Customer Reviews

The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds (33 1/3)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I've listened to Pet Sounds since the day it was originally released in 1966. Fusilli has the ability to tell the story in a way that makes me thinkn I have never really "heard" Pet Sounds. His insights are a fresh way to hear Brian Wilson's heart and soul int he music of the best rock album of the 20th century.

Phil @ prayforsurfblog.blogspot.com

I'm a huge fan of Fusilli's crime novels(Hard,Hard City;Closing Time; etc.)so I tried this book, even though I'm not much of a Beach Boys fan. It is AMAZING! Fusilli describes Brian Wilson, the album, Pet Sounds, that changed his life, and tells us why it's a great album. By the time you are finished with this book, you want to listen to the album to see if it is as great and unusual as Fusilli says it is. You'll also want to read Fusilli's crime novels because Wilson is referenced in them. A great book by a great writer about a sad, misunderstood album from the Sixties.

Webley's review nails it. I have been thinking about this since starting the book and his review sums up my thoughts very well. I had just finished Dan Leroy's take on The Beastie Boys "Paul's Boutique." Granted this era might not be too comparable to Brian Wilson's, but the book accomplished everything I had hoped. Leroy took a journalistic approach and compiled a plethora of detailed information about the making and content of the album in a cohesive and organized manner. It greatly increased my appreciation of the album and I could listen to songs as I read more about them.

I consider Leroy's work to be outstanding, but I had similar expectations for The Pet Sounds installment of the series. What a colossal disappointment. I had heard complaints that some books in the 33 1/3 series are tainted by author's including themselves too often in their writing. This is a prime example, but sadly, not the only problem with the book. I wouldn't mind a few personal anecdotes to contextualize the information if it was organized well, but Fusilli is all over the place. He bounces back and forth between prior albums and frequently includes detailed chord breakdowns of songs. Although this is probably interesting to professional musicians, it doesn't really lend itself well to this book series. It is by no means an easy task to dedicate an entire book to the creation of an album of such importance, but someone with Fusilli's experience and knowledge should have at least been able to understand what readers were looking for, like Wilson knew what his listeners wanted to hear.

I definitely learned some interesting new things, and it did allow me to listen to the album with some new ideas in mind, but overall there was just so much more that could have been done with this book. Very disappointing.

Pet Sounds is my favorite album and I celebrate its existence by sharing it with friends and family every chance I get. It changed my life about three years ago. It was the perfect music that I had been searching for my whole life. I thought I had found it with the Beatles during childhood, but even they never topped Pet Sounds. If you love Brian Wilson and Pet Sounds as much as I do, you might be disappointed with this book. Fusilli manages to downplay the instrumentals and "Sloop John B." as lesser tracks on the album. He even implies that "I Know There's An Answer" and "Here Today" aren't as great as they could be. Of course, he thinks "God Only Knows" and "Wouldn't It Be Nice" are the best and spends more time on those songs. If you're a real Brian Wilson fan and wish to God that Smile had been released in 1967, right off the Pet Sounds high, then you'd do better to check out "Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall and Redemption of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson". While Fusilli's abridged treatment of Pet Sounds is readable, it flirts with being corny and overly-poetic. The trouble with that is that his love for Pet Sounds isn't as close to being blind as most who would read it.

I gave it five stars because I don't want the author's work to suffer because of a technical glitch.

BUT I have a Galaxy 10.1 with the Android Kindle App (Honeycomb) and this book does not work on it. Kept freezing the App on the same page.

Buyer beware...!

I was set to love this book. Pet Sounds is one of my favorite albums, one certainly rich enough to sustain a book-length analysis. I still believe that's the case, but this book isn't it. The book is poorly organized, with autobiography and personal reminiscences intermixed with musical analysis, second-hand recounts of other writers' work on Pet Sounds, and pointless anecdotes (at one point the author spends several pages describing Brian's performance in some comedy skits on a Bob Hope/Jack Benny television special, for no apparent purpose--best I can tell, it's something the author remembers about the Beach Boys, so into the book it went) all without any apparent organizing principle. The writing is similarly all over the place, with occasional acute musical analysis side by side with banalities like "But tell me, is there a pop song that's better than 'Wouldn't It Be Nice?' What? Are you kidding me? Come on!" and "I like the Beatles."

I was expecting a liner-notes-on-steroids with this book, the sort of thing that would accompany a Bear Family box set. What I got instead is a meandering personal essay that is too infrequently insightful and too often sloppily conceived and written. Maybe I simply missed the point of this book series; more likely this just isn't one of its better titles. A pity, because an album this good deserves better.

As a die-hard music fan, I've always been fascinated by the amount of praise and adoration heaped upon Pet Sounds. I've put in countless listens to the album, yet never really "got it." Maybe it's because I never experienced it in the right context, or maybe I've just been ruined on the Beach Boys as a whole having grown up listening to all those fun surf songs as a kid in the 80s.

Whatever the case may be, I've always had a strong desire to understand and truly like this album. I don't think I've wanted to like an album as much as anything else without succeeding. Which is why I turned to this book. I saw it as my own personal bridge to Pet Sounds enlightenment...the key to the door I'd been trying to open for all these years.

But after having read this book, all while listening along carefully, I didn't find my answer. I'll admit, I do enjoy the album slightly more than I used to, but I never found the justification in this book for why so much has been written about the album. I could tell the author was a true fan, but this book preaches to the choir, revelling in emotions and excitement associated with the album that don't really transcend to the uninformed. Maybe that's just the nature of the beast in any kind of rock (or any other art medium) journalism, but for the uninitiated, this book just doesn't do the trick.