Catch a Wave

“The Beach Boys in Peter Arnes Carlin’s Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall and Redemption of Brian Wilson (Rodale Press): Great evocations of a great musician and the pop group he built, via great prose: ”As in our fantasies of America, what matters about a person in a Beach Boys song has nothing to do with who he or she is, and everything to do with the strength of their ambition and the things he or she chooses to do with it. This same message plays out across all cultural and racial lines in ‘Surfin USA,’ and it’s just as vivid in ‘The Girls on the Beach,’ where, as they repeat in the chorus, the young lovelies are ‘all within reach.’ That promise” extended in the warm, jazzy harmonies Brian cribbed from the Four Freshmen, who found them in the big band arrangements of Stan Kenton and Duke Ellington had as much to do with social opportunity as sex.” —Entertainment Weekly

“Fans will be picking up excitations aplenty from Catch a Wave, this absorbing treatment of Brian Wilson. The Beach Boys’ auteur couldn’t live with authority figures or without ’em” his abusive dad/manager, his hit-crazed brothers and cousins, or his controlling therapist. ”If he’d used his music to escape his father,” Peter Ames Carlin writes, success ”transformed everyone around him into a legion of Murrys… [all reiterating] his father’s insults. Nobody wants to hear this crap! Dust yourself off and write another hit!” Ultimately, the exhumed SMiLE was a hit” almost 40 years later” though bandmate Mike Love would still rather get litigious than lavish praise on pop’s patron saint of lost boys. Grade: A” —Entertainment Weekly