My wife and I got tickets to see the core of the late Brian Wilson’s band perform in Lincoln City on October 4th, a decision I made pretty much as soon as I was made aware that such a performance was taking place. Although I have been a fan of Brian and the Beach Boys for most of my life, I had waited until close to the very end to see him in person, in Portland in 2019 for one of his last ventures on the road before the pandemic began. Now that he has gone, I don’t want to let too many chances to connect with a legacy of music that has meant so much to me go by.
When we saw Brian’s band before, the group was augmented by two significant figures of the Beach Boys’ past: guitarist Blondie Chaplin, and Brian’s fellow founding Beach Boy and guitarist Al Jardine. Their presence was essential, because Brian himself was in pretty rough shape, unable to take the stage without a walker and, as the show progressed, increasingly unable to sing all of his parts without trailing off. Blondie and Al, by comparison, were in strong form, and with the rest of the band formed a rock solid structure to support the harmonic intricacy of Brian’s music. Darian Sahanaja, the “musical director” of the group, had everything arranged to capture as much of the grandeur and beauty as possible, even in the face of their leader’s obvious decline.
There is a sense in which the act is diminished, now that Brian Wilson can no longer play even a limited role in its performances. There is still a group calling itself the Beach Boys, led by fellow founding member and Brian’s cousin Mike Love; they focus mostly on the most commercial and accessible songs in the band’s catalog, eschewing most of their strangest and most complicated music, and centering the “beach” and all associated imagery in their presentation. Brian’s shows also routinely featured the songs that everybody knows, but made room for more ambitious songs like “Surf’s Up” and relative obscurities like “Friends,” while emphasizing the centrality of Brian’s role as composer of the music. The Beach Boys could conceivably continue touring long after every original member has died, perpetually riding the wave on a Surfboard of Theseus; without Brian, the Brian Wilson Band faces an existential reckoning.
But with Al Jardine having assumed front man status (a decision that actually predate’s Brian’s death by a few months) for the group, now rechristened “The Pet Sounds Band,” an interesting thought occurs: granted that Mike Love holds the license to call his group The Beach Boys, it is nevertheless the case that the two surviving founders of that band are both on tour at this very moment, playing many (but certainly not all) of the same songs: are the Pet Sounds Band not therefore, in at least some metaphysical sense, also The Beach Boys? I would certainly like to think so.
Unfortunately for Al, Mike’s band benefits from name recognition in two ways. From a marketing standpoint, “Beach Boys” signifies much more to a broad potential audience than “Pet Sounds” does. Furthermore, while none of the Beach Boys’ names are exactly universally known in 2025, Al has always been the most obscure. He played rhythm guitar and sang mostly backing vocals. He wrote or co-wrote some songs, many of which are good but none of which are especially well-known. He sang the lead vocal on the number one hit single “Help Me Rhonda,” but that is a trivia question for the general public. Selling tickets for this tour depends on reaching people who are specifically knowledgeable about a subject as esoteric as Beach Boys lore, and relying on the name of Brian Wilson to do what the name of Al Jardine probably could not.
Al is a professional, though, who loves playing this music and does so with an endearingly authentic modesty. After the introductory songs, he told the audience that he was suffering from “a bit of the sniffles,” but that they were going to go ahead and do the show anyway; he then took his familiar stance behind his guitar and sang with a strong voice (for an 83-year-old man with the sniffles) throughout the entire show. He made light of relying on a monitor for the lyrics and still occasionally getting them wrong (we could swear we heard him drop an F bomb at one point). He also offered plenty of reminiscences and corny stage banter, joking about being ready to go to bed before “In My Room,” and offering to omit his own composition, “Susie Cincinnati,” because he wasn’t “too sure about that one.” Al looks and sounds like an old guy, but the adjective “spry” was seemingly invented to describe people like him. He just keeps on playing his guitar and singing his parts, and it’s hard to believe he’ll ever stop.
Other members of the Pet Sounds band contributed lead vocals, particularly Darian Sahanaja, but the real hero in that regard was actually Al’s son, Matt Jardine. Matt has a voice with exceptional range, able to sing well the high tenor and falsetto parts that were Brian’s, back in the long ago days before his voice was altered by drug abuse. The two Jardines stood side by side for most of the show, as they have many times over the last few decades (Matt performed much the same role at the Brian Wilson show we saw in 2019). The music just would not be the same without somebody hitting the high notes, and although Matt is pushing 60 himself he was probably the youngest person on stage, perpetually the “baby” of the group, as Brian himself once dubbed him.
