'I Am Brian Wilson'

[nicole21290]

Well, no, I'm not. It is, however, the title of an 'autobiography' (probably written primarily by journalist Jason Fine) by Brian Wilson being published this October. Product description from Amazon:

I Am Brian Wilson tells the incredible story of his life. From his success with the Beach Boys to battles with his personal demons, it is anchored in Brian's first person account of his life, his struggles and triumphs, delving deep into his musical and emotional life, talking for the first time about his relationship with his abusive father and his passive mother; his alienation as a teenager; and his struggles to lead the Beach Boys away from surf music into groundbreaking experimental music.

Brian sheds light on his long periods of isolation and creative stagnation, and the mental illness that has plagued him since his teenage years. He also tells, for the first time, how he was able to reinvent himself creatively in the 1990s and 2000s, and describes in detail how he was able to rebuild his life and create the happiest most stable period of his life.

Along with Brian's own words, his story is told through the people that know him best, including his wife Melinda;his best friend and band leader Jeffery Foskett; members of the original Beach Boys and other faces from the world of music, including Paul McCartney, Paul Simon, David Crosby, Lindsay Buckingham, Bob Dylan and others.

Pity they didn't spell his name correctly but one can't have anything.

[michelej1]

oh. Thanks for the alert. "Available only to UK customers." What? I resent it. Brian was born in Inglewood, California, right where the Los Angeles Forum is. Any books about him should be US only. LOL.

Michele

[bombaysaffires]

Who is this Lindsay Buckingham person??

[jbrownsjr]

Originally Posted by michelej1

oh. Thanks for the alert. "Available only to UK customers." What? I resent it. Brian was born in Inglewood, California, right where the Los Angeles Forum is. Any books about him should be US only. LOL.

Michele

word!!!!!!!

[chiliD]

Originally Posted by nicole21290

Lindsay Buckingham, Bob Dylan and others.

Pity they didn't spell his name correctly but one can't have anything.

Pretty much half the people HERE misspell his name, so whattaya expect?

[SisterNightroad]

Brian Wilson’s Brilliance and Pain Explored in ‘Love & Mercy’: Movie Review
By Ultimate Classic Rock Staff May 25, 2015 11:41 AM

If you’re a Brian Wilson fan, it’s tough to be objective about Bill Pohlad’s Love & Mercy, a biopic that reverently jockeys between the Beach Boys mastermind’s unraveling and redemption, but shows little in between.

Deftly alternating between the mid-’60s and mid-’80s, with brilliant portrayals by Paul Dano and John Cusack as Wilson, the duality allows each actor to play to his strengths: Dano masters a youthful exuberance and silent pain; Cusack shows the reserve, mannerisms and whisper of longtime suffering.

“I think the conceit of it is that there’s no one definitive portrait of anybody,” Cusack said in a Q&A session following a screening at Chicago’s Music Box Theatre, where he was joined by Brian Wilson. “You don’t try to do the whole story. This is just part of his whole life, but it captures the spirit.”

The messiest, bedridden years of drug abuse and weight gain are left to the imagination, good news to fans who will instead happily celebrate both on-screen depictions of the beloved legend. It was Brian Wilson himself who brought the topic to the forefront, in fact, when asked what advice he’d give his younger self or young artists today. “It would be a smart move not to take heavy drugs,” Wilson said.

But first Dano gives us the young genius, whose mental illness closes in at his creative apex. As his anxiety grows, he insists on working in the studio instead of touring with the Beach Boys. “I can take us further” at home, he pleads, suggesting his new ideas can help the band best their perceived competition, the Beatles.

Calling him the “Mozart of rock n’ roll,” Cusack noted the difference between the two groups. “With the Beatles there was George Martin and these two songwriters named [John] Lennon and [Paul] McCartney, and they had George Harrison. And on the other side of the Atlantic, there was this one guy, with one ear, who was doing the writing, the music, the arranging – everything,” referencing Brian Wilson’s hearing loss, a result of his father’s abuse.

Fans see that one-man show in the film, glimpsing Wilson’s creative process and watching songs like “God Only Knows” and “Good Vibrations” come to life. Dano performs them on piano and vocals as they’re being written, but scenes of the classics being recorded use the tapes from the Beach Boys’ original sessions.

