ease; a place where careers couldbe made and fortunes earned, all by the grace of a clever new song. Sitting infront of the radio, aloft on the arc of a pretty melody, Murry Wilson had cometo realize something: More than anything else in the world, he wanted to be asongwriter.

But if Murry could be just as dreamy as the next aspiring pop star, he wasalso a realist who had grown up knowing exactly how important—and difficult—itcould be to buy the bare essentials of day-to-day life. He was a mediocrestudent at George Washington High School, but the rock-jawed youngster leftschool in 1935 armed with a steely resolve to find work. And though the rest ofthe nation was still mired in the teeth of the Depression, Murry landed a jobas a clerk with the Southern California Gas Company. He was still employedthere when he met and, in 1938, married Audree Korthof, the sweet-natureddaughter of a stern, hard-working baker who had moved his family west fromMinnesota when Audree was a schoolgirl. Murry and his new wife settled insouthern Los Angeles, reveling for a time in Murry’s ascendance from the gascompany office trenches to a junior administrative post. When Audree becamepregnant in the fall of 1941, Murry’s determination to succeed and to outdo thesad, bitter legacy of his father only grew more intense. The couple’s firstson, Brian Douglas Wilson, was born on June 20, 1942, bearing the same blueeyes, dark hair, and prominent brow that had followed the family across thegenerations.

Murry and Audree welcomed two more boys into their family in the next fouryears—the fair-haired Dennis Carl Wilson coming in late 1944 and Carl DeanWilson, another dark-featured boy, at the end of 1946. Moving his family to amodern, if cozy, two-bedroom ranch house on West 119th Street in theblue-collar suburb of Hawthorne, Murry rolled his sleeves up over his bulkyforearms and set to scratching out his own slice of the postwar economic boom.He’d already made some progress, jumping to a junior administration job at theGoodyear Tire and Rubber Company just after Brian’s birth and then, just as thewar ended, to a foreman’s position in the manufacturing plant of AiResearch, anaeronautics company that made parts for Seattle-based Boeing Aircraft’s growingline of civilian and military airplanes.

By the end of World War II, the South Bay revolved around the thrivingaerospace industry. Borne up by the dual demands of a rapidly expandingcivilian airline market and the just-as-rapidly-growing tension with the SovietUnion, aeronautics presented opportunities for hardworking men that wereseemingly as limitless as their own aspirations. But while Murry’s timing wasspot-on, and he was a tireless worker with a penchant for big ideas, nothingcame easily for him. A gruesome accident at Goodyear cost him his left eye, andthat twist of fate only emphasized an aggressive-to-bellicose personality thattended to alienate him from co-workers and superiors alike. Stalled on thelower rungs of management and increasingly frustrated with his flat career arc,Murry descended into dark moods all too reminiscent of his own father’s. Still,unwilling to resign himself entirely to the old man’s fate, he scraped togetheras much cash as he could and opened his own business, an industrial equipmentrental outfit he called A.B.L.E. (Always Better Lasting Equipment) Machinery.From that point on, Murry Wilson would be his own boss. The arrangement suitedhim just fine.

So in the mornings Murry would dress in his pressed white shirts and skinnytie knotted just so, his horn-rimmed glasses perched on his thick, bulldog’sface, his suit jacket straining against the prominent belly and muscularshoulders that testified both to his appetite for work and for the rewardsawaiting a man at the end of his day. Steering his Ford down the quiet,sun-washed streets of mid-1950s Hawthorne, he’d see a hundred houses just likethe one he shared with Audree and his three boys: small but neat, with a lushlawn and a wide driveway for the late-model Ford, Buick, or Chevy, its tailfins gleaming in the cool morning light.

These were the cars of men who were determined to get somewhere in theirlives. Like Murry, many of Hawthorne’s men were either born in the Midwest orwere the children of men and women who had made the westward trek sometime inthe first few decades of the twentieth century. “It was like a littleMidwestern town that just got moved right there to eighty acres of land,”recalls Robin Hood, who grew up a few blocks from the Wilsons. “There were alot of farmers from Kansas and Missouri, a lot of Dust Bowl-era folks whosettled in with their big, extended families. Nobody was rich, but we didn’tknow it.”

But their parents certainly did. And if one belief held the communitytogether, it was the one about the transformative potential of hard work. Nomatter where you came from, no matter what your people used to be or whatanyone expected you to become, in a working-class West Coast town likeHawthorne—which had been a stretch of empty coastal flats and swamp ageneration ago—you could work your way into being anything or anyone you feltlike being. This belief is liberating, of course, but it’s also evidence ofinternal currents that can give the pursuit an undertone of desperation. AsJoan Didion would write, the California of this era was a place “in which aboom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; inwhich the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion thatthings had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky,is where we run out of continent.”

Eventually the Baby Boom generation would turn the very edge of thecontinent into its own proving ground. But the impulse that propelled themthere, that restless need for deliverance and the intuitive belief that itcould be divined by your own hands somewhere out past the wild fringe of thewestern horizon, was the same one that had dragged their families across theAmerican frontier and into the dreamy, bustling, sun-glazed cities they hadbuilt for themselves. And this was where Murry’s sons, Brian, Dennis, and Carl,came to understand their father’s need for them to kick the world in the ass.He wanted so much for them. He wanted so much for himself. In the worstpossible way, you might say.

Reprinted from: Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the BeachBoys’ Brian Wilson by Peter Ames Carlin © 2006 Rodale Inc. Permission grantedby Rodale, Inc., Emmaus, PA 18098. Available wherever books are sold ordirectly from the publisher by calling (800) 848-4735.

Author Peter Ames Carlin is the television critic for The Oregonian inPortland, Oregon. His award-winning reportage on Brian Wilson and the BeachBoys has appeared in American Heritage, the New York Times, People, and TheOregonian. Carlin’s work has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, theLos Angeles Times Magazine, and Men’s Journal. For more information, pleasevisit http://www.peteramescarlin.com