Brian Wilson and the different drugs that inspired The Beach Boys’ albums: “They make you want to sing”
Maybe I’m being a prude here, but if there’s one thing that has always set my teeth on edge about rock culture, it’s the romanticisation of drug addiction. I know this is nothing new. Ever since romantic poets like Coleridge and Shelley extolled the virtues of opium, we’ve always associated drugs with artists, creatives and progressive thinkers in general. It’s got to the point where several people deep down think that they can’t be creative without chemical assistance. Or, at the very least, it’s a prerequisite to thinking outside the box. To them, I’d simply tell them to look at the history of Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys.
Bill Pohlad’s 2014 film Love & Mercy illustrates this with brutal clarity. John Cusack and Paul Dano play The Beach Boys’ genius in varying states of their drug-fuelled decline and fall into the clutches of Paul Giamatti’s verminous shrink, Dr Eugene Landy. A man whose treatment of Wilson was apparently even worse than the shocking depths shown in the film. Wilson goes from a warm, creative, and funny young man to a traumatised, utterly dependent wreck in a way that both Cusack and Dano embody with chilling humanity.
Now, am I going to be the kind of reactionary narc who sees the state Wilson finds himself in and blames it entirely on drugs? No. Wilson was clearly too sensitive for the circles he found himself in. He was entrusted to the care of abusers and users when he was in dire need of genuine healthcare outside the Hollywood world. However, the weapons the sycophants and leeches in his life used to keep him compliant were absolutely drugs.
It’s a testament to the monk-like patience he must have today that he could stomach a question like the one put to him by New York Magazine in a 2005 interview. When asked about “the drugs behind your albums”, Wilson responds, “Pet Sounds was marijuana. The Van Dyke Parks song (Smile) was Benzedrine. Psychedelics put you in a vocal mood. They make you want to sing. It’s like when a bird lands on a wire.” This is a level of grace that only a man who is completely at peace with his past could find if you ask me.
Especially when it completely disregards Brian Wilson himself as a creative. Sure, blunts and tabs can relax you into silencing everything, telling you your bad ideas are bad, which can lead to some interesting experiments. However, the idea that Pet Sounds comes from weed and not a man driven to find the connecting point between The Beatles and George Gershwin is quite frankly infantilising.
If anything, we may have lost a record due to his tuning in, turning on and dropping out. After all, the reason we didn’t get the record Wilson envisioned as his masterpiece, Smile, at The Beach Boys’ 1960s pomp was all the hippy hangers-on feeding him tabs of LSD like he was a vending machine. Looking at him today, it’s a miracle he’s still around, let alone that he was performing live so long into his dotage.
I know I sound like a cop. However, that’s a badge I’m willing to bear if it means a few more people view Brian Wilson as less of an acid casualty whose dabbling led to some great records and more of the bonafide genius he truly is.
