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Catch a Wave

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

Chapter 1

Brian Wilson, Beach Boys' original songwriter, producer, and visionary, is in his sixties now, a man of age and wealth, and almost no discernible interest in the world as it existed before him, especially with regard to his family and their own travel cross the continent to the golden coast, where he was born. "We've never talked about that stuff," Brian says. It is spring 2004, and he is one of his favorite restaurants, a bustling hillside deli in a shopping mall down the street from his home on top of Beverly Hills. "It's the one thing they never, never talked about our ancestors at all. "Now it's hard to know if Brian says this because it's true or because he just can not remember such conversations. Or more likely, he just did not want to address the issue. He is an intimidating man, both for everything he has achieved in his life and for everything he has suffered under way. And given the removal of his celebrity and his psychic torment, it is difficult to separate the humor from the horror in his eyes when he remembered something his father liked to say.

"Kick some ass! "Brian is smiling now, in his silly, sad way." Exactly, that's what my father said. Kick ass! Kick ass! "

Murry Wilson was a great guy with a big personality and even bigger dreams glory. That he would reach them through the work of his sons were a source of great pride and anger from the old man. "My relationship with my father was very unique," Brian says. "In some ways I was very afraid of him. In other ways I loved him because he knew where it was. He had that competitive spirit that really blew my mind. "

"Do not be afraid to try the greatest sport Around. "It is the story of Brian's life. But the story of his brothers, his cousin and friends and all the ancestors, whose ambitions, fears, hopes and determination delivered them to this country under the unwavering Sun California, here we come. Right back where they started from. "Catch a wave and you are sitting on top of the world. "

As described by Timothy White in his inextricably studied Nearest Faraway Place, the story of Wilson in America begins in the late eighteenth century when the first Wilson to venture to the new world settled in New York. The first American-born family member, named Henry Wilson, was born in 1804 and moved west to Meigs County, Ohio, where he worked as a stonemason. His son, named George Washington Wilson in the zeitgeist, was born in 1820, and he and his family farmed a plot of rich, river-fed land in Meigs County for more than six decades, until his own son, William Henry Wilson, has decided to continue the property west the great open plains Hutchinson, Kansas. So went west, with patriarch George in tow, settling on a large, though it is relatively dry, farm, William Henry left early to go into the industrial plumbing company. Contracts to work on new state reformatory system, together with the many opportunities that modernizing world around them, provided a decent working-class living and a solidly built clapboard bungalow on one of Hutchinson's nice residential streets. As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth began William Henry think again to chase their luck in the western horizon.

California! On the eve of the new century, this was the establishment of any ambitious man dreams. The real estate flyers Pape ring they painted the town in detail, describes the valley soil as rich and fertile as the sun was warm and the wind is weak. Thus inspired, stripped William Henry together cash to buy, sight unseen, ten hectares of prime farmland in southern California village of Escondido. William Henry loaded his wife, children, and even his eighty-five-year father in the family jalopy, they arrived in 1904 and spent years working on their new vineyard. And although the sun actually shines and the water flowed as promised, and vines did break with fat, juicy fruit, agriculture was as hard as it had been back in Kansas, and the money is not nearly as large as previously expected. In 1905 William and family back in the plumbing business in Kansas. Still, memories of the California sun and dream of ease and happiness that had once stirred William Henry's soul came to rest in the imagination of his teenaged son, William Coral "Buddy" Wilson. As the boy grew, so did his vision for the golden future which awaited him in Golden State.

Dark-eyed, tongue Yellow-browed and thick features, Buddy Wilson took off for California in 1914. Then in his early twenties. The young man who is already married to Edith Shtole and father of a child or two fairly seethed with ambition Surely, he imagined a man with his drive and appetite could be an untapped stream of gold somewhere in this rich, open economic border. Leaving his family back in Hutchinson, Buddy would spend months at a time, searching for his place in the sun, looks increasingly in oilfields in the south coast. Guys could earn a fortune if they latched on right rich, and so Buddy used his plumbing skills as his ENTR? E works as a steamfitter on pipes channeled gushes out of the ground and into the pockets of the rich men whose example he was desperate to follow suit.

