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Catch a Wave Excerpt Dennis, and Carl) would tell Timothy The following is an excerpt from the White, describing nights on the Kansas book Catch a Waveby Peter Ames Carlin plains when "we'd have shows on Saturday Published by Rodale; July 2006;$25.95US nights, with three of the oldest $34.95CAN; 1-59486-320-2 brothers on guitars and mandolins. This Copyright © 2006 Peter Ames Carlin was at home, with the windows open to Chapter 1 the street, and people would stop and Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys' original listen." songwriter, producer, and visionary, is Even Buddy, a man with no discernible in his sixties now, a man of age and instincts toward paternal tenderness, wealth and almost no discernible loved to sing with his kids. He'd long interest in the world as it existed since come to admire the sound of his before him, particularly with regard to own tenor voice anchoring the family his family and their own journey across blend. But even more important, weaving the continent to the golden coast where his voice together with those of his he was born. "We never talked about that wife and kids was as close as Buddy stuff," Brian says. It is the spring of could get to actual emotional intimacy 2004, and he's in one of his favorite with his family. And perhaps this was restaurants, a bustling hillside deli in why Murry, the son who had come to be a mall down the street from his home on the family's last line of defense the crest of Beverly Hills. "That's the against their drunk, vicious father, one thing they never did, never talked came to love music so very much. He about our ancestors at all." Now, it's taught himself to play guitar, too, and hard to know if Brian is saying this he picked up piano from his big sister. because it's true or because he just And when the living room radio picked up doesn't remember any such conversations. broadcasts from the elegant nightclubs Or, more likely, he just doesn't want to of Hollywood or downtown Los Angeles, address the issue. He's an intimidating Murry sat in front of the speaker and man, both for all he's achieved in his soaked it in, his face glowing happily. life and for all he's suffered along the What he was hearing was an entirely new way. And given the remove of his vision of the world. Here, life was celebrity and his psychic torment, it's filled with luxury and ease; a place hard to separate the humor from the where careers could be made and fortunes horror in his eyes when he does recall earned, all by the grace of a clever new something his father did like to say. song. Sitting in front of the radio, "Kick some ass!" Brian is smiling now, aloft on the arc of a pretty melody, in his silly, sad way. "Exactly, that's Murry Wilson had come to realize what my dad said. Kick ass! Kick ass!" something: More than anything else in Murry Wilson was a big guy with a big the world, he wanted to be a songwriter. personality and even bigger dreams of But if Murry could be just as dreamy as glory. That he would attain them through the next aspiring pop star, he was also the work of his sons was a source of a realist who had grown up knowing great pride and outrage from the old exactly how important-and difficult-it man. "My relationship with my dad was could be to buy the bare essentials of very unique," Brian says. "In some ways day-to-day life. He was a mediocre I was very afraid of him. In other ways student at George Washington High I loved him because he knew where it was School, but the rock-jawed youngster at. He had that competitive spirit which left school in 1935 armed with a steely really blew my mind." resolve to find work. And though the "Don't be afraid to try the greatest rest of the nation was still mired in sport around." That's the story of the teeth of the Depression, Murry Brian's life. But also the story of his landed a job as a clerk with the brothers, his cousin and friends, and Southern California Gas Company. He was all of the ancestors whose ambitions, still employed there when he met and, in fears, hopes, and determination 1938, married Audree Korthof, the delivered them to this land beneath the sweet-natured daughter of a stern, unyielding sun. California, here we hard-working baker who had moved his come. Right back where they started family west from Minnesota when Audree from. "Catch a wave and you're sitting was a schoolgirl. Murry and his new wife on top of the world." settled in southern Los Angeles, As described by Timothy White in his reveling for a time in Murry's intricately researched The Nearest ascendance from the gas company office Faraway Place, the story of the Wilsons trenches to a junior administrative in America begins in the late eighteenth post. When Audree became pregnant in the century, when the first Wilson to fall of 1941, Murry's determination to venture to the New World settled in New succeed and to outdo the sad, bitter York. The first American-born family legacy of his father only grew more member, named Henry Wilson, was born in intense. The couple's first son, Brian 1804 and eventually moved west to Meigs Douglas Wilson, was born on June 20, County, Ohio, where he worked as a 1942, bearing the same blue eyes, dark