Here's What's Fact and What's Fiction in Love & Mercy, the New Biopic About ... - Slate Magazine (blog)

In Love & Mercy , the new biopic about the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, there’s a scene in which legendary studio musician and Wrecking Crew bass player Carol Kaye notices something unusual about the sheet music that Wilson has set in front of her:... ” “It works in my head,” Wilson replies. In many ways, this also sums up the approach of the film, which could be said to work in two different keys at once: It cuts back and forth between two very specific periods of Wilson’s life, Wilson’s songwriting heyday of the mid-1960s and his... The 1971 Rolling Stone profile describes Wilson’s recording process during this period: “At a session he would go around to each player, take the instrument from him, show him what he wanted, and hand it back. Just as in the movie, Wilson has also been deaf in his right ear at least since childhood, but accounts differ on whether this was caused by a blow to the head from his abusive father Murry Wilson, as the movie suggests. Wilson’s father also really did acquire authority over his son’s share of Sea of Tunes, the publishing company that owned the copyrights to most of the Beach Boys’ songs, before selling them to A&M records for $700,000. (Exactly how Murry managed... Exactly when Wilson began taking LSD is the subject of some debate, but in a 2006 interview Wilson said that he started hearing voices shortly. Source: www.slate.com