Mike Love sits in a dull-looking room at a Sheraton hotel in North Carolina, the bold print of his distinctive Hawaiian shirt standing out against the ocher wallpaper behind him.
The 83-year-old Beach Boys frontman came to Charlotte the other day to play at the Lovin' Life music festival alongside Post Malone and DaBaby, and 36 hours later he's still in the mood to brag: “We had several thousand people singing to our songs,” he says in a Zoom call. “A lot of teenagers and stuff dancing. “It’s pretty phenomenal considering we’ve been doing this for a little over 60 years.”
As Beach Boys fans know, “us” requires a bit of unpacking.
Six decades after Love formed the band in suburban Hawthorne with his cousins Brian, Dennis and Carl Wilson and his friend Al Jardine, a Beach Boys concert these days means a performance by Love and Bruce Johnston, who replaced the band. stage to Brian Wilson after Brian resigned. on tour in 1965 and several very capable backing musicians. (Jardine refers to this group as “Mike's gang.”) Brian, the renowned mastermind behind one of America's most transformative rock groups, eventually returned to the road and toured regularly under his own name with Jardine and other musicians until 2022, when health issues arose. He forced him off the stage again.
So: two Beach Boys groups, separated by fights over money and creative control, without any of the blood relatives whose crystalline harmonies elevated the group's music to a kind of heavenly status.
But Love has old family ties in mind when he talks about “The Beach Boys,” a light-hearted if slightly melancholy new documentary co-directed by Frank Marshall and Thom Zimny that premiered Friday on Disney+. The Beach Boys story has been told countless times in other movies, shows, books and podcasts — “too many times,” Johnston, 81, notes, laughing on a separate call. But this was an “opportunity to show that this is a family situation,” Love says. “A family band.”
Love, who co-wrote many of the Beach Boys' biggest hits with Brian, remembers learning to sing half a century ago “at birthday parties, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Eve”; He remembers mixing his voice with Brian's in the car on Wednesday nights as they drove home from Angeles Mesa Presbyterian Church in Windsor Hills. “When we took my senior trip to Dorsey High School, I invited Brian to come with me,” he tells The Times. “I didn't invite a girl. I was a little shy and awkward and everything. But nice cousin Brian: we went to Catalina and back.”
In the film, Love's blue-gray eyes fill with tears as she describes her bond with Brian, whose mental health problems could make it difficult to communicate with others even as her music was expanding pop's reach in the mid-1960s.
“There was so much love and so much relationship between us at that time that it came across in the records,” Love says from Charlotte. “They talk about Elton John and Bernie Taupin. Well, it was Mike Love and Brian Wilson; Brian Wilson and Mike Love, whatever.”
Featuring a mix of archival footage and interviews with the band's surviving members (Dennis Wilson died in 1983, Carl in 1998), the new documentary comes at a time of high visibility for the Beach Boys, who three years ago recruited the Iconic Irving Azoff’s Artists Group to “preserve and grow his legacy in a digital age,” as a statement puts it.
David Marks, left, Al Jardine, Brian Wilson, Blondie Chaplin, Mike Love and Bruce Johnston attend the world premiere of “The Beach Boys” at the TCL Chinese Theater on May 21, 2024.
(Alberto E. Rodríguez / Getty Images for Disney)
Beyoncé interpolates a bit of “Good Vibrations” on her hit album “Cowboy Carter,” while Lana Del Rey appeared with the band at last month's Stagecoach country music festival in Indio. “My daughter Ambha, who is 28, has been a fan of that person since she was Lizzy Grant,” Love says, referring to Del Rey's former stage name. She even told Lana, 'Hey, I've been playing your music to my dad since I was 12.' “Lana loved that.”
Just this week, the Beach Boys' “Pet Sounds,” the classic 1966 LP that set a new benchmark for expressive pop sophistication, landed at No. 20 on Apple Music's much-discussed ranking of the 100 Greatest Albums. all the times.
Says Zimny, known for his earlier documentaries on Elvis Presley and Bruce Springsteen: “They created a sound that is still active in our dreams today.”
Less happily, the Beach Boys have been in the headlines this month as a result of Brian being placed under conservatorship following the recent death of his wife, Melinda Wilson, who had been responsible for his care amid a dementia diagnosis. Brian made a rare public appearance Tuesday night at the film's premiere at the TLC Chinese Theater in Hollywood, where he posed for photos with the band for the first time since a Recording Academy tribute to the Beach Boys in 2023. .
However, light and dark have always been intertwined for a famously clean group whose history encompasses substance abuse, mental illness, and an intimidating father-manager. “The Beach Boys” glides fairly smoothly over much of the difficult stuff, though it doesn't try to avoid Dennis' ill-advised friendship with Charles Manson not long before the Tate-LaBianca murders.
