On August 25, 1967, The Beach Boys kicked off a weekend run in Honolulu, Hawaii, that would become one of their most historic and strange public performances of their entire careers, despite never being officially released as a live album as the band intended. Indeed, it was perhaps one of the more definitive moments of The Beach Boys’ tenure, encapsulating all of the ingenuity, hedonism, psychedelia, mental health struggles, and musicality that defined their legacy.
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Yet, it was a moment that the general masses have heard the least.
The Beach Boys’ Strange Trip to (And In) Hawaii
The Beach Boys were at a tenuous time in their career when they traveled to Honolulu, Hawaii, for a weekend of shows at the Honolulu International Center Arena, with which they hoped to compile a live album boyishly called Lei’d in Hawaii. Brian Wilson hadn’t been touring with the band for years by the summer of 1967. The California surf pop pioneers had just canceled a recent appearance at the Monterey Pop Festival. Their foothold in the musical scene seemed rocky at best, and Hawaii was supposed to be a paradisian solution to their problem.
Except it wasn’t. Wilson’s decision to return to the stage with his bandmates draped another layer of anticipation over the entire event, and based on most of the reviews from that night, The Beach Boys failed to deliver. According to Jon Stebbin’s biography Dennis Wilson: The Real Beach Boy, Wilson convinced the band to take LSD before their first show at the Honolulu International Center Arena on Friday, August 25. “Bad idea,” Stebbins wrote. “Their performance was something less than spectacular, and most reviews stated that opening act Bobby Gentry had stolen the show.”
The performances were so “less than spectacular” that the band decided to scrap the idea of the live album altogether. The Beach Boys released their 13th studio album, Wild Honey, in place of Lei’d in Hawaii, leaving the latter LSD-tinged recordings for archival releases and bootleg copies made public decades later.
The Almost-Forgotten Footage Defines the Band, in a Way
For better or worse, the story of Lei’d in Hawaii offers a complex image of a band that changed the way pop and rock music would sound forever in the early 1960s. To begin, they were in Hawaii, the only place that’s beachier and more akin to paradise in the U.S. than their native California. Brian Wilson was back on stage. The band was stretching their creative muscles by reimagining old and more recent songs in new ways unlike anything they did before or since.
But the performance was also a more unfortunate look into their career’s decline. The Beach Boys looked like “squares” next to their rock ‘n’ roll contemporaries like The Who and The Beatles, who had already graduated from the schoolboy charm schtick that The Beach Boys helped popularize stateside. The band was struggling not only with Wilson’s deteriorating mental health but also with drug use, interpersonal fighting, and their fight to remain relevant in a changing musical landscape. (Ironically, their celebrity—the thing they feared they were losing in Hawaii—was seemingly the only thing that kept the performance reviews polite and accommodating.)
From there, The Beach Boys’ career continued to cool. The band continued releasing albums, switching lineups and styles along the way. But they never regained the same industry foothold as they had around the release of Pet Sounds and their earlier surf-pop offerings. That fateful weekend in Honolulu seemed to be one of the first signs of a dramatically shifting tide.
Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
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