What do you think?
Rate this book
Brian Wilson
Brian Wilson is a musical genius. Ever since British press agent Derek Taylor launched a publicity campaign with that theme to promote the landmark LP Pet Sounds in 1966, some variation of that claim has been obligatory when discussing the significance of The Beach Boys' founder and chief composer.
Originally designed to liberate Wilson from his outmoded image as a purveyor of sun-and-surf teen pop so the symphonic sophistication of his music might be properly appreciated, the assertion has been repeated so often in the forty-plus years since as to render it virtually meaningless. Indeed, if anything, the label today seems an albatross around the man's neck, inasmuch as Wilson's slow-but-steady reemergence as a working musician since 1998 after three decades of mental illness and drug abuse, has been freighted with expectations that he again produce something as epochal as Good Vibrations to justify the adoration he inspires in impassioned defenders.
Brian Wilson interrogates this and other paradigms that stymie critical appreciation of Wilson's work both with The Beach Boys and as a solo artist. This is the first study of Wilson to eschew chronology for a topical organization that allows discussion of lyrical themes and musical motifs outside of any prejudicial presumptions about their place in the trajectory of his career.
The chapter on lyrics explores questions of quality, asking why the words to Wilson's songs are often considered a detriment, before surveying such tendencies as melancholy and introspection, the conceit of childlike wisdom, his depiction of women, and Americana/nostalgia.
The section on music focuses on his falsetto, the famous harmonies, the peculiar whiteness of The Beach Boys' sound, as well as song structure.
A final chapter on iconicity asks how rock criticism's investment in auteurship both maintains and limits his reputation.
Finally, Curnutt examines what Brian Wilson means to his most fervent fans. Together, these issues emphasize the often overlooked point that, despite his status as a 'living legend', Brian Wilson does not always fit neatly into the paradigms of taste and value by which critics grant certain artists entry into the pantheon of pop and rock importance.
Finalist, ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Awards 2012, Performing Arts and Music (Adult Non-Fiction)
Originally designed to liberate Wilson from his outmoded image as a purveyor of sun-and-surf teen pop so the symphonic sophistication of his music might be properly appreciated, the assertion has been repeated so often in the forty-plus years since as to render it virtually meaningless. Indeed, if anything, the label today seems an albatross around the man's neck, inasmuch as Wilson's slow-but-steady reemergence as a working musician since 1998 after three decades of mental illness and drug abuse, has been freighted with expectations that he again produce something as epochal as Good Vibrations to justify the adoration he inspires in impassioned defenders.
Brian Wilson interrogates this and other paradigms that stymie critical appreciation of Wilson's work both with The Beach Boys and as a solo artist. This is the first study of Wilson to eschew chronology for a topical organization that allows discussion of lyrical themes and musical motifs outside of any prejudicial presumptions about their place in the trajectory of his career.
The chapter on lyrics explores questions of quality, asking why the words to Wilson's songs are often considered a detriment, before surveying such tendencies as melancholy and introspection, the conceit of childlike wisdom, his depiction of women, and Americana/nostalgia.
The section on music focuses on his falsetto, the famous harmonies, the peculiar whiteness of The Beach Boys' sound, as well as song structure.
A final chapter on iconicity asks how rock criticism's investment in auteurship both maintains and limits his reputation.
Finally, Curnutt examines what Brian Wilson means to his most fervent fans. Together, these issues emphasize the often overlooked point that, despite his status as a 'living legend', Brian Wilson does not always fit neatly into the paradigms of taste and value by which critics grant certain artists entry into the pantheon of pop and rock importance.
