By 1968, the Beach Boys had created a new entity called Brother Publishing, whose intent was to buy other writers’ songs and record them ourselves or find other artists to do so. Brother Publishing, along with a company called Filmways, had a joint partnership in a recording studio in Hollywood. Now we intended to partner with Filmways to buy the Sea of Tunes catalog, which held most of our songs. For a group of young guys who lived for the moment, this was a rare time when we tried to plan for the future. As Al Jardine later said, our goal “was to create a musical empire of our own, something we could fall back on when we weren’t touring.”
Brian and I talked in some detail about the proposed acquisition of the catalog, which would finally resolve my copyright problem. Despite my protests over the years, I still had not received credit on many of my songs. The catalog had between 140 and 150 numbers, and I had cowritten about 80 while receiving credit on only a fraction of them. Brian kept reassuring me that his father had mishandled the paperwork but that he, Brian, controlled the catalog, and that I would recoup my losses eventually. The tone shifted a bit in 1968, when Brian told me that he wasn’t getting along very well with his dad, complicating efforts to pressure him. I wasn’t on speaking terms with my uncle Murry at the time, but Brian said once we bought the catalog, we would own the publishing rights and could resolve the copyright issues ourselves.
I didn’t understand the details and didn’t even understand what it meant to own the publishing rights. All I knew was that if I wanted credit and compensation for my songs, we had to buy those rights, and to do that, we had to give my uncle some money.
We were all excited about the impending purchase—not just Brian but Dennis, Carl, and Al as well. This was our music, our legacy, and we didn’t want Murry to have anything to do with it. Our business manager, Nick Grillo, was involved in the negotiations. Letters were written. Meetings were held. Updates were given. But months passed, and nothing got finalized. I assumed this was just the way the business works.
I was wrong. On August 20, 1969, Grillo told us that the Sea of Tunes had indeed been sold—but not to the Beach Boys. It had been sold to Almo/Irving, the music-publishing arm of A&M Records. A&M agreed to pay $700,000 for the entire catalog, and the payment was going to Uncle Murry. In cash.
What the fuck!
Dennis and I both wanted to take a swing at someone, but we didn’t know whom. None of it made any sense. If Brian controlled the songs, how could his father sell them? And why? They were our songs! Not only did we write and record them, but we had spent years on the road performing them, increasing their value. And now not a penny for our efforts.
I drove to Brian’s house in Bel Air to see if he knew what was going on.
At the time, Brian was not in good shape. After he learned to meditate, he stayed away from the drugs for a year, but he didn’t stick with it, and in his relapse, he used cocaine for the first time. Brian didn’t tell us about it—he disclosed it years later during a court deposition—but what I did know was that he was acting spacey. He was also living in the chauffeur’s quarters of his home while Marilyn slept in the master bedroom.
When I reached his house, I stormed into his room and asked what happened with our songs.
“My dad fucked us,” he said.
“Yeah, no shit.”
Brian appeared angry, but he didn’t do anything to try to stop his father. I had no sway with Murry, but I did call Chuck Kaye, the head of Almo/Irving, and cursed him out for being party to such a betrayal. I also told him that Murry was responsible for driving both Brian and Dennis to drugs, and now he had screwed all three of his sons as well as his nephew. “This is the most chickenshit thing he could have done,” I said.
“Yeah,” Kaye agreed, “we all know Murry is an asshole, and he is hard to deal with. But this is what he wants to do. He sold it to us, and there’s nothing you can do.”
Actually, there was something. For the deal to go through, the agreement had to be signed by Brian, Dennis, Carl, Al, and me. No signatures, no sale. The Beach Boys, however, had a lawyer, Abe Somer, who told us that it was a done deal and that everything was in order—Murry controlled the catalog and could do with it what he wanted. We had no recourse.
I complained bitterly. I told Somer that many of my songs had not been credited, so what could I do if they were now owned by a third party?
