It’s a distortion that has seen some of the group’s best work obscured, and iconic albums like Pet Sounds elevated to a level that beggars belief. This careful manipulation of the facts enabled Wilson’s stature to grow, and his work within the Beach Boys to attain mythic status, while the so-called post-Wilson years were for many years viewed as almost worthless, and commercially dire. It cast Wilson as a missing-in-action legend, a drug casualty whose greatest work had been resisted by both the record company and uncomprehending idiots from within the band itself.
The legend of Wilson as pop’s eccentric genius grew legs in the mid-70s. While the Beatles laid the foundations for the British progressive rock phenomenon on post-tour albums like Rubber Soul and Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band, the Beach Boys were forging an equally studio-bound sound that – while hugely indebted to various strands of the so-called Great American Songbook and inspired by Phil Spector’s “wall of sound”– presented a new, skewed version of American pop music. In fact, there’s a case to be made for the Beach Boys having created art pop. On the other hand, they were capable of realising a unique take on art pop (“In My Room”, “God Only Knows” etc) that was, and still is, simply unassailable. They looked like squares and they never had the hip cachet of the band they considered their real competition, the Beatles.
They were all family, managed by their tyrannical dad Murry, apart from Mike Love, Brian’s close boyhood friend and cousin. In the left corner, the drug-fucked genius, the Bach of modern pop: BRIAN WILSON! In the right corner, the craven villain that everyone loves to hate, the man who stole the Beach Boys: Brian’s cousin, MIKE LOVE!įirst, let’s hear it for the Beach Boys. Were they the first proper boy band? When they first broke big, they were all teens, and Brian Wilson’s brother Carl (the one with the really great voice) was a mere 15 years old. Gary Steel surveys two new biographies by two old foes from the Beach Boys – Brian Wilson (genius) and Mike Love (asshole), and finds the asshole’s book is better.
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