July 1, 2026
“I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times“
“I keep lookin’ for a place to fit in, where I can speak my mind.”
First there was SMiLE. Then there wasn’t. For much of 1966 and the first half of 1967, Beach Boy Brian Wilson spent his time in Los Angeles recording studios producing an anticipated magnum opus to follow the critically acclaimed Pet Sounds. It was to be a musical and, with the help of Van Dyke Parks, lyrical accomplishment that would raise the standard of rock music. Album sleeves were prepared, song titles announced and a solo performance by Wilson of one of the songs was broadcast in a prime time TV special hosted by Leonard Bernstein.(1) And when the album didn’t appear, the myths began almost immediately, speculating on what it would have been and why Wilson had suddenly abandoned it.
Over the next five years, some of SMiLE’s intended tracks found their way onto Beach Boys albums, but it was never enough to fully convey the scope of the project. Instead, it simply whet the appetite of fans. As Wilson, suffering from anxiety, depression and chemical dependence, gradually limited his involvement with the band’s recordings during the receding years of the 1960s, the other members needed to step up their game in writing and producing.(2) By 1969, Wilson was contributing less to the Beach Boys but sparsely choosing other projects he found more artistically rewarding although less commercial in nature. Two of these, Stephen Kalinich’s largely spoken word album A World of Peace Must Come and (American) Spring’s eponymous debut, reveal that Wilson’s serious aural evolution, begun with SMiLE, was far from over.
As, according to Wilson biographer Peter Ames Carlin, Brian “shrank from the demands and infinities of pop music,” having undertaken several projects producing artists outside the Beach Boys following the abandonment of SMiLE, he seemed drawn to the eclectic. When poet Kalinich, verse in tow, arrived in Los Angeles from Endicot, New York in 1965, he was introduced to Brian and his brothers Carl, who produced some tracks for the poet’s folk-duo, and Dennis, with whom Kalinich cowrote two songs for the Beach Boys’ Friends album. But it was Brian who offered him a spoken word project. “He would love to hear me recite poems,” Kalinich recalled for Kingsley Abbott,” and he got the idea to do some background voices and vocals and things like that.” Those vocal backings developed into doing “stuff combining music, percussion…adding in people singing stuff or weird sitar tracks,” Kalinich reported in Catch a Wave. “He was working on all this weird stuff with me, poems with strange backing music.”
There are conflicting accounts about when the sessions for A World of Peace Must Come took place. Kalinich told Brian J. Barr in 2008 that recording was done throughout the late 1960s “whenever the inspiration struck” and concluding in 1969. It is also reported as taking place during the evening of August 22, 1969 in either Wilson’s bedroom or basement home studio. Brian Chidester, in an article about Wilson’s “bedroom tapes,” reports Kalinich’s claim that “the reading of the poem [‘America, I Know You’] was delivered in Wilson’s bedroom, where microphones were set up to capture the ambience.”
In 2025, Kalinich clarified for Endless Summer Quarterly how and when the album was recorded. “It wasn’t done in one night; it was done in the course of a year using different studios,” he said, adding that “a lot of it was recorded at Brian’s house.” The specifics of “America I Know You,” according to Kalinich’s interview last year, identify that the vocal was actually recorded in Wilson’s shower “to see what type of echo he could record.” Once Wilson committed the spoken word and ambient cricket sounds to tape, he created a mono mix that he took into Wally Heider Studios to add musical accompaniment. Utilizing session players, Wilson, who provided most of the backing for the other tracks, was required “to register with the American Federation of Musicians,” according to Chidester, the only official documentation for these sessions. Returning to his 1966-67 practice, Wilson, Kalinich has said, taught each musician his parts for the track individually.
What is most notable in Wilson’s backing for the poetry is his use of pure sound to score the spoken word. Dogs are heard barking in “The Deer, The Elk, The Raven,” and what is produced by what appear to be instruments or voices is not organized to accompany Kalinich’s guitar. Instead, it serves as a ghostly counterpoint. On other tracks, like “The Magic Hand,” the soundtrack consists of strains of piano, percussive sounds and in-and-out-of tune vocals on an impromptu rendition of “Tears on My Pillow” from a birthday party held at the Wilson home. “Brian purposefully left the song underproduced,” Kalinich told ESQ, “so it would match my delivery and reading.” Elsewhere, Kalinich’s voice, in a foreshadowing of what producers like Brian Eno would incorporate into their work, is occasionally treated with effects in order to double it or highlight a moment. At other times, the recitative voice is replaced by conversation between Kalinich and Wilson or by the poet addressing us directly.
