In this 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.

On our webpage with the original, full 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.

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Suggested Additional Reading and Media

In Gary’s own detailed review of Nearest Faraway Place, he discusses the ambitious scope of Timothy White’s work, which was a hallmark of his writing more generally, as set out in his obituary in The Guardian;

“…White loved history. In his music biographies, the subject did not appear until at least a quarter of the way into the tale. Long Ago And Far Away: James Taylor, His Life And Music (2001) opens in 1622 with the story of Taylor’s Scottish ancestor Hercules Tailyeour, a shipbuilder from Montrose…”

The San Francisco Chronicle described Timothy White’s biography of Bob Marley as ‘Probably the finest biography ever written about a popular musician’, while Playboy called it ‘As close as rock journalism comes to transcendent literature’.

The official Macmillan Publishing site says;

“…One of the most prominent music journalists of the twentieth century, Timothy White wrote extensively on Marley, reggae, and Caribbean music and culture for Rolling Stone, The New York Times, and other leading publications. His close contact with Marley and his family and inner circle of friends led to White being granted access to private papers, photographs, and memorabilia…”

So it’s not at all surprising that Timothy White was able to write about the Beach Boys from an insider’s perspective, yet The Nearest Faraway Place reaches out well beyond the band to cover a much broader social history of Southern California and historic migration from the Midwest, of which the Wilson family was a part.

Gary points out that Nearest Faraway Place charts ‘An American experience seen through the lens of the Wilson family and the Beach Boys band’, and notes that the bibliography is, tellingly, 15 pages long;

“…The books deal with topics that range from citrus fruit, aeronautical history, Fender guitars, surfing, architecture, beach party movies, democracy in America, automobiles, the Barbie doll, railway history, plants native to California, car clubs, Kansas history, west coast jazz, California orange box labels, photography, Disney, Goodyear and LSD…”

One of the key points we focus on in this clip is what Timothy White identified as the ‘legacy of pain’ perpetuated by the Wilson male family line, and how this ultimately manifested in Murry Wilson and his behaviour towards his own family.

In his review, Gary writes;

“…The author uses the grandparents of the Wilson boys – Buddy, Edith and their children – as examples of pioneer-types moving across country to a land of opportunity. Significantly for those who know something of the Wilson family story, Buddy is painted as extremely remote and as having no “genuine intimacy with another human being”. Buddy and Edith’s children, then, White relates, are doomed to inherit this “legacy of pain”. It is reported that Buddy savagely beat his kids and therefore the die is cast for his son, Murry Wilson. Murry is described as the family’s “desperate hope” as he is not only industrious but creative. He meets and marries Audree Korthof and they have three children who will be the instruments of Murry’s ambition; they are his “captive resource”…”

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.

We learn from a range of credible sources, including his own sons, that Murry Wilson’s behaviour was, 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…”

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Further Related Content

Gary Wells’ own website features related articles on Jan and Dean, Ricky Nelson and a collection on The Beach Boys.

During our clip, Gary briefly mentions The Beach Boys: An American Band. This is a 1985 documentary film written and directed by Malcolm Leo

Another clip from the original, full length episode features Gary’s recollections of meeting the Beach Boys backstage in the early 1990s, and Gary’s appearance on the Donna Loren podcast.

Special thanks to Gary Wells, Steve Collins for technical support, and Gainesville for our theme music.

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