Another nugget from Ken Barnes’ The Beach Boys: A Biography in Words and Pictures:

“Finally, then, Pet Sounds appeared, complete with a piquant cover shot of the boys feeding goats at the Children’s Zoo in Balboa Park, San Diego (just before one or more of the boys began to torment the animals and the group was banned from the premises).”

One thing we can appreciate about USA Today is its music editor, Ken Barnes. The man’s a veteran, and he’s one of those rare breeds of entertainment journalists who can play that familiar role of the garrulous, opinionated remote-twiddler but also double up as a trustworthy and informed industry analyst. Barnes knows a thing or two about music biz nuts and bolts – not only did he work the record reviewing trenches in Rolling Stone and similar mags throughout the seventies, but he served a good chunk of time as editor for industry trade publication Radio and Records before settling in at USA Today in the late nineties. So the American Idol blog he currently maintains over there with such devotion, folks, is probably the single most worthwhile coverage of the show you’ll likely find anywhere. And the craziest thing about it is that he really does seem to be enjoying himself.

Which leads us to his The Beach Boys: A Biography in Words and Pictures (1976), which pre-dates David Leaf’s The Beach Boys and the California Myth by a couple of years and stands as perhaps the first serious – but never at the expense of fun – overview in book form of the Beach Boys’ music. It’s certainly got the aura of a quickie assignment. It was one in a series of six artist bios published by Sire-Chappell, none of them over sixty pages, and each of them jam-packed with photos and typos alike. But you never get a single hint from Barnes that he’s going through the motions, because he’s not. All too aware that recent magazine articles by Tom Nolan (Rolling Stone) and Nick Kent (NME) make any attempts at biographical revelations momentarily pointless (he even refers readers to these articles on the copyright page), he attends to the Beach Boys story using the classic, most basic rock-crit method: the record player. Approaching his subject the way a five-year old approaches monkey bars – rung by rung and with a focus on fun – Barnes evaluates the group’s entire catalog song by song, and even if the book’s format limitations don’t allow him to do much more than thoughtful drive-bys, it’s the very attempt at completeness and the always-engaging writing that makes this curio worth sniffing out. Barnes’ musical worldview, for that matter, in which reverent treatments of the Mystics, Tommy Facenda’s “High School USA,” and the “dense, dreamy mix” of Pet Sounds all share neighboring mountain peaks, is one we might all consider subscribing to.

(Barnes’ frustrations with portions of the BB’s 1971-73 period make for some funny moments. My favorite paragraph: “Sadly, the chief unifying factor [of the Surf’s Up LP] was a pervasive lyrical banality, exemplified by Al and Mike’s opening track, “Don’t Go Near the Water.” Here the boys jumped on the trendy ecological bandwagon (no doubt with complete sincerity, etc. etc.), suggesting we all help the water out of a tight spot (‘toothpaste and soap will make our oceans a bubble bath/So let’s avoid an ecological aftermath,’ lines worthy of an Eric Burdon) and proving that writing [sic] on top of the waves was a much sounder idea than examining their constituent elements.”)

David Leaf, now a successful TV writer, producer, and film director, is the senior caretaker of the Beach Boy narrative, and his The Beach Boys and the California Myth (1978) was the first substantial book about the group. It’s well worth digging up (a must if you’re a Brian Wilson cultist) but you might have to get it from your library since it’s never in print and goes for spirit-crushing prices on eBay. Or look in used bookstores for the potentially less expensive second edition (and, to date, latest), which came out in 1985 and is jam packed with essential “codettas” by the author. Simply called The Beach Boys (pictured above), you might mistake it for a coffee table fluff job, with its 80’s flamingo dust sleeve and thin, longish size, but don’t be tricked. Grab it if you see it (I found mine that way for $9.98, but that was around ten years ago).

