'Sweet Insanity' is a chronicle of exquisite music hidden under a bitter skin. A journey with multiple guests: surfers, hippies, the Manson Family, the Maharishi and dozens of notable people of Los Angeles, the city of Hollywood and falsehood. The rock band protagonist of this book is the whitest and, at the same time, the darkest. The Beach Boys, geographers of California, a land idealized as pop Arcadia (camaraderie, eternal sunsets, cheap gas and “two girls for every boy”), have walked for forty years on the darker side: dissolution, fratricidal battles, quirks, bankruptcies, destruction and death. The band's leader, Brian Wilson, the eternal child, God's Ear, a unique musician and producer, was never capable of finding for himself the harmony that his songs brought to others. Victim of the abuse of a corrosive father, the envies of his family and the machinations of agents, executives and scoundrel psychologists, fell in every well, from madness to immoderate consumption of food and all kinds of drugs. For years, he was the great hermit, only interested in the sheets of the bed in which he lived and the voices he heard in his head. Nevertheless, along this painful journey, Brian Wilson gave birth to outstanding works, including the unanimously considered as best pop song, 'Good Vibrations', and the most significant LP of all time, Pet Sounds.
