Mike Love
Michael Edward Love is an American singer and lyricist who is one of the vocalists of the Beach Boys, of which he was an original member alongside his cousins Brian Wilson, Dennis Wilson, and Carl Wilson and their friend Al Jardine. Characterized by his nasal upper register and for his low singing, Love has been one of the band's vocalists for their entire career, contributing to each of their studio albums and often serving as their frontman for live performances. From 1964 to 1968, he contributed lyrics to hit records such as "Fun, Fun, Fun", "I Get Around", "Help Me, Rhonda", "California Girls", "Good Vibrations", and "Do It Again".
Drawing inspiration from Chuck Berry and Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, Love's lyrics primarily reflected the youth culture of surfing, cars, and romance, which helped fashion pop culture's perception of the "California Dream". Love also contributed to the Beach Boys' vocal arrangements – particularly the doo-wop element in their sound. Starting in 1968, Love was a student of Transcendental Meditation under Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and became a TM teacher in 1971. The experience influenced his lyrics to take on themes of astrology, meditation, politics and ecology. In the late 1970s, Love fronted Celebration, a short-lived band that consisted of Beach Boys touring musicians, and began working on solo albums, releasing his first in 1981, Looking Back with Love.
Love is often vilified by fans and critics due to his history of conflicts with his bandmates, a characterization he has disputed. Many of his lyrical contributions to the group's hits were not officially recognized until the 1990s, when he sued Brian for writing credits on 35 songs. Love remains uncredited for another 44 Beach Boys songs he claims to have co-written. Following Carl Wilson's death in 1998, the band members and their corporation, Brother Records, Inc., granted Love an exclusive license to tour under the Beach Boys' name. Since then, Love has maintained a near-constant touring regimen with his edition of the group, and has released three more solo albums.
Love's honors include an induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Beach Boys in 1988. Beyond music, he has taken part in projects to promote international charities related to such subjects as environmentalism, juvenile diabetes, and music education.
Background
Michael Edward Love, the first of six children, was born in the Baldwin Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles on March 15, 1941. Love's mother, Emily "Glee" Wilson, was the sister of Murry Wilson, a resident of Los Angeles since the early 1920s. Glee married Edward Milton Love, the son of the founder of the Love Sheet Metal Company, in 1938. After Love's birth, the family moved to the View Park-Windsor Hills neighborhood. He attended Dorsey High School and graduated in 1959. Unsure of a career direction, Love pumped gas and briefly joined his father's company, whose fortunes dramatically declined in the late 1950s. Both Milt and Glee Love were active in sports, and Love's younger brother Stan Love later played in the National Basketball Association. Glee had a distinct interest in painting and the arts. Like her brother, Murry, however, she was also strong-willed and, according to her husband, a dominant personality. The family was close-knit and regularly socialized with Murry and his family. Murry was a part-time songwriter.Love often sang at family get-togethers at his cousins, the Wilsons', home in nearby Hawthorne, especially at Christmas. It was here, under the vocal harmony guidance of Brian Wilson, that the Beach Boys sound was established, predominantly influenced by Brian's devotion to the Four Freshmen's arrangements. Musical accompaniment during this formative phase was solely Brian's self-taught piano, but this was quickly expanded by the guitar contributions of Brian's college friend Al Jardine and Carl Wilson. With the failure of Love Sheet Metal, the family was forced to move to a modest two-bedroom house in Inglewood, closer to the Wilsons.
Career
Formation of the Beach Boys
Love played rudimentary saxophone in the first years of the fledgling garage band that evolved from the Pendletones to the Beach Boys. He also established himself, along with neighbor Gary Usher, local DJ Roger Christian, and others, as a collaborator with Brian Wilson in the band's original compositions. To help write many of the Beach Boys songs, Love drew inspiration from the lyrics of Chuck Berry along with Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, who wrote many of the Everly Brothers' songs including "Devoted to You" and "All I Have to Do is Dream". He explained, "They were both the fun, descriptive pictorial vignettes as well as the more sweet, romantic and devotional lyrics.... Even before that and more fundamental than that, I was always into poetry."Carl Wilson commented that, "It's not widely known, but Michael had a hand in a lot of the arrangements. He would bring out the funkier approaches, whether to go shoo-boo-bop or bom-bom-did-di-did-did. It makes a big difference, because it can change the whole rhythm, the whole color and tone of it." He also credited Love, an avid fan of doo-wop combos, with influencing Brian to listen to black R&B records. Writer Geoffrey Himes claimed that without "Mike's R&B influence... Brian couldn't have possibly become 'Brian Wilson.
