A week ago, I emailed some friends furious about the latest shenanigans of Mike Love of the Beach Boys. Love had unceremoniously called an end to the Beach Boys’ 50th anniversary tour, pulling the plug on an experience that had surprisingly revitalized Brian Wilson and the crew and resulted in an actually pretty good album, “That’s Why God Made the Radio.” Wilson had been looking forward to continuing the tour, and even recording another new Beach Boys record. I couldn’t have been more thrilled — but now this was all off, because Love held the rights to the “Beach Boys” name, and planned to misappropriate that name by resuming his tour of truck stops and juke joints with Bruce Johnston. Here is the story I sent my friends; I’m still pretty animated about it, and was complaining about it against last night when I saw Peter Gabriel at the Hollywood Bowl with my wife and some friends.

Evidently, I’m not the only person who felt outraged, because Mike Love felt compelled to respond. This was in yesterday’s LA Times, which I hadn’t seen before foaming at the mouth about this issue last night. Here’s the piece.

It bears reading.

In Mike Love’s view, this contretemps seems mostly not about relationships or even the primacy of the progenitors. (He says in the end “The Beach Boys are bigger than those who created it,” which on the face of it seems true, but which also diminishes the roles of specific members of the band. If “those who created it” aren’t as important as “The Beach Boys,” then I suppose it’s perfectly acceptable to tour with one just one founding member and call it “The Beach Boys.” I look forward to Pete Best’s tour as the Beatles.) No, it’s mostly a business decision:

“Like any good party, no one wanted it [the tour] to end. However, that was impossible, given that we had already set up shows in smaller cities with a different configuration of the band — the configuration that had been touring together every year for the last 13 years. Brian and Al [Jardine] would not be joining us for these small market dates, as was long agreed upon.

“It is not feasible, both logistically and economically, for the 50th anniversary tour to play these markets. It’s vitally important for the smaller markets to experience our live shows, as this is how we’ve maintained a loyal fan base for 50 years. You can’t sustain a fan base on a great catalog alone. You must take your music directly to the people.”

In other words, if the Mystic Lake Casino Hotel in Prior Lake, MN, doesn’t get this performance by Mike & Bruce, the Beach Boys’ legacy will succumb.

Mike Love holds the license to the band name, so he can go out with just his baseball cap and a tambourine and call it “The Beach Boys” if he likes. Me, I’m just glad I got to see the real band in Dallas in April. It was a great show, and a cherished experience — and it doesn’t look like there’s going to be another one like it.

Last night we had a major family emergency that meant I had to run out with my 10-year-old at 8 p.m. on a Sunday: He and his sister had had a mishap with the Xbox, scratching the disk for “Call of Duty: Black Ops” and rendering it inoperable. Thankfully, we located a Game Stop that was open that late, and sanity was restored.

On the way home, we were listening to music in my car. One song in particular caught Dietrich’s attention. (Yes, my son’s name is Dietrich, as people keep inanely asking me, “Your son’s name is Dietrich?”)

“Who’s this?” he said.

“Sonic Youth,” I said. “Why?”

“This is the most awful song I’ve ever heard.”

“Well, your mother would agree with you. But your sister and I like it.”

“It’s awful. What’s wrong with it?”

“The guitars are purposely tuned ‘wrong,'” I explained helpfully.

“Yeah, but what about her voice? She sounds terrible.”

Hm. One person’s “terrible” is another person’s effect. Just last week I had forced one of the designers at my company to purposely “misdesign” a client’s ad so it would get more attention. In this way, I like to think I have some distant kinship with Picasso, who applied those “rules” of his art before he broke them. But none of this made any impression on my son, or, at least, not any positive impression.

“I don’t care,” he said. “I just want this to end!” Again, it was almost as though he were channeling his mother, who has been known to casually reach over and turn a dial, any dial, to remove the offending noise.

So now I think when I get home I will share this news with Dietrich: His new favorite band, Sonic Youth, has just recovered some stolen guitars. Guitars that were stolen 13 years ago. So now they can make even more of this discordant, irritating, off-key music.

That is, if the band hasn’t broken up, as it apparently has, in the wake of the divorce between bassist and “singer” Kim Gordon and guitarist and singer Thurston Moore. Even if that’s the case, though, there’s a whole back catalog I can introduce the kid to. And wait ’til we get to Captain Beefheart!

Two weeks ago, I had a terrific time at the Pasadena Pops show in the Los Angeles County Arboretum, featuring the pop opera group Poperazzi. The duo in this video covers one of the songs performed at the Pops show, but in its own unique way.

I grew up watching Marvin Hamlisch on television (and, certainly, hearing his music in movies). He was a frequent presence on “The Mike Douglas Show” and “The Merv Griffin Show” in the afternoon, and probably did more to introduce me to piano music than anyone else who comes to mind. While I never got to meet Marvin Hamlisch, who died yesterday, I almost did, just two weeks ago.

My company, Counterintuity, works with the Pasadena Symphony and POPS, where Marvin Hamlisch had served as principal pops conductor since 2011. (Click here for more about his relationship with the Pasadena POPS.) On July 21st, my business partner and I entertained clients at our table at the pops performance at the Los Angeles County Arboretum, in what turned out to be Hamlisch’s final performance. He was a real showman: unexpectedly funny, filled with passion and wit about the musical performance he would be leading, in an evening also featuring Michael Feinstein (with whom he later did a piano duet). As the photo above helps to indicate, it was a beautiful summer night spent outdoors with friends and associates and good food and wine and wonderful music.

Afterward, our little group went backstage for the VIP reception, which our friends at the Pasadena Symphony had kindly invited us to. I had brought along two copies of recent ad proofs we’d done for the Marvin Hamlisch performances at the Arboretum — including this particular show — in the hopes that he’d sign them, one copy for our office and one for the designer. We waited for a while, but he hadn’t come out yet, and my wife had noted during the show how he’d been leaning on different things when possible in a way that indicated an aching back. (It was later confirmed that he’d pulled a muscle and was in some pain.) So given that we were unsure he’d be coming out, and eyeing the gathering waiting to congratulate him, as well as the time, I slipped the ad proofs back into their folder and said, “I’ll ask him to do it next time” and we all left.

Funny how every once in a while in life you get a reminder that you can’t always count on “next time.”

Shovelman.

He sings delta blues.

He plays a slide guitar — made out of a shovel.

And I dig it.

In which a talented group give us the theme song from “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” — done on ukeleles. (Thanks to Mark Chaet for letting me know about this.)

David Lowery (of the bands Camper van Beethoven and Cracker) lays it all out: When you’re stealing music, you’re still feeding big corporations — but you’re shafting artists. (And you’re fishing around for self-justification.) This one post says it all better than I’ve been able to do in several discussions and emails with my own kin. If there are artists you like, you need to support them with your cash. (But then, we theatre people already know that.)

In which Mr. Rogers gives us good advice in a haunting and somewhat sinister manner.

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.