The Beach Boys, with original member Mike Love, keep touring and playing the hits. Al Jardine, the other living original member, tours with The Pet Sounds Band to celebrate some of the more underappreciated works by the iconic band.
On Saturday, June 6, Al Jardine and The Pet Sounds Band will arrive at the Plaza Theatre and turn back the clock to the ’60s and ’70s for an evening of both hits and deep cuts. Expect “California Girls,” “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” “I Get Around” and Jardine-led classics like “Help Me Rhonda,” along with some Pet Sounds material to celebrate the record’s 60th anniversary. The band will also do a full-album playthrough of The Beach Boys Love You, the 1977 album that didn’t sell well but became a cult hit, with Brian Wilson—the Beach Boys’ primary songwriter and producer—saying it was “my favorite album we ever did.”
“We’re going to have a great show,” said Al Jardine during a recent interview. “We have a lot of material to cover. … We’ll be doing a couple of extra songs from Pet Sounds, but not the whole thing right now. We’re still rehearsing the whole album, but our primary focus is on … The Beach Boys Love You, which we do in its entirety. I think you’ll enjoy that a lot.”
The show will also feature an even deeper cut—a B-side that will be particularly relevant in Palm Springs.
“We do an outtake from the box set, one of Brian’s pre-eminent compositions,” Jardine said. “It was written for Frank Sinatra, as a matter of fact. We’re going to close the whole show with that last song after the encore. It’s called ‘Still I Dream of It.’ It’s just beautiful, and unfortunately, Frank turned it down. He probably never heard it, because a lot of times, your agents will not play stuff for you. They’ll have their own opinion about something—and I’m sure Frank would have had a No. 1 hit with this song, because it’s so perfect for him, for his style.”
Al Jardine and The Pet Sounds Band’s tribute to The Beach Boys Love You has been exciting audiences and impressing both fans and critics.
“It’s really remarkable,” Jardine said. “My musical director had to convince me, as a matter of fact. I suggested that we do it, because it’s kind of timely. We might be a year ahead of ourselves, actually. … It’s the 50th anniversary, maybe not of the release, but of the recording, and people are going nuts.”
The members of The Pet Sounds Band were handpicked by Brian Wilson before he passed away, and have proven themselves to be the perfect torchbearers of the musical legacy.
“We have to be creative and still play the hits; we’re not cheating the audience in that regard. They’re going to get all those same things and even more, because you can’t do a set without ‘California Girls’ or ‘Good Vibrations’ or ‘Fun, Fun, Fun.’”
Al Jardine
“I’m very proud of the band,” Jardine said. “… They respect the work that goes into doing what I would call a reimagined Beach Boys Love You, with better equipment, more great singers and an original Beach Boy to pull it off.”
Fans looking for more of the hits can check out the other touring Beach Boys band.
“They can do all the hits, but we have to offer something extraordinary, because we’re not the Beach Boys,” Jardine said. “I invented this title, The Pet Sounds Band, because I thought it would reflect what we are to the audiences, and what we play, what we perform, without stepping on the Beach Boys, because that’s Mike’s band. We have to be creative and still play the hits; we’re not cheating the audience in that regard. They’re going to get all those same things and even more, because you can’t do a set without ‘California Girls’ or ‘Good Vibrations’ or ‘Fun, Fun, Fun.’”
One of the members of The Pet Sounds Band is Matt Jardine, Al’s son, who delivers some classic Brian Wilson-style vocal performances.
“Brian and I, when we were touring together in the last 20 or so years, relied on Matt a lot, because those falsettos don’t come easy when you’re in your late 70s and 80s,” Al Jardine said. “Brian’s voice had changed—all our voices do—and Matt has that young, lively sound that Brian used to have in the early ’60s. We got lucky.”
Matt wasn’t a nepotism hire—he had to get through auditions with Carl Wilson.
“Carl was the band leader at the time,” Jardine said. “I said, ‘Carl, I think he’s ready.’ He put it off for a while, but then finally, Matt rose to the occasion, and he’s been with us ever since.”
The Beach Boys’ music will always honor the great work of Brian Wilson, who passed in June 2025.
“We’re celebrating his music every time we go out there,” Jardine said. “We have a few of our own things, and each one of us writes songs, but no one can come close to Brian.”
Jardine reiterated that the music is the star of the show.
“Each one of the members onstage is paying tribute to Brian, and Carl, for that matter,” Jardine said. “I tell these little stories in between numbers about who sang what and when, and then Darian (Sahanaja), my musical director, does a great job doing Carl Wilson’s parts. He’s really got it down, and the other members of the band all share in doing the leads from The Beach Boys Love You. It’s perfect. We’ve got a good balance, teamwork-wise, to pull these things off, because it’s not easy, but we have the right personalities. We’ve been working with this band for the last 25 years, so they’ve got their chops.”
Could future playthroughs of other underrated Beach Boys’ albums be possible?
“Oh yeah, if we live that long, geez,” Jardine said with a laugh. “There are so many projects that we could go to next, like All Summer Long. … We’ll see how it goes.”
While the Beach Boys’ legendary harmonies can be hard to replicate, Jardine said The Pet Sounds Band sounds “just like the recordings.”
“When you hear the band, you won’t believe it,” he said. “… It’s really amazing to have these kinds of vocalists. These instrumentalists also happen to be very fine vocalists, and that’s a rarity.”
Al Jardine and The Pet Sounds Band will perform at 7 p.m., Saturday, June 6, at the Plaza Theatre, at 128 S. Palm Canyon Drive, in Palm Springs. Tickets start at $81.50. For tickets and more information, visit www.palmspringsplazatheatre.com.
