Brian Wilson boycotts Beach Boys over hunting convention

Brian Wilson and Al Jardine have backed a boycott of their former band the Beach Boys, who are booked to perform at an event organised by hunting group Safari Club International.

Wilson and Jardine are not part of the band currently touring under the Beach Boys name, which features only one founding member, Mike Love. Wilson tweeted: “This organisation supports trophy hunting, which both Al and I are emphatically opposed to. There’s nothing we can do personally to stop the show, so please join us in signing the petition.”

A Change.org petition calls for fans to “stop buying or downloading all Beach Boys music, going to Beach Boys concerts, and purchasing any Beach Boys merchandise” until they pull out of the concert at the Safari Club International Convention, which is held from 5-8 February in Reno, Nevada, and which features Donald Trump Jr as a keynote speaker.

The event sells guns and other hunting equipment, features seminars including Designing and Building Your Trophy Room and Managing Hunting Stress – Make Accurate Shots No Matter the Intensity, and auctions off hunting trips in South Africa, Texas, New Zealand and more. “The hunter-members of SCI support legal and ethical hunting based on the concepts of science-based sustainable use,” reads a statement on the organisation’s website.

Love said in a statement that the concert would go ahead as planned: “We look forward to a night of great music in Reno and, as always, support freedom of thought and expression as a fundamental tenet of our rights as Americans.”

Wilson and Jardine currently tour together under Wilson’s name, after a split in 2012 – the latest rift in a career marked by friction between band members.

As well as disagreements over the creative direction of the band and drug use – “there was a division and it was based on lifestyle choices,” Love said in 2018 – Love has been highly litigious against Wilson and Jardine. He successfully sued Wilson twice in the early 1990s, over songwriting credits and defamation in a Wilson biography, and also won an injunction against Jardine for using the Beach Boys name, for which he won an exclusive touring licence in 1998.