I’m just a sound

One Sunday​ morning recently I listened, one after the other, to Monteverdi’s Selva morale e spirituale (1641) and the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds (1966), and it wasn’t in any way jarring. I have to say, though, that it was by Pet Sounds that I felt truly transported. Between July 1965 and April 1966, the 23-year-old Brian Wilson wrote, arranged, produced and sang on songs including ‘Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)’, ‘Caroline, No’, ‘I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times’ and ‘God Only Knows’. All around three minutes long or a bit less, they can make you feel as if you are standing alone in a cathedral, bathed in sound. Wilson was able to make pop music that was uplifting without ever being sickly. Secular hymns baited with pop hooks; heavy themes made exquisitely light. ‘His progressions are always going up, then pausing before they go up again, like they’re going towards God,’ says a musician quoted in David Leaf’s liner notes to The Pet Sounds Sessions (1997).

From ‘In My Room’ (1963) to songs like ‘’Til I Die’ (1971) and ‘Sail on, Sailor’ (1973), the Beach Boys made music that for some of us has become a kind of gospel. This may seem a large and baffling claim if what you see in your mind’s eye when someone mentions them is an image of leathery old guys in Hawaiian shirts, or if all you know of their music is zippy hits like ‘Fun Fun Fun’, ‘Barbara Ann’ and ‘I Get Around’. Yet there is a logic here. Rock’n’roll was born from the uneasy tension between Saturday night and Sunday morning, church pew and dance floor, showing out and making things right with God. After those beginnings, pop and rock would go on to supply plenty of carnal jolt, but far fewer intimations of the sacred.

To an extent rivalled only by the Beatles, the Beach Boys have become the tales told about them, the ever expanding archive, the cornucopia of box sets, the shelves of books. It’s easy enough to see why. This is a tale stuffed with unlikely heroes and monstrous villains, which moves back and forth between glorious sunshine and the depths of despair. Many of the people in it – abusers, exploiters, bad magi – are not rounded or sympathetic figures; it sometimes seems as if everyone is trying to become the worst possible version of themselves. Here are Eugene Landy, Charles Manson, Phil Spector, Murry Wilson. Then there are the scarcely believable transformations of the boy-child Brian Wilson. How did he jump through the hula hoops of novelty pop to arrive, in the blink of an ‘I’, at a place where it seemed perfectly natural to come up with the idea of writing a pop music suite embodying the four elements?

Everything in this story is multiple and contradictory. No fact is secure, no testimony certain: all is apocrypha, surmise and legend. Over the years, the principals have offered wildly different readings of the same events, none more so than the prodigy at the heart of it all. In his brisk, canny, entertaining book Surf’s Up – a summa theologica of Beach Boy lore and legend – Peter Doggett sums it up: ‘As ever with Brian and the past … the details altered sharply in each new telling.’ Sometimes during the course of the same interview. As if this or that reminiscence were simply one more of the musical ‘feels’ he said flowed through his head. There are even two starkly different Brian Wilson memoirs.

Sometime​ in the mid-1980s, Phil Spector floated an idea: he might want to produce the next Beach Boys album, and thereby make them big again. Spector was a nervy bolus of insecurity and ego who thrived on confrontation; he liked to keep people waiting for his seigneurial blessing, everything carefully arranged. Wilson was invited to call at Spector’s mansion, the Pyrenees Castle, a dimly lit Xanadu in the Los Angeles suburb of Alhambra. At this point, all such messages had to go through Wilson’s psychotherapist, Eugene Landy, a man who controlled every aspect of his charge’s life. (Today, regarding the personalities of Landy and Spector, we would use a phrase such as ‘coercive control’; then, such men were merely ‘notorious’ or ‘legendary’.)

Spector, like Wilson, would flame into being then fall into periods of devastating flatness, alternating between grandiosity and lifeless reclusion. Such self-isolation need not mean total inactivity; both men became perhaps too used to the unnatural bubble of the modern recording studio. It was where they came alive, and could conjure unearthly realms. But when the work was done, the real world had to be faced once more. In Spector’s case this bipolar existence eventually ran aground, with terrible consequences. On 3 February 2003 he shot and killed the actress Lana Clarkson, in the vestibule of the same mansion where once he had received Landy and Wilson.

