Part 10 of the Adult/Child saga.

If summer was the dominant season for the Beach Boys, love was the dominant emotion, so it only made sense to combine the season and the feeling. “Summer Means New Love” was the first explicit attempt, even if it was merely an instrumental that left the title to do the heavy thematic lifting. Two years later “The Summer of Love” would officially be declared across the western world. You’d think this would be the summer of the band’s ultimate triumph, and yet…

The end of May in 1967 was the end of Smile. A week after the final collapse of that scrapped album’s sessions, the sessions began for the new album that would take its place. The Summer of Love would be the summer of Smiley Smile’s conception. Hubba hubba?

Honestly, I still can’t fully reckon with what Smiley Smile is. Carl famously declared it a “bunt” rather than the “grand slam” Smile was intended to be. And yet, he took immense pride in the early 70’s telling the story of how it was used in a mental hospital to bring people down from bad acid trips. And perhaps that’s what it is more than entertainment – medicine for those detached from reality. Put some roots down in this, son. Tripping on a cloud eight miles high? Smiley Smile is here to gently drop you back down to earth.

Until digging into the Bellagio archives, I’d always assumed “Heroes and Villains” was the completion of Smile’s collapsing arc, and yet it appears that almost the entire Smiley Smile album was recorded *before* the sessions that completed the single. “Heroes and Villains”, as a finished piece in the summer of 1967, was ultimately always intended for Smiley Smile, once the conscious effort was made to pull it together for release. This is a tremendous mindfuck in my understanding of the Smile saga.

When “Heroes and Villains” was released on July 24th, it was the group’s response to the full flowering of the psychedelic music movement they’d helped usher in with “Good Vibrations”. The new single wasn’t a flop, but it sure wasn’t a smash. It was the hard drive into center field that preceded the bunt of the album. While “Good Vibrations” had come on like the Summer of Love nine months early, “Heroes and Villains” failed to be an era-defining follow-up. It was more of an absurd post-modern anachronism, existing somewhere completely outside of the times in which it appeared.

Within a year of its release the band would go barrelling from one of the most popular acts in the world to one of the least. The fact that they pulled out of the Monetary Pop Festival left them effectively out of the zeitgeist, but appearing there only would have reduced the band to more of a joke than they were. Instead of being blown off the stage by Hendrix, Janis et al like the Mamas and Papas were, and rendered instantly irrelevant, the Beach Boys just quietly slipped away from mass public consciousness.

The window of relevance that the band occupied was an epoch unto itself. Yet today their place in the history of rock and roll is barely represented in places like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, if at all. Only the Beatles were able to ride atop the wave of success through the entire decade of cultural upheaval, only to break up at its end. The Beach Boys have never broken up. They were rendered irrelevant long enough to become nostalgic for multiple generations, and Mike Love has been at the center of that nostalgic focus for as long as he saw a market for it. When milking those sweet memories became a formula, you better believe he milked it.

The 25th anniversary of 1967’s famous summer found Mike at the helm as captain of the oldies express, milking both the greatest hits of the first half of the 60’s and their final smash hit at the end of the 80’s. His formula added up to a nostalgic throwback that was instantly dated, and when it came to the song “Summer of Love”, well… have you ever wanted to hear one of the Beach Boys rap?

To be fair to Mike, he wasn’t the only one to commit such a crime. Brian too had recorded his own incredibly awful rap song in the early nineties, but at least we can mostly blame Eugene Landy for that, and thank the record label for rejecting it.

“Summer of Love” was taken all the way to the finish line, complete with a Baywatch Nights-adjacent music video, full of bikini babes and all of the Beach Boys dressed like Baywatch lifeguards. All of them except Brian, that is, who has packed some weight back on since the late 80’s and is dressed entirely in black. He looks like a gangster who is trying to collect on a debt that Mike owes, and is totally disgusted by what he is witnessing. Either that, or he’s putting Mike and his crew through this humiliation for failing to pony up the dough…

That feeling of disgust would be shared by most Beach Boys fans who heard Summer In Paradise. Which was like… 1000? After the smash of “Kokomo” and the half-assed album it appeared on going gold, this was a flop beyond anything the band had yet experienced before. The impact crater was so substantial that it basically killed the creation of a new original Beach Boys album for 20 years.

