Al Jardine says the death of Brian Wilson “was not expected” and that, when he last saw Wilson in May, he believed his fellow Beach Boy was recovering from some of the many health setbacks he’d suffered. Although resuming any substantial concert appearances was out of the question for Wilson after their last tour together came to an abrupt halt in 2022, Jardine had harbored a hope that, when he hits the road this summer, fronting Wilson’s longtime road band, there was a chance his friend of 65 years might be able to come up on stage. But the architect of the Beach Boys‘ sound was reported on Wednesday to have died at age 82.
“I saw Brian about a month ago, and he looked like he was on the mend,” Jardine told Variety on Thursday. “We were in the living room just chatting, as he was having a blood oxygen test. He had a nurse there, and she said, ‘Well, things are looking good,’ so I was not too concerned.
“I thought he was going to be with us for some time. I was looking forward to him coming to the rehearsals in L.A. And I ordered a piano to be there for him” in case Wilson should be able to show up for a guest appearance and take his familiar seat behind the keyboard, regardless of whether he could perform. “So it’ll be an empty seat, I guess,” Jardine said.
Jardine was taken aback, in a pleasant way, by something Wilson blurted out when he first arrived at his home a month ago.
“I was on my way out of L.A., and I stopped by to say hello. And it’s a funny thing — the first thing Brian said to me, when I came in the door, was, he looked at me and he said, ‘You started the group!’ Just like that! I said, ‘Well, that’s nice, Brian. But I think you helped a little bit, too.’”
That memory on Brian’s part felt like a bookend moment for Jardine, “because we bumped into each other at El Camino, the junior college, when we were going to school there in L.A.” at the beginning of the ’60s, when they were both fresh out of nearby Hawthorne High. “And I said, ‘Hey Brian, we gotta start a group’ — about the same language, almost the same words” as Wilson uttered in their last visit. “And I thought, wow, that’s interesting, and we had a good laugh about that. You know, Brian’s always been real direct like that, very unfiltered. And he spoke what was on his mind, and I thought that was kind of cool. It was unlike him, because normally he’s gonna be quiet, and he won’t offer anything, to be honest with you, to most people. But we always had a very close friendship.”
As for how he’s reacting to the news, Jardine — who is one of two surviving original members of the Beach Boys, along with Mike Love — says, “I get emotional. Unfortunately, yeah, I tend to tear up. But I’m OK.”
He’s continuing with preliminary rehearsals for the tour he is going to do with Darian Sahanaja and other longtime members of Wilson’s band as a solo artist, starting July 4. Those shows feel like they will have an added import now. “I think it will keep the spirit alive, and I think, yeah, it’ll be more meaningful, possibly,” Jardine says. In part, that’s because they have long been planning to throw in some material from the “Beach Boys Love You” album of the mid-’70s that was the last one produced and largely written by Wilson.
Jardine reminisced about the complementary relationship that Wilson had with the other band members during their heyday in the 1960s, and the isolated occasions they would come back together after that.
He describes his professional relationship with Wilson as “musically sympathetic, and I appreciated almost everything he did, and he tolerated most everything I did. No, I’m kidding. But he liked my songwriting. Through experience, he was a great teacher, and all of us learned how to write original material because of him, original material, as we watched him at work. And he was a wonderful vocal coach. He knew how to deliver a vocal and (translate) the kind of sounds that he heard in his head. We were equally beneficial to each other, in that regard, because without us, he wouldn’t have had anyone to interpret the music. So it’s a great marriage, and I felt very included in the family. It was three brothers (Brian, Carl and Dennis Wilson) and a cousin (Love), and then they accepted me as an equal, which was a wonderful feeling. We just always had that feeling of belonging. Musically, we worked very hard at our craft. We were the engine, and he was a starter, clicking it off with all that great music that then we delivered.
“I couldn’t have had a more bountiful experience than sitting around the piano, learning the parts and hearing them all come back to us as an ensemble. What a trip that was,” Jardine continues. “Often, we wouldn’t even hear the songs” before entering the studio to set to work on executing the vocal parts. After Wilson retired from the road just a few years into the Beach Boys’ success, “Brian would do the tracks while we were out on tour, and later on, we’d just come in straight into the studio and start singing. He had all the parts ready in his head, and he’d just deal ’em out to us, and with very little fanfare, we’d just start finishing the songs that he had started while we were gone. It was really amazing when I think about it. Because we were gone quite a bit, so he had to be very patient and wait for us to come home. That really got on his nerves, because he was so excited to share the music with us. But it worked out really great for us: We’d go and do the hits and he’d be writing the next album.”
The blend was simple, in one regard, at least on paper: “Mike usually carried the baritone. I carried the top soprano. Brian was alto, and Dennis and Carl were in the middle. That was the relationship we had musically.”
