Early on in this latest of Disney’s stream of blockbuster rock documentaries, there is a brief but telling moment. It is July 1976, the year of the US bicentennial, and the Beach Boys are taking the stage before a vast stadium of cheering fans in Anaheim, California. It is ostensibly a moment of triumph for “America’s band”, as the announcer calls them. Over the preceding couple of years, the Beach Boys’ long-waning commercial fortunes have been unexpectedly restored by a chart-topping compilation of their early hits called Endless Summer. Moreover, the band’s errant mastermind Brian Wilson has been reputedly restored to full fitness after years of drug abuse and mental health problems (“BRIAN IS BACK!” claims a promotional campaign that summer). “I like it, I like it,” crows frontman Mike Love, surveying the audience, as well he might. Then the camera catches Wilson, his face a mask of confusion and fear, an expression that suggests reports of his recovery were premature; he doesn’t appear to like it much at all.
The Beach Boys were seldom the band they gave the impression of being. Frank Marshall’s documentary is good on the disparity between the myth of gilded Californian youth that their music sold to the world and the people who made it. Singing about a sun-drenched utopia of beauty, confidence and endless material luxury in a succession of vintage television clips, they look awkward and nothing like the tanned, self-assured teenagers who populated their songs. But their harmonies, and the songs Brian Wilson conjured up in astonishing profusion, were so fantastic that their appearance scarcely mattered. Detroit-born producer Don Was is among those attesting to the alluring spell their music cast over teenagers in landlocked states.
