Whale Music

No, not Orca Horizons; this book:

What's it about? Here's how Margot Mifflin's 1990 review in The New York Times, titled "Bad Vibrations," begins.

The story of the Beach Boy Brian Wilson is a tangled yarn of excess, knotted with the kind of pathetic drama only actors and rock stars seem capable of living. Brian Wilson has been riddled with mental problems, is 96 percent deaf in one ear, has snorted an entire gram of cocaine in one breath, used to keep his piano in a sandbox and, in the early 1970's, stayed in bed for the better part of four years. His Beach Boy brother Dennis kidnapped his own child and then killed himself by diving - drunk - off a yacht. His father was a jealous opportunist who, in 1969, for easy money, sold the rights to every song Brian Wilson had ever written. Add wealth, fame and a steady diet of drugs to his biography and you get a story that would strain credulity even if it were printed as fiction.

Paul Quarrington's ''Whale Music'' is, redundantly enough, a fictionalization of Brian Wilson's life.

Here's the beginning of the Publisher's Weekly blurb:

This nimble portrait of a rock 'n' roll legend turned Beverly Hills eccentric will amuse anyone who's followed the misfortunes of real-life ex-superstars.

So there are Hills as well as whales.

The cover of the first edition shows a naked man at a piano, and nakedness is mentioned in the Penguin blurb, too.

Des Howell is a former rock 'n' roll star who never leaves his secluded oceanfront mansion. Naked, rich and fabulously deranged, he subsists on a steady diet of whiskey, pharmaceuticals and jelly doughnuts and occasionally works on his masterpiece, "Whale Music."

In the account of Dee and Kelley's whale vision, the angels say that "the naked man is Dee."

So, despite one commenter's misgivings, I don't think "We come on the sloop John Dee" was noise. There seems to be a real connection there.

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Note added: Apparently Brian Wilson is really big in Toronto -- hometown not only of Paul Quarrington, author of Whale Music, but also of Steven Page of the Barenaked Ladies, who wrote a song called "Brian Wilson." Here's the cover art:

Here we find Brian Wilson juxtaposed with the word naked and with, if not exactly a whale, at least a large air-breathing fish (since smoking implies lungs).