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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
I'm pickin' up terrible vibrations!, 25 Aug 2006
Beach Boys fans read this excellent book at their peril. There are a very few good vibrations in the story of Brian Wilson and his group, but there's no shortage of extremely bad vibrations. By the end of the book you may feel you're heartily sick of each and every drug-addled, money-obsessed, talentless washed-out Beach Boy with the exception of Brian himself. These days they're a living, breathing embarrassment. They sue each other perpetually, and Al Jardine and Mike Love now tour America with rival bands claiming to be the Beach Boys.
Pity rich pop star Brian Wilson. First he was bullied and humiliated by his father, the repulsive Murray Wilson. Later he was bullied and harrassed by Mike Love. Years after that he was taken prisoner by a deranged psychiatrist who bullied him 24 hours a day. What all these people wanted was - more hit songs! More! Another million seller! Now!
The exhilaration of making hit record after hit record quickly became a relentless treadmill. Brian was the sole creative force in the group. By the age of 22 he was composer, lead singer, bass player, arranger and producer. After two years of that he had his first breakdown and quit touring. The wave crested in 1965 when everything was working out - they'd fired Murray as manager, Brian stayed home and wrote more hits and the group toured. But then he began to change. Within three years there was "Pet Sounds", the still astonishing single "Good Vibrations", and then the disaster of "Smile", Brian's increasing psychological problems, and by 1968 the Beach Boys were pulling crowds of 200, hopelessly out of fashion. The 1960s was a very fast decade.
During the next 20 years (!) Brian was not a functioning human being. His colossal intake of drugs and food was in inverse proportion to his tiny output of songs. The whole sorry saga makes for gruesome reading. "As Carnie remembers, her father began most of his days with a dozen eggs and an entire loaf of bread" and for dinner "he'd eat his entire steak in two bites". From the late 60s to the mid-80s the other Beach Boys were perpetually dancing around trying to get Brian to lay more golden eggs for them. They tried anything they could think of, including tough love (pretending to fire him from the group). They ended up hiring a 24-hour-a-day showbiz psychiatrist to rescue him, Dr Eugene Landy. And before you could say "medical ethics" Brian had started writing songs again but they were credited to "Wilson/Landy". So the Beach Boys sued the psychiatrist.
The grim story does have a kind of happy ending though - after trudging through this (always well-written and readable) catalogue of unhappiness we arrive at the year 2001 when Brian, now married to Melinda Ledbetter (who sounds like one of the few really nice people in the whole book), finally - 34 years later! - finishes "Smile" and even performs it live on stage to universal acclaim. As you finish the book you think "Enough - I don't ever want to read another word about these horrible people or about poor tormented Brian - I just want to listen to their beautiful music". And in some ways I'm sorry I did read this book. It's strange to admire the Beach Boys' great mass of brilliant music so much but to dislike them all as human beings, except Brian of course. You don't dislike him, but you do pity him. I don't believe the author intended to perform hatchet jobs on all these people, he just let the awful facts speak for themselves. And now I'm hoping the remaining Beach Boys won't sue me for this review.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Enjoyable if you like Wilson, 28 Jul 2008
I have always liked Brian Wilson and been attracted to the mystery and madness surrounding him. I found this book to be interesting and objective. The author is quite clearly a fan of the Beach boys and Wilson himself and chose to analyse many songs and albums. That did not interest me but did not make me throw away the book either. My favourite part is that mike comes out looking like a proper tight git.
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3 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Augmented minor chords?????, 25 Jun 2007
This book combines an up-to-date biography with detailed musical assessments of the Beach Boys' output, both collectively and individually. I thought it was good, readable, thorough and (as far as I could judge) accurate, except for one thing.
Some of the musical assessments are complete gibberish.
For instance, on p.24 we're told about voices "sliding from one augmented minor chord to the next". This sounds very impressive, but there's no such thing as an augmented minor chord (an augmented chord has a sharpened 5th: e.g. an E major comprises the notes EG#B, and an E augmented chord is thus [enharmonically] EG#C. But since E minor consists of EGB, E minor augmented -- if it existed -- would consist of EGC, which is merely an inversion of C major).
Likewise, on p. 30 we hear about a "major seventh triad chant". Unfortunately, a chord may be either a major seventh or a triad, but not both.
On p.79 we learn that "God Only Knows" has harmonic counterpoint and inverted bass patterns. "Sloop John B" is described as a sea shanty. In short, I was unable to distinguish the author from a total musical illiterate trying to pretend otherwise.
To be sure, these blemishes only form a tiny part of the whole, but they did make me wonder about the accuracy of the rest of it.
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by Brian Wilson
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