The peak of A World of Peace Must Come is “America, I Know You.” Wilson scores and orchestrates the backing for a small ensemble of strings, woodwinds and a ubiquitous harmonica, alternating between placid moments and a cascading atonal interlude. This soundtrack could share the classification of “pocket symphony” with “Good Vibrations,” but it clearly belongs to modern classical music, not pop or rock, its rendering a viable cousin to Aaron Copland’s homages to his homeland.
The album was shopped to various labels like Capitol, Sidewalk and Buena Vista. “[Warner Brothers head] Mo Ostin considered putting it out,” Kalinich told Kingsley Abbott. But the tapes were destined to sit for four decades until the poet and his friend Bill Bentley, a former publicist for Neil Young, re-shopped it and were rewarded when Light in the Attic Records released it on CD in 2008. “It’s not for everybody,” Bentley told Barr. “But that’s the mark of real art for me.”
Two years after A World of Peace Must Come, Wilson sat in the producer’s chair for his wife Marilyn and sister-in-law Diane Rovell’s follow-up to their 1960s recordings as The Honeys. This project appeared under the title Spring aka American Spring, as it was later dubbed because of a British band also called Spring. The recording sessions for the group’s debut album would include Wilson as a performer and newcomer David Sandler as co-producer.
According to Carlin, Sandler was from Minneapolis, a songwriter and producer who admired Wilson, whom he met while visiting Los Angeles where he received an invitation from Bruce Johnston to attend a Beach Boys recording session at Brian’s home studio. Relocating to L.A. by early 1970, he was tasked with co-producing the American Spring album, the material for which, Marilyn recently told Endless Summer Quarterly, was largely selected by Wilson and her sister Diane.
Contradictions abound as to how involved Wilson was with the American Spring album during its sessions from October 8, 1971 to May 1972. The Session Days website identifies that “statements by [engineer/co-producer Stephen] Desper have estimated Brian’s contributions at around 5%” and that Marilyn Wilson “disagreed with Desper somewhat, recounting Brian produced ‘about a quarter’ of the album, a statement that Diane Rovell agreed with.” Meanwhile, Carlin reports that Wilson “ended up doing significant work on more than half of the tracks,” with Sandler offering specifics like “on ‘Tennessee Waltz’ he played the whole track, just stacking the instruments. ‘Awake’ was the same way, and on ‘Sweet Mountain’ we were standing side by side, doing bass parts on a synthesizer.”
In How Deep Is the Ocean, Paul Williams calls American Spring’s version of Wilson’s “This Old World” “inventive” and “ahead-of-its-time,” noting that in the year and a half since the Beach Boys 1970 Sunflower rendition, “lots of new ideas” had surfaced that indelibly link it to previous artistic endeavors. “What has been condensed into three minutes here is remarkable,” Williams writes, “really a nice taste of the kind of musical confection that was being reached for at the SMiLE moment.”
Yet, “Sweet Mountain” is certainly the standout track in this collection. Part of its origin lies in one of the songs Sandler had written and recorded in Minnesota called “Standin’ Tall,” a rather catchy pop tune. It would provide the inspiration for the B section of Wilson and Sandler’s new composition. But, like the song’s A section, the B portion’s form is ethereal, less tangible than what’s expected of a pop song, while the C section, a doo-wop celebration in which the vocals are gradually developed into Wilson’s trademark swirl of background voices in counterpoint to the lead, is as straightforward as any commercial composition. And, according to Phillip Lambert, the C section connects to a Wilson-Parks SMiLE composition in that “its a miniature version of what happens in the first two phrases of ‘Heroes and Villains,’ where the scale descents are ten and eleven notes long.”
What makes “Sweet Mountain,” so mesmerizing is Wilson and Sandler’s arrangement and production of what Carlin calls “neatly contrasting major/minor sections.” The sparse call-response of the first section’s voices against a droning organ and synth bass establishes an otherworldly effect that continues into the ascending melody lines of the next section, resolving into the irresistible third portion. It’s an exercise in melding together disparate parts that form a complete and satisfying 4 minutes and 17 seconds. And United Artists believed in it enough to include it as the b-side of a May 1972 promotional single in advance of the album.
