New Beach Boys documentary brings good vibes. “It's a fantastic thing,” says Mike Love

A few days before the release of the documentary The Beach Boysfounding members Mike Love and Al Jardine sit in the recording studio at Hollywood's EastWest Studios, the exact spot where they recorded some of their biggest hits, including their 1966 remake of the Regents' doo-wop ditty, “Barbara Ann.”

“[Jan & Dean’s] Enter Dean Torrens. He looks at the open door. “Come on in!” Jardine recalls of a time nearly 60 years ago, when the studio was called United Western Recorders. Love joins in, “I shouldn't have,” before Jardine repeats the story. “Dean is standing next to Brian [Wilson], for there was nowhere else for them to sit anyway, and the two joined in the tune in the high place. When you listen to the harmonies on 'Barbara Ann' it sounds double. That's because is doubled. It's Brian and Rector.'

“Now, wait a minute! They didn't tell me that story,” interjects Frank Marshall, the Oscar-nominated producer and director sitting between the two Rock & Roll Hall of Famers in the studio. Marshall and Thom Zimny ​​co-directed the two-hour documentary about the group that premieres on Disney+ today (May 24). To be fair, not even a 10-hour film could encompass the entire glorious and jagged history of one of the most popular and enduring bands in music.

The Beach Boys, originally consisting of Jardine, Love and his three first cousins, Brian, Carl and Dennis Wilson, have charted 55 songs on the Billboard Hot 100 — starting with their first sunny single, “Surfin',” in 1962. and including four No. 1s: 1964's “I Get Around,” 1965's “Help Me, Rhonda,” 1966's “Good Vibrations,” and 1988's “Kokomo.”

Along with long-running hits like “Surfin' Safari,” “Fun, Fun, Fun” and “California Girls,” the Beach Boys ushered in a new wave of sound in the '60s that promised no worries as long as the surf was up. , the skies were sunny and the hot rods had open roads. The documentary examines the band's formation in Hawthorne, California, and how they became, as the documentary asserts, “America's band” — and have remained so, with their upbeat music spanning more than half a century.

“Definitely my goal was to find out how it all happened and tell each member's individual stories,” says Marshall. “It's very complicated. Some members come and go and come back. And so it was really a journey for me to explore how this team came together and what made them stand out.”

In addition to Love and Jardine, the film features new interviews with Beach Boys Brian Wilson, David Marks (who replaced Jardine in 1962 when he briefly quit) and Bruce Johnston (who joined in 1965), as well as archival footage with the late Dennis Wilson and Carl Wilson, who died in 1983 and 1998, respectively. Even though Brian Wilson is now under conservatorship—and, according to a doctor, suffering from a neurocognitive disorder—Marshall was able to incorporate small portions of Wilson's new interviews, which he supplemented with a rich assortment of previous interviews from the decades. .

Given the Beach Boys' decades of infighting—Marshall says, “When we started, they weren't talking to each other”—it's no surprise that “it took a long time to convince them that I wasn't going to just trash everybody” when he and Zimny ​​first approached the band.

While the documentary doesn't shy away from the complicated history of the Beach Boys — including the Wilsons' domineering, controlling father Murry, multiple lawsuits among the members and even Dennis Wilson's relationship with mass murderer Charles Manson — Love likes that the film leads to music. “There [were] issues and problems', but to focus on them, he says, 'would miss the essence of the amazing body of work, the amazing harmonies [and] amazing songs that reached the whole world.”

Much of the history of the Beach Boys has, understandably, focused on the inventive musical genius of Brian Wilson (Jardine refers to him as “the Thomas Edison of music”). But the documentary deliberately highlights the talents and contributions of all members — especially Love, as a co-writer on dozens of gems (including “Good Vibrations,” “Fun, Fun, Fun” and “California Girls” and as the band's energetic frontman and somewhat of a keeper of the flame, given Wilson's reticence to tour and history of mental health challenges.

“It wouldn't be the same without everyone together,” Marshall says. “The mix.”

That family mix was cultivated early on, says Love: “We'd all get together for Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, birthdays, and it was all about the music. Brian's first memory of singing, I remember him sitting on Grandma Wilson's lap singing 'Danny Boy'. Awesome.” Jardine met the cousins ​​in high school, and the mix evolved into something much more wonderful, Love says. The key to the Beach Boys' stunning vocal arrangements was “elevating your individuality” for the sake of the overall sound. “We were obsessed with it,” he says.

