Uncanny

Keith Altham, Rave, May 1969

Vivien Goldman, Sounds, 3 September 1977

Fred Dellar, NME, 7 January 1984

David Dalton, Mojo, September 1999

Ben Edmonds, Mojo, November 2002

DAILY TELEGRAPH "The book will include anecdotes including Dawkins' adventure with drug-addled Queen bass player John Deacon, jamming with Jimi Hendrix at London's Speakeasy Club, encountering the colossal ego of The Beach Boys' Bruce Johnstone and watching Duran Duran self-destruct while recording their 1983 album Seven And The Ragged Tiger."

GUARDIAN "Above all, the album is an essay in the exploration of texture. Heavy strings and a gospel choir mark the opening track, River Song, which also introduces the ecological theme that recurs throughout the album, notably in the title track. The strategic use of banjo, bass harmonica and tuba on other songs marks an intelligent use of resources that Brian had been beginning to exploit on the abandoned Smile sessions. The fondness for ponderous, four-square rhythms is a characteristic drawn from Dennis's own drumming with the Beach Boys, as astute and original in its way as that of Ringo Starr with the Beatles; somehow, he was able to give momentum to mass. You and I, however, is as light as a feather: written with his twice-wife Karen Lamm, from whom he was in the process of separating, it recalls the simplicity of the songs on Friends with which he started his composing career almost 10 years earlier."

LEIGH JOURNAL

STEAMBOAT PILOT

WALL STREET JOURNAL “I believe there are two main categories of nerds: one type, disproportionately male, is intellectual in ways that strike people as machinelike, and socially awkward in ways that strike people as machinelike. These nerds are people who remind others, sometimes pleasantly, of machines….."

"Do I mean that nerds in this category are robots made of flesh and blood? No."

"Brian Wilson is not into the ocean. ‘I'm afraid of the water,’ he says when people ask him about surfing. One interviewer has described his ‘Rain Man-like personality’ as being reminiscent of a ‘voice-mail menu.’ Wilson is from Hawthorne, California, ten minutes from the Pacific, which makes his hydrophobia impressive. But his mother, Audree, has long maintained that he hummed the entire melody of ‘The Marines' Hymn’ before he could talk, and that his mastery of musical instruments proceeded apace. When his younger brother Dennis persuaded him to write a song about a new teen pastime, he came up with ‘Surfin',’ which became the Wilson brothers' first hit and led to their reinvention as the Beach Boys. Wilson proceeded to paint a fantasia in song, an amber-encased America ruled by athletes with multiple vehicles and multiple girlfriends. In the mid-1960s, as the rest of the Beach Boys toured Asia, he surrounded himself with studio musicians and recorded Pet Sounds, making Coke bottles into percussion instruments, recording in a pit of sand to get the right sound, writing string charts, and letting other people write his lyrics. The more the world fell for his make-believe, the more time he spent alone in his studio, sequestered from the world, living with equipment."

"Wilson did things a machine cannot do. His work was more intuitive than logical. Nerds of this kind, crucially, are not actually like machines; they just remind people of them. They get stuck with the name ‘nerd’ because their outward behavior can make them seem less than, and more than, human.”

PASTE

THE DAILY TAR HEEL

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CRAWDADDY

RELIX
ROLLING STONE

NYTIMES "He was a songwriter with a sound that lay somewhere between droning art-song, FM radio pop and country music. He treated songs as permeable, flexible, unfinished entities, letting them drift together, ignoring standard rules about verses and choruses. He has become a hero partly for intellectual reasons, because he didn’t recognize obvious divisions between music for art and music for contemplation. But if he weren’t a great songwriter, no one would be paying attention."

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