Al Jardine Is Keeping the Beach Boys’ Legacy Alive, One Show at a Time

A
l Jardine is feeling a little uneasy. It’s about five hours until a concert at the South Shore Music Circus in Cohasset, Massachusetts, where he’ll play nearly all of the oddball 1977 LP The Beach Boys Love You with veteran members of Brian Wilson‘s touring band. Despite being a founding member of the Beach Boys himself, Jardine hasn’t performed most of these songs even a single time in his life, and he has little memory of recording the album in the first place. He’s also recovering from an illness that caused him to miss most of the rehearsals, and his emotions are still raw from attending Wilson’s private memorial service earlier in the month. 

As his 58-year-old son Matt Jardine leads the band through album opener “Let Us Go On This Way,” the elder Jardine stands in the empty hall about six rows back from the stage, listening intently. “I originally felt we should just do a few of these Love You songs,” he tells me, wearing a blue polo shirt and looking remarkably spry for 82. “They were all originally done on synthesizer. I might have to put my guitar down for some of them. That’s totally new for me.”

Although Love You is a footnote in the Beach Boys’ catalog, with none of the hit singles or pop mythology of Pet Sounds or the abandoned Smile project, it’s become a cult favorite among serious Beach Boys fans — a group that happens to include keyboardist and bandleader Darian Sahanaja, whose idea this set list was, as well as myself. As they rehearse, I find myself singing “God, please, let us go on this way” along with Matt and the rest of the group, since Love You is one of my favorite Beach Boys records, and I can’t believe I finally have a chance to hear it live. Al turns to me, genuinely surprised. “Hey,” he says. “You know this stuff better than I do.”

Moments later, Jardine walks onto the stage, takes over the soundcheck from his son, and painstakingly goes through the unfamiliar material for the next three hours without interruption. “Shall we try out one of the standards?” Sahanaja eventually asks, realizing they are also playing 23 non-Love You songs that they haven’t tried at all today. “Maybe ‘I Get Around?’” But Al shakes him off, and instead asks again for “Roller Skating Child” from Love You. 

“I Get Around” isn’t a song that Al Jardine needs to rehearse. He sang on the original 1964 recording, like practically every Beach Boys hit, and he’s performed it live well over 2,000 times, both as a member of the Beach Boys and with various spinoff acts that continue to this day. In all those years, as many of his original bandmates’ voices corroded due to bad habits and relentless touring schedules, Jardine’s remained largely pristine. That asset is more valuable than ever now, because Brian Wilson’s death means that Jardine is now offering fans the only real alternative to Mike Love’s touring incarnation of the Beach Boys — a consistently popular show, aimed squarely at casual fans, that remains devoted to the Sixties era of surfing, hot rods, and girls. 

The challenge Jardine faces is that despite his monumental role in the Beach Boys saga — that’s him singing lead on their chart-topping smash “Help Me, Rhonda,” to name just one of his contributions to one of pop’s greatest catalogs — many rock fans are only vaguely aware of him. That’s because it was near impossible to stand out in a band full of family drama and enormous personalities. Anyone who’s spent time reading about the Beach Boys knows the main characters: Brian Wilson was the genius songwriter and producer, Dennis Wilson was the madman drummer and only genuine surfer, Carl Wilson was the golden-voiced angel heard on “God Only Knows,” and Mike Love was the hot-tempered lead singer. Al Jardine, by contrast, was just the guy who was always there, singing with them in perfect harmony.

“Dad has always been a team-oriented person,” Matt Jardine tells me in a backstage dressing room. “He recognized Brian’s brilliance, and was like, ‘We’re just going to allow that to germinate and do what it does, because he’s obviously on some kind of an incredible roll here.’ And my dad was a musical contributor when he could be, like when he brought ‘Sloop John B’ into Pet Sounds. Brian once said something that made my jaw hit my lap. He said, ‘Al is our anchor. His goodness flows through the waters and onto the tape.’”

Al is such a team player that, in 2012, he overlooked years of costly litigation over the rights to use the Beach Boys name on the road, and signed on to the Beach Boys reunion tour — an improbable triumph that brought all of the band’s surviving members together onstage for the first time in decades. He then joined Brian Wilson’s road band the following year, when the reunion fell apart in spectacularly messy fashion. He was listed as a special guest on some tickets and posters, unmentioned on others, but he never complained. He was just happy to be onstage with his lifelong friend, playing the music they made together all those years ago. 

