Beach Boys bring fun, fun, fun to the Youngstown amp
It’s been a dozen years since The Beach Boys put out an album of new material, but there is no shortage of releases 62 years after the band’s debut.
There are archival box sets culled from the group’s catalog. There is a Beach Boys documentary that premiered on Disney+ in May and a 408-page hardback retrospective “The Beach Boys by The Beach Boys” released in April.
And there’s the touring that continues with founding member Mike Love and longtime member Bruce Johnston joined by musical director Brian Eichenberger, Christian Love, Tim Bonhomme, Jon Bolton, Keith Hubacher, Randy Leago and John Wedemeyer.
That’s the lineup that will be at the Youngstown Foundation Amphitheatre, where there won’t be any sand or surf but there hopefully will be plenty of sun for the Boys’ Mahoning Valley return.
And it’s not like the group needs new music to entertain audiences. In an interview with this newspaper in 2018, Love said he knew what audiences wanted to hear, and he was happy to deliver it.
“I understand fully that people know you from what was successful and what was performed on the radio,” Love said. “The vast majority just want to have a good time, and I don’t want to disappoint them.
“I have no problem at all doing ‘California Girls’ or ‘I Get Around’ or ‘Fun, Fun, Fun’ or ‘Good Vibrations’ or ‘In My Room’ or ‘Surfer Girl.’ They’re all great songs. They’re like your children. They have different personalities, different music, different tempos, different melodies and come from different time periods. … I wouldn’t want a person coming to our show loving ‘Help Me Rhonda’ or ‘Barbara Ann’ to go away thinking, ‘They didn’t do (my favorite).’ So we do all the hits.”
The Disney+ documentary tells the stories behind the making of the hits, includes interviews with the wide range of musicians who are fans (Janelle Monae, Don Was, Ryan Tedder of The Chainsmokers) and focuses on the turmoil within the group and from outside forces.
Those incidents include manager Murry Wilson (father of Brian, Dennis and Carl Wilson and uncle of Love) selling the band’s catalog for $700,000 without consent from the band and not giving Love any songwriting credit.
“That’s rough when your uncle sells your songs without giving you any credit,” Love told the Associated Press while doing publicity for the documentary. “And it really hit Brian hard …The upside is that I did contribute. My cousin and I together wrote some great songs.”
And the music has endured. On its most recent list of the Top 500 albums of all time, Rolling Stone magazine put The Beach Boys’ 1966 release “Pet Sounds” at No. 2, behind only Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On.”
Love told the Arizona Republic earlier this year that the record was respected by their peers — Paul McCartney once called “God Only Knows” his favorite song — but it wasn’t a favorite of Capitol Records executives when they first submitted it.
“Capitol Records really didn’t know what to do with it because it was such a departure,” he said. “When we played the record for the A&R guy, the nicest guy you’d ever want to meet, he wanted something more like ‘California Girls,’ ‘I Get Around’ and ‘Fun, Fun, Fun’ because they’d had so much success with that type of thing.
But here’s an album with symphonic orchestrations and stuff, dealing more with emotional themes than, you know, the beach or girls or cars, which there’s nothing wrong with that stuff. I love it. But they just didn’t know how to handle it. Then ‘Good Vibrations’ came along a few months after that and went to No 1. and we were voted the No. 1 group in Great Britain, No. 2 being the Beatles, on the strength of ‘Good Vibrations.'”
If you go …
WHO: The Beach Boys
WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday
WHERE: Youngstown Foundation Amphitheatre, 201 S. Phelps St., Youngstown: The Beach Boys
HOW MUCH: Tickets range from $28.50 to $126 and are available through Ticketmaster.