Why ‘Kokomo’ became the “missed opportunity” Brian Wilson always regretted
For a band with as chequered a history as The Beach Boys, a few regrets, missed opportunities, and forever-destroyed relationships is par for the course.
In fact, it’s a wonder that Brian Wilson and the gang ever found time for recording sessions in between their various vicious disputes, legal battles, and long-running feuds.
It didn’t take long for the California surf rockers to find their penchant for arguments. Following their initial formation back in 1961, those initial divisions largely revolved around the band’s manager, and Brian Wilson’s father, Murry Wilson, who ruled over the band with the kind of iron fist that would make a Soviet dictator flinch. Imposing countless bizarre rules on the group, and inflicting a horrific degree of emotional and physical abuse on his sons, the manager prevented the band from living the rock and roll lifestyle that they were carving out for themselves.
Even after the oppressive manager was cut from the picture, the Beach Boys’ behind-the-scenes life wasn’t typically noted for its good vibrations. Namely, many decades of the band’s history was plagued by an intense feud surrounding Brian Wilson and Mike Love; a rivalry so vicious that it derailed the band on multiple occasions over the years, and continued right up until Wilson’s tragic death earlier this year.
A core element of the feud involved Wilson’s refusal to go out on tour during the mid-1960s, instead devoting himself solely to studio work and, in turn, producing one of the greatest albums ever written, Pet Sounds. However, this did mean that The Beach Boys were essentially split into two variations: the live band and the studio band. So, as the years progressed and Wilson’s mental health fell into decline, Mike Love’s touring incarnation of the band began to take over.
This came to a head in the early 1980s when Wilson was removed from the band entirely, at the behest of his then-therapist Eugene Landy. Wilson’s time under the mentorship of Landy was controversial, to say the least. Not only did he isolate Wilson from the band, but also from his family and the vast majority of his close relationships. On one hand, the songwriter himself noted in a 2002 interview, “I loved the guy—he saved me,” but, on the other, Landy’s unorthodox methods risked sending Wilson into exile indefinitely.
Although Wilson did eventually return to the group, Landy’s authoritative influence over him certainly was not over. For instance, when The Beach Boys came to record their chart-topping 1988 masterpiece ‘Kokomo’, Love was omitted from the studio sessions. The exact reason for Wilson’s absence is disputed, with some claiming that he was busy working on recording solo material, and others pointing the finger at Landy, and his alleged demand to be credited as a producer and co-writer on the song.
The story goes that Landy prevented Wilson from taking part in the studio sessions for the track by not informing him about the recording in time. However, when the single shot to the top of the US single chart, and became one of The Beach Boys’ most iconic tracks, Wilson felt an understandable pang of regret. “When he heard it, and when I heard it, we went, ‘Oh my gosh, was that a missed opportunity?’” Wilson’s former legal representative John Mason later shared.
Ultimately, Wilson was able to rectify that regret to an extent, taking part in the recording process for the Spanish-language version of ‘Kokomo’, but the whole debacle was extremely telling of the authoritarian control that Landy had on Wilson’s back in the mid-1980s.