With Wilson’s death in June last year, all three participants in that summit at the Pyrenees Castle are now gone, and we have no way of knowing exactly what transpired. In the end, Spector never produced the Beach Boys. What we do know from Wilson’s own testimony is that of the many influences that shaped his musical destiny, Spector’s ‘wall of sound’ was galvanic. There was one track above all: the Ronettes’ ‘Be My Baby’, released in August 1963 – its heartbeat intro made Wilson’s heart stand still. Spector’s productions were a how-to manual for the young Brian Wilson as he conceived his own form of pop chorale. Like Spector, he would use the nonpareil session musicians known as the Wrecking Crew, and would record at Gold Star Studios on Santa Monica Boulevard. And for the equivalent of the Black-Cherokee-Irish lead vocalist Ronnie Bennett he would choose … himself. ‘I wanted to be a girl in my voice,’ he once said, ‘I wanted to sing like a girl. Not consciously, but it was all figured out in my brain, waiting for me to do it.’ So there it is: he wanted to be a girl, singing ‘Be My Baby’. Listen to the way he caresses the line ‘I wanna cry’ on ‘You Still Believe in Me’ from Pet Sounds. How pierced, afloat, heartstung his delivery. Or the way he sings the words ‘be’ and ‘believe’ in ‘And after all I’ve done to you, how can it be/You still believe in me?’ You can imagine a mid-1960s Mick Jagger, say, delivering that line as a sneery put-down. ‘It’s all soft,’ Jagger said about Wilson’s work in 1966. ‘He writes lyrics that are unbelievable – they are so naive.’ He misses the unmissable point: yes, Wilson sounds naive, but also entirely believable. He just ups and says out loud whatever’s on his mind or in his heart, without any masks or baffles or qualifications. A complicated tenderness, with no macho bluff. Which is the reason so many men feel close to Brian Wilson in a way they never do to Mick Jagger.

The Spector blueprint can be heard on Pet Sounds tracks such as ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’, ‘I’m Waiting for the Day’ and ‘Sloop John B’, although Wilson’s sound is more spectral, diffuse, a panorama rather than a wall. Spector not only remained a touchstone for Wilson, but became an obsession, a doppelgänger, a bogeyman. In 1967, Wilson became convinced Spector had somehow arranged that the John Frankenheimer film Seconds opened with the line ‘Hello, Mr Wilson!’ Maybe Spector was a magus. If he, Brian, had all these new ideas in his head, who’s to say Phil Spector hadn’t planted them there?

Maybe everything begins in 1958 with the dolorous love song Spector formed from words repurposed from his father’s tombstone: ‘To Know Him Is to Love Him’. The patriarch’s grave became a fanfare for the era of the teenager – the young had to be taught how to be adolescent, and this is what pop music would do.

Murry Wilson, the father of Brian and his two brothers, fellow Beach Boys Carl and Dennis, was not by all accounts an easy man to love. He was a businessman, but his dream life was dominated by the siren call of music. It nagged at him that his talent as a composer and songwriter wasn’t getting its due. Why weren’t his melodies heard everywhere? He was snappish, sniping, volatile, and doled out violent punishments to his three sons. The only time he wasn’t angry was when he could be soothed by the syrupy sounds of easy listening music. Off the back of his sons’ success he would eventually release his own LP, The Many Moods of Murry Wilson (1967) – the title is apt. The middle Wilson, Dennis, took the brunt of Murry’s physical abuse, but Brian, first born and most gifted, was the one in the dangerous position of being able to realise his father’s dreams. The ire of a disappointed god: anything you do will be either too good or not good enough. In this eggshell atmosphere, while the boys’ mother, Audree, rustled up huge amounts of anaesthetic food – hyperactive Dennis was the only one who didn’t pile on the pounds – Brian taught Carl and Dennis to sing in harmony; this, he later reflected, ‘brought peace to us’.

Brian studied Bach and Beethoven, and learned to trust in the healing balm of counterpoint. And like Beethoven, who also had two brothers and a violent, overbearing father, he was slowly going deaf. ‘Before he entered his teens,’ Doggett explains, ‘Brian’s parents noticed that he tended to talk out of one side of his mouth and would turn his head around to pick up sounds or voices that came from the opposite side of his head. Tests were carried out, and it was determined that he enjoyed less than 20 per cent hearing in his right ear.’ There seems never to have been an official diagnosis. All we know is that Brian didn’t seem to hear like anyone else. As with Beethoven, his partial deafness and the ringing in his ears didn’t hinder his work as a composer, but it did make live performance a living hell and caused him to withdraw slowly from the hubbub of social life. The crossroads moment took place high up in the air: in December 1964 Wilson was flying to Houston to start a tour when he had some kind of convulsive breakdown. Too much pressure, in both senses. Things that make your head go pop. He no longer wanted to be up on stage with all the feedback and screaming.

