02.04.2010
Mike Love Not War: The Beach Boys in Manila
THOUGH ARGUABLY A NOVELTY GREATEST-HITS TYPE OF TOURING ACT, MIKE LOVE’S UPDATED BEACH BOYS IS STILL A BAND TO BEHOLD
“Mga bata,” I heard a guy in his fifties mutter dismissively, a sly reference to me and my girlfriend, as we try to locate good seats in the Araneta upper boxes. I was wearing a Brian Wilson: Pet Sounds 40th Anniversary shirt, so I felt impervious to baby-boomer sarcasm, and sort of snide, too, because tonight’s Beach Boys show—or any of the Beach Boys shows these days, for that matter—does not feature its mainman. Brian, the only surviving Wilson brother in the band (Dennis and Carl have passed on), lost in the legal wrangling over the “Beach Boys” name to his cousin Mike Love, who is heading this particular incarnation of the band. Al Jardine, the other surviving member of the original lineup, is touring under a different name (the Endless Summer Band), and is reportedly doing 60s-era Beach Boys stuff as well. The last time I was at the Big Dome, it was a terribly hip Nine Inch Nails crowd that filled the arena, the fist-pumping variety that could not be bothered with ad slideshows and cold pizzas. Tonight, I might as well have voluntarily agreed to have a nightcap with my uncles and aunts: throngs of middle-aged men in office garb, titas in leggings, and a dating grandpa-grandma couple here and there.
And then Ramon “RJ” Jacinto and his band attempted to warm up the crowd with an oldies set, with harmonies and occasional lead-vocal work courtesy of Jose Marie Chan’s sons. Their rendition of The Beatles’ “Paperback Writer” was superb, though RJ faltered occasionally on the George Harrison riff. When the Beach Boys appeared onstage, second-generation Beach Boy Bruce Johnston was the first to greet the crowd, along with bassist Randell Kirsch (who in a way was Brian Wilson’s more energetic stand-in), guitarist Christian Love (who was sort of replacing Carl Wilson), drummer John Cowsill (Dennis Wilson obviously, though he does some vocal chores that were originally Al’s and Carl’s), guitarist Scott Totten, and second keyboardist Tim Bonhomme. They all settled in first before having a big to-do over the entrance of their band leader, cheering, “Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Mike Love!” And then Love, who is almost 70, stepped in, visibly older both in the looks and motor-skills department.
Love looked like he was having extreme difficulty during the band’s opening salvo. While this is his (and Bruce Johnston’s) band (because they belonged to the seminal 60s lineups), it served the group well to have vibrant younger players in its roster. “Fun, Fun, Fun” wouldn’t have been much fun, fun, fun and “Wouldn’t it Be Nice” would have been far from nice if they weren’t there. It wasn’t after they played the slower songs—the beautiful “Surfer Girl” for one—that Love regained composure enough to push the crowd to dance to “Little Deuce Coup.” One gets reminded of the post-Brian Wilson incarnation of the band in the early 70s, when Brian quit touring to devote his time to serious writing (the legendary “aborted” project Smile was a product from this period) and Mike took full control of the band’s live sets. Let’s just say that Love, in these shows, was close to a Southern Californian version of Mick Jagger: a hip-swiveling, gyrating, open-vested frontman who was clearly the life of the party. At the Araneta on January 27, 2010, though the mojo is long gone, Mike still had that glint in his eye, a look that told you, “You wanna dance…now”—subtle instructions from a veritable Hawaiian-shirt-wearing jedi. My girlfriend posited, though, that Mike Love was probably just trying to flirt with some girls in the front row with his infamous pogi-lolo squint.
It was probably the band’s second set that was the most musically demanding (and, transitively, the most rewarding, especially for Brian fan-boys like me in the house that night). Randell Kirsch’s vocal work on “Don’t Worry Baby,” for one, was just heavenly, but when he harmonized along with Mike Love on the sweetly dissonant “Warmth of the Sun”—which Mike introduced with some sweet name-checking, “My cousin Brian and I wrote this in 1963”—one quickly realizes the depth and genius of the Wilson brothers. “Warmth of the Sun,” a minor hit for the band, was more introspective than the Wilsons’ early hits, and it was a more mature way of appreciating, what else, the beach (and the warmth of the sun when you’re in one). The loved one in the song has left, yes, but “I still have the warmth of the sun.” (In all of this, by the way, Mike is enjoining everyone to wave their mobile phones in lieu of the traditional lighters—oh, technology!) And while we’re on the subject of maturity, there’s the perennially brilliant “God Only Knows,” originally a Carl vocal penned by Brian, which in this show was reprised to great effect by Bruce Johnston. Other Pet Sounds numbers include the seafaring ditty “Sloop John B.,” and also the aforementioned “Wouldn’t it Be Nice,” which had a freshly rearranged outro (i.e., half-timed), with soaring harmonies that trump anyone else’s in the market (except maybe Brian Wilson’s touring band, led by The Wondermints’ Darian Sanahaja). The evening peaked, however, on “Good Vibrations,” and that’s sort of self-explanatory, if you know what that song requires of the vocalists.
By and large, though, a Beach Boys show is a walk down memory lane—or a dance if you may—and dance the audience did on signature surfer doo-wop numbers such as “Help Me Rhonda,” “Barbara Ann,” “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” and, well, “Do You Wanna Dance?” I sincerely wish they hadn’t done “Rock ‘N’ Roll Music” though, or drop it from their set altogether, because it is clearly a Beatles standard (albeit not penned by the Foursome as well). At the upper box, looking to our right, we saw a man in his late sixties—Love and Johnston’s age group—and he was grooving like anything. Everything was normal, except he was holding on to a crutch, and it simultaneously made me smile and broke my heart.
The days after the concert, I sampled Brian’s “That Lucky Old Sun” online, and listened to Dennis Wilson’s funky Pacific Ocean Blue for the first time (on the subtle prodding of a former Eraserhead). I did these things because, while the oldies remain gems, I guess I would rather see creativity stay alive and not be wiped away to shore, if you catch my drift.
Images from the Beach Boys’ official site, which can be accessed here.