Leaf admits to having found the inspiration to tackle his subject after reading Tom Nolan and David Felton’s seminal two-part 1971 article on the Beach Boys in Rolling Stone. By the mid-seventies, Leaf had packed his bags and moved from the East coast to the West and lost himself in his passion – the music of Brian Wilson – and churned out one of the finest bits of “advocacy journalism” (Leaf himself refers to it as this) one is likely to read in the discombobulated realm of pop music literature. “This book is written for one man, Brian Wilson,” Leaf writes in his intro, and so unwavering is he in spelling out the painful details of what he considers to be “ultimately a tragic story,” that anyone who reads his book from cover to cover will realize that he ought to have just called it “Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys Myth.”

Indeed, the overarching theme here is that Wilson’s loyalty to his family and the Beach Boys franchise – both of whom clearly feared any deviation from the successful hitmaking formula Wilson had mastered from ’61 to ’66 as a dangerous financial risk – was killing him artistically. There lay the blame for the collapse of Smile and God knows what else Wilson may have had brewing. Leaf never loses sight of just how insurmountable this great obstacle in Brian’s artistic life seemed, but he also never refrains from making clear his view that “an artist must put aside obligations to family and friends; he must put his art and himself first.” (Even Eugene Landy, the now discredited therapist, is treated with suspicion by a tuned-in Leaf circa ’85 for offering Wilson precious little in the way of artistic freedom.) This angle of Leaf’s, in fact – of the artist/idealist manacled to family expectations and commerce – is certainly as quintessentially American and epic (and at least twice as tragic) as the “California myth” we’re all too familiar with.

There are three other glorious aspects worth mentioning about the ’85 edition of this book: 1) We get to read about the after effects of its publication, most notably the fact that it earned Leaf Wilson’s trust to the extent that he was admitted into the master’s inner sanctum and that it provoked the apparently ever-smoldering anger of the misnamed dullard we know as Mike Love; 2) we are assured that Leaf is such a true believer in Brian Wilson’s musical gifts that he was able to write, even in the retrospectively cloudy days of “Getcha Back,” that “I’m part of a small cult that has complete faith that the creative resurrection of Brian is imminent”; and 3) we are now able to read it with the glad knowledge that Leaf, who believed then that “a collection of [Smile‘s] still-unreleased fragments pieced together with the music that has come out would make for an unparalleled collection of pop music experimentation,” has not only seen its improbable release, but he also ended up making the documentary.

Ever since its publication in 1986 (regrettably reprinted in 1995), Steven Gaines’ “true story” has been the standard, most abundantly available version of the Beach Boys’ history, which is unfortunate for at least four reasons:

1 – The book has done more than a little to surgically attach the freak show features one now tends to associate with the Beach Boys. The tabloid approach makes for some fast and furious page-turning, but you never ever get the impression that Gaines’ motivations go beyond that. In the book’s intro, Gaines talks about first being transfixed by Brian Wilson’s eyes, “those cold, blue eyes” which eventually turned his alleged “fascination” with the Beach Boys into a “passion.” When all’s said and done, we learn that those happen to be the eyes of a “schizophrenic” invalid who is now safe in the hands of Dr. Eugene Landy, who declares himself “practically a member of the band” on the last page. (If you’re not familiar with Landy, he’s the Svengali doctor who misdiagnosed Wilson, it turned out, abused him emotionally, and lost his license in the early ’90s over his unorthodox practices.)

2 – The book’s mistitled. Gaines’ decision to handle his subject from a sensationalistic point of view makes little room for any discernible heroes other than, perhaps, Landy. And while Wilson’s mother Audree and his first wife Marilyn are treated sympathetically, they are done so as pitiable victims.

