By: Alan Sculley

Making fun possible is pretty easy with the Beach Boys. After all, one of the group’s hits is titled “Fun, Fun, Fun.” And fun is what the group’s lead singer, Mike Love, continues deliver at show after show with today’s version of the legendary group.

At 83, Love is the last member of the classic 1960s Beach Boys lineup still touring with the group. The only other touring member with ties to the early edition of the Beach Boys is Bruce Johnston, who in 1964 joined the group to replace Brian Wilson, who had decided to retire from touring to focus on his role as the main songwriter and producer of the Beach Boys music.

As 2025 begins, the Beach Boys are ostensibly celebrating a pair of projects on tour. One is the 50^th anniversary of “Endless Summer,” the greatest hits album that revived the band’s career in the mid 1970s after the Beach Boys’ popularity had waned in the years following the groundbreaking 1966 album “Pet Sounds” and the innovative follow-up single, “Good Vibrations.”

“We probably do 18 of the 20 songs on that album in our concert,” Love said in a recent phone interview.

The group is also touring behind a new documentary entitled simply as “The Beach Boys” that’s now streaming on Disney+.

The documentary has been dinged in some reviews for glossing over or omitting altogether some of less positive elements of the Beach Boys history, including the drug use of several members of the band, Brian Wilson’s struggles with drugs and mental health that initially culminated in a breakdown following the completion of “Pet Sounds” and the controversial role psychiatrist Eugene Landy took in the years that followed in managing Wilson’s life. In addition, the deaths of Dennis Wilson from a drowning accident in 1983 and Carl Wilson from cancer in 1998 are only referenced with a note at the end of the documentary.

 But Love likes the film and feels it touches on aspects of the group’s history that some of the many other documentaries on the Beach Boys didn’t highlight.

“I think this documentary really (depicts) how it was, how it really was, with the harmonies and the family connection and it a bit more accurately told the story of the making of the music,” he said.

And with temperatures warming now, expect plenty of fun in the sun when Love and his bandmates take the St. Augustine Amphitheatre stage on March 8.