Music

A Newly Released Documentary Shows The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson As He’s Never Been Seen Before

A Newly Released Documentary Shows The Beach Boys Brian Wilson As Hes Never Been Seen Before
Alamy

A year or two ago, a friend and former colleague of mine, Jason Fine, began posting a casual Instagram pic now and again of himself with the legendary Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. This, in itself, wasn’t really surprising – Fine was the managing editor of Rolling Stone, where he had worked for decades, and he’d interviewed Wilson a bunch of times. But these pictures were different – the two weren’t sitting down for a formal interview, and they weren’t “Hey, look who I’m with!” fan grabs, but rather snapshots from the road, of the pair cruising around Los Angeles, stopping off at diners… you know: They were friends. The entire concept seemed otherworldly to me – instead of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, this was Legend Who Wrote Pet Sounds in Cars With My Friend.

As it turns out, Fine and Wilson weren’t just driving around – they were also filming an amazing, unusual, and gripping documentary, Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road, directed by Brent Wilson (no relation). Woven into the film’s relatively straightforward approach to telling the story of the Beach Boys through the prism of the band’s true visionary – with help from a diverse group of obsessive fans including Elton John, Bruce Springsteen, Nick Jonas, and conductor Gustavo Dudamel – is footage of Wilson and Fine on the road in and around LA, chatting about the sort of things (triumphs, setbacks, death, disaster, rebirths, legacy) that two friends talk about when they drive around together. Long Promised Road also gives us vivid insight into Wilson’s decades-long battle with mental illness.

I sat down with Fine to ask him how this film came together – and how he got the notoriously elusive Wilson to open up about his life in a way that few other people could.

I know you’ve interviewed Brian a number of times and were friendly with him, but how did you come to be involved with this film, and how did you settle on this unusual format?

The director, Brent Wilson, and his producers, Theresa Page and Tim Headington, wanted to do a deep documentary on Brian, but Brian just wasn’t that interested in talking. At one point, I was doing a story for Rolling Stone about Brian and was on a bus with him, driving from LA to Santa Barbara, and Brent was on the bus trying to get stuff out of Brian but was getting nowhere – to the point where he was left on the side of the road somewhere on the 101 with his camera on his shoulder! Eventually Brent and his team came to me for some advice about talking to Brian and interviewing Brian – Brent had read some of my pieces in Rolling Stone – and he and I started talking about the idea of just driving around with Brian – which is something we’d done for years – driving around LA and seeing places that were meaningful for him, stopping for sushi or whatever. And we got the idea that that might be a nice way to structure this film. It was Brent’s ingenious ability to make this happen – there were so many cameras in the car – that made it great and so much fun. Brian was DJing most of the time, playing songs and telling stories. He lives now maybe 15 miles from where he was born, and all of his songs were written around there; all of his life has been lived there. And driving around looking out the window makes for a really nice way to have a conversation. He’s such a native Angeleno, and also a mythical figure in the area, and it was such a privilege to see it through his eyes.

Brian has the reputation of being difficult to talk to, or a challenge to draw things out of – and this film is pretty frank about his mental health challenges. Was driving around a way to decrease the stress he feels being interviewed?

One of the great things about being in a car with someone is there isn’t a ton of pressure to fill all the silence. And sure: There were a lot of pauses along the way – you see some of them in the film, but certainly not all of them – but that just seemed like part of what driving around was about.

Brian has struggled with mental illness since he was a young man, and it wasn’t properly diagnosed until he was in his late 50s or early 60s. With the help of his current wife, Melinda – they got married in 1996 – he began getting real treatment for the first time in his life in a consistent way. His illness is called schizoaffective disorder, and it’s quite serious – it’s marked by auditory hallucinations and periods of cyclical depression.

At one point in the film, Brian says, about you, “Man – I haven’t had a real friend in three years…until you came along.” He meant someone just to shoot the breeze with and drive around. What was it that brought you guys close?

We definitely have a similar sense of humour. I’m also from Southern California. We’ve related a lot about our fathers – his whole story with his father and missing his father and missing family members. I’ve had some loss, and I think that’s something we connect on as friends.

You also, briefly, tell the story of the first time you ever interviewed Brian, years ago.

