By Michael Feeney Callan
In a hotel bedroom in Birmingham, England, Mike Love is explaining the origins of his songwriting by singing a verse from The Beach Boys’ Merry Christmas, Baby.
“It started with our families, the Loves and the Wilsons, siblings and cousins, getting together at the holidays to sing tunes. Christmas songs are American bedrock: Johnny Marks’'Rudolph the Rednose Reindeer,' Irving Berlin, Mel Thorme. I suppose, when I think back, my impulse to compose began then, under the Christmas tree.”
Mike isn’t a conventional vacation guy. When I ask him to summarise his life in a sentence or three, the common biographer’s opening volley, he says,
“My life is a song. I’ve been blessed with joy, that’s what I set out to pass on in the music.”
The enduring success of The Beach Boys burns like sunshine, sometimes blinding in its intensity. The extraordinary spontaneity of its beginnings are too easily forgotten.
“Brian loved chords and harmony. I loved words and singing. We saw each other almost every day. It was inevitable we would write together.”
It’s an old story that the songwriting began with Dennis enthusing about his surfer hobby, a truth Mike endorses. Less well known is the fact that the very first melodic murmur of the nascent Beach Boys, that came in the schoolboy rehearsals at the Wilsons’ music room in August 1961, was Mike’s proposal of a bass contrapuntal melody vocalised as “bop-bop-dip-di-dip-di-dip."
“[Mike] was fooling around, trying to spark a new idea with the bass lines he’d sung countless times before,” said Brian. “A couple of hours later I’d finished the song 'Surfin’'.”
Mike wrote virtually all the lyrics.
The writing partnership of Mike and Brian took off with an Olympian sprint. Within weeks they created "Surfin’ Safari," the song that won over the Capitol Records producer Nick Venet, who was hotly in search of the new teen fad. The Beach Boys were signed to Capitol and Brian and Mike dashed forward with the impetus of youth to produce an astonishing package of iconic paeans to joy, beating the Beatles to a debut self-penned album by almost six months.
A dam of Californian creativity burst. By 1965, when the Beatles were consolidating with their fifth album HELP!, The Beach Boys had already produced eight albums jam-packed with songs co-written by Mike and Brian. The Beatles pioneered a new genre, leavening blues, Motown and German cellar-club rock with intimate romanticism. The Beach Boys created the California Dream, finessing the boosterism of William Mulholland and the founding fathers of Los Angeles, the orange grove state, offering the world the idyll of a season in the sun.
The songs of Mike Love and Brian Wilson set new industry standards for youth music and invention. Brian’s mastery of the studio has been atomised by academics and awarded. Mike’s induction this month into the Songwriters Hall of Fame closes the circle, elevating both writers side by side to the pantheon of partnerships that have distinguished a century of transformative American music.
"Merry Christmas, Baby" exemplifies what Mike likes best about songs: tight storylines. Stephen Sondheim’s mentor Oscar Hammerstein 11 famously wrote some of the best lyrics of the 20th century. But even the best writers vacillate. Greatness is an aspiration, not a destination. "Oh What a Beautiful Morning" from Oklahoma was, said Sondheim, perfection. On the other hand, "Climb Every Mountain" was a failure because it defied the rules of brevity. Too many words. Mike agrees:
“When you express something in a lyric, especially when your target market is the widest audience, you need a power phrase like a punchline. I think that’s what I brought to Brian’s music: the concentrated immediacy of 'fun, fun, fun' 'be true to your school,' 'my love's like the warmth of the sun.' I didn’t noodle about. I told the story like a Western Union telegram.”
From the earliest, Brian and Mike’s collaboration echoed that of George and Ira Gershwin’s, revered artists for both. Brian’s approach was to compose in pentatonic scale with minor chord modulations. Mike’s was to parlay Ira’s wit. In the albums leading up to the historic Pet Sounds, the arc of their storytelling spanned youth fetish ("Catch a Wave," "Our Car Club," "California Girls") to the empathic introspection of "In the Back of My Mind."
On Pet Sounds, Mike contributed "I Know There’s an Answer" – a song contemporaneous with John Lennon’s "Tomorrow Never Knows" which Geoff Emerick, the Beatles’ engineer, believed was the better ‘corrective’ to the Sixties’ druggie obsession with "ego death." He also wrote the unforgettable outro to "Wouldn’t It be Nice" and the sublime "I’m Waiting for the Day."
