Everything about pipes and tobacco


Catch a Wave

ExcerptDennis, and Carl) would tell Timothy
The following is an excerpt from theWhite, describing nights on the Kansas
book Catch a Waveby Peter Ames Carlinplains when "we'd have shows on Saturday
Published by Rodale; July 2006;$25.95USnights, with three of the oldest
$34.95CAN; 1-59486-320-2brothers on guitars and mandolins. This
Copyright © 2006 Peter Ames Carlinwas at home, with the windows open to
Chapter 1the street, and people would stop and
Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys' originallisten."
songwriter, producer, and visionary, isEven Buddy, a man with no discernible
in his sixties now, a man of age andinstincts toward paternal tenderness,
wealth and almost no discernibleloved to sing with his kids. He'd long
interest in the world as it existedsince come to admire the sound of his
before him, particularly with regard toown tenor voice anchoring the family
his family and their own journey acrossblend. But even more important, weaving
the continent to the golden coast wherehis voice together with those of his
he was born. "We never talked about thatwife and kids was as close as Buddy
stuff," Brian says. It is the spring ofcould get to actual emotional intimacy
2004, and he's in one of his favoritewith his family. And perhaps this was
restaurants, a bustling hillside deli inwhy Murry, the son who had come to be
a mall down the street from his home onthe family's last line of defense
the crest of Beverly Hills. "That's theagainst their drunk, vicious father,
one thing they never did, never talkedcame to love music so very much. He
about our ancestors at all." Now, it'staught himself to play guitar, too, and
hard to know if Brian is saying thishe picked up piano from his big sister.
because it's true or because he justAnd 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 toof Hollywood or downtown Los Angeles,
address the issue. He's an intimidatingMurry sat in front of the speaker and
man, both for all he's achieved in hissoaked it in, his face glowing happily.
life and for all he's suffered along theWhat he was hearing was an entirely new
way. And given the remove of hisvision of the world. Here, life was
celebrity and his psychic torment, it'sfilled with luxury and ease; a place
hard to separate the humor from thewhere careers could be made and fortunes
horror in his eyes when he does recallearned, 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'sMurry 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 bigthe world, he wanted to be a songwriter.
personality and even bigger dreams ofBut if Murry could be just as dreamy as
glory. That he would attain them throughthe next aspiring pop star, he was also
the work of his sons was a source ofa realist who had grown up knowing
great pride and outrage from the oldexactly how important-and difficult-it
man. "My relationship with my dad wascould be to buy the bare essentials of
very unique," Brian says. "In some waysday-to-day life. He was a mediocre
I was very afraid of him. In other waysstudent at George Washington High
I loved him because he knew where it wasSchool, but the rock-jawed youngster
at. He had that competitive spirit whichleft 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 greatestrest of the nation was still mired in
sport around." That's the story ofthe teeth of the Depression, Murry
Brian's life. But also the story of hislanded a job as a clerk with the
brothers, his cousin and friends, andSouthern California Gas Company. He was
all of the ancestors whose ambitions,still employed there when he met and, in
fears, hopes, and determination1938, married Audree Korthof, the
delivered them to this land beneath thesweet-natured daughter of a stern,
unyielding sun. California, here wehard-working baker who had moved his
come. Right back where they startedfamily west from Minnesota when Audree
from. "Catch a wave and you're sittingwas a schoolgirl. Murry and his new wife
on top of the world."settled in southern Los Angeles,
As described by Timothy White in hisreveling for a time in Murry's
intricately researched The Nearestascendance from the gas company office
Faraway Place, the story of the Wilsonstrenches to a junior administrative
in America begins in the late eighteenthpost. When Audree became pregnant in the
century, when the first Wilson tofall of 1941, Murry's determination to
venture to the New World settled in Newsucceed and to outdo the sad, bitter
York. The first American-born familylegacy of his father only grew more
member, named Henry Wilson, was born inintense. The couple's first son, Brian
1804 and eventually moved west to MeigsDouglas Wilson, was born on June 20,
County, Ohio, where he worked as a1942, bearing the same blue eyes, dark
stonemason. His son, named Georgehair, and prominent brow that had
Washington Wilson in the spirit of thefollowed the family across the
times, was born in 1820, and he and hisgenerations.
