OK, so he was a teenager; and OK, he has since been written out of Beach Boys history somewhat, but at the end of the day, David Marks quit the group, and what can anyone else do about that?
Almost half of this book covers Marks’ time with The Beach Boys (the first six LPs, give or take a little). From the tone taken, it’s often just as much of a hagiographic re-write as the accounts that ignore Marks in favour of Al Jardine. At other times it’s almost overly apologetic in tone, as if Marks shouldn’t be held accountable for his actions. It’s nice to see the early Beach Boys’ story taken from another angle, but the blinkered, relentlessly pro-Marks angle gets just as draining as a pro-anyone else take.
Post-Beach Boys, it’s a relentless list of David Marks projects that were scuppered in one way or another, with enough drug addiction and alcoholism thrown in to give it a good tortured artist spin. Happily, Marks cleaned himself up, became a model father and joined later incarnations of The Beach Boys onstage. What amounts to a string of ‘and then [x] started before [y] happened and [z] failed’, however, is really only for the hardcore.