“That one was a song of raw yearning,” said Mike. “I felt it sat better with Brian’s autobiographical mindset for Pet Sounds.”
In tandem with Pet Sounds Mike co-wrote the landmark "Good Vibrations" with Brian, once again contributing the driving bass melody and nailing the lyrics in twenty minutes.
In the mid sixties a revolutionary wave swept over popular music. Pioneering the changes Brian Wilson embraced avant pop with SMiLE, a sonic cut-and-paste experiment conducted decades before digital sampling was invented. SMiLE morphed into Smiley Smile, The Beach Boys’ first home-recorded lo-fi album which itself was as radical as anything by experimental modernists like John Cage or John Coltrane.
Throughout, Mike nurtured continued collaboration with Brian, co-authoring the raunchy, bizarre "She’s Goin’ Bald" and participating in all the eclectic harmony recordings. Smiley Smile was a monumental risk, steering The Beach Boys a million miles from the broadly relatable number one records like the Mike and Brian compositions "I Get Around" and "Help Me, Rhonda." But Mike prompted a masterstroke for the album, delivering a lean, resonantly coherent lyric in the Blind Lemon Jefferson-tinged "Gettin’ Hungry." With the band under pressure to fulfill their record contract, the pre-Pet Sounds close collaborative recipe was restored and the much-vaunted Wild Honey album was created, delivering sensitive gems like "Darlin’" and "Let The Wind Blow" whose lyrics Lorenz Hart or Johnny Mercer would have been proud of.
In the 1970s and 80s, the years Carl described to me as “the Sixties’ Hangover Era,” The Beach Boys became a full-on democracy.
“We could easily have imploded and gone our own ways then,” said Carl, “but none of us wanted that. We were all so invested in the music and in what we were learning about ourselves through the music.”
For Mike, the symbolist imagery of his Beach Boys changed. That change is signaled on songs like "Anna Lee The Healer" and the nocturne "Meant for You" on the Friends album in 1968 and most powerfully realised in "All I Wanna Do," the hypnotic, transporting Brian-Mike collaboration at the heart of 1970’s Sunflower album. In March 1968, Mike had found transcendental meditation attending the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram in India with the Beatles.
“It altered all my perceptions – about the music, myself, the human condition.”
Like George Harrison, a new imperative directed his songwriting. From henceforth he would, when he could, focus on environmental and spiritual issues. Despite their significant distance from the high elation of the sixties, Mike’s first songs apart from Brian – "Everyone’s in Love with You" (on 15 Big Ones), "Don’t Go Near the Water" (on Surf’s Up, written with Al Jardine) and "Big Sur" (on Holland) – propagated the continued celebration of positivity, hope and joy.
In the third act of Mike’s journey, when the lives of he and Brian intermittently diverged, a constancy prevailed. The Beach Boys prevailed. Ultimately the founding unity held true. Brian continued till his retirement; Mike never stopped writing, forming a partnership with Terry Melcher that kept The Beach Boys as chart contenders. Remarkable songs were written – "Somewhere Near Japan," "Rock ’n Roll to the Rescue," and The Beach Boys’ first number one record since "Good Vibrations," the unforgettable "Kokomo." To boot, of the band members after Brian, Mike’s became the most copious solo album career, producing three largely self-penned works in the last eight years. In addition, beyond all The Beach Boys he, with Bruce, has continued touring, centre stage and in the spotlight, singing the songs, peddling the joy.
Johnny Mercer, Abe Olman and Howie Richmond founded the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1969 to consecrate the poets of the heart. In 1987 Lennon and McCartney were inducted. In 2000 Paul McCartney inducted Brian Wilson, who at last took his rightful place alongside the Gershwins, Rogers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Lowe, Lorenz Hart, Sammy Cahn, Irving Berlin, Hoagy Carmichael and Cole Porter. For so long Mike Love has stood in the wings. Many music fans, me included, have shuffled their feet alongside him. His achievements stand tall. He is manifestly up there with the greats. The memories Mike and Brian Wilson have given us, the joys, are gold. The music is addictive. The lyrics magical in their poetry, wit and ebullience. Who but Cole Porter or Johnny Mercer could write a lyric like “Stark naked in front of my mirror, a pudgy person somehow did appear”? Who but Hoagy Carmichael or Lorenz Hart could write “Let the wind blow, but don’t take her out of my life"?
In his induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame Mike Love’s work and the scintillating collaboration of Wilson and Love, by default, enter the Great American Songbook.