Yeah. It was at his house in Beverly Hills, and I was terrified. We sat down in his living room and talked for about 15 minutes, and it wasn’t going very well, and then he just bolted up and left. I didn’t really know what to do – there’s no one around; I vaguely hear a vacuum cleaner somewhere in the distance. What was I supposed to do now – leave? Wait? I stuck around for a little while and then just thought I’d look around and see if I could find him – and I found him in the kitchen peering into the refrigerator. And I said, “Brian – what happened?”

And he said, “Oh – I’m sorry… I just got a little scared.”

And I said, “What’d you get scared about?”

And he said, “Well, sometimes things just scare me.”

I said, “Like what?”

And he said, “You know that Doobie Brothers song ‘What a Fool Believes’? Scares the hell out of me.”

And in that moment, I just thought: All right. Understood. This is not going to be a linear conversation. And from that, we just built up a kind of friendship. We spent a lot of time listening to music, eating, and talking. Brian grew up an athlete in Southern California with two brothers and a cousin and a band, and he likes hanging out. He likes the camaraderie. He’s got a big family and a great band, but when he’s home and he’s off tour, he’s pretty isolated.

There’s a beautiful and brand-new song in this film, “Right Where I Belong”, that gets at Brian’s fears and anxiety – I mean, the very first line is Brian singing, “Well, I get anxious / I get scared a lot.”

I think that song is incredible, and the origins are incredible too. Brian had written this really beautiful melody but didn’t have words to go with it. And he wanted to collaborate with Jim James of My Morning Jacket, who’s a really big fan of the Beach Boys and understands the sort of spiritual levels of Brian’s music. And Jim wrote these lyrics, some of which came in Brian’s voice in interviews that Brian and I had done, and then Jim wrote around those lines.

For anyone out there who still thinks of the Beach Boys as an oldies act or a kitschy surf band, why are they wrong? What’s the true value of Brian’s music?

The Beach Boys have been trading in nostalgia since 1967 – they were rising with the Beatles and then sort of got left in the dust. In many cases, they haven’t done themselves a lot of favours in terms of their image. But at the core of the Beach Boys is Brian’s music, and the music that he influenced that the other band members made in the late ’60s and early ’70s when Brian was really struggling emotionally. And if you go back and listen beyond the hits – basically beyond Pet Sounds in 1966 – you’ll find incredible, incredible depth of music in albums like Sunflower and Holland and Surf’s Up, which are as beautiful and as modern as anything you’ll find now. And what’s interesting now is that Brian’s instinct is still to move forward – he told me yesterday that he was writing new music. He’s constantly working – what’s the next song? what’s the next approach? – and he’s not writing in the style of a 23-year-old Southern California guy doing surf songs. He’s writing from the perspective of an almost 80-year-old man looking back on his life. And the kind of honesty he brings to it is what keeps it moving forward.

There’s an amazing scene in Long Promised Road where Don Was is in a studio doing a close listen of “God Only Knows” – which Paul McCartney famously called the greatest song ever written –and he’s isolating different instruments and different sounds in the song, and the complexity from a musicality point of view is just astounding.

One of the things that always blows my mind is that studios didn’t work back then the way they work now. You couldn’t add all of these different parts later and layer things on – you had to do it on the spot. And the way Brian worked is that he thought of all these arrangements in his head, and then he had to execute them. You know, you needed four oboes and two violins booked from the LA Philharmonic for that day, along with a banjo and two French horns and whatever else he was thinking of.

I’ve heard some of the studio outtakes when Brian is stopping everybody and making them start all over again because he needed, you know, somebody to scrape the triangle instead of strike the triangle.

It was even different than that, because he didn’t have the musical terminology to talk to a guy from the LA Philharmonic. He would say, “Make it sound like rain” or whatever it was he was hearing in his mind. And he’s still that way in the studio – that’s still his comfort zone. It really raises the question: How do you think like that? How can your mind make these arrangements of instruments that have never been heard before, and then get it down in real time in the studio? I think that’s part of what people refer to when they call him a genius. On top of that, there’s that other thing that Brian has, which is the joy and the happiness and the sparkle of the sun on the beach, but also this undercurrent of sadness, of loneliness and alienation – and ultimately that’s what gives the music such depth.

Things don’t come easy for Brian, but one of the things I’ve always been inspired by is that despite all of this, he’s able to live a really productive life and create art and go on tour and enjoy his family. To me, that’s super heroic – and seeing how much he has to overcome to do the things that he does was part of my interest in sharing his story.