It’s great to hear that former Beach Boy Al Jardine has joined former BB producer and creative leader Brian Wilson on the latter’s “Pet Sounds” fall tour, and, from the sounds of it, his “Brian Wilson Band” for certain future tours and engagements.

This is wonderful news for Beach Boys fans who, wishing to see and hear any kind of “combined creativity” involving the surviving members of the group, have had to settle for the so-called “Beach Boys Band” fronted by former members Mike Love and Bruce Johnston currently touring around the country – which, to be frank, is nothing more than a creatively-spent and pathetic money-grabbing rolling “greatest hits” package masquerading itself as a legitimate concert event. Hurts me to say it, but that’s the unvarnished truth.

(Ed. note: While “The Beach Boys” as a group has never been formally “dissolved” – in fact, the surviving members recently reunited, albeit briefly, atop the Capitol Records tower this past summer to celebrate the 40th anniversary of their landmark “Pet Sounds” album and the recent double-platinum certification of their 2003 “Sounds of Summer” compilation – it is generally conceded that the group ended as a creative, united entity upon the death of guitarist and vocalist Carl Wilson back in 1998.)

Jardine was one of the founding members of the group, having been an acquaintance of Brian’s while the two attended Hawthorne (CA) high school; the story goes, it was his mom who sprung for the cost of renting an upright acoustic bass for the group’s initial “formal” practices in the Wilson brothers’ family room while their parents were away on a weekend trip. After the group’s initial success, he went away to Ohio to attend dental school, but Brian thought enough about the sonic quality of his voice to call him back into the band in 1962 after the Wilson’s neighbor (and Jardine’s replacement) David Marks was fired from the band.

I’ve always been a big fan of Alan Jardine and the critical role his voice played in the Beach Boys harmonic vocal mix. Back in their hit-making heyday, Al’s voice usually sat between Brian’s magnificent falsetto and (drummer) Dennis Wilson‘s husky tenor. Some of the finest examples of their classic harmonic sound with Al’s voice present are “Fun, Fun Fun”, “Don’t Worry, Baby”, “California Girls”, and “Sloop John B”. If you’re looking for a clearer example of Al’s fine voice, his best-known lead vocal was undoubtedly “Help Me, Phonda”, and less so, on “Then I Kissed Her”. He was also responsible for suggesting Brian cut the Beach Boys’ hit version of “Sloop John B.” and, later in their career, Huddie Ledbetter’s “Cotton Fields”, which became a huge hit in Europe when the band’s American popularity was at a low ebb at the close of the Sixties.

Another critical role played by Jardine in the band was in concert, where, following Brian’s departure from the touring band in 1964 after his first breakdown, he took over Brian’s falsetto part and most of the songs where Brian originally sang lead. It was in this way that the concert version of “Heroes and Villains” came to be “owned” by Al, and rightly so. Don Cunningham, publisher of Add Some Music, the excellent, now-defunct Beach Boys “fanzine”, wrote that Jardine’s voice “is complex in its geographic allusions – country/urban/eastern/western – so that he lends additional support to the song’s referral to the Americam experience.”

Michael Bocchini, in an essay originally published in Add Some Music’s September, 1981 issue, characterized Jardine’s importance to the Beach Boys and their overall sound as follows:

The importance of Alan Jardine to the Beach Boys’ sound, and perhaps its’ psyche, was recognized early on by Brian. Alan’s stay at dental school ended when he was aked by Brian to embark on the group’s first major American tour, and to replace David Marks, who had replaced Alan after the group’s early and modest success.

Brian Wilson was creating a lasting metaphor for contemporary America from the momentary icons of the 1960s: surf, cards, and the California youth cult. Alan Jardine’s roots were in an older and more established form of American music – folk. In the Beach Boys, Jardine found a vibrant link in the progression of “peoples’ music.” In Jardine, the group found a link to America’s musical past.

Like most of the Beach Boys, Jardine became estranged from Brian during the post-SMiLE era when the latter struggled mightily with personal, psychological, and health problems. It has been only recently – actually, in the past year or so – that the two appear to have been able to put the personal and artistic conflicts over the years behind them. While it doesn’t look as if their combined tour will make it to the Phoenix area, just knowing the two of them are sharing the music of their lives together once more, in a spirit of friendship, is enough to warm the heart of this fan. Good for both of them.