All Summer Long

Available on Audible and Amazon.
Read by Danny Montooth.

I’ll be honest with you: I’ve been leading a band called Bob & the Beachcombers for more than 35 years. I grew up with the Beach Boys. I thought I knew their story pretty well.

I didn’t know the half of it.

All Summer Long is the kind of book that rewards anyone who has ever hummed “Good Vibrations” in the shower or felt something shift in their chest during “God Only Knows.” David Beard spent more than 30 years collecting archival interviews and original conversations with the people who were actually there — Brian Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine, Bruce Johnston, David Marks, Jan Berry, Dean Torrence, Marilyn Wilson-Rutherford, and a remarkable cast of others who witnessed one of the most extraordinary creative explosions in the history of American popular music.

What the Book Actually Covers

The focus is the early peak years — 1961 through 1967 — and Beard moves through them with the patience of someone who understands that the real story is always in the details. The breakneck creative sprint of 1962–63, when Brian Wilson was writing and producing at a pace that left even his bandmates struggling to keep up. The fascinating parallel story of Jan & Dean and how intertwined those two acts really were. The almost inexplicable artistic leap of 1965. The triumph of Pet Sounds. The singular achievement of “Good Vibrations.” And finally, the haunting, unfinished business of the SMiLE sessions — one of the great “what if” stories in rock history.

What makes this different from the standard rock biography is the format. Rather than a narrator telling you what happened, the subjects tell it themselves. Their own words, their own memories, their own contradictions. You hear the affection and the friction in equal measure. Nobody is being managed or sanitized. It reads — and on Audible, it sounds — like sitting in the room with people who still can’t quite believe what they were part of.

Why I’m Recommending It

After 35 years of performing this music, I thought I understood its appeal. What I came away with from All Summer Long is a much deeper appreciation for how genuinely unlikely it all was — how close the whole thing came to never happening, how much of it depended on one extraordinarily gifted and extraordinarily fragile human being, and how the music survived everything that tried to derail it.

If you have any affection at all for this era of American music — the Beach Boys, Jan & Dean, the whole California sound that defined a generation — this is essential listening. I came away from it with a renewed respect for what Brian Wilson and his collaborators actually accomplished, and a much better understanding of the human cost behind it.

Grab a board and get ready for the ride of your life. The publisher said it, and for once, the publisher wasn’t exaggerating.

Thirty-five years of playing their music,
and I still didn’t know the half of it.
— R.J.B.