Without Carl, Dennis, or Brian, who in 1998 was working on a solo album, it was assumed that the Beach Boys were through. We hadn’t had a hit record in a decade, and Carl was our band director, our lead guitarist, and the lead vocalist on many songs. No more Wilson brothers, no more Beach Boys.
I was nearing sixty, I had a young family, and I could have retired or at least scaled back dramatically. But I wasn’t about to do that. For one, I’d go crazy sitting around. I also rejected that our music was too closely connected to a long-gone Camelot era or the Reagan era or any era. Good music always has a time and a place, and I wanted to continue to play ours.
Brother Records owned the touring license, and I was one of four shareholders in the company. The other three were Brian, Al, and Carl’s heirs (Justyn and Jonah). Brother Records offered licenses to tour as the Beach Boys to Al, Brian, and me. Brian declined it. Al and I each received a separate license, and we would each have our own Beach Boys’ band. Al and I had been touring together for thirty-seven years. Very few groups survive that long, so maybe a divorce was inevitable. But in Al’s case, an incident surrounding Carl’s death ensured that we would not tour together again.
After Carl left the tour in August of 1997, his lung cancer metastasized to his brain, and we all knew he wasn’t going to make it. In December, a promoter called me and asked if the Beach Boys would be interested in doing a tour with symphonies around the country. In light of Carl’s condition, I told him no. The promoter then went to Al and made the same proposal. Al was all for it, figuring he would just get replacements for Carl and me. I got wind of this in early February, and when I called our manager, Elliott Lott, I told him rather heatedly that I wasn’t going to do any symphonic tour while Carl was ailing.
Carl died that night. The symphonic tour never happened. And I decided that my touring days with Al were over.
Al and I both assumed a Beach Boy touring license and took to the road, but after a few months, Al’s band kept generating demands for refunds. Brother Records sued Al for payment and compliance issues, and Al lost the license (it’s been reported that I sued Al over the license, but that’s false). Brother Records in turn offered me an exclusive license to tour as the Beach Boys, and a vote was taken by the board. I abstained. Al voted no, but Brian and Carl’s heirs voted yes, so by a 2-1-1 vote (Carl’s heirs got one vote between them), I received the exclusive license.
But it still didn’t mean the Beach Boys would survive. As part of the agreement, I had to pay Brother Records 17.5 percent of all touring revenue (after expenses for lights and sound); that money would flow directly to the shareholders, including Al. I also paid the usual 10 percent in management and agent fees, so 27.5 percent of all touring revenues—before salaries, travel, insurance, and all the other expenses—came right off the top. To make the tours work financially, we’d have to be a lot smarter and a lot more efficient.
Though he wasn’t on the board, Bruce Johnston could be classified as the “original non-original” Beach Boy. Over the years, he’s played a significant role as an ambassador for our songs—it was Bruce who traveled to London to promote Pet Sounds—and his musicianship was as high as anyone’s in the group. He once stated that his goal was to win an Oscar for a film score, and if he had gone down that path, he might have done so. Fortunately, his passion for Beach Boys’ music ran deep, and he brought energy and enthusiasm to the stage every night, imploring audiences to clap, dance, and sing. So in 1999, Bruce and I went back on the road with one of the best groups of musicians in the business, and that included David Marks.
After leaving the Beach Boys, David had his own band for a while, studied jazz and classical guitar at Berklee College of Music and the New England Conservatory of Music, and he continued playing and recording. I always liked David and had stayed in touch with him, and I knew that he too had been cheated by my uncle Murry. In the late 1970s, David performed with my other group, the Endless Summer Beach Band, and after Carl became ill, I asked David to rejoin the Beach Boys, which he did. Unfortunately, David had severe drug and alcohol abuse problems, which he had struggled with for years and which now led to erratic behavior on and off the stage. I told him that he needed to straighten out or that he’d end up like Dennis. I feared the worst.
David stayed with the band until July of 1999, when he grew tired of us insisting that he sober up. Then in December, he was diagnosed with hepatitis C, a viral infection of the liver; the disease can be contracted by intravenous drug use, which may have happened to David. He received experimental treatments and was told that he had to give up drinking. He did and made a remarkable recovery, and he would play with us again.
