Catch a Wave

Chapter 1

Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys' original songwriter, producer, and visionary, is in his sixties now, a man of age and wealth and almost no discernible interest in the world as it existed before him, particularly with regard to his family and their own journey across the continent to the golden coast where he was born. "We never talked about that stuff," Brian says. It is the spring of 2004, and he's in one of his favorite restaurants, a bustling hillside deli in a mall down the street from his home on the crest of Beverly Hills. "That's the one thing they never did, never talked about our ancestors at all." Now, it's hard to know if Brian is saying this because it's true or because he just doesn't remember any such conversations. Or, more likely, he just doesn't want to address the issue. He's an intimidating man, both for all he's achieved in his life and for all he's suffered along the way. And given the remove of his celebrity and his psychic torment, it's hard to separate the humor from the horror in his eyes when he does recall something his father did like to say.

"Kick some ass!" Brian is smiling now, in his silly, sad way. "Exactly, that's what my dad said. Kick ass! Kick ass!"

Murry Wilson was a big guy with a big personality and even bigger dreams of glory. That he would attain them through the work of his sons was a source of great pride and outrage from the old man. "My relationship with my dad was very unique," Brian says. "In some ways I was very afraid of him. In other ways I loved him because he knew where it was at. He had that competitive spirit which really blew my mind."

"Don't be afraid to try the greatest sport around." That's the story of Brian's life. But also the story of his brothers, his cousin and friends, and all of the ancestors whose ambitions, fears, hopes, and determination delivered them to this land beneath the unyielding sun. California, here we come. Right back where they started from. "Catch a wave and you're sitting on top of the world."

As described by Timothy White in his intricately researched The Nearest Faraway Place, the story of the Wilsons in America begins in the late eighteenth century, when the first Wilson to venture to the New World settled in New York. The first American-born family member, named Henry Wilson, was born in 1804 and eventually moved west to Meigs County, Ohio, where he worked as a stonemason. His son, named George Washington Wilson in the spirit of the times, was born in 1820, and he and his family farmed a plot of rich, river-fed land in Meigs County for more than six decades until his own son, William Henry Wilson, decided to pursue fortune west to the wide-open plains of Hutchinson, Kansas. So west they went, with patriarch George in tow, settling onto a large, if relatively arid, farm that William Henry soon abandoned in order to go into the industrial plumbing business. Contracts to work on the state's new reformatory system, along with the many opportunities afforded by the modernizing world around them, provided a decent working-class living and a solidly built clapboard bungalow on one of Hutchinson's nice residential streets. As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, William Henry began to think again of chasing fortune into the western horizon.

California! At the dawn of the new century, this was the setting of every ambitious man's dreams. The real estate flyers papering the town painted in the details, describing the valley soil as every bit as rich and fertile as the sun was warm and the breezes gentle. Thus inspired, William Henry scraped together the cash to buy, sight unseen, ten acres of prime farmland in the southern California village of Escondido. William Henry loaded up his wife, kids, and even his eighty-five-year-old father into the family jalopy; they arrived in 1904 and spent the year laboring on their new vineyard. And though the sun did indeed shine, and the water flowed as promised, and the vines did erupt with fat, juicy fruit, the farming was every bit as hard as it had been back in Kansas, and the money not nearly as vast as previously anticipated. By 1905, William and family were back in the plumbing business in Kansas. Still, memories of the California sun and the dreams of ease and fortune that had once stirred William Henry's soul came to rest in the imagination of his teenaged son, William Coral "Buddy" Wilson. As the boy grew, so too did his visions of the golden future that awaited him in the Golden State.

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