Mike Love is sitting in a blah-looking room in a Sheraton hotel in North Carolina, the garish pattern of his signature Hawaiian shirt popping against the ochre wallpaper behind him. The 83-year-old Beach Boys frontman came to Charlotte the other day to play the Lovin’ Life music festival alongside Post Malone and DaBaby, and 36 hours later he’s still in the mood to brag: “We had several thousands of people singing along to our songs,” he says in a Zoom call. “A lot of teenagers and stuff dancing around.
Pretty phenomenal considering we’ve been doing this a little over 60 years.” As fans of the Beach Boys know, “we” requires a bit of unpacking. Six decades after Love formed the band in suburban Hawthorne with his cousins Brian, Dennis and Carl Wilson and their friend Al Jardine, a Beach Boys concert these days means a performance by Love and Bruce Johnston, who took over onstage for Brian Wilson after Brian quit touring in 1965, and a number of very capable backing musicians.
(Jardine refers to this outfit as “Mike’s band.”) Brian, the acknowledged mastermind of one of America’s most transformative rock acts, eventually returned to the road and toured regularly under his own name with Jardine and other players until 2022, when health troubles forced him offstage again. So: two sets of Beach Boys, driven apart by fights over money and creative control, neither containing any of the blood relatives whose crystalline harmonies lifted the group’s music .
