I stopped by the Mayo Performing Arts Center in Morristown, NJ on April 4 to catch Love and his version of the namesake group, and left feeling excited, confused, and conflicted.
In my household, the Beach Boys are an American institution and Brian Wilson is sort of like Jesus. Some of my earliest memories include watching kids sing “Surfin’ Safari” on a Disney Beach Party VHS tape. It wasn’t long before I realized that the Beach Boys were everywhere: in the car, on the radio, at home on record, on the television in commercials and movies. The Beach Boys are a household name, a fixture in our society.
In high school, I began to more closely examine the music of the Beach Boys and, like all young, curious explorers of sound, I became highly enamored with the unquestionable genius of Brian Wilson. The Beach Boys’ story is a well-known and often-told tale that includes the genius and mental collapse of Brian, the deaths of his brothers and founding members Dennis and Carl Wilson, the brothers’ often abusive father and one-time manager Murray Wilson, Al Jardine, the Wrecking Crew, Charles Manson, surfing, cars, the Four Freshman, Ronnie Spector, Glen Campbell and of course, a series of conflicts and lawsuits that involve Brian and founding member/cousin of the Wilson brothers, Mike Love.
Mike Love’s highly publicized transgressions date back to 1966. He has often been painted as a resistant force to Brian’s growth and experimentation during the recording of 1966’s “Pet Sounds,” and the shelved but eventually released “Smile Sessions,” a claim that Love has often discredited. In 1988, Love angrily called out peers like Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger onstage at the Beach Boys’ induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. 10 years later, after the death of Carl, Love retained license to use the Beach Boys’ name and has toured with his own version of the band that includes longtime Beach Boy Bruce Johnston since (save for a short lived 50th anniversary reunion of the remaining original members in 2011). Brian has led his own Beach Boys-based touring outfit with co-founder Jardine and “Surf’s Up” era contributor Blondie Chaplin. The two factions operate as separate entities to this day.
Mike Love is easily vilified among Beach Boys fans. The singer has acknowledged this himself, famously stating “for those who believe that Brian walks on water, I will always be the Antichrist,” in 2016. Nonetheless as a self-professed Beach Boys nut, I have always considered Mike Love to be an important part of the Beach Boys’ sound and development and a key part of the whole that is the group.
Love’s transgressions never stopped me from enjoying his music. I saw his version of the Beach Boys in 2014 and on the Fourth of July in 2017. John Stamos performed at the latter date, and if my memory serves me correctly, I had a wonderful time. On the other hand, I have seen Brian perform at least once, but usually upwards of three times, a year since 2014. On April 4, Love’s version of the Beach Boys returned to the Mayo Performing Arts Center in Morristown, NJ. It was a very different show.
The Beach Boys made headlines in 2020 when Brian publicly disavowed Love’s version of the group for performing at a trophy hunting lodge, and again for performing at a fundraiser for then President Donald Trump’s re-election at a later date. This naturally attracted a lot of negative media attention but I, as a die-hard Beach Boys fan, apparently ignored this little tidbit of information. It appears however, that the rest of the Beach Boys community did not.
Love’s Beach Boys opened the first of their two sets that night with “Do It Again,” and proceeded to launch into a fun-filled show jam-packed with hits, many of which Love sang lead on. The Beach Boys fan in me was beyond thrilled to see Love on stage, singing songs I had heard him sing countless times before in the air, on the radio, in my home and on television. It would soon become apparent to me, however, that I was in an environment atypical to the rock and roll shows I had attended before it.
The night was full of light-hearted jokes that poked fun at the group’s age, like when a fart noise rang through the theater as Love ascended from a kneeling position during the intro of “Be True to Your School.”
“Disney doesn’t want us to play this song,” Mike Love told the nearly sold-out audience. I jumped up, happy and expecting him to announce “Disney Girls” as their next song, a seldom heard track from 1971’s “Surf’s Up” penned by Johnston. “Because it’s called ‘Surfer Girl,’” Love continued.
It was at that moment that the audience members around me erupted with laughter at the misguided, thinly veiled, not very funny joke, and I realized that the Beach Boys’ audience was divided politically much like the rest of America. This was a very different show than I was used to; I was in a room full of old, white conservatives.
The rest of the night elicited feelings of great joy from hearing Love sing Beach Boys classics like “Little Deuce Coupe,” “Shut Down” and “I Get Around” in his signature, nasal-y voice, juxtaposed against feelings of disappointment and confusion surrounding his political leanings, and necessity to include a message into the Beach Boys’ set, even if only for a second.
No longer could I ignore the fact that someone I looked up to was contributing to furthering the political divide that plagues our nation. I never felt like that at Brian’s shows. The audience always seemed united by a greater sense of purpose, one that emitted from the stage in the form of music. While Love often took pauses from singing songs to give the audience tidbits of information surrounding the group’s history that were at times self-aggrandizing, Brian’s band largely lets the music speak for itself.
Like any decent human being, I went to the bathroom to take a leak during “Kokomo.” While I was washing my hands, I noticed a man in the mirror, continuously staring at me like he’d never seen a dude with long hair and purple glasses in a leopard print jacket before.
“You like to stare a lot, don’t you?” I asked the man.
“No, and do you got a problem with that?” the most likely former cop told me.
I had always considered how music is powerful enough to unite audiences from different backgrounds, and this remains true. On that Tuesday night however, it was also clear to me how culture and politics can do quite the opposite; drive us apart.
Catch the Beach Boys on tour here.
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