“Just hanging out with him was a joy,” Al says. “The hang was almost better than the actual performances. But Brian and I were a pretty potent force.”

Brian Wilson retired from the road in 2022, shortly before Jardine turned 80. This would have been a natural time for Jardine to retire, but it wasn’t long before he started sketching out possible ways to bring Wilson’s band back on the road with himself at the helm, as opposed to slightly off to the side. “Well, shoot, who wants to sit home and not work?” he asks me via Zoom a couple of weeks after the show in Cohasset. “It’s not fun living in the past. And I just missed the guys.”

Without Brian Wilson’s name to sell tickets, Jardine and the Pet Sounds Band — as he’s redubbed them — are playing venues on the smaller side. And with an 11-piece band to pay, Jardine had to dip deep into his own pockets to make this tour happen. “I haven’t even bothered to ask what it costs,” he says. “I’m sure I’m underwater, but I don’t care. This is my last hurrah.”

JUST ABOUT A MONTH before Brian Wilson’s death, Jardine traveled up to his home in Beverly Hills, California, for a visit. Wilson had been in failing health for years at this point, could no longer walk, and was under a court-appointed conservatorship due to dementia. But he still recognized his old friend. “He looked at me and he said, ‘You started the band,’” Jardine recalls. “I said, ‘Well, Brian, thank you, but I think you had a little to do with it, too.’”

The basic story of how the Beach Boys formed has been told so many times over the past 65 years that it’s become practically a folk tale. The version repeated the most involves Murry and Audree Wilson taking a vacation to Mexico City together in November 1961, and their three teenage sons — Brian, Dennis, and Carl — using money they left behind to rent musical instruments and record their debut single, “Surfin’,” with their cousin Mike Love and their school friend Al Jardine.

In Jardine’s telling, they quickly spent the food money on actual food, and were able to rent the equipment because his mother loaned them $300. But even this obscures the fact that they decided to create music together well before the Wilsons headed off to Mexico City. 

“I remember badgering Brian,” Jardine says today. “I said, ‘Hey, let’s make some music, Brian. Let’s start a band.’ We were at El Camino Junior College in Torrance, California. We immediately went over to the nurses’ room for some reason, where we hoped to find some people to sing with us, but nobody could sing harmonies. And Brian said, ‘Let’s go. I’ll introduce you to my brothers, Carl and Dennis. Carl has a great little voice, he can sing. And my cousin, Mike, has a pretty good baritone.’ And that’s how it started.” 

In early 1962, Jardine decided to quit the group just before they headed into the studio to cut their debut LP, Surfin’ Safari. “We only had about two of our own songs to sing at that point,” Jardine says. “I just got really tired of doing other people’s music in concert. That wasn’t interesting to me. I left to pursue my education.” (Beach Boys lore says he left to attend dental school, but it was actually an undergraduate program.) 

Jardine was replaced by David Marks, another friend of the Wilson brothers. And as Jardine attended classes at El Camino College, the Beach Boys scored nationwide hits with “Surfin’ Safari” and “409,” and began touring all across the country. Had he remained in school, Jardine would have gone down in history as the Pete Best of the Beach Boys. 

But just 12 months after he defected, Jardine got a call from Brian Wilson. “He was in desperation,” Jardine says. “He said to me, ‘I can’t handle this anymore. I can’t do it. Please come back into the band.’”

The strain of the road had already become too much for Brian, even though he wouldn’t leave the touring unit for another couple of years. Marks wasn’t a singer, and Brian needed help with the harmonies. “He knew I could sing the high parts,” says Jardine. “And I already knew most of the music.”

The only problem was that Brian failed to mention the addition of a sixth band member to his father, Murry, a notorious tyrant who served as the group’s manager. “I flew in the day after Brian called,” says Jardine. “Murry didn’t know I’d be there until I arrived at the airport. He was really pissed off.” (Murry pushed Marks out of the band in August 1963, leaving behind the original five-man lineup.)

Jardine came back to the Beach Boys just in time to lend his voice — and often his guitar and bass — to an incredible new slate of songs that Brian had just written or co-written, including “Surfer Girl,” “In My Room,” and “Little Deuce Coupe.” But Murry was never kind to the one member of the band who was not a blood relative. “He treated me like shit,” Jardine says. “No, I shouldn’t say that. But he was never happy with me.”

