The father of the Beach Boys’ Wilson brothers was the personified dark cloud over the family. Now a lengthy letter surfaced on the internet that documents this. Apparently in his own words.
Quote from Letters of Note:
In 1964, less than three years after the release of their first single Surfin' and following many years of psychological and physical abuse, Murry Wilson was fired as manager of The Beach Boys by his son Brian. A year later, Murry wrote him the following eight page letter. In it, he blames Brian's mother for their ongoing rift due to her less severe punishment techniques, questions Brian's honesty and the actions of his friends in the music business, and even recommends that Brian dissolve the band as soon as possible in order to avoid any future problems. It's an incredibly interesting – albeit dark – snapshot of a showbiz family in free-fall, made all the more remarkable when you consider that just a few months after this was written, The Beach Boys began to record Pet Sounds, an album regarded by many as one of the best ever produced.
Quote from the actual letter:
No matter how many hit songs you write or how many hundreds of thousands of dollars you may earn, you will find when you finish this short cycle of Beach Boy success that you didn’t do it honestly and for this reason you are going to suffer remorse. I have been trying to fight you on every act of what I thought was not honest to protect you from yourself some five or seven years later; because I knew that when competition hit you between the eyes that you would not be able to cope with this vicious competition, regardless of how talented you are, because you got so much much too fast and the fact that you used your own father and then threw him away when you thought you didn’t need him will come back into your mind over and over again.
via Letters of Note: All I tried to do was make you all honest men.
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