A Stephen Hoffman Music Forums entry about a first-hand discussion with Marilyn Wilson-Rutherford concerning “Sweet Mountain” states that “she said she’d put that entire song (including production) at ‘75% Brian,’” indicating that Wilson’s interest in expanding his music beyond the constraints of AM radio expectations was ongoing. “I found Brian to be a curious person, open to new ideas, and interested in new things,” Sandler told Endless Summer Quarterly recently. Wilson’s former record company had already observed as much. According to Desper, one of the two “pathways” Capitol Records “repeatedly saw…developing” was “Brian becoming experimental in the studio and his music taking an esoteric turn.” In other words, it was in a direction away from mainstream commercial appeal.
Capitol was right, but the band’s then current label heard something in the American Spring album that it felt was missing from the latest Beach Boys releases. Carlin reports that “Sandler got a call from David Berson, a Warner [Brothers] executive who had heard the Spring album and marveled at how the record… sounded more like a Brian Wilson album than anything the Beach Boys had done for his label.”(3)
Left to his own devices in an atmosphere Carlin describes as “relaxed and fun,” Wilson proved he could still create a project like the American Spring album and effectively juggle both the esoteric and commercial. The Stephen Hoffman Music Forums reported that Marylin explained her husband “just didn’t want the responsibility of the entire project on his back – at that time, he really wanted to come in when he wanted to come in – not being rude about it – that’s just how he preferred to work at that often-fragile time.” What made that period so delicate, according to Peter Reum, was “Brian’s mental health and chemical dependence.”
Reum posits four events that exacerbated these conditions, one of which, he wrote, was that “Brian appeared to have had very mixed feelings about his affiliation with…The Beach Boys, hence in 1971 and 1972, he named his ‘group’ as American Spring in a few interviews. He did not seem to want the pressure and burden of composing and occasionally producing The Beach Boys.” He also reports that a friend of his, attending the signing ceremony for an extended contract with Warner subsidiary Reprise, “witnessed Brian crying about having to be the subject of a clause in the Reprise contract requiring that he write and/or produce a certain percentage of each album in the Reprise contract…”
From the beginning, that deal gave the label power to approve song selections for albums. The same seems to have applied to dissenting band members. Timothy White reports that Wilson “fought to overcome group objections to ‘Til I Die,’” a more esoteric entry in Brian’s catalog, delaying its appearance until the 1971 Surf’s Up album. The composition and initial recording of the song situates it as an older sibling of “Sweet Mountain,” having been written and demoed in 1969.
With both lyrics and music by Wilson,“‘Til I Die” reflects the existential crisis of helplessness we can feel when seen in the context of the universe. It’s a sobering perspective to see oneself as “a cork on the ocean,” a rock in a landslide” or “a leaf on a windy day” and wonder about the depth of the ocean and valley or the duration of a wind’s gusts to measure the time we have in this world. As Bob Stanley wrote in Record Collector in 2021, “the finished song lived up to its troubled composer’s ambition: for ‘each note to sound as if it was disappearing into the hugeness of the universe.’”
While the song’s use of nature echoes that of “Sweet Mountain’s” metaphoric title, it’s the musical component that links the two songs best. Just as the American Spring track balances between contrasting major and minor keys resulting in an uplifting resolution, Lambert notes that “for much of ‘Til I Die’ we hear very little evidence of a firmly established key center…the foundational musical element that listeners can expect virtually every pop song to provide, is [in this song] as futile as the narrator’s quest for cosmic understanding. In the ending, however…the arrival of long-sought tonal clarity coincides with the spiritual arrival of the wandering pilgrim.” The experience, he says, “is as distressing as it is exhilarating.” “Til I Die” joins the Wilson-Parks SMiLE masterpiece “Surf’s Up,” and the environmentally conscious “A Day in the Life of a Tree” to form an impressive esoteric trilogy of Brian songs for listeners to ponder at the close of the Surf’s Up album.
