The Beach Boys have just finished a 50th Anniversary lap of the world. The shows in Australia were an absolute knock-out. Now they’ve left our shores EMI have dropped a terrific box-set compilation 50 Big One’s. The box features two discs and portraits of the various members. If your hip-pocket doesn’t stretch that far: then check out the slim line single CD set, 25 Big Ones. Now, the good news continues. EMI have gone through the archives to re-release newly mastered editions of twelve classic Beach Boys’ albums. Each disc is presented in a slim line digi-pack: they look and sound terrific. It’s here you’ll find the likes of Surf’s Up, Pet Sounds, Summer Days/Summer Nights and the rest of the albums on which the band built their legacy. Below is a chat with Brian Wilson and Mike Love done on the eve of their last tour. Let’s go surfin’ now..
of rock’n’roll’s longest-running family feuds is having a ceasefire. If you’d have told a casual Beach Boys fan 12 months ago that errant genius Brian Wilson and singer Mike Love were about to reunite and make a new album, you might as well have suggested that hell had frozen in the same breath.
The pair, alongside Al Jardine, David Marks and Bruce Johnston, have made a fine new record, That’s Why God Made the Radio. The troupe are touring the world as part of the Beach Boys’ 50th-anniversary celebrations, clocking up sets that include 40-plus songs a night.
Wilson rarely grants interviews now but was prepared to exchange an email with this writer. His answers, like his speech, are brief. Love, on the other hand, is prepared to wax lyrical at length.
According to Wilson, the reconnection, after years of estrangement and lawsuits, happened because ”Mike Love asked me if I wanted to do a reunion tour for the 50th anniversary and I said, ‘Sure.”’
That’s a view at odds with earlier reports, which suggested Wilson brought the concept to Love.
Still, Love hardly cares. He just wants to get the band back together. Previously seeing a Love-fronted Beach Boys ”near-tribute act” is one thing but this, well, this is as close as we’ll ever get to seeing the real deal in 2012.
”We put aside our individual pursuits,” Love admits, ”and kind of blended the bands [we’d been touring in]. There’s only one 50th anniversary for anybody and we just decided to go for it and take a lap around the world. We try to do songs in our show that are representative of just about every area and every important album.”
The new album, buoyed by the superb title track, is a well-crafted contemporary mix of sounds that fans were used to hearing on such groundbreaking albums as Pet Sounds and Sunflower.
”I wanted to recapture [in 2012] the harmonies we used to do,” Wilson confirms. ”It took us three months to record.”
”To me, a lot of it sounds like 1965, going on 1966,” Love says, ”in terms of the vintage feel and sound of the album. I don’t think that was intentional but I think, when you’ve been around for 50 years, it makes sense to revisit some of the themes of the past.”
Oddly, the present incarnation of the Beach Boys never existed previously as a combination. Wilson, Jardine and Love were there at the beginning. Wilson’s writing schedule and subsequent mental health issues took him off the road and eventually out of the band. Love has been a flag bearer for decades: some of his Beach Boys incarnations have been good for a singalong but reductive in terms of the group’s legacy. Johnston initially subbed for Wilson in 1965 and has been playing with Love for 4½ decades. Marks joined the band in 1962 while Jardine completed college; he played on four albums and left in mid-1963 before rejoining Love decades later.
Pivotal to the Beach Boys’ original success were Wilson’s brothers, the late Carl and Dennis. The pair are represented on stage via technology.
”We all got together [again],” Wilson says. ”I don’t remember whose idea it was, but we all wanted to honour them somehow.”
”We have a screen that shows Dennis doing Forever,” Love says. ”We have Carl singing God Only Knows, which he sang so beautifully every night. It’s a way of having them join us on this reunion and we back them up. They’re singing, we’re playing. So it’s pretty sentimental, pretty emotional actually.”
Wilson, who has had a creative renaissance with fine solo albums alongside the eventual completion of the Beach Boys’s 1967 unfinished masterwork SMiLE, was the brains behind the band’s current slice of sonic heaven, the single That’s Why God Made the Radio.
It’s been widely reported that Wilson started work on the tune more than a decade ago, but shelved it with producer Joe Thomas, earmarking it as a possible future Beach Boys track. Wilson was in Australia when he called Thomas to finish the song, but denies the tune’s lineage now, stating it was written this year.
For Love, it has the hallmarks of a classic Beach Boys track.
”Well, I thought it was a great title [when I first heard it] and then we went and did all our parts and heard the harmonies coming back in the studio speakers and I said, wow, a lot of time may have passed but there’s been nothing lost in terms of the harmonies and Brian’s ability to structure those chord progressions. I think there’s about every chord ever invented in that song.”
It’s interesting to ask Love what advice he would give to his younger self and bandmates.
”Be smarter in business,” he says with a laugh, ”because the business part is the unfortunate part of it.
”What I would really say is don’t do any drugs. Dennis got involved with too much alcohol and too much cocaine and ended his life way too early. In 1983 he passed away. And Brian taking LSD around the time he was doing the SMiLE album, he’s often said he wishes he hadn’t done that – so the incursion of drugs; that’s the major bummer, if there is one, of the Beach Boys experience.”
That’s Why God Made The Radio is out now through EMI
Sean Sennett
