Beached Boy

BRIAN WILSON’S earliest Beach Boys compositions trigger fantasies of mythic Southern California: We hear the crash of the waves, feel the sand beneath our feet and the warmth of the sun enveloping our bodies. We ogle beautiful girls in bikinis and smell the exhaust of souped-up hot rods screeching down the nighttime strip.

Then the youthful utopia of “Fun, Fun, Fun” gave way to nakedly revealing self-portraits. The vulnerability Wilson conveyed in the songs “In My Room,” “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times” and “You Still Believe in Me” was unprecedented in the mid-1960s pop milieu. The media tagged him as a genius before he hit 25.

Over the next four decades, Wilson’s music mirrored the rollercoaster of his tumultuous life. From the biographer’s perspective, his is a story rife with drama: A child prodigy-turned-teen hit maker, he battled an abusive father and found sustenance in creating shimmering soundtracks that captured the California dream. He reached an artistic pinnacle in 1966 with the “Pet Sounds” album. But after 1967’s “Good Vibrations,” as close to a perfect pop single as anyone could ask for, he crashed. His failure to complete the album “Smile” in 1967 triggered a creative and emotional free-fall, fueled by drugs, that became one of rock’s great tragedies. There were many failed attempts to revive his career, including the ill-fated 1976 “Brian Is Back” campaign. But Wilson did revive his career and has performed regularly since 1998. And in 2004 he faced down his biggest creative demon, releasing “Brian Wilson Presents Smile,” a critically acclaimed reworking of his earlier failure.

With such rich material, it’s no wonder that among the giants of pop music only the Beatles and Bob Dylan have undergone more biographical scrutiny than the Beached Boy. Few stones have been left unturned, except perhaps those documenting Wilson’s amazing third-act resurrection.

Now, Philip Lambert chimes in with “Inside the Music of Brian Wilson,” which does in fact tread new ground -- that is, if you’ve been waiting for a bloodless dissection of his compositions. It’s too bad, because clearly Lambert, a professor of music theory at Baruch College in New York City is a Wilson fan. Like millions of others, he was moved by “Pet Sounds,” a work he says is “so far removed from anything that seemed possible in a rock album, so deep and sensitive and finely crafted that it surely came from a world beyond this one.”

But Lambert takes a decidedly non-rock ‘n’ roll approach: He examines Wilson’s songs as one would study fossilized bones in a museum. He drains the life from Wilson’s compositions with long-winded discourses -- on chord structures, doo-wop progressions and descending bass lines -- useful chiefly for musicians.

Although mostly academic in tone, the book does give insight into Wilson’s creative process, connecting the dots from influence to inspiration to creation. For example, he details exactly how “Surfin’ U.S.A.” is a rewrite of Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen,” and he meticulously breaks down the melodic connection between “Surfer Girl” and “When You Wish Upon a Star.” Wilson’s love of the Four Freshmen is well-documented, but Lambert offers perhaps the most elaborate (if clinical) explanation of how the 1950s vocal group’s sound found its way into the music Wilson wrote for the Beach Boys. “Brian didn’t just listen but he absorbed, digested, and, ultimately, deconstructed,” Lambert writes.

As a composer, Wilson often drew upon his influences (sometimes fairly obviously) and transformed them. Sometimes he even stole from himself: Lambert cites the similarities between “Shut Down” and “Little Deuce Coupe” as one example. He traces the progression from surf and car songs to deeply personal compositions and ever more complicated production, modeled after Phil Spector’s wall-of-sound style.

On occasion, Lambert tries to explain Wilson’s work without resorting to charts and chord patterns -- though some of these passages can be difficult to read with a straight face. Of the obscure 1964 “Pom, Pom Play Girl,” he writes, “The whole account is from [a] distance, not a stalker I hope, but just a regular guy who isn’t on the football team and who freely fantasizes about that paragon of femininity leading cheers down on the sidelines.”

Lambert wisely focuses on Wilson’s mid-’60s songs, when his desire to compete with the Beatles pushed him to the creative heights of “Pet Sounds” and into the realm of experimental pop with “Smile”” “He had ascended to the status of deity in the realm of popular music, and in the fertile but tumultuous months of the post-’Pet Sounds’ period in 1966 and early 1967, he felt he had a gospel to preach.” But the project’s failure, his paranoia and pressure from the band sent Wilson into a shell creatively. “The decision to abandon ‘Smile,’ ” Lambert writes, “was a monumental act of self preservation. It was a sensitive artist coming face to face with his own mortality, and then retreating, bruised but intact, back to his room.”

Long known as a reluctant performer, Wilson in recent years has seemed to enjoy being onstage. Lambert demonstrates that in the work of composers such as Wilson, popular music can be much more than three minutes of ear candy. But his professorial approach reinforces a golden rule around since Elvis Presley first swiveled his hips more than half a century ago: Rock and academics just don’t mix. *