When there was a nostalgic 50th anniversary to milk, the band reunited with Brian, who had some MOR tunes he’d baked up with Joe Thomas to refry into Beach Boys numbers. It’s a way better album than Summer In Paradise, but consider that damning with faint praise. Mike was disappointed that the reunion would not be a creative collaboration between him and Brian, hoping for the chance to get one last “Good Vibrations” under their belt for posterity. I can’t blame him, but I can’t blame Brian for wanting to work as little as possible with the guy he’s repeatedly called an asshole…

The end of the summer of 2012 brought the end of the 50th anniversary tour. It was the first and last time all the surviving members of the group performed together. Mike Love claimed he didn’t fire Brian Wilson. Brian replied that it sure felt like being fired. The bottom line was the “band” was more lucrative as a smaller oldies revue than it was as the Beach Boys circus, and there were control issues in many directions. But I think the other bottom line is Mike missed being the leader of the band, which he would never be perceived as with Brian present.

Here we are now the first summer since Brian has been gone and Mike is more El Jefe Honcho than ever, with longtime sideman Bruce Johnston having departed earlier in the year. The rest of the band has a median age half that of Mike’s, and the truth is the oldest living Beach Boy is looking his age. This may be his own final summer, the way things are going. His voice is a quivering whisper, as if he doesn’t have the oxygen capacity to even reach for his nasal cavity-rooted head voice. He sounds like Hal 9000 singing “Daisy” as his circuits go.

Is that too harsh? It’s only about half as harsh as the recent Slate article where Luke Winkie recalls seeing the band on their current tour:

Seated next to us was a woman in her early 70s who had not yet realized that she was about to see the Beach Boys. She thought she had purchased tickets for an especially expensive cover band, because the idea that the desiccated remnants of the group could still be touring—62 years after the release of “Fun, Fun, Fun”—seemed frankly impossible. No, I replied to her. Not quite.

After laying out the basic history of the band that led to this uncanny situation, he captures the horror of what unfolds:

Love looked sallow and enfeebled; legs stiff, arms flat by his side. When he opened his mouth to sing, his once resonant tenor was reduced to a whisper, all warbled, strange, and barely there, decimated by the encumbering decades. My friend shot me an ashen look, the same one I remember him giving me during the opening salvo of the doomed Joe Biden debate.

“Is that Mark Love?” asked the woman next to me. She had malapropped his name, but with my help, she at least was now aware that she was in the presence of a Beach Boy.

I nodded in the affirmative. “Oh my god,” she said, looking almost stricken. “I feel bad for him.”

There haven’t been many times in the story of the Beach Boys that Mike has been the sympathetic character. And even now, when those who see him perform can’t help but feel a kind of pity for the poor old sod, he is still the most hated living person in the band’s saga. And now, as he appears to be getting ready to shuffle off this mortal coil (on stage), someone has come out of the shadows to accuse Mike of grooming them as a teenager into an illicit, abusive relationship over 45 years ago.

While there are many people casting aspersions on her story, and questioning “why now”, there is a lot about what she is presenting, the images she has of them together, and the way she appears to be someone publicly unpacking their trauma rather than reciting a story… I’m having a hard time dismissing what she is saying. Am I naive and gullible? Perhaps. But I know in processing my own trauma that it often takes decades to unpack these things and get past the point of blaming yourself as much as your abuser. And then trying not to blame yourself when you know you weren’t the last person to have suffered their abuse, and that if you had come forward sooner… it’s not a trip I’d wish on anyone.

This is a dark direction to take summer and love in. It’s getting harder and harder to return to that innocent nostalgic past, and when you do there’s some middle-aged pervy weirdo there macking on the high school girls. About the only way it could sound much worse would be turned into a white boomer rap song, where you can’t help but wonder when “it’s a love thing”, is it something that is legal in all 50 states?

I’m gonna end up crossing some kind of line here. But, it’s not like we’re talking about a band that didn’t record “Hey Little Tomboy”, “Roller Skating Child”, and “Lazy Lizzie”. Dennis had his own “Schoolgirl”. And Mike had a song that was called “Jailbait” that was later recorded with a less lascivious title with the group Celebration, featuring Ron Altbach of the Epstein files. It’s a sick, sad world, and the Beach Boys have always been a part of it. At least Al Jardine keeps it clean…

The most sordid thing you can say about Mr. Jardine is that he was a real dick after his divorce. But the truth is he was probably ready for a divorce from the Beach Boys by the time his darkest decade in the band rolled around. Stories persist that his attitude was so sour that the rest of the band was already ready to kick him to the curb before Carl died, and once he was gone, so was the central lynchpin of peace, love and understanding in the group. Without Carl, the balance of assholes was forever off – the center could not hold. Al departed, and took a whole world of “Beach Boys Family and Friends” with him.