Somer worked for a big Los Angeles law firm, Mitchell, Silberberg & Knupp, and I had no reason to question his judgment. He said I was all confused. He told me that I had to sign the agreement to ensure that I kept my name on the songs that I had already been credited for. If I didn’t sign it, I could lose credit for those as well.
Those were my options: If I signed the agreement, I would never receive credit for “California Girls,” “Help Me, Rhonda,” “I Get Around,” “Surfin’ USA,” and many other songs that I cowrote. But if I refused to sign the agreement, I might lose credit for “Good Vibrations,” “Surfin’ Safari,” and “The Warmth of the Sun,” among others.
That’s one helluva choice. What could I do? I had to sign the agreement to retain what I had. Everyone else signed too, and with that, we lost all that we had created.
I couldn’t get any answers, from Somer or anyone else, on how Murry had stolen our songs, sold them, and walked away with $700,000. We were all in the dark. As Al later said, “It was done quite in a cloak-and-dagger kind of way, really. Very mystifying.” I don’t know if Murry ever shared any of that money with his sons, but I never saw a penny. I suspect that Murry needed a few more dollars for himself. The year before, in 1968, he had moved out of his house in Whittier and bought a second home a mile away—though he and Aunt Audree remained married, he lived in one house, she lived in the other. The arrangement made sense, I guess, because around that time, Murry went to Thailand and brought home a young woman, who moved in with him.
But as I later learned, money wasn’t the only consideration in my uncle’s decision to sell the catalog. He assumed that by 1969, the Beach Boys were finished. He actually thought we were done long before that. On May 8, 1965, he wrote an angry letter to Brian in which he predicted that the band would soon “finish this short cycle of Beach Boy success” and that “the way things are shaping up now, the Beach Boys cannot go on and on because cycles of music change as well as fads, like the Beatles, the Presleys, etc.”
Part of that was wishful thinking—the more we squirmed out from under his control, and especially after we fired him as our manager, the more my uncle wanted us to fail as evidence that he was the mastermind behind the group. He even took over the management of a local band called the Renegades, renamed them the Sunrays, and recast them in the image of the Beach Boys, including the striped shirts. Uncle Murry, like many in his generation, was also rabidly opposed to drugs and told his sons they were doomed if they ever got involved with them. He was furious at the people who sold or gave the drugs to Brian and at Brian himself, and he surely believed the damage to Brian was irreparable. So if the Beach Boys were has-beens and their leader was a druggie, why not cash out when a buyer still existed?
It was, of course, one of the dumbest decisions in music history. The Beach Boys didn’t die, and the catalog was a cash machine for decades to come, generating more than a hundred million dollars in publishing royalties, none of which Murry or the Beach Boys ever saw.
Uncle Murry and Aunt Audree continued to live in their separate houses, still married and seeing each other on a regular basis. But Murry suffered chronic stomach pain and became increasingly isolated, rarely seeing even my mom. In May of 1973, she spoke to Murry on the phone; he had recently undergone a serious operation and sounded weak. Seemingly out of the blue, he thanked my mom for sponsoring his first musical (in which young Brian sang my song). Three weeks later, on June 4, 1973, with Aunt Audree in the house, my uncle went into the bathroom and dropped dead of a heart attack. He was fifty-five.
Murry Wilson, to be sure, was a driving force in the Beach Boys’ early success, but his greed and vindictiveness deny him any tribute. The most forgiving thing I can say about him is that he was simply an inheritor of his own father’s cruelty. My mom, for her part, was always loyal to her brother, as she was grateful for how Murry had protected his siblings against the violence of their father. I wasn’t going to sully my mom’s devotion to that brother with an explanation of his betrayals against his own family.
I did not attend Uncle Murry’s funeral and don’t know whether Grandpa Wilson was there to bury his own son. Grandpa Wilson himself did not die until 1981, long after I or anyone in the Love family had anything to do with him.
Aunt Audree, meanwhile, wanted a fresh start after Murry’s death. She sold both houses in Whittier and moved back to Los Angeles, where she was closer to her grandchildren.