In early 1965, after two years of dedicated service, Wilson and Love gave Jardine the chance to sing lead on a single they’d written together: “Help Me, Rhonda.” They’d fired Murry by this point, but he still drunkenly stumbled into the studio at a session for the song, and got on the control-room mic just as Jardine was finally having his big moment. Every second of Murry’s cringeworthy efforts to guide the band over Brian’s protests were captured on tape, including now-infamous lines like “I’m a genius too, Brian,” “You guys are coasting,” and “You’re going downHILL!” 

Sixty years later, the meltdown remains seared into Jardine’s brain. “It was this giant room at RCA where Elvis worked,” he says. “I was waiting for instructions on how to sing the song. And I was in there all by myself watching this go down. It was scary. I was like, ‘Who am I supposed to listen to?’”

Jardine stayed the course through the years that followed, sticking with the Beach Boys as Brian pushed the band to new heights, as well as after Brian stepped aside to address his mounting mental health problems. Even after the psychedelic movement they helped usher in with “Good Vibrations” suddenly made them seem passé, the band continued to release an album a year, including genuine masterpieces like 1970’s Sunflower and 1971’s Surf’s Up that wouldn’t be fully appreciated for decades.

With Wilson no longer driving the band’s creative output, his bandmates were given little choice but to step up as songwriters. (To hear Jardine at his finest, check out “California Saga,” from 1973’s Holland.) And when the hits compilation Endless Summer became one of the biggest records of 1974, their shows began centering almost entirely around the previous decade’s oldies. “We knocked them dead every time we went out just playing the hits,” says Jardine. “It allowed us to grow musically at home while we could continue to entertain. It was a nice balance.”

That balance was briefly upended in late 1976, when Brian began penning songs for a planned solo album he wanted to call Brian Wilson Loves You; corporate pressure quickly forced him to rope in his bandmates and tweak the title to The Beach Boys Love You. “It was really a Brian album,” says Jardine. “But the label wanted product.”

If they wanted product that bore even the faintest resemblance to the Beach Boys’ Sixties hits, they were in for a disappointment. Unlike the days where Brian had crammed a dozen or more session musicians into a high-end studio and arranged them like a pop symphony, he created The Beach Boys Love You almost entirely on his own, using a Minimoog synthesizer that he was just learning how to work. “It’s total DIY,” says Sahanaja. “It reminds me of an indie album.”

While he’d written the songs on Pet Sounds and Smile with help from outside co-writers, Wilson composed the lyrics on The Beach Boys Love You himself. Taken as a whole, they’re a trippy journey through his fragile id as he watches The Tonight Show (“Johnny Carson”), grapples with his arrested sexual development (“Roller Skating Child,” “I Wanna Pick You Up”), and contemplates the infinite vastness of the universe (“Solar System”). The delightful lunacy peaks on the 58-second “Ding Dang,” which was written at the house of Byrds founder Roger McGuinn, an L.A. neighbor, during the course of one very debauched evening.

Jardine sings lead on “Honkin’ Down the Highway,” but was otherwise largely uninvolved with the making of the album. “Carl Wilson was guiding Brian through the process of making the record,” he says. “And you’ll hear a lot of Dennis on there. Mike and I came in and basically filled in the harmonies on the backgrounds. That was about it.” And there it stayed for the next few decades, as most of the world ignored Love You and kept grooving to those oldies on tour.

IT’S NOW AN HOUR before the doors open in Cohasset for the live debut of The Beach Boys Love You, and the Pet Sounds Band has gone into the catering area for a quick dinner. Al Jardine remains alone onstage, running through “Roller Skating Child” over and over by himself as his wife, Mary Ann, works the teleprompter. It sounds pretty perfect to me, but Jardine is unsatisfied, even stopping at one point to ask Mary Ann to add an apostrophe to one of the words so there’s no chance he’ll mess it up. “Brian would have been looking at his watch by now,” Sahanaja jokes as he heads offstage. “He’d be like, ‘Let’s move it on! Time for dinner!’”

Brian’s absence is felt everywhere, especially since the funeral just took place. It was a private event where Beach Boys biographer David Leaf and Rolling Stone’s Jason Fine, a longtime friend to Brian, delivered the formal eulogies. Afterwards, the mourners went to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where both Wilson Phillips and the Pet Sounds Band played some music, and Jardine and Love delivered brief speeches of their own.

The two of them have clashed many times over the years — they have personalities that could be kindly described as polar opposites — and eight days after the funeral, Jardine still sounds annoyed about his former bandmate’s remarks. “Mike wanted everybody to know that he wrote every single word of ‘“Good Vibrations,’” Jardine says. “I didn’t feel the compassion, let’s put it that way. Mike’s got some serious megalomania problems.”