family farmed a plot of rich, river-fedMurry and Audree welcomed two more boys
land in Meigs County for more than sixinto their family in the next four
decades until his own son, William Henryyears-the fair-haired Dennis Carl Wilson
Wilson, decided to pursue fortune westcoming in late 1944 and Carl Dean
to the wide-open plains of Hutchinson,Wilson, another dark-featured boy, at
Kansas. So west they went, withthe end of 1946. Moving his family to a
patriarch George in tow, settling onto amodern, if cozy, two-bedroom ranch house
large, if relatively arid, farm thaton West 119th Street in the blue-collar
William Henry soon abandoned in order tosuburb of Hawthorne, Murry rolled his
go into the industrial plumbingsleeves up over his bulky forearms and
business. Contracts to work on theset to scratching out his own slice of
state's new reformatory system, alongthe postwar economic boom. He'd already
with the many opportunities afforded bymade some progress, jumping to a junior
the modernizing world around them,administration job at the Goodyear Tire
provided a decent working-class livingand Rubber Company just after Brian's
and a solidly built clapboard bungalowbirth and then, just as the war ended,
on one of Hutchinson's nice residentialto a foreman's position in the
streets. As the nineteenth century gavemanufacturing plant of AiResearch, an
way to the twentieth, William Henryaeronautics company that made parts for
began to think again of chasing fortuneSeattle-based Boeing Aircraft's growing
into the western horizon.line of civilian and military airplanes.
California! At the dawn of the newBy the end of World War II, the South
century, this was the setting of everyBay revolved around the thriving
ambitious man's dreams. The real estateaerospace industry. Borne up by the dual
flyers papering the town painted in thedemands of a rapidly expanding civilian
details, describing the valley soil asairline market and the
every bit as rich and fertile as the sunjust-as-rapidly-growing tension with the
was warm and the breezes gentle. ThusSoviet Union, aeronautics presented
inspired, William Henry scraped togetheropportunities for hardworking men that
the cash to buy, sight unseen, ten acreswere seemingly as limitless as their own
of prime farmland in the southernaspirations. But while Murry's timing
California village of Escondido. Williamwas spot-on, and he was a tireless
Henry loaded up his wife, kids, and evenworker with a penchant for big ideas,
his eighty-five-year-old father into thenothing came easily for him. A gruesome
family jalopy; they arrived in 1904 andaccident at Goodyear cost him his left
spent the year laboring on their neweye, and that twist of fate only
vineyard. And though the sun did indeedemphasized an aggressive-to-bellicose
shine, and the water flowed as promised,personality that tended to alienate him
and the vines did erupt with fat, juicyfrom co-workers and superiors alike.
fruit, the farming was every bit as hardStalled on the lower rungs of management
as it had been back in Kansas, and theand increasingly frustrated with his
money not nearly as vast as previouslyflat career arc, Murry descended into
anticipated. By 1905, William and familydark moods all too reminiscent of his
were back in the plumbing business inown father's. Still, unwilling to resign
Kansas. Still, memories of thehimself entirely to the old man's fate,
California sun and the dreams of easehe scraped together as much cash as he
and fortune that had once stirredcould and opened his own business, an
William Henry's soul came to rest in theindustrial equipment rental outfit he
imagination of his teenaged son, Williamcalled 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 goldenon, Murry Wilson would be his own boss.
future that awaited him in the GoldenThe arrangement suited him just fine.
State.So in the mornings Murry would dress in
Dark-eyed, heavy-browed, andhis pressed white shirts and skinny tie
thick-featured, Buddy Wilson took offknotted just so, his horn-rimmed glasses
for California in 1914. Then in hisperched on his thick, bulldog's face,
early twenties, the young man-alreadyhis suit jacket straining against the
married to Edith Shtole and the fatherprominent belly and muscular shoulders
of a child or two-fairly seethed withthat testified both to his appetite for
ambition. Surely, he imagined, a manwork and for the rewards awaiting a man
with his drive and appetite could findat the end of his day. Steering his Ford
an untapped stream of gold somewhere indown 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 timeAudree 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 fieldsdriveway for the late-model Ford, Buick,
of the southern coast. Guys could make aor Chevy, its tail fins gleaming in the
fortune if they latched onto the rightcool morning light.
