Yes, arguably the best psychedelic pop group of the 1960s have commenced their official 50th anniversary reunion tour, which is mostly significant because it represents, at long last, an admittance by Mike Love that the group of session musicians he's been touring with for over a decade are not actually the Beach Boys. However, you don't need me to tell you that Mike Love's an asshole (although I will spend a great deal of this post doing so); the sheer, inordinate amount of Google search results for "mike love asshole" speak for themselves. Unless at some point he decided to make a quick buck in the porno industry, there are a lot of people who don't like Mike Love.
Four guitarists? This band must be heavy as shit!
At a Beach Boys show in 2012, you are presented with the band's classic lineup of Love, Brian Wilson, Bruce Johnson, Al Jardine and David Marks...wait, wait, wait, what? Now, perhaps there was a typo in every single one of my Beach Boys CDs, but surely, aside from a brief reappearance in the late '90s, David Marks hasn't played on a Beach Boys album since 1963. Two years before Bruce Johnson joined the band. So, this is less a reunion than an amalgamation of whatever former Beach Boys happened to be sitting around on their asses and were willing to help Love rake in some dolla. I can imagine the conversation now...
RECORD COMPANY MAN: "Whoa, shit man, just realised...Carl and Dennis are dead. How are you supposed to reunite and make some cash?"
[Snorts enormous line of coke and ground-up tofu]
MIKE LOVE: "Hey, hey, chill. The Beach Boys are still the same lean, clean, money-making machine they always were.
[MIKE eats a child, because he's an asshole]
RECORD COMPANY MAN: "What's the plan, Mikey? You wanna sue Brian again?"
MIKE LOVE: "Nah brother, Brian's in the Beach Boys again now. Didn't you get the memo?"
RECORD COMPANY MAN: "No, I'm a cretin. I think I snorted it. What are you going to do about the missing members?"
MIKE LOVE: "You remember that David Marks guy?"
RECORD COMPANY MAN: "No. Who the fuck is David Marks?"
MIKE LOVE: "You know...that dude who played guitar for us?"
RECORD COMPANY MAN: "Mike...I've lost track of the amount of session musicians the Beach Boys have had over the years."
MIKE LOVE: "Hey, fuck you! I'm an asshole! You think I don't know what I'm doing? Eh? Eh? Fuck you! You misunderstand me. He was an official member."
[MIKE is tired out from his tirade, and snorts a line of money]
RECORD COMPANY MAN: "Suck it. Seriously?"
MIKE LOVE: "Yeah, back in the '60s."
RECORD COMPANY MAN: "You were pretty hip in the '60s."
MIKE LOVE: "And he didn't play on that Pet Sounds cockjuice or that SMiLE cowshit. Just the surfing crap."
RECORD COMPANY MAN: "Ok. Call up this Damian Sparks fella. He can join."
[Maniacal cackling]
Even Dennis and Carl Wilson are participating in the reunion from beyond the grave, presumably because Mike "asshole" Love bullied them into doing it. The saddest thing is, they're slaves to the record company; despite the fact that this band contains Brian Wilson, arguably the greatest pop melodicist ever to live, Capitol don't even trust the group with selecting the tracks for their new album. Come on Capitol, they're big boys now. Then again, it'll probably be full of half-baked self-parody surfing bullshit, because they're a group who've never worked out why they were so great.
Now, let's all sit back and listen to the ferociously multitracked, MOR strains of the sexy new jam from my main men from Cali State, the Beach Boys...
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