Brian Wilson Wrote A Song About His Johnny Carson Fandom
He sits behind his microphone
John-ny Car-son!
He speaks in such a manly tone
John-ny Car-son!
Beach Boys. With all respect, “Johnny Carson,” his 1977 ode to late-night comedy, might not have been one of them.
“One morning I was on my way to the studio and I’d been thinking about how I’d seen Johnny on TV the night before and I said to myself, ‘Goddamn it! There’s gotta be some song about Johnny Carson!’ I mean, he’s been an idol of so many people for so many years and why not a song about Johnny Carson?!” Wilson wrote about the tune in Crawdaddy, per LateNighter. “So I said, ‘Fer Chrissakes!’ When I got to the studio I sat down and goddamn cranked out a song about him. I’m definitely a fan.”
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At least that’s one version of the story. When Wilson talked to Uncut, he ed an alternative history. “I was sitting at my piano and someone was talking about him,” Wilson said. “I told them I was gonna write a song about him, and they didn’t believe me. I had the whole thing done in 20 minutes.”
Version three comes via Wilson’s memoir, Wouldn’t It Be Nice: My Own Story. This time, the songwriter says that his psychologist, Eugene Landy, suggested that Wilson write a Carson ditty to help him conquer his fear of appearing on The Tonight Show. (According to LateNighter, the Beach Boys only appeared with Carson once, singing “Their Hearts Were Full of Spring” on The Tonight Show in 1968.)
Whatever origin story you believe, “Johnny Carson” is a pretty goofy track, with lyrics nearly as silly as a Tonight Show monologue.
When guests are boring, he fills up the slack
John-ny Car-son!
The network makes him break his back
John-ny Car-son!
What did the late-night legend think of the song? Well, he never booked the Beach Boys to perform it. “Sure I heard it. Someone sent it over to the office,” Carson told Rolling Stone in 1979. “I don’t think it was a big seller. I think they just did it for the fun of it. It was not a work of art.”
Critics treated the song as a love-it-or-hate-it proposition. In their book Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys: The Complete Guide to Their Music, Andrew Doe and John Tobler wrote this about the “Johnny Carson” experience: “By now, the listener has either thrown the disc out of the nearest window, or is dancing around the room shouting, ‘Yes, yes, more, more!!’ It's that kind of track on that kind of album.”
