Background and career
Michael Edward Love (born March 15, 1941) is an American singer and lyricist who co-founded the Beach Boys alongside his cousins Brian, Dennis, and Carl Wilson and their friend Al Jardine. Characterized by his nasally baritone singing voice, he consistently sang on their recordings and usually served as their frontman on stage. Drawing inspiration from doo wop, 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". He is credited with co-writing 15 songs with Brian that reached the U.S. Top 40, including "Fun, Fun, Fun", "I Get Around", "Help Me, Rhonda", "California Girls", "Good Vibrations", and "Do It Again". Starting in 1968, Love was a student of Transcendental Meditation (TM) under Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and he 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, he fronted Celebration, a short-lived band that consisted of Beach Boys touring musicians, and began working on solo albums, releasing his first, Looking Back with Love, in 1981. His U.S. top 40 hits co-authored without Brian were the Beach Boys' "Getcha Back" and "Kokomo". Often vilified by fans and critics for conflicts with his bandmates, many of his lyrical 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 claimed to have co-written. Following Carl'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 was inducted 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, the first of six children, was born in the Baldwin Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles on March 15, 1941. Love's mother, Emily "Glee" Wilson (1919–1979), was the sister of Murry Wilson, a resident of Los Angeles since the early 1920s, and part-time songwriter. Glee married Edward Milton Love (1918–2013), the son of the founder of the Love Sheet Metal Company, in 1938. After Love's birth, the family moved to the View Park-Windsor Hills neighborhood. As a child, Love wrote his first song, "The Old Soldier", which Murry Wilson described as a "song in hymn form" in a 1971 interview. Murry reworked the song as "By His Side (When Jesus Calls His Soldiers)" with new lyrics, and Love's cousin Brian Wilson performed both songs at a concert held in Love's house. "By His Side" was copyrighted in September 1951.
Love attended Dorsey High School and graduated in 1959. He attended two semesters at Los Angeles City College, where he ran track and played basketball. Unsure of a career direction, Love joined his father's company, Love Sheet Metal, whose fortunes had begun to dramatically decline in the late 1950s. Later, Love also worked as a gas station attendant to help support himself and his first wife. 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. Love often sang at family get-togethers at his cousins, the Wilsons' home in nearby Hawthorne, especially at Christmas. During this time, 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 credited Love, an avid fan of doo-wop combos, with majorly contributing to the band's "funkier" vocal approaches and influencing Brian to listen to black R&B records; journalist Geoffrey Himes argued that without "Mike's R&B influence ... Brian couldn't have possibly become 'Brian Wilson.'"
In early 1964, Brian 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. Love is credited with naming their 1966 album Pet Sounds. Love stated in the 1970 series Pop Chronicles that the planned follow-up, Smile, was "good stuff" and "a fantastically-produced album", adding that "it'll come out, eventually." 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." Many reports conversely suggest that Love had resisted 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 characterizations. Love commented in a 2007 interview, "it's a bunch of crap to say that I didn't like the Pet Sounds album", and he rejected many of the reported claims concerning his involvement in the shelving of Smile. In a 1971 Rolling Stone article, former Brother Records head David Anderle originated "don't fuck with the formula" , a quote often attributed to Love and later repeated in myriad books, articles, websites, and blogs.
Love returned to co-writing with Brian for the Beach Boys' December 1967 album Wild Honey, the group's first foray into R&B. He later reported that the group's unhappiness with Capitol's promotional efforts had led them to change record companies in the late 1960s and that the company had "failed" to adapt following "'Good Vibrations', Pet Sounds, Smiley Smile or Vietnam and everything else". In his 2016 memoir, he wrote that, unlike Brian, he was never concerned about being taken seriously by critics, and felt that detractors of their early songs showed "elitism at its worst: because so many people loved our music, there must be something wrong with it."
