Beach Boys’ Al Jardine on his Final Meeting with Brian Wilson

Beach Boys co-founder Al Jardine had a final meeting last month with Brian Wilson, his friend and bandmate of six decades, he tells Rolling Stone. Wilson, who died at age 82, was sitting in the back of his house when Jardine arrived for a visit in May. “He looks at me and he says, ‘You started the group,’” Jardine says with a laugh. “It was his first statement to me. I didn’t even have a chance to say hi.” (Jardine’s full interview, including a look back at the Beach Boys’ earliest years, will air on an upcoming episode of our Rolling Stone Music Now podcast.)

“I’m going, ‘Yeah, you helped. You were part of it too!’” Jardine continues. “But he is not wrong, because we bumped into each other on campus and I said, ‘We’ve gotta start a band. We gotta start a group, Brian.’ And he remembered that.” For Jardine, Wilson’s acknowledgment of his role in the Beach Boys’ genesis provided some closure: “ I go, wow. ‘Okay. Yeah, I did have something to do with it. So that’s quite an honor.”

Neither of the two men thought they were meeting for the last time, though Wilson was ailing. “I thought he was gonna get better, ” Jardine says. “He had blood-oxygen-level problems, but his oxygen was coming back.” 

But ultimately, Jardine adds, Wilson “just wore out…  He went peacefully, in sleep, and I’m grateful for that.”

Jardine joined Wilson’s solo band for a Pet Sounds tour in 2006, and started touring regularly with him in 2012.  ”My first show was at UCLA, and I got a standing ovation just walking out on stage,” Jardine says. “And I’m going, ‘Holy cow. This feels like the old days, you know, the old Beach Boy days. And so we immediately kicked in where we left off.”

Before Wilson’s final show in 2022, Jardine recalls Wilson slowing down. “The last tour, he was quite reticent,” Jardine says. “He didn’t have the get up and go. He was just kind of slumped over the piano a little bit and not really engaging. So we noticed that, and finally we realized something’s amiss here.” Jardine believes Wilson changed after contracting Covid: “That was the end of it. He never came back after that.”

Jardine is currently prepping for his own tour with members of Wilson’s solo band — he had hoped to have Wilson himself join the band for at least one show. The tour will include both Beach Boys hits and deeper cuts from later albums, including 1977’s quirky The Beach Boys Love You. “I was hoping he’d be there to approve,” Jardine says.

Jardine says that his old friend was “beyond” a genius. “He invented the Beach Boys and he invented a style of music,” he says. “A style of putting eight notes together in a different way. He could do anything, and each time it was a joy to hear his arrangement of something as simple as ‘Surfer Girl.’ Writer, arranger, producer, singer — all five of those things. And he left us with the best repertoire for the rest of our lives to re-record, re-sing, replay.”