I had been arranging tours since the 1960s and knew how to do them. We were not looking to play in football stadiums, where promoters can lose millions of dollars. Do that once, and no one wants to work with you again. We wanted smaller venues, including festivals and fairs, where refreshments were affordable and families could enjoy our concert as part of the entrance fee. We played at performing arts centers and amphitheaters that could easily accommodate intermissions and where the acoustics were often superior. We played at casinos so couples could see a show as part of their evening at the tables. I still believed, as I did in the 1960s, that it wasn’t enough to play in the biggest cities but that we should also perform in the smaller markets that are often passed over, in Cheyenne or Wichita or Scottsdale, where fans were so obviously appreciative. We traveled as well to the United Kingdom, Japan, Australia, or anywhere else that presented an opportunity. We played privately for companies or sponsors while also appearing in select arenas that held 20,000. I wanted to play as many shows in as many venues as humanly possible. The guys in the band teased me that I want to schedule the “no más tour”: keep playing until they scream, “No más!”
The challenge, however, was to create a show that was vibrant onstage but efficient offstage so we could meet our obligations to Brother Records. I could handle the onstage part, but I’m not a business manager and don’t really like telling other people what to do. I asked Jacquelyne to review our operations, and that led to some draconian changes. We were spending thousands of dollars a day on catering while giving employees per diems for food. Our liquor bill was out of control, with Jack Daniel’s, tequila, beer, and wine backstage at every show. We were taking our own limousines to and from the airport. Every band member had his own six-foot-tall, heavy wardrobe case with built-in drawers, and that required an employee to set it up and break it down at each stop. Moving these cases around the country cost over $100,000 a year, but as Jacquelyne said to me, “No one sees a Beach Boy concert for the wardrobes.”
All of the unnecessary amenities were either curtailed or eliminated. Nowadays, as far as food is concerned, I request gluten-free and vegetarian, and to ensure that my shirts look nice, an iron is supplied. We have ownership in NetJets that was purchased many years ago, but we use private aircraft strategically. We don’t have anyone on payroll who is not essential, and we don’t squander money on garish stage props or fireworks or overblown production. It’s less about conjuring the atmospherics and more about replicating the harmonies.
—
In 2003, Capitol wanted to release another best-of album. Our music had been sliced, diced, and repackaged in various ways dating all the way back to 1966, when the first Best of the Beach Boys was released. Our box set from the Pet Sounds sessions in 1997 was a tribute to the original album, but most of our compilations were just that—the compiling of songs on one LP. These made economic sense for the label, and by 2003, about thirty compilation albums had been released. But since the 1960s, only Endless Summer and Spirit of America had become Top 20 records.
For the 2003 effort, I was able to offer some recommendations to Capitol, starting with the title. I suggested Sounds of Summer, as a continuation of our seasonal motif. Capitol wanted to use our biggest hits, but it didn’t understand how the sequence creates an overall tempo and vibe—the same effect you create with your set list in a concert—and Capitol got the order all wrong. You don’t put “Little Deuce Coup” next to “God Only Knows.” So I rearranged the sequence, beginning with “California Girls” and grouping the fast-paced surf and car songs at the beginning, dialing it back with the ballads, and then picking up steam in the last third and ending with “Good Vibrations.”
Sounds of Summer included thirty songs, the largest collection of our music ever issued. The cover was a shimmering sunset over the ocean, and the album charted at No. 16 while selling more than 3 million copies—a complete surprise. I think the title, the cover, and the large number of songs all helped, but more than anything it was just a new generation of Americans discovering the Beach Boys.
—
In the late 1970s, Brian wanted to work with me on some new songs, but I was on a retreat in another country. So Brian wrote a short note and gave it to my brother Stan, who was working for him at the time. The message was addressed to Maharishi and read, “Please send Mike home.” Stan had no way of getting the note to Maharishi, so he kept it. Now it stands as a reminder of my partnership with Brian and how much he valued our relationship. I was always confident that if Brian and I ever sat down at the piano, we could be successful again and try for another No. 1 record, but it was never that easy.
