Catch A Wave: The Rise, Fall & Redemption of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson by Peter Ames Carlin (2006).

There are many things I should be doing rather than reviewing a book about Brian Wilson. But that’s the whole point. The Beach Boys are all about doing what one would rather do. Whether that’s surfin’, singin’, swingin’, or just survivin’.

Brian Wilson, in particular, represents a whole genre of music, a foundational worldview associated with 1960s America and the Western coastline of Southern California. It’s the culture of “what I’d rather be doing.” More about this in a paragraph or two below.

I don’t see how this book can be as meaningful to someone who didn’t grow up (I turned 8 in 1960) when I did, but the longevity of The Beach Boys and Brian Wilson’s unlikely solo career tell me that it can be. This is true because Brian and his brothers and cousins and fill-ins discovered America’s secret (and that of millions of wannabe Americans trapped in foreign countries they would never be able to leave): we have been and always will be dreamers. California dreamers. In fact, it is clear to me now that Brian Wilson invented California in the early 1960s at home in Hawthorne, CA.

Americans dream of being things and doing things they probably can never be or do, but–and this is important– they have intuited that if one can’t be or do something then the next best alternative is to listen to someone sing about being or doing it. We wish they all could be California girls. After all, that’s really the Beach Boys’ secret. As one contemporary songwriter’s lyrics suggest:

This is a song about songs about California.

When you’re in doubt, sing a song about California.

It’ll take you away, don’t you say that I didn’t warn ya.

It’s California, where the sun beams’ll warm ya. . .

The Beach Boys, as Peter Carlin’s great and candid and sad book documents, weren’t beach boys, and they weren’t car fanatics, and they weren’t all that lucky in love. But they did live in California, and they knew that kids everywhere wanted to trade places with them. Only Dennis really surfed. And Brian loved baseball almost as much as music–and was and is terribly shy about girls. But what they created, and what they continue to embody, is a whole generation’s aspirations to be in the sun, to be in love, and to have fun, fun, fun until daddy takes our T-bird away.

Few rock acts of the 1960s cared as much about promoting “innocence” (Wouldn’t It be Nice?) and “sincerity” (In My Room) as the hallmarks of courtship and self-esteem as Brian and his family members did. Not that they were all that chaste or spiritual. But they knew deep down that their fans and listeners wanted to be “true to their school,” and as well to Rhonda or Caroline or Barbara Ann. His impossibly sweet harmonies and orchestral imagination made the prospect of every summer endless  even in the snow belt.

Readers of this biography will encounter some of the typical sordid behind-the-scenes tales of rock icons–an overbearing father, overzealous and unscrupulous promoters and fairweather friends–as well as sibling rivalry and heartbreaking losses, Brian’s drug-induced stupors and epic binges on food, and the infamous flashes of genius diminished by bouts of madness. Of great interest to me personally were the histories behind favorite songs (When I Grow Up to Be a Man; Heroes and Villains) and albums (Holland; Surf’s Up; Smile) and the cost Brian and others paid psychologically and otherwise to get them to their sometimes adoring, sometimes skeptical public. Carlin, himself a devotee but not uncritical as a journalist (the book is promoted afterall on Brian Wilson’s own website), tells this story with compassion and telling detail; he likes Brian and wants us to like him, and we do.

Most of all, Carlin’s tale is a story of redemption, or as much redemption as one can restore to a life lived with such a ferocious and frantic pace in the midst of the manifold temptations of stardom and the bleak wayfaring that a lost soul like Brian endured. It is a miracle that Brian has persevered, his mind and voice have returned, and he is still able to perform. What are we to make of his career and the music behind it, and thus the professed redemption it purports to chronicle? (Even now in the Pet Sounds interviews and the Smile performances captured on DVD, Brian still looks like the fragile, tender-hearted, whimsical teenager of 1963, his half-smile/half-smirk desperately wanting to please, and to be pleased, by the wonder of his music.)

To me, Brian Wilson’s life work is a testimony to the power of contemplating what we’d rather be doing. His music comprises a treasure chest of longing: old memories, forgotten feelings, and many boyish trials–too precious and pretentious for some, but also the soundtrack for a thousand lives, mine included, a boy as far away from the beaches of Malibu and Hawthorne and Santa Monica as one could be geographically, but emotionally, this close.

I, too, dreamed of one day being in California doing God knows what, since I couldn’t swim or sail or surf. But Brian and his clan knew what was stirring inside me and a lot of adolescent boys my age. The fear of looking stupid, the desire to make my dad proud, the strangeness and awkwardness of growing up (and now growing old). “God only knows” what Brian didn’t, and I can say in my mid-50s, both His Knowledge and Brian’s music are welcome comforts and inspirations to me.

 
Posted in Books by Bruce Edwards

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