Let Them Run Wild

On a new documentary about the Beach Boys

“It was funny. That image we were trying to get away from—it’s what saved us,” says Al Jardine, one of the founders of the Beach Boys, at the very end of the new Disney+ documentary about his band. “And that reenergized our career. We got a second chance.” The image is sun, surfing, hot rods, and the California myth, and the context is the summer of 1974: less than two months before Richard Nixon resigned, a Beach Boys greatest hits record known as Endless Summer was delivered to record stores, transforming a wondrous, volatile, and commercially-suspect rock band into the greatest nostalgia venture anyone had ever seen. Endless Summer climbed the charts to number one; the Beach Boys, left for dead as a 60s relic, were back.

It makes sense that Frank Marshall and Thom Zimny’s documentary, simply titled “The Beach Boys,” represents 1974 as a moment of unalloyed triumph for the band. At this point, the steward of the Beach Boys legacy is their pugnacious and hammy frontman, Mike Love, a perpetually polarizing presence among fans. Love, at eighty-three, still tours, though not with Jardine or Brian Wilson, one of the great pop songwriters in the history of music. There are confounding legal reasons for that, just as there are certain imbroglios a Disney documentary of the band will not address. What stands above is the music, arguably the most stunning to emerge from any rock act anywhere, and the rest of the story might be trivia and dross, six decades’ worth of tangled narrative, swollen mythos, and lurid spectacle.

Writing on the Beach Boys can feel like writing on America. The task, if done right, is immense: so much sublimity, so much sprawl. There are facts that can be recited, that must be entered into the ledger—that the Beach Boys were founded in 1961 and never, on a technicality, broke up, that they defined the early and middle 60s with their surf guitars, empyreal harmonies, and strikingly complex arrangements, innovating pop like few artists before or after; that they were mostly a family affair, three Wilson brothers (Brian, Dennis, Carl) managed by their abusive father (Murry), and a first cousin penning lyrics and singing lead (Mike); that Brian, the oldest brother, born two days after Paul McCartney, was the American Mozart, driving the band, repeatedly, to the top of the charts while reimagining the very nature of recorded music; that the band, at its peak, rivaled the Beatles, and may have scraped higher artistic peaks; that they were from the unfashionable Los Angeles suburb of Hawthorne and, through their music, transformed California into a dreamworld, despite their inner anguish; that they made Pet Sounds, entirely conceived by Brian, which is widely considered one of the greatest albums ever recorded; that Brian, not long after, descended into mental illness; that Charles Manson once recorded music in Brian’s home studio.

What do with all of that? Where to begin? If the new documentary—timed to no particular anniversary but perhaps an open acknowledgement that the living current and former band members, all in their seventies and eighties, will only be around for so long to tell (again) their tales—fails on many fronts, it does linger on the question of the band’s relation to the Beatles. And this will always be most interesting to me, as a great admirer of both bands but an individual, residing in a clear minority, who believes more deeply in the achievements of Brian and his bandmates.

The Beatles got the best of all worlds; the Beach Boys only got some. For a clean decade, the Beatles burned bright, always in vogue, celebrated by high and low culture alike. They were beloved and extraordinarily popular as the lads in suits and mop tops, belting out ballads of young love. They were revered as the avant-garde, heralds of a psychedelic era that still proved as lucrative as the sepia-toned world they escaped. Each album was an unbridled success. They created trends and then topped them. To be a Beatles fan was to be like everyone else but still, somehow, retain a touch of the singular. Experimentation did not soil them in the eyes of the public. Their break-up in 1970, traumatic at the time, only cemented the lore. They would never play live again. History has allowed the Beatles to be everything to everyone. They are not held captive by Please Please Me. The fan who still prefers the pre-acid Beatles understands what came next. “I am the Walrus” and “Getting Better” live harmoniously in the mass consciousness with “Love Me Do.” Paul McCartney is an uncomplicated titan, and people flock to his concerts with the gratitude that he is still here, knocking out the hits. No one expects him to be twenty-three again, as they long did for Brian. And John Lennon, dead at forty, is comfortably deified.

