Editor's Note: Originally published in This Land, Vol. 3, Issue 19. Sept. 15, 2012.
Just as we were enduring week after blazing week of drought and conflagration and hell-worthy heat in our part of the world, along came that venerable American band The Beach Boys to remind us that an endless summer can also be a wonderful thing. Their disc That’s Why God Made the Radio debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard magazine album charts in June, a distinction that doesn’t mean as much as it would’ve 10 years ago but remains impressive—especially for a group that launched the CD as part of its 50th anniversary celebration.
The term “anniversary,” however, is slightly misleading. The Beach Boys did indeed score their first Top 20 record, “Surfin’ Safari,” in 1962. But the band had peeled apart not long after the 1998 death of founding member Carl Wilson, its remaining originators bobbing in a sea of recrimination and legal maneuvering.
After Carl Wilson died, “we disintegrated,” original Beach Boy Al Jardine told me in 2001, when I interviewed him for the Tulsa World. “We just fell apart, because we had these divergent points of view, and I got really fed up with just singing the hits.”
Mike Love, however, apparently enjoyed singing the hits. A cousin of the Wilsons who was on board from the beginning, Love—depending upon your point of view—was either a ruthless capitalist bent on leaching every cent he could out of The Beach Boys’ reputation, or a man who saw his life’s work as bringing joy to fans by giving them what they wanted to hear. He and the charismatic Bruce Johnston—an early replacement for Brian Wilson, the troubled genius who stopped touring full-time with the band members around Christmas of 1964—carried on under The Beach Boys name, hiring other musicians to replace the originals. Brian, who became, improbably, the last Wilson brother standing (Dennis, the group’s drummer, had drowned in 1983), went out on the road with his own backing group and continued to write and record. And Jardine, the only original member not related to the Wilsons, ginned up Family and Friends, a group specializing in lesser-performed Beach Boys tunes. Family and Friends swelled to 11 members and included, at one time, Brian’s daughters Wendy and Carnie Wilson (of the pop trio Wilson Phillips) as well as Jardine’s own sons.
To celebrate their five decades as the leading musical purveyors of California dreams, however, the scattered Boys temporarily reunited this year, adding guitarist David Marks, a one-time neighbor of the Wilsons who spent much of 1962 and ’63 filling in for Jardine before the latter returned permanently to the fold. The 50th Anniversary disc they created together, That’s Why God Made the Radio, is in many ways a classic Beach Boys record, balanced between optimism and resignation, joy and loss, longing and escape. As the songs play, it doesn’t take much imagination to visualize the quintet standing there in the sand, older guys now, three-quarters of their lives behind them, watching the sun go down over the rippling Pacific—and still exhorting us to not only remember what it was like when we, and they, were young, but to get out there and do it again, dammit, until we can’t do it any more. Do not go gently, they’re telling us, into that good surf, that bitchin’ sunset over the sea.
As has been the case for a half-century, that message isn’t just aimed at their fellow Californians. It also resonates with those of us who were once landlocked Okie kids, surfing only on the waves of golden daydreams inside our heads—to a Beach Boys soundtrack, of course.
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