—
The sale of the catalog, for me, had a long ripple effect. For years, I’d been expecting a lump sum of money for the lost royalties on my songs, and, once the writing credits were fixed, I assumed I’d be receiving a new flow of income. Now all that money owed would stay with Brian and those future songwriting royalties would also go to Brian. The rest of us would have to make do, and without any new hit records, that meant even greater reliance on touring. It was lose-lose for me and the touring band. Instead of being recognized and promoted as the co-lyricist of our most popular songs (three No. 1s and ten originals that charted in the Top 10), I was simply the perennial front man, and any effort on my part to set the record straight was seen as my vanity run amuck.
In March of 1970, I finally reached my own breaking point. So much had been happening around me—Charles Manson, Susan Atkins, Suzanne’s affair with Dennis, the sale of our catalog, family betrayal, financial stress, single parenthood, everything—I wanted to purge all the evil from my system, and I thought I could do that by going on a fast. I had read about the power of fasting in Szekely’s Essene Gospel of Peace, which said: “For I tell you truly, that Satan and his plagues may only be cast out by fasting and by prayer . . . The living God shall see it and great shall be your reward. And fast till Beelzebub and all his evils depart from you, and all the angels of our Earthly Mother come and serve you.”
I’m sure that fasting, in moderation, can be healthy, but moderation has never been my style. For three weeks, all I consumed was juice, tea, and water. Medically, excessive fasting can cause your body to purge toxins (or high levels of ketones), which seemed appropriate—I wanted to free my body of anything pernicious. It was my way to escape. But those toxins, once they enter your bloodstream, can also impair your brain and central nervous system. I didn’t realize this, and the longer I fasted, the more light-headed I felt. I recall driving in Hollywood and seeing a flock of birds and sensing that their flight had some profound meaning, and feeling extremely emotional and manic and sensitive to everything around me. I drove through several stoplights, and then a police car pulled me over. I’m vague on the details, but I recall that an officer threw me onto the street, handcuffed me, and drove me to a substation. I was put in a cell, and I could hear the cops using nightsticks to beat the living shit out of some guy in another cell. I thought to myself that I may be a smartass, but I’m not going to cause any problems.
Nick Grillo bailed me out and took me to my place in Manhattan Beach. The next thing I recall is my dad and my brother Stephen coming to get me. I guess I was a little amped up. I don’t remember it but was later told that when they were trying to get me into the car, I bit Stephen, and he yelled, “I thought you were a vegetarian!”
They drove me to Edgemont Hospital in Hollywood, a psychiatric facility. I was later told that I had a bad reaction to a drug and was put in a straitjacket. I do recall that I was given some pills (which made me nauseous) and was forced to rest. My physical recovery was not complicated: I started eating again, and I was released after a couple of days. I learned the obvious lesson about the perils of excessive fasting and of using such a tactic to escape your problems.
The episode was hard on my parents. I told them about my extreme diet. They didn’t ask me many questions beyond that, but they knew I had other troubles. Neither they nor I knew how to talk about them, but I knew I had their love and support. As my mom later wrote in her memoir: “I like to think there is a God, a power that will help me in my time of need. I guess the hardest I ever prayed was for Michael when he was overworked and unhappy and had a short breakdown. He had a bad reaction to a drug the doctor gave him and went into convulsions. Milt and I thought we were going to lose him . . . I can still see the room. Mike came through it all right and maybe would have anyway, but I like to think my pleading prayer helped.”
Reaching my limits forced me to consider what I was doing with my life. At the time, I was fighting for custody of Hayleigh and Christian, and I knew I had to be stronger, and smarter, for them. I had a lot at stake professionally as well. I was angry that our music had been stolen from us and that I had lost a huge part of my own legacy. I realized that the only way I could claim ownership of the songs that I had written, the only way I could stay connected to them, was to be a road dog: to rejoin the guys, get back onstage, and take our music to all four corners of the country and beyond.
That would be my nourishment, and my revenge.