3 – Gaines can’t write about the Beach Boys’ music. I say “can’t” instead of “is unwilling” because he actually makes occasional, tossed off, critical attempts but stumbles badly when he does. Here’s Gaines’ complete analysis of the group’s cult favorite, Friends: “a boring, emotionless LP.” Here he is on The Beach Boys Love You: “The best promotional campaign in the world couldn’t have helped [it].” But those are acquired-taste cult albums, you say? Here’s Gaines on “Surfin’ “: “The song was no knockout…nasal, whining, and childlike”; and here’s the most irksome – his take on one of the group’s uncontested core albums, The Beach Boys Today: “The album was not one of Brian’s best works, consisting mostly of a melange of uninspired car tunes.” I’m not even sure what album he’s really talking about here, and if he’s just gotten his records mixed up, I can’t figure out which one he might have really meant.

4 – And this leads to the book’s biggest problem, which is that Gaines evidently despises the Beach Boys’ music enough to disregard it as a significant part of the story. And I’d say that if having a tin ear when endeavoring to write about a cultural phenomenon that happens to be of a primarily musical nature is perhaps forgivable, the consistent failure to acknowledge that phenomenon for what it essentially is is much less so.

Just finished this and, as a Brian Wilson cultist, I’m ready to rank it among the best books so far about him or the Beach Boys for at least four reasons:

1) It’s got a happy ending. Carlin hammers home the recurring theme that every stage of Wilson’s life is affected by a dynamic creative/business collaborator for better or (often) worse, then he leaves us with the clear impression that Wilson circa ’06 is in the hands of folks (wife Melinda being at the forefront) who equate his personal creative vision and personal happiness with financial success. And it’s about time, we sigh.

2) It frames the Beach Boys saga, with all of its familiar, sordid aspects, in the context of Wilson’s creative frustration. Carlin emphasizes that the perceived rejection of Wilson’s Smile material by the rest of the group, and eventually by radio and the buying public, played a major role in his late-sixties collapse. This wasn’t the only factor, of course, but it was a huge one, and Carlin doesn’t let us forget it.

3) It plays down the “heroes and villains” model so much Beach Boys writing drifts toward (and I’m not necessarily thinking Steven Gaines’ Heroes and Villains here, in which everyone’s a villain). The Brian vs. Mike concept, for example, is one that Brian fans eat for breakfast, and although Carlin is obviously on the Brian team (is anyone on the Mike team, come to think of it?), he goes out of his way to give us as sympathetic an image of Mike that a book aimed squarely at Brian fans could possibly give.

4) Carlin speaks the language of the true Brian Wilson faithful. This is perfectly OK because this ilk deserves a book that puts the music front and center, and while Carlin can and does talk about the music on its own merits with a critical eye, it’s shaded with the Church of Brian doctrine that while translations of the Truth may go awry (productions, arrangements, lyricists), Brian’s essential musical vision is 100% pure and reliable. Thus, The Beach Boys Love You is rightfully heralded, song-by-song, as a “darkly lovely” masterwork, Friends as “transcendentalist” (Carlin’s audience will know that he’s not just talking about nature and Thoreau here), and the unlikely 2004 miracle of Smile as a catalyst for redemption. You can’t believe everything you read, but because this is what most of us want to believe anyway, it sure feels nice.

A fun flip-through despite memories of the sixth grade coat room, where forgotten lunchboxes with tuna sandwiches were frequently allowed to work their magic.

Welcome to the Boneyard, friends, where all manner of subjects – mostly arts/leisure/media – get dug up and pawed at randomly and attempts might even be made to “unite the joints,” so to speak. Here’s a small image of our mascot, Timothy Spall, who plays Mr. Venus in the BBC’s 1998 production of Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. Mr. Venus is what Dickens calls a “preserver of [dead] animals” and an “articulator” of skeletons. He continues on about the character like this: “The face looking up is a sallow face with weak eyes, surmounted by a tangle of reddish-dusty hair. The owner of the face has no cravat on, and has opened his tumbled shirt-collar to work with more ease.” Venus is a bitter sad-sack, and he spends most of the story involved in a conspiracy against our heroes, the Boffins. But he changes his ways in the end.