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.

Which brings new meaning to the term Beastie BOYS.

In which Philip Glass writes music for… “Sesame Street.”

For years, I’ve said that “Sesame Street” teaches kids one thing — to watch TV. So while I’m not sure it’s filling an educational need, I am sure that it has a 43-year history of getting very cool creative people involved, from Jim Henson to Bill Irwin to Eric Idle to Cab Calloway to Jughead Jones (?). Maybe it’s not an educational program that we’re all funding. Maybe it’s an arts program.

“Crazy Clown Time,” courtesy of David Lynch. Yes, that David Lynch, collaborator with Angelo Badalamenti, Danger Mouse, Sparklehorse, Karen O, and many other fine talents, and, oh yeah, film director as well, as shown here. Is this video, as a friend of mine posted today hopefully, a return to “Eraserhead” form? No (and it’s not even a return to “Dune,” a film that some of us, for inexplicable reasons, can’t quite get enough of, no matter how ill-conceived and often poorly executed it is). But what the video of “Crazy Clown Time” definitely is is a return to offbeat lo-rent white trash filmmaking, the sort that very few of us knew made up the actually “good” movies at the video stores. Enjoy.

P.s. And, oh yes, David Lynch’s solo album is most definitely available on iTunes.

Last night, Paul McCartney closed the Grammy Awards. (An event that I actually watched part of, for once, because it featured the reunion of “The Beach Boys.” Please note the quotation marks, being of the opinion as I am that The Beach Boys died with Carl Wilson.) During his performance, lots of people jumped on Twitter to ask this question:

“Who is Paul McCartney?”

I want to be charitable and assume that most of the people who asked this are children. I like to think that adults, especially adults with access to Twitter and, therefore, the internet, would jump onto said internet and use either Google or Wikipedia or, well, almost anything, and Look It Up. Whereupon they would learn that Paul McCartney is the most successful songwriter in history and that he was a member of something called The Beatles.

But then I think that even if these are children, wouldn’t even children know that if they are holding a device that connects them to unlimited information — then maybe they could use it properly to gather such information as they’re seeking? And that tweeting out the question “Who TF is Paul McCartney” isn’t as good as, again, Google or Wikipedia or, well, almost anything else.

Some years before the recent relaunch of “Star Trek,” I told my friend Larry, who is this universe’s foremost expert on “Star Trek,” that almost none of my grad students knew who Kirk or Spock were, so I’d stopped using them as an example in my lectures. He couldn’t believe it — and it seemed incredible to me as well, I have to admit — but it was true. I would mention Kirk or Spock and get blank stares in return. Their cultural significance had diminished. Now the person who is probably the foremost popular musician of the past 50 years is going unrecognized.

One bright spot:  Maybe at some point, we’ll all be able to forget “The Macarena.”

During a recent debate in South Carolina, Newt Gingrich said the “Stop Online Piracy Act” was unnecessary because “We have a patent office, we have copyright law. If a company finds it has genuinely been infringed upon, it has the right to sue.”

So the composer of “Eye of the Tiger” has taken him at his word and is suing Gingrich for using his song without permission at campaign events.

Turns out that some women object to the urinals in the new Rolling Stones museum.

I have to admit some personal trepidation about putting myself in there.

The Los Angeles Review of Books gives us this discussion between two historic figures — Art Spiegelman, the first comic-book writer to win a Pulitzer Prize, and Van Dyke Parks, the lyricist and Brian Wilson collaborator behind some of the best Beach Boys music (“Cabinessence,” “Heroes and Villains,” and “Surf’s Up,” to name just three). It’s an interesting discussion, to say the least.

The headline on the LATimes.com site reads: Body found in burning car on 10 Freeway onramp.

Which triggered this thought:  burning airlines give you so much more.