The wild speed session with Roger McGuinn that resulted in one of Brian Wilson’s worst songs
Drugs, whether you like them or not, have had an undeniably profound effect on the music landscape over the decades, from the days of acid-fueled hippiedom to the pill-popping days of acid house.
That is not to say, however, that all you need to create a musical masterpiece is access to enough drugs – a fact which Brian Wilson found out the hard way during the 1970s.
The fresh-faced Beach Boys of the early 1960s, with their striped bowling shirts and surf rock guitars, hardly seemed like the type to immerse themselves in drug culture. Nevertheless, as the 1960s progressed and the counterculture years started to rear their head, the emergence of a drug like LSD infiltrated virtually all walks of the music industry.
Seemingly, everybody from the tripped-out hippies of San Francisco to the pop stars of Carnaby Street was infatuated with this new drug, and Brian Wilson wasn’t one to miss out on the opportunity to discover its creative powers.
In the end, Wilson ended up deeply regretting his experimentations with LSD, citing its mind-altering powers as being a key contributing factor to the deteriorating of his mental health throughout the remainder of his life. However, without those early acid trips and their artistic inspiration, an album as transformative as 1966’s Pet Sounds might never have come to fruition.
As The Beach Boys continued on in their quest for world domination, all the while becoming embroiled in vicious infighting and lasting rivalries, the presence of drugs only became more regular. Particularly during the late 1960s and into the 1970s, Wilson became particularly infatuated with cocaine and the occasional amphetamine, too. Inevitably, the products of that increasingly crippling addiction weren’t quite as masterful as Pet Sounds.
“Brian came up to my house in Malibu one day in his station wagon,” the Byrds frontman Roger McGuinn once recalled of an unlikely meeting between the pair circa 1973, per Classic Rock. “When he came in he said: ‘You got any speed?’ I said yeah, I had some somewhere around. So I found some amphetamines that I gave him.”
Brian Wilson has always been happiest in front of a piano, but plonking him in front of one with unrestricted access to amphetamines probably wasn’t the greatest idea. “He took them, and started playing piano, while I pulled up a chair and got my guitar. We started working on a tune and came up with this line and a chorus. But that was it,” McGuinn shared. “Because of the speed, he kept playing the same thing over and over. He just wouldn’t stop.”
“In the end I went up to bed for seven hours of sleep,” the songwriter continued. “When I came back down he was still playing exactly the same thing at the piano. It was like something out of a strange movie. He was very overweight and a little crazy back then.” That speed-fueled song took another four years to see the light of day, being released as ‘Ding Dang’ from The Beach Boys Love You in 1977.
Although it is true that Love You is a woefully underrated record in the band’s repertoire, it is fair to say that ‘Ding Dang’ is not one of the tracklisting’s highlights. In fact, it is arguably up there with Wilson’s most dismal efforts for the group. So, perhaps drugs aren’t always the answer to a creative drought.