In the early 2000s, I saw Brian during one of the settlement hearings between Brother Records and Al Jardine (numerous lawsuits were filed between the company and Al over use of the Beach Boys’ license). Brian walked right up to me in the courthouse and said, “Mike, I really want to work with you. I’ve got all these ideas, but Melinda says it’s not time yet.”
Years passed. Brian and I continued to communicate, and in March of 2011, he and Melinda joined Jacquelyne and me and most of my children for my birthday dinner in Los Angeles. After dinner, we attended a Lakers game to watch my nephew Kevin Love (Stan’s son), who was a star with the Minnesota Timberwolves, and we met with him on the floor after the game. The following month, Jacquelyne and I had dinner with Brian and Melinda in Palm Springs, and the waiter asked us if we wanted anything to drink.
“Do you want to share a beer?” Brian asked me.
“I think we can afford two,” I said.
In May, Brian called me about doing a rock and roll album, and we spoke of some hits that we wanted to cover. I was all for it. We’d had success with past covers (“Rock and Roll Music,” “Barbara Ann,” “Sloop John B,” “Why Do Fools Fall in Love”); the music was already written; Brian could do new arrangements; I could sing in my bass voice, my “Kokomo” voice, my “Surfin’ USA” voice, whatever voice; and it would be a way to get the partnership going again.
We discussed the album as part of a larger effort involving the Beach Boys’ fiftieth anniversary—a tour as well as a new album. Brian and I had our own bands and our own representatives, so a lot of time was spent hammering out a collaboration agreement, or partnership, that would rightfully honor fifty years of the Beach Boys. The crux of the partnership, according to Joe Thomas, Brian’s producer, was that Brian would be “king of the studio” (for the new album), while I would be “king of the road” (for the tour). We knew our fans would love the idea—all of the “original” living Beach Boys (Brian, Al, David, Bruce, and me) would be on tour—and I believe Brian was as excited as I was about writing new songs together.
“We still got it, Mike,” he told me. “We still got it.”
Capitol Records, however, wasn’t interested in an album of rock and roll covers, and that was the least of my problems. Melinda and Joe Thomas, who had produced Brian’s Imagination album (1998), went to Capitol with songs that Brian had left over from his solo efforts, and Capitol gave us a contract that would require using those numbers. Even though Brian and I had a partnership agreement, I was never consulted on the record contract and hadn’t even heard any of the tracks.
In the summer of 2011, I went to the Ocean Way Recording studio in Hollywood to work on the new album but quickly discovered I had little to do. Most of the songs were completed. I was given some lines to write on a couple of tracks, but I felt that was just to placate me. The result was comical. One person wrote War and Peace (1,225 pages), but it took five people, me included, to write “Isn’t It Time” (twenty-five lines).
What I came to do—what Brian and I had agreed on—was to collaborate on new material, but that never happened. I didn’t ask Brian because I knew he wasn’t in control. I did ask Melinda about my agreement, and she told me, “Brian doesn’t write that way anymore.”
Actually, he does write that way, if he is given the chance, but there was no point in arguing.
Though I was nominally the album’s “executive producer,” That’s Why God Made the Radio was delivered to Capitol in 2012 without my approval or without my even listening to the final cut. It was a “Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys” album, even though it was not advertised as such. I had one song on it, “Daybreak over the Ocean,” which I had recorded many years ago for a solo LP but never released. I played it for Brian in the studio, and he said it was his favorite song on the new album. To promote it, we appeared on QVC, the home shopping network, and Capitol front-loaded the sale orders, so the record reached No. 3. But it had no hits and quickly dropped from the charts.
The anniversary tour was even more difficult, and it was almost killed before it began.
I knew the logistics would be tricky, as Brian’s own band had been performing for a number of years, so we’d have to integrate his group with the Beach Boys. I consulted with Brian on the anniversary set list—he didn’t want the lead on “Sloop John B” because he didn’t want to sing about fighting—and I drew up the songs that would work for the integrated band. I assumed everything was in place. But when I arrived at our first rehearsal, Melinda was already there, and incredibly, she had changed the set list. She had also ordered five Auto-Tune devices, to correct off-key vocals, and attached them to the mics used by Brian, Al, Bruce, David, and me. But no one used the device except Brian, no one else wanted to use it, and they shouldn’t have been purchased and installed without approval.
