Mike Love

American singer and songwriter

Michael Edward Love (born March 15, 1941) is an American singer and songwriter who was the lead vocalist of the Beach Boys which he co founded with his cousins Brian, Dennis, and Carl Wilson and their friend Al Jardine. Characterized by his nasal tenor and occasional bass baritone singing, Love has been one of the band's vocalists and lyricists for their entire career, contributing to each of their studio albums and serving as their frontman for live performances. During the mid 1960s, he was one of Brian's main collaborators, contributing lyrics to hit records such as "Fun, Fun, Fun" (1964), "I Get Around" (1964), "Help Me, Rhonda" (1965), "California Girls" (1965), and "Good Vibrations" (1966). 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 had a significant role in the Beach Boys' vocal arrangements – particularly the doo wop element in their sound. Starting in 1968, Love was a student of Transcendental Meditation (TM) 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 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. He has not performed with Brian since their 2012 reunion tour. 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.

Michael Edward Love's mother, Emily "Glee" Wilson (1919–1979), was the sister of Mary and Murry Wilson, a resident of Los Angeles since the early 1920s. Glee married Edward Milton Love (1918–2013), the son of the founder of the Love Sheet Metal Company, in 1938. Mike Love, the first of their six children, was born in the Baldwin Hills district of Los Angeles on March 15, 1941. Thereafter the family moved to the upmarket View Park area. 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 (whose fundamental interest was folk music) and Carl Wilson (whose idol was Chuck Berry). 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.

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.'"

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 (1966). 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,

The people around Brian who do his PR have always perpetrated these myths about what I liked and didn't like. So, I'm perfectly happy to own up to what I said and what I didn't like, but it's a bunch of crap to say that I didn't like the Pet Sounds album. It's fantastically crafted. I just think that some people who lionise Brian try to build him up by thinking if they tear down anybody else, me in particular, that that's a way of building him up. It's quite unnecessary and unfortunate, but that whole thing about me not liking the album is absolute trash. It's completely false. 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". 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. 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 (a pedal steel guitarist formerly of The Flying Burrito Brothers and Manassas) and mostly featured original songs written by Love. Both albums were not released but were later bootlegged; Love later 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 (third to be recorded, but first to be released), Looking Back with Love (1981), 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 (along with "Kokomo" co writers Scott McKenzie, Terry Melcher, and John Phillips) was nominated for a Golden Globe Award (1988) 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 [earlier that day]." The case ended up being settled outside of court with the terms not disclosed. In 2000, ABC premiered a two part television miniseries, The Beach Boys: An American Family, that dramatized the Beach Boys' story. It was produced by Stamos and was criticized for historical inaccuracies. Love was an advisor to the film. Some critics accused him of having the film overstate his role in the group and portray negative depictions of Brian and Smile collaborator Van Dyke Parks. On November 3, 2005, Love sued Brian and the British newspaper The Mail On Sunday because the Beach Boys' name and Love's image were used in a promotional CD that was given free with the paper to promote the 2004 Brian Wilson presents Smile release. Love argued that the unauthorized (by Brother Records Inc.) free CD resulted in loss of income for the band. Wilson's wife Melinda alleged that, during the deposition, Love turned to Wilson and remarked, "you better start writing a real big hit because you're going to have to write me a real big check." The lawsuit was dismissed on May 16, 2007, on the grounds that it was without merit. In 2011, Love reunited with Brian, Jardine, Johnston and David Marks for a new Beach Boys album and 50th anniversary tour beginning in 2012. In September 2012, Love and Johnston announced via a press release that following the end of the reunion tour the Beach Boys would revert to the Love/Johnston lineup, without Brian, Jardine or Marks, all of whom expressed surprise. Although such dates were noted in a late June issue of Rolling Stone, it was widely reported that the three had been "fired". Love's autobiography, Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy, was published on September 13, 2016. He wrote the book as a response to "many inaccuracies" that had been said about him over the decades. It was published one month before the release of Brian's autobiography, I Am Brian Wilson: A Memoir. When asked about the book's negative comments toward him, Love responded: "He's not in charge of his life, like I am mine. His every move is orchestrated and a lot of things he's purported to say, there's not tape of it." As of November 2016, Love claims that he has not read Brian's book. On October 26, 2018, Love released his third solo album, Reason for the Season, featuring traditional and original Christmas music. Love's fourth album 12 Sides Of Summer was released on July 19, 2019. The album Mike Love Not War followed in 2023.

Love has been married to Jacquelyne Piesen since 1994 and has eight children: two with Piesen and six from his four previous marriages. As of 2015, he resides in Incline Village, Nevada on the northern shore of Lake Tahoe. In addition to being a cousin of the Wilson brothers, Love is the brother of former NBA basketball player Stan Love, and Pink Martini harpist Maureen Love, and the uncle of Miami Heat basketball player Kevin Love. Shawn Marie Love, a woman who was engaged to Dennis Wilson in his final days alleged to be Love's daughter, an accusation that Love denied.

Love describes himself as a progressive, although a photographed handshake between him and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s led many to label him as a conservative. Notwithstanding the friendly relationship between the Beach Boys and George H. W. Bush for many years, in 1992 the band raised money for the TM backed Natural Law Party. At the time, Love announced he was switching his support from Bush to NLP candidate John Hagelin. In 2018, Love praised Donald Trump for his "support of music historically" and was present at the signing of the Music Modernization Act in October. After Trump's election, the Beach Boys were asked to perform in the festivities for Trump's inauguration, and Love initially responded positively, saying Trump had "been a friend for a long time. Does that mean I agree with everything he says? No. But if we were asked [to play his inauguration], I'm sure that we would." Instead, during the evening of Trump's inauguration day, Love's Beach Boys performed at the Texas State Society's "Black Tie & Boots" Inaugural Ball. In February 2020, Brian Wilson and Jardine's official social media pages encouraged fans to boycott the band's music on animal rights grounds, after it was announced that Love's Beach Boys would perform at a Safari Club International convention in Reno, Nevada. The concert proceeded despite online protests; Love issued a statement that his group has always supported "freedom of thought and expression as a fundamental tenet of our rights as Americans." In October 2020, Love's Beach Boys agreed to play as the headliner at a high dollar fundraiser for Trump's reelection campaign in Newport Beach. In a press release, Wilson and Jardine disavowed the use of the Beach Boys' name and music at the event, stating "we have absolutely nothing to do with the Trump benefit today in Newport Beach. Zero." Love again played at Mar a Lago's New Year's Eve celebration that year, alongside other acts.

Love has been a longtime supporter of environmental causes and was among speakers at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and Earth Day 2000 in Washington, DC. He was instrumental in forming StarServe ("Students Taking Action and Responsibility to Serve"), which enlisted high profile celebrities to inspire America's youth to help serve their communities. He performed a benefit concert for the foundation for the Children of the Californias which raised one million dollars to support the expansion of three new surgical suites. During the 50th Reunion Tour, Love, alongside the Beach Boys, partnered with Operation Smile to raise funds for those in need of cleft lip and palate repair surgeries. In May 2013, he was recognized for his decades of investment in education and national service by being awarded City Year's "Seven Generations Award".

2014: Society of Singers Lifetime Achievement Award.