As a tribute to Brian Wilson, this tour has distinguished itself from all others by featuring as its centerpiece a selection of songs from what he often claimed as his favorite Beach Boys album, and one that is probably the most acquired taste of all their better works: 1977’s The Beach Boys Love You. In contrast to Pet Sounds, Brian’s universally regarded magnum opus, Love You is far stranger than it is conventionally beautiful, although it bursts with similarly sophisticated and original harmonies. Its arrangements are defined by crunchy synthesizers and crunchier lead vocals, while the childlike tone of the lyrics ranges from left field to out of the ballpark entirely, up into the furthest reaches of outer space. It’s a document of Brian’s mental state in the late seventies, bursting with goofy delight and raw vulnerability. We saw the band play eleven songs from Love You, and they were awesome.
Al himself seemed bemused by the contemporary appeal of Love You, an album he seems to remember mostly as a commercial disappointment that he wasn’t very involved in making. Nevertheless he was game to inhabit the material, offering a new, even more delirious verse to the legendarily delirious “Ding Dang,” and participating in some amusing leaning-based choreography on “Johnny Carson” (he has great balance for an octogenarian). Afterwards, he expressed a desire to perform that song on Jimmy Kimmel Live, as a gesture of support for the cause of free speech. Kimmel’s people should get on that.
Also included in the night’s set were a pair of rarities from 1978’s MIU Album, a much less beloved entry in the discography, which was largely produced by Al himself as Brian once again receded from creative control of the group. The two albums are supposedly headed for a combined reissue later this year, along with 1976’s 15 Big Ones. This could raise the question, is Al only playing along with the fans’ affection for Love You in order to quietly set the stage for the critical rehabilitation of MIU? Personally, I think that’s more of a Mike Love kind of move, but I’m sure that Al doesn’t mind a chance to give people a second look at the material.
Moving away from the Beach Boys proper, the band began their encore performance with “Islands in the Sun,” the title track of Al’s recent solo EP. This was not surprising, except that he claimed we were witnessing the first ever live performance of that song. Taking a glance at the online set lists for previous shows on this tour, that seems to be true. He compared it to “Kokomo,” I think mostly because it includes the names of some Caribbean islands. It’s a lot better than “Kokomo” though.
Speaking of set lists, I thought I might challenge myself to recall the order of every song they played, and check it against the record on the internet. I did pretty darn well, I must say; I screwed up the order of a few songs, but I got them all:
- California Girls
- Do It Again
- Surfer Girl
- Don’t Worry Baby
- Little Deuce Coupe
- I Get Around
- In My Room
- Darlin’
- Susie Cincinnati
- Sweet Sunday Kind of Love
- She’s Got Rhythm
- I Can Hear Music
- Let Us Go On This Way
- Roller Skating Child
- Johnny Carson
- The Night Was So Young
- Solar System
- Honkin’ Down the Highway
- I’ll Bet He’s Nice
- Good Time
- Ding Dang
- I Wanna Pick You Up
- Airplane
- God Only Knows
- Sloop John B
- Wouldn’t It Be Nice
- Heroes and Villains
- Good Vibrations
- Islands in the Sun
- Help Me Rhonda
- Surfin’ USA
- Fun, Fun, Fun
What we have here is effectively a Beach Boys sandwich, with a tasty Love You center (13-23) to set the show apart from the average nostalgia showcase. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a nostalgia showcase, though. People come to shows like this to remember the old music, whether they were around when it was new or not. We weren’t the youngest people in the room, though if you looked at the percentages I think you’d find us near the bottom, along with the literal children who came along to see what it was all about.
This show offered some insight as to the future of the music of Brian Wilson, some one who for the last several decades has been proclaimed an immortal. It’s easy to call somebody immortal while they’re still alive, but mortality has already come for Brian. Some day it will even come for Al and Mike, and the only people who will still be playing Beach Boys music will be people like the members of the Pet Sounds Band, who weren’t there from the start but have found a place for themselves in what has become a tradition. They’ll play for an audience increasingly consisting not of those who remember the 1960s or 70s, but people who discovered the Beach Boys at a later time, and found something in the old recordings to take for themselves and carry forward.
This doesn’t happen to every musician. Eventually the demand for mere nostalgia runs dry, but the appeal of the Beach Boys does not lie solely in nostalgia. It lies in a deeper quality, which can be felt in the room whenever the music is played with love and care, influences the people who hear it for the better, and plays a part in shaping the music that is yet to come.
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