The story of The Beach Boys has been told again and again and again, and yet, there’s still something about their legacy that feels like a secret–a secret that probably millions are already in on, but a secret nonetheless–and that’s part of why it’s still worth telling their story in 2024, 63 years after the band released their debut single “Surfin’.” From the harmonies they perfected early on, to the adventurous art pop of Pet Sounds and the storied Smile, The Beach Boys have influenced generation after generation and they continue to do so. Their music is the definition of timeless, and it’s something that each new generation has been able to feel like they’ve discovered for themselves.
The Beach Boys’ story was further immortalized with the recently-released book The Beach Boys by the Beach Boys (Genesis Publications) and once again with the new Disney+ documentary, The Beach Boys, directed by Frank Marshall and Thom Zimny, written by Mark Monroe, and streaming as of May 24. The documentary features newly-conducted video interviews with surviving band members Brian Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine, David Marks, Bruce Johnston, and Blondie Chaplin; Wrecking Crew member Don Randi; other musicians the band has inspired, including Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham, Janelle Monáe, Ryan Tedder, and Don Was; and others like music historian Josh Kun and Brian’s first wife Marilyn Wilson-Rutherford. It also features archival interviews with the late Carl and Dennis Wilson, other Wrecking Crew members, and an audio interview with former member Ricky Fataar, alongside footage from throughout the band’s career, some of which had never been released.
The documentary follows the band’s story from the Wilson brothers and eventually their cousin Mike Love singing together as children, to recruiting a high school friend who played in a local folk trio, Al Jardine, and solidifying their lineup as The Pendletones, who would later change their name to The Beach Boys. From there, the film follows The Beach Boys’ immediate local success with “Surfin'” to national success with subsequent singles, to the arrival of The Beatles and the creative rivalry between the two groups that followed. (Or, as Josh Kun puts it in the film, perhaps it was a “collaboration” not a “competition”–Kun suggests that albums like Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper’s wouldn’t have existed at all if either band didn’t have the other inspiring them.)
As the film explores, Brian’s desire to one-up The Beatles coincided with his fascination with Phil Spector’s wall-of-sound recording style and his decision to stop touring, which led to Brian writing, recording, and producing increasingly ambitious arrangements while his bandmates were out on tour, leading up to the culture-shifting Pet Sounds, its chart-topping followup single “Good Vibrations,” and the “Brian Wilson is a genius” campaign. From there, the film walks us through the abandoning of Smile, the home-recording era that followed, the decline of Brian’s mental health, and the surprise comeback brought on by Capitol’s 1974 pre-Pet Sounds-era best-of, Endless Summer.
Present-day Brian isn’t in the film as much as some fans might want, though that might be related to his recent dementia diagnosis that led to him being placed under a court-ordered conservatorship. He does, however, offer this quote: “I’m super happy with the way the documentary turned out, they did an amazing job. It really brought me back to those days with the boys, the fun and the music. And of course those incredible harmonies.”
If you’ve already consumed the various other books, documentaries, and biopics on The Beach Boys that have come out over the years, Disney+’s The Beach Boys doesn’t exactly offer any surprises, but it’s a fun watch with so much great music and footage, and it really gets at why The Beach Boys were such a special band like no other. The world loves an underdog story, and The Beach Boys are the perennial underdogs–the Beatles rivals that still require digging just a little deeper to even realize that they’re Beatles rivals. (There’s a reason why it made headlines in 2023 when Margot Robbie said she refused to listen to The Beatles growing up because she was too devoted to The Beach Boys.) All of their successes occurred in the face of roadblocks, and their rapid decline in popularity in the late ’60s remains a shock for a band of their stature. There’s always been more to The Beach Boys than meets the eye, and if this documentary is your first deeper dive into the band’s story, it’s a great place to start.
To coincide with the film’s release, I caught up with Al Jardine over Zoom to discuss the band’s enduring impact, the Smile song that remains his favorite Beach Boys song, his own songwriting contributions on post-Pet Sounds albums Holland and Friends, The Beach Boys’ perspective on The Beatles’ other rivals, The Rolling Stones, and more. Read on for our chat…
The new documentary comes out just months after the new Beach Boys book that was just released. Why now for all of these retrospectives?
Al Jardine: Probably because we’ve been around for about 60 years, or more [laughs], so better get ’em while they’re still around. I think it’s probably post-60th anniversary, that would probably count for it all. And you know, why not?
When the band was first starting to take off in the early 1960s, did you ever imagine it would be viewed as so important and influential 60 years later?
Gosh no, are you kidding? There’s no way of projecting that far ahead. I thought 1984 was a long time away [laughs]. George Orwell was lurking out there somewhere. It’s really remarkable when you think about it.
Yeah, and also it stood out to me that you have younger generations of musicians in the documentary like Janelle Monáe, and the recent book has members of Radiohead and The Flaming Lips. How did you react when you started to realize that the band was impacting musicians of all these future generations?
It’s very impactful, the music’s very important. It’s a bedrock, our career is like a teaching tool for a lot of people coming up through the ranks. They appreciate the hard work we did, and also the genius within the hard work is self-evident, so you’re gonna get that quite a bit. You know, everybody learns from everybody else; we all learn from one another ultimately.
Speaking of, one thing that’s always kind of fascinated me is that sort of the first era of rock & roll had kind of died down by the end of the ’50s, and it felt like there was a slight lull for maybe a couple years before bands like The Beach Boys and The Beatles start coming out with this fresh new take on things. I think even with your first single, you can hear something markedly different than ’50s rock & roll–what do you think were some factors that contributed to bands like The Beach Boys and The Beatles sounding so new right off the bat?