The tinnitus that afflicted Wilson can be a paradoxical thing. It is often accompanied by hyperacusis, a condition that imposes an extraordinary sensitivity to noise in the immediate environment. This renders everyday sounds – especially repetitive ones – a painful violation, but may also increase one’s auditory discrimination. It can be like having an untuned radio playing inside your ear – which makes Wilson’s fear that Spector might have been beaming messages into his head seem less fanciful. While it would be too much to claim that Wilson’s hearing issues somehow ‘explain’ his music, they do perhaps have some bearing on why his natural bent was towards a sound that was more episodic, diffracted, dispersed. The breakthrough music on Pet Sounds isn’t tethered to the customary bass, guitar and drums; it doesn’t stick with straightforward repetitive patterns; it stops, starts, pauses, reflects.

The recording studio made possible new ways of listening. Tiny increments of syllable and sound to juggle. Listen to tapes of Wilson working in the studio and you can hear just how precise and in control he is: this is the one place where he knows who he is and what he wants. Did he ever sound more sensual than when he delivered the lines ‘I can hear so much/in your sighs’ and ‘Listen, listen, listen …’ from ‘Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)’? ‘Music became his language of choice,’ Doggett writes, ‘with which he was far more articulate than he ever was with words.’ You could say things to girls you could never say in real life. You could conjure up swells, plateaux, shivers; the sound of the sun coming up over the sea. Like many a Romantic man, his way of feeling intimacy is via something cloudy, oceanic, mountain-top. The nearest faraway place.

One of​ the mythic promises of rock’n’roll was escape to a place where the action was and where you could maybe find others like yourself. But there would be no such getaway for the Beach Boys – no big city salvation, no yellow brick road. They would live and die in LA. The Beach Boys didn’t scour snow-strafed city streets looking for old blues 78s. They idolised the very ‘square’ barbershop quartet the Four Freshmen; Wilson wrote a song called ‘Be True to Your School’. They were not, in a word, cool. They didn’t leave home, didn’t mooch, didn’t stray: they were already in the teen fantasy promised land. In Hawthorne, south-west Los Angeles, everything was on their doorstep, including their future bandmates: livewire cousin Mike Love; high-school classmate Al Jardine; long-time neighbour David Marks.

The Beach Boys, like many of the new bands of that era, sprang out of a local scene with its own heroes, slang, fashion. In this bright diurnal paradise, four of their early singles were hymns to a local leisure pursuit/metaphysical quest: ‘Surfin’’, ‘Surfin’ Safari’, ‘Surfin’ USA’, ‘Surfer Girl’. But then there suddenly appeared the achingly introspective ‘In My Room’. Co-written with Gary Usher, it’s a swerve away from the world of the drive-in, the burger place, the drag strip into a wholly/holy inner world where the singer can ‘lie awake and pray’. It’s a vulnerable song about the desire to be invulnerable. ‘You’re not afraid when you’re in your room,’ Wilson once said. The recording studio was his other panic room. It was somewhere you could explore a spectrum of emotional tones, as heard in early songs like ‘Lonely Sea’ (1963), ‘Don’t Worry Baby’ (1964), ‘The Warmth of the Sun’ (1964) and, most of all for me, the near-perfect pop record ‘Guess I’m Dumb’ (1965), written, arranged and produced by Wilson, sung by a young Glen Campbell.

Wilson would soon become notorious for how much time he took to record things, but at this early stage everything was a blur. There were ten Beach Boys studio albums between 1962 and 1965. There were no maps, no precedents; their de facto manager and ‘appropriate adult’ at this point was their irascible, interfering father. Brian Wilson may have had his mood swings but he was, in his own way, quite sturdy. Something you begin to notice, leafing through all the Beach Boys books, is how strapping the teenage Brian looks in high-school snaps and how sporty too; this was no neurasthenic squirt. He also had a reputation for being a bit of a cut-up. A twelfth-grade report card reveals that he got an A in Physical Education, a B in Senior Problems (Personal Psychology) and only a C for Piano and Harmony.

Wilson was famously not a surfer: he may have held business meetings in his swimming pool and set up his piano in a sand pit, but he had to be dragged into the sea as if he was undergoing aversion therapy. The Beach Boys’ early hits were the sound of everything to do with surfing, absent the sensation of surfing itself. Surfers try to control unpredictable swells and curls, seeking moments of transcendence, measured in seconds or a few short minutes – just like the pop music Wilson was about to unleash on the world.