Finalist, ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Awards 2012, Performing Arts and Music (Adult Non-Fiction)
192 pages, Paperback
First published April 30, 2012
About the author
Kirk Curnutt
44 books255 followersKirk Curnutt is the author of twelve volumes of fiction and literary criticism. His first novel, Breathing Out the Ghost, won the 2008 Best Books of Indiana competition in the fiction category. It also won a bronze IPPY and was a Foreword Magazine Book of the Year finalist. His second novel, Dixie Noir, was published in November 2009. Other recent works include Key West Hemingway, co-edited with Gail D. Sinclair (UP of Florida), The Cambridge Introduction to F. Scott Fitzgerald, the fictional dialogue with Ernest Hemingway Coffee with Hemingway (with a preface by John Updike), and the short-story collection Baby, Let’s Make a Baby, Plus Ten More Stories. The recipient of a 2007-08 Alabama State Arts Council literary fellowship, he is currently at work on a nonfiction account of the 1956 attack on Nat King Cole in Birmingham.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
December 8, 2012
Rock and pop from a formal aesthetic point of view are (is?) extremely confusing – it's ephemeral yet it adheres and sustains throughout all our lives, these throwaway songs will never be thrown away; it's low art yet so much of it is as flamboyantly recherche and hierophantic as any piece by Stockhausen; it's convivial, collaborative, corporate and corpulent; and it's also anguished, solitary, honest, lyrical and original.
Brian Wilson and his jolly but mostly not-so-jolly Beach persons personify the Janus nature of the thing. Professor Kirk Curnutt's book is a great munchy rumination on all things Brian and is a must-read for anyone whose daddy has taken their set of keys away.
FAT MAN ICARUS – THE MYTH OF BRIAN
There is always a myth which may or may not be the truth but always contains A truth. The myths of Michael Jackson, Elvis and Brian Wilson are all versions of Icarus. They flew too high, the sun melted their wings, they shouldn't have flown so high, but they were so beautiful when they were up there, we all loved it, and look how they crashed. So the Icarus myth is one of self-destruction caused by overweening artistic ambition – the artist believes himself to be the equal of the Gods, who then smite him. I'm not so sure how the details pan out with Michael and Elvis but the myth works well for Brian. He battled through many obstacles, and almost achieved his supreme artistic vision but collapsed while doing it.
I am a proponent of the "One Brian – Two Beach Boys" theory, which does sound like something Chairman Mao would have come up with. Brian wrote hits between 63 and 66 and then started to write weird stuff. He deconstructed songs into art fragments. There were vegetables and wind chimes. You know all that. Brian was trying to escape from the beach. They kept dragging his ass back.
First his dad tried to control his music. Brian fired his dad. Then Mike Love (The Dark Lord of Don't Fuck With The Formula as KC describes him!) tried to scupper the avant stuff. Mike was in cahoots with Capitol Records, who likewise hated anything that didn't sound like Top Five. So there was Brian in 1966 alone except for a bag of dope and a handful of acid tabs, fighting off these grim conservative forces with a sharpened tape recorder. By sheer force of will he held them all at bay, corralled everyone into the studio to create The Masterpiece, then oh the irony, he couldn't remember how The Masterpiece was supposed to go – he'd had the Vision but he couldn't quite remember it. The gods had smote him. Or actually, more banally, he had a second mental breakdown and didn't recover for thirty years.
CRAZY BEATINGS BY MY FATHER – AOOOH, AOOOH *
This review could be very long because Professor Curnutt crams such a lot into 156 elegant, goodnatured and only sometimes too technical pages. I will note a few of the interesting areas covered :
The whiteness of the Beach Boys – this is apparently, for some, a bad thing. They weren't funky. They were square. This is an argument thrown out by people who have no problem ascribing racial characteristics to art.
The assumption that the Beach Boys are 'too white' reflects a cultural need to define whiteness as inauthentic
– (p90) – which comes from the pervasive white liberal guilt we are all familiar with.
Brian wrote a lot of very short songs - but that's okay. Perhaps length = significance to some, but not to Brian fans. The challenge is to find a model for developing a structural rationale that doesn't perpetuate pejorative connotations of brevity says the professor in one of his more jawbreaking remarks.
