In February 2023, Al Jardine was sitting in a private loge box at Hollywood's Dolby Theatre with his on/off Beach Boys bandmates Brian Wilson, Mike Love, Bruce Johnston, and David Marks, watching the Grammys' all-star salute to the band he co-founded with Love and the Wilson brothers six decades ago in nearby Hawthorne, Calif.
"It was nice," Jardine recalls wistfully of that night. "I remember I told Mike, 'We should all get back together and work again, tour again.' And he looked at me, then looked at Brian" — who was sitting at the opposite end of the balcony from Love — "and said, 'I don't think he can do it.' He said, 'The way he is now, no.' I thought to myself, 'Well, that's pretty rude. Why can't he just give it a try?' That bothered me. ... But Mike just didn't have an open mind to that, and you can't force people to work together if they don't want to work together. That's too bad. It would've been an ideal time to do it."
Fast-forward to May 2024, and the 81-year-old Brian Wilson has just been placed under a court-ordered conservatorship because, according to legal documents, he is suffering from dementia. Love is currently over in London promoting the Frank Marshall/Thom Zimny-directed documentary The Beach Boys, which premieres May 24 on Disney+, while Jardine has chosen to spend the weekend on the opposite end of the Earth, performing Beach Boys classics with the Licorice Pizza All-Star Band at Sunflower Farm Music Festival benefit in Maui.
But Jardine doesn't seem very bitter. Yes, occasionally during his conversation with Music Times at Maui's Woodrose studio, where the Licorice Pizza All-Star Band are rehearsing, he throws in a sarcastic barb about Love's current "little Beach Boys band" lineup and how "Brian and I are like second cousins to that situation, so it's just kind of sad.'" Or, there's a sadder moment when he realizes that now, with Dennis and Carl Wilson gone and Brian presumably retiring for good, "We don't have any Wilsons. I've never thought about that. We're Wilson-less."
But Jardine says he's still in regular communication with Love. "We talk a lot, actually, in spite the fact we aren't in the group together anymore. We actually do. It's funny how you can kind of set things aside," he muses. And he remains optimistic about Brian's condition, saying, "He's hanging in there. I think he's better now than he was, because the guys in his band have been visiting him. The Brian band comes over and they sing songs. They all get together and sing."
And Jardine, at 82 years young, is optimistic about his own musical future, brightening as he talks about a few solo songs he "can't wait to share with everybody" in the coming months. "We don't have to have to finish and master 10 or 12 songs to release an album anymore," he points out — a surprising statement from a man who played on some of the most important LPs that kickstarted and defined the album era, like All Summer Long, which turns 60 this year, and, of course, Pet Sounds. "You don't even need four songs! That's gone now. If you have a good song, you can pretty much put it out there and people can hear it."
Jardine has recorded an "incredible" and "very bluesy" song called "Highway 101" that's about "going to Mexico and enjoying yourself back in the '50s or '60s," as well as a remake of "Crumple Car" ("a cute little song about little rusty car; I just love that little tune") by his friend Denny Aaberg, who gave Jardine permission to rewrite some of the lyrics. But then Jardine casually mentions a "little thing" he recorded a while back with another friend, Neil Young, before divulging more details.
"Neil's plaintive voice, it's so beautiful. It's just spectacular. It gives me a chill," gushes Jardine, who recorded with Young when the two remade the Beach Boys' "California Saga" for Jardine's 2010 solo album, A Postcard From California. "We did a couple of songs together then and I said, 'Hey, could you put your voice on this one? I've got this idea..."
Jardine says that unreleased 2010 outtake, "My Plane Leaves Tomorrow," is about "a new soldier going to war. He's just beginning to understand why he joined [the army]. He had nowhere else to go. He was looking for a purpose, that kind of thing. ... It's pretty deep. It's not necessarily [an anti-war song], it's just about the reality of it and what happens to a young man when he's inducted or joins up. You don't really know where you're going to be next, and it's kind of scary, but it's also kind of beautiful. I have to finish mixing down that one later this month. I'd like to get it out there as quick as I can."
