The Smiley Smile Message Board

:/ certain interviews that I see of him now puzzle me and make me sad ...This is a genius that came up with some of the most beautiful music ever created by a human being.
It's bizarre how a regular conversation/interview with him can seem like such an obstacle but he can create a very complicated yet beautiful song like it's nothing, that's truly a gift.
In an interview Brian said LSD shattered his mind and he doesn't know how much of his mind came back :/...i wonder how much of his brain were destroyed by drugs :[
Thank goodness he didn't wind up like Syd Barrett.(may god bless his soul)

Eugene Landy did more to destroy Brian Wilson's mind than LSD, amphetamines, cocaine, booze, marijuana, or heroin ever did.

[amateurpharmacist] Whilst those drugs do bad things to your brain, there's always a way back 'mentally' if addiction can be bested - see countless old 60's geezers still in control of their faculties - but the drugs that Landy forced Brian were much more dangerous abused in those quantities.

Look at it this way - Brian took cocaine for most of the 70's but while he himself was 300lbs and a psychological mess, his brain was still functioning somewhat underneath the levels of intoxication - he was self-medicating, seems to be the case. After the 80's, with little recreational drug use (well, at the start of the decade) but regular and abusive doses of anti-schizophrenia medication (per Landy's misdiagnosis), Brian had tardive dyskinesia - the shakes, effectively, because those drugs were literally eroding his brain. His manners of speech changed, his memory was stunted, and so on. He had changed mentally - any interview footage from the Landy years should tell you as much, and the damage is quite clear in I Just Wasn't Made For These Times. I hate watching that doc, he still seems so ill. He's much better nowadays. [/amateurpharmacist]

LSD is a red herring, really, for Brian. He had, at most, two full doses (he claims he had a smaller dose than the first one in the Tom Wolfe interview, I think?). Compare to The Beatles, who were reportedly tripping 24/7 at points in 1967. Mental illness and Eugene Landy are much better signifiers of his condition.

I agree,  Landy was the main offender drug wise.  I can't remember which documentary it was on, but there was an interview with Brian and Landy, and Landy was saying that someone (also can't remember who)  was worried that Brian was going to end up like Elvis. Brians reaction and the way Landy talked to him (like a small child) is very, very disturbing. It's criminal what he did to Brian.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-K-n5op9nI

All of the second Landy-era interview clips are disturbing, but this one may take the (birthday) cake.

Yep that's the interview I was talking about.  Landy makes me skin crawl.  I read that he only got banned from practicing in California, I find that odd, that you can be banned in one state but still practice in others,  If you've done something bad enough to be banned from practicing you should have your license revoked period. Not sure if I'm correct on this though.

Difficult questions. Landy was a psychologist, not psychiatrist, so he wasn’t formally allowed to prescribe psychotropic drugs at all. However, there was at least one M.D. in his team, who might have been used as a scapegoat. The state-related question I cannot answer, but I’d find it very odd that if Landy was in some way to be found to be associated with malpractice, and/or undue intimate forms of a personal relationship with his client, that he then still was allowed to continue in states other than California.

In the 70s even though he looked and sounded quite depressed he still seemed quite sane. And then in the 80s you start to get this....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_yUFStXQvQ

That's really sad. His eyes took on a really crazed look during this period.

That's the Sweet Insanity period, early 90's.  Unwatchable.

After watching that video, have some observations...


1) How old are children?

2) :lol at him not being able to stop the sound of the theremin

3) How old are children again?!

4).  WTF at 'NO, let me logically convince you that  this record *mumble mumble mumble* we got people over to our art to our houses listening'. That was quite a weird sentence.

5). Children of God are in their twenties.

That video is equal parts sad and hilarious. I couldn't contain my laughter when Brian says (at around 2:20), "It was a rock n roll record. It rocked."

Not that it shows him 'better' by any means, but it's a long way off from the monosyllabic answers you get from his modern interviews now...

I sorta put the monosyllabic answers down to the 'Gee, did you take all day to think that question up?' kinda thing. Although as Wirestone will probably attest, even deeper questions will probably hit that kinda wall if he's not in the mood to be interviewed. He's better in that his actions and speech are natural, something which didn't really recover (working out his new meds?) until the late nineties, but he's also 20 years older than in that clip. Sometimes I think Brian is just a grumpy old man at times. It explains rather a lot...

Sorry to break it to you, but this reminds me a lot of '66 Brian, IMO...

http://www.americansongwriter.com/2009/01/brian-wilson-gods-messenger/

This interview was done only three years ago and Brian seems just to be just as lucid as he was when he was young. I think Brian just isn't interested in giving interviews anymore and just uses the same stock phrases and stories to get through them.

