Guardian Article - Andrew Loog Oldham

'I will write songs that people pray to'

When former Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham first met Brian Wilson, the drug-fuelled Beach Boy made an extraordinary boast. Then, one night at the Hollywood Bowl, it all came true...

Andrew Loog Oldham
Guardian

Friday January 18, 2002

So, I'm sitting here at home in Bogota, Colombia, late August 2000 - in a town where it's never late. Lou Adler was calling from Malibu. Adler is the man who either charmed you or alarmed you with his 30 years of non-stop hits and innovations - Jan & Dean, Johnny Rivers, Barry McGuire, the Mamas & the Papas, Carole King, and Cheech and Chong to name a few. Lou was calling to let me know that at the end of September at the Hollywood Bowl, Brian Wilson, the legendary Beach Boy loon creator, would be performing Pet Sounds in its entirety with a 10-piece band and a 60-piece symphonic orchestra, and would I care to join him. I told him it was just a matter of luggage and he knew I'd be there.

It's 34 years since Adler walked through my London door with Pet Sounds and played the acetate to a gob-smacked Paul McCartney and me. Pet Sounds was the Beach Boys' answer to the 1965 Beatles Rubber Soul. We were still in a summer of enthusiastic competition; too many drugs and schadenfreude mania had yet to set in, and Pet Sounds spurred Paul and the Beatles onward into the triumph of Sgt Pepper. I would channel its influence into my work via the sauntering cocky road movie that formed Aftermath and the rock'n'vaudeville Between the Buttons, the first two Rolling Stones LPs composed in their entirety by the Glimmer Twins, Jagger and Richard, that would signal the end of my run and the beginning of theirs.

The Pet Sounds recording changed my life for the better; it enhanced the drugs I was taking and made life oratory. I was 21 and enjoying my second year at the top of the pop heap. I had unsettled into a premature domesticity as an apology for not being there and was wondering what had gone wrong. It gave me an emotional life for the cost of just two sides of vinyl. I considered it a fair exchange.

The career of Wilson and the Beach Boys began to take shape on a Labor Day weekend, 1961, in Hawthorne, California. It was there and then that 19-year-old Wilson and his younger brothers Dennis and Carl gathered in their family's living room with cousin Mike Love and friend Al Jardine to rehearse a song Wilson and Love had written. The Wilson brothers' parents were away and had left $250 for food. Home alone, the boys used that money to rent musical equipment - and an American legacy, the Beach Boys, was born. The single was Surfin'. It was written at Dennis's suggestion and sang the praises of the burgeoning southern California surf teen craze. The raw matter that formed the forever sound of the Beach Boys can be heard in this primitive early outing - the fusing of the rhythm'n' blues of Chuck Berry with the smooth pop vocals of the Four Freshmen.

In four short years, the Beach Boys racked up a dozen top 10 smashes including Help Me, Rhonda, California Girls, I Get Around and When I Grow Up (To Be a Man). As America fuddled in confusion and lost its way under the British Invasion of 1964, only the Beach Boys on the west coast and the Bob Crewe-Bob Gaudio driven Four Seasons on the east coast held their own and grew.

I first met Wilson in late 1965 at RCA Studios on Iver off Sunset Boulevard. The Stones and I were recording in Studio A. Wilson sat wasted in a sluggish marijuana haze in the reception area. The only words he said that I recall were: "One day I will write songs that people will pray to." He already had. By that time, Wilson has stopped touring with the group and would soon slide into a two-decade tub of drug chaos, morbid food excess, madness and musical isolation. The lively and addicted Dennis Wilson would survive Charles Manson but succumb to drowning in 1983, and youngest brother Carl to cancer in 1998. Mike Love's main crime in the mid-1960s was being an embarrassment to shop with.

Wilson started the long trek back to reality via the controversial methods and billing habits of Dr Eugene Landy. Say what you will, and everybody did, he got Wilson up from death and walking and worked him down from 320lbs of lard to a reasonable and liveable weight. I met Wilson again in 1993, during Landy time in a restaurant in Santa Monica. Wilson arrived with two "health bodyguards" who allowed him out of the resturant every half-hour for a Marlboro. I was not yet into survival, so I used the timing to go for a line of coke in the loo.

