Hawthorne, California is one of those very blue collar, working class towns. For years it was headquarters to one of the largest aerospace corporations in the world -- Northrop Aircraft. It was just two miles down the road from plants run by Rockwell International and McDonnell-Douglas Aircraft.
Those companies, now parts of larger corporations, built the aircraft that helped win World War II.
Many of the factory workers that toiled in the wartime plants lived in Hawthorne -- from a very young Norma Jean Baker who worked on an aircraft assembly line before emerging as Marilyn Monroe, to Murry Wilson, a guy who ran a machine shop in the aerospace industry.
Even after the war there weren't many frills in this gray little town, not much for the kids to do other than hang out at the local A&W or go to the beach, where they were all learning the new sport in town -- surfing.
Before The Beatles burst upon the scene and led an invasion of moptop bands to the Colonies, The Beach Boys were already recording songs and performing at sock hops and community fairs. Murry's sons Brian, Dennis and Carl recruited their cousin Mike Love and a neighbor friend, David Marks, to form the band, which leaned heavily on the harmonies of The Four Freshmen and iconic riffs of Chuck Berry to write and perform songs that thrust them into musical nirvana and placed the band as the greatest spokesmen for the southern California lifestyle.
They wrote about a fantasyland California, a place of the endless summer where there were always two girls for every guy, it was cool to be true to your school and it didn't matter if daddy took your T-bird away, you were still the prettiest little girl in school and your life would continue to be nothing but fun, fun, fun.
It didn't take long for The Beach Boys to become America's favorite band. They reflected an image of wholesomeness from their red and white striped short-sleeved shirts and white pants to the innocence of their songs.
Meanwhile, beneath the surface, there was darkness.
Murry would never win father-of-the-year awards. He was brutal -- particularly so to his most sensitive son, Brian. He battered the boy so much, according to folklore, that he deafened his right ear. From what I've been told over the years, that's not true. As I heard it, Brian suffered deafness in that ear from birth. The brutality? That part was true. Murry was a tyrant, a frustrated musician himself, who mismanaged the band for years before they finally fired him. When they did, he signed on a copycat band called the Sunrays to compete with his own sons.
I had always been a fan, even during the psychedelic '60s when many of my friends turned away from The Beach Boys because, well, they said they just weren't cool. They were a pop band, a bunch of bubblegummers, many of my friends said. Yeah, but they sure could sing.
That's why I was really stoked, as they would say, when I got my first opportunity to meet them.
I was working at the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner and it was early summer. The band was rehearsing for a huge tour at a place called SIR Studios in Hollywood. SIR Studios rented equipment and rehearsal halls of all shapes and sizes. There was one aircraft-hangar-sized room where bands with a more elaborate stage and production could work out the details before going on the road.
On this day, the room was filled with a huge replica of a sailing vessel, decked out with a multi-level stage where The Beach Boys would play. Up on one corner was a roost where Brian Wilson, who had just come out of a couple of years of self-imposed solitary confinement in his bedroom, would play as he rejoined the band.
Dennis was the first to arrive. He walked up, looking nothing like The Beach Boy Denny of old, with a scruffy beard, long hair, khaki cargo pants and tank top T-shirt.
"Got any pot?" he asked me.
Times were fairly dry and so I had to tell him, "No."
Still, he sat down and started chatting like we had grown up together. He was all excited about the rehearsal, the gig, his brother's return to touring with the band. After about a half an hour, he asked who I was. That's how it was with Denny, the eternal puppy, who sought friendship and compassion at any cost.
Denny had always been the first Wilson brother over the fence. If there was trouble to be found, he found it first. It was Denny who got tangled up with Charles Manson and his group of homicidal lunatics. It was all just fun until the sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll turned into ugliness on a scale that propelled Manson into international headlines and sent Denny into decades of fear. He was just there for a good time, Manson wanted to be a rock star, and Denny tried to help. When he couldn't and when Charlie became too deranged and demanding, Denny cut the ties. It was Dennis Wilson and his buddy Terry Melcher -- Doris Day's son and a well-respected record producer in his own right -- that the Manson clan was after that night they slaughtered Sharon Tate and her friends. Denny carried the fear of Manson with him until the day he died.
It was Denny who came home from the beach one day and told Brian, "Hey, all the kids are surfing. You oughta write a song about that."
His skills as a drummer were fairly limited in the early days, so much so that session drummer Hal Blaine played percussion on most of the band's early records. Still, Denny developed a unique style and eventually became fairly skilled behind the drum kit.
The concert was a smashing success, the band had made what was, at that time, it's third rebound in popularity and Denny? Somewhere during the tour he stole Karen Lamm away from Bobby Lamm, keyboard player and lead vocalist for Chicago, which served as opening act.
Flash forward a few years to a very warm and comfortable recording studio a stone's throw from the beach in Santa Monica. Brothers Studios it was called.
In the control booth, Denny is sitting behind the console, mixing down tracks for one of the songs on his vastly underrated solo album, "Pacific Ocean Blue," his beautiful tenor coming through the playback speakers bolted to the walls.
"I'm gonna lay down more tracks tonight...about 3...you play?" he asked. "I'll give you album credit."
"Well, I learned to play drums by listening to Beach Boy records," I told him. But, alas, my shot at stardom had to go unfulfilled because, well, I had this thing called a job and God knows how many hours I would have ended up in the studio with Denny or what condition we would both be in when it was all over.
His then-wife Karen Lamm-Wilson, as she liked to be known, waltzed into the studio.
"What have you given my husband? He's in a great mood," she asked.
"Nothing, he was like this when I got here," I told her.
"Come by more often," she said.