—
A new decade had begun, and a new era as well. The year 1970 saw the Beatles break up, for the same reasons that virtually all rock bands break up—creative differences, clashing egos, fights over money, the accumulation of grudges, slights, and irritants. The Beach Boys had all those as well, but I assumed we would stay together for years to come. We just had to reconnect with our fans.
Our first album of the decade, Sunflower, was one of the best recorded and mixed albums of its day, with an approach to stereo that made even the Beatles’ Abbey Road sound primitive. Stephen Desper was something of a mad genius, and at the time he was researching the acoustic properties of center channel quadraphonic sound, which offered breathtaking effects on two speakers when decoded by a device he later called a “spatializer,” and it was used for two cuts on Sunflower (“It’s About Time” and “Cool, Cool Water”).
The album itself turned out to be a product of desperation and trial and error. Sunflower was to be our first LP with our new label, Warner/Reprise, but the record company rejected our first two submissions.* At the same time, we were trying to fulfill our last contractual obligations to Capitol Records, so we took several of the best songs from our last Capitol master reel, including Dennis’s “Forever” and “Got to Know the Woman,” Bruce’s “Deirdre,” and “All I Wanna Do” by Brian and me, and we quietly spliced them onto the new Sunflower reel. It made a difference. “Forever” was Dennis’s most acclaimed ballad, as it captured the raw emotion and bluesy sensibility that he brought to his vocals. Capitol, meanwhile, mixed the tapes from a 1968 concert and released a Live in London LP for the United Kingdom, which satisfied the demands of our Capitol contract.
Carl later said that Sunflower represented the Beach Boys’ “truest group effort,” while Bruce said it was his favorite Beach Boys album. I thought it was damn good, and it received excellent reviews and has only grown in critical appreciation over the years. In 2003, it was voted No. 300 for Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. I also know that we have fans who cherish that album like none other. But it sold poorly, charting at No. 151, making it our worst-performing album to date (excluding a compilation in 1968).
We were still out of kilter with the times. Our music was viewed as too conventional to reach the FM rock audience, and Warner/Reprise was adrift on how to position Sunflower. Its name evoked peace and love, and the cover featured the Beach Boys on a tree-lined golf course, holding our young children in our laps or on our shoulders. Inside photos showed Bruce sitting on the bumper of a deluxe car, Carl standing next to a horse, Dennis with aviator goggles, Brian with a blue “Good Humor” cap, and me in my long white robe and full beard (a bit like Maharishi’s). The images might have worked five years earlier, but Sunflower was released in August of 1970, just three months after the Kent State shootings and during a summer of campus protests and street rallies in response to bombing raids in Cambodia. The world was aflame; we were projecting innocence and harmony. We were still doing concerts and television appearances in all-white uniforms, and even our name, the Beach Boys, sounded like we were mementos from a bygone era. We thought about shortening the name to “Beach” but concluded that was even worse.
Our fortunes, however, as well as our image, would soon begin to change.
When Sunflower was released, Bruce, Brian, and I did an interview at an alternative station called KPFK Pacifica Radio. The DJ was Jack Rieley, whom Brian already knew; Brian was part owner of a health-food store, and Rieley was an occasional customer. Brian told him and his listeners about our problem. “The first half of our career, the surf thing was projected so much,” Brian said. “It was so clean—the sound was so clean, we looked clean, and about 1966, I think people started rejecting that image. We got a little funkier about that time, but they didn’t know it . . . I’m proud of the group and the name, but I think the clean American thing has hurt us.”
Rieley was a chatty sort who said he had worked in television news, and he saw an opportunity. A week or so after the interview, he sent a memo to Brian and recommended a publicity campaign to make us more contemporary. And he would be our publicity manager.
Rieley’s brazenness offended some of our existing managers, but I liked him. The Beach Boys were too disorganized and fragmented to master the publicity and marketing part of the business, so Rieley came on board and began the makeover. We ditched the matching uniforms, Carl and Al grew beards, and we began a promotion campaign that said, “It’s okay to listen to the Beach Boys.” Another said: “The Beach Boys—They’ve changed more than you have!”