The documentary also examines how the rivalry between the Beatles and the Beach Boys drove each to greater heights. The Beatles' 1965 classic Rubber soul prompted Brian Wilson to create the complex, gorgeous, groundbreaking sounds of the Beach Boys' 1966 masterpiece, pet sounds, and Pet sounds showed the Beatles the potential they realized on the following year's original album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. (Although Pet sounds It didn't do well commercially at the time and, as the documentary notes, is now considered one of the best pop albums ever made.)

One of the most poignant parts of the documentary revisits Murry Wilson selling the group's music label to Irving Almo Music for a paltry $700,000 in 1969 (about $6 million in current dollars). If sold in today's market, the catalog would likely fetch more than $200 million. “My uncle Murry disrespected me and his sons. That was a huge blow, both psychologically and materially,” says Love. “We had fired him [as our manager] long before that and that was his way of responding to me and my cousins.”

Additionally, Jardine adds, in a story not included in the documentary, “We actually had a deal ready to go with another company. They had already accepted. They were going to put up the money and we were going to be partners. He deliberately went ahead and sold it to Almo.”

“It totally blew us away,” Love says, with a rueful laugh. “It affected Brian in a horrible way. I mean, he got him back. He went into solitary confinement. Was he ever the same?'

Although Love later successfully sued Brian Wilson for posting money, he prefers not to “dwell” on the bad times. “What we prefer is to recreate these songs as beautifully as possible,” he says.

And this beautiful re-creation continues. Love, who had the legal rights to tour under the Beach Boys name for decades, and Johnston are now in Endless summer gold tour, which includes more than 75 dates before the end of the year. (Wilson, with Jardine at his side, stopped performing in 2022. There are no plans for Jardine to join Love and Johnston on tour. After years of touring in different formations, Love, Wilson, Jardine, Marks and Johnston briefly reunited in 2012 for the Beach Boys' 50th anniversary tour.)

Irving Azoff's Iconic Artists Group is producing the documentary, and the film is the latest in IAG's efforts to keep the Beach Boys' music in front of listeners, having gained control of the band's intellectual property in 2021. “The documentary is an important part of the overall strategy to bring new fans into the world of the Beach Boys,” says the IAG chairman Jimmy Edwards. “The film serves as a wonderful introduction to one of the most important cultural groups in the history of popular music.”

The documentary follows such IAG-led efforts as the Grammy salute to the Beach Boys which aired on CBS last May, an exclusive Beach Boys channel on SiriusXM and an extended coffee table book produced by Genesis Publications, The Beach Boys by The Beach Boys, which was released in April. Adding to the bounty, an official documentary soundtrack also drops today from Capitol/UME featuring the band's greatest hits, as well as a new track, 'Baby Blue Bathing Suit', by Stephen Sanchez, written as a tribute to the boys of summer .

For his part, Love says IAG has “done a fantastic job” with the band's legacy. “Probably better than we could ever hope it would be.”

“The music of the Beach Boys is timeless. We're just creating opportunities to experience it,” says Edwards — noting that, since the acquisition in 2021, “we've nearly doubled The Beach Boys' social audience to about 7.5 million and seen their global audio streams exceed 1 billion for the first time in a calendar year in 2023.”

The documentary ends in 1974, with its release Endless summer, a greatest hits collection that focused on the 1962-1965 hits that introduced the Beach Boys and their upbeat music to a new generation — just as the documentary is doing now. The double album became the Beach Boys' second No. 1 on the Billboard 200, spending 156 weeks on the album chart — but, more importantly, resurrected the group's live career. They went from playing for $2,500 a night, Jardine says, to packed stadiums and eventually played to a total of 1.4 million people in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. on July 4, 1980.

In the film's poignant coda, Marshall gathered Jardine, Johnston, Love, Marks and Wilson last September at Paradise Cove, the Malibu site of the Beach Boys' first album cover shoot 61 years earlier. The scene shows the five surviving Beach Boys, laughing and smiling, enjoying each other's company and memories.

Marshall deliberately decided to use only video, not audio, but considers the reunion a great triumph. “My dream was: let bygones be bygones. Let's see the joy and what they've accomplished,” says Marshall. But his endgame was to reunite the members, ultimately deciding to return to the location where it all began. “It was really designed as a montage, a cinematic moment,” he says.

Nine months later, Love remembers it as a joyous gathering. “We sang songs together, reminisced about old times. Al played the guitar. Brian was remembering things that happened when we were in high school from 1958 or 1959,” he says.

The five band members briefly reunited on Tuesday (May 21) at the documentary's Los Angeles premiere, and Love says he sees the whole process as a gift. “We're thankful and grateful and kind of honored to have this documentary that Mr. Marshall has undertaken,” he says. “It's fantastic that it's happening at this stage in our lives.”