The period 1964-65 was a honeymoon in sound for him. In his early twenties, newly married (to the singer Marilyn Rovell), and with his brother Beach Boys away on tour, he began working with the very hip and preternaturally versatile Wrecking Crew. He used these master craftsmen to produce Pet Sounds, a work he pieced together more as if it were a film than a pop record; it even ends like a movie, with the lulling clatter of a train fading into the distance and the ‘pet sounds’ of Wilson’s two dogs. He acknowledged various influences down the years, but the Nelson Riddle production of Frank Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours (1955) seems to have been key in suggesting the idea of a self-contained suite. Like the Sinatra classic, Pet Sounds can be enjoyed simply as a great collection of songs, as immersive mood music, or as a sketch of a young man’s feelings about love and marriage. Mystical and erotic, though not in obvious ways, Pet Sounds is a concept album without any heaviness or pomp.

A raft of other possible influences has been floated: the Beatles, Burt Bacharach, Duke Ellington, Hampton Hawes, West Coast jazz. There were also the records Wilson had been raised on, a whole hinterland of odd, uncategorisable LPs by the likes of Les Baxter, Martin Denny and Anita Kerr: easy listening meets exotica meets sound effects and cartoon soundtracks and the sound of the sea. ‘Gone were the days when it was enough to assemble a hand-picked rock’n’roll line-up,’ Doggett writes. ‘Now Brian wanted to hear an oboe against a cello, or horns alongside vibes and xylophone, or a bass harmonica over an exotic rhythm track.’ Pet Sounds is full of surprising combinations that mingle high and low, orchestra and comedy skit. ‘You Still Believe in Me’ opens with a delicate harpsichord-like sound – actually piano strings being plucked with a hairpin – and ends with the indelicate PARP! of a bicycle horn. The pointillist composition of the album, along with its odd chord progressions and unexpected time shifts, may also reflect Wilson’s discovery of marijuana and LSD. The predominant tone is a mixture of bliss and anxiety – there is elation and exaltation, but you also can’t help noticing how many negatives or qualifiers swirl around in this lover’s discourse: ‘wouldn’t’ … ‘that’s not’ … ‘don’t’ … ‘I just wasn’t’ … ‘No’. Wilson, as Nik Cohn put it, wrote ‘sad songs about loneliness and heartache; sad songs even about happiness’.

Emotionally overwhelmed and lacking the words to express it, Wilson often needed collaborators to articulate his feelings in song, notably Tony Asher and Van Dyke Parks. The alchemy is mysterious: while these may not have been precisely his ‘own’ words, they somehow feel as if they are written in Wilson’s voice. Talking to himself, talking to his wife, talking to God. The more unvarnished the lyrics, the more affecting they are. It is at once stark, plaintive and strangely cheering when in ‘I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times’ he repeats the line ‘Sometimes I feel very sad …’

Like surfing, Wilson’s creativity involved a fragile balance, and carried the very real risk of going under or too far out to sea. Which is just what happened with his next project, the legendary SMiLE, which he dubbed a ‘teenage symphony to God’. Where Pet Sounds is one long, distilled and concentrated mood, SMiLE – original title: ‘Dumb Angel’ – is the sound of countless thoughts passing through someone’s newly expanded head. SMiLE has taken on the status of a holy relic, and it is an article of faith to mourn its non-completion as one of pop’s great tragedies. But you can adore many of its individual tracks and still remain unconvinced that it’s an unimpeachable opus. The good stuff is astonishing. Tracks like ‘Good Vibrations’, ‘Cabin Essence’ and ‘Wind Chimes’ pretty much inaugurated a new pop idiom, and are beautiful in a way that was quite unprecedented. Elsewhere, there are sketches and suggestions of songs. Songs on a hike! Songs having a late-night snack! Songs from an aerial perspective! Songs about watching cartoons on TV! The freak-out clip ‘George Fell into His French Horn’ strays into avant-garde noise – here is the Los Angeles of jazz clubs, but also flash fires and riot panic. ‘Fire’ (also known as ‘Mrs O’Leary’s Cow’ or ‘The Elements – Part 1’) sounds like the Marx Brothers scored by Harry Partch. It’s bold and unhinged and epiphanic, but you have to wonder what it would be like to have this sort of thing going on in your head all the time. There are moments on SMiLE that teeter on the edge of mania – a reminder of the ready availability of prescription speed in those days. ‘Heroes and Villains’ has already got far too much going on as a stand-alone track, never mind a multi-part suite.

