The Summer Cats make waves with Beach Boys legacy show

The Summer Cats return to Fringe World this summer with their show, Surfin’ the Soundwaves of the Beach Boys’ Legacy, in a performance packed with nostalgia, surf-rock vibes, and a touch of irresistible charm. The Summer Cats will take audiences on an unforgettable musical journey with shows at Encore Rockingham @ VAT 116 on Sunday, January 25, and Aces Downstairs at His Majesty’s Theatre from Tuesday, February 11 until Saturday, February 15, with tickets on sale now. BOB GORDON caught up with lead vocalist, Zalia Joi, to chat about the musical impact of Brian Wilson and the legacy of the iconic band.

So, Surfing the Soundwaves of the Beach Boys’ Legacy—tell me about the show and how you surf it.

I really love the spirituality of music and the vibration. Brian Wilson was really cutting into that when he was creating most of their hits but also in the distinct value of harmony. I just love that aspect of what we can then bring to the audience. We have a show that takes The Beach Boys from their early inception and talks through it in a fun and upbeat manner about how they became the legends that they were. I do believe Brian is the genius behind that—he had this ability to operate on that other level and that frequency of sounds.

It’s a beautiful story; what I love particularly about The Beach Boys is that it really ignites that time when love and life were innocent and you hadn’t been fucked over by life. It generates that time when there was positivity and anything was possible. I love that part of something that evokes that to an audience and gives them hope and even just ignites that feeling of what The Beach Boys’ music delivers, and they can then leave uplifted. It’s like holding the flame of the responsibility of being a musician and lifting the vibration in people’s hearts. That’s where I come from in presenting and writing the show.

Describe the choices you’ve made from The Beach Boys’ songbook.

Because of the size of the catalogue, you need to consider, “What are the top hits that we absolutely have to do?” And the top hits just happen to be the masterpieces anyway. We definitely have focused on the upbeat, beach surf sound that took over from Chuck Berry. It was the crossover from rock’n’roll into the sixties. Those songs, like Good Vibrations, California Girls, and Surfin’ USA, which talk about all the beach places in LA that have all now been blown up because of the wildfires. We do a sort of mash of Surfin’ USA and go into Fun, Fun, Fun, California Girls, and All Summer Long, and that sort of captures that sound of innocence and a life that hasn’t been tarnished yet.

We also touch upon the car songs. The early Beach Boys had an album of car songs. I’m a bit of a word nerd, and with learning songs, there’s a theory that I’ve only ever seen proven to be correct. If you have a word or a symbol in anything you’re trying to learn and you don’t understand it, it creates stupidity in your mind, and you actually just can’t learn it. So the trick is to get a definition of the word or symbol, and it’s kind of magical—all of a sudden you can remember stuff without having to rote learn it into your muscle memory.

With Little Deuce Coupe I could not for the life of me work out what that song was about. I’m a bit of a perfectionist in that all my songs are off-book, and there’s no iPad. I know them. They’re in my muscle memory. It took me about 10 hours of research to understand what that song is about. So what we do is a Q&A in the form of a quiz show. I ask questions like what’s “four-on-the-floor,” or “a flathead mill,” or “ported and relieved”—we decode that with the audience, and that’s turned out to be a highlight. We’ve decoded the song, and then we perform the song, and they’re like, “Oh, that’s what it means!” It’s basically all about car racing, but if we just sang the song, people wouldn’t know what it was about. Creating an understanding of the times also really helps the audience have a good time as well.

There’s commentary featured in the show about The Beach Boys. Given the amount of history and mythology about them, what aspects of the story do you bring to light?

Once we’ve done the ‘60s summer of fun, we talk about Brian’s demons, and we quote something Marilyn Wilson, Wilson’s first wife, said about him battling with his demons and how he always thought that people were trying to kill him. She said to him, “Honey, you’ve been saying that for years, and they’ve never succeeded.” We put that there for some context that when he was going through those dark times, and there’s an allusion to drugs, but we just say that he was experimenting, and that in his darkest hour he thought that people were trying to kill him.

It’s an illusion rather than a focus to show that he did have some wrestles with the black dog. We say that in those times he wrote In My Room, and when he couldn’t get out of his room, he high-rotated songs like Don’t Worry Baby, which was his favourite song by The Ronettes, and that really influenced a lot of hits that he wrote.

The review of the show in X-Press Magazine at last year’s Fringe commented on how the four-piece band with you fronting as a vocalist is a minimal line-up for the epic nature of The Beach Boys, but with your voice and range going throughout, it makes it all work.

That’s really lovely to hear. The guys are really fabulous to work with, and everyone is just as passionate as me about getting the harmonies right. All of the guys sing except for the drummer, Reilly Stewart, but he also does commentary through it all.

What has the music of The Beach Boys meant to you in your life, and where do you think it sits in the overall pantheon of music?

That’s a great question. I’ve got this thing I try to do regularly where at night I think of what I call pleasure moments, all the positive things in that day. Count your blessings. What are my blessings? A cat meowed at me. I smelled a rose. Those things that lift your spirit.

The world’s pretty fucked up right now, but we have a choice about what we focus on. We can focus on someone being stabbed by a crazy person on meth, or we can focus on “I can hear music.” So for me it has strengthened my resolve to be a conduit through music to remind people that there is a sun that shines. God Only Knows, I just wanna have Fun Fun Fun, let’s dance, you know? All of those things that are designed to lift the human spirit. The music of The Beach Boys is a bit like a life raft in this sea of troubles.

For me, I come away with this concept of counting my blessings, and the fact that I get to perform these songs and sing these harmonies with these guys that I sing with is such a blessing for me. I’m grateful to have this opportunity because it keeps me buoyant. So if it keeps me that way, then it must keep other people buoyant, and it is something to focus on. Often when I’m performing this, I feel that it’s like a miracle that all of us are in this room right now feeling this amazing energy, which is not from us—we’re just the conduits of it.

It’s the magic of this music and Brian Wilson opening himself up to the world and delving into his genius that keeps me open to the possibility of music and harmony travelling through me. I believe that’s our job as artists, and having this vehicle to do that is really humbling.

Surfin’ the Soundwaves of the Beach Boys’ Legacy hits Encore Rockingham @ VAT 116 on Sunday, January 25, and Aces Downstairs at His Majesty’s Theatre from Tuesday, February 11 until Saturday, February 15, 2025. Tickets are on sale now from fringeworld.com.au