But nothing in the complex world of Wilson’s musicality could ever be boiled down to anything remotely resembling a formula. Jardine still gets stuck thinking about one session where he feels he failed to come through perfectly — the exception that proves the rule, maybe. “There’s one song in particular — (1964’s) ‘All Summer Long,’ a great little tune. But we sang flat. At least I know I did, because I could hear my part. And that always bothered me. There were so damn many parts. That wasn’t like just a little three-part harmony thing; it was like five parts. All guns firing on that one. Normally he would catch it if we were flat, you know? But for some reason he didn’t. We were in a big hurry at the time and we were trying to catch up and keep up with him, basically. And every once in a while, one gets away, you know? But now I hear it now and it’s kind of charming because it’s kind of, like, human, you know? It’s not perfect. Sometimes you have to accept that it is what it is.”
The surviving members of the Beach Boys all got together for a 2012 reunion tour. But prior to and following that, there have been two bands touring the group’s material — the officially licensed Beach Boys, led by Love and sometimes including Bruce Johnston (who joined the group later in the ’60s), and Wilson’s group as a solo artist. Jardine first joined the latter on tour for a special “Pet Sounds”-themed outing in 2006, and then came back aboard with Wilson in 2014, all the way through to the final dates in 2022.
Prior to the pandemic, Jardine says, Wilson was engaged on stage. There would always be some fans who, wary of Wilson’s stillness and lack of affect at the center of these huge ensembles, wondered if he really wanted to be out there. Jardine says he very much did, even if his well-known psychological issues prevented him from being anyone’s idea of a demonstrative rocker.
“He was not at all uncomfortable on tour” for that long run of tours, Jardine says. “He enjoyed being out in the road with his family — his adoptive family, which is really what his band was. I came along a little bit later and kind of completed this (circle), You know, our friendship endured, and he needed the support (on lead vocals). I could sing a lot of the songs that he wasn’t gonna sing, that he didn’t want to sing. And so we shared a lot of leads and a lot of good times together. So, no, he was quite comfortable on the road. I didn’t have to nurse him along or anything like that.”
In 2022, though, things were different, before they were called to a halt. “There was no trauma to speak of until that very last tour in ’22. He kind of went silent and began to suffer the effects of long-term COVID, I was told, so I think that was a turning point for him. He became detached.” And after multiple back surgeries, Wilson had to use a wheelchair or a walker. “His infirmity must have been really depressing, not being able to walk again” without the walker. Even then, Jardine says, Wilson found comfort in being out on the road, though his ability to participate wavered from night to night.
“He was with his adoptive family, and we all loved him, and he knew it, and he savored every moment,” Jardine says of that last tour. “Until he got on stage. And then he might decide, ‘Well, I’m just gonna let them do it.’ Who knows what was going through his mind, but he would check out on that last tour, And that was hard work for him; he was fragile and tired and exhausted from probably that long-term COVID thing” — which Jardine says band members were not aware of until after the decision to stop the tour was made. “So, he became, on stage, not the entertainer that everyone thought they were coming to see.”
It is a challenge, but one Jardine feels he is up to, to hit the road again with most of the members of that same band now, now as primary vocalist. Of course Jardine is known for being the lead singer on “Help Me Rhonda” and other Beach Boys classics, as well as a harmonist. But now that this version of the band is going to pay tribute to the “Love You” album as part of the nightly setlist — partly because there is a boxed set commemorating the group’s mid-’70s material due this fall, and partly by the fandom’s popular demand — there is more to be worked out.
“Thank God for Teleprompters,” he says. “I never used to have one in the past, but now it’s gonna be essential, because there’s some deep cuts that we’re adding that we haven’t done before, and a lot of pickup things that I never sang in concert any of these songs, other than ‘Honkin’ Down the Highway’ from that particular album.” Of the Brian songs that he has been most looking forward to performing from “Love You,” which tends to be one of the favorite albums of hardcore Wilson cultists, “I think my favorite’s gonna be ‘Roller Skating Child.’ I love the ‘Airplane’ song, and of course there’s ‘Solar System,’ two quirky little things that we all liked a lot. And of course my favorite, I think,” from “Love You” is “The Night Was So Young,” “because I love ballads. And I can’t wait to play the real high guitar part on that, that little answer guitar. And those will be a few pleasurable moments, in between the fear of failure.”
He says, “This is a part of the repertoire that has been under-appreciated for so long, and bringing some light to it, in Brian’s memory, will, I think, really enhance it. I think we’ll shed light on what he had accomplished, and we’re looking forward to it. If we can get by. If we can get through it emotionally. I’ve got a feeling there’s gonna be some tears up there, but we’ll just have to get through it somehow.”
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