Brian Wilson Finally Able to Smile - Page 5

Murry and Audree’s first child, Brian, came in June 1942. He was sensitive, tall, athletic, and friendly, with a preternatural ear for melody and harmony. His father said that 11 months into his life he could hum a note-perfect “Marine Corps Hymn.” At five, he was spending hours listening to George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. His brother Dennis, born in 1944, had blond hair, freckles, and a restless, prankish energy; his neighbors called him Dennis the Menace. Carl, the youngest, came at the end of 1946. Soft-eyed and pudgy, he had a feathery voice and a sweet, accommodating personality to match.

Along with his father’s ambition, Murry Wilson had inherited Buddy’s self-pitying rage. After losing an eye in an industrial accident at Goodyear, he turned his discontent on his sons, taunting them mercilessly, demanding impossible levels of perfection in school, on the baseball diamond, in keeping the house tidy, and he was quick to assert his authority with his fists. When physical violence seemed to lose its efficacy, he would pluck out his artificial eye and force the children to stare into the empty socket.

Even as adults, Brian, Dennis, and Carl had trouble assessing the emotional effect their father had had on them. “In some ways I was very afraid of my dad,” Brian told me in 1998. “In other ways I loved him, because he knew where it was at. He scared me so much I actually got scared into making good records.” But Murry may have had a more brutally damaging effect on his son’s ability to make music, for the architect of so much intricately crafted songs is deaf in one ear, and Brian links his lifelong disability to a blow delivered by his father just before his third birthday.

The loss did nothing to diminish the boy’s appetite for music. Singing and playing became the teenage Brian’s most potent form of expression and most reliable avenue of escape. He spent hours alone in his bedroom, electrified by the rhythms of Chuck Berry and Little Richard, or riding the harmonies of the Four Freshmen. He could toss off graceful melodies and then arrange multipart vocal arrangements. Later he’d get Audree and Carl to sing with him while he perfected the blend.

Dennis would sing too, if you could ever manage to make him sit still long enough. More often the Wilsons’ middle son preferred going to the beach, drawn to the surfers who were beginning to take over L.A.’s shoreline. In the summer of 1961, when he heard Brian musing about writing some rock ’n’ roll and putting together a band to play at dances, Dennis offered a suggestion: “Why don’t you write a song about surfing?”

Article Author: Eric Olsen

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