Edit:

“Surf’s Up.”
That was written with Van Dyke Parks in 1966 and it was done on drugs. We took speed pills. “Surf’s Up” was probably the worst vocal I ever sang.


^
Referring to 2004 version???

I don't know, here he just sounds so normal:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRFE-24ucxc

I don't really know how to describe it, I'm just so used to hearing interviews with him from the 80s, 90s, and 2000s that when I actually hear him back in the 60s and 70s it seems like a totally different person. Like it actually feels weird to me hearing Brian just speak like a regular person. Nearly all of the interviews he gives today aren't very good, he stammers a lot, he forgets his train of thought, he can't think up the words he wants to say, he lies, if there's another person 'helping' him be interviewed he'll defer answers to them, sometimes he just seems totally phony. He comes off more often than not as crazy, laconic, or even stupid. But every once in a while I'll read some tidbit from an interview and he'll not only give a very lucid answer, but he'll also say things that are incredibly lucid and penetrating. It's so hard to figure out where his head is at most days, has his brain been permanently damaged by drugs? Is he just annoyed? Or is he pulling the interviewers' leg?

I wish Brian would write a real autobiography.

There is just so so so much going on here. I agree with those before who sad it is mostly sad and scary... but god, it's funny too.

It's funny, just when you start thinking "Oh god there he goes this is going absolutely nowhere" he turns it around and gets his point across pretty well. "Written music with an unwritten sound"? That's pretty frigging beautiful and makes total sense.

The age/children thing..... he didn't get out too well but it goes along with the idea that while writing Pet Sounds they thought of themselves as teenagers in their 20s (I think it was Tony Asher who said this..... or was it VDP about Smile... I forget.) ((And I love how he draws a *very* serious distinction between a 25/26 yr old and someone "rapidly approaching 30"))

The face he is making at 2:33 cracks me up. Like he's saying "Yeah, you know you love it"

Without knowing anything else about Brian, I would say his behavior is consistent with someone who has taken a lot of coke.

And re: how this compares to Brian's present-day persona.... I think how he acts today is a mixture of the voluntary and involuntary. I think most of it is disinterest. But there was that one interview (again, I forget what it's from) where they show a clip of the Mike Douglas show where he's talking about drug use and the interviewer asks him what he thinks of the clip and Brian remarks upon how fast he used to be able to talk when he was young...

That was a good one. He never liked his 1966 vocal. I think the one for Inside Pop was a tad rough, but the studio version I think he sang great in 1966.

I just think he's embarrassed of his high voice.

Which is a shame because I adore his falsetto. I heard an interview where he said "I sounded like a chick, a sick chick"  HAHHA

I found this from a New York Times article:

In 1989, after the California Board of Medical Quality Assurance accused Mr. Landy of "grossly negligent conduct" in the Wilson case and others, he voluntarily surrendered his license for at least two years.

Check out how many times Brian mentions Ding Dang in that interview!  :lol

I'll tell you guys a funny story, about how I met Brian Wilson.  It was long before I knew anybody connected with him or had any involvement with the band other than being a uberfan.

My girlfriend at the time had expensive tastes and we had driven out to Malibu to grab lunch.  I walk in, wait for a table, look to my left, and the first thing I see is Brian Wilson playing pool with a blonde woman (Melinda, though I didn't know that yet because they had not yet married).  Needless to say, I freaked.

I spent the whole meal working up the gumption to go talk to him.  I finally did.  And as I approached Brian, I realized, I could think of absolutely nothing to say to the man that hadn't already been said.  I just sort of stood there gaping.

Now here's the cool part.  Brian leans in, grabs my hand, and says "I can see you've had some dark times in your life."  And proceeds to take control of the conversation, talks briefly about PET SOUNDS, wishes me well, and sends me on my merry way.  It was every fan's dream encounter with their idol.  The guy was totally good-natured, sweet, real and totally "there", and he bailed me out of an awkward social situation.  That despite the fact that I'd interrupted his pool game.

Now I've been in the same room with Brian since then, by my count, about five times.  We've never said a word to each other other than nodding when we passed each other on the staircase at a show once.  I doubt he knows who I am other than to have a vague bad impression because I used to have punk rock hair or some such thing.  He's always been very standoffish in those situations by my observation.  But the point is, when I encountered him one on one in an environment he was comfortable in, and approached him as a human being with his guard down, the guy was not just normal, he was awesome.  And that dovetails with everything I've ever heard about the man.

Take that observation for what it's worth.

Hilarious.  What year was that, 1994? (Post Landy, pre marriage)

Pretty sure it was the first half of '93.

