This fall will be a reading season for classic rock fans. First Bruce Springsteen and then Prince announced they would be telling their life stories in print. Now Brian Wilson joins the 2016 rock star book club on October 11th when DeCapo Press publishes I Am Brian Wilson: A Memoir.
A short excerpt from the 320-page hardcover book has been released. In it, Wilson notes, “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.”
Wilson has already published one autobiography, 1991’s Wouldn’t It Be Nice: My Own Story, written with – or maybe in this case more by – Todd Gold. He claims to have only read part of it. On the new book, Wilson is being assisted by Ben Greenman, who worked with ?uestlove and George Clinton on their memoirs. He was also the subject last year of the well-received biopic Love & Mercy in which Paul Dano and John Cusack both play Wilson.
Read the Best Classic Bands review of Love & Mercy.
The released excerpt certainly promises Wilson’s fascinating life’s journey from his unique perspective. “Sometimes memories come back to me when I least expect them,” he writes. “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.”
Wilson is currently on tour celebrating the 50th Anniversary of his Beach Boys album Pet Sounds.
