Carl Only Knows: A New Biography of the Man Legally Known as the Beach Boys

Critic Jesse Jarnow on the new biography of Beach Boy Carl Wilson, Long Promised Road.

October 12, 2015

Image may contain Carl Wilson Face Human and Person

While the recent biopic Love and Mercy continued the deification of Brian Wilson, it was his youngest brother Carl that led the Beach Boys for more than twice as long, both onstage and in the studio. Kent Crowley’s Long Promised Road: Carl Wilson, Soul of the Beach Boys, the Biography is a fascinating but frustrating effort to recast Carl as the hero of an alternate but equally real version of Beach Boys (and pop music) history. And of all the Wilson family members in need of illumination, Carl deserves it most, the voice of “God Only Knows” and “Good Vibrations”, the Boy who captained the band o’er the stormy seas between their ’60s hits and their improbable stadium-filling success in the ’70s and ’80s.

-=-=-=-But Long Promised Road reads more like a Carl-centric take on the familiar surf-rock-to-stardom narrative, offering few peeks into the brooding, bearded Wilson on the front cover. Indeed, when 18-year-old Carl shows up at the recording session for Beach Boys Party in late 1965 with his new fiancée on his arm, it’s a surprise to learn that young Carl has been dating, or even (one assumes) moved out of the Wilson home in suburban Los Angeles. The textures of Wilson’s life are mostly absent as Crowley leaves the well-told parts of the Beach Boys’ tale to previous biographers and instead focuses on Wilson’s unlikely and influential teendom in L.A.’s thriving independent rock scene of the early ’60s. Crowley uncovers some interesting facts (Wilson’s teenage guitar lessons with fellow teen and future Walker Brothers guitarist John Maus, who’d played with Richie Valens) and some not terribly interesting ones (Wilson’s preferred gauge of guitar strings), but offers no real doorway into Carl himself.

Though Mike Love gets all the (bad) press, and brother Dennis is remembered as his own out-of-control ’60s rock caricature, it was Carl who provided the rudder/anchor/shore to the Beach Boys, and his almost-silent subplot within the band invests the book with some amount of natural plot movement. However, it isn’t until more than two-thirds of the way through Long Promised Road that Crowley drops one of the book’s most interesting points: from early on, Beach Boys’ contracts stipulated that the band would consist of “Carl Wilson and four musicians known as the Beach Boys.” Carl Wilson wasn’t merely the soul of the Beach Boys but, for legal purposes in most jurisdictions, he was the Beach Boys, and his regime was a progressive one.

Following Brian Wilson’s emotional recession in the wake of the failed Smile project, it was Carl (as Crowley rightly points out) who fused the road and studio Beach Boys, “reconcil[ing] the complex chorale of ‘Cool, Cool Water’ with the raucous simplicity of ‘409.’” These are the years that one wishes Long Promised Road might luxuriate in, building an emotional and artistic historical space for Carl Wilson around the golden art-rock detailing of the Carl-helmed classics Friends, Sunflower, and Surf’s Up. Here, Carl was responsible for completing some of Brian’s Smile recordings and contributing his own fully-formed songs for the first time. These fertile and collaborative moments of creative calm pass by all too quickly before Capitol Records’ 1971 deletion of the entirety of the Beach Boys catalogue and the unexpected second wave of success with 1974’s Endless Summer singles compilation, toppling the band’s internal balance toward nostalgia.

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But for Beach Boys fans looking for fresh angles that might reflect back on the band’s music and life, Long Promised Road is full of fun and surprises, a 300-level text perhaps best consumed after more standard works like Timothy White’s Nearest Faraway Place: Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys, and the Southern California Experience or even Keith Badman’s The Beach Boys: The Definitive Diary of America’s Greatest Band. (David Leaf’s The Beach Boys and the California Myth remains out-of-print and prohibitively expensive.) Working in semi-unauthorized mode, Crowley pieces together Carl’s corner of the Wilson saga without access to Brian or surviving Beach Boys Mike Love, Al Jardine, or Bruce Johnston. The book suffers for it, and interviews with Beach Boys historians offering second-hand assessments don’t quite work to fill in the gaps. Since he died from lung cancer in 1998, there remain many aspects of the Carl Wilson story that can never be told. Instead, Long Promised Road delivers its punches in brief episodic bursts that hit like stories told in single panel comics, often more tantalizing than illuminating.

Yet Carl Wilson’s personal triumphs and struggles are all present, driven by family demons and the strange Californian currents just as palpably as in the more familiar stories of his brothers Brian and Dennis, but they are almost never fully animated. On the spectrum of Beach Boys writers, Crowley veers dangerously close to being an apologist for Murry Wilson, the band’s notoriously abusive father, even quoting members of the Sunrays (a Murry-produced act, introduced to him by Carl) to the effect that Murry couldn’t’ve been that bad. Still, Crowley raises a valuable point as he details Murry’s presence around Gold Star studios as an aspiring songwriter a decade before Brian led sessions there for Pet Sounds and Smile: “Murry’s musical aspirations and efforts laid the groundwork to turn the Beach Boys from a surf band to the family business to a legend.”

In How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘N’ Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music, Elijah Wald brilliantly uncovers and connects the seething indie music scenes that existed in regional pockets around the country from the jazz era up through the moment when, Wald notes, surf rock was the last major twist that “helped to form a new image of the rock’n’roll band.” Parallel to the arrival of the lead guitar as an iconic totem of the ’60s, Carl Wilson was the lead guitarist in the world’s most popular surf band. Though they grew long-haired and bearded and briefly psychedelicized, the Beach Boys were never fully at peace with the counterculture, and their creative choices and tensions grew from an earlier and perhaps even weirder time in American history. On the left were the Wilson brothers, voting as a block to continue creating new music and, on the right, cousin Mike Love and others, happy to churn out the hits for paying customers. By the ’80s, it was Love was who was most visibly calling the shots. Staying true to his school, as promised, it was Love who forged relationships with Nancy and Ronald Reagan, who sometimes appeared onstage at the Beach Boys’ annual Fourth of July concerts in Washington, D.C., where the Hawthorne group branded themselves America’s Band. By then, the contracts had been changed and Carl’s reign was over, perfectly mirroring the dim end of the 1970s.

“I haven’t quit the Beach Boys but I do not plan on touring with them until they decide that 1981 means as much to them as 1961,” Crowley quotes Carl as saying near the turn of that decade. It could be a big moment in the book, coming after a long creative battle with Mike Love. Isolated strands of drama lead up to it, such as a pivotal 1977 meeting with Brian voting against his brothers and effectively ending Carl’s leadership of the band, followed almost immediately by an acceleration of Carl’s own substance abuse. But, like many rock biographies, Long Promised Road goes into fast-forward as the 1980s arrive, covering the entirety of Carl’s solo career, subsequent return to the Beach Boys, and remaining decade-and-a-half of his life in the last 13 pages. It’s a disappointing end to a promising set-up: a study of the odd and shifting power center of the Beach Boys’ American epic, simultaneously an archetype and totally unrepeatable, and the singular Wilson brother who kept it (mostly) together.

TAGSTHE BEACH BOYS BRIAN WILSON CARL WILSON ROC

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