There’s a strain of post-LSD pop on SMiLE, epitomised by ‘Vega-Tables’, ‘Do You Like Worms’ and ‘I Love to Say Da Da’, that is more rictus than goofy grin. As with the solo work of Syd Barrett, the whimsy can be charming, but can just as easily make you wince. A sunny playfulness is on display – the Wilson home was fully stocked with toys and silly putty – but a darkness had settled slowly into Wilson himself. He became afraid of his own music – he later described the glorious ‘Good Vibrations’ as a ‘scary record, very scary’ – and was convinced that ‘Fire’ had started real fires out in the world. SMiLE was a dream impossible to coax into reality. It stalled or collapsed or was abandoned – again, there are as many explanations in circulation as there are alternative takes of the tracks themselves. Selections from SMiLE would be recycled on various albums, starting with Smiley Smile in 1967, and then on 20/20 (1969) and Surf’s Up (1971). Different versions with different running orders slowly leaked out until finally, in 2011, the Smile Sessions box set put together an official 19-track approximation of what the original album might have been. For some fans it should have remained a glorious dream, better left unrealised. A labyrinth without a centre. The Arcades Project of pop.

The progression from the Beach Boys’ early commodity pop to Pet Sounds to SMiLE seems to mirror a broader cultural shift: clean-cut collegiate larks to reefer madness to psychedelic revelation. One of the biggest distributors of LSD in California was a gang of working-class ex-surfers called the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, who merged Eastern mysticism with psychonaut politics and heavy-duty illegality. Chasing the white light and the dark sun. Chasing the memory of a high that will never be recaptured. John Milius’s wistful Big Wednesday (1978), set between 1962 and 1974, tracks the difficult transition to adulthood of three young surfers. Offscreen, two of the film’s lead actors – Gary Busey and Jan-Michael Vincent – had their own gnarly difficulties. The dream of those early surfer-boy Beach Boys songs inculcated the promise of smiley teenage omnipotence. But how was that promise to be fulfilled in a culture that allowed too many men to drift through life as if it were indeed an ‘endless summer’, in which they never had to grow up or make amends or lose their appetite for self-distraction? By 1975 a hollowed-out, disconsolate Wilson had retreated to his bed, where the porous line between dream and reality washed away completely. The safe space of ‘In My Room’ had become a sorry terminus: drawn blinds, junk food and an ogreish need for drugs, heroin included. A beached boy. Wilful son to blotted-out sun.

It​ is a typically Californian spin on the American Dream to insist that an uncomplicated happiness is there for the taking, if only you do the necessary work on yourself. In the Beach Boys compound, Mike Love was devoted to transcendental meditation, and Carl Wilson was a member of the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness. Brian Wilson ended up with Eugene Landy, whose patented style of white-knuckle pastoral care involved 24/7 surveillance. For a select clientele the return to functioning normality was managed like a hostage situation by Landy and his group of mental health enforcers (one of whom was nicknamed the ‘surf Nazi’). The thinking was that successful people in film and music were routinely encouraged to ignore reality – ‘learned helplessness’ was the defining condition of some superstars’ lives – and this was the antidote. And as these were very rich people, Landy’s all-day, every-day reinforcement method also made for a tasty business model. It is said that between 1983 and 1986, Landy charged Wilson something like $430,000 a year for his services.

Landy was way out ahead of our own current era of group therapy reality TV, celebrity crisis management and social media surveillance. For one of Wilson’s shaky ‘comeback’ TV appearances, Landy stood off-camera holding signs prompting his charge to SMILE. This is not a future Freud can ever have imagined – more stalking cure than talking cure. And yet, Landy’s notion of what might work for patients who were in the terminal stages of addiction and surrounded by cowed enablers was not unrealistic. There was, at the very least, an understanding of the way an addict will arrange everything around themselves like a siege directed outwards, making the people in their life prisoners to their illness. A ferocious will can lurk behind what may present as terminal lassitude. There were some in Brian Wilson’s circle who saw this ‘dumb angel’ as a tenth-dan master in passive-aggressive manipulation. His seeming lostness went hand in hand with an intermittent ability to focus on exactly what he wanted to the exclusion of all else, whether it was exquisitely layered harmonies or being left alone in his room to scarf up drugs. This was procrastination choreographed like a battle plan, and Landy responded with a plan of his own: he effectively restaged the Wilson family’s toxic psychodrama, complete with Bad Dad’s all-seeing eye, violent mood swings and harsh words.

