MUSIC
IN THE SPOTLIGHT: AL JARDINE
The Founding Member of the Beach Boys Embarks on a Rare Solo Tour think it’s better to do this than to be besieged by publishers to write a book. Whenever I start to go into detail to do it, I go into such detail I can’t get past the first chapter!
BY LEE VALENTINE SMITH
O
FTEN OVERSHADOWED BY fellow Beach Boys Brian Wilson and Mike Love, Al Jardine is an integral part of their legacy. As bassist, guitarist and harmony vocalist, the affable You’re billing this as “from the very first musician has contributed to some of the song,” so that would be “Surfin’.” greatest moments of the band from the Right, we start with the very first song earliest days of the group. It was actually and before the show starts the media Jardine’s mom who loaned the fledgling is showing the recoding of the song at outfit the money to record their first Brian’s house. It’s the nucleus of the whole songs in Brian Wilson’s house. thing. Then I come out and play the big Now in his new show “A Postcard From ol’ double bass which is what I played on California: From the Very First Song, With the record. Then I put that down, pick a Founding Member of the Beach Boys,” up the guitar and we just plow through Jardine starts the evening with “Surfin,’” the catalog. the first song the Beach Boys recorded, and takes his audience on an intriguing You mentioned the trio format, that’s journey of hits, rarities and the stories gotta be a blast for you behind the songs. because I know you were Backed by his son Matt influenced by the Kingston Jardine and musical Trio early on. director Jeff Alan Ross, MARCH 26 That’s how I learned the show is a musical how to sing. I loved their City Winery memoir for one of classic harmonies, style, positivity rock’s often-overlooked citywinery.com/atlanta and just the fun of that geniuses. INsite spoke sound. They were really the with Jardine by phone folk-singing Beach Boys, from his home near Big Sur, California. with their Hawaiian influences.
AL JARDINE
Your career spans decades but you’ve only released one solo album, A Postcard From California. Right and I’ll do a couple songs from it in the show. I like the “Postcard” song because it’s symbolic of so many families who moved to California after the war. After the war years, people were wanting to start all over again.
Has that sort of tropical allure always been an influence? Yeah, there’s nothing like the tropics especially when you’re a cold weather boy like I am. The Wilson guys grew up in L.A., so they don’t even know what cold weather is. Brian’s still in that area and Mike Love is in San Diego, so they really don’t have a clue!
Including your own family from Ohio. That’s right. My dad said, ‘Hey, we’re going out west.’ And we sure did! We went as far as we could and wound up in an exciting place called San Francisco.
Even your first bands were tropical flavored. Your first one was The Tikis, right? I think so; that sounds about right. Yeah, we were The Tikis and then The Islanders. We were a trio knock-off band. Then when I met Brian Wilson, we became a Four Freshmen-type band. That changed everything. We got into very complex harmonies but we were still folk. We were singing about surfing, which is folk music and car songs. It’s all about the folks, you know? We got lucky, but I must say we were talented.
Who knew what that move would eventually lead to at that point? Exactly. Actually it was my mother I have to thank for that because she kept prodding him to move to warmer climates. San Francisco is cold, like I say in the song. Very warm people but very cold weather. She kept pushing the envelope and they both loved Los Angeles so that’s where we ended up. And you’re back up the coast in the Big Sur area. Yeah now I’m cold all over again! My mom would probably encourage me to go back south, but it’s extremely beautiful here. It’s like following the highway on the back of the album, there’s a little map to mark the sights and the destination points you reach musically and physically. You’re in a good musical location now, from the big reunion tours with the Beach Boys a few years ago that morphed into the Brian Wilson shows of the last few years to this stripped-down experience. This is a lot more fun. I’d forgotten how much fun it is to sing as a trio. My son Matthew is an extraordinary singer and percussionist and my musical director is Jeff Alan Ross who also works with Peter Asher. It’s really fun and exploratory. It gives me a chance to actually talk. I
That definitely helps. That does help. But I always say, don’t listen to the naysayers. What I’ve learned is that often people don’t want you to succeed. They want to be the ones, they don’t you to be the ones. So they go, ‘Oh you’ll never make it with that stuff.’ But we didn’t care because we enjoyed doing it so much. You heard enough of that negativity from [Brian’s dad] Murray Wilson in the family living room, you didn’t need to hear it from anyone else. Yeah, he said, ‘You’ll never make it,’ too. You’re right! I think I’ll tell that story. In fact, I just may include it in the monologue. It was tough. We all had to go begging to my mother to make the record because he didn’t believe in us. That’s insane. Well he just couldn’t relate to the music. He was from another generation and it
didn’t appeal to him. I think it was more about musical taste. But he learned to appreciate it, let’s put it that way. The last time we talked you were at Capitol making That’s Why God Made The Radio in 2011.Now in retrospect, what do you think of it? There were such high hopes for a Beach Boys reunion record.
It’s a distant memory to me. It was just a necessary step in the evolution of the final moments of the Beach Boys. Now that’s done and the rest of us are off doing our own things. Other than Mike Love, who still thinks he’s the Beach Boys. He has the illusion that he is the Beach Boys. But he’s having fun and the rest of us are having fun. Brian and I are having a lot of fun!
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