Brian the feminised man : his voice, for a start. Although physically a big guy his voice was always very high, his falsetto pronounced. He was participating in the grand tradition of pop castrati, from yodelling cowboys through the glories of doowop and the ubergruppendoowopper Frankie Valli. His beautiful melancholia is an audio version of the swooning junkies and soulful vampires of anti-macho alt.masculinity. Brian as antidote to the rock-star love-god – the bathrobe years. As a symbol, the bathrobe signifies more than Brian's hermitic history. In a broader sense, it marks an unusual de-emphasis of the body's primacy in rock iconography. (p139)
The auteur theory in popular music – Brian is regarded as the ultimate auteur in pop. The Cahier du Cinema theorists of the 50s wanted to read the collaborative art of films as novels, and the auteurists of pop want to read pop songs as poems, as if they are crafted by a single vision. Which is reasonable with your singer-songwriters like Dylan or Tom Waits. But Brian has mostly used other people to write his lyrics – Tony Asher for Pet Sounds, Van Dyke Parks for Smile, and many others including Mike Love. Who, then, is the author of a song like God Only Knows? Is the music 90% of it?
Fandom – Recent studies of fan cultures of various pop icons ameliorate what was once viewed as pathology into an act of creative self-fashioning. –phew, thanks, prof!
A FIGURE SO IMMOBILE
Prof Curnutt concludes with a description of an average Brian Wilson live show :
Non-fans are struck not only by the lack of spectacle and showmanship but by the absence of presence : sitting on a stool behind an electric keyboard he rarely touches, his face inscrutable in its impassivity, reading stilted stage patter from a teleprompter, the star of the show barely even moves… he seems the least engaged if not the least comfortable of anyone in the hall… frequent attendees have grown to anticipate with humor the evening's most spontaneous gesture, the moment when he checks his wristwatch
***
* from "Thank You" (unreleased! lyrics by Brian Wilson)
Brian Wilson and his jolly but mostly not-so-jolly Beach persons personify the Janus nature of the thing. Professor Kirk Curnutt's book is a great munchy rumination on all things Brian and is a must-read for anyone whose daddy has taken their set of keys away.
FAT MAN ICARUS – THE MYTH OF BRIAN
There is always a myth which may or may not be the truth but always contains A truth. The myths of Michael Jackson, Elvis and Brian Wilson are all versions of Icarus. They flew too high, the sun melted their wings, they shouldn't have flown so high, but they were so beautiful when they were up there, we all loved it, and look how they crashed. So the Icarus myth is one of self-destruction caused by overweening artistic ambition – the artist believes himself to be the equal of the Gods, who then smite him. I'm not so sure how the details pan out with Michael and Elvis but the myth works well for Brian. He battled through many obstacles, and almost achieved his supreme artistic vision but collapsed while doing it.
I am a proponent of the "One Brian – Two Beach Boys" theory, which does sound like something Chairman Mao would have come up with. Brian wrote hits between 63 and 66 and then started to write weird stuff. He deconstructed songs into art fragments. There were vegetables and wind chimes. You know all that. Brian was trying to escape from the beach. They kept dragging his ass back.
First his dad tried to control his music. Brian fired his dad. Then Mike Love (The Dark Lord of Don't Fuck With The Formula as KC describes him!) tried to scupper the avant stuff. Mike was in cahoots with Capitol Records, who likewise hated anything that didn't sound like Top Five. So there was Brian in 1966 alone except for a bag of dope and a handful of acid tabs, fighting off these grim conservative forces with a sharpened tape recorder. By sheer force of will he held them all at bay, corralled everyone into the studio to create The Masterpiece, then oh the irony, he couldn't remember how The Masterpiece was supposed to go – he'd had the Vision but he couldn't quite remember it. The gods had smote him. Or actually, more banally, he had a second mental breakdown and didn't recover for thirty years.
CRAZY BEATINGS BY MY FATHER – AOOOH, AOOOH *
This review could be very long because Professor Curnutt crams such a lot into 156 elegant, goodnatured and only sometimes too technical pages. I will note a few of the interesting areas covered :
The whiteness of the Beach Boys – this is apparently, for some, a bad thing. They weren't funky. They were square. This is an argument thrown out by people who have no problem ascribing racial characteristics to art.
The assumption that the Beach Boys are 'too white' reflects a cultural need to define whiteness as inauthentic
– (p90) – which comes from the pervasive white liberal guilt we are all familiar with.
Brian wrote a lot of very short songs - but that's okay. Perhaps length = significance to some, but not to Brian fans. The challenge is to find a model for developing a structural rationale that doesn't perpetuate pejorative connotations of brevity says the professor in one of his more jawbreaking remarks.