Landy also laid down the law in other areas of Wilson’s life. He asked for songwriting credits on top of his fees, whether he’d contributed anything or not. He demanded that Wilson change his will. He even wanted the two of them to merge their names to become Eugene Wilson Landy and Brian Landy Wilson. Then there was the matter of an immediately disputed ‘autobiography’, for which Landy stood to receive 30 per cent of the royalties. Wouldn’t It Be Nice (1991) is an unsettling, unpleasant read. You’re instantly struck by the certain knowledge that this is not Brian Wilson’s voice. The book is subtitled ‘My Own Story’, yet that is precisely what has been taken away from him.

What exactly was wrong with Wilson? A psychiatrist who treated him during a hospitalisation for one breakdown classified him as paranoid schizophrenic, but as ever in Beach Boy world, there were other interpretations, other diagnoses. It may well be that Landy’s regime of heavy prescription medications – the list includes, but may not be limited to, Xanax, Eskalith, Navane, Serentil and Cogentin – is what did the real and lasting harm. Some people close to Wilson suspected he ‘went insane’ when it suited him, as a defensive tactic. Which, if true, is a pretty drastic way of navigating the world.

Buried in the mix of ‘I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times’ is an easy-to-miss chorus of voices singing in Spanish: ‘¿Cuándo seré? Un día seré’ (‘When will I be? One day I will be’). As if Wilson isn’t sure of his ontological status: is he a sprite of the air or a body of flesh and blood? From the beginning, his songs are preoccupied with the hope or the promise or the sheer hell of leaving childhood behind and becoming an adult. One album, recorded in 1977 (but unreleased), was called simply Adult/Child. And there were tracks such as ‘When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)’(1965), and ‘Child Is Father of the Man’ from SMiLE. ‘Brian had a fervent desire,’ Van Dyke Parks said, ‘to reinvent himself as an individual, not as a boy, and that’s what happened, I think. By the time I met him, he had already done “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)”; he’d already raised those questions about being a man, and when I met him, that crisis was acute.’ Perhaps it’s difficult to grow up when you are eternally known as the head Boy – stalled between youthfulness and adulthood, waiting for some whispered prompt or sudden wave that will instantly transform everything.

Amid the white noise of speculation about Brian it’s easy to forget the other two Wilson brothers. Carl was the youngest son, calm, quiet, self-effacing, who usually ended up as go-between and peacemaker, a rare good enabler for his older brother (‘I was his sounding board. I was his underling. I always tagged along’). Carl’s voice features on many of the most beloved Beach Boys songs, but he had to wait a long time until his own creativity was allowed to surface. His ‘Feel Flows’ and ‘Long Promised Road’ (co-written with Jack Rieley) are two of the loveliest songs on Surf’s Up.

The relationship between Brian and Dennis is harder to read. Dennis was handsome, feckless, the genuine article: a leonine surfer and hot rodder. He acted in Monte Hellman’s terrific film Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), playing the Mechanic to James Taylor’s Driver. Brian is the Wilson most often thought ‘childlike’, but this was just as true of Dennis. He made impossible demands on everyone around him, knowing that he would always be indulged and forgiven. ‘Dennis had to keep moving all the time,’ Brian said. ‘If you wanted him to sit still for one second, he’s yelling and screaming and ranting and raving. He’s the most messed-up person I know.’

If Spector was the spectre in Brian’s psyche, for Dennis it was Charles Manson. There are, as ever, various accounts of how they met and why they hit it off. It’s clear that Dennis enjoyed the communal sexual free-for-all that Manson had going on; clear, too, that in return Dennis promised him some kind of access to the music biz. It appears that Dennis had a far deeper involvement with the Manson Family, and for far longer, than was ever admitted at the time. One messed up fam for another. Both men were severely injured sons. Both deployed a malign sort of charm to get what they wanted, and left awful wreckage in their wake.

As with Carl, Dennis’s musical ability was long undervalued. In August 1977 he released the marvellous Pacific Ocean Blue, maybe the most complete, organic Beach Boys album of the post-SMiLE period. On the cover, Dennis might be a devil-may-care drug pilot, flying under the coastal radar. But as things turned out the album heralded not a glorious rebirth but the beginning of a gruelling decline. For most of his short life, Dennis had been sliding through life on charm, in Marianne Faithfull’s pretty phrase. Now his drug and alcohol addictions deepened, coarsened, accelerated. The end came with bleary inevitability in December 1983. He was 39, near indigent, drinking onboard somebody else’s yacht in borrowed clothes. He dived into the water and didn’t return.

