Closing arguments of the prosecution
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury: We are a nation of laws, of virtuous conduct that must be upheld for the strength and prosperity of all. Chief among these are rules simple and finite: do not murder. Pay your taxes. And do not kick Brian Wilson out of the Beach Boys. When such trust is violated, when we are left foundering in the absence of such decorum, punishment must be swift and abetted by all.
The defendant, Mike Love, would have you believe otherwise. In his recently released memoir, Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy, he argues vehemently that he is not deserving of his widespread reputation as the villain of the Beach Boys—the vindictive cloud over the band’s sun-dappled empire, the penny-clutching pedant whose sole agenda is to kick down Wilson, sensitive and maligned genius, at his quavering knees. Such is the legacy that has been ascribed to him through decades of unpopular behavior, from his oft-reported disdain for Pet Sounds through his hurling of various lawsuits at Wilson. Over these interminable 436 pages, you have read Love recount, seemingly in real time, his childhood hijinks in Southern California with his cousins Brian, Dennis, and Carl Wilson; the rise of their sonorous surf-pop band; and, most crucially to this trial of public opinion, the band’s 50th anniversary reunion tour and Love’s dismissal of Wilson from the Beach Boys’ touring lineup.
Incidentally, you’ve also read the defendant’s inexhaustible, smarmy fawning over Transcendental Meditation and his gleeful recounting of the various Asian ethnicities of his sexual conquests—not to mention a deployment of the N-word that lands,16 pages in, with the blunt and pointless trauma of a surfboard to the head—but we’ve just got to set that aside for now, before the prosecution starts turning her rings around.
Ladies and gentlemen, in Good Vibrations, Love asks you to remove his black hat, to recast him as he views himself: the true, long-neglected genius of the Beach Boys, whose creative contributions equal and often eclipse those of Wilson, and an honorable pacifist whose only wish is to preserve the legacy of his treasured band.
But I implore you to examine the evidence presented herein and reach the only logical conclusion: Mike Love is still a dick.
Brian and Mike, together again at the 2012 Grammys. (Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
Let us look at the facts, so selectively curated in these pages. Several times, in terse tones, Love insists he harbors no animosity against Wilson. “I’ve never been competitive with Brian,” he writes early on. However, he underscores this point with constant, vitriolic asides. “I’m a Pisces, and Brian, a Gemini; and it is said that a Pisces writes out of inspiration while a Gemini writes out of desperation,” he snipes. Later: “For those who believe that Brian walks on water, I will always be the antichrist.”
Across several chapters, he labors to paint his cousin as a damaged, drug-addled shell who also, somehow, doubled as a duplicitous mastermind, actively stealing millions of Love’s songwriting royalties from the early hits they co-wrote (including “Catch a Wave,” “Fun, Fun, Fun,” and “California Girls”). Love never explains how Mr. Wilson accomplished these extreme poles of intellect while in the throes of drug addiction and mental breakdown, though he does detail these difficult periods with condescension. (“I thought he was so gone mentally there wasn’t much that I or anyone in the family could do,” he shrugs of one dark period of “hibernation” in the ’70s.) Only after Wilson stepped off the Beach Boys’ tour circuit in the mid-’60s did Love act as the frontman of the group, giving him the mantle of power he still grips with white knuckles today; to be flippant about his cousin’s ongoing mental instability comes across tone-deaf at best, despicable at average.
Love’s grievances against Wilson are not just financial. He is endlessly defensive about his creative importance to the Beach Boys, as petulant as a toddler (orhis pal Donald Trump). Love details only the Beach Boys songs he wrote, only the band accomplishments he spurred on. This keyhole focus can be merely tedious, as in the celebrity anecdotes, when he spins nearly every interaction around whatever quip he made to them. Boldface cameos rise briefly before sinking back over the event horizon of his massive ego: to hear Love tell it, the Beatles, Marlon Brando, Muhammad Ali, Chuck Berry, and Richard Pryor all basked reverently in his wit.
But when Love details the Beach Boys’ accomplishments, he is blatantly revisionist. In his narrative, Wilson’s genius reputation is the result of a savvy publicity campaign, not the harmonic depth and symphonic grandeur he created. Carl and Dennis Wilson, both essential and talented contributors to the band, are belittled repeatedly, and their untimely deaths are mentioned perfunctorily. And any song that did not bloom from Love’s pen is dismissed, so the most beloved and successful tracks of the band are reduced to footnotes—though he leaps into stultifying detail about writing the charming yet empirically uncomplicated lyrics for “California Girls” and “Be True to Your School.”
