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Catch A Wave: The rise, fall and redemption of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson

Catch A Wave: The rise, fall and redemption of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson

by PeterAmesCarlin (Author)

  • Used

    Paperback 2007

    $4.41
Synopsis

Everyone knows the music. No band sells 100 million albums and remains adored for more than four decades without making an impact on the world. So why hasn't anyone got round to telling the real story? Because, as "Catch A Wave" shows, the story of the Beach Boys and Brian Wilson is about the way the American dream filters through popular culture and how the American appetite (for money and success) can destroy it.And in "Catch A Wave" the entire tale of Wilson's rise to fame, his battle with mental illness and drugs, and his emergence into a new era of creativity comes straight from the people who actually lived it. Written with the active cooperation of Brian Wilson, the book includes exclusive interviews with surviving Beach Boys, Mike Love and Al Jardine, many of Wilson's childhood friends and schoolmates, a rich variety of family members, all of his surviving collaborators and a vast array of other witnesses. As such, it is the definitive book on the life and career of Brian Wilson.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
 Pages: 368
 Edition: Main Market
 Publisher: Rodale
Published: 15 Jun 2007
ISBN 10: 1905744005
ISBN 13: 9781905744008

Media Reviews
The Beach Boys in Peter Arnes Carlina (TM) s Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall and Redemption of Brian Wilson (Rodale Press): Great evocations of a great musician and the pop group he built, via great prose: 'As in our fantasies of America, what matters about a person in a Beach Boys song has nothing to do with who he or she is, and everything to do with the strength of their ambition and the things he or she chooses to do with it. This same message plays out across all cultural and racial lines in 'Surfin USA, ' and it's just as vivid in 'The Girls on the Beach, ' where, as they repeat in the chorus, the young lovelies are 'all within reach.' That promise extended in the warm, jazzy harmonies Brian cribbed from the Four Freshmen, who found them in the big band arrangements of Stan Kenton and Duke Ellington had as much to do with social opportunity as sex.' - Entertainment Weekly Fans will be picking up excitations aplenty from Catch a Wave, this absorbing treatment of Brian Wilson. The Beach Boys' auteur couldn't live with authority figures or without 'em his abusive dad/manager, his hit-crazed brothers and cousins, or his controlling therapist. 'If he'd used his music to escape his father, ' Peter Ames Carlin writes, success 'transformed everyone around him into a legion of Murrys... [all reiterating] his father's insults. Nobody wants to hear this crap! Dust yourself off and write another hit!' Ultimately, the exhumed SMiLE was a hit almost 40 years later though bandmate Mike Love would still rather get litigious than lavish praise on pop's patron saint of lost boys. Grade: A - Entertainment Weekly
Author Bio
Peter Ames Carlin is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, American Heritage and the Los Angeles Times Magazine. Previously a senior writer for People in New York, he is currently a television critic and makes regular appearances on radio to discuss developments in popular culture.