Getting Hit in the Head with a Lead Pipe Made Brian Wilson a Better Musician
Beach Boys founder writes candidly about a turbulent childhood and unexpected inspiration
By Brian Wilson
Editor’s Note: As a cofounding member of the Beach Boys in the 1960s, Brian Wilson created some of the most groundbreaking and timeless popular music ever recorded. With intricate harmonies, symphonic structures, and wide-eyed lyrics that explored life’s most transcendent joys and deepest sorrows, songs like “In My Room,” “God Only Knows,” and “Good Vibrations” forever expanded the possibilities of pop songwriting. Derailed in the 1970s by mental illness, drug use, and the shifting fortunes of the band, Wilson came back again and again over the next few decades, surviving and — finally — thriving.
In this exclusive excerpt from his new book I Am Brian Wilson (coauthored with Ben Greenman), the artist takes us back to his turbulent childhood, when a violent incident had a lasting effect on his body and his life—and unexpectedly became a source of his creative inspiration.
When I was barely a teenager, I was afraid of my dad. He yelled at me all the time and it made me nervous. He was not only a tough guy but also rough. He was rough with all of us, me and my brothers — he grabbed us by the arms and shoved us and hit us with hands that were sometimes open and sometimes even closed.
When I went to school I would think everyone was my dad. It was a little trick I played to keep myself in line. Then one afternoon I went home and cried and decided that I wasn’t going to be afraid of my dad anymore. I didn’t tell anyone else. I’m not even sure I said anything to Dennis or Carl, about being afraid or not being afraid. That’s not how things went back then in Hawthorne. Everyone thought it was better to keep those kinds of things inside.
My dad was violent. He was cruel. What makes people that way? Maybe he was rough because he had a rough life. When my dad came to California from Kansas with his dad, my granddad, they were real poor, to the point that they had to live on a beach in a tent. That was in San Diego. My mom might have told me that. I didn’t hear it from my dad. He thought it was better to keep those kinds of things inside, too.
Buddy, my dad’s dad, was a hard guy to get to know, especially when I was a kid, but as I have gotten older I see that he had some of the same personality I have, and some of the same hard time with it. He loved music and he was good at it. He sometimes drank too much. He had trouble with his moods. One thing that makes us different is the way we deal with anger. I always kept it inside, or if I did let it out I kicked a can or punched a wall. I was usually lucky enough not to get the stud. But Buddy wasn’t always very nice to my dad. There was a story that once my dad did something that made his dad angry, and Buddy swung a lead pipe at the side of my dad’s head. His ear was hanging off. They rushed him to the doctor and eventually it was okay again.
I wasn’t there for that, obviously. It happened long before I was born. But things repeat, and they repeat in strange ways.
When I was out playing in my neighborhood, between my house and another, a kid hit me in the head with a lead pipe. His name was Seymour, I think, either his first or his last. The feeling was just shock at first, but the next day I realized that I couldn’t hear as well out of my right ear. I told my mom and she took me to the doctor, who examined me and said that the eighth nerve in my head was severed. I say that my right ear’s completely deaf, though doctors are more specific. Some say 98 percent and some say 95 percent.
The ear affected me deeply for the rest of my life. When I was a kid, whenever my mom would talk to me I would turn the left side of my head toward her. It was like I was tuning a radio station. It also affected the way I spoke. I couldn’t hear myself out of the right side, so I started to push the speaking over to the other side of my mouth. It made me look lopsided, like I was coming from the dentist with one side numbed out from novocaine.
In old films of the Beach Boys performing, there are some cases where the crooked mouth is very pronounced. I’ve seen film of Munich in 1964 where it almost looks like I had a stroke. Over the years I have learned to give people instructions when they first come speak to me: move to the left side or, if you have to be on the right, lean around.
But the ear helps to create the music, too. When I make music I make mono music. I can only hear out of one side, which means that it’s already mixed down. That one ear is doing all the work.
Maybe limits help you to focus, in a way. Beethoven was deaf, of course. Bill Haley was blind in one eye. Maybe that’s not the same thing. I know I have learned to work with my ears the way they are, and I think I hear fully with whatever partial hearing I have.
I don’t go around collecting things that people say about me, but there is one I like. It’s from Bob Dylan, and it’s one of the nicest compliments, and one of the funniest. “That ear — I mean, Jesus,” he said, “he’s got to will that to the Smithsonian.” I might.
And things repeat. When Daria and Delanie were little girls, a few years after we adopted them, they started telling Melinda that they wanted a baby brother. She came to me and asked me about it. “That would be cool, to have a boy,” I said.
We found a baby who was supposed to go to another family but their arrangement had fallen through. The day we were supposed to go the hospital, they called and said that the baby had failed his hearing test and would probably be deaf in one ear. On the way there, I told Melinda how strange it was for something like that to happen again. As it turned out, the baby could hear fine. He had water in his ear when he was tested.
We named him Dylan. When we got him home, I held him for the first time and sang “Mr. Tambourine Man” to him. The name felt just right.
Excerpted from I Am Brian Wilson: A Memoir by Brian Wilson with Ben Greenman. Copyright © 2016. Available from Da Capo Press, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. Available now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other fine retailers.
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Thank you Charles J. Moss
Top Photo: RB/Redferns/Getty
