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The 40-city tour will take the band's members to bigger venues than in recent years, including headlining performances at the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival. To honor Carl and Dennis Wilson's contributions (Dennis died in 1983), the band will play alongside videos of the late founding Beach Boys during a tribute in the show.
"We haven't gotten the holograms together yet," joked Marks, referencing the hologram of late rapper Tupac Shakur that appeared at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival earlier in April.
For a group who could hardly be considered boys anymore, they're surprisingly unfazed by the prospect of a sweeping tour that will take them across North America, Europe and Japan. Johnston noted that "hotels are great" nowadays, while Marks was reminded that they no longer have to unload or haul their own equipment in a "U-Haul trailer and station wagon."
"The heavy lifting is the writing, arranging and recording," said 69-year-old Johnston, who joined the group in 1965. "This is not the heavy lifting. This is the chocolate cake for me because we get to pull all of these magnificently arranged parts out and sing them live. We don't have to write them now. We just have to pull them out of the trunk."
The Beach Boys will stuff more tunes into that trunk with the release of an as-yet-untitled album of new material this summer. Love said the new songs will recall their classic harmony-stacked style. The group plans to perform their new single, "That's Why God Made the Radio," while on tour and may add new tracks to the set list when the album is released.
"We're slaves to the Beach Boys legacy," said Marks. "We're just out there trying to keep that legacy alive. I can't count how many times people have come up to me after shows and told me that they sing their children to sleep with `Surfer Girl.' I look in the audience and little children know the words to `Help Me Rhonda,' and 80 year olds are dancing in the aisles."
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