Mike Love

Mike Love was one of the lead singers of The Beach Boys, along with Brian Wilson, the leader of the band, and Brian's younger brothers Carl Wilson and Dennis Wilson, and their old schoolfriend Al Jardine. Love is a first cousin to the Wilson brothers.

He plays with the current incarnation of the group, a configuration lately challenged in court by Al Jardine for ownership of the name "Beach Boys".

Love wrote most of the lyrics for the early Beach Boys hits, up to and including their famous 1966 single Good Vibrations. However, this was to be the last major collaboration between Love and the group's main songwriter and producer, Brian Wilson.

Wilson first worked with an outside lyricist, Tony Asher in 1965-66, and they co-wrote all but two of the original songs on the landmark 1966 LP Pet Sounds. This was followed by a new partnership during 1966-67 with lyricist and musician Van Dyke Parks, which resulted in the brilliant suite of songs composed for the aborted SMiLE project.

Mike Love was to play an increasingly contentious role in the Beach Boys career, and rightly or wrongly, he has often been identified as one of the 'villains' in the story. Probably motivated in part by anxiety over his replacement as Wilson's writing partner, Love exhibited increasing hostility towards Wilson and his new material between late 1965 and early 1967, a period that critics and fans now widely acknowldege as the most creative phase of Wilson's career.

He reportedly led the group's opposition to the Pet Sounds' material and particularly objected to the song Hang On To Your Ego, which, at his insistance, was partly re-written and re-titled; it was eventually released as I Know There's An Answer.

Love's trenchant opposition to Wilson's new direction came to a head over the songs they were recording for their follow-up to Pet Sounds, the legendary SMiLE album, which was begun in mid-1966 but was eventually shelved in mid-1967.

Love reportedly took great exception to Parks' oblique lyrics, reserving particular scorn for the song Cabinessence. After a heated studio argument in which Love demanded that he explain the song's meaning, Parks walked out and immediately terminated his work with the Beach Boys, effectively scuttling the album only weeks before its scheduled release.

Many now feel that Love's dogged opposition to SMiLE was the major reason that Brian finally abandoned it, and that his opposition was motivated by in part by professional jealousy, as well as the fear that Wilson's departure from the Beach Boys' proven formula would cause them to lose ground.

In the late Sixties, as Brian Wilson withdrew from public life and his mental condition deteriorated, Love took over unofficial leadership of the band, although it was arguably Brian's brother Carl whose songwriting and production skills were the real driving force behind the group's renewed success in the late Sixties.

Love was one of the first pop musicians to become involved in the practice of Transcendental Meditation, through his meeting with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and as a result he accompanied The Beatles and Donovan on their famous trip to the self-styled guru's ashram at Rishikesh in India in early 1968. Love has been a lifelong advocate of the benefits of TM and contributed a song on the subject to the beach Boys' 1969 album Friends.

Love's relationship with the other group members appears to have gradually deteriorated over the years, and his self-appointed role as the 'face' of The Beach Boys was eventually overthrown when Brian Wilson made his remarkable recovery during the 1990s. Wilson's recovery was so well-managed that by the mid-1990s, he had managed to returned virtually full time to recording and live performance and made his first solo concert appearances, culminating in his rapturously received live performances of the entire Pet Sounds album in 2002-2003.

In the late 1990s Wilson went to court to regain his rights to the publishing company, Sea Of Tunes, which owned the right to most of his songs. The suit stemmed from Wilson's ill-advised decision to sell his rights to his father Murry Wilson in 1967, but when the suit came to court it was found that the contract Wilson had signed was not valid because of the mental problems he was suffering from at the time.

Following Wilson's win, Love launched his own lawsuit, claiming that he had made significant writing contributions to many Beach Boys songs, including two titles on Pet Sounds, and Good Vibrations. Love won the case, and as a result his name was retrospectively added to the writing credits on all subsequent releases of Beach Boys songs.