But Buddy would never end to them in the gilded halls powerful. Moody and scattered, plagued by headaches and a burning self-destructive thirst for whiskey, Buddy wandered from job to job at longer distances of unemployment, he went grumbling into a glass in a dim barroom. When Edith and the children finally joined him in 1921, taking the train to elegant-sounding village of Cardiff-by-the-Sea, he could not afford to rent an apartment in the city. Instead, the family spent their first two months living in a sheltered eight by eight-foot tent with all the other squatters on the beach.

Edith took a job pressing clothes for a garment manufacturer, and eventually the family moved to a small home on a gravel road in Inglewood, where the eight Wilson children attended school, worked weekend jobs and marched the thin line dictated by their hard-father and stern, demanding mother. Escape, as it was, came in occasional afternoon bicycle trips to the open, airy expanses Hermosa Beach.

Escape was a necessity for Buddy Wilson's children. Buddy, now in middle age and is happy with his life prospects for small and severely limited vision, had long felt his ambition clot in anger. Frequently awash in alcohol and self-pity, Buddy's bile regularly boiled over into violence, directed mostly at Edith. But he could also reverse the hands of his children when beating school-aged Charles so violently (for mistakenly breaking glasses) that Murry as a teenager, would come to his brother's rescue, pushing the old man out of the house until he sobered up. And this was not the only time Murry was come to blows with his father. Increasingly the family's second son was thrown into the role of his mother's protector, raising its fists against the father that he loved but seemed unable to love him or anyone else in the family.

As in most abusive families, physical and psychological violence that ruled their home was an unacknowledged presence, a force that both dominated their lives and forced them into silence. But if they could not talk about their problems, Wilson could always sing their way to a sort of friendship. Actually singing group had a Wilson family tradition going back to Kansas and then as an eighty-seven-year-old Charles Wilson (an uncle of Brian, Dennis and Carl) will tell Timothy White, who describes nights at Kansas plains when "we want the show on Saturday evening, with three of the oldest brothers on guitar and mandolins. This was at home with windows open to the street and people would stop and listen. "

Even Buddy, a man with no noticeable instincts against the fatherly tenderness, loved to sing with his children. He had long since come to admire the sound of his tenor voice anchoring the family compound. But more importantly, weaving his voice together with those of his wife and children was as close as Buddy could get to actual emotional intimacy with his family. And perhaps that was why Murry, son, there was come to the family last line of defense against their drunken, vicious father, came to love music so much. He taught himself to play guitar, too, and he took the piano from his older sister. And when the living room radio picked up broadcasts from the elegant nightclubs in Hollywood or downtown Los Angeles, Murry sat in front of the speaker and soaked it in his face glowing happily. What he heard was a whole new perspective on the world. Here was life filled with luxury and ease, a place where careers can be made and fortunes earned all by the grace of a clever new song. Seated front of the radio, aloft on the arc of a beautiful melody, Murry Wilson had come to realize something: More than anything else in the world, he would be a songwriter.

But if Murry could be as dreamy as the next aspiring pop star, he was also a realist who had grown up knowing exactly how important-and difficult-it might be to buy the bare essentials of day-to-day life. He was a mediocre student at George Washington High School, but rock-jaw young left school in 1935 armed with a steely determination to find work. And even though the rest of the nation was still mired in the teeth of depression, Murry landed a job as a clerk with Southern California Gas Company. He was still employed there when he met and in 1938 married Audree Korthof, the sweet-Nature daughter of a stern, hard-working baker who had moved his family west from Minnesota, where Audree was a schoolgirl. Murry and his new wife settled in South Los Angeles, reveling in a period of Murry's ascendance from the gas company office ditches to a junior administrative position. When Audree became pregnant in autumn 1941 that Murry's determination succeed and to surpass the sad, bitter legacy from his father only grew more intense. The couple's first son, Brian Douglas Wilson was born on 20 June 1942, with the same blue eyes, dark hair, and prominent forehead, which had followed the family across the generations.