The Beach Boys are, in many ways, a peculiar band. To most of humanity, they will never outrun their early 60s selves, the adolescent crooners of surf and car culture. “Surfin’ U.S.A.” and “Fun Fun Fun” and “California Girls” are so melodically embedded in popular culture that few can remember when they first heard any of the songs. They grew into the ultimate Boomer act, Mike Love with his goofball hats and his tambourine, John Stamos drumming in the “Kokomo” video, beckoning them for cameos on Full House. The songs are catchy, but so what? By the latter half of the 1970s—when Endless Summer made the Beach Boys big enough again to sell out arenas and secure multimillion dollar record deals— they had regressed into an oldies act, their number called. They would make money forever, but never be taken as seriously as they deserved to be. To invoke the Beach Boys and Beatles together—to declare, in fact, the Beach Boys at their best could match and surpass them—can still seem like sacrilege.

But the Beach Boys did. In the 1960s and briefly in the early 1970s, they produced some of the greatest and most staggering pop music the world has ever known, the very “symphonies to God” Brian promised to deliver up. Through 1966, Brian was the band’s chief songwriter, arranger, and producer, possessed of an even greater ambition than his idol, Phil Spector, and a more native genius. His voice, reaching a soaring falsetto, seemed to recall the enchanting castrati of the old world. He had the pathbreaking insight, as the writer and academic Justin Smith-Ruiu argued, that it was the products of mainstream commercial culture, ratcheted to their very limits on the West Coast, which offered the greatest potential for avant-garde exploration. Brian, like Andy Warhol, was a capitalist transcendentalist.

Another early reality of the Beach Boys, despite their peerless harmonies, was that they were deceptively weird—a superstar musical act melding and violating old traditions. They managed complex, a cappella glee-cub arrangements with sophisticated chords and modulations. They brought jazz harmony to surf. They smashed together Chuck Berry, the Ventures, and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, Brian’s compositions outstripping whatever rock had previously brought to bear. Brian couldn’t make the Beach Boys alone, but they could not exist, in those years, without him.

The Disney documentary can’t quite capture this. If past documentaries, like Endless Harmony, trotted out A-listers like Jackson Browne and Elvis Costello to explain the impact of the Beach Boys’ music, Disney has settled for the junior varsity. No one is really sure why the singer and songwriter from the middling pop band OneRepublic is allowed to expound at length on the Beach Boys, or why longtime chroniclers like David Leaf are sidelined for an academic and music critic who wasn’t even alive during the 1960s. Told in a too-tidy two hours—if any band, beyond the Beatles, needs an anthology series, it’s the Beach Boys—the documentary resides chiefly in the 60s, when the Beach Boys, in less than two years, rose from obscurity to great fame on the strength of Brian’s songwriting and studio work. Obsessed with the Four Freshmen, a popular 1950s vocal group, Brian deconstructed their harmonies and banged out compositions on the family piano. Murry, his father, longed to be a successful songwriter, and never got much closer than hearing one of his songs performed by the Lawrence Welk Orchestra; Mike Love, in his autobiography, argued it was Audree, Murry’s meek wife, who had more musical talent. Murry was wrathful and physically abusive, saving his worst for the rebellious middle child, Dennis, though the old unverified family legend goes that he bashed Brian so hard he made him deaf in one ear. Murry, however, wasn’t merely psychotic; for preternaturally talented, if occasionally unfocused, teenagers, he could be useful, driving them harder to succeed and ultimately getting them, after a regional hit and several rejections, a record deal with Capitol.

