A few songs, click to listen, right click to download
Don’t Back Down (wipeout video)
I finished reading Mike Love’s autobiography, “Good Vibrations.” This is a book where you’re constantly reading between the lines and I did it the wrong way around, most people read Brian’s first. Mike Love is a force, raised in privilege in Baldwin Hills, cars, talent, Swedish good looks, an easy familiarity with the way things are, he perfectly represented the Southern California myth that the Beach Boys epitomized: Lutheran, a rebel whose rebellion mainly consists of lots of girlfriends (Lots! And Lots! More below), a casual attitude towards ethnic divisions, drinking (beer!) and generally transcending the extremely narrow moral ground of his parents while he remained conventionally double standard. Later he turns to environmentalism, the soft, acceptable politics of ocean, earth, love and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, all the while finding comfort close to the Reagans and George H. W. Bush (while opposing the Iraq invasion, based on Maharishi Mahesh’s own opposition).
While the world surges and quakes around him, his own somewhat situational and personally satisfying values seem not to change. His main concern is not, as many charge, money but rather security: he builds the Beach Boys brand and it provides a lifetime of support for all of the band members and their families despite what is often only a mediocre product. This has obviously good but equally obvious bad effects, most immediately on the band members, most clearly on Brian Wilson, the genius, and then by extension on their families. Disastrous actions do not have disastrous effects. Mike goes through women like….what’s the metaphor? He has a lot of them. There are two marriages in five short chapters, he has the marriage certificate for the current one filed with the divorce papers from the previous one in the same folder. I lost count—five? Six? Traditional, he will not live with a woman who he has not married, but living with them invariably (until he’s 55 or so) ends in a breakup. Just like….oh yeah, the band.
Here at least it is obvious that he is the one who keeps the band together, popular and touring, and that is no small feat. He will not be swayed, he is continually positive about their worth and value even as their reputation slides on mediocre albums followed by terrible albums punctuated by occasional unexpected hits. He mentions poor management which they definitely experienced. He compares Brian Epstein’s Beatles management to dad and sociopath Murry Wilson’s Beach Boy’s management (compare stage costumes) as a telling if late revelation. Paul McCartney suggests they pay more attention to their album covers: and other things, Mike, and other things. Until it was a little too late to draw the best, all of the music and business relationships are based on family ties or people they meet personally, the old southern way. The Beatles found actual real professionals when they were at the top. No management in Los Angeles saw the Beach Boys as anything but one hit wonders, and when Brian started hitting harder, first with I Get Around and Barbara Ann, and then Pet Sounds, the Beach Boys became the first of the new kind of bands that no one knew what to do with, most especially the rest of the band.
All of it goes back to a mythical time for Americans, imagined largely in terms of Southern California high school with its ideal combination of cars, girls, beer and a carefree (careless?) life full of imagination (Brian) and daring (Mike). They never really grow out of it, try as they might. Mike is smart and perceptive, writes the lyrics to some of their best songs (Good Vibrations, California Girls, Warmth of the Sun, Don’t Worry Baby, etc.), but when Brian’s wife Melinda tells him, “You’ve got a big chip on your shoulder, Mike Love,” he responds with “Oh yeah? Well me and my chip are out of here” and momentarily quits the band. It’s telling, and he tells it. Left out are how and why his cruises with Brian, listening to the radio together and harmonizing (Imagine! Mike Love and Brian Wilson on the Hollywood Freeway, Saturday night, windows down, singing along loud! with the Jive Five, My True Story or the Regents Barbara-Ann), why those cruises came to an end, and why neither one of them could ever really find the way out of that.
The last chapter of the book has this section, deeper, more personal and revealing than anything else in the book:
“In 1972, Brian wrote “Mount Vernon and Fairway,” the corner of my childhood home. It wasn’t really a song but a 12 minute fairytale, or allegory, about a young Prince (me) whose special bedroom window (like mine) ”looked down into a deep, deep forest [and glimpsed] distant lights from other castles in the kingdom.” A Pied Piper (Brian) brings magical music to the Prince through a glowing transistor radio (like the one we listened to as kids). The Piper tells the Prince that if he leaves the transistor radio on after midnight, the Piper will bring more magic music to him. In days ahead, the Prince does that, but “he heard nothing like the music of that magic night… There’s nothing but Bach on this radio.” The Prince stops believing in the Piper and disregards the transistor until he hears a mysterious sound one night.
Could it be the Pied Piper himself,
Coming out of the magic transistor radio?
Or was it just the wind whistling by the castle window.
If you have a transistor radio and the lights are all out some night,
Don’t be very surprised if [the radio] turns to light green.
And the whirling magic sound of the Pied Piper comes to visit you.
I’m the Pied Piper
In the radio.
Like I said, in this book you’re constantly reading between the lines.
