The Beach Boys: Alone Together Now

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Crowley makes a case not only for Carl’s guitar innovations but also for Murry’s much maligned musical talent. The father didn’t have the son’s genius, but he was a songwriter who got cuts. Murry’s “Two-Step, Side-Step” was performed by Lawrence Welk on national TV and recorded by Rockabilly Hall of Famer Bonnie Lou. Murry’s “Tabarin” was recorded by the Red Callender Orchestra and by the doo-wop group, the Hollywood Four Flames, featuring Bobby Day. Murry proved to his son that a nobody from a lower-middle-class suburb like Hawthorne could get his foot in the door of the music biz.

There’s a touching scene in the new documentary DVD, The Beach Boys/Pet Sounds, where today’s Brian sits at a piano and demonstrates how his dad taught him to play boogie-woogie rhythms in his left hand. Then he plays and sings Murry’s song, “His Darling And Me,” remarking how beautiful it is and emphasizing that his dad wrote that. None of this erases the reality that Murry was a needlessly harsh disciplinarian, who reacted with juvenile jealousy when his sons outgrew him musically, but the other side of the story deepens the picture and explains why Brian co-wrote a song (the delightful “Breakaway”) with his dad after angrily firing him a few years earlier.

“People probably don’t imagine the Wilsons crammed into a tiny two-bedroom house in a poor neighborhood,” David Marks told Crowley. Marks lived across the street, was Carl’s best friend and served as a Beach Boy for a while. “There was one bunk bed and one cot in the bedroom, and … they didn’t really have any material possessions to speak of, other than the instruments in the music room. All the stuff you hear about Murry being a prick? For me, it was an average, normal household. My dad was a prick too, and all the dads in the neighborhood were pricks. The school of parenting for that generation [was] it was OK to smack your kid.”

Like comic-book heroes, every rock and roll band has an origin story, and James B. Murphy tells such a tale in his book, Becoming The Beach Boys: 1961-1963. The prose is workmanlike, but the research is astonishing. Murphy provides far more detail about those three years than has ever been available before; everything from Murry’s songwriting career to his sons’ school years to the teenagers’ first recording sessions is covered in exhaustive detail. This is not the place to begin your investigation of the Beach Boys, but it’s the place every fanatic will end up.

The book inspired the similarly titled two-CD set Becoming The Beach Boys, which collects nearly every take recorded by the Beach Boys before they signed with Capitol Records, just eight months after the their first stabs at “Surfin’” in September, 1961. No casual fan will want to hear nine similar takes of that song nor the eight takes of an early trifle called “Barbie.” But the hard-core Beach Boys fan (this writer pleads guilty) will, and Murphy’s liner notes supply the context.

What comes through in all these books is the truth that Brian didn’t do it all alone. He possessed a rare talent and would have made fascinating music in any event, but that music may not have reached a broad audience without Love’s stage charisma and R&B vocals, Carl’s Chuck Berry guitar licks and gorgeous tenor, Dennis’ surfing and hot-rodding experience, Al’s Kingston Trio folk harmonies, the Wrecking Crew’s virtuoso contributions and Murry’s example and early push. On his own, Brian might have created the equivalent of the Manhattan Transfer singing the Bill Evan Songbook; with his collaborators, he rivaled the Beatles.

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