Tag: Brian Wilson

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Beach Boys, Boppers, and Burnouts

I Am Brian Wilson: A Memoir by Brian Wilson and Ben Greenman

Brian Wilson has long been the most interesting Beach Boy, but his struggles with mental health have sometimes overshadowed the fact that the California native has won two Grammy awards, in addition to writing some of the Beach Boys’ biggest hits like “I Get Around,” “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” and “God Only Knows.”

Following the release of the Beach Boys’ 11th studio album, 1966’s Pet Sounds, Brian Wilson was hanging on by a thread. When it came time for the follow-up album, SMiLe, Wilson was in a downward spiral of addiction and mental illness, and the album’s release date was put off before being cancelled completely in May of 1967.

Now, after many years of seclusion, a few tribute albums, and some live shows, Beach Boys fans finally get the scoop from the man himself, with help from author Ben Greenman. I Am Brian Wilson isn’t necessarily for everyone who rocked out to “Help Me, Rhonda” in the ’60s, but it does provide a crucial blueprint of the rise and fall of one of America’s most interesting pop musicians. Wilson carefully answers questions that many die-hard fans have been wondering for years and doesn’t shy away from exploring the darker, less glamorous side of being in one of the most famous American bands of all time.

Bop Apocalypse: Jazz, Race, the Beats, and Drugs

by Martin Torgoff

Martin Torgoff is the author behind Can’t Find My Way Home: America in the Great Stoned Age, 1945-2000 — the book that the VH1 show The Drug Years was based on. And while the heinous marijuana term “jazz cigarette” should be forever removed from the American vocabulary, it’s safe to say that Torgoff knows a thing or two about drug culture.

Just as Can’t Find My Way Home explored how drug use shaped the American cultural landscape during the post-war era, Bop Apocalypse dissects how American drug culture was born and how it shaped American music.

The book explores musicians’ use of drugs in great detail, starting at the beginning of the 20th century. Highlights include the birth of jazz in New Orleans, the start of swing in Kansas City, the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, and the birth of bohemian culture in cities and college campuses nationwide in the ’60s.

While Bop Apocalypse covers a lot of ground in a short amount of time, Torgoff seamlessly weaves one decade into the next, giving the reader a feel for the era without inundating them with too much information. With the success of The Drug Years and the success of the 1987 Torgoff documentary Elvis ’56, we could see Bop Apocalypse turned into a documentary soon. As for now, you’ll have to track down the book, which is available everywhere in January of 2017.

My Damage: The Story of a Punk Rock Survivor

by Keith Morris

As an enthusiast of Southern California punk culture, I devoured this book, finishing it in about a week while on the road this summer. Much like We Got the Neutron Bomb, Lexicon Devil, and Disco’s Out … Murder’s In!, My Damage does a terrific job of describing the setting for which some of the most memorable American punk rock would be created. These books make the reader feel like they were at classic punk landmarks like the Oki Dog, the Masque, or the Strand. You can practically smell the sweat when Morris describes the violent mosh pits that took place at Circle Jerks shows.

But just like with any tell-all memoir, My Damage isn’t full of good times and “bet you wish you were there” anecdotes. Morris talks openly about his addiction to both alcohol and drugs, how those addictions shaped things in his life for better or for worse, and how he probably shouldn’t be alive to tell the tale. There’s also some pretty big let downs, including Greg Ginn (the lead guitarist of Black Flag) being way too involved with the nu metal travesty known as Korn. Let that sink in for a moment. As a Black Flag/Circle Jerks super fan, the book is a must. As someone who has little interest in what Morris did post Circle Jerks, the last third of the book is pretty hit or miss.

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Film Features Film/TV

Love & Mercy

Brian Wilson’s rise to the heights of musical genius and subsequent fall into the depths of psychosis has been ripe for a biopic for years. The transatlantic rivalry between the Beatles and the Beach Boys that pushed both bands into new creative territory is one of rock music’s greatest myths. The Fab Four’s 1965 record Rubber Soul inspired Wilson to push his studio work further with 1966’s Pet Sounds, which in turn inspired the Beatles to rip up the rule book for 1967’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Wilson’s rejoinder was to have been an album called Smile that, Beach Boys partisans claim, would have been the greatest rock album of all time. But Wilson had a nervous breakdown in the middle of the Smile recording sessions and the rest of the band, led by Mike Love, wrested musical control away from him, ceding the field to the Liverpudlians and dooming the American band to decades of formulaic surf nostalgia.

Director Bill Pohlad’s Love & Mercy gives myth the film treatment it deserves, not by creating an epic clash of musical titans, but by concentrating on Brian Wilson’s point of view. Pohlad is a veteran producer whose filmography includes Brokeback Mountain, The Tree of Life, and 12 Years a Slave, so he understood that the relatively small-scale and built-in audience allowed him to take creative chances. His experiments pay off handsomely. The film shuttles back and forth between the mid 1960s and the 1980s with two different actors playing Wilson in different periods of his life. Young Brian is Paul Dano, who portrays Wilson with wide eyes and an open mind but with a stinging emotional vulnerability. Old Brian is played by John Cusack, who is as foggy and frightened as Dano is clear and focused. Using multiple actors to play a famous figure has been tried before, most notably when Todd Haynes used six actors to play Bob Dylan in I’m Not There. But here the move feels completely appropriate. Wilson has said he looks back at the time before his breakdown and can’t recognize the person he used to be.

