The Beach Boys are one of rock's most storied groups, and perhaps the most paradoxical. When they raced to the top of the charts in the early '60s, the Beach Boys embodied the dream of Southern California's breezy surfing subculture, yet only one member surfed. They represented a Disney ideal of good clean fun, and fell in with Charles Manson. They were the family that sang together, but unlike the von Trapps, succumbed to addiction and madness. Brian Wilson, the group's genius, was institutionalized, in therapy and—even in the early years—often MIA. His drug-troubled brother Dennis was eventually barred from the group and homeless at the time of his death by drowning—a painful irony, given that he was the one Beach Boy who surfed.
Jon Stebbins marshals the band's troubled history for inspection in The Beach Boys FAQ: All That's Left to Know About America's Band (Backbeat Books). While it could have been better organized—the blurby roster of the act's numerous part-timers, guest stars and sidemen should have been relegated to an appendix instead of occupying Chapter 2, once the narrative gets under way, the story gathers interest. While obviously a fan, Stebbins is honest enough to acknowledge the group's role in the “surfsploitation assembly line.” It was the instrumental groups, led by Dick Dale, who really rode the wave. But even in their sophomoric early years, the Beach Boys had something going for them—the marvelous interplay of their voices, a talent hey learned by rehearsing over and over with recordings by vocal groups such as the Hi-Los and the Four Freshmen.
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Even before their hugely influential 1966 album Pet Sounds, Brian Wilson's creative ambition was pointing the group toward greater complexity. Inspired by the Beatles, the Beach Boys would influence the Beatles in turn. The sophisticated flow of Pet Sounds would become a model for Sgt. Pepper, and some of FAQ's most interesting writing occurs in the chapter on the making of that album.
While the record label drones complained that Pet Sounds was too out there, despite decent sale and four Top-40 singles, “the album was frantically embraced” in the UK, where it reached number two on the charts. “It could be the most intimate grand production ever, the saddest hopeful sentiment of all time, the most comforting confession of loss,” Stebbins writes, beautifully. And in its wake came the decline. Wilson intended Smile as his follow-up; instead, it became “the greatest rock album that never was,” initiating “the substance-addled train wreck that Brian Wilson became.” The compulsive traits Brian already displayed as a teenager led to his “savant-like ability to build fantastic rainbows of sound” but also to his psychological unraveling.
Much of what happened in the aftermath is sad to contemplate. The Beach Boys remained a cash cow, albeit a sickly one, and the endless summer of their golden days became the endless touring of their declining years. As Stebbins puts it: “balding old men in Hawaiian shirts with pony tails was a painful thing to process” and “had a radioactive-like effect on the group's legacy.” The author devotes an entire chapter to “What Went Wrong?”
