“What good is the dawn that grows into day? The sunset at night? Or living this way?”

So began the first ballad by The Beach Boys to reach for the depths of existential tragedy and reckon with the will to carry on. In the end, it found an elemental affirmation of life in the warming rays of the sun. What makes it so significant is where it finds that warmth: not shining down from above, but radiating out from within…

For all the conflict between Brian Wilson and Mike Love, there was also a kind of spiritual yearning shared by the cousins, one that could sometimes unite their most transcendent selves in soul-grade kismet. In fact, what comes through most in the deepest of their shared creative efforts is the desire for two souls not only to merge with each other, but with some greater cosmic force that transcends boundaries of self. 

Union. That’s the theme that is constantly emerging in the collaborations of Brian and Mike. Even their most materialistic efforts like “Fun Fun Fun” had that kind of reckoning in store – once the escapism of cruising Daddy’s T-bird as fast as you can solo is taken off the table, let’s see what there is for us to discover *together*. And if an earthly union may collapse, the cosmic connection will always live on…

“For I have the warmth of the sun within me tonight.” No matter how deep into the darkness, that warmth continues to radiate. 

It was the escapism inherent in the surfing formula which first found transcendence in the sun’s light: “Just get away from the shady turf and, baby, go catch some rays on the sunny surf, and when you catch a wave you’ll be sittin’ on top of the world!” Watch some of those guys catching waves on the California coast and see how close to God it looks like a human can get on the water…

It’s easy to dismiss the depth that the two cousins were capable of probing together, but the truth is that their best work as creative partners contains multitudes. The ballads on the albums that immediately preceded Pet Sounds, composed by Brian and Mike, contained just as much self-reflection and moments of revelation as that later album’s Tony Asher-penned lyrics. 

In some cases it could almost be more revealing, as Brian and Mike shared a naive sensibility that found reflection in each other, especially on The Beach Boys Today. “Sometimes I have a weird way of showing my love, and I always expect her to know what I’m thinking of.” That’s how “She Knows Me Too Well” begins, like a direct confession or a therapy session. It’s raw, unvarnished truth, served up without any flourishes, but framed in some of the most eerie, spell-casting melodic passages Brian had yet conceived of.

That song was preceded by the first young-adult confessional of the album, “Please Let Me Wonder”. “I built all my goals around you, that some day my love would surround you.” It’s a song about yearning for an elusive love so long the singer can’t bear to surrender the fantasy. Felt. 

Finally he finds himself alone with the woman whose love he yearns for, and he can’t make himself say the words that he longs to say; he just can’t risk shattering that precious fantasy. It’s somehow better to hope she’s yearning for him too, but never really know, than to find out she feels nothing but platonic friendliness towards him.

The album’s other masterpiece of conflict and reckoning finds fascinating depths in seemingly simple sentiments: “Can’t remember what we fought about. Late, late last night we said it was over. I remember when we thought it out we both had a broken heart.” 

On the surface it’s almost awkwardly naive, but then, when you think it out… you realize more than just a rational thought process is occurring. This is a full spectrum embodiment of an emotional reckoning that ends with the conclusion of not only the heart of the thinker being broken, but of both parties realizing the heart of the love they shared is broken. 

There’s a kind of holiness in that realization of union. It’s the same depth of feeling present in “God Only Knows”, but with divinity implied rather than explicitly defined. “Kiss Me, Baby” cascades into its chorus with an underpinned chant recognizing the cosmic dance of love and war may never cease: “kiss a little bit/fight a little bit”… Or as The Boss sang, “you can’t start a fire without a spark”…

Perhaps there were just too many sparks flying between the cousins for their collaborations to consistently continue. Mike had kind of fought his way to be the dominant lyrical voice within the band while working with Big Poppa Murray to shut out outside voices like Gary Usher and Roger Christian, who did far more to define the car side of the formula than Mike ever did. True to his name, Mike was the Love lyricist. What he wasn’t was the self-doubt lyricist. 

