Brian Wilson: God Only Knows
Brian Wilson hears voices. They talk to him. They distract him, frighten him, confuse him. Right now, as the creative genius behind the Beach Boys‘ classic surf-rock sound sits for an interview in his darkened living room, the Pacific crashing loudly outside his million-dollar Malibu home, the voices are calling.
The forty-six-year-old screws up his face. His eyes roll toward the ceiling; they’ve gone blank. His brow is furrowed with thick worry lines. He is silent. Gone.
“Brian,” says Kevin Leslie, a twenty-four-year-old who is with Brian around the clock, looking after him and acting as the “eyes and ears” for Wilson’s therapist-manager, Dr. Eugene E. Landy. “Uh, Brian, come on.”
This tortured rock & roll legend — who changed pop music irrevocably with the string of masterpieces he created for the Beach Boys — snaps out of it. He looks up, jerks his head back and forth for a few seconds, as if physically shaking away the voices.
“I get calls, in my head, from people in the vicinity or maybe ten, twenty miles out,” he says. “They get to me. They say things like ‘You’re going to get it, you motherfucker!‘ Cruel talk.” He frowns, and then, as if he were a twelve-year-old resigned to the teasing of schoolyard buddies, says, “That’s a drag.”
Wilson is silent again. But this time he’s just thinking. The voices have stopped — for now. He flashes a nervous, boyish smile, summons up some inner resolve and says firmly, “I’ll get through it.” Brian Douglas Wilson has been diagnosed as having a schizoid personality (extremely introverted, unable to express or show emotion, pathologically shy) with manic-depressive features. Untreated, he could shift from delusional highs to possibly suicidal depths of depression and despair. But according to his psychiatrist, Dr. Solon Samuels, 81, controlled use of certain medications — including lithium (Eskalith), sedatives (Xanax and Halcion) and antidepressants (Elavil) — allow Brian to remain somewhat emotionally balanced. Still, Brian remains, in the words of Warner Bros. Records president Lenny Waronker, “a troubled soul.”
Yet despite his problems, for the first time in over twenty years, Wilson has completed a brilliant album. This month he’s releasing his first solo record, Brian Wilson, a delightful, engaging pop masterpiece. His chief co-producer, Russ Titelman, proudly calls it Pet Sounds ’88, referring of course to the legendary 1966 Beach Boys album that helped inspire the Beatles to make Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
If there is one man responsible for Brian’s return to the recording studio, it is Landy, who, in addition to being Brian’s psychotherapist and personal manager, is also his executive producer, business partner (they recently formed a company called Brains and Genius) and songwriting collaborator (Landy receives co-writing credit on five of the eleven songs on the new album; Landy’s girlfriend, Alexandra Morgan, receives co-writing credit on three of those five songs). Beginning five and a half years ago, using a controversial twenty-four-hour-a-day “milieu therapy” program in which Wilson’s entire environment was under Landy’s control, the doctor miraculously brought Brian back from a state of near death.
But Landy’s involvement in every aspect of Wilson’s personal and professional life has caught the attention of the California attorney general’s office. This past February, following what Landy describes as a four-year investigation, the attorney general filed formal charges against him for gross negligence in his treatment of Wilson. He is accused of acting as “the business manager, business adviser, executive producer, and co-song writer with his patient while also serving as his therapist.” Landy is also accused of prescribing drugs to Wilson — something he is not licensed to do, because he is not an M.D. — and of directing his assistants to dole out the drugs. (He is additionally charged with gross negligence in his treatment of a female patient identified only as R.G. He allegedly gave her illicit drugs and forced her to have sex with him.) At the earliest, the Landy case will be heard this fall.
Brian Wilson cost a million dollars to make. The project is considered so important at Warner Bros. Records that although Wilson is signed to Sire Records (a Warner subsidiary) and would normally deal exclusively with Sire president Seymour Stein, Waronker — a longtime Beach Boys fan — has also been heavily involved. In fact, he went so far as to enter the recording studio and coproduce one of the tracks, “Rio Grande,” something Waronker (known for producing Randy Newman and Rickie Lee Jones) hadn’t done in five years. “For the past six months,” says one Warner executive, “we’ve practically been a record company without a president, Lenny has been so preoccupied with the Brian Wilson album.”
For any major recording artist, the release of a new album is a high-pressure experience. There are interviews, photo sessions, video shoots, industry functions, TV appearances. But the resurrection of Brian Wilson has put even more than the usual amount of stress on Wilson and the others involved with the record.
They want the world to perceive Brian Wilson as being back in the saddle in all the important ways: as a recording artist and as a healthy, mentally alert adult.
It’s an uphill battle. In 1962, Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys emerged from the nondescript suburban community of Hawthorne, California, with a Top Twenty hit, “Surfin’ Safari.” With Wilson writing the songs, composing the music and producing the records, the Beach Boys quickly became America’s most popular rock band. Until mental illness and drugs sabotaged his life in the mid-Sixties, Wilson was considered a genius as a songwriter and record producer.
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