I think it’s time. Recently, I was listening to a favorite podcast of mine: Rivals, hosted by Steven Hyden and Jordan Runtagh. On it, the duo discuss (used to discuss… thanks iHeart) beefs, feuds, and long-simmering resentments in the world of music. It’s a show that’s gotten me interested in groups like Oasis and The Smashing Pumpkins, not to mention music criticism in general. One of their episodes though, in fact the first I ever listened to, I take a pinch of issue with. It’s the one concerning the Beach Boys’ rival forces Brian Wilson and Mike Love. While it is customary for the show to draw up the pros and cons of each side presented, it soon became clear that much of the love Mr. Love would receive would come in the form of mockery! I, for one, am a member of the Brian Wilson cult described in this episode, and the many free periods I spent in high school pondering “Do You Like Worms? (Roll Plymouth Rock)” in a corner prove it, but I felt the need to complete the other half of this picture myself. I submit my attempt to give to you Mike Love’s greatest Beach Boys moments. And I shall do it by copying a format oft-used by Mr. Hyden in his own writing: the LIST!
“I Get Around”
The credit for this song often goes solely to Brian Wilson, and he certainly deserves a great deal of it; the story goes that “I Get Around” was written under the immense pressure to contend with groups like The Beatles whose success in America eclipsed even that of the Beach Boys at the time. The fact that Wilson was able to create a song in that situation that wasn’t just great but that was, on top of that, a musical and lyrical encapsulation of almost everything the group had done before, is amazing. In order for a surf-rock wonder like this to come off, though, you need a band ready to fire on all cylinders, and the Boys certainly were here. It seems, from drums to guitars to harmonies, that the whole group were ignited, like Brian, from the pressure they found themselves under. Mike Love’s vocals are awesome here, having crystallized since their earliest hits into something synonymous with this sort of music. His first syllables sung solo are fried: “I’m gettin’ BUGGED!”, ostensibly at the prospect of drivin’ up and down the same ol’ strip, but they’re delivered with a hunger(!) that suggests they might be intended at the British groups stealing success away from the Beach Boys. That vitality is essential in “I Get Around”’s status as one of the group’s more hallowed pop tunes, and Love is most responsible for bringing it.
Harmony Singing
When the Wrecking Crew came onto the Beach Boys’ scene in the mid-60s, the latter’s actual lineup was consigned in the studio mostly to harmony duty, and I must put forth that Love excels here as well. Despite not being a Wilson brother, his voice blends beautifully with theirs on songs like “I Get Around”, “Good Vibrations” and especially “Our Prayer”, which features a progression of notes for Love that your typical rock ‘n’ roll singer might find unnatural. Though he tried pretty hard to fashion himself into one of these more archetypical frontmen in the 70s, Love retained his fluency in singing as part of a harmonizing group, which earns him another point. Good thing he didn’t bail on Smile too soon for us to hear his contributions to it.
He Didn’t Bail On Smile Too Soon For Us To Hear His Contributions To It
I’m going to group many of his vocal performances under this entry, since what I’m really trying to say is that Mike Love could’ve been a much worse sport about the songs he did and did not sing on. Smile, for instance, would not fully succeed as a psychedelic adventure in American music if Mike Love, whose voice as I’ve suggested was linked to that music, made no appearance on the recordings. He does, though, even on “Cabin Essence”, the song whose abstract lyrical content he objected to most. “Have you seen the Grand Coulee working on the railroad? Over and over, the crow flies, uncover the cornfield. Over and over, the thresher and hover, the wheatfield.” Just when you think the record cannot get further out, Mike Love of all people arrives as the messenger of its most mind-bending lyrics as if to signal the totality of the group’s dive into the experimental, however brief it was.
Honestly, I find his presence on a song like “Johnny Carson” much more confusing. If you had helmed an entire campaign to bring Brian Wilson back into the fold of the Beach Boys, and were then told to communicate this song, which at best is a veiled condemnation of that very campaign and at worst is plainly annoying, what would you do? Mike Love sang the song! Would the rest of us be so strong?
“Love Is Here”
The Wilson brothers vocally shine most consistently over the duration of Pet Sounds, a record which lyrically engages a lot with themes of insecurity, indecision and isolation. It might not sound like a compliment at first, but Mike Love’s performance on the boisterous “Love Is Here” shows us the very perspective those concerns come from. When Brian laments on “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times” that “Every time I get the inspiration / To go change things around / No one wants to help me look for places / Where new things might be found”, the sentiment seems slightly broad until you realize that Love’s protagonist on “Love Is Here” is the exact type of flakey defeatist friend that Brian sings about being surrounded with. While I’m not one for overlaying a story to the arc of every record, the events of the two songs seem at least thematically adjacent: sensitive guy thinks about starting something new in his life, goes to friend who strikes it down with a cynicism that is almost neurotic, sensitive guy mourns that the world will punish those who take chances for the sake of their own happiness. It makes the record even better.
Frankly, “Kokomo”
I tucked this one way down here because I feared that you might throw out the whole thing if you read it first, but seriously. This song is great. My most favorite “80’s Beach Boys” tune is “Make It Big”, but this is a very close runner-up; though the group mostly floundered in that decade, “Kokomo” definitively proves that their style was perfectly suited to thrive in that environment if they only could come up with the right tunes. Though the song wasn’t written solely by Love, he was the only Beach Boy involved in its composition. This manifests throughout the song as his vocal sits mostly in his lower register (think the mid-harmony “yeah” from “I Get Around” for a whole song) and guides us through, essentially, a crystallization of Mike Love’s “get a girl and have some fun” vision of the band. The premise of the song, that there is somewhere out there equivalent to paradise that you fantasize about going to in order to “get away from it all”, could have been heartbreaking had the group tackled it in 1966. Four years after Pet Sounds, they beckoned us to “do it again”, as if twenty years had passed. Then, eighteen hard years really did pass for the Beach Boys; they had every reason to deliver a concept like “Kokomo”’s with an air of melancholy, but I don’t know if that word is in Love’s dictionary. It’s a straight-up summer hit, saxophone and all, and its singular focus is what keeps it almost as immortal as something like “Surfin’ USA”.
