Maybe it’s nostalgia for a time when madness and death were fodder for campfire stories and B-movies rather than cable news networks, but for whatever reason, our culture picks one week out of the year to embrace scariness. This is great for Hollywood, which has been cranking out horror flicks since the inception of cinema. In the absence of any great motive for your average fictional serial killer, screenwriters tend to fall back on that old standby: stark, raving insanity. This is a bit of a cop-out, but it sells like hotcakes; just check the box-office figures for the latest Hannibal Lecter pic.
Not to be outdone, rock’n’roll has a fine tradition of completely insane artists, who have the added attraction of being non-fictional. Some went truly and completely mad—Jim Gordon, the drummer who co-wrote “Layla,” killed his mother with an axe. Others put their psychiatric disintegrations on record, writing whole albums chronicling their descents into madness.
If you’re going to talk about rock stars and insanity, you have to start with Syd Barrett. Pink Floyd’s 1967 debut album was a seminal masterpiece of British psychedelia drenched in Lewis Carroll; band founder Barrett, meanwhile, was drenched in LSD. By 1968, he had destabilized completely, freezing up on stage and writing songs like “Vegetable Man” to describe his state of mind. With his behaviour growing more and more bizarre, the Floyd unceremoniously dumped him. Perhaps motivated by guilt, Syd’s former bandmates co-produced his solo debut, a spooky, mixed-up wreck of an album appropriately titled The Madcap Laughs. Barrett’s descent into madness—brought on by the debilitating collision of sudden fame and an inconceivably voracious drug intake—had run its course by the time the sessions were complete, and the result is both beautiful and harrowing.
If Syd Barrett was the ultimate psychotic rock star, Beach Boys frontman Brian Wilson was the one who blazed the trail. In 1965, Wilson heard the Beatles’ Rubber Soul and was moved to go one better. In ’66, he masterminded Pet Sounds—a record so revolutionary in its production and maturity that it invented the concept album, reinvented the recording studio, and scared the hell out of John, Paul, George and Ringo. Suddenly, the Beach Boys were critical gods. This caused an unexpected problem, though: how do you follow up The Greatest Album Of All Time? First, you announce that Pet Sounds was nothing; you’re working on The Holy Bible of Pop. Then you have a breakdown, and then you hit the nastiest bout of writer’s block in history, and then you panic. And then you hear Sgt. Pepper’s. And you realize you’re never going to win. And then you scuttle the new album, and release a druggy, unfinished, bleached-out mindfuck record that could pass for comedy if it weren’t so indicative of the actual state you’re in. The album was called Smiley Smile, and it’s filled with songs chronicling Brian’s obsession with health, bits about women going bald, and tunes where the Boys are so stoned that they break out laughing in the middle of verses. There are also some truly frightening moments, glimpses into a fragile, damaged psyche. Wilson probably never fully recovered from that breakdown, and with the exception of (shudder) “Kokomo,” neither did the Beach Boys’ career.
The meltdown album isn’t unique to the sixties, either. After the huge success of Weezer’s 1994 debut, frontman Rivers Cuomo did what any budding Rock God would do: he put the band on hold and enrolled at Harvard. While Cuomo’s nerdy persona made his band ultra-cool, it didn’t do much for his social life, and he became reclusive. Cuomo was not in a good frame of mind when Weezer re-convened in 1996, and it shows: their second album, Pinkerton, is full of glossy melodies and pop perfection, but the lyrics offer way, way too much information. “Across The Sea,” for instance, starts as a sweet letter to a teenaged Japanese fan, but quickly devolves into something far stranger. Cuomo pins all his hopes and dreams on the girl, curses himself for being an ocean away from her, and imagines her touching herself in her bedroom. Later in the album, he discusses his own onanistic habits, indulges his thing for Asian girls, falls in love with a lesbian, gives up on love entirely, and then collapses with a stunning acoustic confession about guilt in the wake of casual sex. The weirdest thing about the album is that it’s Weezer’s best record by far. When it flopped, Cuomo took it personally and retired for five years, painting his windows black and disconnecting the phone. It took him until 1999 to emerge from his depression.
Cuomo was lucky: he was able to pick himself up and move on. Now he’s cavorting with Muppets on MTV and seems to be enjoying himself.
Brian Wilson, too, has seen something of a resurgence both in his career and his personal life, becoming (more or less) healthy and taking an orchestra on the road to perform Pet Sounds live for the first time. Syd Barrett, meanwhile, is a near-blind diabetic recluse in Britain. It’s a sad, scary fate, worthy of the season in which we find ourselves—but Barrett has to live with it for the other 51 weeks of the year.
