Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email


2015 August 14 • Friday

If you want to indulge in the more fantastical elements of The Beach Boys' story, if you want the dirt and the stardust and that well-worn tale of rise and fall and rise again, then by all means curl up with Peter Ames Carlin's Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall & Redemption of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson.

Carlin is good on the music and has a substantial collection of interviews at his disposal. Brian Wilson is the center of this story, as he tends to be, but I found myself becoming just as interested in Carl and Dennis as well as Mike Love, for whom I gained some sympathy. (I still regard him mostly with dislike snd suspicion, but I now have a few reservations about that, knowing a bit more about him and his life.)

Some of the staccato piano and snare drums work anticipates Goldsmith's First Blood score. Though this is a sci-fi movie, Goldsmith relies heavily on acoustic instruments, generating weird sounds through the use of unusual percussion and unusual writing for conventional instruments.

The first line is "Brian Wilson is sitting in a little room somewhere deep in the recesses of the Austin Convention Center, staring intently at the green linoleum floor".