With the Beach Boys‘ 50th anniversary tour firmly in the rear-view mirror of their little deuce coupe – and Mike Love effectively ditching his bandmates on the side of the road to drive off on his own – what is a Beach Boys fan to do in 2013? Love, the legal owner of the Beach Boys name, announced a few months ago that the group’s 50th anniversary tour – which welcomed former members Brian Wilson, Al Jardine and David Marks back into the fold – had ended.  The tour, he said, was conceived as a finite event, and that he was going to continue playing dates under the band’s name with the incarnation of the group he’d been working with prior to the reunion.

While many in the press painted Love as the “bad guy,” he pointed out in a letter to the Los Angeles Times that there were originally 50 reunion dates planned, which quickly grew to 75. He also noted that, early in the tour’s planning, Wilson was just going to join the band for “a few dates in big cities.” “Brian, Al and I signed an agreement outlining the beginning and end of the tour,” Love wrote. After the tour had been scheduled to end, Love’s pre-reunion version of the band had been booked for the types of smaller scale venues that they had been playing for years.

On one hand, as Love pointed out, “It is not feasible, both logistically and economically, for the 50th anniversary tour to play these markets.”  Whether or not it would actually have been “logistically” feasible for reunion version of the band to play smaller markets, it most likely would not have been “economically” feasible. There’s no doubt that playing concerts with Al Jardine, David Marks and (especially) Brian Wilson have a much higher overhead, and playing smaller venues in these markets would not be nearly as profitable.

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– Brian Ives, Radio.com