The Beach Boys album Dennis Wilson disowned: “An embarrassment to my life”
Anyone who has been around for as long as The Beach Boys aren’t going to be safe from a few messy moments throughout their history. Their music is still the definition of what summer sounds like to most people, but from the eras when Brian Wilson was MIA to them struggling on with to the darkest days of his drug abuse in the late 1960s, there was no telling whether an album of theirs was going to be great or turn into an absolutel dumpster fire. While there have been many more Surf’s Ups in their discography than repeats of Summer in Paradise, there are more than a few that even the band don’t want to discuss.
Then again, it’s hard to look at the creative direction of the band and not see the tension between Brian and Mike Love. Each of them helped make the band what they were, but when looking at their values, it’s not like they were on the same page. Love knew the formula for what made a great pop song and wanted to stick with it, but there was no reason to think something as adventurous as Pet Sounds wasn’t going to be an absolute smash hit.
After years in the dark, though, it seemed like Brian was actually starting to make some progress and felt comfortable enough coming back to music. A lot of his vocals were a little bit shaky listening back to The Beach Boys Love You, but the reason why it works so well is because you can hear Brian having fun with music again, even if songs like ‘Roller Skating Child’ are more than a little bit uncomfortable.
They seemed to be building some momentum on the record, but the follow-up Adult/Child should have been the album we all got to hear. After all, Brian was singing about going back to his youth in a way that was more than a little bit creepy before, so hearing him have an album that was embracing his age should have been a lot better than what ended up on the MIU album.
But in the case of Love, it almost felt like the band came second in his life at that point. He had started practising transcendental meditation, and since he was away for six months, it left only Brian and Carl Wilson to carry on with the record by themselves. It’s one thing for people to have conflicting schedules, but Dennis Wilson hated seeing Love treat the rest of the band like they weren’t a priority.
Love himself may called the album not democratic enough, but Dennis wished that his bandmate’s lack of involvement put a curse on his practises, saying, “I hope that the karma will fuck up Mike Love’s meditation forever, that album is an embarrassment to my life. It should self-destruct.” It’s not like Love’s involvement would magically transform the project, but it probably would have saved us from a few creepy moments.
For all of the vitriol that is thrown his way, Love was always aware of what the fans wanted to hear. Given the fact that ‘Hey Little Tomboy’ made it onto the record, it was clear that the quality control wasn’t working properly, especially when the tribute to Carl Wilson’s dog, ‘Shannon’, was outpacing them on the charts a few years before.
MIU was always going to be one of the band’s more underwhelming albums, given Brian’s mental breakdown halfway through, but knowing what Love can do on his own, maybe it’s for the best that we ended up with the version we have. After all, since Love eventually co-opted the sounds of the time on ‘Summer of Love’ later in his career, could you imagine what it would have been like if that same guy suddenly decided he was going to preach about his spiritual life?
