Ken McNab - You Started It: Rock n Rolls Most Notorious and Bitter Feuds

This book is dedicated to Norah Bebe McDonald (She started it).

I would like to pass on my gratitude to all those who, unlike myself, actually have a life but who have all helped me to complete this book. My biggest thanks and all my love go to my beautiful wife Susanna and my children Jennifer and Christopher, who are used to seeing their old man chipping away at the rock face of truth. And sincere shout-outs to all the extended family that include Caroline and Alan Cullen, Linda and Kieran Sharkey, Jacqueline and Ronnie Brown, Terrance and Anne-Marie Porter, Drew and Maureen Porter, and Ian and Margaret McNab. Thanks also to my three lifelong compadresStephen Jack, Martin McCartney, and Graham McCurrach, who continue to be baffled by my harmless obsession for all things Beatles, Tolkien, and Star Trek. And finally... give it up for the bands. They really started it.

The Beach Boys: From left, Carl Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine, and Brian Wilson

Capitol Records/Photofest Capitol Records

A Melbourne hotel provided an appropriate setting for a kangaroo court. Staring defiantly from the makeshift dock was Beach Boy Carl Wilson, accused of scoring heroin from a tour flunky for his mentally fragile and drug-addicted brother Brian. Sitting alongside him was his other older brother Dennis, himself no stranger to narcotic excess.

Meantime, pressing the case for the prosecution while acting as judge, jury, and executioner were three men: Mike Love, the groups lead singer and cousin to the Wilson brothers, his own brother Stan Love and Rocky Pamplin, two men whose primary job was to be Brians minders, a role that primarily involved ring-fencing him from every conceivable opiate temptation during the bands 1978 tour of Australia.

An interested third party was David Frost, the urbane British TV broadcaster best known for his forensic post-Watergate interviews with Richard Nixon, whose promotion of the tour was in serious danger of unspooling that very moment amid fears of multimillion lawsuits.

Earlier that day, and hours from a nighttime show, Brian had slipped the shackles of his two gatekeepers. They later found him retching violently in his room, the repercussions of him being unable to handle the smack churning through his body. Amazingly, Brian still made it onstage that night at the Myer Music Bowl. But press accounts noted all three Wilson brothers were clearly stoned and barely functioning. The Melbourne Herald reported Brian, Carl, and Dennis disappeared so often it was like Exodus gone wrong.

Now, hours later, they had arrived at the formal inquest, a Beach Boys post-mortem into the night the group, famed for their surfing songs, struck a critical reef. Pamplin and Stan Love had carried out their own investigations and concluded that Carl had indeed acquired and fed the drugs to Brian, an accusation he emphatically denied. The highly charged atmosphere quickly turned venomous until Carl could bite back on his temper no more.

Fuck you, he shouted at Pamplin, a former college football player who was built like a linebacker. In an instant, Pamplin, tall, lean, and muscular, had delivered a brutal uppercut that laid out the youngest Beach Boy flat on the deck. He doesnt tell me to get fucked, said Pamplin.

Summary justice had been dispensed. Stunned though they undoubtedly were, neither Brian nor Dennis, himself an extremely volatile individual, raised a word in protest. It was unquestionably a shocking new low in the life of a band that once epitomized the American Dream, resonating the very best in apple pie wholesomeness. But it would not be the last time that Stan Love and his heavy-handed accomplice would dole out arbitrary, vigilante-style sanctions to a Wilson brother/cousin.

It was also the moment the truth finally dawned on Mike Love over the untold depths that had now been plumbed. Mortified by what he saw, he recalled in his autobiography, Good Vibrations, My Life as a Beach Boy,

I dont know what motivated Carl, and to a degree Dennis, to give heroin to Brian. They both idolized him. Maybe they thought he would enjoy it or maybe their judgment was clouded by their own drug use.

Stan believed that Carl, frustrated by Brians endless struggles, wanted him off the stage and even out of the band and figured the heroin would do it. Whatever their motives, the spectacle for me was a reminder of how vulnerable Brian was in trusting those around him, even his own brothers, to his detriment... that was not a great thing for the Beach Boys to be involved with. I think our music and our way of life and what we always promoted was positivity and harmony and stuff. It didnt fit.

The story of the Beach Boys is a tale of two Californian families ultimately mired in a black hole of dynastic envy, violent parental abuse, drug degradation, explosive egos, court cases, and inter-band sexual liaisons bordering on incest. Occasionally lost in this swirling nexus was the unforgettable magic of the spellbinding music they created, of the days they surfed the new wave of JFKs sun-dappled presidency, and for a while, left even the Beatles in their creative wake.

And at the core sat Brian Wilson, the gifted young Icarus who touched the sky with his enchanting lyric-visions, then crashed to earth, a burned-out, paranoid, drug-addled husk. Riding shotgun was Mike Love, whose longtime stewardship of the Beach Boys performing legacy has polarized the bands fans and seen him demonized down through the decades.

For those who believe that Brian walks on water, I will always be the Antichrist, is Loves prosaic summary of the contempt in which his critics hold him. Inside the Beach Boys bivouac, Brian was indeed lionized as a musical messiah by the other members of the band, Mike, Carl, Dennis, Al Jardine, Bruce Johnston, and, occasionally, David Marks.

His intuitive ability to knit their voices onto a tapestry of perfect pop songs ensured the Beach Boys left indelible motifs upon the cultural landscape from the first hits in 1962 through to their groundbreaking album Pet Sounds. That record was released in May 1966thirteen months before the Beatles Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Bandand was instantly hailed as a milestone in pop music, one that cemented Brians reputation as a songwriting genius.

Between 1963 and 1966, he wrote and produced eleven Beach Boys albums and sixteen singles in an incredible outpouring of creativity. Pet Sounds, though, would be the high watermark of the Beach Boys career and the last time the band was properly in harmony with each other and the world. By the time of Pet Sounds, Brians descent into a form of mental purgatory had been ongoing for twelve months.

Unknown to almost everyone, he had been shoring up his fragile psyche with a growing cocktail of drugs. But it was only when he began dosing himself with LSDalmost two years before the Beatles took the same, precarious tripthat he found himself trapped in a frightening and never-ending vortex of auditory hallucinations and inner voices telling him he was going to be killed. It was the fork in the road that changed Brians life forever, sauteed his brain, and paved the way for decades of soap-opera feuding between almost every band member, but most notably with Love, as the Beach Boys were caught in the undercurrents of their own riptide.

Overnight, he quit touringopening the door for Bruce Johnston to join the bandand shuttered himself inside the studio for months while slowly becoming a recluse at home. It was like losing our quarter-back, said Love.

But the seeds of Brians estrangement from reality were undoubtedly sewn during a troubled childhood and most notably the abusive relationship each Wilson sibling had with their father. Murry Wilson was a failed songwriter who saw in the Beach Boys growing musical talents a conniving opportunity to escape his humdrum life as a salesman in the Californian town of Hawthorne.