In the hours after the announcement of Brian Wilson’s death, the Miami Heat centre Kevin Love posted a black and white photograph on Instagram. It showed the Beach Boy, in tracksuit bottoms, with a swishing mane and bushy beard, dribbling a basketball on a YMCA court. A delightful sliver of incongruity. Like the famous shot of Bob Marley juggling a soccer ball in Battersea Park. Musical genius at play. In the background, Love’s moustachioed father Stan watches his first cousin drive to the basket, the picture made all the more poignant because he died just 45 days before Wilson.
The picture was taken during one of the lengthy spells in the 1970s and 1980s when Stan, all 6ft 9in of him, had been appointed bodyguard-cum-minder to the tormented Wilson. As part of his extraordinary efforts to keep him away from drugs, Love often brought the musician to shoot hoops in local gyms. Improvised occupational therapy by a former star of the college game, Love’s previous occupation had been as a NBA journeyman with the Baltimore Bullets and the Los Angeles Lakers.
“Those were chaotic years,” said Love of his role running interference around Wilson. “It was 24 hours a day of worrying, trying to keep the creeps away. Fame and money in rock’n’roll – it’s all a very dangerous area to live in.”
In those days, Wilson was battling serious mental health issues and long-term addiction. In his first day on the job, Love discovered his new charge, in the pyjamas and bathrobe he almost never took off, curled in the foetal position on the floor of his mansion on Bellagio Road in Beverly Hills. He was refusing to wash because of fears lethal gas might be piped in through the shower head. Once the musician was persuaded otherwise and cleaned up, Love set about trying to nurse him back to health. Not an easy task with a patient inhaling five packs of cigarettes per day.
Some of his methods proved rather controversial. What he called “tough love” others deemed too extreme. Applying an athlete’s mindset to getting the bloated Wilson to shed some of the 114kg (18 stone) he was then carrying, he padlocked the refrigerator in the house and threw out the coffee pots to stop him chasing caffeine highs. Constantly being berated about needing to get off the couch and exercise, the musician sometimes gave his martinet caretaker the slip and made his escape, often walking barefoot to freedom or joyriding behind the wheel of a car he wasn’t licensed to drive. To try to put a stop to his gallop, Love visited every house in the neighbourhood asking them not to give Wilson any assistance should he come knocking.
Much as he bristled against the harsh manner of his care, Wilson later credited Love with saving his life twice following overdoses, the first after ingesting sleeping pills, the second from heroin. The star athlete was six years younger than his mercurial cousin who gave the world Pet Sounds but their families had always been intertwined. The Loves lived in Baldwin Hills while their mother’s brother, Murry Wilson, raised his lads in nearby Hawthorn. The very parts of southern California that became revered in popular culture through the songs of the Wilson brothers and Stan’s older sibling Mike. The Beach Boys’ artistic greatness was, of course, matched only by their serial acrimony and toxic infighting.
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On the night of the Super Bowl in 1982, Stan Love was drinking on a yacht with his friend Randy Pamplin, a former college football player who sometimes moonlighted as a Wilson bodyguard. Talk turned to Brian, who was at that juncture reputedly snorting five or six grams of cocaine in half an hour. As the evening wore on and more bottles were emptied, the pair agreed that the man rumoured to be Brian’s supplier was the root of his problems. With the moral certitude of the seriously drunk, they headed to the alleged dealer’s mansion.
With the imposing Stan wearing a stolen LAPD jacket, they announced themselves as cops and barged their way in. Quickly driving out all the interlopers, they homed in on their target, Dennis Wilson. Using fists, feet and a telephone handset, the pair beat Brian’s brother bloody and flung him through a plate-glass window. By the end, he was pleading with his cousin, “Stanley, please, Stanley, please.” Love was fined $750 and given six months’ probation for the assault.
“Dennis was so arrogant and wild; he thought he could f**k around with a professional basketball player, you know,” said Love. “And I wanted to point out to him what happens when you do that.”
In 1990, Love filed a controversial lawsuit seeking to become Brian Wilson’s conservator, alleging that he needed constant supervision and to be liberated from the clutches of his Svengali-like psychiatrist Eugene Landy. As he gave a press conference explaining the legal action, Wilson stormed into the room and denied all charges being made about the parlous state of his life. Somehow, the friendship between the pair recovered from that low ebb, and over subsequent decades they were photographed together watching Kevin Love become a much bigger basketball star than his father.
“I personally admire Brian’s true creative resilience despite mental health challenges,” wrote the younger Love of his cousin’s epic life. “Beauty amid turmoil. We can all stand to learn from that.”
Beauty amid turmoil. Yeah.
