The Beach Boys were always around, but never at the top of my music thoughts. And I would say generally, that’s the vibe they give off in the culture. But this 2nd tier status doesn’t sit right with everyone in the group, and that tension drives this documentary, as we see the complex, intertwined, cloudy relationships and how they unfolded, from good vibrations to bad, back and forth.
How much of a family affair are we talking? Well, 3 of the main boys are brothers: Carl, Dennis, and Brian Wilson, and the others are either cousins (Mike Love) or close family friends (Al Jardin, Bruce Johnston). Born and raised in SoCal, the blonde haired kids embraced their convenient location to become THE surfer doowop group of their time in the 1960s. Everyone wanted to surf in California, exploding the band’s popularity almost instantaneously. Strange timing though, because a foursome of mop topped kids from Liverpool happened to start arriving as The Beach Boys became the biggest pop act in the US.
Showing The Beach Boys receipts is the most revelatory part of the documentary. For a while there, The Beach Boys were neck & neck with The Beatles, flip flopping #1 hits, which would probably shock most younger people. Funnily enough, while Beatlemania hit the US, BeachBoy mania hit the UK as well by the time Pet Sounds came out, topping even the Beatles on their home turf a few times. In the early to mid-60’s, both were in a mutually beneficial battle with each other creatively, one upping with each new album. The Beach Boys’s Pet Sounds especially comes off incredibly in the doc, because of how it pushed the Wilson gang from just a simple surfing harmonizing clean cut group to a real musical engine pushing musicality into a new stage.
But this doc gets stabbed by the double edged sword of musician involvement. The most interesting parts of the doc are the specific, weird ways the Beach Boys set themselves up after the early days: 1 group of family members toured, while Brian and some of his close friends wrote the music. It’s a strange, untenable mixture, as we see when the band gets to the late 1960s, and Brian’s taste diverges from the money making touring Boys. But because the doc needs all of the living members to be talking heads and tell their story, we never get any real headway into the much more interesting material, like how the rest of the group felt when the rights of the music were sold off, or all the late stage suing and counter suing band members have been doing to each other for the last couple decades. The doc addresses it…as part of a 3 minute wrap up so we can get the shot of everyone together on a California beach. While I understand how cute of an ending that is, it undercuts the real story of the group, which should have been a little bit darker and sadder in tone and style after we get past Pet Sounds.
However, color me intrigued at least. I also did undercount how many great songs The Beach Boys made, and how legitimately impressive the great ones are: God Only Knows, Good Vibrations, Wouldn’t It Be Nice, man, those songs are much more interesting than I gave them credit for. But that’s on me, when God Only Knows was the soundtrack to one of the great sitcom heartbreaks of all time.