On a Friday night in June, Mike Love took the stage at the State Theatre in New Brunswick, New Jersey for what may be one of the final performances of the Beach Boys—a moment that arrived not with fanfare, but with something closer to indifference.
The 85-year-old sole surviving original member shuffled to the microphone in his pastel shirt and baseball cap, and when he opened his mouth to sing“Do It Again,”his voice had become barely a whisper. The contrast was stark: above him, a projector screen displayed memories of the band in their prime—Brian Wilson in the studio, the members in matching sailor shirts on rocky coastlines—while below, a mostly elderly crowd sat in silence, many not even realizing who they were watching. One woman seated nearby had actually thought she’d bought tickets to a cover band.
What unfolded over the evening was equal parts haunting and deeply strange. The current iteration of the Beach Boys features drummer Jon Bolton (who joined in 2023) and vocalist Chris Cron (who arrived earlier this year), while the only current member with real tenure besides Love is keyboardist Tim Bonhomme, who signed on in 1995. Bruce Johnston, the bassist, retired from the band in March after seven decades. Carl, Dennis, and Brian Wilson are gone. Al Jardine has been estranged for years, now performing as“The Pet Sounds Band.”Love is the only one left who can legally tour under the Beach Boys name—and he’s made it his life’s work to keep that machine running.
The show itself was a collision of the sacred and the tacky. When“Kokomo”played, the screen advertised Club Kokomo Spirits, a canned cocktail line Love founded in 2022 with flavors like“Mystique,”“Excitation,”and“Kokomojito.”Stock footage of white women in polka-dot bikinis accompanied“California Girls.”The lyrics to“Surfin’Safari”flashed by in an attempt to rouse the motionless crowd into a singalong. Yet when Christian Love, Mike’s son and the band’s rhythm guitarist since 2006, stepped up to sing“God Only Knows”with an affectation of Carl Wilson’s achingly pure voice, something transcendent happened. For a few minutes, the tastelessness fell away, and the mythic power of the material—the spiritual experience Brian Wilson once felt recording Pet Sounds—came rushing back.
This is the paradox that defines the twilight of the Beach Boys: Mike Love has spent half a century fighting for recognition he never quite earned, suing fellow band members, aligning himself with conservative politics, and turning what was once America’s greatest pop group into a touring vehicle for his own legacy. The music media settled on a consensus decades ago—Love is“one of the biggest assholes in the history of rock and roll,”as Rolling Stone put it in 2016—and he’s never fully escaped that reputation. Yet he remains the only person on Earth who can deliver the Beach Boys experience, however depleted, to the dwindling hardcore fans who still crave it. The tragedy isn’t that the band is finally ending. It’s that almost nobody notices.
The Beach Boys still have dozens of shows scheduled—casinos in Minnesota and Wisconsin, runs in England. The diehards will be there. And Love, who reportedly appeared zombified in viral TikTok footage from the Atlantic City show, will keep going until the bitter end. After all, he can only die happy if he dies onstage, singing“Help Me, Rhonda”or some other relic from the Endless Summer. That’s the deal he made, and he’s going to see it through.
About the Author
Ava Hart
Ava Hart is a contributor to LocalBeat, covering local news and community stories.
