I thought he would become a producer on his own, branch off and work with other acts. “Carl was the other one in the group that I thought was brilliant. So consequently it’ll take him a lot longer, because it’s probably very hard for him to be satisfied. He was always brilliant and I’m sure he’s a lot smarter now. As long as he was happy with the record, that’s all. If I had him under contract, he could take four years between records. “I think Brian’s gonna be with us as long as he wants to be with us. They would say, ‘Well, surfing is off, you know, dead, or car stuff is dead.’ But Brian Wilson was still alive. Brian was growing and they held him down. Like, ‘That was a hit, that’s it, but now that’s out.’ That was a lot of shit. So when they asked for a record he gave them one. He thought he was going to make it forever on their terms. “I think Brian got eaten up by that syndrome. Eventually I think they were dealing directly with the vice-president. Like all of a sudden I didn’t deal with them anymore, I dealt with attorneys, bookkeepers, executives. Once you have a few hit records for the company and it looks like you might be there a while, you start dealing with a lot of strange people. “They went through a lot of attorneys and business managers. If you had a hit record and wanted to spend all your money, fine, because the law of averages was you weren’t to have one tomorrow. In those days they really didn’t care where the fuck you were going. “If Brian had started today - I think the record industry is more equipped to handle a Brian Wilson, set up a life style for him so that he could live and work without ever worrying about going broke. Even ‘Good Vibrations’ is an evolution of ‘Surfin’ U.S.A.’ “You really can’t pull an individual record. A reflection of last Saturday, that’s what his music was on the Coast. “Brian was making music in those days, he wasn’t making speeches, and it was OK, because no one was using words then. Even on Top 40 radio, they had those pseudo-jazz changes in the station tags. Before they used to have that chick do her be-bop-a-do-wah in the air at the end of each commercial, with the guys who weren’t traveling that week with Stan Kenton doing the background. “Do you realize that 70 percent of the jingles you hear on the air and on TV evolved from Brian Wilson’s records? Think about all the ads, from Coca-Cola to Seven-Up from Thom McCann to some bank in Cleveland. The Beach Boys Partner With Vilebrequin Swimwear for New Coastal Collab That’s a pretty heavy trip for a kid of his age. “He was one of the first acts on a major label to bust out of the major label syndrome of coming into their studios at their appointed hours and using their facilities – good, bad or indifferent – at their union scales and their hours, changing engineers for dinner breaks, banana breaks, pee breaks, all that bullshit he’s the first one to be allowed to go outside. See, the company used to absorb the cost if you used their magic studios. Brian was five years too early with his business thinking, with his creative thinking, and yet he made it. “Brian had all the odds against him ever having more than two hit records. The record just broke all kinds of sales records in New York City and everything for us that year. California had put it off, in fact some of the people in California had put it down. “The day the record came out it was a hit. He wanted to give us the publishing and I had to advise them to open a small company with the boys, with the group, split it between them and keep the publishing. Gave him $300 for it and made him a good royalty deal. They produced it, Brian and the guys, and it was a-fucking-terrific. Probably the best record I heard that year. He played me the record and it was really good. “I was the only person at the label under 62. The only other person in the store was the counter man, the owner, Magic Christian Brian Wilson. At eleven o’clock at night there was no overhead lighting the only illumination came from fluorescent tubes in the food bins. The movie had left me shaken perhaps the little store wasn’t as surreal as it seemed. It had just opened a few days before in West Hollywood and was purveying health foods right across the street from the Black Rabbit Inn. The night I saw Bergman’s Skamen was the night I decided to try out the Radiant Radish. I’m not a genius, I’m just a hardworking guy. “Is there any part of the earth that never has any sun?” What does geodetic mean? Of the earth? Of the earth, it must be, it must be the relation of the earth to the satellites, that’s right.” He was like a man trying to fight his way out of a pocket of time.
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