I’d had enough. I told Melinda that she wasn’t where she was supposed to be and reminded her that I was in charge of the tour.
“You know what’s wrong with you, Mike Love,” she said. “You’ve got a fucking chip on your shoulder.”
“Really? Well, me and my fucking chip are out of here. Enjoy the tour.” And I walked out.
Joe Thomas and John Branca, who was one of Brian’s former lawyers and was now serving as a co-consultant on the fiftieth anniversary efforts, called me to try to mend the fences, and I told them I would return only if Melinda was banned from rehearsals until the final day, when the press arrived. They agreed, and we continued on.
The tour began on April 24—the five principals, plus a ten-member band, and we sang backup on videos of Carl singing “God Only Knows” and Dennis singing “Forever.” Brian had appeared with us onstage in the mid-1990s, but he hadn’t really toured with the Beach Boys since the early 1980s. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I assumed that our fans would love it, and they did. We generated more media attention than we had in years, including a performance of “Good Vibrations” on the Grammy Awards show.
Traveling with Brian was both hopeful and sobering. There were times when I’d see the Brian of old. During one sound check, our band director, Scott Totten, asked Brian if he’d like to perform “It’s OK,” which Brian and I wrote in 1976, but it’d probably been years since Brian had played it or even thought about it. Brian said, “Yeah, great!” He turned to his keyboard and said, “This is what we gotta do!” He then began assigning everyone his part as if we had written the song yesterday.
His memory and his wit could both be sharp. The Beach Boys’ drummer, John Cowsill, used to play in his own family band in the late 1960s and ’70s. (The Cowsills were the inspiration for the TV series The Partridge Family.) One of their hit songs, “Indian Lake,” included a war whoop. Way back in 1978, John was performing at a club in Los Angeles, and in the middle of the set, some bearded guy in the audience started banging his hand yelling, “Indian Lake! Indian Lake!” It was Brian, and he wanted to hear the song.
Now on the fiftieth tour, Brian often relaxed in the dressing room, his eyes closed, and one time John walked by, and Brian suddenly yelled out the war whoop from “Indian Lake”—as if to say to John, I know you’re there, and I remember when I tried to get you to play that song long ago.
Brian even made light of his physical aches and pains. During one rehearsal, his back was hurting, and he had to lie down to relieve the pressure. We didn’t know where he was. John Stamos was with us, and after a while, Brian saw John and said, “Hey, Stamos! Could you tell them I’m not dead.” John called out the news.
But Brian’s discomfort with live shows was still apparent. When we were at the Beacon Theatre in New York, the fans were close to the stage, and when they started cheering for Brian, he became agitated, and Jeff Foskett walked over, put his arm around him, and said, “Hey, man, they love you.” Brian used a monitor onstage, not only for the lyrics but even to remind him when to say, “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.” Sometimes during the finale, “Fun, Fun, Fun,” Brian’s hands dropped to his side, and he wouldn’t play or sing.
Interviews were often an ordeal. We did a group interview at Google’s headquarters, and Brian was practically inert; when he did speak, he couldn’t remember to lift his microphone. At one point, David had to raise Brian’s elbow to get the mic near his mouth. There were times in the dressing room when Brian needed help. Jeff Foskett had joined Brian’s band years ago and was now authorized to give Brian his medication as part of his duties as caretaker, and when Brian got too excited, Jeff would give Brian a white envelope with his prescription meds.* I had no objections to Brian’s medical care, but for those of us who knew Brian in his glory, when his eyes were on fire and his emotive swings were part of his improvisational genius, it was a bit sad to witness.
For all the success we had onstage, the tour was one of the most stressful things that I or anyone in my band had ever been through. Combining the two groups was like merging two corporations with radically different cultures. Mine was a seven-piece band with five crewmen; we were doing 120 shows a year, and we were light and nimble and knew how to do a great show while staying on budget and making our financial goals. Now we were part of a fifteen-piece band with twenty-five crew members and a revolving door of special guests, and we traveled with far more elaborate lighting, sound systems, and staging equipment.