From there, it was kismet. Brian, in an unprecedented fashion, decided he wanted to use studios beyond the Capitol Records basement and produce the albums himself. Executives were skeptical but relented because Brian was too good and the hits kept coming. Each early album was an evolutionary leap, with the band’s third, Surfer Girl, hinting most at what was to come: the layered harmonies, subtly ingenuous song structures, and themes of love and loss. The Disney documentary barely lingers on the individual albums and elides so much history that viewers would not know that some of the Beach Boys’ most canonized early songs, like “Don’t Worry Baby” and “In My Room,” were not a product of the Brian Wilson-Mike Love songwriting partnership. Mike, who frequently wrote lyrics for Brian’s songs—Brian would unnecessarily fret that his own lyrics weren’t good enough—would be sidelined throughout the 60s for other collaborators, including Roger Christian, the car-loving disc jockey who penned lyrics for many of the automobile-themed hits, and Gary Usher, a local songwriter who mind-melded well with Brian before Murry chased him away.

The British Invasion changed music forever. And it spooked Brian and the band, who were scoring hit after hit and finding ever-larger crowds on a frenetic touring schedule. They’re in Australia and New Zealand, as the documentary recalls, when the Beatles make their landmark appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. The Beach Boys come back to a changed country, the Beatles now ascendant. Marshall and Zimny dig up archival footage of Brian slagging “I Want to Hold Your Hand” (Brian has dementia now and appears sparingly in the documentary) and the boys are plainly unnerved by what’s in store. But unlike most American acts of the time, they’re able to rise, even in the shadow of the Beatles. “I Get Around” hits number 1 in 1964, and two of their marvelous pre-Pet Sounds albums, The Beach Boys Today! and Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!), are released in 1965. A retooled “Help Me, Rhonda” is another chart-topper, and “California Girls,” with its astounding orchestral prelude, shimmers across the pop landscape. The B-Side, “Let Him Run Wild,” is nearly as good, the vibraphone, horns, and Brian’s piercing falsetto achieving pop bliss. “The Little Girl I Once Knew,” a standalone single released near the close of that magical year of 1965, was a John Lennon favorite. What the documentary never spells out is that Today!, in particular, anticipates Pet Sounds, with its sensitivities and neuroticism married to lush chamber pop. It’s the pinnacle, arguably, of the Brian-Mike partnership, with “Please Let Me Wonder” and “Kiss Me Baby” topping off a sensational B side. These albums are made possible by Brian’s decision to quit touring. At the end of 1964, he has a nervous breakdown on a flight to a concert, and he correctly surmises he’s of best use to the band dreaming up new hits and engineering them in the studio, not playing bass and singing to screaming fans. He also begins using LSD, which was, in those years, disastrously potent.

The documentary is, at least, a useful capsule for this era. There’s plenty of photographs and live performance footage likely missed by casual fans. Marshall and Zimny spell out the trajectory of the band’s shifting lineup, as Jardine, a Hawthorne High classmate of Brian’s, departs not long after their first single is released, believing his future lies in pre-dental studies. David Marks, a neighbor who played guitar with Carl, joins up when he’s just thirteen, and remains in the band until clashing with Murry and departing in 1963. By this time, Jardine is back, and he’s filling out the Beach Boys’ harmony stack and contributing his folk sensibilities, eventually talking Brian into recording a cover of “Sloop John B,” which remains a Beach Boys staple. Glen Campbell, soon to be a country and pop superstar, briefly tours as Brian’s live replacement, but it will be a young staff producer and musician at Columbia Records, Bruce Johnston, who becomes a full-time Beach Boy.

The Beach Boys, as a musician friend recently pointed out to me, have a somewhat curious and uneasy relationship to Pet Sounds, their masterpiece. Other bands in their position would probably center the album even more in their lore: songs like “God Only Knows” and “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” will endure for centuries, as long as there are human beings alive to hear them. The Zombies, who were not nearly as commercially successful as the Beach Boys in their heyday, eventually realized their legacy rested on Odessey and Oracle and they embraced the album, in their promotional materials and public messaging, as much as possible. Pet Sounds is, undeniably, famous, and has been reissued, lavishly praised, and rediscovered by newer generations of fans. But Love’s edition of the Beach Boys, and much of their posture post-1974—it is dizzying to think the Beach Boys have been an oldies act for a full half century—has been, in some form, an implicit dismissal of the Pet Sounds legacy. A de facto Brian solo album filled out by the elite L.A. session musicians known as the Wrecking Crew—and a lyrical collaboration with an otherwise obscure jingle writer named Tony Asher—Pet Sounds was the apotheosis of the Brian Wilson myth, which did match reality. A marketing campaign, billing him a genius, may have driven him insane, but it was absolutely true. Vocally, Pet Sounds is a true team effort: Carl’s ethereal lead on “God Only Knows,” Al carrying “I Know There’s An Answer,” and Mike rising to the occasion on “That’s Not Me.”