The inane 1988 hit “Kokomo,” on which Wilson did not appear, gleans multiple pages of gaseous praise; Wilson’s magnum opus, “God Only Knows,” earns the listless description, “It became one of the album’s most celebrated numbers.” As it happens, Love has been extensively documented as opposing that album, Pet Sounds—in the definitive Beach Boys biography The Nearest Faraway Place, he’s recounted as calling its psychedelic bend “offensive” and “nauseating,” and refusing to participate in some recordings—but he denies this now and takes dubious credit for the album title. Then, in the same breath, he insists that Wilson suffered without his guidance. (“The conventional wisdom on Pet Sounds is that Brian needed a different lyricist who could connect with his feelings of longing and disillusionment… I could have done that.”) He brags breathlessly about Sunflower, a moderately successful Beach Boys record he helmed in 1970, and crows that it was voted No. 300 in Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list. (Studiously omitted here: Pet Sounds was No. 2.)
Love also labors to insult many of his rock colleagues, usually as unfit to follow him onstage: Elton John, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and Chicago. (Some of them havereturned the goodwill.) He also slams nearly everyone in the Beach Boys’ orbit, including founding member Al Jardine and Brian Wilson’s second wife Melinda. This will surprise no one who recalls his infamously belligerent speech during the Beach Boys’ Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 1988, during which he called Mick Jagger“chickenshit to get onstage with the Beach Boys.” Of this, he now acknowledges, begrudgingly, “I got off track and began to ramble, and sounded angry, which I probably was. I didn’t have time to meditate that day, so I was even more on edge.” Then, naturally, Love details a time Jagger complimented him.
In general, Love’s surliness is wearying. He sniffs at Woodstock after the Beach Boys weren’t invited to perform (“I can’t say I was heartbroken”), then pens two slavish pages on small shows the group played in South Dakota, Iowa, and the Czech Republic, as if bluster alone can mask the demotion. His personal life is the only area in which he’s generous, but exclusively to himself; he disparages ex-wives yet excuses himself handily of his many infidelities (“I was still too young, too impulsive, to make lifelong decisions”).
Good Vibrations fulminates with significant (and not exactly meditative) anger throughout, one that erupts once Love details his 1993 lawsuit against Wilson for back songwriting credits. As he tells it, once he discovered that Wilson had been hoarding the profits of songs they co-wrote, he took him to court and won easily on all counts. Love neglects to mention some pretty damning details, like that his suit was filedright after Wilson won his own hefty payday from the publisher for fraud, and that some of his contested contributions were just one or two minor lyrics, such as in “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.” Love doesn’t acknowledge the timehe unsuccessfully sued Wilson in 2005 over a middling promotional CD in a newspaper, and heavily glosses over his 1992 defamation suit stemming from Wilson’s first autobiography. (No wonder Wilson’s forthcoming sequel, I Am Brian Wilson, is more muted about Love.) He defends his current touring with his group named the Beach Boys, of which he is the only original member, as his way of recouping these royalties, a strategy he describes ominously “my nourishment and my revenge.”
And of his greatest controversy, ejecting Wilson from the Beach Boys’ tour lineup after their 2012 reunion tour, his appeal is wholly unconvincing. He insists, “I couldn’t fire Brian even if I wanted to… the tour was always meant to be a limited run,” then sneers that Wilson’s response op-ed, “It Kinda Feels Like Getting Fired,” must have been ghostwritten for him. Love evades explaining that he owns the sole rights to perform under the Beach Boys’ name, so he could—and did—oust Wilson from the club tour associated with it. He insists that the larger ensemble with Wilson would have overpowered the modest venues he’d already booked; as anyone can infer, this really means he would have lost money by including Wilson.
Ladies and gentlemen, when you close Good Vibrations—and then retrieve it from the garbage can you have instinctively flung it into, multiple times by that point—you will understand why the defendant feels shortchanged by history. You may even sympathize with him and his grievances, his petition for a bit of the cultural deification long bestowed on his bandmate. He is not a cartoon despot twirling his Snidely Whiplash mustache in a high castle, and Brian Wilson is not a helpless doe falling constantly under his blade; these characterizations are overly reductive. Love contributed much to the Beach Boys’ success—but he only damages himself by detailing his perceived misfortunes while refusing to explore any real sympathy toward his bandmate of actual disability. Yes, it must have been frustrating for Love to work with Wilson in the 1960s as he was descending into mental troubles and drug cocoons, but he benefited more than anyone from his cousin’s brilliance. Love is hated because he has never seemed to empathize with Wilson, only stew in jealousy and seize his misfortune for profit. And if any doubts over his character remain by the end of Good Vibrations, they are summarized neatly in the acknowledgements section, where Love thanks neither Wilson nor the original Beach Boys but does praise John Stamos.
There was the potential of a better, more thoughtful book here, one that delved into the complexities of creating art with someone of great troubles and transcendence. If only Love had taken some time in his 75 years to consider writing it. But, ladies and gentlemen of the court, Mike Love’s surname is the kindest thing about him. His memoir leaves him neither vindicated nor convincingly tolerable as a human being.
The prosecution rests.