For what it's worth, my experience with Brian -- in an tiny, backstage setting -- was similar. When he's in a small group, and around people he knows, he can be kind of a take-charge guy.

There's also something here that people sometimes don't understand -- Brian has fears that are kind of logical. He took John Lennon's death very hard, and has talked about his fears of something similar happening to him. And I recall about three or so years ago that some FBI files were released that showed Brian had indeed been threatened over the course of a year or two in the late 90s, early 2000s, by a stalker. The person had his home phone and would call him up.

How would that make a lot of us act in public situations?

Melinda claimed once that Brian was scared to death to say anything publicly detrimental about Landy, because he was afraid that Landy would show up at his house. 

Now, that sounds kind of crazy at first... but hell we don't know what Brian knows about Landy, or if Landy ever threatened him, or hell maybe Brian knows Landy had somebody hurt, or whatever. 

So there's a couple ways to look at it

1. It could have been mentally ill Brian emotionally not wanting to deal with Landy

2. It could have been an irrational fear that a mentally ill man can subscribe to anybody or anything ("I'm afraid of lighting bugs!!!")

3. It could have been a rational fear, based on prior experience with the man.

Of course all that is moot now with Landy gone. 

As for the drugs, drugs are drugs.  I agree with everyone that Landy did more harm than the recreational drugs did, but I'm not in the camp that excuses his use of those.  Someone with mental illness should absolutely not be using recreational drugs. 

One more thing I just noticed, the original question was "how much did drugs do to Brian's mind?". 

Personally, and you can call me naieve if you want, I think Brian's overcome all the issues drugs (Landy's, or recreational) caused in his life.  His 'mind' may have been messed up for periods of his life, but I think he's pretty straight now.  Now, the illness is still a factor, etc.  .. but if you're saying Brian's a burn-out, I disagree.  I think he's as sharp as he ever was, and some of his erratic behavior you see hints of, PRE drug use. 

I think Brian's mind is as straight as it could be post landy.  I think a drug less 1970s Brian would be sharper.  But I guess you could say that about most people, but 70 isn't that old.  Harrison ford is 70, he could still kick ass.  Wasn't there an interview recently where Brian said he was amazed at how fast his young self could talk?  That's kinda telling. 

What do you guys think thorazine did to Brian?

Obviously the only time many of us have seen him is either in a staged M&G or when there's a camera on him, and both of those situations are bound to make him clam up. Wasn't there a story of someone who went to interview him (a friend or acquaintance) where Brian was totally charming and verbose...until the tape recorder went on. He then clammed up and asked the guy to turn off the tape recorder. Then, with the recorder off, he became his talkative, friendly self again.

f***ed him up, probably.

I often wonder though what kind of damage was done to him in 1968 when he was institutionalized. Electro-shock, perhaps,  which probably didn't have the best possible effect on Brian.

Have we ever narrowed down the dates for this? I've heard I Went To Sleep was based on that experience, and the track for that was done June, 4 1968. So it had to be before than right?

I've also heard a lot about how Brian can be quite normal under relaxed conditions. Hasn't he always used bizarre behaviour as a shield?

What do you guys think of May, 1968 for the period of Brian's commitment? April seems like it would have been a hard month for him. As soon as Mike got back from India, after two months of not playing any shows, the very first gig they were supposed to do was called off. Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed. Though this was probably not an overwhelming blow for Brian, I imagine the news was a little hard for him to swallow.

The Friends single came out April 8th, it was the worst charting single A-side since "10 Little Indians".

April 29th Carnie was born. I've heard Marilyn said Brian first became noticeably different around this time, and sometimes cried in the middle of the night.

Less than one week later, Sunday, May 5th, the band's Maharishi tour was canceled. In a January '68 interview Brian sounds fairly hopeful about The Maharishi, and said he wanted to write some songs about meditation. Now The Maharishi dumped the band, and according to AGD cost them $250,000 (upwards of $2 Million in today's money). This cost was on top of the band's existing financial trouble, and the money they owed Capitol for canning SMiLE.

May just feels ripe for renewed mental health issues, hell, May, 1968 must have been a very unpleasant month for the entire band. No recording was done, no shows were given. The conversations that month could not have been fun. I imagine Brian was committed sometime in there, maybe a few days later when the rest of the guys made it back to LA and started talking about their continued solvency as an organization. Brian went away for a couple of weeks, and when he came back things had maybe settled down a bit. Brian had a few new ideas he wanted to try out, and he likely consented to writing and recording a commercially viable single at the behest of Mike and/or the rest of the band. They talked things over, spent a few days regrouping and banging out some ideas and returned to the studio May 26th.