(“That’s not true,” a representative for Love says in response. “Mike’s focus has always been on uplifting audiences around the world through the music he helped create with his bandmates and cousin Brian. His commitment has been to preserve and share this great American songbook while providing resources to fellow Beach Boys shareholders, including Al Jardine. In addition, Mike and The Beach Boys have dedicated significant time and support to nonprofit organizations using their platform to give back to communities in need.”)

When it was Jardine’s turn, he opened with, “Mike, I’ve written some songs with Brian myself. We wrote one called ‘Surfin’ Down the Swanee River.’ It just wasn’t as big as ‘Good Vibrations.’” The room, he says, erupted with laughter. He then spoke movingly about Brian’s genius and his legacy. “I was focusing on Brian, and Mike was more focused on Mike,” Jardine says. “I think that is what it boiled down to.”

Though never close, he and Love coexisted in the Beach Boys until Carl Wilson died of lung cancer in 1998. “Mike always wanted to do more and more shows every year,” says Matt Jardine. “Carl and my father wanted to do fewer shows and keep the quality up. They didn’t want to use rental gear. Their focus was always quality.”

“Mike is like P.T. Barnum,” Al Jardine adds. “He had these incredibly exotic ideas for tours. He was always looking at that next tour. He probably has a tour of Mars planned right now. I was going, ‘Let’s go back to the studio.’ And then he kicked me out of the band. It was pretty shitty.”

Al went on to form a new group that he called Beach Boys Family and Friends, recruiting Brian’s daughters Carnie and Wendy Wilson, Cass Elliott’s daughter Owen Elliott, his own sons Matt and Adam Jardine, and beloved former Beach Boys touring band members like Billy Hinsche and “Captain” Daryl Dragon. 

“Dad got his ass sued off,” says Matt Jardine. “They came after him with both barrels. It was really disappointing and sad. Obviously, they did that because he was a threat. He was a threat to their marketplace.”

“Frankly, they were threatened by me, because my band sounded better than the Beach Boys band,” adds the elder Jardine. “Mike just came down on me with a shitload of lawyers. And pretty soon I was down about a million bucks. It was pretty devastating financially and emotionally. He showed me no mercy.”

(A representative for Love disputes this, saying “Mike has never sued Al.” While the suits were largely between Al Jardine and Brother Records, the company that the Beach Boys founded in the Sixties, they were widely understood as a battle between the two bandmates.)

After all the legal wrangling was done, Al was no longer allowed to use the Beach Boys name. “Mike has better lawyers,” he says. “They wrote my epitaph: ‘You may not use “beach” and “boy” in the same sentence to describe your band.’” (To this day, however, Al gets a small percentage of the earnings from every Beach Boys show as a shareholder in Brother Records. The same percentage goes to Brian’s estate, Carl’s estate, and to Mike himself, which is on top of the rest of the money he pulls in from his gigs.)

Adding to the emotional turmoil, Al says, Brian sided with Mike in the conflict. “Brian wasn’t in a frame of mind to…. It’s tough when you’re related,” says Jardine. “You don’t go against your family members. Brian wasn’t about to argue with Mike.”

In 2000, he attempted to book shows under the new moniker Al Jardine’s Family & Friends Beach Band, but he was now competing against both Mike’s Beach Boys and against Brian’s new solo band. “We were in a no-man’s land for a number of years,” says Matt Jardine. “It was kind of like being in a divorce, because I’d grown up with that band. So to all of a sudden be persona non grata was painful. A huge part of my dad’s identity is wrapped up in being one of the Beach Boys. It was incredibly painful for him and difficult, but he’s just too stubborn to quit, so he didn’t.”

Throughout the first decade of the 2000s, Jardine’s shows were largely at third- and fourth-tier venues like the We-Ko-Pa Casino in Flagstaff, Arizona, the Skagit Valley Casino Resort in Bow, Washington, and the “Oldies Stage” at the Taste of Minnesota food festival. 

Everything changed in 2012, when the surviving Beach Boys put aside years of animosity for a reunion album and tour. Suddenly, Jardine was playing at Bonnaroo, New York’s Beacon Theatre, and other large stages across the world. “I enjoyed hearing everybody sing again, even Mike.” Al says. “It still had political overtones, believe me, within the band, but it really proved that we could do it again, and have fun doing it.”