“I only met him once and that was enough for me, but Dennis had him as a roommate,” Love says today. “Everything was terrible. But it happened. It was reality. It was the '60s: there were drugs, there was madness, the Vietnam War was underway. It was very heavy. But you know what? I always like to accentuate the positive. Then it is good vibrations.”
One way to think about the power of the Beach Boys' music is to hear the essential sadness in even the most joyful of their songs. Love isn't so sure about that: “If you talk about 'Fun, Fun, Fun' or 'I Get Around' or 'Surfin' USA,' there's nothing melancholy about them,” he says. “Even in 'The Heat of the Sun,' it's about how you were in love but it didn't happen; She doesn't feel the same anymore, so you stay. But at least you have the memory of having felt that euphoria of being in love.”
According to Azoff, the veteran music industry insider who manages the Eagles and U2, “The Beach Boys” grew out of an offer from cable network Epix (now known as MGM+) to make a documentary about the band. Azoff decided “we could do better than Epix” and hired Marshall, a longtime presence in Hollywood, and together they went to Disney boss Bob Iger, who Azoff says personally made the decision to purchase the documentary for Disney+ .
“To me, his story hadn't been told for a while outside of Brian's personal story, and no one wants to see Dr. Landy anymore,” Azoff says, referring to the late psychologist whose controversial treatment of Brian in the '80s was depicted. in the 2004 film “Love & Mercy.”
Marshall was drawn to the group's family dynamic in part, he says, because he grew up in a family of musicians: His father was Jack Marshall, a jazz guitarist and composer who also worked as a producer at the Beach Boys' record label, Capitol. . In 2020 he directed HBO's acclaimed “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart,” about another band of brothers, the Bee Gees.
“Both groups had a father figure who was instrumental in their lives, in a good way for the Bee Gees and in a not-so-good way for the Beach Boys,” Marshall says. The film examines Murry Wilson's dominant role in the band's affairs, including her battles with Brian over her studio job and his sale of the group's publishing company in 1969 for less than $1 million. (Billboard estimates that the Beach Boys catalog would be worth more than $200 million today.)
“A father should never be a manager; That's where everything came from,” says Jardine, 81, via Zoom. “He was with us everywhere, telling us how to tune up. His famous term was “Sharp, guys!” He apparently had lost his hearing and didn't think he was bright enough. “Things like that were infuriating.”
The film also hints at tension between Love and Dennis Wilson (“competitive cousins,” Jardine calls them) as the two vied to be seen as the Beach Boys' resident heartthrob. “Any time Dennis could upstage Mike, he would,” Jardine tells The Times. “All he had to do was stand on his drum kit and hold his hands in the air with his drumsticks and the crowd went crazy. As soon as Mike spoke a little, he would time it to get the applause instead of Mike.” He laughs. “It drove Mike crazy.”
According to Jardine, Love wasn't the only target of Dennis's energy. He remembers the Beach Boys sharing a trailer with the Rolling Stones at a concert in Jacksonville, Florida, in the mid-'60s, “right when they first came here. They sat at one end of the trailer and we sat at the other. We never speak. I think Dennis had a problem with Mick. [Jagger]as far as I remember.” He shrugs. “Alpha types.”
Beyond the band's complicated relationships, “The Beach Boys” traces the group's friendly rivalry with the Beatles and highlights Brian's pioneering role as the band's producer in an era when few, if any, pop groups supervised their own. recordings.
“In 2024 that's common, but this was a world where writers, producers and performers were all separate,” says producer Dan Nigro. Known for his work with Olivia Rodrigo and Chappell Roan, Nigro co-wrote and produced a Beach Boys-inspired song by singer Stephen Sánchez, “Baby Blue Swimming Suit,” which appears as a bonus track on the documentary's soundtrack. “Brian was the first person I knew that he was doing all this.”
Producer Mike Elizondo, who served as musical director for last year's Recording Academy tribute, still uses the Beach Boys' music as a source of motivation when working with an artist in the studio. “Even if we're not necessarily trying to make a Beach Boys-sounding record, it's like, 'Look, this is what's possible if you have a vision and follow through,'” he says.
Given Brian's condition, no one in or around the Beach Boys says they expect a reunion like the one the group called to commemorate its 50th anniversary. But Love's band will be on tour all summer (including an August 30 stop at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles) and there's a limited-edition vinyl reissue of “Pet Sounds” on the way later this year. Last month, a handsome new coffee table book, “The Beach Boys by the Beach Boys,” was published with detailed photos and memories of the members.
“There's a lot of nostalgia for someone who was in the band,” Love says of all the flashback action, so much so that it can almost seem painful.
“We were very close growing up,” he says of himself and Brian. “We were listening to KGFJ and KDAY on his Nash Rambler after we got kicked out of the house for being too loud because my dad had to go to work at Love Sheet Metal in the morning. We would literally hang out at the Rambler, listen to the radio, sing things and laugh at each other.”