A very different track Jardine has in the works is "Islands in the Sun," which he describes with a sly chuckle as something "Mike Love would be incredibly jealous of! It's very 'Kokomo'-like in vibe, musically. A lot of fans always want to hear ["Kokomo"] and we're kind of sick to death of it, to be honest with you. So, I've spoken to Mike about this in the past, about this particular song ["Islands in the Sun"], and he never got back to me about it. He doesn't seem to be interested in going back to 'Kokomo,' and I kind of get it, because he's probably thinking in other ways now as an artist. But this, God, it's right down the 'Kokomo' landscape, about an island in the sun. And it's been long enough now — Jesus, it's been 20 years, actually almost 40 years, since 'Kokomo.' I think it's about time for another one. So, look out, Mike — you could've sung the lead!"
The Beach Boys' Johnston actually sings on "Islands," along with Jardine's son and Endless Summer Band-mate Matt, but Al takes the lead, explaining with a shrug, "My speaking voice is kind of quiet, but I can belt it out when it requires. It's just something that happens to you inside. ... And I'm singing a part that is so interesting in the intro. I can't believe I even did it myself, but it's actually triple-tracked in a baritone, the way Mike would sing his baritone parts because he has that excellent low voice, which is a big part of the Beach Boys' harmonies. But somehow, I came out with that inner voice; I don't know, it just happened. And I'm going, 'How did I do that?' But Mike's going to go, 'You ripped me off!' So, we will see what happens. Mike, just know I told you so."
Jardine says it was Brian Wilson who "basically taught me how to sing, in the style that we're singing now. I was a folk singer originally when we created the band; I was more from the folky, Pete Seeger, Kingston Trio era, that kind of thing. And Brian taught me how to sing more current things. ... The family voices were always important, but I happen to also be able to sing pretty good, and it just kind of worked. I can't explain it. ... We were really good in the studio, but it was actually more fun singing live. It was a good era, a very innocent time — and we got a No. 1 album out of it," he adds, referring to Beach Boys Concert, which became the first live LP to top the Billboard album chart, also 60 years ago.
Beach Boys Concert is actually Jardine's favorite Beach Boys album, associated with his fondest recording memories. "We had the most fun recording live because we sang better live, I think," he explains. "The best of our [studio] albums were a little bit of torture. It wasn't a lot of immediate gratification. It was such hard work all the time. It was like having a job, like working in a steel mill or something. You had to go. You didn't want to go, because you knew it was going to be hot or it was going to be difficult — not just physically, but mentally — to show up every day and every night. We usually started working later in the night. Brian would wake up, who knows, at 1 in the morning, and say, 'Hey, I got something. Come down to the studio.' So, that got to be kind of normal, and that normal was constant. We had Pet Sounds and Smile, and working on two of those projects at the same time, that was like burnout time. I enjoyed singing five-, four-part harmony, so my favorite stuff was the early stuff that we cut our teeth on."
Jardine hasn't stopped hoping he'll sing with Brian again. "His voice is still great; it's a different tone now, different timber," he insists. "I'd like to have him finish a vocal on something that's on my Postcard album, actually, because he did a beautiful counterpart, but we had a modulation in the song and he didn't sing the modulation for some reason. I thought I could just grab it and put it on a whole song, which is an old trick we used to do. But he needs to sing the modulated part. It's on a song called 'And I Always Will,' which is a real beautiful ballad. He's amazing. He'll come up with a part you can't even imagine, and you go, oh yeah."
It remains to be seen if that new version of "And I Always Will" will ever be completed, but in the meantime, Jardine is planning to head to England (ironically, where Love is at the time of Jardine's interview, conducting his own interviews about the past) to launch his future releases. "I figure if you go overseas, you might get some good success. And then who knows, it might reverberate back," he says. "I have to get it done — get it done in May. It's almost too late.
"Wait, what am I saying?" Jardine interrupts himself, laughing. "After all these years, it's never too late."
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