In the recording studio, Brian Wilson is famous for being a master of his own mood swings.
From the ethereal highs of "Good Vibrations" and "California Girls" to the heartbreaking lows of "God Only Knows" and "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times," Wilson gave the Beach Boys an emotional complexity few rock bands have ever matched.
He's like that in conversation, too - upbeat one moment, but filled with existential sadness the next.
"I act happy, but I don't feel quite as happy as I used to, and I don't know why," he says, describing his life at age 73. "It's just a little bit rougher of an existence now."
Wilson's entire life has been a lot rougher than anyone would have expected from the guy who came to fame as the co-writer of hits like "Fun, Fun, Fun" and "I Get Around." The acclaimed new biopic Love & Mercy shines a bright light on his roller-coaster saga, with Paul Dano playing the brilliant young Brian in the 1960s and John Cusack playing a burned-out, middle-aged Wilson struggling with mental illness in the '80s.
Speaking by phone from his home in Los Angeles, Wilson, who performs at the Verizon Theatre on Wednesday, isn't eager to talk about the thornier parts of his life story. In fact, he's not eager to talk at all.
Among rock legends, he's rivaled only by Jerry Lee Lewis and the late Lou Reed for answering questions with the fewest words possible. Wilson's go-to answer is "I don't know," followed by silence.
But stay in the ring long enough with him and he'll open up - at least a bit - about his music, his career and his well-chronicled struggles with bipolar disorder and schizoaffective disorder, a condition that causes people to hear voices.
"I first heard voices in my head after I took acid in 1965, and that's been going on for, like 50 years. I still have auditory hallucinations," he says. "I just try to bear with it."
In the '70s and '80s, Wilson's illness and addictions left him so incapacitated he rarely performed with the Beach Boys. In the late '80s and early '90s, his family successfully took legal action to separate him from Dr. Eugene Landy, the Svengali-like psychotherapist who had became Wilson's business and songwriting partner.
Today, Wilson admits he had a hard time watching the Love & Mercy scenes in which Paul Giamatti portrays the late Landy.
"It brought back bad memories," Wilson says. "I was under the control of Dr. Landy for nine years in Malibu, and it was just a very rough time, and very tough to watch. The only two good things he did was he turned me on to exercise and health food. Other than that, he was not fun to be around."
Wilson has much fonder memories of producing the Beach Boys' greatest and most complex album, Pet Sounds. A song cycle about the growing pains of becoming an adult, the album collided pop music with the avant-garde and changed the way music was made in the 1960s and beyond. Legend has it Wilson claimed he was on a mission to "beat the Beatles" with Pet Sounds.
"Well, we didn't really want to beat them," he clarifies. "We were inspired by Rubber Soul. I listened to that album and learned you could make a collection of songs where every song seemed to go together with the others. Then Pet Sounds inspired Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which makes me feel real proud."
In more recent years, the surviving Beach Boys have battled like the Hatfields and McCoys over songwriting royalties and the right to use the group's name. In 2012, they buried the hatchet for a 50th anniversary tour, but it ended on a sour note with Wilson issuing a statement criticizing his cousin, singer Mike Love, who holds the exclusive license to tour as the Beach Boys.
"It sort of feels like we're being fired," Wilson said in the statement. Love took umbrage with Wilson's comment, saying in a March story in The Dallas Morning News: "I can't fire Brian ... That's erroneous."
No matter who's to blame for the tour's end, Wilson doesn't expect to regroup with the Beach Boys ever again.
"I doubt it - no," he says. "I don't talk to Mike very much. We haven't been speaking for three years ever since the Beach Boys Anniversary tour."
Since then, he has focused on his solo career, releasing the recent No Pier Pressure CD with guest vocals by Zooey Deschanel, Kacey Musgraves and Fun. singer Nate Ruess. He's plotting to record a new album of songs by rock pioneers like Little Richard and his hero, Chuck Berry. And he's embarked on a concert tour with a band featuring Beach Boys founding member Al Jardine and occasional member Blondie Chaplin.
"People can expect to hear mostly Beach Boys classics and two or three new songs," he says. "I can still sing, but my range has come down, so I have another singer onstage who sings the high notes for me."
Offstage, he relies heavily on his wife, Melinda (portrayed in Love & Mercy by Elizabeth Banks), a former car saleswoman who helped him turn his life around. "It was her idea to have me a do a solo career and I've been doing [solo tours] for 17 years now," Wilson says.
Married since 1995, the couple has five adopted children. And while Wilson is probably never going to turn into an even-keeled Ward Cleaver-type patriarch, he credits his wife for helping him smooth out the rough edges of his often turbulent life.
"She makes me happy," he says. "She's nice to me - just seeing her is a good experience."
By Thor Christensen, Special Contributor
