Mike Love acknowledges that many fans in any random Beach Boys audience, and particularly those of boomer age, are there because “our music is nostalgic for them.” But he doesn’t think that means the band he helped form in 1961 in Hawthorne, California, is strictly an oldies act.

“That doesn’t explain the kids — I mean children and teenagers and young adults, as well as their parents,” Love, 84, says by phone from a tour stop in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. “They all seem to love the Beach Boys music, at least some of the songs. We’ve found that doing ‘God Only Knows’ and ‘Sloop John B’ and ‘Wouldn`t It Be Nice’ every night goes over fantastic, as well as they always have.

“Some of those kids are hearing the songs for the first time, so it’s not nostalgia for them. They hear them and they want to hear more and get the rest of the story.”

And for the Beach Boys, that story is epic.

Thanks to its run of enduring hit singles during the ’60s and early ’70s, the Beach Boys is the best-selling American band of all time, with more than 100 million records sold worldwide and more than three dozen Top 40 hits spanning seven decades. The deceptive simplicity of pop classics such as “California Girls,” “Help Me, Rhonda,” “Surfin’ U.S.A.” and more belied the sophistication of their vocal harmonies and instrumental arrangements, primarily from the acknowledged creative genius of Brian Wilson. A dollar for every subsequent act that cites the Beach Boys as an influence could possibly buy a small country.

And 1966’s “Pet Sounds,” a conceptual work Wilson termed “a teenage symphony to God,” inspired no less than the Beatles’ equally landmark “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

“We`ve had tremendous amount of success over the years,” Love — a cousin of Wilson as well as his late brothers and fellow Beach Boys Dennis (the group’s only actual surfer) and Carl Wilson — understates. “A family hobby became a long-lasting profession.”

It hasn’t all been fun, fun, fun for the Beach Boys, however.

There were Brian Wilson’s issues with anxiety and, subsequently, substances that took him off the road and made him increasingly erratic — including the “Pet Sounds” follow-up “Smile” that was abandoned. There were creative and personal battles with the Wilsons’ father and original band manager Murry, interpersonal issues and periods of estrangement between the band members, Dennis Wilson’s tragic drowning accident in 1983 and Carl Wilson’s death from lung cancer in 1988. All of it has been dramatized, sensationalized and widely tabloided in every form of media.

Love himself was for a time demonized as a bully, particularly towards Brian. Time has been kinder to his reputation, however, especially as he’s continued to lead the band since the late ’90s, with the blessing of the Beach Boys’ corporate entity. During 1994, meanwhile, Love prevailed in court proceedings to restore his co-writing credits (and royalties) for many of the Beach Boys hits — and led to a “better late than never” induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame that will take place June 12 in New York City. (Brian Wilson was inducted in 2000.)

“My uncle Murry didn’t credit me on several songs, and Brian was not in control of himself for many years in the late ’60s, ’70s and ’80s,” says Love, who also co-wrote the Beach Boys’ 1988 single “Kokomo,” the group’s only No. 1 hit that didn’t involve Brian. He told his side of the story in a 2016 memoir “Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy.”

“All those songs — ‘I Get Around,’ ‘Help Me, Rhonda,’ `Good Vibrations,` so many of them — I wasn’t credited. Bruce Johnston remembers me writing the words to ‘California Girls’ in the hallway of Western Recorders on Sunset Boulevard, on a legal lines paper. So it’s nice that finally there’s the recognition. It should have come long ago, but now people have a proper idea of who actually co-created these songs, which is a really nice thing for me and my family.”

The surviving Beach Boys — Love, Johnston, Brian Wilson and original members Al Jardine and David Marks — regrouped in 2012 for a 50th-anniversary tour and final studio album, “That’s Why God Made the Radio.” Brian Wilson has not performed since finishing his 2022 tour with Chicago at the Pine Knob Music Theatre; Love, who visited him recently, says that Wilson is “immobile. He’s in bad shape. But we did sing together; that was fun.”

Jardine, who was performing with Wilson since the anniversary tour, is now leading his own band and playing Beach Boys songs, and Love doesn’t rule out the possibility of them working together again. “I’m not going to say we’ll never do something; that would be silly to say,” Love notes. “When there’s a right opportunity or right time, I think anything’s possible.”

Love — who released five solo albums (the most recent in 2023) — feels much the same way about the possibility of more Beach Boys music. “As creative individuals, there are always new projects we’re thinking of. So, yeah, there’s some interesting stuff but to speak of, really, nothing planned as the Beach Boys, per se.” He and Johnston are happy enough keeping the group’s spirit and legacy alive and playing its songs wherever people will have them — including in Europe this summer.

“Our music has reached all around the world, which is really fascinating,” Love says. “We`ve had fan letters from Russia, fan letters from China. The Saudi ambassador to the U.S. told me one time he had our cassette in his Austin Healey when he was going to school in England. I think it’s music that makes you feel good, no matter who you are, no matter where you are.

“That’s inspiring for those of us who had a hand in creating those songs, and we’re obsessed with recreating them as close to the recordings as humanly possible. And I’m still singing the songs in the same keys as the original recordings — not bad for 85, huh?”