In this audio clip compiled from our 2022 Beach Boys Book Club episode, with our leading contributor, Gary Wells, we focus on Timothy White’s wide-ranging 1994 biography, The Nearest Faraway Place: Brian Wilson, The Beach Boys and the Southern California Experience. Gary explains what sets this apart as more than just a rock and roll bio, we discuss Timothy White’s assessment of family patriarch Murry Wilson, and how, in the early 1960s, emerging artists in Southern California transformed the corporatised music scene.
For more background on this episode, visit the dedicated page at our podcast website. You can also listen on Soundcloud, YouTube Podcasts and the major podcasting platforms.
In the original 62 minute episode, we expand a little on Timothy White’s distinguished career as a music writer and industry advocate (he sadly passed away in 2002, aged just 50), and provide some additional context from other sources on the Wilson family dynamic, on both a personal and business level. We also go on to discuss Mike Love’s autobiography co-written by James S Hirsch, Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy, and take some additional context from I am Brian Wilson, by Brian himself and Ben Greenman, both from 2016. We also try to get to grips with why Mike can be such a polarising figure within the fan universe and beyond.
Thanks to Beyond Visible Films on YouTube – a clip from the 1976 television special The Beach Boys: It’s OK, AKA The Beach Boys: Good Vibrations Tour, written, produced and directed by Saturday Night Live stalwarts Lorne Michaels, Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, and Gary Weis.
As we learn from a range of credible sources including his own sons, Murry Wilson’s behaviour is, at times, inexcusable, but we're cautioned not to to see him purely as a one-dimensional villain, as Gary points out during the clip.
At the end of I’m Bugged at My Old Man, Dennis Wilson says this;
"...So the three of us would be in the backseat singing away, and actually that's the birth of the three brothers singing together, it really is, and there are moments when we'd be singing harmony together, that my father would just fall down crying, with joy..."
DEC4 Podcast (Clip): Gary Wells on Beach Boys Biographer Timothy White - Murry Wilson and the 'Legacy of Pain'