rig, and so Buddy used his plumbingThese were the cars of men who were
skills as his entr?e, working as adetermined to get somewhere in their
steamfitter on the pipes that channeledlives. Like Murry, many of Hawthorne's
the gushers out of the ground and intomen were either born in the Midwest or
the pockets of the rich men whosewere 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 thethe first few decades of the twentieth
gilded halls of the powerful. Moody andcentury. "It was like a little
scattered, plagued by searing headachesMidwestern town that just got moved
and a self-destructive thirst forright there to eighty acres of land,"
whiskey, Buddy wandered from job to jobrecalls Robin Hood, who grew up a few
to long stretches of unemployment, whichblocks from the Wilsons. "There were a
he passed grumbling into a glass in alot of farmers from Kansas and Missouri,
dim barroom. When Edith and the kidsa lot of Dust Bowl-era folks who settled
finally joined him in 1921, taking thein with their big, extended families.
train to the elegant-sounding village ofNobody was rich, but we didn't know it."
Cardiff-by-the-Sea, he couldn't affordBut 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 monthsit was the one about the transformative
living in a snug eight-by-eight-footpotential of hard work. No matter where
tent with all the other squatters on theyou came from, no matter what your
beach.people used to be or what anyone
Edith took a job pressing clothes for aexpected you to become, in a
garment manufacturer, and eventually theworking-class West Coast town like
family moved to a small home on anHawthorne-which had been a stretch of
unpaved road in Inglewood where theempty coastal flats and swamp a
eight Wilson kids attended school,generation ago-you could work your way
worked weekend jobs, and marched theinto being anything or anyone you felt
thin line dictated by their sour fatherlike 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 occasionalinternal currents that can give the
afternoon bike rides to the open, breezypursuit an undertone of desperation. As
expanse of Hermosa Beach.Joan Didion would write, the California
Escape was a necessity for Buddyof this era was a place "in which a boom
Wilson's kids. Buddy, now in middle agementality and a sense of Chekhovian loss
and resigned to his life of smallmeet in uneasy suspension; in which the
prospects and severely limited horizons,mind is troubled by some buried but
had long felt his ambition curdle intoineradicable suspicion that things had
resentment. Often awash in alcohol andbetter work here, because here, beneath
self-pity, Buddy's bile regularly boiledthat immense bleached sky, is where we
over into violence, directed most oftenrun out of continent."
at Edith. But he could also turn hisEventually the Baby Boom generation
fists on his children, once beating thewould turn the very edge of the
school-aged Charles so savagely (forcontinent into its own proving ground.
mistakenly shattering his glasses) thatBut the impulse that propelled them
Murry, then a teenager, had to come tothere, that restless need for
his brother's rescue, shoving the olddeliverance and the intuitive belief
man out of the house until he soberedthat it could be divined by your own
up. And this wasn't the only time Murryhands 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-oldestthat had dragged their families across
boy found himself thrust into the rolethe American frontier and into the
of his mother's protector, raising hisdreamy, bustling, sun-glazed cities they
own fists against the father he lovedhad built for themselves. And this was
but who seemed unable to love him orwhere Murry's sons, Brian, Dennis, and
anyone else in the family.Carl, came to understand their father's
As in most abusive families, theneed for them to kick the world in the
physical and psychic violence that ruledass. He wanted so much for them. He
their home became an unacknowledgedwanted so much for himself. In the worst
presence, a force that both dominatedpossible way, you might say.
their lives and forced them intoReprinted from: Catch a Wave: The Rise,
silence. But if they couldn't talk aboutFall, and Redemption of the Beach Boys'
their problems, the Wilsons could alwaysBrian 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 WilsonRodale, Inc., Emmaus, PA 18098.
family tradition dating back to KansasAvailable wherever books are sold or
and beyond, as an eighty-seven-year-olddirectly from the publisher by calling
Charles Wilson (an uncle to Brian,(800) 848-4735.



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