stonemason. His son, named George hair, and prominent brow that had Washington Wilson in the spirit of the followed the family across the times, was born in 1820, and he and his generations. family farmed a plot of rich, river-fed Murry and Audree welcomed two more boys land in Meigs County for more than six into their family in the next four decades until his own son, William Henry years-the fair-haired Dennis Carl Wilson Wilson, decided to pursue fortune west coming in late 1944 and Carl Dean to the wide-open plains of Hutchinson, Wilson, another dark-featured boy, at Kansas. So west they went, with the end of 1946. Moving his family to a patriarch George in tow, settling onto a modern, if cozy, two-bedroom ranch house large, if relatively arid, farm that on West 119th Street in the blue-collar William Henry soon abandoned in order to suburb of Hawthorne, Murry rolled his go into the industrial plumbing sleeves up over his bulky forearms and business. Contracts to work on the set to scratching out his own slice of state's new reformatory system, along the postwar economic boom. He'd already with the many opportunities afforded by made some progress, jumping to a junior the modernizing world around them, administration job at the Goodyear Tire provided a decent working-class living and Rubber Company just after Brian's and a solidly built clapboard bungalow birth and then, just as the war ended, on one of Hutchinson's nice residential to a foreman's position in the streets. As the nineteenth century gave manufacturing plant of AiResearch, an way to the twentieth, William Henry aeronautics company that made parts for began to think again of chasing fortune Seattle-based Boeing Aircraft's growing into the western horizon. line of civilian and military airplanes. California! At the dawn of the new By the end of World War II, the South century, this was the setting of every Bay revolved around the thriving ambitious man's dreams. The real estate aerospace industry. Borne up by the dual flyers papering the town painted in the demands of a rapidly expanding civilian details, describing the valley soil as airline market and the every bit as rich and fertile as the sun just-as-rapidly-growing tension with the was warm and the breezes gentle. Thus Soviet Union, aeronautics presented inspired, William Henry scraped together opportunities for hardworking men that the cash to buy, sight unseen, ten acres were seemingly as limitless as their own of prime farmland in the southern aspirations. But while Murry's timing California village of Escondido. William was spot-on, and he was a tireless Henry loaded up his wife, kids, and even worker with a penchant for big ideas, his eighty-five-year-old father into the nothing came easily for him. A gruesome family jalopy; they arrived in 1904 and accident at Goodyear cost him his left spent the year laboring on their new eye, and that twist of fate only vineyard. And though the sun did indeed emphasized an aggressive-to-bellicose shine, and the water flowed as promised, personality that tended to alienate him and the vines did erupt with fat, juicy from co-workers and superiors alike. fruit, the farming was every bit as hard Stalled on the lower rungs of management as it had been back in Kansas, and the and increasingly frustrated with his money not nearly as vast as previously flat career arc, Murry descended into anticipated. By 1905, William and family dark moods all too reminiscent of his were back in the plumbing business in own father's. Still, unwilling to resign Kansas. Still, memories of the himself entirely to the old man's fate, California sun and the dreams of ease he scraped together as much cash as he and fortune that had once stirred could and opened his own business, an William Henry's soul came to rest in the industrial equipment rental outfit he imagination of his teenaged son, William called A.B.L.E. (Always Better Lasting Coral "Buddy" Wilson. As the boy grew, Equipment) Machinery. From that point so too did his visions of the golden on, Murry Wilson would be his own boss. future that awaited him in the Golden The arrangement suited him just fine. State. So in the mornings Murry would dress in Dark-eyed, heavy-browed, and his pressed white shirts and skinny tie thick-featured, Buddy Wilson took off knotted just so, his horn-rimmed glasses for California in 1914. Then in his perched on his thick, bulldog's face, early twenties, the young man-already his suit jacket straining against the married to Edith Shtole and the father prominent belly and muscular shoulders of a child or two-fairly seethed with that testified both to his appetite for ambition. Surely, he imagined, a man work and for the rewards awaiting a man with his drive and appetite could find at the end of his day. Steering his Ford an untapped stream of gold somewhere in down the quiet, sun-washed streets of that rich, open economic frontier. mid-1950s Hawthorne, he'd see a hundred Leaving his family back in Hutchinson, houses just like the one he shared with Buddy would spend months at a time Audree and his three boys: small but searching for his place in the sun, neat, with a lush lawn and a wide looking increasingly in the oil fields driveway for the late-model Ford, Buick, of the