Brian and I never had a cross word, but those looking out for us did. I always rode in the same bus as the rest of the band, but Brian had his own bus, the expense of which would come out of all of our pockets. Jacquelyne was overseeing my side of the budget, so she had to negotiate with Melinda and Joe Thomas that Brian reimburse the tour for his bus. The disagreements and bruises accumulated. We once had to fly from Florida to New York, but Melinda planned to have the tour buses drive from Florida to New York and sit idle for several days, until the engagement was over. This extravagance the tour didn’t need, so we nixed that idea.
We were only a month into the tour when we had a concert in San Diego, near a part-time residence of ours in Rancho Santa Fe and where our daughter, Ambha, was attending high school. Now sixteen years old, Ambha had been singing and dancing with us onstage since she could walk, and she has the voice of a songbird. Whenever we played in San Diego, her second home, she would dance with me on “Surfer Girl” and sing either “Darlin’” or “Sail On, Sailor,” and she always brought the crowd to its feet. I asked Brian if Ambha could sing “Sail On, Sailor,” which was one of his leads, for this one concert on the tour. He said yes. During sound check, Ambha asked Brian as well. He agreed but was skeptical that a girl so young could actually do it. Then the band played the song, and Ambha was awesome.
“Wow,” Brian said, “you did it better than me.”
We were good to go, but then backstage, Melinda, their son Dylan in tow, stormed up to Jacquelyne and contended that Ambha should be singing one of my leads, not one of Brian’s. She asked how I would feel if Dylan sang “California Girls.”
Jacquelyn said that I would have no problem with that as long as Dylan could sing it well.
The argument got more heated, the two women standing toe-to-toe and Scott Totten having to redirect Ambha to a dressing room. Finally, Jacquelyne told Melinda, “Mike already discussed the matter with his partner, Brian.”
Melinda’s face reddened. “Mike’s not his fucking partner,” she said. “I’m his fucking partner.”
Well, I didn’t sign up for that. You can mess with me, but you can’t disrespect my family. The confrontation prompted me to call Branca and Thomas and let them know that the Hollywood Bowl would be my last show. As far as I was concerned, they could go on without me. I really didn’t care. Branca, however, told me that my pulling out would be extremely disruptive to the whole enterprise. I figured it was in everyone’s interest to finish, so I stayed on.
This crisis actually had a happy ending. Ambha sang “Sail On, Sailor” and got a standing ovation. Brian, speaking into the mic, congratulated her, and Ambha walked over and gave him a big hug. Brian had spent little time with Ambha over the years, but this moment opened the door to a warm friendship between the two for the duration of the tour.
But those bright spots were few. There were endless negotiations and often disputes over sponsorships, endorsements, marketing campaigns, artwork, merchandise, master videotapes, and the tour dates themselves. Vendors weren’t paid. Budgets were ignored. Bridges were burned. The tour, in fact, lost money in North America and only finished in the black because of our concerts in Asia—but at the expense of our promoters there, who lost money. So too did our promoters in Spain, and it would take several years to reestablish those markets.
But I will say this—we kicked butt onstage. The tour that was originally planned for fifty dates in fifty major markets was extended to seventy-three concerts in fourteen countries—a five-month whirlwind that ended on September 28, in London. The audience response didn’t surprise me, but that we made it to the end was a miracle.
Everyone should have gone home happy, but that would have been too easy. On June 1, we received an email from Melinda that said, in response to a lucrative offer for the reunion band to perform in Israel, “no more shows for Wilson.” With the end in sight, the Beach Boys—the non-reunion version of the band—began accepting invitations for when the fiftieth tour was over. (Our license in fact obligates us to continue touring to maintain the revenue flow to Brother Records.) On June 25, Melinda sent another email asking us to disregard her previous message. But by then it was too late. We had booked other concerts, and promoters had begun selling tickets. Besides, the reunion tour was never meant to be permanent—it wasn’t feasible logistically or economically. The band was too big to play in smaller markets, but playing those markets is how we’ve maintained a loyal fan base and kept the catalog alive all these years. And the longer the reunion tour lasted, the more confusion we’d be creating once my band returned to the road.