Was this a smooth exit? Hell no. Not when the license to tour as “The Beach Boys” was supposed to be paid. Al’s intention to get around this by adding “fam and friends” in small print was not considered a good faith move. Al contented that BRI, Inc, was acting with “unclean hands”, which is the most on point Al Jardine countersuit I can imagine. The courts declared that Al was the one doing dirty on the deal, and he was stripped of the Beach Boys name.

The Al Jardine Experience eventually merged into the 50th anniversary tour, after rhizomatically converging with Brian’s Pet Sounds Band. For 6 brief months Jardine was officially a Beach Boy again. But spring and summer came to an end, and fall found the group shaking off loose leaves to get back to the county fair circuit.

Al and Brian continued on with the Pet Sounds Band and friends, but Brian started fading out by that point. A decade later, post-Covid, he really began to struggle even more noticeably, with chronic respiratory issues decreasing oxygen to the brain and increasing the already pronounced on-stage dissociation that he was infamous for. He had become more of a prop than a performer, seemingly unsure of where he was or what he was there for. Sometimes you had to wonder if he even knew *who* he was.

Today people are saying Mike’s current post-Covid state of frailty is reminding them of Brian’s decline. The Slate article straight up assumes we’re witnessing the slow, painful on stage death of the last card carrying Beach Boy, and the band with him. Now the question remains: will he die with some semblance of dignity intact, or will his past come back to crucify him?

What will ultimate reckoning look like for the Lovester? Will the vibrations be good? Or will his own personal Hell be something unfathomable and infuriating to him, like “over and over the crow cries uncover the cornfields?” Will his soul simply be swallowed by acid alliteration? Will he still be standing in the night, a strutting cock unafraid of what a doodle doo? Or will he remain forever lost in a town full of Heroes and Villains? When the tidal wave comes, will he be prepared to say “Surf’s Up”?

In the end, I suspect God Only Knows… but, maybe if Mike thinks and wishes and hopes and prays, his salvation might come true – although I suspect it takes more than that to atone. In the meantime, the death watch continues. It remains to be seen if Mike has one last Summer of Love left in him, or if he’ll make it to the 60th anniversary of the first one. Maybe he needs to listen to Smiley Smile for some good medicine.

If he hangs on til August I might just go see the Beach Codger in Redmond, WA. They were originally gonna play the Yuppieville Winery but now they’re playing at Marymoore Park, which is my favorite outdoor venue in the Puget Sound. I’m obviously not Mike’s biggest fan, but I’d be pretty dumb to be yammering about the band all the time without seeing them do their thing, even if a John Stamos cameo is the closest us millennials can hope for on the nostalgia trip beyond dying Mike. Hopefully he’s got his hospice care routine dialed in at this point. And hopefully Bruce Johnston is enjoying retirement.

Meanwhile….

r/beachboyscirclejerk

u/brianhildebrandland:

Now that Mike can’t do anything on stage except moan, is Jon Bolton the new focal point of the group?

Mike Love Not War

I couldn’t help but notice they’ve started propping Mike up in front of the plexiglass partition that Bolton is setup behind for all his stick-spinning antics. Is this because just looking at Mike is too depressing now?

When Mike dies, are Bolton and Stamos gonna face off Highlander style?

jojoebake
There can be only one.

bangsilencedeath
There is going to be a battle to own the name.

Many_Count_6447
hey, fuck you for introducing moaning mike as mental imagery

brianhildebrandland
moans “Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeennnnnnunngg”

Rambunctious-Rascal
I didn’t use to like Bolton when he was in the Trump administration, but I can’t bring myself to dislike an actual Beach Boy!

brianhildebrandland
He’s making America’s Band great again! One twirling drum stick at a time.

Johnbsloop
Night of the Living Mike

brianhildebrandland
Pretty soon Bolton will have to actually start puppeteering Mike with all his flourishes…

32777694511961311492
Consider this my official let me put Michael McDonald’s name in the hat. His credentials are impeccable.

brianhildebrandland
Brian’s ghost would be perpetually terrified he’d bust out “What A Fool Believes”…