Brian the feminised man : his voice, for a start. Although physically a big guy his voice was always very high, his falsetto pronounced. He was participating in the grand tradition of pop castrati, from yodelling cowboys through the glories of doowop and the ubergruppendoowopper Frankie Valli. His beautiful melancholia is an audio version of the swooning junkies and soulful vampires of anti-macho alt.masculinity. Brian as antidote to the rock-star love-god – the bathrobe years. As a symbol, the bathrobe signifies more than Brian's hermitic history. In a broader sense, it marks an unusual de-emphasis of the body's primacy in rock iconography. (p139)
The auteur theory in popular music – Brian is regarded as the ultimate auteur in pop. The Cahier du Cinema theorists of the 50s wanted to read the collaborative art of films as novels, and the auteurists of pop want to read pop songs as poems, as if they are crafted by a single vision. Which is reasonable with your singer-songwriters like Dylan or Tom Waits. But Brian has mostly used other people to write his lyrics – Tony Asher for Pet Sounds, Van Dyke Parks for Smile, and many others including Mike Love. Who, then, is the author of a song like God Only Knows? Is the music 90% of it?
Fandom – Recent studies of fan cultures of various pop icons ameliorate what was once viewed as pathology into an act of creative self-fashioning. –phew, thanks, prof!
A FIGURE SO IMMOBILE
Prof Curnutt concludes with a description of an average Brian Wilson live show :
Non-fans are struck not only by the lack of spectacle and showmanship but by the absence of presence : sitting on a stool behind an electric keyboard he rarely touches, his face inscrutable in its impassivity, reading stilted stage patter from a teleprompter, the star of the show barely even moves… he seems the least engaged if not the least comfortable of anyone in the hall… frequent attendees have grown to anticipate with humor the evening's most spontaneous gesture, the moment when he checks his wristwatch
***
* from "Thank You" (unreleased! lyrics by Brian Wilson)
Read
January 2, 2023For all that there's no shortage of books about The Beach Boys, I haven't found that many which do what I want them to, which is talk about the songs. This one does that, and so I'm fairly confident it will join Philip Lambert and Andrew Hickey on the list of BB books that I go back to again and again.
It's less dense than Lambert (whose discussions of chord sequences and keys go over my head a reasonable amount of the time) and less detailed than Hickey (who talks about every song a la Revolution In The Head*) but has plenty of new things to say. It's a bit expensive (as these academic publications tend to be), and is fairly short for the price, but highly recommended despite that.
___________
*This is not to suggest that the Hickey books are as GOOD as RitH, but that's a high bar.
It's less dense than Lambert (whose discussions of chord sequences and keys go over my head a reasonable amount of the time) and less detailed than Hickey (who talks about every song a la Revolution In The Head*) but has plenty of new things to say. It's a bit expensive (as these academic publications tend to be), and is fairly short for the price, but highly recommended despite that.
___________
*This is not to suggest that the Hickey books are as GOOD as RitH, but that's a high bar.
June 30, 2017
Perhaps the best thing I can say about this is I believe the author successfully accomplished what he attempted to do: this is a well-reasoned, well-supported examination of the lyrics, musical contributions, and legacy of Brian Wilson that presents and cuts through a good deal of the hoopla, both negative and sentimental. I'm no David Leaf or Mark Linnett so I can't testify to the complete success of the project, but even with the occasional tone dips Mr. Curnutt surveys a wide variety of viewpoints on the major areas of discussion and draws very solid conclusions from them. The only drawback, just like Mr. Granata's revised treatment of Pet Sounds, is it came about about six months too soon! He alludes to the forthcoming 50th Anniversary Reunion but alas can do no more than speculate - I wonder how that event would have figured in to this work (well, probably not much, come to think of it).
As a focused nonfiction (instead of rambling fanfiction) treatment of what Brian Wilson contributed (and didn't) to the Beach Boys and the "California Sound" and more, this work mostly eschews the extremes, even making multiple references to the dangers of over-sentimentalizing Brian's perceived frailty and thus should never be criticized. Thus Mr. Curnutt does not hagiographicize nor does he cast aspersions - he even presents a good defense of Mike Love (something you don't see in Brian-focused works).
