I Went to One of the Last-Ever Shows of a Beloved Rock Band. What I Saw Was Haunting and Strange.

Music

The Beach Boy

My uncanny night watching one of the last-ever Beach Boys shows.

By

Luke Winkie

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June 19, 2026 5:50 AM

Geoffrey Clowes/Sipa USA via Reuters

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On a recent Friday night, with the early-summer air whetting the sky, I drove with a friend out of New York City, across the Verrazzano Bridge, and into New Jersey, where we took our seats in the imperial 1,850-capacity State Theatre in New Brunswick. Seated next to us was a woman in her early 70s who had not yet realized that she was about to see the Beach Boys. She thought she had purchased tickets for an especially expensive cover band, because the idea that the desiccated remnants of the group could still be touring—62 years after the release of “Fun, Fun, Fun”—seemed frankly impossible. No, I replied to her. Not quite.

In a matter of minutes, she would, indeed, bear witness to what will certainly be one of the last-ever shows performed by America’s greatest pop group. I told her that the Beach Boys would blitz through the car songs and the surf songs; that they would detour into the winsome and psychedelic Pet Sounds ; that they would play “Kokomo”—they always play “Kokomo”—and they would do all of this without the presence of Carl, Dennis, or Brian Wilson, who are dead, or guitarist Al Jardine, who has been bitterly estranged from the group for ages, or bassist Bruce Johnston, who retired from the band in March after a seven-decade run.

Left behind is only one original member: The frequently embattled 85-year-old Mike Love. He has been touring with a fugazi version of the Beach Boys constantly since the late 1990s, replicating some vestigial approximation of the band’s golden years, a process that has naturally become more strained over time. Nevertheless, Love has made it his life’s work to keep the Beach Boys alive, even if—as I’m learning from my conversation with the woman—everyone in America already thinks they’re long gone.

And so, with tricolored beach balls bouncing around the mezzanine, Love emerged onto the stage dressed in his usual pastel shirt and baseball cap, and shuffled gingerly to the microphone. A slideshow overhead displayed memories of happier days. We watched images of the Beach Boys in matching sailor-striped shirts posing for photos on rocky coastlines, of Brian Wilson’s shaggy coif bobbing over his head in the studio, of polyphonic harmonies shining like diamonds on muted, black-and-white soundstages. The musicians below were Beach Boys of a much more recent vintage than the ghosts above—drummer Jon Bolton has been playing with the band since 2023, vocalist Chris Cron joined earlier this year. In fact, outside of Love, the second-longest-tenured player is keyboardist Tim Bonhomme. He signed up in 1995.

The first song of the night was the minor 1968 hit “Do It Again”—a track written to resuscitate the band’s breezy sun-worshipping image after several challenging years. Love looked sallow and enfeebled; legs stiff, arms flat by his side. When he opened his mouth to sing, his once resonant tenor was reduced to a whisper, all warbled, strange, and barely there, decimated by the encumbering decades. My friend shot me an ashen look, the same one I remember him giving me during the opening salvo of the doomed Joe Biden debate.

“Is that Mark Love?” asked the woman next to me. She had malapropped his name, but with my help, she at least was now aware that she was in the presence of a Beach Boy.

I nodded in the affirmative. “Oh my god,” she said, looking almost stricken. “I feel bad for him.”

You would think that any show the Beach Boys play at the late hour of 2026—where the band’s legacy threatens to be snuffed out for good—would be wreathed with elegy. But Mike Love has not been blessed with such a fate. The terminus of the Beach Boys is here, and the mood is indifference. Worse than that, it’s obliviousness —nobody even knows the era is ending. Love soldiers onward, undeterred, running out the clock in the same ignoble venues he’s been playing for eons. The evening before this night in New Brunswick, the band played the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Atlantic City. Weeks earlier, the Beach Boys had been one of the featured acts at the Tampa Bay–area Busch Gardens Food & Wine Festival. (Other headliners included Skillet, Hoobastank, and Ryan Cabrera.)

I suppose this is what happens when you strike a deal with the devil—the bill eventually comes due. Love can only die happy if he dies onstage—maybe during the chorus of “Help Me, Rhonda”—and he’s hellbent on taking the Beach Boys with him. It’s a destiny he has meticulously arranged the circumstance for with deep-seated…