"I spent 30 years or more disassociating myself from the Beach Boys so I could make it on my own," Marks, 58, said at his home in North Salem, N.Y. "But one day, I realized I'd never get away from it. I decided to embrace it."

Embracing doesn't mean just retelling the old stories that surround the band. In his new book "The Lost Beach Boy" written with Jon Stebbins -- to be released by Virgin Press Tuesday -- Marks talks at great length about how the group actually came to be.

"It's the most truthful account of the early days of the band that's ever been written," said Stebbins, who has written extensively about the Beach Boys. "You get a really good sense of the of the band."

But the book also clears away some of the junky myths that surround the group, including the tale that the three Wilson brothers rented instruments on vacation and, somehow, miraculously came up with the Beach Boys sound.

It also establishes Marks as one of the founders of the group -- the kid who started trading twangy electric guitar licks with Carl Wilson when they were still in grade school.

It also tries to tells how Murry Wilson, the Wilsons' domineering father and business manager, played an instrumental part in getting Marks to leave the band, to cut him out of the band's profits, and then successfully misled the press about the part Marks played with the band. Hence the book's name.

Murry Wilson's influence lives on. In the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's synopsis of the Beach Boys' history, Marks is mentioned once in a parenthesis, as a temporary replacement for band member Al Jardine.

"Murry did a really good PR job," Stebbins said. "He wanted to slam the door shut on Dave and he did."

But, in fact, it was Jardine who left the band for two years, from 1961 to 1963, to go to college. When he returned, there were six Beach Boys -- five who toured, including Marks, and Brian Wilson, the group's leader, songwriter, arranger and all-round genius, who stayed home and wrote the song book.

Both Marks and Stebbins said that Brian Wilson's current persona -- as a troubled, drug-addled, somewhat reclusive artist -- bears little relationship to the Brian Wilson of the early 1960s.

"He was a normal kid," Marks said. "He was bright and focused and very interesting. He organized us, and sometimes bullied us. But he got a bunch of unruly kids to perform our music."

"Brian was totally the leader -- everybody wanted to be around him," Stebbins said. "But he had stage fright. He was very funny and charming, but that all melted away when he got before a crowd."

What's so remarkable about the Beach Boys was how young they were. When they started, Mike Love, the oldest member of the band and the man who now owns the rights to tour as the Beach Boys, was just 21. The rest were in their teens. Marks was 13.

"We had no idea what was happening," he said. "I was old enough to know we were popular. But I was too young to understand that being a Beach Boy would be a big business deal and that the band would be worth millions."

Marks actually started playing electric guitars with next-door neighbor Carl Wilson around 1958. Their idols were Chuck Berry, Richie Valens and instrumental surf bands like the Ventures and Dick Dale and the Deltones.

While Brian Wilson was already thinking of a group with tight vocal harmonies, his first attempts to create a group were more like folk music.

"Brian got interested in what we were doing, and that was what did it -- the combination of electric guitars and Four Freshmen harmonies," Marks said.

"How much did Dave contribute to the Beach Boys sound? Five percent? Ten percent? Twenty percent?" Stebbins asked. "I don't know. But he was there."

While the surfing songs put the Beach Boys on the top of charts, Marks said it was the car songs -- "409,""Shut Down,""Little Deuce Coupe" -- that really made them a great American band.

"Surfing was a coast thing," he said. "But every little town in the United States had kids with cars. I think the car songs are what really took the Beach Boys to the top of the country."

But Marks said there was little glamour to the band's early days of touring. "There were no groupies, no four-star hotels, no limos."

Added to that was Murry Wilson's animosity toward Marks -- in large part, Marks said, because Wilson wanted to confine the band's fortunes to the Wilson family (the three Wilson brothers and Mike Love, their cousin).

"He knew how to push all my teenage buttons," Marks said.

In 1964, at age 15, after two years of playing rhythm guitar, singing background harmonies and getting harassed by Murry Wilson, he quit.

"I was a 15-year-old punk," he said of his heedless, arrogant youth.

When Marks signed his original contract with Capitol Records, it made him a one-fifth partner in the band until 1967, getting 20 percent of the proceeds.

When he quit, Murry Wilson had him sign away his future royalties to the band he helped created. Marks gets royalties on the songs from the Beach Boys' first four albums. But between 1964 and 1967 -- using hired studio musicians to play and sing Marks' parts -- they recorded 14 more albums, with many, many more hits He's estimated that if he had kept his 20 percent rights, those songs would have earned him $10 million over the years.

"Murry gave me a piece of paper to sign," he said of his leaving. "What I didn't know was that a 15-year-old's signature isn't legally binding. It was totally bogus."

After the Beach Boys, Marks started his own band -- Dave and the Marksmen -- which played, he said, "a bizarre combination of British invasion and surf music."

Although the band signed with a major label, A&M, it went nowhere.

Instead of becoming a teen star, Marks became a highly respected, albeit anonymous, guitarist in the Los Angeles studio scene. He played with other groups -- The Moon and Dot -- and toured with disc jockey Casey Kasem.

He became a full-time father, raising daughter Jennifer alone when the girl's mother left him.

Along the way, he got the Beach Boys organization to pay him royalties on hit records he performed on. He never saw his one-fifth share. He kept in touch with the band members and finally rejoined Mike Love's touring Beach Boys band from 1997 to 1999 at Love's urging.

It was on on tour with the band that he met his wife, Carrie. Because her family lived in North Salem, the couple decided to settle there.

Marks has recorded CDs of his own music. He performs regularly with the Surf City All-Stars, along with former Beach Boys member Al Jardine and Dean Torrence of Jan & Dean fame.

That's forced him to relearn a lot of the Beach Boys' repertoire and made him more aware than ever of the verve and complexity of Brian Wilson's songs.

He's become an outspoken advocate of better care and research for people with hepatitis C -- the chronic liver disease Marks was diagnosed with in 1999. After treatment in 2004, he's now virus-free.

He looks back on his two years of fame with a certain amount of philosophical rue.

"All I can say today is 'Oh, nuts,'" Marks said of the lost fame and money. "But I have a beautiful wife, a beautiful daughter and a great life. All I can do is look back and be grateful."

When he's on tour, he gets a full appreciation of what the Beach Boys' music still means to people.

"I've played in Germany and New Zealand before crowds of 150,000 people," Marks said. "I've had people come up and tell me they sang their babies to sleep with 'Surfer Girl.'

"I had no idea that the music would sustain itself and still be so popular. It's universal, from generation to generation.

"That's one of the things I've learned -- what it means to be part of something that big. It's mind-blowing."

Courtesy of the Danbury News Times.