(Credits: Far Out / Brian Wilson)
Fri 31 October 2025 21:30, UK
In today’s climate, it goes against everything in the PR rulebook for an artist to give away any sort of personal details about themselves. It was fair to say that back in 1968, in the case of Brian Wilson, the rules around this notion were a lot more relaxed.
It has to be said off the bat that it’s probably not advisable for anyone, with celebrity status or not, to give away their address. But it was well seeing that this was the pinnacle of the swinging sixties, when everyone was seemingly so hippie-dippie that they couldn’t possibly have any malicious intentions, right? It may be mind-boggling through our contemporary lens, looking back on how naive they really were – but in many ways, we also have to consider that Wilson was close to throwing all caution to the wind.
Quite frankly, the man had already been through enough turmoil at this still relatively early point in his life and overall career – why shouldn’t he just reveal where he was living to add to the chaos? That seemed to be his mantra when it came to the song ‘Busy Doin’ Nothin’’ from The Beach Boys’ 1968 effort Friends. OK, granted, it didn’t give away the exact coordinates of his residence or anything, but it did pretty much provide the precise directions to get there, so long as you were on the right patch.
“Drive for a couple miles/ You’ll see a sign and turn left/ For a couple blocks/ Next is mine, you’ll turn left on a little road/ It’s a bumpy one,” he sings, seemingly without any sense of inhibition, in the song’s fourth verse, following that up a little later with a description of the “white fence” that was meant to guard the entrance to his home in Bel Air, Los Angeles; instead, Wilson tells the listener to “come right in”. They do say that connecting to your audience is the key to success – but literally inviting them into your private life was probably not the answer.
Of course, there is a lot to be said for how Wilson found himself situated, as well as how the world perceived him, during this period. He was the man who had only just stepped back from the brink of something entirely catastrophic, all while being lauded for the genius of Pet Sounds two years earlier, and the starkness of this juxtaposition was still somewhat throwing him off kilter. As such, metaphorically inviting his fans into the microcosm of his home was both a bold move and an expression of vulnerability – because no one would know what they would truly find.
To be fair, if any crazed fans did manage to find Wilson’s address from that description, you would have to hand it to them for their absolute dedication to the cause. Come to think of it, people went wild ten years ago when Mac DeMarco explicitly revealed his address at the end of his song ‘My House by the Water’, but maybe he was just taking a leaf out of Wilson’s book. In fact, maybe the key to toning down fan culture is just to have everything out in the open.
You can almost feel the sweat breaking out on every music manager’s forehead while reading those words, so this should also come with a caveat to any budding musician that you should really weigh up the repercussions before diving headfirst into something you may live to regret. Yet in Wilson’s case, you can hardly claim that he wasn’t aware of the risks; ultimately, he was living a life flying by the seat of his pants, with ‘Busy Doin’ Nothin’’ simply another example of just that.
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