The Beach Boys' Al Jardine

Bullseye with Jesse Thorn

NPR

Society & Culture

4.5 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 22 August 2025

⏱️ 50 minutes

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Summary

Our guest this week is Al Jardine, one of the founding members of The Beach Boys alongside Brian Wilson, Carl Wilson, Dennis Wilson, and Mike Love. Jardine left the Beach Boys in 1998 and has toured solo ever since. He just released an EP called Islands In The Sun, and he’s touring it with Brian Wilson’s band. Al Jardine talked with Bullseye about Brian’s recent passing, growing up making music with the Beach Boys, and rediscovering the magic of The Beach Boys compositions in his later experiences with their music.

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0:00.0	Support for NPR and the following message comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
0:05.4	RWJF is a national philanthropy, working toward a future where health is no longer a privilege but a right.
0:12.1	Learn more at RWJF.org.
0:16.6	Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of Maximum Fun.org and is distributed by NPR.
0:39.2	It's Bolzai. I'm Jesse Thorne.
0:50.7	Look, maybe I'm going to get in trouble for saying this, catch some flak, but it is hard to think of an American rock band more distinct and influential than the beach boys.
0:55.4	There is, of course, the songwriting, catchy and apparently effortless.
1:00.1	You can hear God Only Knows on a solo piano or with a 20-piece band.
1:01.6	It gets you every time. So what could one living to me?
1:06.3	God only knows what I'd be without you.
1:13.7	And then there's that 20-piece band.
1:16.8	Not really exaggerating there.
1:21.3	The core members of the Beach Boys were Brian, Carl, Dennis, Mike, and Al.
1:24.9	But when it came time to lay down a song like Good Vibrations,
1:28.5	they'd cram in as many session musicians as the studio would hold.
1:35.5	I'm picking up good vibrations. She's giving me to excitations.
1:45.1	I'm fucking up. Good vibration. She's got my harmonies. The most beach boysy thing about the beach boys.
1:49.5	You can hear any song of theirs, even one that never even got a proper release, like Our Prayer, and you know in an instant who you're hearing.
2:00.8	These days, there aren't many Beach Boys left.
2:04.1	Dennis and Carl Wilson died in the 1980s and 1990s, respectively.
2:08.7	Their brother Brian Wilson was the band's main songwriter, producer, and creative force.
2:13.5	He'd been mostly out of the band since the 1990s.
	...

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