By relevent, I mean relevant with the teen/young adult record buying market of the late 1960s and early 1970s. IE the “Hippies” for lack of a better catch-all. The 18-24 year olds in the period say from 1967 to 1971.
The Beach Boys’ (old) music was, and remains, relevant, but that’s not the same thing as saying they’re continuing to make (new) relevant music, which I think is what the OP was talking about. When was the last time that those rock and alternative musicians would have said “We’re influenced by what the Beach Boys are doing now” (as was true with Pet Sounds)?
Then again, it’s hard for any artist to stay at the cutting edge year after year after year.
I can’t speak for then, but certainly now. Besides Pet Sounds being a perennial top 10 albums of all time favorite for rock critics and contemporary musicians (and is on my list, too), their post-Pet Sounds albums Sunflower and Surf’s Up also make top 100 albums of all time lists. To be honest, until about two months ago, I didn’t listen past Pet Sounds. I was missing out. There is some fantastic stuff on the following three albums:20/20, Sunflower, And Surf’s Up.
A point that’s so obvious that many people miss it. The cutting edge is not the ideal place for the long term steadiness. Good artists may stay good but will go through hot and cold spells like any other human, and on top of that depend on audiences whose tastes will vary as time goes on.
Yes, Brian took LSD, probably the worst possible drug for someone in his condition to have taken.
They did release one of Chuck’s masterpieces, in 1968. “Cease To Exist”, retitled by Dennis to “Never Learn Not To Love.”
Many artists have cited Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys as influences sometimes slavishly recreating the sounds, even up to the current day. In this century anyway, Sean Lennon would be one. The High Llamas are another.
The OP is about what was hip in 1967 is my impression.
There isn’t anyone from 50 years ago who is making music right now that is influential to young bands. Is that what you meant? I can’t even think of anyone close. Maybe Robyn Hitchcock. Still relevant, still an inspiration, began recording in the mid 70s I think.
Nobody stays at the cutting edge for that long.
We saw it earlier in the tour - be prepared to have your socks blown off. Brian is astonishingly frail - they had a La-Z-Boy set up offstage so he could put his feet up - but once he got to the piano, he transformed into the performer you’re there to see. Al Jardine doesn’t look old enough to have been born when Pet Sounds was released, and Blondie Chaplin has to be seen in person to be believed.
The program guide has interviews and quotes from artists ranging from Eric Clapton to Carol King, to Billy Idol, to George Martin, all talking about how Brian Wilson, and Pet Sounds in particular, influenced them as musicians. I get what the OP is asking, but it’s hard not to consider their work as seminal.
When you get to the show, look around the crowd - particularly those in their 20’s and 30’s. If it’s anything like the crowd I was in, an awful lot of them will be musicians.
I most assuredly was around in 1968, and I grew up one town over from Cambridge, Massachusetts,–widely regarded as Berkeley, East back then–and I remember when Bob Dylan was an obscure, culty folk act and played the Club 47 in Harvard Square.
Crimson & Clover was widely regarded as pleasantly middle of the road; and Tommy and his Shondells borderline bubblegum, but I don’t want to get into a fight over this, just sayin’. That’s me and My Perception.
The Graduate was an enormous success but it was also MOR in the extreme. Simon & Garfunkel, whose songs were featured in the movie, had their fans, were an upscale urban, east coast singing duo who had their time in the sun. Hip isn’t the first word that comes to mind when I think of them. Country Joe & The Fish, yes. Janis Joplin, fuh sure.
Agree totally on the White Album. 
As to what’s hip and/or relevant today, I’d say that relevant is whatever the mass media conglomerates say it is. Pop culture is now borderline authoritarian IMHO; and no, I’m neither a radical nor a Sixties person. This is just a fact of life. We can point our fingers at MTV or whatever, this or that media mogul. This was probably inevitable. Hip has gone from meaning anti-Establishment, individualistic, intuitive, understanding, subtle, sometimes wry and humorous, at other times serious but never solemn or stuffy to, essentially, nothing at all. It’s all monkey see, monkey do these days. The Boomers perverted the word hip as they approached middle age, while for younger people,–Millennials?, whatever–it’s whatever is happening.