Carl had assumed Brian’s role as our producer, and he and Jack worked to improve our live act, seeking to get the new rock audiences to take our music seriously. That effort took us to the Big Sur Folk Festival in Monterey in October of 1970—the same locale we spurned in 1967, but now we appeared before 6,000 fans with Joan Baez, Kris Kristofferson, and other performers heralded by the intelligentsia as hip or relevant. We also played the debut of “Student Demonstration Time,” originally recorded in the 1950s as “Riot in Cell Block No. 9.” But I had rewritten it to fit our era, referring to Kent State as well as Jackson State College (where the police killed two students). While it wasn’t so much a protest song as a message for kids to stay safe, it was at least connected to the nation’s tumult.
Around the same time, a young booking agent in New York, Chip Rachlin, thought the Beach Boys could still attract a big crowd in Manhattan. So too did another young fan, Michael Klenfner, who worked for Bill Graham at the Fillmore East. Graham was still angry about the stub count after our last visit, so when Chip and Michael asked him about the Beach Boys returning, he called us “goyish scumbags.” If my Yiddish is correct, that meant no.
Chip and Michael then asked the operators of Carnegie Hall if the Beach Boys could play there, and Carnegie agreed to let us perform two shows on a Monday night in February in 1971. Only then did Chip actually call us; he said the Beach Boys were such a big draw we wouldn’t even need an opening act. (In truth, he couldn’t afford an opening act.) Chip and Michael gave us a $9,000 guarantee, but they could sell enough tickets for only one show, so they didn’t make anything. But we still had our night at Carnegie.
To promote it, Chip spoke to Pete Fornatale, the popular DJ at WNEW-FM, and asked him if he’d do some ticket giveaways. Fornatale, a huge Beach Boys fan, agreed but also asked if he could emcee the concert.
“Sure, Pete,” Chip said, “but there is one rule. They’re not an oldies act. They’re an act with a catalog.”
“Of course,” Fornatale said. “I love the new music.”
On the night of the performance, the lights came down, and Fornatale walked onto the stage with a surfboard.
“Do you know,” he asked, “how tough it is to get one of these motherfuckers in February?”
After the audience stopped laughing, he continued. “Growing up wouldn’t have been half as much fun without these guys. Ladies and gentlemen, the Beach Boys!”
Our appearance at Carnegie was an unexpected success, with stellar reviews. Chip joined us full-time and, seeking the “Rolling Stone magazine crowd,” started booking us on college campuses and in hipster clubs. Even Bill Graham, seeing how well we had been received at Carnegie, softened his view, and on April 27, 1971, we returned to the Fillmore East, where laughing gas was available on the second level, Bob Dylan was in the audience, and the Grateful Dead was the headliner. When the Dead introduced us, the place was silent, save for one guy in the back clapping. No one could believe it was actually the Beach Boys, but it was, and it went over so well that we played there two months later on the club’s last night before closing. We also performed at the May Day Peace Demonstration at the Washington Monument before tens of thousands of protesters, though I asked that we play first, so we would be gone before any riots broke out.
We played a benefit concert for the defense fund of the Berrigan Brothers, the peace activists, even postponing a show or two to make it happen. We did a couple more concerts with the Dead in the Bay Area and returned to Carnegie as well. Rolling Stone put us on the cover. I did an antiwar concert without the Beach Boys, which I would do on occasion. Dylan was one of the headliners, and he asked me to sing “California Girls.”
I knew Dylan liked our music, but I didn’t know that that was the right song for a crowd of activists.
“Are you sure?” I asked him.
“Yeah, they’ll dig it.”
So I sang it, and it went over fine.
We were still working on the cheap, maybe clearing $1,000 a show, riding a chartered Trailways bus, and—in one infamous performance—playing at the Paris Cinema in Worcester, Massachusetts, where unknown to us, porno films were shown. But at least we were still in the game.