New Beach Boys memoir

The autobiography of the Beach Boys' original guitarist and co-founder David Marks, titled The Lost Beach Boy, has been causing a stir with its warts-and-all portrait of the band's early days on the road. Marks, who wrote the book with Beach Boys historian Jon Stebbins, details how the band's early concert tours were peppered with underage drinking, rowdy fights, run-ins with prostitutes, and bouts of venereal disease.

Marks explained that the public's perception of the Beach Boys has always been slightly out of whack: "They just have this image of Carl (Wilson), an image of Mike (Love), and image of Brian (Wilson), and it's fixed in their minds and it somehow became a collective consciousness. And that's probably the way with any famous person. Every politician, every rock star, has this image that was created through the people, through the fans. And to think that any one individual is that way all the time is just really fantasy, man."

Marks, who was a neighbor of the Wilson family, had been making music with Brian, Dennis and Carl Wilson since his elementary school days. He performed on the group's first five albums and their initial hits such as "Surfin' U.S.A.," "Shut Down," "In My Room," "409," "Be True To Your School," and others.

He rejoined the band for three years in the late '90s, and remains friendly with all of the surviving group members. For more information log on to davidleemarks.com
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