I’m just a sound: Back to the Beach Boys

Ian Penman in the LRB on Peter Doggett’s Surf’s Up, the latest entry in the ever-expanding Beach Boys archive. I’m currently working through David Leaf’s God Only Knows, which covers a lot of the same ground: the abusers and exploiters around Brian, the scarcely believable transformation from novelty pop to Pet Sounds, the apocryphal nature of every retelling.