Publisher's Weekly Review
For the audio edition of his candid memoir, Love, a founding member of the Beach Boys, adopts a style that seems more akin to reading than performing the text. He keeps the pace relaxed and the tone generally understated. He subtly interjects emotion at key intervals, however, particularly with regard to the abusive antics of his uncle and the tragic losses in his band and family. Love seems wistful rather than desperate or heavy-handed when discussing his complicated relationship with his cousin Brian Wilson. He lets his voice crack without completely breaking in these moments, leaving the listener with a sense of someone seeking to stay above the fray to the greatest extent possible. Fans of the Beach Boys will most appreciate hearing Love's story told in his own voice. A Blue Rider hardcover. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
Love lacked the sensitivity of his cousin Brian Wilson, but he kept the band going after their fall from grace. He tells his side of an extraordinary story Pop music's villains have usually been in management, or record company executives, but there are a select number who are musicians. Some are actual criminals -- Gary Glitter -- while others have been condemned for their conservatism and lack of adventure; the artist Jeremy Deller has claimed that Oasis "destroyed music in Britain for years". Among these bad guys, there's a special place reserved for Mike Love of the Beach Boys. For five decades he has been held responsible by fans and many critics for cowing the band's free-spirited songwriter Brian Wilson, Love's cousin, with barbs such as "Don't fuck with the formula". Some see a direct link between Love's behaviour and Wilson's breakdown and withdrawal from the pop scene in the early 1970s. Fifty years after the release of "Good Vibrations", the group's masterpiece and a contender for the greatest pop single of all time, both Wilson and Love have written autobiographies. I Am Brian Wilson: The Genius behind the Beach Boys (Coronet, [pound]20) is Wilson's second; both of his books have been ghostwritten and his memory is apparently poor. As Wilson's brothers Dennis and Carl are no longer around to tell their side of the story, there's a strong case for Love being the Beach Boys' most reliable narrator. And given that the story involves Charles Manson, Leonard Bernstein, Republican fund-raisers, parental abuse, mental illness and a cataclysmic fall from grace, as well as some of the greatest music of the 20th century, it's a story well worth reading. Mike Love is a "jock", more interested in sports and moneymaking than complex chord changes or appealing to critics. He lacked the sensitivity of his cousins, but they harmonised together from an early age. Cross-country captain at school, he describes his younger self as a "renegade ... a peacenik and a badass ... I sent the message: don't mess with Love". Unlike the Wilsons, who lived in the working-class Los Angeles district of Hawthorne, Love grew up in a house with a pool, sundeck and five bathrooms. This was thanks to his father's business, Love Sheet Metal, whose fortunes dipped dramatically in the early 1960s. Losing the family home led to a keen sense of thrift. Love comes across like a science experiment: if a jock were thrown into the heart of the 1960s cultural revolution, how might he emerge? Initially he smoked dope like his bandmates, but by the turn of the 70s became fiercely anti-drugs. In 1970 he fasted for three weeks, living on juice, tea and water; as a consequence of his light-headed state, he was arrested after driving through several red lights and ended up in Edgemont psychiatric hospital in a straitjacket. Like the Beatles, Love fell hard for the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and transcendental meditation; unlike the Beatles, he stuck with it. During the early 70s he took time out to study an advanced siddhi meditation programme, a three-month stay in Switzerland following a three-month stay in France, "changing venues to take advantage of off-season hotel rates". It's easy to laugh at Love's gaucheness and narrow-eyed barbs. He cites a "fascination with ethnicity of any kind"; of Pet Sounds lyricist Tony Asher, he says "Though he didn't have any Beach Boy records, Tony loved our music". Still, there's no doubt Love kept the group together through a series of crises. Although they were hailed as the best group in the world by Melody Maker readers in 1966, ahead even of the Beatles, the counterculture turned heavily against them after the non-appearance of the troubled Smile album and their withdrawal from the Monterey Pop festival in 1967. In November 1966, they were No 1 in the US and UK with the Grammy-nominated "Good Vibrations"; they spent Thanksgiving 1969 playing the Corn Palace in Sioux City, Iowa, to 50 people. On the verge of splintering into various solo projects after the 1973 album Holland, the Beach Boys were rescued by Love, who took hold of their live shows and turned them into flag-waving rallies of patriotic nostalgia. Given the patchiness of their catalogue since, keeping the group together wasn't necessarily a good thing, but it's hard not to be impressed by the hundreds of thousands who turned out to see the Beach Boys on various Fourth of July parties in the 1980s. For Love haters, it's also instructive to be reminded of just how young the Beach Boys were when they were thrown into the spotlight by the surf