But Buddy would never join them in the gilded halls of the powerful. Moody and scattered, plagued by searing headaches and a self-destructive thirst for whiskey, Buddy wandered from job to job to long stretches of unemployment, which he passed grumbling into a glass in a dim barroom. When Edith and the kids finally joined him in 1921, taking the train to the elegant-sounding village of Cardiff-by-the-Sea, he couldn't afford to lease an apartment in town. Instead, the family spent their first two months living in a snug eight-by-eight-foot tent with all the other squatters on the beach.
Edith took a job pressing clothes for a garment manufacturer, and eventually the family moved to a small home on an unpaved road in Inglewood where the eight Wilson kids attended school, worked weekend jobs, and marched the thin line dictated by their sour father and stern, demanding mother. Escape, such as it was, came in the occasional afternoon bike rides to the open, breezy expanse of Hermosa Beach.
Escape was a necessity for Buddy Wilson's kids. Buddy, now in middle age and resigned to his life of small prospects and severely limited horizons, had long felt his ambition curdle into resentment. Often awash in alcohol and self-pity, Buddy's bile regularly boiled over into violence, directed most often at Edith. But he could also turn his fists on his children, once beating the school-aged Charles so savagely (for mistakenly shattering his glasses) that Murry, then a teenager, had to come to his brother's rescue, shoving the old man out of the house until he sobered up. And this wasn't the only time Murry had come to blows with his father. Increasingly, the family's second-oldest boy found himself thrust into the role of his mother's protector, raising his own fists against the father he loved but who seemed unable to love him or anyone else in the family.
As in most abusive families, the physical and psychic violence that ruled their home became an unacknowledged presence, a force that both dominated their lives and forced them into silence. But if they couldn't talk about their problems, the Wilsons could always sing their way to a kind of amity. Indeed, group sings had been a Wilson family tradition dating back to Kansas and beyond, as an eighty-seven-year-old Charles Wilson (an uncle to Brian, Dennis, and Carl) would tell Timothy White, describing nights on the Kansas plains when "we'd have shows on Saturday nights, with three of the oldest brothers on guitars and mandolins. This was at home, with the windows open to the street, and people would stop and listen."
Even Buddy, a man with no discernible instincts toward paternal tenderness, loved to sing with his kids. He'd long since come to admire the sound of his own tenor voice anchoring the family blend. But even more important, weaving his voice together with those of his wife and kids was as close as Buddy could get to actual emotional intimacy with his family. And perhaps this was why Murry, the son who had come to be the family's last line of defense against their drunk, vicious father, came to love music so very much. He taught himself to play guitar, too, and he picked up piano from his big sister. And when the living room radio picked up broadcasts from the elegant nightclubs of Hollywood or downtown Los Angeles, Murry sat in front of the speaker and soaked it in, his face glowing happily. What he was hearing was an entirely new vision of the world. Here, life was filled with luxury and ease; a place where careers could be made and fortunes earned, all by the grace of a clever new song. Sitting in front of the radio, aloft on the arc of a pretty melody, Murry Wilson had come to realize something: More than anything else in the world, he wanted to be a songwriter.