Brian needed voices that could ask the darker questions – what if love just wasn’t enough? What if fate and kismet could be defeated by chaos and disorder and the trauma of existence? These were the kinds of areas Mike could never quite reach into. This was what Brian went to Tony Asher for, and what makes Pet Sounds such a direct expression of what “thinking out” a broken heart looks and feels like. 

The weird irony is that Asher’s lyrics are almost more superficial than Mike’s, in that they express so much of an inner realm that they leave little to the imagination. They’re not impressionistic but emotionally direct. Pet Sounds is closer to a baroque proto-singer-songwriter album than a pop spectacle. It’s not about ego but about that higher heart, and the yearning to be reconciled with it, and yet it expresses that in a realm of total inner reckoning turned outwards.

The biggest difference between the lyrical voice on Pet Sounds and the voice of the previous year’s albums is that yearning for peace in reconciliation. There’s a rejection of the fire of passion in search of a more watery and complete immersion, where boundaries between lover and beloved are dissolved without flames of conflict. Not two candles that are melted by heat, but rather two liquid beings returning to their truest form, becoming one again in the sea of love.

The contradiction to that comes, ironically, with “Hang On To Your Ego”, or rather, “I Know There’s an Answer”. Mike’s disdain for Asher’s “druggie” lyrics, obliquely referencing LSD’s ego shattering effects in obvious enough ways to raise his ire, is well known. His insistence on rewriting those lyrics turns them into something even more oblique that actually inverts the original message in favor of affirming the ego’s isolation: “I know there’s an answer. I know now, but I have to find it by myself.” Ba do be do be do…

This was two years before Mike would become enmeshed with the Maharishi and immerse himself in Transcendental Meditation, but the desire to find the answer inside one’s self was already present. The world may be filled with chaos and conflict, but that’s what gives life its spark, and the shadows make the fire pop. Anyhow, peace comes from within, where the true sun (son?) lives…

“Sun of my soul, Thou Savior dear, it is not night if Thou be near. O, may no earth-born cloud arise to hide Thee from Thy servant’s eyes.” – John Keble, “Sun of My Soul”, 1827

Beyond the cosmic order lies something eternal. Not just cold darkness, but a loving warmth, a holy warmth. Even if the sun falls from the sky, that inner sun will continue radiating. It’s a hopeful way to approach eternity.

“My love’s like the warmth of the sun, it won’t ever die.”

The assassination of President Kennedy was the first great defining crucifixion moment for young men like Mike and Brian. It was this tragic pivot point in modern American history that inspired “The Warmth of the Sun”. In wrestling with such a traumatic collective loss it only makes sense to turn to the central traumatic loss story of western civilization. To reach for a salvation that is still somehow guaranteed, despite the “savior’s” violent departure. 

The eternal love still lives on within the lover, much like the ascended Christ is said to live within the hearts of those who believe, guaranteeing salvation from earthly woes. But what exactly is “salvation”? What does that ultimately mean beyond feeding the hungry, clothing the poor, and setting the captives free? Almost as if the point of getting to Heaven is to learn the lessons to bring that kind of salvation back through Hell, so that Hell itself becomes Heaven. Otherwise what are we doing except hanging on to our egos, isolating our heads and staying in our safety zones?

By the time the band recorded the Wild Honey album in 1967, isolation within one’s safety zone was becoming a way of life for Brian Wilson. But how safe was that zone, really? And how fragile was the safety that existed within it? He would isolate his head from his own beloved wife as much as anyone else, lost in a dissociative trance when not fully immersed in his own personal Hell.

After the bizarre commercial disaster of Smiley Smile, Wild Honey wasn’t exactly a return to the formula, but it was a return to the accessible themes of love and loss. Musically, most of the album landed in an upbeat r&b vein that was closer to The Rascals than The Beatles. There were exceptions, though, and perhaps the biggest was “Let the Wind Blow”. It was the first Beach Boys song that Mike composed the vocal melody to before bringing it to Brian, who then composed the haunting instrumental. 