Two years and two albums later, on Holland, Wilson would exercise even more experimental tendencies in the twelve-minute audio fairytale Mt. Vernon and Fairway, a project Brian told White “was really a thrill; the first time we’d ever done anything that creative.” The narrative, inspired by the mood created while listening to label-mate Randy Newman’s Sail Away, follows a prince who discovers a magical transistor radio that leads him to a world of music and a Pied Piper before the radio is confiscated and hidden away. It’s possible to see it as a thinly veiled reminiscence about the formation of Wilson’s relationship to music early in his life and to his bandmates since the title references two intersecting streets near cousin Mike Love’s home when the Beach Boys were growing up and the prince initially introduces the music to two of his brothers, who immediately fall under its spell. But David Leaf has alternately proposed that “metaphorically, the magic transistor could be considered Brian’s muse, and he was having trouble tuning in his station.”
Musically, the piece is the next step in the evolution of Brian’s artistic output during this period. The Moog synthesizer, already familiar from American Spring and Beach Boys tracks, is used here to create a soundtrack for Mt. Vernon and Fairway’s spoken word fantasy, much in the same way the atmospheric backing for the words of A World of Peace Must Come did several years earlier. But on Mt. Vernon and Fairway, the soundtrack, which Leaf discerns as having “a power that was missing from the rest of the album,” is broken into thematic pieces that arrive, disappear and return, somewhat embellished, at the corresponding moments in the narrative. In essence, the piece is unmistakably modeled on early 20th century radio drama/comedies, whose narratives, soundtracks and sound effects ask listeners to use their imaginations in visualizing the tale. All six sections have a simplicity reminiscent of “Sweet Mountain’s” lyrical brevity and production. It’s a cleverly-designed and executed audio experience that still meets with resistance or befuddlement.(4)
It’s likely the Beach Boys, whose reputation can’t help but precede them, contributed to such a reception. Eager to navigate a course into the changing 1970s rock scene while retaining an identity molded by its early catalogue of hits, the band didn’t always have room for Brian’s more adventurous explorations like Mt. Vernon and Fairway, which was released as an EP packaged with Holland. That maneuver probably denied it the repeated listening buyers would have accorded the album proper at the time.
Yet, Marc Schuster, examining Mt. Vernon and Fairway in the context of its era, notes that “despite the fairy tale’s weirdness…it isn’t too far removed from other recordings of its time.” He cites David Bowie’s hit “Starman,” “a song about a mysterious voice speaking to young people through their radios in 1972,” and Harry Nilsson’s album-turned-animated-TV-fable The Point, as similar ventures in concept and form. But Schuster also feels that Mt. Vernon and Fairway“arguably served as a farewell from Brian to both his fans and the muses that inspired him through the first decade of his career.” If so, it was apparently lost on the other Beach Boys, who, according to Carlin, “didn’t get the gist of how the whole thing was going to fit together until most of the recording had been done.”
At the time of Holland’s release, Jim Miller praised the LP in his Rolling Stone review, calling it “a special album” consisting of “Beach Boy music…at its most satisfying.” Surprisingly, the article devoted considerable time to an evaluation of Mt.Vernon and Fairway, declaring its music “quirky and inspired,” before concluding that “it hopefully does the rest of the group no disservice to remark that Brian, even in such enigmatic expressions as Mt. Vernon and Fairway, remains the Beach Boys’ most profound source of creative energy; it is Brian who sets the group’s musical standards.”
Those standards would be reset once again with the 1977 album The Beach Boys Love You, a collectively titled project that’s essentially a Brian Wilson solo album. But that’s another tale for another time.
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(1)The CBS-TV special Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution aired on April 25, 1967 and included Wilson’s performance of “Surf’s Up” filmed the previous December. Bernstein evaluated the piece as “poetic, beautiful even in its obscurity.”
(2)The Beach Boys’ post-Capitol Records studio releases during the period under examination consist of Sunflower, Surf’s Up, Carl and the Passions – So Tough and Holland, all of which were released through Warner Brothers/Reprise on the band’s imprint Brother Records. Of the 12 songs on Sunflower, 7 have Brian’s involvement, with 1 song dating back to 1967. Surf’s Up has 4 Brian-related songs out of 10 tracks, one an outtake from Sunflower and one originating from the 1966 SMiLE sessions. Carl and the Passions – So Tough has 3 Brian Wilson co-writes out of 8 tracks. Holland has only 2 Brian co-writes out of 9 tracks plus the EP Mt. Vernon and Fairway, originally treated as a separate 7-inch release packaged with Holland after the band reportedly vetoed Brian’s wishes to include it on the album proper.