southern coast. Guys could make a or Chevy, its tail fins gleaming in the fortune if they latched onto the right cool morning light. rig, and so Buddy used his plumbing These were the cars of men who were skills as his entr?e, working as a determined to get somewhere in their steamfitter on the pipes that channeled lives. Like Murry, many of Hawthorne's the gushers out of the ground and into men were either born in the Midwest or the pockets of the rich men whose were the children of men and women who example he was desperate to follow. had made the westward trek sometime in But Buddy would never join them in the the first few decades of the twentieth gilded halls of the powerful. Moody and century. "It was like a little scattered, plagued by searing headaches Midwestern town that just got moved and a self-destructive thirst for right there to eighty acres of land," whiskey, Buddy wandered from job to job recalls Robin Hood, who grew up a few to long stretches of unemployment, which blocks from the Wilsons. "There were a he passed grumbling into a glass in a lot of farmers from Kansas and Missouri, dim barroom. When Edith and the kids a lot of Dust Bowl-era folks who settled finally joined him in 1921, taking the in with their big, extended families. train to the elegant-sounding village of Nobody was rich, but we didn't know it." Cardiff-by-the-Sea, he couldn't afford But their parents certainly did. And if to lease an apartment in town. Instead, one belief held the community together, the family spent their first two months it was the one about the transformative living in a snug eight-by-eight-foot potential of hard work. No matter where tent with all the other squatters on the you came from, no matter what your beach. people used to be or what anyone Edith took a job pressing clothes for a expected you to become, in a garment manufacturer, and eventually the working-class West Coast town like family moved to a small home on an Hawthorne-which had been a stretch of unpaved road in Inglewood where the empty coastal flats and swamp a eight Wilson kids attended school, generation ago-you could work your way worked weekend jobs, and marched the into being anything or anyone you felt thin line dictated by their sour father like being. This belief is liberating, and stern, demanding mother. Escape, of course, but it's also evidence of such as it was, came in the occasional internal currents that can give the afternoon bike rides to the open, breezy pursuit an undertone of desperation. As expanse of Hermosa Beach. Joan Didion would write, the California Escape was a necessity for Buddy of this era was a place "in which a boom Wilson's kids. Buddy, now in middle age mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss and resigned to his life of small meet in uneasy suspension; in which the prospects and severely limited horizons, mind is troubled by some buried but had long felt his ambition curdle into ineradicable suspicion that things had resentment. Often awash in alcohol and better work here, because here, beneath self-pity, Buddy's bile regularly boiled that immense bleached sky, is where we over into violence, directed most often run out of continent." at Edith. But he could also turn his Eventually the Baby Boom generation fists on his children, once beating the would turn the very edge of the school-aged Charles so savagely (for continent into its own proving ground. mistakenly shattering his glasses) that But the impulse that propelled them Murry, then a teenager, had to come to there, that restless need for his brother's rescue, shoving the old deliverance and the intuitive belief man out of the house until he sobered that it could be divined by your own up. And this wasn't the only time Murry hands somewhere out past the wild fringe had come to blows with his father. of the western horizon, was the same one Increasingly, the family's second-oldest that had dragged their families across boy found himself thrust into the role the American frontier and into the of his mother's protector, raising his dreamy, bustling, sun-glazed cities they own fists against the father he loved had built for themselves. And this was but who seemed unable to love him or where Murry's sons, Brian, Dennis, and anyone else in the family. Carl, came to understand their father's As in most abusive families, the need for them to kick the world in the physical and psychic violence that ruled ass. He wanted so much for them. He their home became an unacknowledged wanted so much for himself. In the worst presence, a force that both dominated possible way, you might say. their lives and forced them into Reprinted from: Catch a Wave: The Rise, silence. But if they couldn't talk about Fall, and Redemption of the Beach Boys' their problems, the Wilsons could always Brian Wilson by Peter Ames Carlin © sing their way to a kind of amity. 2006 Rodale Inc. Permission granted by Indeed, group sings had been a Wilson Rodale, Inc., Emmaus, PA 18098. family tradition dating back to Kansas Available wherever books are sold or and beyond, as an eighty-seven-year-old directly from the publisher by calling Charles Wilson (an uncle to Brian, (800) 848-4735. 1 A B C D E 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130