After lunch at a seafood joint a couple blocks away, where we could see Pacific Ocean Blue just across the street, we returned to the studio. That's when I witnessed one of the many breakups of one of the most famous bands in the history of the world.
I was sitting with Denny at the mixing board when Brian walked in. He had one arm folded across his bulging belly, the other at a 90-degree angle with his finger pointing upward.
"I just called Johnny Carson and we're going to do his show tomorrow night and sing 'Johnny Carson,'" Brian said, referring to a cut from the band's latest LP.
"You what?" Denny asked incredulously.
"Yeah...we're gonna do his show," Brian responded.
"Brian, you're my brother and I love you, but no...you can't just book The Beach Boys like that," Denny said.
He started out compassionately, but anger soon took over as Brian wouldn't budge. About 15 minutes into the argument, their younger brother Carl arrived to hear, "well...you can do the show, but not with me...I'm out...no more Beach Boys," Dennis screamed, leaving the studio.
Brian meandered to an outer office, Carl stood frozen, tears rolling down his cheeks.
We went into one of the other empty studio rooms and sat.
"It's been like this a long time," he said. "I don't know what to do anymore."
We chatted for an hour. I already knew that during Brian's down time, when he had his nervous breakdown and lost the will to perform live with the band, that Carl was the one who held the band together, did his own brand of wizardry in the studio when Brian was too stoned or crazed and actually forfeited some writing credits to his older brother, just for the sake of family harmony and continuing the illusion of the Endless Summer. Even when I mentioned that Carl, as sweet a human being as ever walked the face of the Earth, downplayed it all.
"So...it's over?" I asked Carl.
"You were here...you saw it...you tell me," he said.
"It's over...for now, I guess," I said, leaving with a completely different story than the one I had come to write.
The rift pushed more distance between Denny and Mike Love, who had never been on the best of terms anyway. Al Jardine? The guy who replaced David Marks, because Murry Wilson didn't think it would be good for business to have a very Jewish-looking kid playing lead guitar, was just a hanger-on, a hired hand, never really as much a part of the band as he would have liked to have been. I could understand because what chance did an outsider have against the Wilson clan and their cousin, Mike?
The band was about six months into its breakup when I got a call one day from Mike Love, who was recording with his new band, Celebration.
"C'mon up to the ranch in Santa Barbara and I'll show you how I can levitate," Love said.
Huh? Levitate? Now, I had been invited to interview Bootsy Collins once, a guy who would only do the interview if I showed up on a Saturday morning, take a tab of acid and eat Fruit Loops with him as he watched cartoons. Honest. I took a pass. And, I had been offered trips to go watch other bands rehearse or perform on the opening leg of their tours. But, I had never been invited to see someone levitate.
"C'mon...the hometown paper...hometown band...it'll be cool," Mike said.
I took a pass. There was a concert that night and I didn't feel like driving all the way to Santa Barbara to see a follower of the Maharishi fall flat on his ass. Besides, I knew that if Mike got you stoned enough on rock star grass, you'd actually believe he was levitating. And, Santa Barbara would be a long, long drive home.
But, we chatted about his new project anyway. I asked about The Beach Boys and he said not to worry, they'd be back, but to make sure I listened to "The TM Song" very loud. It was his ode to transcendental meditation, which he learned to practice while hanging out in Rishkish with The Beatles.
"I'll do that," I said, glad I didn't have to go all the way up the coast to listen to hours of chanting and God knows what other kinds of madness.
A few months pass and I get a call from Sandy Friedman, the Rogers & Cowan publicist who served the band loyally for years.
"Tomorrow they're playing a street party at a sorority at USC," Sandy said. "Jan and Dean will be there and it should be very cool."
I was on board for this one.
So, I show up at the sorority about the time the roadies are dressing the stage. Mike is in the backyard, chatting up the young ladies. Carl and Brian arrive in the lounge. No entourage, no publicists, agents, or managers.
"Do me a favor?" he asked. "Watch Brian for awhile, please? I gotta make a beer run."
"Why me?" I asked.
He mumbled something and was off.
So, here I am with rock 'n' roll's most eccentric personality, charged with his welfare while his brother goes on a beer run.
"Brian? You know Ed...he'll be with you for awhile. I gotta go for a bit," Carl told his older brother before he left. Brian just nodded.
We chatted, but Brian was not terribly responsive. He was going through his therapy phase and was not very communicative unless he was sitting at a piano. So, to get through to him, I walked him over to a grand piano in the center of the room and we sat on the bench.
Immediately, he started playing. Old Beach Boy songs, old Phil Spector songs. He was in the first verse of "Da Doo Run Run" when he elbowed me in the ribs to sing along. For a couple of guys with only two good ears between them we did OK on the harmonies. Finally, Carl showed up with his beer.
"Hey, where's Denny?" I asked.
Turns out Denny got busted. He was caught the night before in Phoenix with a 15-year-old girl, who turned out to be Mike Love's daughter. Yeah...and they eventually had a child together.
Sill the USC gig was very cool, especially when Jan and Dean hopped on stage about two-thirds of the way through the set and they did all those great surf classics.
The years passed. Denny died in a drowning accident. Carl passed away from brain cancer. The Beach Boys, however, continued to tour and they were coming to Cedar City, Utah, where I was living and working.
I set up a phone interview with Mike.
"Oh, my God," he said as we recalled some old times. "Well, come backstage and say hello, OK?"
I did.
It was a decent show and certainly nostalgic to see a 60-something guy dancing around on stage wearing a red and white striped shirt, white pants, and tennis shoes while singing about fast cars, big waves and an endless summer.
And, even though the band was pretty much nothing more than a pleasant nostalgic act, it was still cool to see.