Well the vocal blend was beautiful. You have that family blend of voices, and particularly Brian’s beautiful voice–falsetto, we call it–just seemed to cement the whole thing together. Certain people know how to write chords, or shall we say notation, in a unique way, and Brian’s presentation was so unique that it caught the ear right away. And he would say it too: the vocals, the quality of the voices.
We weren’t great players though [laughs], that was the one thing we weren’t. We had to learn how to play. The Beatles had a head start on us there, because they actually went and ground it out in a bar in Germany of all places, go figure. And that’s where they got their chops together, and they were very fortunate that way. We started out just the opposite. We started out as an acoustic band, because none of us played instruments, other than Carl. I tinkered a little bit on the bass, Brian of course always had his expertise on piano, but he was also a good bass player so we could cover for each other. But the vocal thing, the reason that first record was such a hit, I think, is because it was so simple and easy to appreciate, and you heard that beautiful blend. It didn’t matter if it was about surfing, or cars, or girls, or whatever. It just caught your ear.
There was obviously this big Beatles/Beach Boys songwriting rivalry at the time, but there was also of course the Beatles vs Stones rivalry at the time. What was the reaction within The Beach Boys to what the Stones were doing in those early days?
It was very competitive. They were drawing on a whole different genre. I don’t think we ever felt threatened or anything like that. We shared a trailer with them actually, in Jacksonville I remember. They sat at one end of the trailer and we sat at the other and… didn’t talk to each other [laughs]. They were the bad boys; we were the goodie two shoes.
There’s been so much documented over the years about how Brian had The Beach Boys do countless vocal takes in the Pet Sounds and Smile era. As one of the singers, how do you remember reacting at the time to the process that Brian had in the studio?
We went blind practically, singing so many overdubs. We were double tracking everything–fortunately, thank god that we weren’t triple tracking–but nonetheless, whenever we’d finish a session, we’d say, “Well that’s great, that turned out great.” But the next night, the next evening or whenever, we’d be doing it all over again. Over and over and over and over. Brian heard it in his head a certain way, and he wanted it… Mike had the same feelings, particularly regarding “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and “Good Vibrations” and “Heroes and Villains”… We were doing Smile and Pet Sounds all at the same time. It became kind of a blur in my memory, but I do recall working on “Nice” and “Vibes” for maybe even six months at some point. Brian swears it was only a month… in his mind it might’ve been. The reality was he wanted perfection, and if you listen to the vocals-only sessions, I think we found perfection.
How did you feel when the decision was made to abandon Smile?
Oh, we never really abandoned it; we reignited it. We went home, we decided to retreat from the studio and we began re-cutting the same songs in a more informal way, and it turned into an album called Smiley Smile. Or some of the parts; some of the songs became Smiley Smile… kind of a nod, the younger cousin of Smile. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the studio-quality instruments–for some reason we just assumed at every studio, wherever you go, there’s a wonderful rack of pianos and equipment that, you can draw on anything if you want. We didn’t have that in Brian’s house, so we relied really on our own ingenuity, and so it became more of a homemade album of sorts.
What was your experience like doing these home-recorded records versus being in such professional studios with everything at your fingertips?
I missed it. I missed the edge. There was an edge in the big studios that we didn’t have. We were very aware of the costs of making music too. We had just moved off of Capitol, and so it just all seemed to be the right move to try a more personal style. But I did miss the big pianos and the harpsichords and the bell chimes and all the whistles–you could just grab anything and put it on the record right there.
And the chambers, don’t forget the chambers! We didn’t have a recording chamber, so we were cutting dry the whole darn time. When you don’t have your great reverbs and your great chambers that we had at Gold Star and Capitol and Sunset Sound, that was a huge difference.
From what I understand, especially on a record like Friends, the process in that era became a lot more collaborative compared to when Brian was taking the reins, and I know that you have songwriting credits on that record. For you, how did making a more collaborative record like Friends compare to some of the earlier Beach Boys records?
Oh, it was a wonderful experience, but I’m just happy to have material to sing to.
You also wrote “California” on Holland. What do you remember about writing that song?
I remember watching the sun come up on the West Coast, on the mountains. I could see the horizon coming out ,literally the shadow of the horizon of the earth, and I thought, Wow, “Horizon edges quick up the mountain’s way.” People were probably like, What does that mean?! But, you know, it gives you food for thought. [John] Steinbeck was a big influence on me here; Travels with Charley is a book about traveling with his dog, stuff like that. Very earthy stuff. And then I loved “California Girls” so I put it to that tempo, that cowboy tempo. And then Neil Young came along and helped me finish it [decades later] for my own personal album, [2010’s] A Postcard from California. He sings the second verse. That was very nice of him to do, and we had a lot of fun doing it.
What’s your personal favorite Beach Boys song?
I love Brian’s solo thing, the one he did for Smile, [“Surf’s Up”], that my son [Matt Jardine] actually sings in my band, I have a band called Endless Summer Band. I think that’s a magnificent piece of music, and I enjoy doing that every night when we go out and do my solo tours. It’s a very special moment in the show, for Matthew to sing it too. It’s just great.
After Endless Summer came out and became such a huge hit, and it sort of turned the band into a bit of a nostalgia act, where the earlier songs were so popular again and you were touring on them, how did writing new music differ after you had begun this second act in the mid ’70s where the early ’60s songs were now driving the band?
They weren’t the kind of songs that you toured on necessarily, because everyone wants to hear the hits, unfortunately–sometimes we’d be able to perform a few of them. We actually had an unplugged tour, which I really enjoyed, where we were able to go out and… you could hear the lyrics a little better. We were able to continue the songwriting experience and have the hits too, so it was a nice combination of the two, to be able to do both kinds of music in the same performance. We tried everything, and it always gets back to songwriting. The best songs in the world to sing are Beach Boys songs.