The promo campaign​ for the Beach Boys’ album 15 Big Ones (1976) – the original, more fitting title was ‘Group Therapy’ – boasted the slogan ‘Brian is back!’ As if he were Freddy or Chucky or one of those child-monsters who can’t be killed and always return from a murky half-life somewhere in our collective psyche. Any consideration of the Beach Boys’ later output doesn’t really belong here; it’s the preserve of obsessive fans, picking out this jewel and that, punctuated by long sighs of despair. Something about Brian Wilson attracts a certain kind of man, prone to a pop culture equivalent of theological hair-splitting.

Doggett begins Surf’s Up with his own story of attending a fan event in West London in 1988 at which Wilson made a surprise appearance. What he describes is akin to a religious experience (late-period Brian Wilson gigs were often like gatherings of the faithful), with more than a passing resemblance to the worship of saints and martyrs. The magnetic attraction of ruins and reliquaries. Something to believe in. There are those, like Nik Cohn, who love the rev and glee of the early pop and are suspicious of the later, more adult phantasmagoria. There are those devoted to the endless explication of the mysteries of SMiLE. There are even full-blown Dennis Wilson acolytes. There isn’t one Beach Boys legacy, but several. An uncertainty over what the Beach Boys are or should be was there from the beginning. Brian Wilson’s battles with his father, other band members – most of all Mike Love – and record company suits all hinged on this question of identity, the risks of going against the grain or veering from the familiar formula. Love’s conception of the brand shows in the titles of such late-period albums as Keepin’ the Summer Alive (1980), Still Cruisin’ (1989) and Summer in Paradise (1992). In 1969, when Murry Wilson sold his son’s back catalogue for a song (there may have been some spite behind the deal), he had no notion of afterlife, archive, legacy, of a future global bonanza from books, films, soundtracks, adverts, media then undreamed of. Buried treasure, as it turned out.

There is now a whole library of Beach Boys reading, from Timothy White’s grand social history The Nearest Faraway Place: Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys and the Southern California Experience (1994) to one of my personal favourites, the slender but peppy Brian Wilson: An Art Book (2005), edited by Alex Farquharson. In comparison to the Landy-ventriloquised Wouldn’t It Be Nice, Steven Gaines’s once notorious Heroes and Villains (1986) now seems pleasantly scurrilous. One of the exhausting things about reading these books consecutively is how much of a guy thing it all is. It’s not that women are absent – there are mothers, wives, girlfriends, daughters, muses, fans – but they rarely register as real presences, and sometimes seem unnervingly interchangeable, as with Brian Wilson’s fixation on his first wife’s older sister, Diane Rovell. Or there’s the soap opera hell in which Love (allegedly) has a daughter he won’t acknowledge from an extramarital fling. In 1981 this (alleged) daughter, 16-year-old Shawn Love, met the 36-year-old Dennis Wilson, her father’s cousin, and they started ‘dating’. Just before her seventeenth birthday, Shawn got pregnant by Dennis and in 1982 gave birth to a son, Gage. Gage was the middle name of Murry Wilson, who you suspect would have strongly disapproved of this tribute – which for Dennis may well have been the whole point.

Doggett is obviously a true believer, but doesn’t bury his head in the sand when confronted with the grisly anomalies and internecine nastiness. He is scrupulous, and leavens his writing with a sense of humour; he even manages to give a balanced appraisal of the egregious Mike Love. Surf’s Up isn’t aimed solely at other obsessives – Doggett steers a sure course between deep Brian worship and the beckoning shallows, between trivia and telling detail. In a section called ‘Which Side Are You On? Playing politics with the Beach Boys’ we learn that on 1 May 1971 the band played on an ‘anti-war’ bill with Charlie Mingus, Phil Ochs and Linda Ronstadt. In May 1974, Love was incorrectly accused of being a communist after participating in ‘An Evening with Salvador Allende’; his tribute of choice was ‘California Girls’. Later that year he sang the same song on a TV music show called Speakeasy, improbably supported by the jazz mavericks John McLaughlin and Charles Lloyd.

