artsintheairpark
Unplugged and Un-beached Beach Boys co-founder Al Jardine premieres new storyteller’s show at MIM By Jimmy Magahern
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t’s about a month away from the debut of Al Jardine’s acoustic show at Phoenix’s Musical Instrument Museum, and Jardine, a founding member of the Beach Boys with a special connection to Scottsdale, is just starting to sketch together his show, a Springsteen-on-Broadway-style mix of songs and storytelling backed only by his son Matt and a media projectionist. “I’m going to start with the first song we ever recorded, ‘Surfin’,’ and I’m hoping they can place a big double bass on stage for me, because that’s what I played on that song,” he says. “They should have one at the museum, I think.” Obviously Jardine has never been to the MIM: One of the museum’s centerpieces is
its 12-foot-tall bowed Octobasse, one of the largest string instruments ever made. But Jardine plans to rectify that situation before his concert by dropping in on pal Peter Asher’s MIM show prior to his gigs. For Jardine, who lived in Scottsdale during the ‘80s when he was a familiar face around the Lasma Arabians horse ranch (he and second wife Mary Ann bred some million-dollar mares there), debuting his unplugged show at the MIM will mark a kind of homecoming. “We lived in Scottsdale for about ten years, and my wife’s parents and her brother still live there,” he says. “Our twins Robbie and Drew were born there. Those were great years, man.” If Jardine’s show shapes up anything
like his easygoing conversational style, the 75-year-old Rock and Roll Hall of Famer is guaranteed to deliver an intimate, freewheeling account of his life as the one non-family member of one of America’s most influential family bands. It was a young Jardine, an early Kingston Trio aficionado, who first recognized in next door neighbor Brian Wilson’s tuneful odes to surf, bikinis and hot rods a rich mythology worthy of its own folk music, and encouraged the three Wilson brothers, Brian, Carl and Dennis, along with their cousin Mike Love, to sing about the Southern California life they knew best. “The California that existed before we got here,” Jardine jokes, acknowledging that the Beach Boys created an indelible fantasy January 2018 Scottsdale Airpark News | 41