ANAHEIM, Calif. — When the Beach Boys made their Hollywood Bowl debut on Oct. 27, 1962, it was the biggest venue the band had played in a year of gigs that included a run of shows at the Pandora’s Box nightclub in West Hollywood, a tour of Broadway department stores in Southern California, and the Howdy Hop in the Hawthorne High School cafeteria.

Then the band included brothers Brian, Dennis and Carl Wilson, David Marks, and the Wilsons’ cousin Mike Love, who at 21 when the Beach Boys played the Bowl, was the oldest.

The Wilson brothers all are gone, Brian Wilson, the last of them, on June 11, 2025. Marks has toured with different versions of the Beach Boys, and founding member Al Jardine now tours as Al Jardine and the Pet Sounds Band.

But Love, now 85, still carries the official Beach Boys banner, and from Thursday, July 2, through Saturday, July 4, the Beach Boys with occasional member John Stamos and the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, will return for the Hollywood Bowl’s Fourth of July Fireworks Spectacular.

“We’ve done the Hollywood Bowl since the ’60s and it’s like hometown, you know?” Love says on a recent Zoom with Stamos. “It’s very special for Beach Boys music to be performed there with an orchestra. It’s fantastic.”

Stamos, who was a star on “General Hospital” when he first joined the Beach Boys on stage in the early ’80s, was with Love and the band when they last played the Hollywood Bowl in 2023, too.

“I would say, and Mike, you can chime in on this, they were three of the best Beach Boys concerts that I can remember in the last 20, 30 years,” Stamos said of the 2023 shows, which were also for the annual July Fourth celebrations. “It just had everything.

“It was such a family event,” he says. “It had fireworks, it had this beautiful orchestra. And those songs, especially the ‘Pet Sounds’ stuff they’re doing now, is so incredible.

“I’ll just say, too, that in all the years that I’ve been lucky enough to have played live with them, I’d say lately it just feels like the audience needs this music more than ever. We just are craving optimism and positive and good vibes.

“You think of the songs that Mike and Brian wrote – ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice,’ “Fun, Fun, Fun,’ ‘Good Vibrations’ – it’s this positivity that we need in the world so badly right now; right, Mike?” Stamos says.

“We love doing it,” Love replies. “And we love the fact that our music has been accepted all around the world.”

In an interview edited for length and clarity, Love and Stamos talked about Love’s last visit with Brian Wilson before his death, the 60th anniversary of the “Pet Sounds” album this year, and more.

Q: Mike, what do you recall about those early shows at the Hollywood Bowl in the ’60s?

Mike Love: I recall that we had opening acts like Sonny and Cher, Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs. Neil Diamond was one of the opening acts. So it was pretty amazing early on, but special for us because it was our hometown.

Q: For the Beach Boys Summer Spectaculars there in ’65 and ’66, you had acts like the Byrds, Love, Percy Sledge, and the one that surprised me, Captain Beefheart.

Love: Oh, yeah. It was amazing, because it drew from all kinds of musical interests.

Q: John, when do you recall first noticing their music as a boy, and what about it appealed to you when heard it coming out of the radio?

John Stamos: My dad had “Endless Summer” and an 8-track player in his El Camino. So I remember hearing it, and it was just like boom! I always say this music bypasses the brain and goes straight to the heart. That’s why it doesn’t matter the age. You’ll see 8-year-olds and 80-year-olds at the concerts.

And there was this group at Disneyland called Papa Do Run Run and I remember hearing them playing “Sloop John B.” I was over on the other side of the park, and it was like the Pied Piper, it just sort of got me over there. I came back every night that summer.

Q: So how did you end up, in your early 20s, meeting and joining the Beach Boys?

Stamos: There was a guitar player, Jeffrey Foskett [who played with the Beach Boys]. He was my friend, and he said to come to see them in San Diego and meet them. I said OK. He said after “Fun, Fun, Fun,” run backstage, because their break and then go on and do “Barbara Ann,” and then leave.

So I get on the field to come back and all of a sudden I heard this screaming, and I was like, “What the hell’s going on?” I realized a bunch of cheerleaders were screaming for me, and I just started running. These girls are chasing me, and I look up on the jumbotron and they were gaining on me, because I was a terrible runner.

Then I get backstage, and the girls are screaming. They slam the door, and Mike Love says to my friend, “Who was that?” He says, “John Stamos. He’s on ‘General Hospital,’ and he’s a good drummer.” And Mike says, “Do girls scream like that for him all the time?” And my friend said, Yeah. Mike goes, “Get him on stage.” [Love laughs] I played “Barbara Ann” with them, and they were kind of enough to have me.

Love: He played Blackie on “General Hospital” back then, and he was very, very popular. I mean, mailbags full of fan letters.

Q: And now, 40 years later, to have played with the Beach Boys as much as you have?

Stamos: Next to my wife and my kid, it’s just the greatest thing in my life. My first concert, I saw the Beach Boys at Universal Amphitheatre. I was like, Oh, I hope that Dennis broke his finger and Mike Love would come out and say, “Our drummer broke his finger, does anybody know this song?” And I’d be like, ‘Me! Me! Me!”

They’ve given me so much, and Mike has given me so much. When someone comes and says, “I got turned onto the Beach Boys by ‘Full House’,” [Stamos’s TV sitcom], that’s the greatest thing I could hear.

Q: Mike, I saw in May that Capitol Records hosted you and Al Jardine and Bruce Johnston at a “Pet Sounds” 60th anniversary event.

Love: It was a really nice recognition of the album. The fact that we released “Pet Sounds” 60 years was kind of a miracle. It’s gained such a great reputation. Not at first. Capitol Records didn’t know what to do with it, but it became very popular, especially with peers, other groups.