Like nearly all books about the Beach Boys, there is a small, though understandable, insufficiency at the heart of Surf’s Up: an inability to convey the specific qualities of the band’s best music and why it affects us the way it does. Something that goes a long way towards succeeding in that task is Bill Pohlad’s film Love & Mercy (2014). Music biopics have been getting much better at showing how things spark in the recording studio, but Love & Mercy is in a whole other league – it’s a story told in sound. It begins with a close-up of Brian Wilson’s ear, and you could read the entire film as taking place there. He remembers events as sound – sometimes blissful, sometimes intrusive, an unmixed din.

Is it significant that the cover of Wilson’s memoir from 2016 displays the title as ‘i am Brian Wilson’? Another diminished ‘i’, like the one in SMiLE. Did he feel helplessly overshadowed by his own name and legend? Wouldn’t It Be Nice was rejected by fans as an ambush by Landy; both Love & Mercy and I Am Brian Wilson were seen by some in the inner circle as having been steered by Wilson’s second wife (and manager) Melinda Ledbetter, who helped develop the film and is portrayed sympathetically in it (Van Dyke Parks referred to it as ‘Mrs Wilson’s biopic’). Mike Love, whose own memoir, Good Vibrations, was published a month before Wilson’s, claimed: ‘He’s not in charge of his life, like I am mine. His every move is orchestrated.’ He also described Love & Mercy as a ‘fairy tale’ – which is accurate, but perhaps not in the way he means. Wilson himself called I Am Brian Wilson ‘almost all factual’, as distinct from the film, which was ‘factual – but it had parts of it that weren’t actually as factual’. Which is about as definitive as things get in Beach Boy world.

Submerging​ yourself in all this literature can be a soul-sapping experience; but you return to the music and its lustre is undimmed. Maybe some of it resonates even more once you learn of the unstable ground it sprang from, the darkness it escaped. The album Surf’s Up closes with two of the most moving songs in the Beach Boy canon. ‘’Til I Die’ is one of the only songs for which Brian Wilson wrote both words and music, and for all its gentle beauty, he was never more explicit about his inner life: ‘I lost my way … It kills my soul.’ He sings of things against which ego is surely no defence. ‘Surf’s Up’, co-written with Parks, is a song partly about losing and regaining the love of music, and with it the deep feeling of connection and belonging it can bring. There is a kaleidoscopic final passage that brushes close to epiphany: ‘I heard the word … wonderful thing.’ The song dissolves into a polyphonic chorus which resurrects Wilson’s ‘Child Is Father of the Man’, before fading into the dawn on the single word ‘child, child, child …’

Doggett gives an account of one of Wilson’s own personal musical epiphanies. He was eighteen, and heard something that ‘bent me out of shape a little bit’. It was the Christmas carol ‘Joy to the World’. He remembered that the ‘music touched him so deeply … he came home from college … and cried for fifteen minutes.’ And here are Wilson’s own words, looking back forty years to this transfiguring moment:

My whole life was given over to God as soon as I heard that … so in a way I can’t be blamed for being a little more sensitive than usual, because I gave half my life to God and the other half to try to be a human being, so it’s been tough for me in that regard.

I find that the most heart-rending phrase: ‘to try to be a human being’. In 1983, Wilson told the reporter Jonathan Taylor: ‘I think ultimately I’m just a sound. I don’t know if I’m a human being.’ This boy-child’s story has recognisable stages: he begins in a kind of innocence, ascends to glory, tarries with self-mortification, then returns from the dead. It is a struggle that might once have been couched in religious terms: moments of rapture that we call sacred, but also a dark forest of suffering. The experience of unearthly bliss isn’t always an aid to living a life of order and harmony.

The original release of the album Holland (1973) came with a bonus 7-inch EP containing just one track: ‘Mount Vernon and Fairway’, a twelve-minute ‘fairy tale’. As well as words and music, Wilson provides the cover illustration and voices the mischievous Pied Piper who is the tale’s quicksilver heart. It’s an odd blend of children’s story, metaphysical parable and sonic autobiography (in the 1950s, Mike Love’s family lived at the corner of Mount Vernon and Fairway in LA’s View Park neighbourhood), about a ‘young prince’ who spends each night ‘by himself, usually in his secret hidden bedroom’, listening to a magical radio. At first the radio broadcasts classical pieces (‘Bach was playing. After a while, it began to sound distant … the music was floating away from his hearing’), but then starts to transmit bursts of something altogether different: rhythm and hooks, vocal harmonies, the future. For a lot of postwar kids, music took the place of religion. For Brian Wilson, it may be that they were one and the same.