I Am Brian Wilson by Brian Wilson

Author:Brian Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780306823077
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2016-09-12T16:00:00+00:00

That letter hung over my head—or maybe in my head—for years. It was with me when I was doing Pet Sounds, when I failed to do SMiLE. It was with me when we did a bunch of albums in a row, knocked them out pretty quick and pretty basic, and where the other guys in the group came forward to contribute more songs. That was happening all over rock and roll. In the Beatles, George started to write more. In Creedence Clearwater Revival, John Fogerty let everyone else in the band write songs. With us, it was a chance to get back to being a rock and roll band. I still got plenty of songs on records and plenty of ideas. For Wild Honey, I tuned my piano slightly out, more like a twelve-string guitar, to get a more mellow sound. I got the idea to slightly detune from my piano tuner, and I loved what it did to the sound of the record. That album had such good energy, especially on the title song where Carl gave us another great vocal. That whole record had so much soul. We put a theremin on that one for old time’s sake. Mike got the album title from some actual wild honey that was out on the kitchen table. Eating healthy was good for our music. Wild Honey was one of the records that I made a point of going back and listening to after a while. It was after more than forty years. It kind of swept me away.

On the records after that, Friends and 20/20, the other guys were doing more writing, sometimes with me, sometimes on their own. I wrote lots with Al, especially on Friends, where we did “Wake the World,” “Be Here in the Mornin’,” and “Passing By.” Mike, who had met the Maharishi in 1967 and then gone to Rishikesh to study with him at the same time as the Beatles and Donovan, started writing about those kinds of things in songs like “Anna Lee, the Healer” and “Transcendental Meditation.” In general, it seemed like we were turning a corner into something more adult. We weren’t kids anymore. We didn’t have a dad around to tell us we were kids. There were marriages and kids and mind expansion.

In the summer of 1968, we released “Do It Again.” I was playing around with Mike, playing some chords, and slowed it down a little bit and started to get a melody. He started writing lyrics and we got the thing done. It was probably the best slow rock song we ever did. I had this idea for the intro where our engineer, Steve Desper—the great Steve Desper—rigged up a kind of defibrillator thing to the drums so that each hit vibrated at like a thousand beats per second. There’s never been an intro like it. It’s mixed back in the mix of the main body of the song. It was a strange song, or was about something strange. At that time, we were already nostalgic.

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