I had wanted to send out a joint press release, between Brian and me, formally announcing the end of the reunion tour on September 28. But I couldn’t get Brian’s management team on board (Brian himself doesn’t make those kinds of decisions). Everything came to a head in the middle of September, when Brian’s lawyer accused me of using Brian’s likeness on the Beach Boys’ website to promote future concerts that did not include Brian. That violated my license for the Beach Boys. But the website was controlled by Capitol/UMG. Regardless, the lawyer told me that to maintain the license and to eliminate the confusion, I needed to announce the end of the reunion tour.
We still couldn’t get Brian’s signature on the release, so I had to send it out by myself. The media backlash was swift and devastating: I had fired Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys. This triggered more death threats, by mail and phone, which we had to take to the authorities.
Over the years, I’ve rarely responded to personal attacks, and I don’t believe I have ever defended myself in writing. But this time I wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, explaining that I couldn’t fire Brian even if I wanted to, that the tour was always meant to be a limited run, that smaller markets wouldn’t support the reunion band, and that now Brian and I—as agreed upon—were returning to our separate groups.
Brian responded with his own op-ed, titled “It Kinda Feels Like Getting Fired.”
I’m not sure if Brian, or whoever wrote the column for him, appreciated the irony of his statement. For much of the history of the Beach Boys, Brian and the people around him have tried to distance him from the group so he could shed his surf-pop image and take his place in the critics’ pantheon. Me fire Brian? From what? If Brian had wanted any part of the Beach Boys, it would have been quite easy after Carl’s death. He could have accepted a Beach Boys license for himself, when it was offered, but he didn’t. His new album had just come out. His solo career needed to be nurtured—a career that did not require him to distribute 17.5 percent of all revenues to Brother Records. Brian’s managers and advisors surely told him that he had better opportunities on his own.
And the Beach Boys? Brian gave me the torch, which I’ve proudly carried since the day we began.
Brian’s true feelings came out on the tour. As anyone who was on it will attest, he loved the camaraderie of the guys, he loved the music, and he loved being a Beach Boy again. He wanted the tour to continue, and he said so loudly and often, but you can’t change the melody once the score’s been written.
And after the tour was over, Brian often told reporters that he still wanted to do that album of rock and roll covers.
The whole experience was bittersweet for me. The concerts were amazing, and I was grateful to play again with all the living Beach Boys. I didn’t care for the vilification at the end, though I’m used to it. For those who believe that Brian walks on water, I will always be the Antichrist.
—
In 1972, Brian wrote “Mount Vernon and Fairway,” the corner of my childhood home. It wasn’t really a song but a twelve-minute fairy tale, or allegory, about a young Prince (me) whose special bedroom window (like mine) “looked down into a deep, deep forest [and glimpsed] distant lights from other castles in the kingdom.” A Pied Piper (Brian) brings magical music to the Prince through a glowing transistor radio (like the one we listened to as kids). The Piper tells the Prince that if he leaves the transistor radio on after midnight, the Piper will bring more magic music to him. In days ahead, the Prince does that, but “he heard nothing like the music of that magic night . . . there’s nothing but Bach on this radio.” The Prince stops believing in the Piper and disregards the transistor until he hears a mysterious sound one night.
Could it be the Pied Piper himself,
Coming out of the magic transistor radio?
Or was it just the wind whistling by the castle window.
No one knows, but the tale concludes:
If you have a transistor radio and the lights are all out some night,
Don’t be very surprised if [the radio] turns to light green.
And the whirling magic sound of the Pied Piper comes to visit you.
I’m the Pied Piper
In the radio.
I remember Carl’s remark to Brian many years ago that his estrangement from his family was “contrived,” engineered by others. It’s still contrived. I haven’t seen Brian since the reunion tour, and there comes a point where you become conditioned to doing certain things or not doing certain things. I don’t know if Brian and I will ever write another song together, or share a meal together, or even have a conversation.
But my radio is on.