Last month, I had the enormous joy of seeing the Beach Boys on their 50th anniversary tour. Like I’m sure many other people, I assumed they’d be mediocre at best. Carl Wilson, whose vocal harmonies and guitar leads seemed essential to their live show, died in 1998. Al Jardine hadn’t been touring with the rest of the band in a while. What Mike Love and Bruce Johnston were touring with wasn’t fairly called The Beach Boys (and, indeed, was billed as “The Beach Boys Band”). And Brian Wilson had gone solo, and when I’d seen him with his own band several years ago at the Hollywood Bowl, he was a lumpen vestige of his previous self, unable to remember his own lyrics, to offer much in the way of actually playing, or, even, to know who or where he was at the moment. Accordingly, I described this 50th anniversary reunion as their “wheelchair tour.”

But my friend Trey Nichols wanted to see them. Although we’d seen that Brian Wilson show together, he’d never seen the Beach Boys perform. (I’d seen them twice in the 1980’s, once on the beach in Atlantic City in what proved to be Dennis Wilson’s final performance, and a couple of years later in Philadelphia.) So we bought tickets for the Dallas performance and off we went.

Why Dallas? Because I was going to be out of town for every California performance of the tour — for example, I’m now in Omaha, Nebraska and the Beach Boys are playing the Hollywood Bowl this weekend. I couldn’t make the Las Vegas tour date either. Tucson, Arizona — the first date on the tour — I could do, but the seats were lousy (on the lawn way in the back, for eighty bucks a ticket). When we discovered that, I said to Trey, “Let’s check out Dallas.” Voila: We got fourth-row center tickets in Dallas at the lovely Verizon Amphitheatre for only twenty bucks more, and the plane fare to Dallas didn’t cost much more than plane fare to Tucson. So off we went.

The show started on time (7:30 p.m.), which was refreshing, and over the course of two hours the Beach Boys played 44 songs. That’s right: 44 songs. They sounded great, they were incredibly entertaining, and they were gracious, clearly thrilled at the reception they were getting. The crowd was overjoyed, me among them. I was especially gratified that they played “Heroes and Villains” (Mike Love may not like the Van Dyke Parks songs, but I sure do). I now find myself reevaluating the role of Al Jardine, who handled many leads, in a new and more positive light. Mike Love was a more low-key (and, therefore, better) front man than the two previous times I’d seen them. And David Marks, a founding member newly re-found, took over for Carl on those guitar leads. But who filled in for Carl on his vocal parts, or helped Brian fill out the parts he can’t quite carry any more?

Jeffrey Foskett, who is profiled here in today’s LA Times.

It’s hard to read this profile of an otherwise unheralded sideman who is a lifelong Beach Boys fan and now living his dream of playing on tour with them, without thinking that without him there would be no tour. He’s a stabilizing presence within the band, and onstage he’s supplying a lot of the heart that I was afraid the band would lack without Carl. The Beach Boys are all over the U.S. now through July; if you’ve got a chance to see them, I urge you to take it.

A couple of side notes:

1. I also didn’t hold out much hope for their new album, “That’s Why God Made the Radio,” which goes on sale June 5. I was dreading a return to the “Kokomo” era. In fact, what I’ve heard so far of the album makes me think it holds more promise than I’d thought — several of the songs are more reminiscent of the “Surf’s Up” era. The closer, “Summer’s Gone,” could be a leftover track from “Pet Sounds.” Three months ago, I wouldn’t have predicted this, but I think I’m going to buy the album.

2. During the show when they set up the new single, Mike Love said, “Here’s the single from our new album, ‘That’s Why God Made the Radio.’ ” I turned to Trey and said, “What’s a single? What’s an album? What’s the radio?” That one sentence relegated the era of the Beach Boys to times long gone. But their songs and their sound remain timeless.

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