These sessions however did not go well from everything I've heard. All of the old problems surfaced again, Brian's time in the institution hadn't cured him and he went back to his compulsive recording habits on Old Man River. I've never read anything about how exactly the arguments played out, but the fact that those sessions didn't pan out speaks pretty loudly.

That's just what I came up with for a timeframe after a little thought, does anyone have anything they can add?

Interesting stuff.  I really love the recording sessions of that time.  Was walk on by in the same time period?

Fishmonk, you said somewhere on this forum -- maybe this thread in fact -- that "I Went To Sleep" was written by Brian about his time institutionalised. I've also heard it suggested the song is about coke. I'd be very curious what makes you suggest this, not because I disagree but because that song is over before it even begins and little is known (at least to me) about its writing.

"I Went To Sleep" about being institutionalized? Or cocaine? That's a fuckin' baloney sandwich and a half, if I ever heard it. Why does everything Brian writes have to be about doing drugs or some horrible thing that happened to him? Can't a guy just write a nice little song about going to the park, spacing the fuck out and falling asleep?

So Much

Hello Kitty, how the f*** did you bypass the swear machine?

I would say late summer or early autumn, after the songs were sold by Murry and after a productive series of recordings. After that period, there is virtually no involvement by Brian in the recordings in 1968 to the extent that he was involved in them from the rest of the year. There are no new Brian songs, and the band begins taking stuff out of the vaults or contributing their own material.

QFthefuckingTruth

 :angel:

It's really fucking easy.

Possibly, but I also very much dislike the whole "Brian never wrote a song with any subtext" thing. I've heard this little rumor for years, it very well might not be true. My post was just an attempt to make sense of things, if Brian went to the hospital in May, and started working on I Went To Sleep a few days after he got out...well...

Yes, who knows... From personal experience I can say that people ascribe weird and entirely unrelated things to lyrics - the sky's the limit, really - especially when the lyrics are abstract. It is still a worthwhile discussion.

However, Cocaine? It is not a drug that is conducive to sleep, from what I understand. Perhaps after he used it, he would go to sleep...

Yeah, it's likely not a song about coke. But that being said, "I Went to Sleep" is definitely suggestive of drug experiences.

I don't think "I Went to Sleep" is about coke at all. Mostly because of all the things coke makes you do, none of them is sleep.

Haha, exactly.

Wow! Great story. That's a memory for life. I wonder how many other stories like this are out there.

How did you react to that statement from him?




I don't think that these type of guesstimations are particularly useful when considering with mental illness. Most of the time there is no outside cause.  Mostly likely he was just getting sicker and sicker until he did or said something or felt something that got him committed. 

Brian seems like he has a pretty atypical case of mental illness. It seems to combine panic attacks, schizophrenia, and bipolar mood disorder. He likely checked himself into the hospital in 1968 after a severe panic attack. There's a story of him doing the same thing when work started on BWPS, and his panic attack on the airplane in the early sixties is well known.
I don't think it was a case where he got so crazy he had to be committed by his family because he was rambling on for hours about incomprehensible nonsense while calling himself Jesus. I don't know to what extent Brian has auditory hallucinations, but it seemed more like a combination of marijuana/amphetamine use and a panic disorder that caused some of his serious problems 1966-1968. I simply think the question of when he entered the hospital is interesting in of itself.

I Went To Sleep seems too oppressive to me to be simply about zoning out. It always reminded me Brahms' 4th Symphony, there's just something about the e minor key, it's a song with an ambivalent sort of melancholy. It's not a happy song about about taking naps, there's something depressed about it. The lyrics too are a little strange,

Again at the park on a nice summer day,
high up above me the trees gently sway,
a bird flew away,
and I went to sleep.

It's the link between the bird and the singer that seems so odd to me. The singer isn't able to fly away free like the bird, he falls asleep. There's also something sort of hopeless in the repetition of the park. Like the singer isn't getting anywhere, he's right back where he started.

Even the shared lead vocal makes the song seem very impotent and depersonalized. It isn't even Brian singing, it isn't anyone. The singer is lost and unable to find himself, confused, voiceless.

All these things paint a different picture of the song for me. I wouldn't be surprised at all to find out the song was about Brian being administered sedatives, it's a very beautiful song and I think you can't discount interpretations like this, it has a more complicated set of emotions behind it than you're giving it credit for.

Excellent Fishmonk, I can relate to that song. It is like a recurring dream I used to have, the simplest thing like a bird or sleeping would envoke great panic. It is his voices that are labouring, lagging along slowing his mind down the bird or those above him are free to do as they feel, he is helpless alone but accompanied only by his mind that betrays him.