The fun stopped near the end of the year, when Love and bandmate Bruce Johnston pulled the plug on the reunion and went on playing their own shows as the Beach Boys. “He cut us right off there,” says Jardine. “We were hopefully going to continue on doing some more, but he insisted on going back to his handpicked band, and basically left Brian and I in the dust.”

This time around, however, the Beach Boys exiles didn’t fracture into their own camps. Instead, realizing they had strength in numbers, Brian recruited Al into his solo band alongside Blondie Chaplin, who briefly served as an official  Beach Boy in the early Seventies and sang lead on 1973’s “Sail On, Sailor.” They didn’t have the Beach Boys name, but fans and critics responded warmly to this version of the band. 

A couple of years later, when longtime high-harmony singer Jeff Foskett defected from Brian’s band to Mike’s Beach Boys, they invited Matt Jardine — who has a stunning falsetto voice, reminiscent of a young Carl Wilson — to take his place. “That was very unexpected,” says Matt. “I didn’t really know what was going on with Brian and his health and where I fit into it and all of that. But it was really exciting.”

As the years ticked by in the 2010s, Brian became less and less engaged onstage. There were many nights where he simply sat behind the keyboard and barely sang, staring off instead into the distance. “He kept wanting to go out and tour, though,” Sahanaja says. “Most musicians are like, ‘You know how it is on the road, you put up with the 22 hours of the day for the two hours that you’re onstage.’ Brian was the opposite. He put up with the two hours onstage so he could have room service, be on the bus, and all that.”

With Brian’s capacity diminishing, Al and Matt Jardine became crucial parts of the show, providing many of the lead vocals. “We’d be right at the beginning of a song and Brian would start singing and then fade out,” says Matt. “I’d get on the mic as fast as I could to cover. The more uncomfortable he felt in scenarios, he just leaned on either me or leaned on Dad more and more — which was fine. That’s why we’re there, to support him, and to be there for him.”

The last tour took place in the summer of 2022, when Brian Wilson and his band played North American amphitheaters with the band Chicago, an echo of the famous “Beachago” dual-headline shows of the Seventies. Wilson was in a bad state the entire time, despite the heroic efforts of the Jardines and the rest of the band to compensate. “I sensed that something was wrong, but I later learned from his managers that he contracted long-term Covid,” Al Jardine says. ”It would’ve been really nice if they would’ve told us that so that we could understand what was going on, because we were really concerned. But we didn’t know.”

The tour wrapped up July 26, 2022, at the Pine Knob Music Theater in Clarkson, Michigan. The final song was “Fun, Fun, Fun,” with Al Jardine singing lead as Brian sat passively by his side, not singing. It was Wilson’s final time on a concert stage. 

“The decision was made right before showtime that that was going to be the last show,” says Matt Jardine.  “When we had our circle on the side of the stage right before we went on, it was really emotional. But I was still kind of in a state of disbelief, because it’s like, ‘This can’t possibly be the last show. This is still such a great act. And Brian is probably going to bounce back from this in some miraculous fashion.’ It just didn’t feel like the end to me.’”

THE SOUTH SHORE Music Circus in Cohasset is a tiny fraction the size of Pine Knob or the other mega-ampitheaters that Wilson and Jardine played on that last tour with Chicago. Posters from the venue’s Seventies heyday (Zero Mostel in Fiddler on the Roof, a double bill of The Brady Bunch’s Florence Henderson with Gomer Pyle’s Jim Nabors) line the dressing-room walls, and the grounds — which include a circus-like tent and a round, revolving stage — feel frozen in the amber of that time. Today, most bookings are acts like Rumours: The Ultimate Fleetwood Mac Tribute and Yächtley Crëw, a yacht-rock band that performs in sailors’ uniforms.

A small contingent of hardcore Beach Boys fans wait in the parking lot for the doors to open, straining to hear Jardine run through the last few Love You songs he has time to practice before they’re allowed in. It’s far from a sellout crowd, even though the stage will remain stationary, and no seats were sold in the back half of the house or on the sides. 

But there’s still a roar when Jardine and the band come out to kick off the first set with “California Girls,” “Do It Again,” “Surfer Girl,” “Don’t Worry Baby,” and other early hits. There was talk during soundcheck of trotting out “Catch a Wave,” but it was dismissed as  “too Mike Love’s Beach Boys.” They instead please the faithful with “Sweet Sunday Kind of Love” and “She’s Got Rhythm,” two extreme rarities from 1978’s M.I.U. Album — an LP that’s even more obscure than The Beach Boys Love You, if that’s possible.

