The Beach Boys are still celebrating ‘Endless Summer Gold’ on the road

Mike Love of The Beach Boys performs during their “Endless Summer Gold” tour on July 28 in San Jose. They’ll arrive next weekend in Temecula and San Diego. (Nhat V. Meyer/Bay Area News Group)

UPDATED: August 25, 2024 at 6:02 AM PDT

By Tim O’Shei

Some bands sell themselves, and after six decades singing about sun, surf and sand, you’d think the Beach Boys are one of them. But still, here’s the lead singer calling on the phone, just before 9 a.m., a bit ahead of the appointed interview time.

“This is Mike Love calling,” he says.

You recognize his voice. You know it from TV clips, from his appearances decades ago on “Full House,” and even from his music. Love’s speaking voice, distinctive and a touch nasally, is similar to his singing voice.

“My schedule got a little twisted this morning,” he says.

Love was calling to promote the Beach Boys’ summer tour, which arrives in the aera next weekend. The band will perform Saturday at the Pechanga Resort Casino in Temecula, then again next Sunday, with special guest John Stamos, at the Rady Shell at Jacobs Park in San Diego.

Like many Americans, I suspect you grew up with a sun-splashed fascination for California and surfing and all things “Fun, Fun, Fun,” and that’s largely because our parents had some Beach Boys albums that you popped into the stereo.

From left, Bruce Johnston, David Marks, Brian Wilson, Mike Love and Al Jardine of musical group The Beach Boys pose backstage at the 54th annual Grammy Awards on Sunday, Feb. 12, 2012 in Los Angeles.

You suspect you’re not alone in that. Thousands, maybe millions of fans likely discovered the Beach Boys in the same way, and when Love calls back an hour later, you ask him if that’s reflected in the age range of the crowd.

“It’s amazing, because sometimes there are four generations out there: grandparents, their kids, and then kids’ kids,” Love says. “Literally the entire family can come out, which is awesome because our family has always been based on music. Music and sports.”

This is a tale told in the lore of American pop culture. Love grew up in Southern California singing at family gatherings with his cousins Dennis, Carl and Brian Wilson. Those at-home sing-alongs were the building blocks of the Beach Boys’ complexly layered harmonies, and they weren’t limited to the four boys. Aunts, uncles and cousins ed in; some played the grand piano, organ or harp in Love’s childhood home.

To Love’s point about sports: Some of the family would ascend to basketball fame. Mike’s brother Stan Love played in the NBA, and his nephew (and Stan’s son) Kevin Love is a five-time All Star with Minnesota, Cleveland and Miami.

The Beach Boys are shown in this 1966 file photo. From left are Al Jardine, Mike Love, Dennis Wilson, Brian Wilson and Carl Wilson. (AP file photo)

But music, above all, shaped the family’s legacy. Love is the only original Beach Boy in the group now: Dennis died in 1983; Carl, in 1988. Brian Wilson, the composer of nearly all of the Beach Boys’ most famous songs, went off the road in the 1960s to focus on working in the studio, and has since split away amid a spate of family and business issues. The fifth member, Brian Wilson’s childhood friend Alan Jardine, performs with his own Endless Summer Band, and sometimes with Wilson.

“I hope people get a chance to see the Disney+ documentary,” Love adds, referring to “The Beach Boys,” a two-hour documentary on the band released in March. “It goes over the origins of the group and how we sang harmonies together as little kids. For every holiday, we’d all get together.”

Love loves being a Beach Boy, and Love loves selling the Beach Boys, too.

The Disney+ documentary is little different from other Beach Boys history pieces. Most of the books and films on the band focus — rightly — on the drama among the , and on Wilson’s struggles with his personal demons. But this one focused on the love between the band and family.

“That was because of Frank Marshall’s involvement,” Love says. Marshall is the filmmaker and producer behind smash franchises including “Indiana Jones” and “Back to the Future.” Marshall, who directed the 2024 documentary, “wanted to show the family connection and the real love,” Love says. “We loved singing together.”

Love referenced his early days working with Brian in their teens and early 20s. (The cousins are close in age: Love is 83; Wilson, 82.) “We were so close and such good friends, and we had nothing but harmony and humor together,” Love says. “We would get together and crack each other up. That’s how we would term it: ‘Crack it up.’ “

Those crack-it-up sessions produced generational songs: Wilson would sit at a piano “and structure these fantastic chord progressions. He was so brilliant with that.” Love, a voracious reader who loved wordsmithing, added lyrics.

On our phone call, he starts reciting them: “I would come up with things like, ‘I’m picking up good vibrations,” he says, “or ‘Round, round, get around, I get around,’ or ‘Inside, outside U.S.A.,’ or ‘Let’s go surfin’ now, everybody’s learning how,’ or ‘I wish they all could be California girls.’ “

Hearing Love say those words is like plunking a quarter into the jukebox in your brain. You start singing along in your head to a medley of Beach Boys tunes: “Good Vibrations,” “I Get Around,” “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” “Surfin’ Safari” and “California Girls.”

“I wrote every word of that, but I was not given credit by my Uncle Murry (Wilson), who istered the publishing — and I didn’t even know what publishing was when we started out,” Love says.

Ah, now he’s getting into the tougher parts of the story, which — like most families — has fissures and disappointments. The Wilson brothers’ father, Murry Wilson, was the group’s first manager. He helped them secure a deal with Capitol Records in 1962 — a smart move that led to the Beach Boys’ surf and car songs launching to the top of the charts — but he “was abusive to his sons, in particular Brian. He was not a nice person.”

The Beach Boys ultimately broke away from Murry as manager, and Love later utilized lawsuits to get co-writer credit — and collect royalties — on many of the songs. Those multiple legal proceedings, which cumulatively spanned decades, essentially split the Beach Boys into multiple touring groups.”I think that was kind of where we lost it,” Jardine says in the documentary. “You go, ‘Wait a minute guys, hold on here. What’s the deal?’ ” And an older clip of Brian Wilson quotes the songwriter as saying, “After that, we sort of got separated, a little bit.”

While the documentary doesn’t dwell on the lawsuits or breakups, Love is candid on where his relationship with Brian Wilson stands today.

“There have been ups and downs in our relationship, and these days, we don’t really even talk much,” he says in the film. “But you know, if I could, I’d probably just tell him that I love him, and nothing anybody could do could erase that.”

While the hard times split the band, they didn’t irrevocably break the family or the bond. The Beach Boys did reunite for a 50th anniversary tour in 2012, and more than a decade later, in a scene filmed for the final moments of the documentary, they reunited on Paradise Cove beach in Malibu. They exchanged smiles and fist bumps, and sat in a circle, Love next to Wilson, clinking glasses.

They may not be “cracking it up” anymore, but they’re still together. It’s reminiscent of the Beach Boys music. It’s no longer new or fresh; it’s something more enduring. It’s lasting.

“When those songs hit, and those harmonies hit, the divisions go away,” Love says on the phone, presumably about the crowds, not his bandmates. “Everybody is enjoying things in unity and harmony and positivity.”