It’s hard to appreciate how radically culture can change over a year’s time. A year ago Jimmy Fallon was the king of late night for creating viral videos of people dancing while Stephen Colbert was being written off as a failure unable to duplicate his character’s success as a real boy. Today Fallon is snarked at for being an irrelevant buffoon and loses to the triumphantly anti-Trump Colbert.
The sixties lurched from the sunny British Invasion in 1964 to Summer of Love in 1967 to the killing fields of 1968 to fin de siecle sadness in 1969. Each measured hip differently. The Graduate was released late in 1967 and perfectly caught the schism between what the parents’ generation expected and represented and what the younger generation saw. It was the definition of hip. Calling the music AOR is anachronistic: AOR didn’t yet exist. It wasn’t guitar-laden; it certainly was hip. Simon & Garfunkel had just played Monterey, after all.
But I should have qualified my statement by saying The Graduate was the hippest movie of the sixties* up until then*. In 1969 we got the totally different look at society called Easy Rider and its soundtrack. Hip? Yes. Tonally distinct? Yes. Head-banging? No. Steppenwolf provided harder-edged music than S&G but the bulk is far from metal, even proto-metal.
What different parts of the country considered hip also varied, as you note. Still, the sixties had a common culture in ways impossible for today’s kids to imagine.
Black Sabbath put out an album in 2013, it hit #1 in the U.S. and U.K., sold out a world tour this year and is basically cited by every metal band ever as an inspiration.
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OK fair enough. I don’t use charts to measure things anymore though, even though it does sound impressive. The business is wobbly. Hard to say how influential something like that is.
Neil Young is a huge inspiration, who tours and makes LP. I haven’t listened to his current stuff in a long long time.
I might check out the sabbath thing.
Lots of oldies’ names have had recent success. Bob Dylan had a number one album in the U.S. and U.K. in 2006 and several top ten albums since. Bruce Springsteen has had four straight such albums from 2007 to 2014. Paul McCartney’s last album, from 2013, went to number 3 in both countries. That’s all irrelevant to the question of current relevance. Being a nostalgia act is good business in the 2010s. But not so much in between. It had been 30 years in the U.K. and 40 years in the U.S. since Black Sabbath last had even a top ten album before 13.
Yeah, the important thing isn’t initial chart position but length of stay. Debuting high and dropping like a rock indicates a solid core of support but not a real breadth of appeal.
Also doesn’t say these tunes have legs. We’ll have to wait some years to know. For now all we know is that there is a baby boomer and nostalgia legacy market for rockers.
Brian Wilson’s illness pretty much ended the Beach Boys.
Rock and roll is a young mans game. The necessary anger tends to lessen with kids and mortgages.
Dylan, Springsteen, Van Morrison maybe a few others, Neil Young, Bowie, can (could) make interesting music still but they never were about anger anyway.
“Tryin’ to Keep the Summer Alive” on “Surf’s Up” with Carl on lead vocals is both a really great B.B. song and a metaphor for the bands demise.
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Spring Break has never died down, they should have tied themselves to that and evolved into 80s night club songs, and maybe even 90s rave culture.
Cabinessence, Busy doin nothin, til I die, wonderful, time to get alone, sail on sailor, funky pretty, and dozens of others disprove this thesis.
Plus: Disney Girls, feel flows, be with me, little bird, trader, california saga, and many others, all were written by other Beach Boys.
You’re about 9 years off with that LP cite.
The Beach Boys are going to play at the NYS Fair this year - one of the FREE concerts. I have every expectation every baby boomer within 100 miles is going to show up. We plan to be at the fair at opening, 10 a.m. to beat the gridlock traffic that is surely going to happen. We pensioners love the Beach Boys.
And I HATE ‘hip’. Who determines what’s ‘hip’, some drug addicts? Meh.