The Beach Boys perform onstage, circa 1964, in California.Supplied
- The Beach Boys
- Directed by Frank Marshall and Thom Zimny
- Written by Mark Monroe
- Featuring Al Jardine, Mike Love and Brian Wilson
- Classification N/A; 113 minutes
- Streams on Disney+ starting May 24
As the major and most popular voice of the California sound, the Beach Boys sold the dream of endless summers and blond, bronzed youth. They had a great run – 13 top-10 hits from 1963-66. But by the end of the decade, the summer was over and the hippie counterculturists saw the Brian Wilson-led band as squares.
Surf music and the sixties – it was fun, fun, fun, ‘til her daddy took the T-Bird away.
The Beach Boys, a straightforward new documentary now streaming on Disney+, crisply chronicles the rise and fall of a sun-splashed act that was as American as apple pie and rise-and-falls. The band’s “Wouldn’t it be nice” notion was fantasy. Directed by Frank Marshall and Thom Zimny, the film is a level-headed look at artists who promoted joy but lost their own.
The central theme is that the Beach Boys were bound by blood, and that the family band whose forte was harmonics eventually fell out of tune in many ways. The stripe-shirted Wilsons – the late Carl and Dennis, and the wunderkind Brian – were brothers from Hawthorne, Ca. Singer-lyricist Mike Love is a cousin. They were initially managed by the boys’ musically inclined father, Murry Wilson.
I referred to Love as a singer-lyricist, not just a lead vocalist. The documentary asserts that Love was underrated creatively, and that the media’s obsession with the sensitive maestro Brian came at the expense of the rest of the band.
The litigious Love went to court and won lucrative songwriting credits. The film is interested in rehabilitating his cranky reputation. The cousin weeps on camera – sand in his eye?
This isn’t the first Rodeo Drive for Californian Marshall and Australia’s Zimny when it comes to music documentaries. The former directed The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart; the latter, Elvis Presley: The Searcher and the Springsteen-starring film Western Stars. Together they break no new stylistic ground with their festival of talking heads, which concentrates on the group’s earlier years.
Brian, 81, is mostly represented through archival interviews. Now suffering from what has been reported as a major neurocognitive disorder, he was recently placed under an uncontested judge-ruled conservatorship. Earlier this week, he posed in a wheelchair alongside the surviving bandmates while attending the film’s world premiere in Hollywood.
Singer-guitarist Al Jardine speaks honestly and with integrity. He admits their image as seasoned wave riders was all marketing: “We all tried to surf, but we just could never get the hang of it.” Talking about the Beach Boys’ hit version of the folk song they titled Sloop John B, Jardine expresses regret for abandoning a folk group of his youth.
Non-family Beach Boys David Marks and Bruce Johnston are contributors with lively opinions. “Brian was lucky to have our voices to sing his dreams,” Johnston says, with no evident bitterness.
The presence of the gifted actress-musician Janelle Monáe, on the other hand, seems arbitrary. She’s a fan. Okay, got it.
I would have liked to see Paul McCartney as one of the interviewees. Still, the segment on the Beatles-Beach Boys rivalry is quite smart. The Beatles inspired the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, which in turn influenced Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Was it even a rivalry? “It’s far more interesting to think of it not as a competition, but a collaboration,” says author/music critic Josh Kun.
The doc has drama. The manager/producer father is portrayed as an overbearing, fogie presence who secretly sold the band’s publishing rights. Like the dad, Capitol Records was not supportive of Brian’s progressive artistic vision. Instead of promoting the critically hailed Pet Sounds, the label competed by releasing a compilation of the band’s tried-and-true material, Best of the Beach Boys.
(Pet Sounds, by the way, landed at No. 20 on Apple Music’s list of the all-time best albums, published this week. Sgt. Pepper did not rate.)
Dennis Wilson’s unfortunate episode with cult-leader and convicted murder-planner Charles Manson is unavoidably covered.
The film ends with a reunion of the band on California’s Paradise Cove Beach. Paradise – a sandy utopia. Were bygones bygones? Wouldn’t it be nice.
Brad Wheeler