Wilson was coming back but was still behind the count; he had not got all his ball bearings back, but he was looking strong and once more like a Beach Boy. At the end of the meal, Wilson asked for the bill and struggled with it as if trying to work out how to sign it. I asked him if he'd like me to sign it for him. For the first time in the whole evening, Wilson answered in present time and not on a 10-second delay: "No, too many people have done that for me in my life."

The orchestra tuned up on the Holly wood Bowl stage as Lou, his wife Page and I slipped into our booth and ordered coffee. The legendary Wilson collaborator Van Dyke Parks waltzed on to conduct a 20-minute Beach Boys overture cum suite, reducing the music of the Beach Boys into the dross of 1,000 musical nightmares I've walked out of. Ten rows back and yonder I could feel the yawn and hope that things would improve. I was having second thoughts about having tried to splice this night into my life.

Wilson sauntered on, waved, grinned sheepishly at the audience and sat down behind an electric piano that he did not play once all night. It was common knowledge that a guitarist/vocalist was on hand to double for Wilson in case he zoned out, forgot where he was, and the words.

For the first half, 58-year-old Wilson is backed by a 10-piece vocal and instrumental group. The Los Angeles pop band the Wondermints form the core. It's competent, little more. Wilson is sluggish, displays idiosyncratic mannerisms that are uncomfortably only one tweedledee away from the cuckoo's nest. Darlin' gives the 12,000-strong crowd a truly joyous moment, a deliciously harmonied R&B romp into the essence of the Beach Boys. But other than that, as the first half wound down with another high school wave and a "We'll be back", I wondered if the zenith of the evening would be my late realisation at what an accomplishment it was to write an up-tempo ditty with the name Rhonda in the title. So far the night had been full of nuggets, waves and pearls - but I'd yet to be born again.

We got our coffee, received some Hollywood hellos and pretty soon the grey-blue leisure-suited, black-trousered, boat-loafered Wilson slipped back onstage. I'm nervous. This is the moment, the celebration of being able to return from the dead and embrace the best of yesterday and move stimulative memory into clear and productive present time. Wilson is grey and terse; the years of drug abuse show as one side of his mouth droops into stroke mode. He catches himself, pulls himself up, and us with him. Charles Floyd picks up the baton to conduct the 60-piece Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra, the Wondermints plus are poised. Wilson counts off and we are finally away into Pet Sounds.

As I write, the glow and flow of the night washes over me. I sat in communion and harmony and wondered at this perfect live duplication of his recorded art. I cried and I smiled and I laughed, said goodbye to all remaining luggage and hello to the art. After side one, Wilson announced side two and took us on a cause for celebration and united the audience. In 1966, the audience had still been musical upstarts, their lack of taste lamented and groaned over by the grown-ups, but they had clutched this music to their hearts, and it had never let them down. It had armed them through the long dark night of the American 1960s, and now they beamed and celebrated their art and their participation and preservation of its spirit and esprit de corps and its ability to stay forever young.

The wave continued like a visitation. It was not virtual, it was reality. Wilson is one of the greatest composers and producers any of us have ever heard. He doesn't say much - but when he speaks, he speaks for us. Wilson was our voice in the teenage dark. We'd got laid, got confused and hurt. Wilson gave us the space to become men. This was an awesome task for an artist and it crippled him and prevented him from growing into one himself. The burden of speaking for so many drove him into the dark. I'm glad he got so lonely that he had to work his way back into life.

"One day I will write songs that people will pray to," he told me in 1965. And on September 24, in the year 2000 at the Hollywood Bowl, we did.

Brian Wilson is at the Royal Festival Hall (020-7960 4242) January 27-30. His Live at the Roxy is released to coincide with the tour. A version of this article will appear in 2Stoned, the second part of Andrew Loog Oldham's autobiography, published in October.