Page 20 American Book Review California Icarus Tom Nolan Inside the Music of Brian Wilson: The Songs, Sounds, and Influences of the Beach Boys’ Founding Genius Philip Lambert Continuum http://www.continuumbooks.com 416 pages; cloth, $90.00; paper, $26.95 The saga of Brian Wilson, prime creative force behind the Beach Boys, has been told so often by so many writers (including this reviewer, in various magazine pieces over the years), that its lineaments are as familiar, to many of us, as a modern California myth: the gifted young Icarus who soared above his golden land and sang enchanting lyric-visions, then crashed to earth and hid from the vengeful sun—only to emerge at last from his cave of seclusion, no longer young and not so golden but seeming all the more human and valuable for his ordeal. Music professor and author Philip Lambert is the latest scribe to scrutinize the art and life of this Southern California pop-music legend, in Inside the Music of Brian Wilson: The Songs, Sounds, and Influences of the Beach Boys’Founding Genius. His approach combines the broadly biographical with the minutely musicological. The resulting book, like its title, is a somewhat unwieldy if mostly gratifying mixture. Its density of detail can sometimes feel claustrophobic—“But it’s a great story,” as Lambert states, “and one worth retelling from every possible angle.” The author approaches his subject’s history from a musical vantage point, through a song-bysong , track-by-track dissection of Wilson’s lifeoeuvre —mega-hits (“California Girls,” “Good Vibrations”) to LPmasterpieces (Pet Sounds [1966], Smile) to obscure B-sides and album-fillers (“Rockin’ Roadster,” “Pom-Pom Playgirl”). As an appendix, there is a fourty-five-year chronology that lists every tune or track to which Brian Wilson is known to have contributed. It’s hard to imagine any popular composer , from Johann Sebastian Bach to the Beatles, craving a more careful homage than Lambert’s. Inside the Music of Brian Wilson finds its own path to an idiosyncratic excellence. Here’s a sample of his approach at its most technical (from his analysis of “California Girls”): Within each phrase the chords move up by step (B up to C-sharp in the first phrase,A up to B in the second, G-A-B in the third), thus reversing the downward chordal movement of the introduction. But from phrase to phrase, the chords move down by step as an exact recollection and then extension of the earlier idea (B to begin the first phrase, down toAfor the second, then to G for the beginning of the third). Similar to what Brian had done in the chorus of “Don’t Hurt My Little Sister,” the unfolding sequence spreads out over the entire chorus and completely shapes its harmonic structure and forward momentum . Lambert diagrams similarities between various Wilson tunes, and between certain of Wilson’s songs Nolan continued on next page Ball continued from previous page that engages and includes us, deepening as the book progresses. Bonnard’s paintings employ windows as internal figures of vision, which in experience is always partial, divided, conflicted. His famous The Breakfast Room (1930–31), its table arrayed with definite ham, fish, and fruit, looks out over a balcony onto an alluringly blurred and thus infinite garden. His wife, Marthe, had a skin condition that required her to spend long hours in the bath, and he painted her there, imprisoned in a lens of water—the window through which she, as she floated, became permanent. Seeing this, we see through life into art. Throughout The Glass Age, we see how art transforms the fragile into the enduring, the invisible into vision. In characterizing this book, I’ll contrast it with another verse/prose-poem collage sequence: Michael Ondaatje’s now classic The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), a work which is dramatically cinematic, a series of jump cuts between the journalistically historical and the viscerally imagined—the Kid as the world saw him and the world as seen by the Kid. Rather than referring to images, Ondaatje’s book incorporates visual documents in the form of reproduced photos and woodcuts. The Glass...