WASHINGTON — The Kennedy Center is hosting an increasing number of live NSO Pops collaborations with celebrity musicians, from Boyz II Men to John Legend, Nas to Kendrick Lamar, even country star LeAnn Rimes next spring.
But it’s hard to imagine a band more uniquely suited to pair its heavenly harmonies with the illustrious instruments of the National Symphony Orchestra than the legendary Beach Boys.
Founder and lead vocalist Mike Love will join longtime bandmate Bruce Johnston (vocals/keyboard), Jeffrey Foskett (guitar/vocals), Brian Eichenburger (bass/vocals), Tim Bonhomme (keyboard/vocals), John Cowsill of The Cowsills (percussion/vocals) and Scott Totten (guitar/vocals) for a live two-hour set with NSO conductor Vinay Parameswaran at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall at 8 p.m. Tuesday.
“Our doing this with the symphony is just another dimension of The Beach Boys,” Love told WTOP.
This isn’t the first time the band has joined an orchestra. Earlier this year, the boys performed two nights with the Hong Kong Philharmonic. Stateside, the group has joined various orchestras across the country from Nebraska to Louisiana, including recently at the U.S. Capitol with the NSO during a live PBS special on Memorial Day weekend. But this will be the first time at the Kennedy Center.
“We sounded awfully nice, they’re a great orchestra, but this is going to be a complete show,” Love said. “Whereas the Memorial Day special was a variety show, this is going to be an evening with The Beach Boys and National Symphony Orchestra at Kennedy Center, so that’s going to be awesome.”
Indeed, certain Beach Boys songs sound as natural with an orchestra as waves with sand.
“When we did the ‘Pet Sounds’ album … there was a lot of symphonic instrumentation that’s ordinarily confined to just symphonies, but we used it in our rock or our pop music. … I’ve always felt that the opening of ‘California Girls’ is like an overture in itself … ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’ is phenomenal with an orchestra, ‘God Only Knows’ is incredible with an orchestra, and we have an arrangement of ‘In My Room’ that is just the orchestra. We don’t even sing on that one, but it’s incredibly beautiful.”
In fact, the groundbreaking “Pet Sounds” album (1966) is celebrating its 50th anniversary. Two years prior in 1964, the band’s songwriting savant Brian Wilson had retired from touring to focus on writing, arranging and producing the albums. When Love and the rest of his bandmates returned from a tour date in Japan, they got in studio to record some of the most legendary vocals in history.
“We knew it was special because the orchestrations and arrangements and musicianship for the tracks were done by the best musicians on the West Coast at the time,” Love said. “We came in and … worked very hard on all the vocals. There is a CD that exists, a box set, that just has the vocals alone and when you listen to that it’s pretty incredible how phenomenal all the vocal arrangements were.”
Today, “Pet Sounds” is remembered as one of the most important albums ever created, voted by Rolling Stone magazine as the No. 2 greatest album of all time, behind only The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” Although, you could argue “Pet Sounds” inspired “Sgt. Pepper.”
“Bruce Johnston took an acetate of the ‘Pet Sounds’ album and played it for John Lennon and Paul McCartney in England. They heard it and were very impressed and got busy on their ‘Sgt. Pepper’ album,” Love said proudly. “There was a rivalry there, but it wasn’t like a negative thing at all, it was like, ‘Oh, wow, that was great, we better do something really great, too.’ It’s like if you’re playing basketball with somebody and they have a really good hook … it makes you want to play better.”
If song hooks are like sky hooks, “Pet Sounds” was a slam dunk, featuring “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “Sloop John B” and “God Only Knows,” which McCartney calls the greatest song ever written.
“He’s been very generous in his praise,” Love said, echoing what Brian Wilson told WTOP last year.
“I actually couldn’t believe that he thought that,” Wilson said, noting the irony of the song’s inspiration. “I had just come off listening to ‘Rubber Soul’ by The Beatles. I went to my piano and I started writing ‘God Only Knows’ and I said I’m gonna make an album just like ‘Rubber Soul.’”
Yes, musical influences are often cyclical, just like life. Love is privy to this notion, suggesting that he has been marching to the sound of a symphony in one way or another for as long as he can remember.
“[The live NSO show is] something that my mother just would have loved to have heard,” Love said.
“She was so into music, she was so into opera and symphonies and all that. Music has been a fact of life since we were born in this family. That’s what got us started at family gatherings at Christmas parties and birthday parties and stuff like that. Every special occasion always involved music.”
Indeed, the Beach Boys began as a family affair between Love and his first cousins Brian, Dennis and Carl Wilson, as well as friend Al Jardine. Tragically, Dennis drowned in 1983, Carl died of cancer in 1998 and Brian battled mental illness, as chronicled in the fabulous film “Love & Mercy” (2015).
“Our music emulates life,” Love said. “In life, you have your moments where you’re introspective or melancholy, maybe something didn’t go so right or maybe you’re concerned about your life.”
From the heartbreaks to the joys, Love has compiled his life story into a new memoir, “Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy,” co-written with bestselling author James S. Hirsch.
“It’s a rather comprehensive look at my career and life,” Love said. “It wasn’t always easy to think about it. … It was emotional. Some parts of it were really upbeat and cool because we were talking about really fantastic and positive things, like ‘Good Vibrations’ going to No. 1 in 1966 and we were the No. 1 group in Great Britain, No. 2 being The Beatles and No. 4 being The Stones! So there were really highs, but there were also some emotional things like the passing of my cousin Carl Wilson.”
Through it all, Love maintains a contagious positive outlook, focusing on the good vibrations.
“There’s ups and downs, but by and large … what the Beach Boys have done musically is given so much pleasure, happiness and positive gifts to so many millions of people that if you get hung up on the not-so-great parts, you’re missing the bigger picture … A fantastic, almost miraculous body of music that has uplifted and entertained so many people for so many generations now worldwide. So that’s what I primarily choose to focus on. I’ve always been one to try to accentuate the positive.”
Click here for ticket information. The show runs approximately two hours with a 15-minute intermission.
Listen below for the full conversation with Mike Love of The Beach Boys:
