Andy Greene
View all posts by Andy Greene October 17, 2026
The Beach Boys in 1966. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images Before the Beach Boys played what may wind up being their final concert, at least with Mike Love in the lineup, John Stamos addressed the crowd. “All we have is tonight, really,” he told fans at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. “Mike, he insisted on being here… He’s done over 7,000 live shows. And tonight’ll be 7,422, I think exactly. I think that’s where we’re at. He’s counting.”
It’s possible that’s a perfectly precise number, but we’d be surprised, since Love has been on tour almost nonstop since 1962 and has played many private events and special shows with spinoff groups like Mike Love’s Endless Summer Beach Band and Mike Love & Dean Torrence. The Beach Boys have also played two or even three concerts in a single day on many occasions. At this point, counting each and every show Love has played over the years is likely an impossibility, even for him.
“He’s a Viking,” Torrence told us in July. “He’s struggling now. He’s not well, and he’s struggling, but he’s not going to stop until it’s really over. And I think he wants to probably even die on the road.”
The Viking has a tremendous arsenal of songs to draw from whenever he plays, but he almost always sticks to the most famous Beach Boys hits of the 1960s. “I have always felt that people come to see you on the basis of what songs you’re known for,” Love told Rolling Stone in 2012. “I would never think of not doing our biggest hits. That would be foreign to my way of thinking.”
One song that’s always in the setlist is “God Only Knows.” According to setlist.fm, the Beach Boys have played it 2,333 times. The actual number is probably somewhere north of 6,000, because the Beach Boys aren’t exactly like the Grateful Dead, where every single moment of their live career has been carefully chronicled. (My first concert, by the Beach Boys or anybody, took place at the Front Row theater in Highland Heights, Ohio, on Feb. 10, 1991. They did two shows that day, and neither has a known setlist.) And when you factor in shows by solo Brian Wilson and Al Jardine, together and apart, and even the occasional Carl Wilson concert back in the day, it’s possible members of the group have done the song around 9,000 times.
We’ve picked out 26 versions here, including some from the Pet Sounds tracking session back in 1966. As a whole, they tell the story of America’s greatest band across the span of the past 60 years.
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Beach Boys Tracking Session (1966)
Image Credit: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images Pet Sounds is a Beach Boys album, and every member of the group sings on it, even new member Bruce Johnston, but much of the hard work was done by Brian Wilson, lyricist Tony Asher, and a large group of L.A. session pros that were later known as the Wrecking Crew. Mike Love, Carl Wilson, Al Jardine, Dennis Wilson, and Johnston were touring Japan when the basics tracks were laid down. To hear how the song came to fruition, check out this incredible recording that cobbles together some of the most interesting moments from the tracking sessions, including a rendition with Brian on vocals.