Elizabeth Banks and John Cusack

The 1960s segments tell the story of the creation of Pet Sounds, the recording of “Good Vibrations,” and the disastrous Smile sessions. Dano is brilliant as he fights off questions from his band, including Kenny Wormald as long-suffering Dennis Wilson and Jake Abel as the ambitious Mike Love. The high point of his performance is when he sings a sweet, aching version of “God Only Knows.” But his confidence melts when confronted with his manipulative, abusive father Murry Wilson (Bill Camp).

In the 1980s, we meet Cusack’s broken, scattered, middle-aged Brian as he haltingly reaches out to Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks), a glammy, Southern California Cadillac saleswoman who acts as the audience’s way into Brian’s cloistered world. Oren Moverman and Michael Lerner’s script expertly dribbles out disturbing details of the reclusive rock star lorded over by his psychiatrist, Dr. Eugene Landy, played with gleeful evil by Paul Giamatti. Cusack, who has long been trapped in his own movie star persona, digs deep into this role, nailing Wilson’s shuffling walk and his pained expressions when he tries to play piano as well as he used to. Cusack gets some of the best lines in the film, like when Brian, explaining the creative process to Melinda, says, “Every once in a while, once in a blue moon, your soul comes out to play.”

Cinematographer Robert D. Yeoman, a frequent Wes Anderson collaborator, shoots Southern California as both beautiful and alienating, as appropriate to the story. But director Pohlad’s secret weapon is his incredible sound design team, led by Eugene Gearty, who mixes snippets of Beach Boys songs with swirling, ambient sounds to reflect Wilson’s inner state. In an age where directors are content to use the unprecedented technology available in modern movie theaters just to make subwoofer “whomp” noises to telegraph dramatic moments, Pohlad and Gearty create a subtle, complex soundscape worthy of a film about a sonic genius. With a substantive story, a passionate cast and crew, and an experimental eye and ear, Pohlad has crafted one of the best movies of the year.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

The Wrecking Crew

In film circles, Denny Tedesco’s music documentary The Wrecking Crew has become a shorthand reference to the strained and bizarre state of the copyright regime in 2015. Tedesco first started making the film about Los Angeles studio musicians 19 years ago. Inspired by his father, guitarist Tommy Tedesco, he spent years arranging interviews, tracking down archival footage, and, teaching himself filmmaking in the true indie spirit. It premiered at the South By Southwest film festival in 2008 to wide acclaim and went on to be a hit on the festival circuit. Normally, a great subject, good execution, and a good festival run gives a documentary a good shot at distribution. But after more than a decade of struggle, Tedesco found himself facing two daunting challenges to getting his film out to the audience. First was the financial crash of 2008, which instantly dried up the traditional funding sources for small budget films in a way the industry has yet to fully recover from. Second was the astronomical cost of licensing the dozens of songs for the film from the media conglomerates that owned them. Since this was a music documentary, the songs were inseparable from the film, so Tedesco begged, pleaded, took out mortgages on his home, and watched all the buzz he had worked so hard to build up drown under a sea of red tape.

The Wrecking Crew in the studio

Now, seven years and a $300,000 Kickstarter campaign later, The Wrecking Crew can finally (legally) meet its audience. The story opens in the late 1950s. Lured by a growing talent pool and closer connections with the film and television industries, the center of the music industry started shifting from New York’s Tin Pan Alley to the sun-drenched streets of Los Angeles. At the same time, rock-and-roll was taking the country by storm, and many of the older musicians who had made their living playing on commercial jingles and anonymous teen idol ditties were not enthused by the new style. But a new generation of players, such as drummer Earl Palmer, who were mostly into bebop jazz, had no such compunctions. They earned the name “The Wrecking Crew” when one old timer complained that the rockers were going to “wreck the music business,” but over time, their nickname came to symbolize their fearsome chops.

To earn a spot on the rotating crew, players had to have an almost inhuman ability to figure out what the often inarticulate clients wanted and to nail the songs instantly. Tedesco uncovers a group of fascinating characters. His father tells stories of bands that could dish out entire Disney soundtracks before lunch and then move on to moonlight as the Monkees in the afternoon. Drummer Hal Blaine played on seven tracks that won song of the year Grammys in consecutive years. Legendary bassist Carol Kaye not only wrote the iconic bassline for the Mission: Impossible theme, but was also mistress of the groove on the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, all while raising two children. Phil Spector constructed his Wall of Sound in L.A’s Gold Star studio using 15 members of the crew and then refused to use anyone else on recording sessions for years. They made careers, from Cher, who in the film remembers being a young, naive singer who idolized the crew, to Nancy Sinatra, who recalls talking her father Frank out of recording “These Boots Are Made for Walking” before sneaking into a studio with the crew and cutting the huge hit herself.

Carol Kaye and Bill Pitman

But despite their ubiquity on pop radio, few of these day-rate players were recognized for their work. As Dick Clark says in an interview, “Who created it? No one cared.” The big exception was Glen Campbell, who was a session guitarist for years before striking out on his own and taking some of the crew with him as he rose to country music stardom.

Tedesco organizes the documentary around the personalities he encountered, which sometimes makes for a confusing chronology. But what the director lacks in technical chops and narrative clarity, he more than makes up for in enthusiasm and heart, and that’s what make The Wrecking Crew an exceptional documentary.