In My Room with Brian Wilson and Henry James

Maybe some artists make their best work before they're allowed to really express themselves.

I first learned about the Beach Boys in 1966, when I was in sixth grade. The source was my classmate Andy Cottle, who told me not only that the Beach Boys were the greatest group ever but also that Dennis Wilson, the coolest of the Beach Boys, was his uncle.

“Then how come your last name’s not Wilson,” I said. Andy explained that Dennis was his uncle on his mother's side. He added a caution: I shouldn’t bring up the connection around his house, because his mom didn’t fully approve of the rock-and-roll lifestyle, so things were a little dicey between her and her brother.

I didn't know the Cottle family well—Andy was a school, not a neighborhood friend and lived way out in Sheepshead Bay, so I was rarely at his house—but when I was there, I kept quiet about Mrs. Cottle’s black-sheep brother, and I felt kind of vaguely weird about their awkward family situation.

I was only just learning about the Beach Boys, so I didn’t ask Andy why, if Dennis Wilson was his uncle, Brian and Carl Wilson weren’t his uncles too. Even after I got way into the Beach Boys, on Andy’s recommendation, and learned from Tiger Beat and other reference material that they were largely a family act, for a while I continued to think that my friend was Dennis’s nephew. We’d mention it to each other occasionally in conversation. I even shared the info—but only with a select few, of course.

Then I changed schools and lost touch with Andy, and by the time it crossed my mind that Dennis Wilson probably wasn't Andy's uncle, he’d probably forgotten about it. Sixth grade boys’ brains are a strange operation.

Andy was an excellent and fun and funny guy, as I recall, and I first liked the Beach Boys because I liked him and was eager for guidance in what was hip (also, Dennis Wilson was his uncle!). The first rock-and-roll album I bought—wait, no, I got it as a Christmas present—was “The Best of the Beach Boys,” and I played that LP so often, on our little monaural record player, that I still know all the words and hear in my head all of the weird vocal harmonies to almost every track.

I really liked those recordings. I mean I liked them on my own, not just because Andy did. I fell pretty hard for all the surfing, the cars, the girls, the teenagehood, the California, plus what I now know was bizarrely advanced—yet in another way retro—doo-wop singing and tight session playing. It all sounded good to me. I looked forward to the time when my life would be exactly like that.

But time rushed on. By the time I was turning thirteen—still quite alert to what was and was not hip—I wouldn’t have admitted to ever having been into the Beach Boys. Or Herman’s Hermits, whom I’d also really fallen for in sixth grade. All that was bubblegum to me now, strictly for teenyboppers, might as well be a Monkees fan. (As a Beach Boys and Hermits fan, I’d made a hard-and-fast distinction between my faves and the TV-manufactured Monkees. I listened to the Monkees constantly only as a guilty pleasure).