I Am Brian Wilson

'My life has been written about over and over again, and that's mostly okay with me. Other people can talk about my life. Sometimes they'll get it right and sometimes they'll get it wrong. For me, when I think back across my own life, there are so many things that are painful. Sometimes I don't like discussing them. Sometimes I don't even like remembering them. But as I get older, the shape of that pain has changed. Sometimes memories come back to me when I least expect them. Maybe that's the only way it works when you've lived the life I've lived: starting a band with my brothers that was managed by my father, watching my father become difficult and then impossible, watching myself become difficult and then impossible, watching women I loved come and go, watching children come into the world, watching my brothers get older, watching them pass out of the world. Some of those things shaped me. Others scarred me. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference. When I watched my father fly into a rage and take swings at me and my brothers, was that shaping or scarring? When we watched him grow frustrated with his day job and take solace in music, was that shaping or scarring? Those are all memories but I can't get to them all at once. I've had a whole lifetime to take them in. Now I have a whole book to put them out there.' Excerpt from I Am Brian Wilson

For the first time in his own words, the legendary musical genius of The Beach Boys reflects on his tumultuous life and astonishing 21st-century comeback to live performance and renewed creativity. Brian Wilson was the driving creative force behind The Beach Boys, a band that defined an era and charted nine consecutive gold albums and hit after unstoppable hit. But he was derailed in the 1970s by mental illness, drug use, and the shifting fortunes of the band he'd helped to create. Amazingly, he persisted. With the right support network, including his second wife, Melinda, the right doctors and the right medication, Wilson found his way back to the foundation of his creativity. In the 2000s, he was able to emerge as a solo performance artist, and complete Smile, the unfinished Beach Boys record that had become both the symbol of his genius and of his destabilization. I Am Brian Wilson is the story of Brian Wilson's life, told by an older, calmer Brian Wilson. He reflects on his difficulties, his extraordinary accomplishments and forgiveness for the people who complicated those accomplishments, and his life. Wiser, more measured, though still possessed of the youthful spark that helped him rise to the top of the rock-and-roll world, Wilson relates his life with emotional honesty: "Telling my story honestly means remembering things I sometimes prefer to forget. I would like people to get to know what I've gone through, and I hope that my story will give them strength."

Memoir of legendary Beach Boy member Brian Wilson

A fascinating study of Brian Wilson's creative career as a composer, producer, performer, and collaborator that addresses all aspects of Brian's five-decade-long music career through his creative methods and processes. • Presents the first complete and career-spanning biography of Brian Wilson and detailed examination of his musical career • Considers Wilson's work with The Beach Boys and the many performers and bands with whom he collaborated as producer, songwriter, and performer in a chronological narrative instead of categorizing his work as "Beach Boys" and "Other" • Discusses Wilson's diverse musical activities as comprising equal parts devoted to composition, production, performance, and collaboration • Sorts through various conflicting narratives about Brian Wilson's career in order to provide an accurate account of his creative chronology

The former Beach Boy discusses his meteoric rise to superstardom, his breakdown and recovery, the birth of his band, his bouts with drug and alcohol addiction and mental illness, and his relationship with Dr. Eugene Landy

Dig If U Will The Picture is a portrait of The Artist who will be remembered by many as the most seductive and enigmatic pop star of his generation. A year after Prince's death at the age of 57, acclaimed writer Ben Greenman brilliantly anatomizes the star's dramatic career and an aesthetic that at times seemed otherworldly. In thematically structured chapters that blend critical consideration of Prince's art with the author's personal connection to the music, this is a fitting memorial to a legendary performer: monumental, yet deeply intimate. Drawing on over 40 studio albums, a repertoire of 2,000 plus live shows, and close analysis of the unreleased highlights of the Vault, Dig If U Will the Picture is the definitive book on Prince's work.

Philip Lambert's infinite need to delve deeper into the musical oeuvre of Brian Wilson - by understanding the technical basis of his sound worlds; exploring the music Wilson heard as a child - creates a different type of biography, taking the perspective from within Brian Wilson's music, instead of from his personal life, though they are interwoven, and results in this engaging work.

A single-volume source in which to find most of the many, many proper names used by crossword puzzle solvers.

Award-winning author Andrei CodrescuOCOs ""Bibliodeath: My Archives (With Life in Footnotes)"" surveys the evolutionary relationship between language and technology by examining his own career as a prolific American writer for more than four decades. Born in Transylvania, Romania, CodrescuOCOs journey spans from his earliest days as a scattered poet in the 1960s to his founding of the journal"" Exquisite Corpse"" in 1983 to his ongoing commentary today on National Public RadioOCOs All Things Considered. Amid the release of some of his most celebrated books, the authorOCOs story is an insightful address of the survival of the literate world and the transformation of print, told through suspenseful reflection and alluring, signature footnotes."

Lists every album from every musical genre that made Billboard's popular albums chart between 1956 and 2006, providing information on the sales, position on the chart, and background information of each album.

Description Surfers loathed them, teenagers flocked to them, critics dismissed them, and producers banked on them. They were surf and beach movies—which were Hollywood's interpretation of the surf culture. For a short period in the 1960s these films were extremely popular with younger audiences—mainly because of the combination of sand and surf, the musical performers, the shirtless surfer boys and bikini-clad beach girls, and the wild surfing footage.This lavishly illustrated work features profiles on 32 sizzling fun-in-the-sun teenage epics from Gidget to the Beach Party movies with Frankie and Annette to The Sweet Ride plus a few offshoots in the snow. It offers an introduction with an overview of the surf movie genre; film entries with credits, plot synopses, DVD availability, memorable lines, reviews and awards; and biographies of actors and leading actresses who made their marks in the genre. The work also includes behind-the-scenes commentary from such actors as Aron Kincaid of The Girls on the Beach, Susan Hart of The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini, Peter Brown of Ride the Wild Surf, Chris Noel of Beach Ball, and Ed Garner of Beach Blanket Bingo. Catch the wave!