It was an album of dolor and doubt; it went against the sun-dappled sensibility of the band, and none of the tracks made it to Endless Summer. Its peak chart position, at number 10, was viewed as a deep disappointment in 1966, with the band used to breaking into the top 5. Capitol Records did not want to seriously promote Pet Sounds. They wanted a surfing band. Never mind none of the members, absent Dennis, ever surfed. In the U.K., with Johnston playing the record for the enraptured Lennon and McCartney—Marshall and Zimny wisely have Johnston recall this episode—the listening public is much more attuned, and the Beach Boys are heroes there. By the close of 1966, with Brian’s pocket symphony, “Good Vibrations,” selling a million copies and hitting number 1, the Beach Boys are outpolling the Beatles in New Musical Express, a leading British music magazine.

Commercially, it was downhill from there.

Smile was Brian’s intended follow-up to Pet Sounds, his “teenage symphony to God.” Beset by growing bouts of mental illness and paranoia, as well as the skepticism of his bandmates of a project so alien to the contemporary pop landscape, Brian walked away. Smile was never finished, though gems would trickle out in subsequent albums. “Surf’s Up,” written with Van Dyke Parks, whom is not interviewed for the documentary, might be the best, an equal match to “A Day in the Life” and great enough to be featured on a pop documentary hosted by Leonard Bernstein. The attention, though, only further crippled Brian. A pared down and somewhat befuddling—if ultimately underappreciated—album called Smiley Smile was rushed out instead. In subsequent decades, it would be popular with those coming down from acid trips.

From there, the documentary is in a hurry to reach 1974, even though this era, a kind of wilderness period for the band when they were at their most democratic and unconventional, is quite intriguing. Brian, his psyche fracturing, was in retreat. Wild Honey, a wonderful R&B album, features plenty of Brian compositions but a production credit for the full band. Friends and 20/20 are uneven, but boast enough gems, including “Time to Get Alone” and Dennis’ eerie “Be With Me” on the latter album, to be standouts for any other major act. Carl, the youngest brother, was the unquestioned leader, and Dennis, the wild drummer, was improbably emerging as the second best songwriter in the band, taking up piano and crooning gorgeous, moody ballads. Dennis, too, picked up pretty young women in 1968 who belonged to the Manson family. Soon, the impressionable 23-year-old rock star was boasting to the music press about his new guru “Charlie” and letting the cult debauch itself in his rented mansion. Manson longed for a rock career, and Dennis even recorded a version of one of his songs for 20/20. (“Never Learn Not to Love,” to Manson’s chagrin, was popified and is still a dynamic listen.) Dennis cut ties before the Tate-LaBianca murders, which came at record producer Terry Melcher’s old house; Melcher, a close Beach Boys associate, had been introduced to Manson through Dennis and entertained, for a period, recording the cult leader’s music and making a film based on his followers.

Marshall and Zimny have plenty on Manson—we learn of Dennis’ eventual terror, and his guilt from associating with the Family—and a drive-by, if mostly accurate, explanation of the Beach Boys’ faltering commercial standing in the late 1960s. The image the Beach Boys had projected was an ill fit for the new counterculture, even if Carl, quietly, was a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. They made the career-scuttling mistake of backing out of the Monterey Pop Festival. They did not play acid rock, roots rock, or socially conscious folk, and they were less savvy than the Beatles, who fast embraced the counterculture and made the late 60s as triumphant as their early years. None of this, necessarily, was inevitable. Crowds were diminishing for Beatles concerts in 1966 and the “bigger than Jesus” controversy was taking its toll. But once a studio band, composed of two and a half geniuses and perhaps a third in George Martin, they were primed to dominate until their dissolution.

