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This topic came up in another thread but I thought an exploration of it would drag that thread way off topic.

According to Wikipedia, Brian Wilson attended El Camino College for a while in 1960, majoring in psychology.  But the only source for that information is Keith Badman's book, which apparently is known to have some factual errors.

I distinctly remember a segment on some show (Entertainment Tonight, perhaps?) from 1989 or 1990 that showed Brian being awarded an honorary diploma by the principal of Hawthorne High.  The show asserted that Brian did not graduate back in the day.  This was all bound up with the story about Brian submitting "Surfin'" for a music composition class and getting an F... which I've never been sure whether to believe because it sounds too perfectly ironic.  Allegedly that F prevented him from graduating, which would have been the reason behind the honorary diploma.

Was this all just Hawthorne High playing along with a myth?  Did Brian really pass his composition class and graduate after all?  Or is Badman wrong about his having attended college?

Well, his picture is on Page 49 of the 1960 Hawthorne High School yearbook, class of 1960.  I'm assuming he graduated with his class.  He's on the first full row, third from the left.

http://www.e-yearbook.com/sp/eybb?school=30018&year=1960

How's that for obsessive   :p

Yeah, Carlin confirms it. He dropped out of college, not high school.

Thanks.  I wonder what the heck was up, then, with that big publicity stunt 20-odd years ago.  ???

So, does anyone know whether it's true that he submitted "Surfin'" for a class and got an F?

According to Fred Morgan, yes. And the F was for the assignment (write a sonata): for the overall course he got a C.

sh*t, I just scared myself by typing that without thinking.  :o

There's an 80's TV interview with the music teacher (also available on YouTube - but of course I cannot find it now) where he's sitting next to Brian and he's telling the F story.  So it would appear as a true story.

Fred was also interviewed fro the 1976 TV special.

Is that the same interview where he claimes Surfin' got an F but made him a million dollars?

Wait...Brian got an 'F' in 1960, for a song that he wrote in 1961? I'm confused...I thought it was established that he hadn't yet written that song when they had their meeting with the Morgans.

Seems Brian started recycling previously written material earlier than we thought.

I wonder if it was just an instrumental song by that point.

That's what I always assumed. and Surfin' as a piano instrumental... well, if I were a music teacher I'd probably give it an F, too!

I find this whole "write a sonata" thing a little hard to swallow.  Music majors aren't even generally expected to write sonatas as assignments.  Writing a sonata would assume the level of musical intelligence and skill found in about one in ten thousand public school students, unless "sonata" is being used as some sort of wishy-washy term meaning a piano piece in general. The music teacher should know full well what this term means.  Therefore the following scenarios are plausible:

The teacher is a sadist.
The teacher is an idiot.
Someone with no knowledge of music grafted the term "sonata" onto the story.
Hawthorne High was full of unparallelled musical genius throughout the student body.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonata_form

yeah, I agree with scenario #3.

I think - and it's been a while since I watched it - that it's the teacher himself to call it sonata, in that interview (around '89-'90) that I mentioned in above post.

You can write a very simplistic sonata--more about the form than about any sort of musical invention.

Bit harsh. Here's another theory: the story as related combines elements of truth with a healthy serve of poetic licence, and is being taken too seriously here.

The terminology is getting jumbled a bit - it is perfectly reasonable to get an assignment to write a piece using "Sonata Form", as I did when I was about 16 and taking a second year of music theory in high school, and later into college. It's a standard form that requires the music to follow a specific pattern of melodic and harmonic development from section to section. The assignments would grade how well the music student could write within the somewhat strict guidelines of that particular song form including staying within a specified key during specific sections, all of that apart from the aesthetics of having it sound good and follow Bach-inspired rules of harmony.

So if a student were assigned a project to write a piece in sonata form, and he/she were to turn in a piece based on a 12-bar blues or anything other than a piece which strictly follows the guidelines of sonata form, it would obviously get a failing grade, no matter how good the piece is!

So yes, it is very much possible that Brian being tasked with writing a fully developed sonata may be getting confused with writing a composition project in sonata form, because the latter is standard practice for almost all theory and harmony classes I've seen or experienced.

That is what I think.

Adding it all up, an assignment to write in sonata form is standard practice for high school theory classes, and if Brian or anyone in the class turned in a 12-bar blues form like Surfin as part of anything related to writing in sonata form, he'd obviously get a failing grade because he didn't follow the assignment.

Speaking of aspects of early Beach Boys mythology which don't entirely pan out - we are told that Dennis made the revolutionary suggestion of writing a song about surfing after they first auditioned for the Morgans, and were told they needed a hook. But hadn't Brian already written Surfer Girl - supposedly the first song he ever wrote? Although I suppose one possible explanation is that Brian meant Surfer Girl was the first song he wrote by himself. Maybe the historians out there have others ...

Exposition, Development, Recapitulation. Not as hard as it sounds. Still I have a hard time picturing it as a High School theory assignment. Anything is possible though.

Take my word for it - it's pretty standard practice for music theory students in high school, at least it still was when I took a few years of it, and I'd imagine the course level standards may have been even higher in Brian's day before the influence of pop music and the 60's music revolution.  :)

I would expect that Surfer Girl was just an instrumental at first. The lyrics seem like they were grafted on later -- the song was clearly written as just a tune (not a lot of different note values for different words).

I frankly wonder if the piece Brian turned in was an early version of Surfer Girl, not Surfin.

I think Brian mean the melody. He wrote the words later.
According to many of Brian's childhood friends, 'Surfer Girl' was NOT the first song he wrote, though.

Yes, that was what I was thinking as well.

Sadly, High school music doesn't teach this stuff anymore. What a shame :/

I hear it was, in fact, the legendary but never booted "Shortenin' Bread" suite. All 11 minutes of it. I'f not only give than an F, I'd kick Brian's ass out of the class.

And that early, erm, boost to his confidence would have achieved exactly what?  We'd none of us be here, moaning and a 'groanin'…