Bad Vibrations Book Reveals The Gritty Details Of The Lives Of The Beach Boys

“The Nearest Faraway Place: Brian Wilson, The Beach Boys, And The Southern California Experience” By Timothy White (Holt, 416 pages, $25)

Three decades after the Beach Boys surfed to stardom with songs of fun in the California sun, surely only the most oblivious fan has failed to notice that the band’s buoyantly upbeat musical image is seriously at odds with the dark undertow of reality.

In recent years, several books and countless newspaper and magazine articles have chronicled the dysfunctional dynamics in dismal detail: Brian Wilson’s mental breakdowns and apparent dependence on a Svengali-like therapist; internecine squabbling; childhood abuse at the hands of despotic dad Murry Wilson; drug and alcohol problems; paternity suits and far more than the standard number of divorces.

Author Timothy White’s “The Nearest Faraway Place” - the title comes from an instrumental track on the group’s “20/20” album - doesn’t skip the messy details. Written with the cooperation of Brian Wilson and based on interviews with Beach Boys and others, the book chronicles the band’s ups and downs from the 1960s through 1994.

By now, of course, the band’s history is well-tilled turf. But longtime music journalist White has added an engrossing new social dimension to the saga by setting the Beach Boys’ story against the backdrop of the Southern California culture that spawned and shaped their sound. On a more personal level, this is also the story of a troubled family whose problems stretched back across several generations - and persisted despite Edith and Buddy Wilson’s migration from their native Kansas to the sunny “Promised Land” of California in the early 1920s.

Edith and Buddy - Beach Boys Brian, Carl and Dennis Wilson’s paternal grandparents - eventually settled in Pasadena and raised eight children, including Murry, born in 1917. Described as a rootless, difficult man who had problems with intimacy, Buddy routinely drank to excess and abused his children physically and verbally.

As is often the case, the abused son turned into an abusive father. Brian Wilson, writes White, believes that the near-total deafness he suffers in his right ear could have been caused by Murry slapping him on the side of the head shortly before his third birthday. Murry, who had lost an eye in an assembly line accident, also frequently terrified Brian by removing his glass eyeball and forcing the sobbing boy to look into his mangled eye socket.

But Murry (who died in 1973) also could be generous, especially when it came to indulging his sons’ musical interests. The Wilson brothers took music lessons, bought records and enjoyed singalongs with their parents and more upscale relatives, the Loves.

Eventually, the Wilson brothers would join forces with cousin Mike Love and pal Al Jardine in a pop group known first as the Pendletones and briefly as the Surfers before being dubbed the Beach Boys by a record distributor; their first record, “Surfin’,” was released in 1961.

Musical mastermind and principal songwriter Brian had never set foot on a surfboard; he was scared of the ocean. It was Dennis who embraced the Southern California surf culture and filled Brian in on the latest surfing lingo. (Dennis Wilson drowned in 1983 while diving off a boat slip.)

Brian also had little firsthand knowledge of drag racing, the other Southern California cultural force that fueled many of the Beach Boys’ early hits. Nevertheless, the songs he wrote or co-authored about hot rods put the group on the pop charts repeatedly through the mid-1960s.

By 1966, his mind addled by LSD, Brian had retreated to the piano in his Beverly Hills living room, which he had filled with eight truckloads of sand. He stayed there, more or less, for the next decade. Meanwhile, with Carl at the helm and Bruce Johnson replacing Brian on the road, the band played on, reprising their hits for new generations. They continue to do so.

Brian re-emerged in the late 1980s, releasing a solo album that met with enthusiastic reviews but relatively modest commercial success.

A follow-up release done in collaboration with controversial clinical psychologist Eugene Landy (whose license to practice was revoked in 1989) was rejected by Wilson’s record label.

Landy also participated in Brian’s 1991 autobiography, “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” a memoir that did little to foster family harmony and prompted lawsuits by Mike Love and Carl Wilson and his mother, Audree Wilson. The Love lawsuit, charging defamation of character, was settled last year with a payment to Love. Following the settlement, Love issued a press release quoting Brian as having stated in sworn depositions that portions of the book were “absolutely fiction” and “all garbage.” Kind of makes you wonder if Brian told author White the truth this time around.

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