El Paso music lovers will soon be picking up some “Good Vibrations” when The Beach Boys, led by singer Mike Love, head to the Abraham Chavez Theatre in Downtown on Aug. 26.
Love and the current Beach Boys lineup, which includes longtime band member Bruce Johnston, are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the song, which is one of the band’s most enduring and influential hits.
Love co-founded the band in 1961 alongside his cousins, Brian Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Carl Wilson and friend Al Jardine. Dennis died in 1983, as did Carl in 1998. But, while Brian Wilson, the group’s chief songwriter during its heyday, and Jardine have played with the group sporadically since the 1970s, including a 50th anniversary tour and album in 2011, it has been Love who has carried the torch for The Beach Boys for all 55 years of the band’s existence.
Love is just as enthusiastic about taking the sunny vibes to global audiences as the day the group was formed, he said in a phone interview from his home in California.
“Last year we went to Australia, New Zealand, Japan, England and Germany,” Love said. “We live up to the song title, ‘I Get Around,’ and the audience response is so great. Five decades after we started getting all those hit songs in the ’60s, those songs still go over.”
Those hits include a string of songs that Love co-wrote with Brian Wilson, including “Help Me Rhonda,” “California Girls” and “I Get Around.”
Love also co-wrote The Beach Boys’ biggest hit, “Kokomo,” alongside John Phillips of The Mamas & the Papas. The song went to No. 1 in 1988, giving The Beach Boys one of the longest spans between chart-topping hits in Billboard history.
“Good Vibrations” was the group’s previous No. 1 in 1966.
“‘Good Vibrations’ — when I first heard the track, it was really funky, almost an R&B kind of thing,” Love said. “It was done over several months. Brian came up with different sections and tempos.”
Before singing the song’s familiar chorus over the phone, Love said that he had come up with the familiar melody, but not the words, when Brian Wilson summoned him to the studio to complete the song.
“I dictated the words to a poem that became the verses to my wife at the time, Suzanne, on my way to the studio,” Love said. “Brian had asked me to write lyrics and I hadn’t done it yet. I was literally dictating it as I was driving. I had visions of a girl that was into peace, love, flower power — all that psychedelic stuff that was going on in the ’60s. I wrote a psychedelic poem to complement the psychedelic vibes of the song.”
Love said it’s a “bummer” that the rest of the original Beach Boys haven’t always been along for the ride, and it was hard losing his cousins Dennis, who drowned, and Carl, to cancer, but he will continue The Beach Boys’ legacy for as long as fans demand it and he is able.
And although Brian Wilson and Jardine, as well as other surviving members of the group, joined The Beach Boys’ 50th anniversary tour, Love said the arrangement was “sometimes problematic” and “primarily done for the fans.”
Although Love and others helped write many of The Beach Boys’ hits, it’s Brian Wilson who has gotten the majority of critical acclaim as the group’s chief songwriter. While Wilson remained a member of the group throughout the 1970s, he ceased touring with the band for the most part in the 1960s.
Still, Love said, he doesn’t hold any bitterness toward Wilson and doesn’t feel underappreciated by fans.
“I think I get plenty of credit,” Love said. “Where I didn’t get credit, sometimes, was the songwriting. But my book documents those parts of my story. I co-wrote songs I didn’t receive credit on. I’ve always been the lead singer and I co-wrote some of our biggest hits. Our biggest hit is ‘Kokomo’ and Brian wasn’t even on that record.”
Love will release his autobiography, written with James S. Hirsch, “Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy,” on Sept. 13. Love said the book not only tells his side of The Beach Boys story but also his own humble beginnings.
“There’ve been hundreds of thousands of words written about The Beach Boys,” Love said. “I’ve never written a book and I’m the one person who’s been in the group since the beginning. It starts with the inspiration that came from my mom’s side of the family, which was a musical family. They were poor, they came to California during the Dust Bowl of Kansas and slept on the beach for a couple of months before finding a place to live.”
Love said that besides touring and the book, he has been “stockpiling songs over the years.” The Beach Boys’ last album, “That’s Why God Made the Radio,” coincided with the band’s 50th anniversary and featured all of its surviving members, including Love, Brian Wilson, Jardine, Johnston and guitarist David Marks, who first performed with The Beach Boys on the song “Little Deuce Coup” in 1963.
Love said he hopes The Beach Boys will release new material, written primarily by himself and in collaboration with other musicians, later this year or in early 2017.
“It’s songs I’ve recorded and never come out with,” Love said. “Sort of like the book. It’s the story I’ve never told.”
Until then, “the beat goes on,” Love said.
“It’s a blessing to take these songs I made with my cousins and that became successful and perform them five decades after writing them,” Love said.