Stylistic shifts and creative disputes
In early 1964, Brian Wilson shifted the Beach Boys away from beach-themed music. That November, Love told a Melody Maker reporter that he and his bandmates wanted to look beyond surf music and avoid living in the past or resting on the band's laurels. He is also credited with naming their album Pet Sounds. Asked for his favorite Beach Boys album in a 1994 interview, Love responded, "I guess Pet Sounds... because of the orchestrations and arrangement. Because it's not just about cars or girls or school, but it's about feelings."Conversely, Love has also been reported as resisting the group's new direction. In the description of music journalist Erik Hedegaard, Love gathered a reputation as "one of the biggest assholes in the history of rock & roll" due to such accusations. Love commented in a 2007 interview,
Similarly, Love dismissed most of the reported claims about his reservations with the Smile album: "I never said anything bad about any of the tracks. I admit to wanting to make a commercially successful pop record, so I might have complained about some of the lyrics on Smile". In 1970, Love stated in Pop Chronicles that Smile was "good stuff" and "a fantastically-produced album", adding that "it'll come out, eventually." Brian said that the collapse of Smile was not due to Love's opposition to the lyrics. However, Van Dyke Parks, the album's lyricist, blamed Love with putting "a stop" on the album. In a 1971 Rolling Stone article, business associate David Anderle quoted Love saying, "Don't fuck with the formula". Over the ensuing years, the quote was repeated in myriad books, articles, websites, and blogs. Anderle later said that his statement about "the formula" had been misinterpreted. Love returned to co-writing with Brian for the Beach Boys' December 1967 album Wild Honey, the group's first foray into R&B.
Love stated in 1978 that the group's unhappiness with Capitol's promotional efforts had led them to change record companies in the late 1960s. "They promoted us very well for the first four or five years, then they failed... in promoting the change, which would have been very commercially sensible on their part, but they didn't ever do it. In '68 or '69, they were still promoting us as the number one surfing group in the USA. How relevant was that after 'Good Vibrations', Pet Sounds, Smiley Smile or Vietnam and everything else?" In his 2016 memoir, he wrote that, unlike Brian, he was never concerned about being taken seriously by critics, and felt that detractors of their early songs showed "elitism at its worst: because so many people loved our music, there must be something wrong with it."
Rishikesh and Transcendental Meditation
In late 1967, Love became one of the many rock musicians who discovered the teachings of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi following the Beatles' public endorsement of his Transcendental Meditation technique in August 1967. In December, Love and his bandmates attended a lecture by the Maharishi at a UNICEF Variety Gala in Paris, and were moved by the simplicity and effectiveness of his meditation process as a means to obtaining inner peace. In January 1968, the Beach Boys attended the Maharishi's public appearances in New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts, after which he invited Love to join the Beatles at his training seminar in Rishikesh in northern India. Love stayed there from February 28 to March 15. He later claimed to help Paul McCartney with the lyrics of "Back in the U.S.S.R.", recorded for the Beatles' White Album.While in Rishikesh, Love planned a U.S. concert tour that would feature the Beach Boys and the Maharishi as co-headliners. The tour begun in May 1968 ended abruptly after five shows due to the disappointing audience numbers and the Maharishi's subsequent withdrawal to fulfill film contracts. In his 2016 autobiography, Love wrote: "I take responsibility for an idea that didn't work. But I don't regret it. I thought I could do some good for people who were lost, confused, or troubled, particularly those who were young and idealistic but also vulnerable, and I thought that was true for a whole bunch of us." Despite the ignominy of the tour, the Beach Boys remained ardent supporters of the Maharishi and TM. Love became a TM initiator in 1972 and later progressed to more advanced levels such as the TM-Sidhi Course.
Other work, "Kokomo", and credits lawsuit
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Love wrote the words and music of several Beach Boys songs, including "Big Sur", "Everyone's in Love with You" and "Sumahama". In 1978, he co-founded the band Celebration, which achieved the U.S. Top 30 hit single "Almost Summer". Besides his work with Celebration, he also recorded two solo albums in October and November 1978. First Love was produced by Love's Celebration collaborator Paul Fauerso and featured original songs by Love and vocals from cousin and Beach Boys bandmate Carl Wilson. Country Love was a country album produced by Al Perkins and mostly featured original songs written by Love. Both albums were not released but were later bootlegged; Love revisited and re-recorded several songs from First Love later in his solo career and with The Beach Boys. The First Love version of "Brian's Back", written about the fairly recent return of Love's cousin and Beach Boys bandmate to recording and touring with the group, was later released on the Beach Boys' 1998 compilation album Endless Harmony Soundtrack. In 1981, he released his first solo album, Looking Back with Love, with production by Curt Boettcher.In 1988, the Beach Boys had a U.S. number 1 hit with "Kokomo", the only number 1 the band achieved without Brian's involvement. Love was nominated for a Golden Globe Award in the Original Song category, and was nominated for a Grammy Award, for "Kokomo". Also in 1988, Love was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame along with the other founding members of the Beach Boys. At the induction ceremony Love delivered a hostile speech, criticizing McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, and Mick Jagger. When asked in 2016 if he regretted anything about the night, Love said, "Yeah, I regret that I didn't meditate ."
In 1992, Love, along with Jardine and several Wilson family members, sued Brian for defamation regarding claims made in his 1991 memoir Wouldn't It Be Nice: My Own Story. The case was settled out of court by publisher HarperCollins, who awarded Love $1.5 million. It was the first of numerous lawsuits that Love would file against Brian. Two years later, Love won a legal proceeding to establish what he considered to be proper authorship credit for many of the Beach Boys songs he co-wrote. Love successfully argued that Murry Wilson avoided crediting him with his early lyrical contributions to Brian's songs, denying Love accrued royalties. He later called it "almost certainly the largest case of fraud in music history". Brian Wilson agreed to pay Love $5 million and split future royalties on 35 songs.