Many of those scenes were, in fact, filmed in the same studios where the music was originally recorded, Wilson noted. But his experimentation with new lyrical ideas and sounds, played primarily by the Wrecking Crew and not the Beach Boys, drives a deeper wedge between him and his cousin Mike Love (Jake Abel) and his disapproving father Murry (Bill Camp) – both of whom want Wilson to continue writing the sun-and-surf songs that brought earlier success. “Even the happy songs are sad!” Love complains.

Young Brian Wilson goes to great lengths to get the music out of his head and onto the record. When the pianist hits a bad note, Wilson encouragingly tells him it’s no longer a mistake if repeated every fourth bar. He records barking dogs, and wonders aloud whether a horse would fit in the studio. He even dives headfirst under the piano hood, feet in the air, plucking strings with bobby pins to achieve the perfect sound.

Famed drummer Hal Blaine (Johnny Sneed) reassures Wilson that his innovations and instincts impress even the classically trained musicians who have worked with the biggest names in the industry. “Phil Spector’s got nothin’ on you,” he tells Wilson. (Some of these tales are also told in the recently released documentary The Wrecking Crew by Wilson, Blaine and bass player Carol Kaye – who’s portrayed in Love & Mercy by Teresa Cowles.)

The peer and critical praise, however, is not enough to counter other staggering personal defeats: Love proclaiming the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, which has since been regarded as one of the greatest albums in history, a flop; or his father – already fired as the band’s manager – selling the Beach Boys’ publishing rights in an attempt to even the score. The sounds in Brian Wilson’s head become too much, and he cracks while writing tracks for what, decades later, would become Smile.

These scenes of young Wilson are intercut with Cusack’s empathetic look at the broken, middle-aged musician, already under the spell of Dr. Eugene Landy (a wicked Paul Giamatti), and struggling to regain control of his life. Landy uses Wilson’s increasingly fragile state and fractured relationships to manipulate and overmedicate him, exerting total authority as his legal guardian. The full extent of Landy’s practices comes into view during Brian Wilson’s courtship with his future wife, Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks), who tries to free Wilson from his doctor’s grasp.

Cusack’s sensitive portrayal followed hours spent both with the Wilsons and with Smile, which the actor said he listened to nightly before bed.

“I felt a little bad because I didn’t want to be the guest who wouldn’t leave, but if Brian and Melinda were going to invite me into their homes, I just wanted to soak up as much as I could from them,” Cusack said. “I hope you liked the movie, but if you didn’t like what I did or anything else, you can go listen to the Pet Sounds sessions or Smile sessions and Brian’s body of work and you can hear an explosion of creativity that comes along once every hundred years.”

Love and Mercy opens June 5.

Review by Debra Filcman


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[SisterNightroad]

Brian Wilson and His Mad-Genius Influence on Pop Music
By Michael Gallucci


Listen to the radio in any decade from the ’60s through today, and you’re bound to hear Brian Wilson‘s influence on the songs that are playing. You may have to turn a little further to the left of the dial to notice that influence on much of today’s music, but it’s there, in some form or another.

And it’s not just because Wilson was the mastermind behind one of the greatest albums ever made. Or because he was the mastermind behind one of the greatest albums that was almost never made. Or even because he somehow injected heart and soul and spirit into a genre mostly known for its lack of them. It’s because Wilson did all of these things and more during a period when music was truly revolutionary and opening new doors to independence and creativity every day. And because he did it by battling demons that led to years of inactivity, seclusion and borderline madness.

Love & Mercy, a biopic about Wilson starring Paul Dano as young Brian and John Cusack as an older version, opens on June 5, and explores both his genius and troubled psyche. The movie also charts his road to recovery — with the help of his wife and a doctor friend — after years of hardship.

But without those demons fueling his work, would the Beach Boys‘ Pet Sounds sound as heartbreakingly beautiful? Would Smile represent a life’s worth of tortured genius without all that weird stuff that rolls through it? Probably not.

And there lies Wilson’s greatest triumph in a career that’s now stretched past 50 years: His ideas, his determination, his pretensions, his unstoppable drive to get every single note right ,long after everybody else hears perfection. No other artist in the history of pop music has suffered for his or her art the way Wilson has. Not the Beatles. Not Madonna. Not Kanye.