This is all a warmup for the Love You set. “We’re going to do something really different,” Jardine informs the crowd after a brief intermission. “You thought the first set was strange, this is really undiscovered territory….Brian’s incredible music went undiscovered for many years, at least except for a very small minority. This is an album called The Beach Boys Love You.”

Lead vocals on album opener “Let Us Go On This Way” are provided by Sahanaja, and this entire endeavor would never have happened without his tireless work in the months preceding the show. It involved using state-of-the-art software to isolate each musical element from the original master tapes, sending them off to the band members responsible for recreating them, and then painstakingly rehearsing it all over and over.

“There’s some quirky timing going on on the record, and that was probably due to Brian, on the spot, deciding to do something in a really unorthodox way, counting measures and coming in in the most unusual spot,” says Sahanaja. “That’s just not intuitive to most people, but it was probably very intuitive to Brian. And now we have to think that way while doing it live.”

All that work is invisible as the band tears through 11 of the 14 Love You songs, sending shockwaves of joy to the devoted Beach Boys enthusiasts sprinkled throughout the stands. Some attendees, it must be noted, look fully dumbfounded by what’s happening onstage — especially during the truly bizarre songs, like “Johnny Carson” (“When guests are boring, he picks up the slack…The network makes him break his back…”) — but even they perk up during a madcap, extended “Ding Dang” and an achingly tender “The Night Was So Young.” (The latter should forever extinguish the absurd notion that Brian lost his gift after Smile. It’s as beautiful as anything on Pet Sounds.)

The night wraps up with a suite of Pet Sounds songs, the Smile version of “Heroes and Villains,” an inevitable “Help Me, Rhonda,” and a short address by Al Jardine about the genius behind all this music. “We’re all a reflection of Brian Wilson’s music and his spirit,” he says. “That’s why we’re here. We wouldn’t be here without him. That’s it. We’re his messengers.”

Despite the somewhat thin attendance, it’s hard to see the show as anything but a tremendous success. And when the Jardines and the band gather backstage in the aftermath, there’s a sense of triumph in the air. “I rehearsed ‘Roller Skating Child’ down to the nail, and I got it!” says Al Jardine. “We did a couple of flubs, but they are easily correctable.” 

That same night, Mike Love’s Beach Boys played a festival in Lörrach, Germany. It’s one of the roughly 120 shows Love has booked for this year. But his set was limited purely to the same well-known songs he’s been performing for 60 years. “They’re trapped in a box,” says Matt Jardine. “They’re forced to play the hits over and over and over and over again. But what he’s done has forced my dad to really try and think outside that box.”

The future of Al Jardine and the Pet Sounds Band is a little murky outside of a smattering of U.S. dates on the calendar in the late summer and early fall, before they head to Australia in October. They hope to book larger venues next year and find a way to make this endeavor at least break even for Al, and they’re not opposed to the idea of maybe one day reviving Smile and Pet Sounds. I tell Al that big plans like this don’t sound like someone on their “last hurrah.”

“I just don’t like being away from home as much as I used to,” he says, “but if we could do a residency somewhere, perhaps on Broadway, that would be fun. Before we even talk about something like Smile, let’s get Love You done.”

Broader questions linger about what happens to the Beach Boys touring license once Mike Love, now 84, decides to hang it up, whenever that day may come. If Al remains fit and vital, might it revert to him? “I think that would be an incredible opportunity,” says Matt Jardine. “We could probably bring a lot of what we’re doing with this band. We’d have a lot more material to choose from. But under the licensing agreement, I think they have to play well over a hundred shows a year, and I don’t know if Dad is up to doing that.”

Al isn’t so sure he wants to do that, either. “I would definitely retire it unless Matt Jardine and Mike’s son, Christian, maybe want to go out and use the name,” he says. (Christian Love currently sings in the touring Beach Boys band with his father, handling many of the high vocal parts on songs like “God Only Knows.”) “I don’t know if anybody would see it, but you never know. The music is so powerful, and there’s always new generations coming along that might want to hear these songs.”

As I say goodbye to Al in Cohasset, his thoughts go once again to Brian. “It’s too bad Brian couldn’t be here to see this tonight,” he says. “What a shame. But it’s almost like he’s not gone. I never really saw him much anyway, even though we talked on the phone. But now he’s always here, in the music.”