The painful song that made Brian Wilson hate The Beach Boys: “They’re assholes”
There’s a good chance that no one would have given a second glance to The Beach Boys without Brian Wilson.
He was the resident genius of the group on every single record they made, and even if they didn’t have the most thoughtful lyrics on every one of their songs, it didn’t matter when the melody was enough to break anyone’s heart on tunes like ‘California Girls’. Every single melody that he wrote seemed to be touched by some musical god, but Wilson was also the first to say when the band was making a mockery of the kind of music that they had started with.
At the same time, the story of Wilson’s time with the band has always been troubled to a certain degree. He was always willing to go above and beyond in the studio to get something that sounded right for the song, but there were more than a few times where he seemed to go a bit too far into experimental territory. Whether or not that was the case of Mike Love being a dick is up for debate, but it was clear that Wilson needed a little bit more help by the time the 1970s had got underway.
And while his eventual returns to the band did give them a bit more staying power on albums like Love You, it’s not like they didn’t have their fair share of problems, either. The idea of anyone in their 30s writing a tune like ‘Roller Skating Child’ was going to get a few strange looks from fans, but Wilson felt that the true low point of the band didn’t happen until he got to see what the band looked like without him.
The band was already one of the biggest draws back in the 1960s, but their management’s idea to play up their earlier material was a huge step backwards for the rest of them. They had officially become a nostalgia act by the 1980s, and it didn’t help that they relied on the songs that made them look like clean-cut versions of what rock and roll was supposed to be in the days of Frankie Avalon.
Now, it should be said that Love actually was that clean-cut asshole when he took charge of the band, but the idea of them trying to fit into the new school in the late 1980s was never going to work. The idea of getting Terry Melcher back in the studio to produce with them wasn’t the worst idea, but since that resulted in them making ‘Kokomo’ without Wilson, their former genius felt that they were destroying the legacy that he helped create.
He didn’t want them to be pandering to what the rest of the world was doing, and he had no problem calling them out on it, either, saying in 1995, “The Beach Boys are being assholes to me. There’s probably five or six real good reasons why they don’t like me. One is they’re jealous. Two: they’re assholes. Three: they’re too businesslike. And four: there’s no respect. They have no respect for me. I think The Beach Boys are trying to destroy me as a producer. I think they’re trying to make Terry Melcher their hero and me their villain.”
And given where the band went afterwards, it’s not like Wilson’s argument doesn’t hold a little bit of water. Summer in Paradise is still one of the most desperate albums a band has ever made to try and stay relevant, and when that went over about as well as a whale carcass that washed up on the beach, Stars and Stripes Vol. 1 is pretty much the same thing, only this time with a country twang to it.
The entire Beach Boys enterprise may have started with Wilson’s genius songs, but Wilson wasn’t about to stick around and see his baby get desecrated this badly. The band could have gone the respectable route of just playing the songs from their early years, but they seemed to jump the shark a few times when they figured that John Stamos deserved to have more time on their records than Wilson did.
