“One of the great songs”: the 1964 track Brian Wilson wrote to woo his future wife
Brian Wilson should have counted his lucky stars that he came away with the legacy of being a sonic genius. Really, he was a massive schmutz.
To be fair, this was hardly a shocking revelation when he had come out with one of the best love songs of all time in the form of ‘God Only Knows’. You never needed to question where the heart of the man who wrote “If you should ever leave me/ Though life would still go on, believe me/ The world would show nothing to me/ So what good would living do me?” was.
But at the end of the day, he was only able to do that once he had the woman of his dreams secured. Up until that point, he had to dance and romance his way towards love in the same way as any other budding bachelor. The trick he had up his sleeve, however, was that he had a penchant for writing a song.
That seemed to particularly come into handy when he fell into the orbit of Marilyn Rovell, whose girl group The Honeys, he was heavily involved in during their time at Warner Records, to transform into a fellow 1960s success. Whether he succeeded in that mission as much as his own band was another matter, but he did come away with something else from that deal.
One of the lesser-known tunes by The Honeys was called ‘He’s a Doll’, and although it didn’t manage to make them much acclaim in terms of chart success, it did manage to worm its way into Rovell’s heart for other reasons. “Brian would always notice, when we saw a cute guy, we would say, ‘He’s such a doll,’ so he picked up on it and wrote one of the great songs for us,” she later said.
But don’t be fooled: this was much more than just an attentive eye. It was actually Wilson’s not-so-subtle attempt at taking the phrase of his desired woman and handing it straight back to her, hence making it more than clear that he wanted to be the doll in question. It may not have been that suave, but you’ve got to hand it to him. It worked.
Wilson and Rovell got to hear their wedding bells in December 1964, within the very same year that ‘He’s a Doll’ had been written in the first place. At least you couldn’t accuse them of stringing each other along. They were straight to the point in their marriage and relationship, and their daughters, Carmie and Wendy, soon followed.
Of course, there is a bit of an elephant in the room with all of this. Within just a few years, the couple had begun to experience strains, and the pressure was becoming too much. For better or worse, that obviously became the major muse of Pet Sounds, but also Wilson’s descent into mental illness, and his whole life coming close to unravelling.
Sometimes it felt better to stay in the safe space. To keep within the confines of naive, uninterrupted, blissful early romance, and never step outside of that. ‘He’s a Doll’ was the epitome of their love at first sight – but also had the slight tinge of an omen for all the chaos that was to come.