Murry and Audree welcome two boys in their family for the next four years, the blonde Dennis Carl Wilson coming in late 1944 and Carl Dean Wilson, a second dark-featured boy, at the end of 1946. Moving his family into a modern, whose cozy two-bedroom ranch house on West 119: E Street in the blue-collar suburb of Hawthorne, rolled his sleeves up Murry over his bulky forearms and willing to scratch his own slice of the postwar economic boom. He had already made progress jump to a junior management job at Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company right after Brian's birth, and then, just as the war ended, to a foreman position in the manufacturing plant for AiResearch, an aviation company that made parts for the Seattle-based Boeing aircraft growing line of civilian and military aircraft.

By the end of WWII, turned the South Bay around the thriving aerospace industry. Borne by the twin demands of a rapidly expanding civil airline market and just-as-fast-growing tension with the Soviet Union, Aeronautics presented options for hardworking men who seemed as boundless as their own wishes. But while Murry's timing was spot-on and he was a tireless worker with a penchant for big ideas, nothing came easy to him. A gruesome accident at the Goodyear cost him his left eye and twist of fate only emphasized an aggressive-to-bellicose personality that tended to alienate him from colleagues and senior alike. Stalled on the lower steps in management and, increasingly frustrated at his flat career arc, Murry into dark moods all too reminiscent of his own father. Still, unwilling to resign himself completely to the old man fate, he scraped together as much money as he could and opened his own company, an industrial equipment outfit he called ABLE (always more durable equipment) machines. From this point on, Murry Wilson would be his own boss. The scheme suited him just fine.

So tomorrow Murry would dress in his pressed white shirts and thin ties associated Just then, his horn spectacles sat on his thick, bulldog face, his suit jacket straining against prominent stomach and muscular shoulders, both testified his appetite for work and the rewards awaiting a man at the end of his days. Steering his Ford down the quiet, sun-washed streets of the mid-1950s Hawthorne, he would see a hundred houses like that he shared with Audree and his three boys: small but nice, with a lush lawn and a wide driveway to the late-model Ford, Buick, or Chevy, its tail fins flashed in the cool morning light.

These were the cars of men who were determined to get somewhere in their lives. Like Murry, were many of Hawthorne men either born in the Midwest or had children of men and women who were making westward trek sometime in the first decades of the twentieth century. "It was like a small Midwestern town, just got moved right there for eighty acres of land, "remembers Robin Hood, who grew up a few blocks from Wilson." There were a lot of farmers from Kansas and Missouri, a lot of Dust Bowl-era people who settled in with their large, extended families. No one was rich, but we did not know. "

But their parents certainly did. And if you kept faith communities together, it was one of the transformative potential of hard work. No matter where you came from, regardless of what your people used to be, or what anyone expected you to be in a working-class West Coast town like Hawthorne, who had been a stretch of empty flats and coastal marsh a generation ago, you could work your way to become something or someone you want to stay. This belief is liberating, of course, but it also reflects internal power that can provide exercise an undertone of desperation. As Joan Didion would write, was California in this era a place "where a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension, where the mind is troubled some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here in this immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent. "

Eventually Baby Boom generation will turn very edge of the continent in its own Proving Ground. But the impulse that propelled them there, that restless need for liberation and the intuitive belief that it could be divined by your own hands somewhere out past the wild fringes of the western horizon, was the same who had dragged their families across the U.S. border and into the dreamy, bustling, sun-glazed cities they had built for himself. And it was here 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 to them. He wanted so much for themselves. In the worst way you could say.

Reprinted from: Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall and Redemption of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson by Peter Ames Carlin © 2006 Rodal Inc. Permission granted by Rodal. Inc., Emmaus, PA 18098 Where Papers sold or directly from the publisher by calling (800) 848-4735.

Author
Peter Ames Carlin is the television critic for The Oregonian in Portland, Oregon. His award-winning reportage about Brian Wilson and Beach Boys have appeared in American Heritage, New York Times, People, and The Oregonian. Carlin's work has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Los Angeles Times Magazine and Men's Journal. For more information, please visit http://www.peteramescarlin.com

About the Author

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