The Beach Boys have cancelled all their remaining shows in 2026 due to Mike Love’s ongoing health issues.
However, they did play one date this week at Disney’s Epcot Centre in Florida. This was notable for being the first ever Beach Boys show not to feature any of their founder members: Love, the Wilson brothers or Al Jardine.
With this in mind, they did change their billing. Guest frontman John Stamos decided to rechristen the group John Stamos and the California Sound for this one-off occasion.
Stamos acknowledged the absence of the Beach Boys leader, announcing on stage: “Before we go any further, we want to send some love to our dear friend Mike Love. He can’t be with us tonight, but we’re sending him lots of love and good vibes from Florida tonight. He’d be so proud. I can’t think of a better way to send him love than with a little California Sound.”
The group played just four Beach Boys songs – California Girls, Fun Fun Fun, Kokomo and Forever. Stamos padded out the rest of the set with standards and rock classics, including Suspicious Minds and Hippy Hippy Shake.
Where this leaves the Beach Boys as an entity remains unclear. Since the summer, the group have cancelled a succession of shows, as Mike Love’s health has worsened. The gigs that he has managed to perform, such as the one in Cincinnati last month, have been worrying spectacles for fans. At that show, Love, who in the words of Rolling Stone looked “alarmingly frail”, had to be helped to walk very, very slowly to centre stage, where he sat for the duration of the performance and contributed just the occasional backing vocal.
When asked about that by Rolling Stone, the only other surviving original Beach Boy Al Jardine said that the footage he’d seen was “shocking… I was really depressed. Just the optics of it were just awful and I’m speechless.”
The only show the group have in the calendar for 2027 isn’t until May at River Cree Resort in Alberta. By that time, Love – who’ll be 86 by then - may well have recovered from whatever is currently ailing him (and no details of what his health problems actually are have been disclosed as yet). But he may not, and Beach Boys fans may have to face the fact that their endless summer may be coming to an end.