I found every section very helpful: coming from 2012 his historical background navigates all the major biographies and works up to that point and provides what appear to be adept assessments of their weaknesses and strengths. His longer section on the lyrical world of Brian Wilson was very insightful, especially as it dealt with so much of the misinformed perceptions about Brian's lyrics and how many of "his" lyrics are not just Mike's but also Tony Asher's, Gary Usher's, Van Dyke Parks's and more. Even a good number of the "autobiographical" songs we sometimes find too much in aren't solely the work of Brian Wilson ... and that's not a bad thing, says Mr. Curnutt.
The longest section, about Brian's musical distinctions, is very thorough and diverse, ranging from Brian's ability to sculpt in the studio what he heard in his head (in a good way for Pet Sounds, not so good for Smile at times) to his oft-derided bass playing technique and what seems to be everything in between.
The final section on the "myth" of Brian Wilson is also engaging, though it does not treat on the 50th Anniversay, No Pier Pressure, or Pet Sounds 50 as we may want (perhaps a revised edition will come out eight months before Brian's next major release). Mr. Curnutt, as I said, is not interested in rehashing (so to speak) painful memories, but he does address what needs to be addressed quickly and academically, and his conclusions are part of what makes this such an enjoyable read (apart from the very insightful and rare analysis of Brian's actual contributions, the bulk of the book, and what really make this required reading for BB/BW fans): Brian Wilson is not "one thing" - he may seem like an abject figure today, a shell of his former self, but aren't we all? Let's see you weather what he has and come out better. (Mr. Curnutt doesn't say it precisely that way.)
By "not just one thing" Mr. Curnutt means he is not just a "figure of melancholy" whose only greatness is in his sad songs and whose sense of humor is too simple/corny to make him "deep." Some of the best insights in the book discuss our misguided attempts to contrast him with Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Paul McCartney, and the other storied lyricists of his day, or how we misunderstood the Beach Boys because they weren't "hip" like the Rolling Stones, when "hip" really means "vulgar and sassy." Mr. Curnutt points to quite a few clever, sly lines in "golden age" Beach Boys lyrics that aren't all that "tame" but not so blatant as what everyone else was doing. Why do we find fault with Brian Wilson's sense of humor and think only his sad songs are "deep"? We are wrong to do this, says Mr. Curnutt, and by jingo, he's right.
Perhaps Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys were "guilty" of idolizing "The Myth of Southern California," an exotic paradise that may have existed in early '60s America but surely is long-gone now (just like the sweetness of all of America and the world). But ... what's wrong with that? As Mike said, "everybody knows a little place like Kokomo (or pre-Summer of Love Southern California) so if you want to get away from it all go down to Kokomo." What's wrong with reveling in simplicity, earnestness, decency, and good timin'? Nothing. So read this book and re-evaluate Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys. (And Mike.)
As a focused nonfiction (instead of rambling fanfiction) treatment of what Brian Wilson contributed (and didn't) to the Beach Boys and the "California Sound" and more, this work mostly eschews the extremes, even making multiple references to the dangers of over-sentimentalizing Brian's perceived frailty and thus should never be criticized. Thus Mr. Curnutt does not hagiographicize nor does he cast aspersions - he even presents a good defense of Mike Love (something you don't see in Brian-focused works).
I found every section very helpful: coming from 2012 his historical background navigates all the major biographies and works up to that point and provides what appear to be adept assessments of their weaknesses and strengths. His longer section on the lyrical world of Brian Wilson was very insightful, especially as it dealt with so much of the misinformed perceptions about Brian's lyrics and how many of "his" lyrics are not just Mike's but also Tony Asher's, Gary Usher's, Van Dyke Parks's and more. Even a good number of the "autobiographical" songs we sometimes find too much in aren't solely the work of Brian Wilson ... and that's not a bad thing, says Mr. Curnutt.
The longest section, about Brian's musical distinctions, is very thorough and diverse, ranging from Brian's ability to sculpt in the studio what he heard in his head (in a good way for Pet Sounds, not so good for Smile at times) to his oft-derided bass playing technique and what seems to be everything in between.
