I Am Brian Wilson: A Memoir [FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING]

As new condition yellow boards, yellow cloth spine, and black spine lettering contained in an as new condition non price-clipped photographic dust jacket. Includes Author Dedication; Overture: Royal Festival Hall, London, 2004; Discography; Acknowledgments and Credits. Illustrated with a section of black-and-white photographic plates. "What is a song, exactly? It's something that starts as an idea and becomes more than that. In lots of interviews people have asked me what I would have been if I'd been born in a different time. I think I would have been a classical composer. But not like Mozart, Beethoven, or Tchaikovsky. I would have been like Bach, using counterpoint, layering things. Of all the composers, he's the one who makes the most sense to me." "I love the whole Pet Sounds record. I got a full vision out of it in the studio. After that, I said to myself that I had completed the greatest album I will ever produce. I knew it. I thought it was one of the greatest albums ever done. It was a spiritual record. When I was making it, I looked around at the musicians and the singers and I could see their halos. And the voices were everywhere. I heard Phil Spector's voice, talking to me about whether I could do something as complicated as his records. I heard my dad's voice: "What's the matter, buddy? No guts? Too scared to finish it? Can't do it, can you? I told you that this so-called masterpiece of yours was going nowhere." And I heard the other voices, the ones that wanted to do me harm. We're coming for you, Brian." "When you think songs are just for you, you pay special attention to them, and then you grow from them. It's like a building going up. You have a foundation, and then you keep adding stories until you look down and you're so far from the ground that you don't know how you got up there. That's how it's always been for me." - from I Am Brian Wilson and the rear outer jacket. "The long-awaited, candid, poetic memoir by Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys - a journey deep into the mind of a musical genius. They say there are no second acts in American lives, and thrid acts are almost unheard of. That's part of what makes Brian Wilson's story so astonishing. As a co-founding member of the Beach Boys in the 1960s, Wilson created some of the most groundbreaking and timeless popular misuc ever recorded. With intricate harmonies, symphonic structures, and wide-eyed lyrics that explored life's most transcendent joys and deepest sorrows, songs like "In My Room," God Only Knows," and "Good Vibrations" forever expanded the possibilities of pop songwriting. Derailed in the 1970s by mental illness, drug use, and the shifting fortunes of the band, Wilson came back again and again over the next few decades, surviving and - finally -thriving. Now, for the first time, he weighs in on the sources of his creative inspiration and on his struggles, the exhilarating highs and the debilitating lows. I Am Brian Wilson reveals as never before the man who fought his way back to stability and creative relevance, who became a mesmerizing live artist, who forced himselt to reckon with his own complex legacy, and who finally completed Smile, the legendary unfinished Beach Boys record that had become synonymous with both his genius and its destabilizations. Today Brian Wilson is older, calmer, and filled with perspective and forgiveness. Whether he's talking about his childhood, his bandmates, or his own inner demons, Wilson's story, told in his own voice and in his own way, unforgettably illuminates the man behind the music, working through the turbulence and discord to achieve, at last, a new harmony." - from the inner front and rear jacket flaps. …