Al Jardine Plays Beach Boys Deep Cut Back Home Live

During an intimate performance with the Pet Sounds Band at the Robins Theater in Warren, Ohio, founding Beach Boys member Al Jardine surprised the crowd by dusting off a long-shelved deep cut. Jardine kicked off the encore with “Back Home,” a track he noted he hadn’t performed in roughly 50 years.

The Complicated History of ‘Back Home’

Written by Brian Wilson and Bob Norberg in 1963 during the Surfer Girl sessions, “Back Home” has a famously winding history in the Beach Boys canon. Early recordings leaked to bootleggers, and the band revisited the song twice in 1970 during the Sunflower sessions—including a version featuring Jardine on lead vocals with entirely different lyrics—before shelving it once again.

A version worthy of official release was finally captured during the 1976 15 Big Ones sessions, featuring Brian Wilson on lead vocals. While not a single, Wilson famously performed the track with the house band on Saturday Night Live in November 1976, and the Beach Boys played it at least 41 times between July 1976 and October 1978. It subsequently vanished from both the band’s live repertoire and its members’ solo offshoots until Jardine’s recent return to his birth state of Ohio.

Resurrecting Seventies Gems on the Road

The performance fits into a broader pattern for Jardine, who has resurrected overlooked material from the 1970s over the past year. His current live sets have featured the entirety of the 1977 album The Beach Boys Love You, alongside cuts like “Sweet Sunday Kind of Love” and “She’s Got Rhythm” from 1978’s M.I.U. Album.

Jardine is the only Beach Boy on the road at the moment. Following a string of recent cancellations and postponements from Mike Love’s touring lineup, Jardine and the Pet Sounds Band filled an empty slot at the Oregon State Fair as part of a busy calendar stretching through late October.