The documentary, sadly, has almost nothing of substance to say about the early 1970s, when the Beach Boys pumped out a run of albums—Sunflower, Surf’s Up, and Holland—that were some of their very best, with numerous highs like Dennis’ “Forever” and Brian’s “Til I Die,” which has the most haunting coda of any pop song. Disc jockeys, regarding the Beach Boys as unhip, stopped playing their records, and Sunflower couldn’t even break into the top 100. Marshall and Zimny make no mention of the band’s new manager, a sharp-eyed hustler named Jack Rieley who had the insight to reposition the Beach Boys in the early 70s as brainier, edgier, and just a bit more socially aware. Surf’s Up and Holland charted far better than Sunflower, which the documentary never notes. And it only manages, for a short while, to discuss that the Beach Boys became the rare multiracial band, recruiting South African musicians Blondie Chaplin and Ricky Fataar to fill out the lineup when Johnston left and Dennis drunkenly injured his hand. Chaplin speaks onscreen while Fataar does not. Holland is brilliant because of them, Chaplin especially, who sings lead on “Sail on, Sailor,” a classic single that, ridiculously, goes unmentioned. “Leaving This Town,” primarily a Fataar composition, is an overlooked treasure. (Oddly, the fact that George Lucas’ American Graffiti helped kick off the Beach Boys nostalgia wave, in 1973, is not referenced at all.)

“Brian was lucky to have our voices to sing his dreams,” Johnston says in the documentary, and this is true. If Disney wanted to give the Beach Boys the Beatles treatment, there would have been attention and care dedicated to the period, post-1966, when the Beach Boys operated as a full-fledged band. Instead, we’re hurried past the early 70s and strategically cut off at 1974. No mention of Brian’s further decline, his notorious years in psychiatrist Eugene Landy’s captivity, or his brief display of a more crooked genius on the proto-punk The Beach Boys Love You. No exploration of Dennis becoming the first Beach Boy to release a solo album or his relentless slide into drug and alcohol addiction, culminating with his drowning death in 1983. No mention of Dennis marrying and impregnating a woman who claimed to be Mike Love’s daughter; no mention, either, of Mike’s numerous marriages and affairs. No mention that Al Jardine was ultimately wrong—the Beach Boys were reenergized in 1974 and made a boatload of cash, but they would never, collectively, produce any music of great consequence again. Beyond “Kokomo”, the 80s albums and singles are dreck. They would happily confine themselves to a coffin of kitsch, if they becoming, until Carl’s death from lung cancer in 1998, one of the great live acts of their time. The 2012 reunion album, “That’s Why God Made the Radio,” is superior to their 80s work, and impressive coming from men hitting their seventies. But it’ll never stand up against anything released before 1974. Brian’s long-lived and improbable solo career is never noted, either. If Brian’s new music, post-1970s, wasn’t particularly impressive, it was striking enough he found the will to make it or, in 2004, finally finish his version of Smile with the help of the Wondermints, an L.A. rock band.

Instead of dwelling on the actual Beach Boys reunion of 2012—and how it crumbled due to Mike-fueled infighting—the Disney documentary stages a new one instead. All of the current and former living band members, minus Chaplin and Fataar, reunite on Paradise Cove, where photography for the first Beach Boys album was shot. The old men are shown on cushioned chairs under a white umbrella, toasting glasses of water. A vocal coda from a little-remembered Surf’s Up track “A Day in the Life of a Tree” plays in the background—if the choice is unexpected (Rieley, their old manager, actually sings lead), it’s also fitting, a blend of melancholia and uplift. What we don’t hear is what any of the bandmembers say to each other. “The positivity far outweighs the negativity,” Mike manages in a voiceover. Indeed. But that positivity—that genius—can only shine through so much in projects like these. If this is the final word on the Beach Boys, they deserve better.