The charity supergroup Mike Love wanted to put together: “A great opportunity”
For most music fans, Mike Love captaining any band is the last project they’d ever want to see materialise.
He gets a bad wrap, really. Lore would have it that Love was the crass and commercially minded one of The Beach Boys, wringing his hands with exasperation at his genius cousin Brian Wilson’s avant-pop brilliance and urging him to stay closer to the safe waters of surf rock over the choppy terrain of Pet Sounds’ lauded experimentalism.
Coupled with later legal battles over song credits and his eager hobnobbing with Republicans, Love can’t help but stand as the target of ire among the band’s many fans.
What his detractors won’t really acknowledge is his solid input in many of The Beach Boys’ biggest hits. Love was instrumental in many of the doo-wop-leaning vocal arrangements, as well as co-writing ‘Fun Fun Fun’, ‘I Get Around’, and ‘California Girls’, and lyrically dreaming up the bulk of ‘Good Vibrations’. Still, ruthless litigious action in the early 1990s against Wilson and a perception that he was keen to keep slogging The Beach Boys through the nostalgia circuit still dogs Love to this day.
But did he really consider jumping ship in a new venture with some of the day’s biggest stars? “I’d like to see a Mick Jagger and a Mike Love and a Bruce Springsteen do something that is real, to fix something, rather than just a photo opportunity like Live Aid, which has no design to change anything,” Love quipped to journalist Dean Goodman in 1992. “It was a great press opportunity, and maybe they shipped a few million dollars’ worth of something to the docks to be stolen by the people in Ethiopia.”
The Beach Boys, in fact, played Philadelphia’s side of the Live Aid bargain back in 1985, but what prompted such a cynical jab at the charity industry? In 1988, Love seemed to have plenty to be happy about. ‘Kokomo’ had scored a US number one, and The Beach Boys were to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame along with The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and The Rolling Stones. What could go wrong?
Well, missing that day’s Transcendental Meditation session meant Love’s capacity for assholeism was alive and kicking. As well as beckoning Springsteen and Billy Joel to come and stage and jam, he called out Paul McCartney for letting business differences stop his attendance, and accused Jagger of cowardice for not attending the event, never mind his actual presence in the audience watching Love’s rambling tirade.
It turns out that Love’s industry jab was supposedly wrought from his fatigue with the music business’ artifice and hollow spectacle, a concern likely to surprise longtime Love haters. “It is fake because they don’t think any further than the footlights,” he furthered. “And I don’t like that, I’m not into that. I think black-tie benefits are great, but when they start losing money for the cause, or they don’t address the issues with dynamic enough results, then it’s like a Pyrrhic thing. It doesn’t mean anything.”
The answer, then, is another charity jamboree with Jagger and Springsteen, according to Love. It’s not entirely clear what the reviled Beach Boy is clamouring at, but it’s safe to assume rock and pop haven’t missed much on the absence of Love’s mooted supergroup.