Oppressive? Hopelessness? Being unable to find yourself? Can't say I hear any of that. It's not a shiny, happy song as with their earlier material, but I don't hear anything near the terms you described. A touch of happy, something dream-like, a touch of sad, but nothing in the extreme.

I feel like people read too much into everything Brian does as being this profound thing about mental illness or drug use or whatever and are sometimes looking for something that isn't there. To me, Brian was seemingly on a kick of describing or possibly seeking simplicity for a few years, there. That's not a suggestion that that material lack substance - quite the opposite. See "Busy Doin' Nothin'", "I'd Love Just Once To See You", "Wake The World", and yes, "I Went To Sleep".

Different interpretations, I s'pose.

Brian in the '67/'68 period is a more complicated songwriter than I think some might realize. He had a very keen sense when it came to the marriage of a song's text with music. I'm a big fan of German art songs, and when it comes to composition Brian does a lot of very interesting things in his musical interpretation of lyrics, like Schubert or Schumann before him.

Busy Doin' Nothing is great in the sort of masturbatory tension it uses during the driving and phone sections. These little tasks become huge ordeals for Brian, and the way he resolves them and dissipates the tension musically is really wonderful, in this self important little orgasm. It's a song that evokes a feeling of routine complacency, of being isolated in your own little world where everything revolves around you.

I wouldn't say the song is "about" those things, but I think you're leaning too heavily on this misguided notion of what it means to be "about" something in the first place. The lyrics just describe someone giving directions and making a phone call, but it that what it's "about"? It evokes a range of ideas and emotions, it evokes how Brian felt in those late 60s heydays. Isolated, lost, satiated, pampered and overly comfortable, unproductive, unimportant, unambitious.

The combination of the text, the composition, and the production gives the song a more sophisticated depth that goes well beyond the literal meaning of the lyrics. It's a song that's couched in his life experience, piddling around his mansion, busying himself with trifles as the world went by outside his window. It's an expression of his lack of direction and aimless future.

I'd like to hear somebody take Brian's songs from Pet Sounds and Friends especially and arrange them for piano and voice.

That was a beautiful interpretation of the song.

I really enjoyed reading Fishmonk's posts in this thread. Inspired me to listen the songs discussed for the first time in years, wonderful to hear them with fresh ears. "I Went To Sleep" is one of the 2 or 3 songs that vaulted me into 'hardcore fan' territory. After hearing "I Went To Sleep" I knew I wouldn't rest until I heard everything they did.

Yes Fishmonk also inspired me and I listened to them walking my dog today.  Could never be as wonderfully descriptive about them though.  Do you take requests?   ;)

What the hell is "masturbatory tension"?

Get me a baggie of hydro and a let me stare at my wife while she naps, and I'll show you.


Kidding. ;)

BW always said that the LSD trip in the 60s shattered his ego into a thousand pieces.


What I can't get my head around is that:

• He had his worst meltdown in the early 2000s after being under professional medical care for over 10 years.
  
  He seemed more coherent and together in the 80s than in the 90s.

Brian seemed more coherent in the 1980s because Landy had him hopped up on speed for public appearances.

See that doesnt' make sense to me. I'm no  chasing some big conspiracy but I just don't get it.

Brian also didn't feel the full abuse of Landy until the 1990s when the damage from the landy drugs became apparent.

Yes, these things are cumulative.

You know, we like to paint a pretty bad picture of Mike here. But I think the real villain of the Beach Boys' story is Landy.

Absolutely. BW today is pretty much down to him.


Mike is an asshole, true, but that is balanced out by his many redeeming features - songwriting, performances, etc. Landy is irredeemable.

 :lol :lol :lol :lol :lol

Brilliant Billy, I actually did 'lol' at this!

right on!

Yeah, except the whole thing where Brian didn't die in the 70s or early 80s, which there's no doubt in my mind that he would have. Guy went way too fucking far and did some really disgusting things, obviously, but let's be real here.

Yes, and the Kathy Bates character in Misery has good qualities.

Landy is the only one in the whole story I have nothing good to say about.

I was reading some of your old posts when browsing earlier looking for stuff about the mid-'68 period. I hadn't heard about your book, but it sounds really amazing. I hope you'll get it out soon, I'd buy the first copy.

Thank you and I hope you get to read it as soon as possible. Because of your enquiry I will put up a full update tonight.

Landy was not the only psychologist and was probably, in fact, one of the worst options available.

Let's be grateful he lived through it to make all the beatuiful music that has poured out of him since 1995.