TO think it all started with rheumatism. California in the 1920s was an under populated, dreary place until the state's PR people got their hands on some medical statistics about dry air and absence of winters that, when publicised, were enough to attract tribes of rheumatically inclined folk to the Golden state.
The others who bounded on to the long distance Greyhound buses had more prosaic interests at heart: sun, sand, sea and surf. Either way, California was one of the first places to recognise the existence of the teenager and all the reckless, disjointed culture that stems from that unsettled time.
Timothy White's social history of the state employs the area's most popular music group, The Beach Boys, as a conduit for his tales of a hyper accelerated youth culture. Most cogently, he mixes the socio political movements of the times - McCarthyism, the Black Power movement, feminism - with the lower intensity, parochial concerns of how hula hoops, skateboards, Sandra Dee and LSD affected the culture. All of this is played out over an impossibly beautiful soundtrack: the heavenly harmonies of the Beach Boys.
It is perhaps taking a degree of literary licence to place the Beach Boys at the epicentre of Californian culture. Fortunately, though, the parallels between the band's fortunes and the state that spawned them are sufficiently linear to warrant such a weaving of fortune. The popular myth of The Beach Boys is that they were "fun in the sun popsters who surfed their way to the top of the charts unencumbered by any of the drug added angst that characterised their contemporaries. The reality is they were a hunch of dysfunctional junkies. Thankfully, White doesn't over extrapolate from band to state and any analogies are left to be the reader to draw.
The Beach Boys became the most effective propagators of California's sunshine fantasy and it is a tribute to the author's intelligence that he manages to distinguish clearly between the fact that, while the group extolled the American dream, they never quite embodied it. Focusing mainly on the group's chief songwriter, the enigmatic genius, Brian Wilson, White traces how Wilson was routinely physically - and psychologically abused by his father. Deaf in one ear and prone to panic attacks, Wilson was so much of a psychic wreck by the time The Beach Boys became famous that he was unable to tour with them - his place being taken by a series of stand ins, one being Glen Campbell.
Because The Beach Boys were made up of three brothers (Brian, Carl and Denis Wilson) a cousin (Mike Love) and a neighbour (Al Jardine), the sins of the father were visited on the majority of the group, with the result that they remained in a state of perpetual fear, particularly as their father (a failed musician) was prone to fits of jealous anger.
Tensions were further heightened by Brian Wilson's neurotic levels of competitiveness. As wonderful and as popular as The Beach Boys' music was, Wilson always felt they had never surpassed the work of Phil Spector, or, for that matter, The Byrds and The Beatles.
Providing necessary relief from the claustrophobic confines of this troubled family affair, White continues to deftly drop in appropriate extracts from the unfolding social history. Up through the Sixties, he explains, the Vietnam war and the Watts race riots were shaping the decade's thoughts and beliefs and, displaying his populist leanings, he also treats of the advent of Star Trek and freeze dried coffee.
The final few chapters, when we see the band degenerate into tired, overweight has beens, flirting with mystic religions and talking in psychobabble, may not totally reflect the fortunes of their native state - but give it time. {CORRECTION} 96031100015