It’s a love song that is more of a prayer to God than to his lover, but it’s also a prayer for salvation as well. “Let the bees make honey, let the poor find money, take away their sorrow, give them sunshine tomorrow”, begins the final plea, before pivoting back to his most pressing concern: “but don’t take her out of my life. Please, keep her part of my life.” 

Mike was halfway through the 5 years of his second doomed marriage at the time; maybe he was feeling the cracks becoming a chasm in his own life. Or perhaps he was thinking of the growing void between him and Brian. In the year since they’d conquered the world together with “Good Vibrations”, Brian had abandoned their creative partnership and teamed up with a character that was a combination of Mark Twain and Mickey Rooney; Van Dyke Parks was a pint-sized pipsqueak who was too clever by half, and he knew it. When that partnership disintegrated, Mike was overjoyed. He had no idea how much Brian would permanently disintegrate with it.

1973 was probably the early nadir of Brian’s involvement with the band, with his participation in the making of their Holland album an afterthought to his depressive isolation. That summer, the entire band and their families had left America to set up a base of operations in Holland for an upcoming European tour. 

The assumption that there would be studios available for them to record the new album there before the tour turned out to be disastrous. In the end, what was considered salvageable from Brian’s home studio was deconstructed and sent over to The Netherlands, along with an entirely new mixing board, and the band, sans-Brian, got to work as soon as the kinks were worked out. 

The Netherlands have sunny summers… sometimes. They often have just as much rain. Even at their nicest, they never really get as warm as an average LA day. The making of Holland was the first time Brian had been dragged away from that California sun for an extended sabbatical since 1964, and from all accounts he was absolutely miserable. Most of the time he would just sit in his room and listen to Randy Newman’s Sail Away album endlessly. Eventually he would wrap a car around a tree driving drunk, somehow walking away unscathed. 

When he finally pulled out of his stupor to produce a proper song with the band, he turned back to Mike to help him craft an astrological saga about a Pisces lady who could tell your fortune from your star chart. The formula, it seems, could be spelled out from the stars’ relation to the time and place on Earth of your birth. What sign is *your* sun in? Is it the ultimate affirmation of universal self as a decoding of destiny, or just a story about being a cosmic puppet? Perhaps like all truths in the Beach Boys saga, the answer lies somewhere in the middle. 

Between hope and despair is where the song hangs, landing on a yearning for all the forces of the cosmos to finally bring his lover back. But at least this time she gives him hope of the possibility of their reunion, when all the stars align around their fate to be together. “I’m coming back when the aspects are right,” she reassures him when she departs. Now he’s left to look up his horoscope in the daily paper, hoping for the signs that their reunion draws near.

Three years later, a couple tentative stabs at Brian and Mike resurrecting a creative partnership were dropped on 15 Big Ones; the bouncy summer song carried an air of grim determination, while the song dedicated to transcendental meditation began with a screaming match. At this point, meeting in the middle was on a lawn that some asshole had parked his car on. The resolution to such heated conflict? Meditation! Salvationary warmth from within, rather than any resolution achieved in the cold outer world. 

When Brian finally began firing his creative cylinders for their next album, he decided to bypass that grim struggle altogether and just write both the music and the lyrics entirely on his own. The Beach Boys Love You was the idiosyncratic result, where Mike’s ego was totally subjugated to Brian’s id. If Mike thought there would be room to polish up and rewrite some lines with his cousin, he was sorely mistaken.

As far as Dennis was concerned, this was exactly as it should be. “Brian Wilson is the Beach Boys,” he declared with vigor. “He is the band. We’re his fucking messengers. He is all of it. Period. We’re nothing. He’s everything.”

The co-author of “Good Vibrations” may have had some qualms with that, but he recognized at that point that he had to play along with the “Brian’s Back!” hype until something in the fundamental balance of the group shifted back in his favor.