(3)Illustrative of the new decade’s record-industry mindset, Warner Brothers/Reprise, in what can only be seen as pure irony, hoped to score the abstruse SMiLE album in signing the Beach Boys yet rejected more than a few versions of albums submitted by the band during its tenure with the label for not being commercial enough. According to Brad Elliott, an album called Sunflower “was recorded and assembled sometime during 1969” while the band was shopping for a label. Landing the Warner/Reprise deal, the group assembled Add Some Music, “a reworking of the original Sunflower. Nine songs were from that album; three were apparently new recordings.” Set for release in May 1970, the album met with concerns from Warner, and Brian was consulted, resulting in yet another reconfiguration of tracks and a title change back to Sunflower for its August 1970 release. In the case of Holland, a November 5, 1972 release date was delayed when, Elliott reports, “Warner’s executives apparently reconsidered the lineup and decided it wasn’t commercial enough,” which led to the completion of the composing and subsequent recording of Brian’s “Sail On, Sailor” as a replacement for one of the tracks.
(4)A 16-page booklet providing Shelley Benoit’s technical and historical account of the recording of the album in Holland includes brief explanations for each of the musical pieces comprising the release. The comments for Mt. Vernon and Fairway seem to be more damning than explanatory. Referred to as “a so-called gift from Brian Wilson,” the work is described as “a post-Sartre essay on the nothingness of being, carrying with it a joy and exaltation which evaporates time as nothing Brian Wilson has ever attempted before.” It is asserted that because the piece isn’t a rock opera, “it will disappoint some and insult perhaps a few listeners.” It is nothing more than a fairy tale, Benoit tells us, “except perhaps an autobiographical look at Brian Wilson’s early planet.” In a more recent evaluation, Tom Petty summed up Mt. Vernon and Fairway in the liner notes of Holland’s CD re-release by stating, “At best I would call it ‘weird.’”
Notes
Abbott, Kingsley. “Writing with the Wilsons: An Interview with Steve Kalinich” in Back to the Beach: A Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys Reader, Kingsley Abbott, (ed.). London: Helter Skelter Publishing, 1999.
Barr, Brian J. “Stephen John Kalinich’s LP With Brian Wilson Gets Rescued” Seattle Weekly, 7 October 2008. retrieved from seattleweekly.com.
Beard, David. “American Spring.” Endless Summer Quarterly, Spring 2026, 26-36.
Beard, David. “A World of Peace Must Come.” Endless Summer Quarterly, Winter 2025, 36-41.
Benoit, Shelley. “Holland: The Making of an Album,” 16-page booklet accompanying the original LP release, reprinted in Back to the Beach: A Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys Reader, Kingsley Abbott, (ed.). London: Helter Skelter Publishing, 1999.
Captain Groovy (Jeff) . “Spring’s Sweet Mountain…Any Love?” Steve Hoffman Music Forums, 19 August 2009. retrieved from forums.stevehoffman.tv.
Carlin, Peter Ames. Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall & Redemption of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson. n.p.: Rodale, 2006.
Chidester, Brian. “How Did This Unknown Poet End Up Making an Album with Brian Wilson?” LA Weekly, 9 April 2014. retrieved from laweekly.com.
Desper, Stephen W. (Stephenwdesper). “Dear Mr. Desper.” Surfermoon, 7 February 2002. retrieved from surfermoon.neocities.com.
Elliott, Brad. Surf’s Up. Ann Arbor: Pierian Press, 1982.
Lambert, Phillip. Inside the Music of Brian Wilson. New York: Continuum, 2007.
Leaf, David. The Beach Boys. Philadelphia: Courage Books, 1985.
Miller, Jim. “Holland: Beach Boy Music at Its Most Satisfying.” Rolling Stone, 1 March 1973, 66.
Reum, Peter. “The Beach Boys: The Family Business and Brian’s Mental Health.” Reuminations – Thoughts on Music, Books and the American West, 11 July 2016. retrieved from peterreum.blogspot.com.
Schuster, Marc. Tired of California: The Beach Boys’ Holland Revisited. privately published, 2018.
Stanley, Bob. “The Beach Boys 1970-71.” Record Collector, August 2021, 83-98.
White, Timothy. The Nearest Faraway Place: Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys, and the Southern California Experience. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1994.
Williams, Paul. Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys: How Deep Is the Ocean? London: Omnibus Press, 1997.
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