The vibrations will be good, even if the Beach Boys are old men

The surviving members of the Beach Boys have reunited for the first time in 14 years for a new album and a world tour – this will be no exercise in nostalgia.

The Beach Boys Photo: THE MARK AND COLLEEN HAYWARD COLLECTION

Anybody who grew up on the irrepressibly sunny and heart-lifting sounds of California Girls, God Only Knows and Good Vibrations will have experienced a sinking feeling at the photographs that appeared recently of a group of septuagenarians waving to the crowds at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. The surviving members of the Beach Boys were celebrating the 50th birthday of the stadium and, more poignantly, the 50th anniversary of the group itself – reunited for the first time in 14 years for a new album and a world tour which begins in America next week.

Balding, corpulent and careworn – from Boys to ageing men – can these have really been the architects of a Californian dream writ large in music of a sublime and enduring innocence?

The Beach Boys are the great American band in the way that the Beatles were the great English band – the perfect measure of the place they came from and the joys and pleasures of the times they lived in. Their early songs about the beach, surfing and hot-rods are a history lesson of California in the 1960s as the teenage Jerusalem, a place of endless summer and youthful exuberance. And the catalogue of drug abuse, premature death and internecine feuding that overwhelmed them can be read as a parable of pop music’s fall from innocence.

No other group, it seems, has been as troubled as the Beach Boys, and no Beach Boy more troubled than Brian Wilson. It was Wilson – shy, socially awkward and brutalised by his bully of a father – who so adroitly conjured in his songs the carefree teenage existence that he was unable to lead. And Wilson, in 1966, virtually single-handedly created the masterpiece Pet Sounds – an album that would elevate popular music to hitherto uncharted levels of sophistication, and top the lists of critics’ polls for years to come.

The early Beach Boys – Surfin’ USA and Fun, Fun, Fun – had borne the stamp of two of Wilson’s great musical heroes: the seamless harmonies of the Four Freshman and the rock and roll riffs of Chuck Berry. Pet Sounds drew on a third influence – George Gershwin. Gone were the paeans to fast cars and high waves, replaced with songs of adolescent yearning and loneliness and of being out of step with the times, framed in elaborate musical arrangements – “pocket symphonies”, as Wilson had it.

The sessions for Pet Sounds also produced Good Vibrations – perhaps the greatest demonstration of Wilson’s skill as an arranger and producer, the group’s harmonies woven into a dazzling tapestry of sound. His wife of the time, Marilyn, would later recall that on the night he first brought the completed record home, Wilson lay all night on the bed, playing it over and over again, with tears streaming down his face. “It was really, really heavy.”

Wilson saw Pet Sounds as his response to the gauntlet thrown down by the Beatles’ Rubber Soul – “an album made up of all good stuff”. And the producer George Martin would acknowledge that without Pet Sounds, the Beatles’ masterpiece, Sgt Pepper, recorded the following year, “wouldn’t have happened. Pepper was [the Beatles’] attempt to equal it.”
By then, Wilson, struggling once more to surpass the Beatles – and himself – with the ill-fated Smile, had begun his descent into drug-addled and bloated stupefaction, and his long struggle to return to some semblance of normality. In 1983, his brother Dennis – the group’s drummer and party animal – drowned after diving intoxicated off the side of a boat in the Santa Monica marina. Brother Carl died in 1998 of cancer. Wilson once said that the reason he thought people liked the Beach Boys’ records was “because our voices carried love in them”. But for many years love was a quality distinctly thin on the ground among the group themselves.
In a peculiar way, the fact that they should have prevailed over calamity and bitterness to reunite is the ultimate testament to the optimism that always lay at the heart of their music. For even now to listen to the Beach Boys is no mere exercise in nostalgia. It is a voyage into unalloyed happiness. Even if best taken with your eyes closed.