When that shift came in the wake of the cancellation of Adult/Child, Mike somehow managed to bully Brian into forfeiting his voting rights in the band, allowing Mike to gain the upper hand in band decisions. Fine, Brian seemed to be sighing, we’ll do it your way this time.  He had no idea just how far from the sun’s warmth that way would drag him next. Holland would be comfortable sweater weather in comparison…

To be continued…

Meanwhile…

Back at the Afterlife Roast of Brian Wilson

Gilbert Gottfried: Speaking of connecting flights at ground zero, let me introduce one of the other hardest working showmen touring the seven circles of Hell. Ladies and gentlemen, Mike Love!

Mike Love: Thanks, Iagogo, now you can go back to sucking Robin William’s big blue cock.

Gilbert (off mic): With pleasure!

Mike Love: F*****t. It’s amazing how many f*****s I have to deal with. 

Gilbert (off mic): takes one to know one.

Mike Love: Yeah, I suck cocks in Hell. I’ve always sucked cocks in Hell, that’s the price you pay to be up on stage bringing people “Good Vibrations” for all eternal damnation. But I bet Mick Jagger won’t be spending his eternity sucking cocks in Hell, that chickenshit. He’s not going around singing “Sympathy For the Devil” down there, he’s sitting around up here singing “God Gave Me Everything I Want” because he was always happy to be a f***** for the devil and they worked out some kind of contract breaking sell out deal with “Cocksucker Blues”

Robin Williams (off mic): That’s what Gil calls it when I come out of my lamp and give the dog a bone!

Mike Love: Yeah Mick sang about the devil, but we grew up with the devil, and he taught us syncopation like some old big band bastard. We got lessons from Satan himself about keeping it sexy. And the heat of Hell, well… what the fuck is that to a California summer? Mick is a limp wristed tart from a soggy, cold country, he wouldn’t last a day down there.

Elton John: Thank fuck I’m sucking cocks in Heaven!

Mike Love: Anyhow, I didn’t drag myself up here to talk about f*****s or pronouns on surfer guyls, I came to talk about the time I wrote “Good Vibrations” with Brian. 

Robin Williams (off mic): Who’s got the remote for his butt-plug?

*Theremin player starts playing “Good Vibrations”…*

Mike Love: When Tony Asher, or as I like to call him, Ton Ash, put his PR minded spin on “Good Vibrations”, it sounded more like an advertisement for his erection. It wasn’t about the experience of picking up anything at all except your own dick. I told Bri “no one wants to hear us sing about beating our meat, they want to hear about what it *feels* like to pick up Good Vibrations from a foxy mama.” It’s exciting, right? We’re picking up excitations, right? It’s so exciting that we have to bend the English language in an obvious way to explain it. Did Bob Dylan ever come up with anything as directly impressionistic as that?

Bob Dylan (off mic): It was directly impressionistic when I bent your mother over on my big brass bed…

Mike Love: But we had to capture something elemental about the attraction. It wasn’t just the “colorful clothes she wears” that worked on my “brain”, but also “the way the sunlight plays upon her hair.” It’s like she captures the elements in her orbit, her beauty has an embodiment that is cosmically transcendent. Then: “I hear the sound of a gentle whirr on the wind that lifts the blossoms through her hair.” She’s a goddess blessed by the Mother Earth herself. That’s how deep the good vibrations go when I look in her eyes.

Robin Williams (off mic): That’s how deep we go in our blossoming anus world!

Mike Love: You see the kind of f****try I have to put up with. Fuck my afterlife. Congratulations, cousin, on being the one that everyone loves despite your immense flaws. 

Brian Wilson: Love you Mike! See you in AI slop Hell, prick!

Mike Love: You wouldn’t believe the heinous shit they’re shipping us doing to each other. And the flyers they make for it! You people are sick! You’re literally venting the steam of Hell on Earth for the sake of this garbage! “Cumming on the Sloop John B, my grandfather and me”… What the fuck is wrong with you?!  

*Theremin player starts playing “Good Vibrations” again…*

Mike Love: And let me tell you about what a f*****y bitch “The Boss” really is…