Bad vibrations

I must own 40 books about the Beatles, 30 about Bob Dylan, and maybe 20 more about Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys. Then there are the CDs and DVDs by these artists overflowing my meager New York City shelf space, not to mention the back issues of Mojo and Uncut piled up beside my bed.

Don't laugh. If you're not like me, you may well know someone who is. Clearly, as the enabling flow of product attests, I am not alone in these passions. But, even following the boom in Brian Wilson ruminations that accompanied the release two years ago of his finally finished Smile album (for more than three decades it had been rock's great lost masterpiece), I wasn't all that enticed by the prospect of reading Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall and Redemption of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson by Peter Ames Carlin, a former writer for People magazine.

If myths are tales we tell over and over to help make sense of the world or pluck some resonant chord in our psyches, then the life stories of the great 1960s pop stars – not just Lennon and McCartney, Dylan and Wilson, but also Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Marvin Gaye, even Bobby Darin – are some of our era's most potent secular myths, only a notch below Kennedy legends.

Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys' producer and leading songwriter, took a hard and long tumble after abandoning Smile, the album he had begun working on in the summer of 1966 as a follow-up to the group's melancholy masterpiece, Pet Sounds. As the sessions wore on into 1967, the record, intended as a kind of album-length suite, or, in Wilson's famous description, "a teenage symphony to God", began generating impossible-to-justify buzz. Wilson, his head cluttered by drugs and blossoming mental illness, began to lose his way in the maze of his own ambition. At the same time, he was trying to fend off his angry band mates – among them his two brothers, Carl and Dennis, and his cousin Mike Love – who saw Smile as too sharp a detour from the surf and hot-rod songs that had made them rich. And so, with perfection still over the horizon, Wilson abandoned Smile, in the process becoming a shattered man who would spend the next 20-odd years in a wilderness of insanity and self-indulgence before righting himself and eventually reclaiming his visionary mantle with the triumphant version of Smile he finished with a new band in 2004.

But is there really anything "new", as they say, to say about Wilson and the Beach Boys? Not really, at least on the evidence here – don't go looking for revisionist theories about Al Jardine being the group's real genius – though Carlin seems to have spoken to everyone close to Wilson who's still alive, and some who aren't. He has also dug up some illuminating new documents and recordings, transcripts of family squabbles, druggy parties and such, that flesh out the story more fully than earlier tellings did. And I've never seen a diagnosis of Wilson quite as precise as the one Carlin offers: "mildly manic-depressive with a schizo-affective disorder".

As his subtitle suggests, the author is enamored of the Wilson myth – it's a selling point, after all, and it's not without truth – but Carlin is too scrupulous to ignore more nuanced shadings and contradictions; his Wilson is both a victim and a passive-aggressive manipulator, a man who, at times, willfully squandered his talent. Carlin tells his story well and sensitively, and only rarely lapses into glib rock critic-ese. The pacing of his narrative, however, is sometimes perverse. The Beach Boys' signing of their first contract with Capitol and the scoring of their first national chart successes zip by in two pages, while whole chapters are devoted to the recording of the group's crummy middle and late-1970s albums and its endless touring as an increasingly cranky oldies act. Fans of entropy will find much to delight them.

One more caveat: like many people who write about rock, Carlin tries to justify his subject by dragging in grad-school-worthy names for extra credit. Thoreau, Twain, Melville and Steinbeck all make appearances in these pages, despite never having gotten bugged driving up and down the same old strip or spilling Coke all over your blouse. Still, while this might not be the best possible book about Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys, for now it's the best one down here where mortals tread.

BRUCE HANDY

© 2006 The New York Times