POP MUSIC : The Real Boys of Summer

Alan is 6 years old. His favorite rock group is the Beach Boys, and he fairly squealed with delight when he found their greatest-hits package, “Endless Summer,” in his Easter basket.

A few days later, Alan’s mother, who was the same age as her son when the Beach Boys first topped the charts in 1962 with “Surfin’ Safari,” returned to the record store and picked up a copy of the album for herself.

And this Sunday, when the Beach Boys make their annual post-Padres game appearance at San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium, before a crowd expected to top 50,000, both mother and son will be in the stands--one reliving memories that the other will someday savor as his own.

When it comes to the Beach Boys, there is no such thing as a generation gap. The group is as American an institution as mom, apple pie and, appropriately enough, baseball.

Unlike most aging rock stars, the Beach Boys’ appeal lies not in who they are, or in who they once were, but in what they represent: a naively simplistic view of the world--and Southern California in particular--through the eyes of a child.

More than a quarter of a century ago, when brothers Brian, Carl and Dennis Wilson first teamed up with cousin Mike Love and buddy Al Jardine in a suburban Los Angeles garage, there was little indication of a legend in the making.

Their lyrics were almost unbearably trite. Their music was a blatant rip-off of rhythm and blues, their vocal harmonies a throwback to the doo-wop “race music” of the early 1950s.

But together, all three elements equaled magic, the magic of growing up in the carefree early 1960s, when youth seemed eternal and fantasies of riding the wild surf were as much the dreams of pubescent boys on the beaches of Southern California as of those in the cornfields of Iowa.

It was a time when being true to your school--and to your gal (or guy)--mattered a whole lot more than the Vietnam War or the civil-rights movement, when life was fun-fun-fun even if your daddy took the T-Bird away.

Eventually, the mood of the nation swung from idealistic to cynical, and mounting concerns about social and political issues found their way into pop music.

The Beach Boys’ magical spell was broken when critics began to deride the group for its cheery optimism. Chief songsmith Brian Wilson promptly adopted an “I’ll show them” posture and went on to produce some of the most adventurous rock music of the decade. The band’s 1966 album, “Pet Sounds,” ushered in the era of studio experimentation a year before the Beatles’ landmark “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

But, as a child thrust into a grown-up world, Brian Wilson had trouble coping with his sudden loss of innocence--and the cries of genius that kept following him into the studio. He stuck his feet in the sandbox, his head in the clouds and led his band down a painful path to critical and commercial anonymity, a descent hastened by infatuations with drugs and religion.

Since then, the Beach Boys have never quite been able to find their way back. In the studio, they are drab shadows of their former selves; they haven’t had a Top 5 hit since 1976, and then only with a remake, of Chuck Berry’s “Rock and Roll Music.”

Live, however, the Beach Boys are as big a draw as ever. On stage, playing their old hits, they still come across as the epochal boys of summer, their sound and mystique as fresh and invigorating as the early-morning surf.

Accordingly, whenever the Beach Boys roll into San Diego for their annual spring concert, sales of their old albums double the month before, said Maria Meiners, manager of the Tower Records store in El Cajon.

“They do well all over the country, but especially here in Southern California because everything they sing about is right here,” Meiners said. “We get a lot of tourists in our store from as far away as Japan, and to them, Beach Boys albums are almost like souvenirs.”

At oldies radio stations KCBQ-AM and FM (“Eagle 105), program director John Forsythe said requests for vintage Beach Boys hits also pick up whenever the band is in town.

“The percentage isn’t really that noticeable, but that’s because we already play more Beach Boys than any other station in town,” said Forsythe, also the two stations’ morning-drive deejay.

“We regularly play 30 of their old songs, which makes them No. 2 on our play list, right behind the Beatles. They are America’s all-time favorite rock group, and, even though they haven’t had a hit in years, they are so closely associated with the Southern California mystique that, as long as the myth is perpetuated, they will be around.”