Much of this was part of Wilson’s DNA from the start. Without his fractured psyche goading him to do better (as well as his dad pushing him to the breaking point time and time again), Wilson never would have evolved beyond the rudimentary period pop of “Surfin’ Safari” or the timely Chuck Berry rewrite “Surfin’ U.S.A.” Without Phil Spector‘s teenage symphonies pounding out of the radio and daring him to top them, Wilson never would have gotten around to “Don’t Worry Baby,” his first flash of real brilliance. Without Rubber Soul‘s revolutionary making and marketing of the LP as a viable format vs. the 45 single, as well as its extension of Spector’s studio-as-playground ethos, Wilson never would have been shoved toward the gorgeous orchestral overload that surrounds Pet Sounds.
Listen to the Beach Boys’ ‘Pet Sounds’

The seeds of Brian Wilson’s legacy were planted on 1964′s The Beach Boys Today! album, after a breakdown forced him to quit touring and focus his efforts instead on crafting layered pop landscapes like his idol Phil Spector was doing on hit records by the Crystals, Ronettes and others. Spector employed dozens of musicians, who played everything from cello and saxophone to harpsichord and castanets, on his songs. Soon, Wilson would be using dozens more, who brought banjo, ukulele, accordion and more to the sessions. All for two-and-a-half-minute pop songs, mixed in mono, blasting out of single-speaker AM radios.

It was only a matter of time before Wilson caught up with Spector (on classic pop chart-toppers like “Help Me, Rhonda” and “California Girls”) and then surpassed him on 1966′s Pet Sounds, a song cycle about heartbreak, growing up and, most of all, love. Paul McCartney heard it and wanted to make Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Countless others have heard it over the years too (from David Bowie to Neutral Milk Hotel to Wilco) and tried to make their own versions of Wilson’s pop symphonies.

Even Wilson was inspired and then stymied by the record. He immediately started working on his next song, “Good Vibrations,” which was supposed to be a centerpiece of the Beach Boys’ next album, Smile. But Wilson — by then deep into drugs and nearing another breakdown — couldn’t get the songs right, or at least what he thought was right. He recorded and recorded, tore apart and threw away, wrote more songs, recorded them and then rebuilt. And then he just gave up.

For years, Smile was one of popular music’s most in-demand and fabled lost albums. Sketchy and half-finished bootlegs were passed around, some songs found their way here and there onto later Beach Boys LPs and Wilson’s legend grew as he withdrew from the world.

Brian Wilson eventually revisited Smile in 2004 as a solo record, with a new band and new recordings. Later, 2011′s The Smile Sessions reconstructed the original 1967 tapes to the best of Wilson’s memory (which was battered and scarred by this point), and it represents everything post-Pet Sounds Wilson was about: It’s weird, it’s wonderful, it’s messy, it’s a masterpiece and it’s obviously the work of a man barely holding on to his sanity.


Over the years, artists have picked up on Wilson’s mad-genius legend. But he’s much more than that. Even in the ’70s and ’80s, two decades in which he pretty much disappeared from public except for a handful of Beach Boys appearances, he continued making music, much of it still unheard today. The unreleased “Bedroom Tapes” purportedly chronicle an artist sorting through his damaged mind during a period that was mostly filled with massive amounts of coke and LSD. And the songs that did make it to records back then were living in a shadow of a fading legend.

It took a while for Wilson to dig himself out of his personal mess. (Love & Mercy, the upcoming biopic, goes into detail about the effect his wife and doctor had on his life.) Since his comeback self-titled solo album in 1988, Wilson has released a dozen LPs, including one with the Beach Boys to celebrate their 50th anniversary in 2012.

Some of them are good, some of them aren’t. But they all reveal the same thing: Wilson is just as influenced by his past as everyone else is. There’s no escaping it. And while he tries to play down his legacy, you know he knows just how important and influential he is. He wouldn’t have pushed himself toward excellence if he didn’t. It’s all there — in the songs, in the sounds and in some of the greatest records made in the past 50 years — as proof. And it will continue to be there as long as “Don’t Worry Baby,” Pet Sounds, Smile and other classic records are around to remind us.



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