Honorable Mention: Drafting the Wilsons to form a pop band in the first place
That’s right! While the Wilson brothers were already becoming a cohesive singing unit as kids, it’s unclear whether Brian intended on conquering the charts at this stage as opposed to soothing his abusive, wannabe-musician father. Mike Love, whose family’s financial situation had taken a terrible turn, enlisted his talented cousins in hopes of finding real success in the world of pop music. We have him to thank, at least partially, for situating Brian Wilson’s compositional genius in the genre that it would eventually elevate.
Messed Around And Made Some Of Their Best 70s Music
Okay… this was the real reason I wrote any of this. As the 60s ended, Brian’s dominance in the group receded a bit, and the rest of the members were presented with opportunities to bring their own songwriting efforts to the fore. Beyond the summery aesthetics and cultural ubiquity, what in my view defines greatness from the Beach Boys is the strength of the songs they could produce, likely because of the standard set by Brian’s obsession with songcraft itself. Now, there began to be a vacancy in this very department. Luckily for us, it seems that the rest of the group experienced something similar to George Harrison’s improvement as a songwriter as a result of proximity to Lennon and McCartney; they each shine in their own right on albums like Sunflower, Surf’s Up and Holland. I’d like to highlight Mike Love’s contributions to this!
First, what was praised as one of his best vocal performances even at the time it was released: “All I Wanna Do”. This is a beautiful rolling vibe of a track that might be to dream-pop what “My Generation” is to punk, though I’d call the former even more prescient sonically; it truly sounds like what some artists are still trying to create right now. Love sheds much of the more unique qualities of his lead voice here and gives the track an effortless, soft performance that even the angel-voiced Carl Wilson probably wouldn’t have bettered.
On this same note, he eschews his normal singing style entirely for two of the trio of songs making up Holland’s centerpiece, the California Saga. “Big Sur” is the first of these, and it might be my most favorite Beach Boys song written by someone other than Brian; it opens with piano arpeggios and guitars beckoning the listener into mysterious murk, then drops into a tear-jerkingly earnest groove where the boys sound like The Band. Love here is almost unrecognizable from his performances on songs like “Fun, Fun, Fun”, which works to great effect. The tune at the heart of this track is simple and touching; there exists another recording of “Big Sur” sometimes called the “Landlocked” version that splits the difference between Holland folkiness and “All I Wanna Do”, and I find this version just as wonderful. The song, in all its variations, finds Love finally in the zen state he appeared (physically, with his Jesus-beard and robes combo) to have found in the early 70s. At the end of the day, Big Sur sounds like a much nicer place to be than Kokomo.
The California Saga submerges us again in those pianos, then continues with “The Beaks of Eagles” which opens with… wait. Mike Love reading poetry!? What!? I was under the impression that he didn’t mess with that sort of mumbo-jumbo. Well, here we are. This track alternates between soft, short grooves with historic-sounding anecdotes (“spilled on the hill, a wagonload of bodies lay scattered / shipwrecked at sea, limestone ore is all that mattered”) and, yes, readings from Robinson Jeffers’ poem “The Beaks of Eagles” over mystical woodwind and those creepy arpeggios. Love takes two of these segments, the first and third. It’s worth wondering why he scuppered “Cabin Essence” over its poetic lyrics while seemingly helming this effort, but the answer probably isn’t that complicated. This text is much more like prose, as in it makes sense (sorry Van Dyke), and includes cosmic glorification of the American wilderness as it describes meteorites “plowing” Ventana Creek. In other words, you could say that the beauty in this poem is evident; the language is vivid, the topic engaging. Pairing it with music creates a psychedelic Americana separate from Smile, the kind of thing you might imagine Jack Nicholson’s character in Easy Rider hearing stream into his ears his first time getting high. It’s a sound more lived-in than groundbreaking, more personal than complex, more concerned with humanity’s place in nature than the vibrations one human picks up from another.
The Saga ends with, simply, “California”, which makes this thematic change very stark as stylistically it reads as a sequel to the very interpersonally-concerned “California Girls”. Here, Mike Love revives his iconic, nasally self, though instead of listing the attributes of girls across the country, he quizzes us on a few of California’s natural wonders: have you been south of Monterey? North of Morro Bay? Down Salinas way? Each of these places is presented as half of a couplet completed with a rhythmically succinct but joyous line about the things that make these places special. As Love references John Steinbeck and how he wrote not just about the places he traveled, but also about writing about those places, we get a new image of the Beach Boys as a collective that contributes to the California Myth by connecting with, and reviving, its literary and concrete history. Mike Love was a creative voice behind this genuine artistic development, and I give him a lot of credit for that. He, Mr. “Don’t fuck with the formula”, understood more than anyone the way the Beach Boys had become one with American pop culture, with Americana itself, and at least in this case used that understanding to create music that beautifully celebrated all three. This strange art does much to place the Beach Boys firmly on the positive side of culture, far from Vietnam and closer to cowboys and moon landings.