Review: 'God Only Knows: The Story of Brian Wilson, The Beach Boys, and the California Myth' (Remastered edition)

In 1977, The Beach Boys were still a going concern, but one that had recently released fluff like 15 Big Ones while playing the oldies festival circuit. The group's reputation was not strong. Mike Love was flapping his chicken wings and croaking "Fun, Fun, Fun" for the billionth time. Brian Wilson was shattered. His history of making progressive, futuristic music was not what the average person thought of when confronted with the name "Beach Boys."

Review: 'Everybody Had an Ocean: Music and Mayhem in 1960s Los Angeles'

A few months ago I reviewed Joel Selvin's Hollywood Eden, an interesting, well-written chronicle of the earliest days of L.A.'s fertile rock scene in the sixties. Because that book halted just as Brian Wilson created "Good Vibrations" and the scene was really about to take off, I described Hollywood Eden as "an extended prologue" and ended the review by suggesting that "further reading is required to learn the complete story of why LA was so important to sixties rock."  

Published four years before Hollywood Eden, Everybody Had an Ocean: Music and Mayhem in 1960s Los Angeles could be that further reading. William McKeen's book covers the same period Selvin's does (though with fleeter feet through the 1950s run-up to the main story and a lot less focus on dopey Jan and Dean), but then he moves beyond the point L.A. really exploded. Selvin cuts his tale short just as The Byrds and Mamas and Papas were getting together. Key L.A. artists such as Buffalo Springfield and The Doors and Joni Mitchell, never get to jump in Selvin's sandbox. However, they're all on board for Everybody Had an Ocean, and instead of Jan and Dean, the far more artistically and commercially pivotal Beach Boys become the track on which the narrative rolls. Natch, that narrative rolls into some pretty dark places as Brian Wilson loses his grip on his group and brother Dennis runs into a certain charismatic psychopath with a grudge against producer Terry Melcher.

McKeen's writing also brims with humor, vulgarity, and the willingness to confront the artists' myriad flaws--all the things a rock writer should bring to the table. I wish he'd given more attention to at least two key L.A. artists: Love, who (with the exception of Brian Wilson, and arguably, The Byrds) made better records than any of McKeen's mostly white main cast of characters, and The Monkees, a massively popular, massively weird group that could not have sprouted anywhere but L.A. Oddly, Selvin's two pages on Mike, Micky, Davy, and Peter are riddled with errors (he states that it took The Monkees a couple of years to take control of their music when it was closer to six months, suggests non-instrumentalist Davy Jones had "musical chops" Micky Dolenz lacked, and repeats Mike Nesmith's line that The Monkees outsold The Beatles and Stones combined as if it was fact, though Nesmith later admitted he was bullshitting). So maybe it's for the best the author didn't devote more time to them. These mistakes also made me question some of the other factoids McKeen lays down, but there's still no question that Everybody Had an Ocean is a highly entertaining read. It's now being published in paperback for the first time.

Psychobabble’s Perfect Beach Boys Box Set Recipe!

The review of the new Beach Boys box set I posted last week led to some interesting comments. The consensus seems to be that while Made in California has a number of legit selling points, it’s not quite the perfect six discs of Beach Boys classics and rarities. This inspired me to compile my own sextet of sun, fun, and warped psychedelia.

I believe a perfect Beach Boys compilation is more necessary than, say, a Beatles or Who comp because those groups generally made albums that demand to be heard from beginning to end. The Beach Boys didn’t quite reach this place until 1965’s Today. Before then, they mostly made hit-and-miss albums like Shut Down Volume 2. While that particular album houses the absolute classics “Don’t Worry Baby,” “The Warmth of the Sun,” “Why Do Fools Fall in Love,” and “Fun, Fun, Fun,” the rest of it is pretty poor. Most of the other early discs generally have a higher ratio of good stuff than Shut Down Volume 2, but even the best of them (All Summer Long) has some junk (“Our Favorite Recording Sessions”) that disrupt the flow of classics.

Review: The Beach Boys’ 'Made in California' Box Set

A lot has happened since the 5-disc, career-spanning box set Good Vibrations: Thirty Years of The Beach Boys was released in 1993, and much of it was unthinkable at the time. Carl Wilson was diagnosed with cancer in 1997, and we lost him the following year. Brian Wilson worked past his aversion to touring and performing, and even more incredibly, gave us both a solo version and approved a Beach Boys box set of his unfinished masterpiece SMiLE. He has reunited with the often-feuding surviving members of his group for a fiftieth anniversary album and tour. This year marking the five-decade anniversary of The Beach Boys’ unchallenged dominance of pop music (at least in America where the British Invasion was still a year away), it’s a good time to update Good Vibrations, and Capitol/UMe has released a 6-disc set called Made in California that brings the story to the present.

20 Things You May Not Have Known About Brian Wilson

As the head Beach Boys turns 70 today, Psychobabble takes a look at twenty things you may not have known about brilliant Brian.

1. Murry Wilson instilled a fascination with the Old West in his oldest son, believing frontier tales would make Brian a rugged individualist… and possibly, a singing cowboy. Old West themes would later play a central role in SMiLE.

2. Brian has often blamed the deafness in his right ear on a punch he received from Murry as a toddler. His doctor, however, believed it to be nerve impairment, while his mother thought the deafness was either a congenital disorder or the result of a street fight with a fellow two-year old!

3. When he was a boy, Brian’s favorite ride at Disneyland was the Matterhorn Bobsleds rollercoaster.

4. Brian scored As and Bs in all of his twelfth-grade classes. Well, all but one. He received a C in piano and harmony. One of the reasons he got such a relatively poor grade in his area of expertise was the F he received for a sonata-writing assignment. Apparently, “Surfin’” is not a sonata.

5. Brian is renowned for his beautiful falsetto, but one man is not a big fan. The singer, himself, was always ambivalent, often embarrassed, about his high voice and confided to the women in his life that it was one his biggest “hang ups.” Although he has said he purposely wanted to "sing like a girl" on Pet Sounds, he apparently nixed "Let Him Run Wild" from the Good Vibrations: 30 Years of The Beach Boys box set because he hated his sublime performance, feeling he sounded "like a little girl... a sick chick." Al Jardine later theorized that Brian purposely ravaged his voice with cigarettes and drugs to get a rougher, more “manly” voice, like his brother Dennis.