Some pretty noteworthy individuals like Paul McCartney and John Lennon listened to it before it was an album, when it was just an acetate, and so that influenced them to get busy on their next album. So it took a while to sell a lot, but it’s been well-regarded by so many people for so many decades.

Q: I want to ask you about your memories of making it. My sense is that Brian was in the studio getting the instrumental tracks ready and then you and the other Beach Boys came in to sing the vocal tracks.

Love: Well, yeah, there’s been inaccurate stuff said about what I said about the album, which is kind of silly because I worked on every song. Brian did brilliant tracks, and when we came back and listened to all of them we were amazed and worked very, very hard, all of us, on the vocals.

Brian didn’t know what to name the album, but he had his two dogs barking at a train going by at the end of it, so I said, “Well, let’s call it ‘Pet Sounds.’”

Stamos: And you wrote some of the lyrics to some of the songs, too, right? “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?”

Love: Yeah, I did write some lyrics, and I sing a bit of a couple songs. “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” the bridge part that’s so popular in that song. I was able to write some of the songs with Brian, but he had a co-writer [Tony Asher] who did an extremely good job, I think. Who was very helpful with making the lyrics to that album because we were away.

Effectively, there were two bands. Brian left the touring group in late 1964. We were touring in Japan and came back to finish the [“Pet Sounds”]. So there were effectively two groups, the touring group and the record group, and some of us were part of both groups. It was a drag. We didn’t want to see him leave the touring group, but it worked out because he was able to spend a lot of time making great tracks and incredible music.

Stamos: Talk about Mike’s songwriting, one of the great honors of my life was last summer I got to induct him into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. What I always say is that he helped, he painted a tableau of this optimistic Camelot sort of place. The whole world wanted to be us [Southern Californians].

Sometimes he would just write lyrics separately, but other times he would come up with them, some of the hooks, with Brian. [He sings] “I’m picking up good vibrations.” “‘Round, ’round get around, I get around.” “Aruba, Jamaica.” Those are all classic Mike Love hooks. Sometimes he gets overlooked in the songwriting and coming up with some of the hooks and melodies. Not to take away from Brian’s genius, but you got to get Mike in there, too.

Q: When you look back at “Pet Sounds” today, what are your thoughts on what it’s become?

Love: It stands out because it’s so unique. And it started a trend with other groups to think more comprehensively about the concepts of their albums. So it did have an influence. Maybe it was subtle, but there was the influence there. And when it’s listened to people still to this day have a great opinion of it.”

Q: Mike, is the band still opening each show with “Do It Again”?

Love: Yes, it is. It’s retro, and I like starting retro.

Stamos: Tell Peter how you wrote that with Brian.

Love: Well, I actually got him to get out of his house, get out of his bed. We drove to the beach, walked along the beach, came back and sat at the piano and banged it out in about 15, 20 minutes.

Q: That was the period where he rarely left home?

Love: No, not that much. But I got him to.

Stamos: Mike is sort of a master at doing the setlist. Sometimes it will be completely different from night to night, which keeps us on our toes.

Love: I always try to choose a set that’s representative of different singers and all the different eras. I mean, we’re doing “Sail on Sailor,” which is a groove of a song. So it’s different than all the Top 40 hits.

Stamos: Myself and an editor, we cut together this video that’s sort of a tribute to Brian. We probably won’t do it at the Hollywood Bowl because we don’t have time, but Mike sang this song called “Brian’s Back.” He wrote the song. And we have this beautiful montage of Mike and Brian together, hugging and laughing and showing the good side of the relationship, which was a lot.

I think people forget how they were brothers. That they loved each other. I have so many audios of Brian saying how much he loved Mike, how much he loved his voice. So I put this together in a video. Mike sits on the side of the stage and watches it every night, and sometimes I’ve watched Mike more than the video.

Q: Mike, I know Brian had not been in great health for a while before he passed —

Love: — June 11th, last year.

Q: — how did that hit you when you lost your musical brother, your actual cousin?

Love: Yeah, it was rough, but he was in bad health for quite a while. The interesting thing is, a couple of weeks before he passed, I was able to go visit with him, and all he wanted to do is have me sing Beach Boy leads to him. It was great. We had a great time.

We even harmonized on a song called “Their Hearts Were Full of Spring,” which is by the Four Freshman, and we used to do a capella, four parts. So we had a great time singing together and visiting together. Unfortunately, it was just a couple of weeks after that that he left us.

Stamos: Thank God [Love’s wife] Jackie pulled her phone out a little bit. I’ve seen what he’s talking about and it’s just the most heartwarming, beautiful thing to see. They were teenagers again. To see the two of them sitting there. Brian kept saying, sing this song, sing that song. It’s just a beautiful thing to see.

Q: I got goosebumps just hearing Mike talk about it. It would have been such a special moment.

Love: It was. It was.

Q: Mike, when you picture the first times you and the Wilson Brothers got together to sing, what do you see?

Love: It was in Hawthorne, California, at the Wilsons’ house in a garage that had been converted to a music room. That’s where Brian and I wrote “Surfin’ Safari” together, “Surfin’ USA” and “I Get Around” and “Fun, Fun, Fun. We wrote a ton of great songs, and they were all on the radio and huge hits. And still popular today.

Q: Did you also live in Hawthorne?

Love: No, I lived in a place called Baldwin Hills. They called it Pill Hill because there were so many doctors there. Ike and Tina Turner lived down the street. It was quite the neighborhood.

Q: They put the 405 over the Wilsons’ home. Is your old house still there?

Love: Oh yeah, it is. A beautiful home. Three stories, stained-glass windows looking out over the city. It was a beautiful home.

Q: And today, when you think about all the Beach Boys have done, and that you still get out there to sing them all the time?

A: We just want to go as long as people want to hear us. We want to go on and do the songs as well as we possibly can.

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