We All Got The Beach Boys Wrong—This Film Gets Them Right
Perhaps no major band has ever been hounded by such a highly prescriptive sense of expectation as the Beach Boys. For millions of listeners, they were a group whose primary function—and job—was to deliver catchy hits of surf and sun, cool cars, and trips to the movies with your “steady.” Because that’s what they had done so well from their very first recordings.
The music within the grooves of those early records enveloped the listener in a gold and blue world of warmth, water, wakefulness, the possibility of the new day. The Beach Boys’ music spoke—sang—to joy, with songs that functioned as an open invitation to lend one’s own voice to them, never mind that they featured the harmonies of the gods. You simply felt good listening to the Beach Boys.
Then there are those in the know, who realized somewhere along the Beach Boys’ journey that this was music as adventurous as a dream. That idea of the oneiric state—and all the wonder to be sourced therein—is the key theme of directors Frank Marshall and Thom Zimny’s two-hour-long Disney+ documentary, The Beach Boys. It arises again and again, as if these Beach Boys were purveyors of the kind of clarity that originates with mystery, rather than singsong simplicity.