I AM BRIAN WILSON

Nonfiction

But listen to his music

I AM BRIAN WILSON:
A Memoir
By Brian Wilson with Ben Greenman
307 pp. Da Capo 

Reviewed by Alan Goodman

Brian Wilson has few peers as a prolific and influential Rock And Roll songwriter. As the front man and driving creative inspiration for the Beach Boys he is responsible – in total or partially – for such R & R musical icons as “California Girls,” “Fun, Fun, Fun,” “I Get Around,” “Surfin’,” “Surfin’ Safari,” “Surfin’ USA,” and “Surfer Girl.”  

In 1988, Wilson and the Beach Boys were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In 2000 he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. And in 2007 he was honored by the Kennedy Center for a lifetime contribution to the performing arts. A biopic film about his life won several wards at the Toronto Film Festival in 2014.

All in all, not too shabby a track record for any ten musicians, let alone one single person. And yet, Brian Wilson is revealed in I Am Brian Wilson: A Memoir, as barely hanging onto sanity. A man constantly on the edge, and more often than not, going over it.

The start of Wilson’s life is one of early physical abuse by a father ambitious for his sons’ fame – that being Brian and his siblings, all who learn vocal harmonies in family sing-a-longs as youngsters. After very early success, there enters the specter of drugs, struggle, downward spiral into despair, obesity, self-loathing, self-recrimination. Divorce, drifting in a fog of depression, the meeting of a woman – his present wife – who rescues him, and sets him back on the path of a productive songwriter.

The story is not unlike that of other successful show business lives that one might read about. The problem with this account is that you will not easily learn about the successes and failures unless you are a doggedly determined and persistent reader. This is a narrative that is not a narrative. It is an account awash in drifting and wandering. This is no straight-ahead telling of a life with sensitivity to a chronological order. What you get are fragments of thought, meanderings of feelings, descriptions of a favorite chair.

It is as if the depressed and disordered mind of Brian Wilson has invited you into the wavelengths of his thought process. I imagine those among the readers who are professional or (perhaps) amateur psychologists might well use this memoir as a case study of how the depressive sees the world about him.

The book is ordered in chapters that have such titles as “Overture,” “Fear,” and “Fathers and Sons.” This promises an orderly procession of a life explained. But it is a promise broken as the read proves a difficult slog. The opening is a bit of soliloquy on random memories of early influences along the way. If you are not fully aware of exactly what the life has been about, this can be – and for this reader, definitely is, disorienting. 

For example: 

“There are other voices too, along with Chuck Berry and Phil Spector and my dad. The other voices are worse. They are saying horrible things about my music. ‘Your music is no damned good, Brian. Get to work, Brian. You’re falling behind, Brian’ Sometimes they just skip the music and go right for me. ‘We’re coming for you, Brian. This is the end, Brian. We are going to kill you, Brian.’ They’re bits and pieces of the rest of the people I think about, the rest of the people I hear. They don’t sound like anyone I know, not exactly, except that I know them all too well. I have heard them since I was in my early twenties. I have heard them many days, and when I haven’t heard them, I have worried about hearing them.” 

The book has a pace of its own, which could be one of its charms. Could be. But isn’t, as the reader has to get through a series of cryptic references to feelings and fears. If the book had some of the energy, verve, rhythmic pulse, beat and time of Wilson’s music, one could forgive the maudlin diffusion that interrupts a sense of flow.

This book is simply too fragmented, too self-absorbed, too wallowing in confusion, to provide enough impetus to stay with it. I started it, made it through half a chapter. Picked it up two days later, thinking it was probably my mood that made the poor first impression. Managed twenty or so more pages. Put it down for a week. Came back for a third try, and ended up reading it back to front (which perversely rendered it more readable).

I have long been a fan of Brian Wilson’s music (how could you not?) If I’m cruising the airwaves for something to listen to, anything the Beach Boys are singing is where the dial stops. The music is terrific.

But I Am Brian Wilson: A Memoir is much less so.