Brian Wilson & TRP smoking dope?

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

Weird---I've been sitting on a borrowed copy of the book for about three or four weeks now, having been in the midst of a low-level Brian Wilson obsession for the last few months. I've been working on and off on an ultimate Brian Wilson/Beach Boys ccompilation, one that focuses on the Pet Sounds/Smile era. One interesting element in "Smile" is that the development of Brian's basic musical materials is a lot more like classical music than popular music. In Brian's post surfer-dude songs, melodies pop up in a new context a few songs later ("Chlid is Father to the Man"/"Good Vibrations"/"Surf's Up",), there's greater freedom and range in the vocal parts and there are songs  composed out of brief motifs than longer melodys. I used to find it odd that Pynchon held the Beach Boys in such high regard. Now I listen to a sequence like Wonderful/Song For Children/Child Is The Father Of The Man and think Brian's a stone genius. There's a lot of elements in "Smile" that remind me of Charles Iv
es.
 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: pynchonoid <pynchonoid at yahoo.com>
> 
> Saturday August 19, 2006
> The Guardian
> 
> Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall and Redemption of the
> Beach Boys' Brian Wilson by Peter Ames Carlin (Rodale,
> £18.99)
> 
> Brian Wilson was the man whose way with vocal
> arrangements and avant-garde orchestration forced the
> Beatles into new artistic pastures in an effort to
> keep up. Carlin describes brilliantly the
> claustrophobic sonic psychodrama that followed, as
> Wilson locked himself away in the studio working on
> Smile, his "teenage symphony to God", only to be met
> with blank incomprehension from the rest of the band,
> who thought they should stick to happy surf music.
> There followed decades of insincere music, drugs and
> drink, and then near-slavery at the hands of a
> psychologist who kept the musician on a
> life-threatening cocktail of psychotropics, before
> Wilson finally broke free, returned to touring and
> finished the most legendary unreleased album in pop
> history. Carlin has interviewed Wilson himself as well
> as other surviving band-members and collaborators, and
> the result is a compelling tale of fragility, leavened
> by the conditionally upbeat ending and the odd amusing
> tableau, as when Wilson sat in a tent smoking dope
> with Thomas Pynchon, each man too nervous to talk to
> the other. You will want to put on Pet Sounds out of
> respect.
> 
> http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/roundupstory/0,,1853545,00.html
> 
> http://pynchonoid.org
> "everything connects"
> 
> http://OnlineJournalist.org
> 
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