Judging the thickness of this book (over 400 pages) versus the time span covered (2 years) gives you an idea of the level of detail gone into. That’s a little more than half a page a day. I can’t imagine trying to write an interesting half page about the last week of my own life. For the academic or the die-hard fan a book like this is a fantastic thing: an almost excruciatingly detailed coverage of your subject of interest. For the casual reader or fan, it may be a bit much at times, but that’s okay. It doesn’t have to be read cover to cover, and there is enough interesting material here to make it well worth perusing. ( )

If ever you want to learn everything you possibly can about the Beach Boys then this is the book to read. This book is filled with so much information and wonderful pictures. It's something I can read over and over without getting bored and always learning new things. ( )

I received this book from the Early Reviewers program and it was a bit intimidating. I learned a lot about the Beach Boys and the formation of the group. I also learned a lot about the advent of Rock and Roll and a lot about the recording business in the early Sixties.
Mr. Murphy seems to know a lot and have an extensive collection of Beach Boys memorabilia many of which are photographed in the book.
This book is almost too much information, it kind of bogs down with details and is a little confusing with all the different recordings and versions of the same songs. It got to be hard to follow in places and seemed repetitive in others.
I would recommend it for the die-hard fan or a historian looking for information, but for the casual fan it is a bit too much. Although it did make me want to go back and listen to music that I hadn't listened to since I was a teen myself. ( )

This is a wonderful tome for the dyed-in-the-Pendleton-wool Beach Boys fan. James B. Murphy combined his love for the Boys with true scholarship in documenting every twist and turn of the first two years of the group's formation. That the book weighs in at 422 pages of meticulously footnoted text shows the detail the author has adopted. Personal histories of not just group members but their parents and associates are here. Every personal appearance, studio recording, contract and record is precisely described using a vast array of sources. Collectors will appreciate the descriptions of label variations and memorabilia associated with the group.

Becoming the Beach Boys doesn't read like a novel, and it isn't supposed to. Recounting events fifty years in the past, there are often alternative reminiscences from the participants, sometimes self-serving, sometimes simply forgetfulness. Murphy did a good job of using quotes from the participants to state their case, steering away from taking sides.

This is as good an example as I have seen of applying scholarship to a modern musical group, without having biases show and without gushing. ( )

This is an exhaustive--and sometimes exhausting--account of the Beach Boys from their origins as the three Wilson brothers and their cousin Mike Love harmonized at family gatherings, through their first recordings, and to their chart-topping successes of 1963. Well-written by a Maryland veterinarian, this is a labor of love that diehard Beach Boys fans or those interested in the music industry of the early 1960s will appreciate. Others will probably give up long before the end, since the level of detail can be mind-numbingly trivial, accounting for just about every personal appearance during that period, and even what the boys wore. The book gives a good picture of the Wilsons' father, Murry, a mediocre songwriter who used his connections to arrange the group's first recordings, which later become the subject of a series of lawsuits chronicled in an appendix. Of the group itself, the main focus is on Brian, the creative force behind almost everything they did. While his genius is undeniable, the author does tend to overrate his work with other groups, including the Honeys, a female group Brian put together that included his future wife. (He was engaged to someone else at the time.) The brief career of David Marks also gets a lot of coverage, perhaps due to Marks' later book and his willingness to talk. Carl Wilson is basically presented as a fanatic guitar player, and the rest of his personality doesn't really emerge. Dennis comes across, unsurprisingly, as a free spirit, who seems to get along best with Love, despite their age difference, as they engage in friendly races between Dennis's Corvette and Love's Jaguar. We also learn a lot about Al Jardine, who left the group to study dentistry (thinking they wouldn't make it big), and later started filling in for Brian on tour, before joining full-time again when Marks left.

Still, this is more a story of the music than the personalities. The author has done an enormous amount of research, and none of it seems to be unused. After more than 50 years, it is hard to sift through the varying accounts participants have given over the years, but this book does about as good a job of sorting it all out as could be done. As I said, it is a labor of love, and I hope the author has enough energy to continue the chronicle. ( )