“Absolute trash”: Did Mike Love really not like ‘Pet Sounds’?
It might be a slight sense of bias on my part, but it often astonishes me when people say that they don’t like or can’t appreciate The Beach Boys’ 1966 classic, Pet Sounds. For its time, it was a revolutionary album that took pop music to a higher level of experimentation, and in terms of its approach to production, it’s still the sort of album that is rarely ever matched for its inventiveness. Plain and simple, Brian Wilson created one of the greatest records of its time, and of all time, and how anyone can dislike it is beyond me.
Supposedly, one of the band’s members, Mike Love, has often been a critic of the album over the years, and while he and his cousin Wilson often failed to see eye to eye on creative decisions within the group, with Love preferring the early material of the group that focused on barbershop harmonies and creating simple yet fun surf pop. However, while there may have been tensions between the two parties, Love remained a member of the group and would eventually get on board with Wilson’s wild ideas.
He may not have been a fan of the change in sound that Wilson had attempted to usher in for the group, and certainly stood in the way of him releasing the even more expansive follow-up, Smile, for how it all but abandoned the pursuit of pop success in order to make a chaotic concept album that mixed theatrics, children’s music and acid-laced storytelling.
Despite this, there is also the tendency for some people to embellish the truth when it comes to artists giving their own work a healthy dose of criticism, and love to play up the most minute details and spin them into a far more juicy version of the true events. With that, is it possible that Love never really hated Pet Sounds as much as the media likes to let on, and that his occasional disparaging comments about Wilson’s opus were totally blown out of proportion?
Let’s get things straight; there are some things that Love doesn’t like about the record, and he made sure that his voice was heard and specific changes were made to the record at the last minute. For instance, Love took objection to the fact that the song, ‘Hang On to Your Ego’, was all about Wilson’s experiences of taking LSD and how the drug can shatter one’s ego. With Love’s persuasion, the lyrics and title were changed to the more commercially viable and family-friendly alternative, ‘I Know There’s An Answer’, to avoid the band becoming too heavily associated with drug use.
However, Love chose to set the record straight in a 2007 interview with Record Collector, and debunked all of the myths about him detesting the album, claiming that external influence has shaped the narrative to paint him as the bad guy who was always trying to sabotage Wilson’s work. “The people around Brian who do his PR have always perpetrated these myths about what I liked and didn’t like,” he told the publication. “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.”
Love continued to back himself up in the interview and claimed that he thought it was a “fantastically crafted” album. “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,” he argued. “It’s quite unnecessary and unfortunate, but that whole thing about me not liking the album is absolute trash. It’s completely false.”