music craze -- the youngest member, David Marks, hadn't turned 14 when they had a hit with "Surfin' Safari" in 1962. It all disintegrated rapidly into drug-addled paranoia, revenge attacks and thoughtlessness. It says a lot about Love's low standing and the persuasive powers of Dennis Wilson's music that the drummer isn't regarded as the Beach Boys' real monster -- after all, he slept with Love's first wife, ending their marriage, and later married one of Love's daughters. Love claims that Dennis and Carl both supplied their bed-ridden brother Brian with cocaine and heroin in the late 70s, which would seem barely credible if we hadn't already been told that Dennis and Love's estranged wife had hired Susan Atkins, a Manson gang murderer, as a babysitter. What rankles most with Love is the suggestion that his first reaction on hearing backing tracks to the timeless Pet Sounds album was to warn Brian Wilson "Don't fuck with the formula". "It's the most famous thing I've ever said," he writes, "even though I never said it." On other occasions, though, he dismisses fine but less publicly vaunted Beach Boys records, such as the Love You album (1977), as "weird". He claims to have written the verses for "Good Vibrations" on a crosstown car journey, dictating them to his wife without missing a beat. I'm ready to believe he wrote the leering lyrics to "California Girls", and he is proud to have added the "round round get around" intro to Brian's otherwise finished "I Get Around", but "I love the colourful clothes she wears /and the way the sunlight plays upon her hair"? I'll give him the benefit of the doubt, but the Love who has written this book would surely regard that lyric as pretty "weird". - Bob Stanley.
Booklist Review
Beach Boys member Love chronicles how the Wilson brothers found massive success with songs celebrating West Coast surf and car culture. He describes how mental illness hobbled Brian, who spent years out of commission on drugs. Dennis, Love explains, was sexually insatiable, generous to a fault, and for a time allowed Charles Manson and some of his followers to live in his mansion. Dennis also had an affair with Love's former wife Suzanne (prompting Love to contemplate killing him), and later married a woman who claimed to be Love's daughter. Much vilified by music aficionados, Love attempts to set the record straight, describing how he collaborated with Brian on many of the group's more well-known songs but wasn't given writing credit until years later, following a lawsuit. Admittedly, he was more concerned about commerce than art, but he never said, Don't fuck with the formula. Love might not make converts out of haters, but with the structure and focus provided by coauthor Hirsch, Good Vibrations tells a memorable story of a band whose music is now part of our country's DNA. --Segedin, Ben Copyright 2016 Booklist
Library Journal Review
There's not much warmth of the sun in either of these memoirs by the two most high-profile members of the Beach Boys, America's "Beatles"; in fact, if it's good vibrations you're looking for, listen to the band's albums instead. Of the two, Love's memoir is certainly the sunnier, and he strives for a brightness that illuminates the dark corners of his childhood and youth and especially his years working closely with his cousin Brian Wilson in the band. Love recalls the halcyon days of the Beach Boys, especially the very early years when he realized that there was musical "magic in the gene pool" that had to be set free. He cheerfully chronicles his life with the band, from discovering music with Brian and working out harmonies and his role in penning lyrics for some of the band's most recognizable tunes-"I Get Around," "California Girls," and "Good Vibrations," among others-to the impact of the deaths of Carl and Dennis Wilson on the band, his own legal battles to win the right to lost royalties, and his immersion in Eastern spirituality that provides him with the key to his harmonious outlook. Love refuses to see life other than through rainbow-colored glasses, and his cheeriness eventually grates on the heart and soul. By contrast, Wilson's memoir digs deep, with fierce honesty from the opening pages: "My story is a music story, but it's a story of mental illness, too." He describes the ways that mental illness can be both debilitating and inspiring. His recollections move simply from one moment of consciousness to another; he writes only peripherally about his childhood and youth, bringing up memories of those times only where they impinge upon his narrative. Wilson's tortured relationship with his father, Murry, is legendary, and he candidly embraces the difficulties of his times with his father, concluding that he's striving to reconcile his father's anger and doubt with Murry's ability to joke around, his musical gifts, and just how much he meant to the band. Because Wilson meanders through his life and music, his memoir is more difficult to follow and can be tedious and exasperating reading. Verdict Neither of these memoirs brings new insights to the life and music of either musician or to the band. Love's happy-go-lucky tone creates a shallow pool, and Wilson's rambling prose irritates. Yet no library, especially large public facilities, will want to be without these volumes as they relate two sides of life in America's band.-Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Grayslake, IL © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.