David Leaf tried to do his part to correct that leeway course by writing what may be the first truly serious book about The Beach Boys. God Only Knows: The Story of Brian Wilson, The Beach Boys, and the California Myth told the full history of the band up until 1977, but it crucially brought the focus back to that crucial year of 1966. Brian creates Pet Sounds. Brian creates "Good Vibrations". Brian creates SMiLE. Brian abandons SMiLE when the blowback he always suffered from those who couldn't comprehend his artistry finally got to be too much for him.
God Only Knows was surely a revelation when it was first published, but this is a story that all Beach Boys fans worth their salt know inside-and-out today. That makes its current republication something less than earth-quaking, yet it is fascinating to revisit The Beach Boys through 1977 eyes, and Leaf never lets us forget what year it is, and there is no effort to update the text. The band are referred to as being a bit over the hill... and in their thirties. Dennis and Carl Wilson are still alive. Bruce Johnston is not yet a right-wing creep dismissing fans of Brian's most ambitious work as "one-percenters" and President Obama as an "asshole" and a "socialist" but is so supportive of Brian's artistry that he proposes the rather socialist idea of "an incredibly funded foundation" that might "pay artists like Brian to make music." As he relates his own personal history with Pet Sounds, Henry Winkler is still playing the Fonz. The music of SMiLE is still essentially a mystery and nearly four decades away from being the subject of a massive box set. The first bootleg hadn't even been released yet.
However, the story of God Only Knows does extend past '77 because Leaf updated his book in 1985 and then again in 2021. The latest edition often functions as a clarification, particularly in praising the non-Brian Beach Boys more to those guys' satisfaction and in taking a firmer stance on Brian's domineering and infamous "therapist" Eugene Landy than he had in '85 when the extent of Landy's craziness was not yet widely known.
Leaf's handling of Mike Love's craziness is borderline cowardly in comparison. Check out the way the author bobs and weaves around the content of Love's insane and venomous Rock and Roll Hall of Fame speech before simply directing the reader to just Google it. He refuses to name Love in instances when an unnamed party who is obviously Love is causing trouble. For the most part, Leaf steers clear of any recent business with The Beach Boys, not even really dealing with the group's 2012 reunion album.
All of the extra text is included in Omnibus Press' new "Remastered" edition of God Only Knows. With those updates came a slew of new information to clarify the original publication's perspective, as well as a bunch of new forewords from fans, friends, and family. The fact that one of them, Brian's wife Melinda, has since died emphasizes the fact that time just keeps on mercilessly marching along. Since the latest updates were made in 2021, we do not find out what life is like for Brian Wilson since he's been struggling with dementia, which was only reported a year ago.
I do wish that Leaf had taken a similar approach to that of Michael Azerad, who extensively footnoted his Nirvana bio Come As You Are when it was republished in 2023. Leaf could have at least corrected some of the more glaring errors in the early editions, such as the very outdated notion that "Our Prayer" was cut during the 20/20 period when it is now well known to be a SMiLE remnant.
Nevertheless, it's still good to have such a seminal book back in print again. According to one of his introductory statements, David Leaf once met a fan who'd paid $500 for a copy of the original edition after it went out of print. That's a lot of money to pay for a book whose information has since been cannibalized over and over again in lesser volumes.
