The Beach Boys opened their show Saturday night at the Hollywood Bowl with 'Do It Again,' and if that slow-rolling single oozed nostalgia upon its release in 1968, you can imagine the note it strikes today.
A three-hour marathon of good reverberations, Saturday's concert ' part of a world tour that extends through late September ' reunited Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys' creative genius, with his two surviving original bandmates, Mike Love and Al Jardine; the L.A. group's current lineup also includes a pair of longtime associates, Bruce Johnston and David Marks, as well as 10 backing musicians and video-screen representations of Wilson's late brothers, Carl and Dennis.
All those voices were working to reproduce the astonishing harmonic complexity of the Beach Boys' music, which throughout the 1960s did as much as the Beatles' to expand the notion of what pop could be. At the Bowl, where Love thanked the capacity crowd for 'coming to our hometown reunion,' songs such as 'Surfer Girl' and 'Wouldn't It Be Nice' condensed worlds of emotion into a few melodic phrases.
But the voices also were combining in an effort to channel the wistful optimism of the days before drugs, mental illness and a series of internecine legal conflicts drove the Beach Boys apart. Prior to this trek ' which comes accompanied by a new studio album, 'That's Why God Made the Radio,' due out Tuesday ' the group hadn't toured together for 'more than two decades,' as a note on its website asserts. Out on the road at last, it's using music to restart a once-endless summer.
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