One song “brought peace” to The Beach Boys, according to Brian Wilson
Beyond the stories of his talent and creativity that rightfully dominate any mention of Brian Wilson’s name, there is also a sad legacy of struggle. As someone who battled greatly with his mental health, music was more than just a calling for Wilson. It was a safe haven, and one song in particular always felt like that.
In the mid-1960s, after already achieving success, The Beach Boys had to adapt. Brian Wilson, their leader, refused to tour anymore, largely because he refused to leave his house. This wasn’t a new thing. The artist struggled through bouts of agoraphobia his entire life, starting in his childhood, but then becoming utterly crippling as the pressures of fame and success mounted on him.
The song ‘In My Room’ captures that with a kind of sinister edge to it. “In this world I lock out all my worries and my fears, in my room,” he sings with the world of his bedroom being a comfortable prison at that point, a place where he hid from everything and pretended that it was soothing.
But at one point, it was, and a whole other song encapsulates that, and not one Wilson wrote. As someone who spent so much time at home, the setting of his house, or his bedroom, comes up again and again in Wilson’s work, usually as a stand-in image for the idea of safety or comfort. In this song, though, it’s the opposite, standing as a ditty that encourages a trapped person to fly free.
“Don’t lock yourself in an ivory tower / Don’t keep us so far apart,” Cathy Carr sings in ‘Ivory Tower’, the Jack Fulton and Lois Steele song she made famous in 1956. Calling for the person to free themselves from their confines and embrace life, it goes, “Come down, come down / From your ivory tower / You’ll find true love has its charms / It’s cold, so cold in your ivory tower / And warm, so warm in my arms”.
As a young boy, Wilson loved the song. He loved it so much that he wanted to sing it, and wanted to sing it with his brothers. “When Dennis, Carl and I lived in Hawthorne as kids, we all slept in the same room. One night, I sang the song ‘Ivory Tower’ to them, and they liked it. Then a couple of weeks later, I proceeded to teach them both how to sing the harmony parts to it,” he recalled of those young days as this song became the first that the core of The Beach Boys learnt to perform together. It was the spark of everything that was to come.
More so than that, though, it was a song that came to represent the innocent joy of childhood and the moments before darkness crept into Wilson’s life. To be young and singing a song about going out into the world, that kid version of Wilson had no idea that soon he would grow up to be the other person, the one trapped in his ivory tower and too scared to get out.
Yet for a beautiful period before things got tough, this was a cheerful and uniting song for Wilson and his brothers. “We then sang this song night after night. It brought peace to us,” he recalled tenderly, thinking back to when the song was a lullaby they’d soothe themselves with each night.