The final section on the "myth" of Brian Wilson is also engaging, though it does not treat on the 50th Anniversay, No Pier Pressure, or Pet Sounds 50 as we may want (perhaps a revised edition will come out eight months before Brian's next major release). Mr. Curnutt, as I said, is not interested in rehashing (so to speak) painful memories, but he does address what needs to be addressed quickly and academically, and his conclusions are part of what makes this such an enjoyable read (apart from the very insightful and rare analysis of Brian's actual contributions, the bulk of the book, and what really make this required reading for BB/BW fans): Brian Wilson is not "one thing" - he may seem like an abject figure today, a shell of his former self, but aren't we all? Let's see you weather what he has and come out better. (Mr. Curnutt doesn't say it precisely that way.)
By "not just one thing" Mr. Curnutt means he is not just a "figure of melancholy" whose only greatness is in his sad songs and whose sense of humor is too simple/corny to make him "deep." Some of the best insights in the book discuss our misguided attempts to contrast him with Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Paul McCartney, and the other storied lyricists of his day, or how we misunderstood the Beach Boys because they weren't "hip" like the Rolling Stones, when "hip" really means "vulgar and sassy." Mr. Curnutt points to quite a few clever, sly lines in "golden age" Beach Boys lyrics that aren't all that "tame" but not so blatant as what everyone else was doing. Why do we find fault with Brian Wilson's sense of humor and think only his sad songs are "deep"? We are wrong to do this, says Mr. Curnutt, and by jingo, he's right.
Perhaps Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys were "guilty" of idolizing "The Myth of Southern California," an exotic paradise that may have existed in early '60s America but surely is long-gone now (just like the sweetness of all of America and the world). But ... what's wrong with that? As Mike said, "everybody knows a little place like Kokomo (or pre-Summer of Love Southern California) so if you want to get away from it all go down to Kokomo." What's wrong with reveling in simplicity, earnestness, decency, and good timin'? Nothing. So read this book and re-evaluate Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys. (And Mike.)
December 4, 2016
It doesn't get much better for me than a scholarly analysis of Brian Wilson. Kirk Curnutt does a commendable job of presenting a thorough survey of Brian's (super fans like Curnutt and myself consider ourselves on a first-name basis with our hero) music, lyrics, and status as a music icon.
Throughout the book, Curnutt treats his subject with respect but doesn't shy away from due criticism (take, for instance, his treatment of Brian's appropriation of Chuck Berry's music). The exhaustive research he's done helps to illuminate aspects of Brian's life and work that even lifelong fans like myself might not have uncovered. I was particularly fascinated by Curnutt's analysis of Brian's evolving approach to composition and piano playing, as his insights have given me new ideas to apply to my own musicianship. The relatively short length of the book left me hungry for more, but the good news is that Curnutt has laid the groundwork for new areas of Brian scholarship for both himself and others to pursue.
While parts of the book might come across as overkill for non-Beach Boys/Brian Wilson fanatics, those interested in pop culture in general will appreciate Curnutt's analysis of songwriting and rock stardom (and Brian's status as a type of anti-rock star). Really, I can't recommend this book enough to those who want a wide-ranging analysis of Brian's career.
Throughout the book, Curnutt treats his subject with respect but doesn't shy away from due criticism (take, for instance, his treatment of Brian's appropriation of Chuck Berry's music). The exhaustive research he's done helps to illuminate aspects of Brian's life and work that even lifelong fans like myself might not have uncovered. I was particularly fascinated by Curnutt's analysis of Brian's evolving approach to composition and piano playing, as his insights have given me new ideas to apply to my own musicianship. The relatively short length of the book left me hungry for more, but the good news is that Curnutt has laid the groundwork for new areas of Brian scholarship for both himself and others to pursue.
While parts of the book might come across as overkill for non-Beach Boys/Brian Wilson fanatics, those interested in pop culture in general will appreciate Curnutt's analysis of songwriting and rock stardom (and Brian's status as a type of anti-rock star). Really, I can't recommend this book enough to those who want a wide-ranging analysis of Brian's career.
July 15, 2014
One for hard core fans only
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews