The Smiley Smile Message Board

I thought I'd just start the anti-Mike Love thread for this week. Please post your thoughts on:

1) Country Love
2) The RnR Hall of Fame speech
3) The demise of Redwood
4) Summer in Paradise
5) The songwriting credit issu
6) The Summer of Love video
7) Full House
8) The airplane episode with VDP
9) His questioning of lyrical idea
10) His concern for career direction of the band
11) His criticism towards Brian about ideas he didn't like

.....or use the sites search function if like me, you can't be bothered.

Conclusion: Mike Love is a moron.

 :thumbsup :thumbsup :thumbsup  Chances are that he would have gotten his "due" or the acclaim he thinks he's always been denied if he had stayed at the gas station. I mean  like he could have worked his way up to assistant manager by now.  :angel:

Insert obligatory Mike Love defense.

Mike Love put a candy bar in my gas tank and broke my car.

Well, the "demise of Redwood" led (directly or indirectly) to the (enormous) success of Three Dog Night.   Based on Brian's success (or lack thereof, commercially speaking) producing other artists, I don't think they would have gained the success they did had they remained with him on Brother Records.   So I think it worked out okay for them. 
I have never heard their version of Darlin', but I dislike their take on Time To Get Alone, the Beach Boys did it much better. 
Anyway, sorry, this is a "bash Mike Love" thread, isn't it?   My bad.  ;)

Anyone who doesn't like No Pier Pressure is a racist.

1) Haven't heard it
2) Classic rock n roll moment!!!
3) Umm, wasn't the rumor that a few of the BBs were ticked? Why tack this purely on Love?
4) It was to Mike what 15 Big Ones was to Brian. No wait. 15 Big Ones was worse!
5) He got what he deserved. Murry's fault!
6) Typical 80s, early 90s cheese. Everybody was doing it!
7) Like number 6. But when it's on, I get sucked in!
8) Funny story
9) Because understandably, he was the band lyricist and his cousin was using others. It's a normal reaction. Have you ever been bitter?
10) Hmm. With the exception of a few quotes in 1966, he seemed to embrace it for the next 7 years!
11) Carl, Al, Bruce, Dennis(?), the wrecking crew all did the same thing!

So this is my completely unbiased answers to the questions above!

Regarding number nine… Well of course he was bitter. But you'd never know it if you just believed the words you heard from him regarding an explanation. If he just said the words "I was bitter" at least it would be the truth, instead of mounting a decades-long defense which cops to zero bitterness and zero culpability whatsoever. That denial in no small part is a (not THE, but a) reason for his unpopularity.

On #9, he was agreeing with Brian who himself was "clashing" with VDP over the lyrics being "too sophisticated".

Those quotation marks hit the nail on the head. This is surely the entire "genuine" overview of history that "happened", and you "aren't" grasping at straws to omit other portions of the story that are inconvenient to reconcile.

Mike Love's best friend is Bill Cosby.  :o

1.  His album, his business.
2.  Uncalled for
3.  Desperate times, desperate measures. Unfortunately, the reported bullying wasn't good for Brian.
4.  Meh.
5.  Murry shafted him and Brian was too passive to take a stand against his domineering dad. My question has always been, why didn't Mike stand up for himself on this one, instead of waiting on his cousin? In the end, though, he got his due and a bit more. Time to move on.
6.  Meh
7.  Full House was extremely popular in the day, so I don't blame them for going on the show. I just regret that it's led to the never-ending Stamos-as-Dennis impersonation.
8.  Don't care.
9.  In my opinion, anyone in the band had the right to ask questions.  The issue here was Brian's growing fragility, and their inability to see it and adjust to it.
10. Not necessarily wrong, but definitely short sighted.
11. He needs a new nick-name. Mr. Positivity ain't working for him.

Now, my real issues with Mike these days are not above. They are:

12.  The never ending Brian-did-drugs-I-didn't mantra.
13.  The inability to give Brian and Al a place in the band again
14.  The bashing of the C50 and TWGMTR, when, to everyone else in the music industry, it was the biggest success the band has had in years.

Asking questions is one thing, but *how* they were asked/how often they were asked is another. As you said, an inability to see someone's fragility is the biggest problem. But if the intent was to wear down Brian's urge to write songs and entire albums with primary usage of outside lyricists, then a consistent barrage of negative vibes and an ever-increasing attitude problem would be exactly the way to accomplish it. To strongly coax a change to happen with Mike (getting back to his position of increased importance), not entirely dissimilar with his actions of late 2012.

A person doesn't just get to talk to someone else in any manner in which they choose and have the nature in which they acted be by definition considered appropriate and acceptable, just because they are related and in a band. And by the way, I'd include Dennis publicly embarrassing Mike onstage as being inappropriate behavior too, just in case anyone needs another BB member to figuratively be thrown under the bus in discussing this unrelated incident.

The problem is, if you ask any of the diehard Mike extremists to define what would and what wouldn't be appropriate and acceptable behavior for how to talk to an emotionally-fragile person, they clam up and stop responding. Meaning, either they are afraid to answer and draw a line in the sand that possibly might have been crossed by Mike, or they feel that the only person who knows how to talk to Brian is Mike, and that nobody has a right to question how Mike talked to/approached Brian about any matter, whatsoever, under any circumstances. An ideology which somehow hypocritically doesn't seem to apply to all sorts of other people in the BBs' story for some reason.

Plus those hats are ugly and pointless. Bald can be beautiful!  :tm :spin

top 20 reasons why one should despise him...

1.when he was in the Garden of Eden and he gave Eve the fruit.
2. He not wearing toupee's like Trump is a total shame.
3. All the wars he started in the name of the surf board.
4. His long lost daughter Courtney Love.
5. His long lost Polka album called "The Love of Polka".
6. His nasty habit of eating some sort of food substance, then to top that off he drinks some sort of liquid.
7. The fact that he wrote the best song ever, called "Dallas". and the best album ever called "Country Love".
8. The long lost follow up to SIP titled "Pet Sounds 2" produced and written by Mike. It is his masterpiece.
9. The airplane incident where he and Dick Van Dyke were arguing about Mary Tyler Moore.
10. The fact that he never changed his last name ,legally, to Wilson, Mike Wilson!
11. that one time when he was planning to change the name of the band from the Beach Boys to the Bitch Boys.
12. his long lost duets with the Olsen Twins. when they were 3.
13. The fact that he never became a action star the likes of Chuck Norris or Bruce Lee has confounded me.
14. when he said that Elvis stole his music and the music of his race.
15. it's sad that he never became a world renown professional "Gas Pumper", He took the easy way by becoming a rock n roll star because there are many rock stars but not many famous Gas Pumpers known and respected worldwide for their craft.
16. He worked 10 years to finish his now long lost masterpiece "Country Love" only to shelve it after the other members started complaining about the lyrics.
17. He Got Love...... (which most of us don't have  :-\ :'()
18. He's a woman in drag...that's true, Love is a woman.
19. He's planning world domination as head of the Illuminati and is planning to place 666 on the foreheads and hands of everyone in the new world order in order so that they could buy or sell, HAIL LOVE!!!!!!
and the most important one
20. He never hosted SNL.....

Bravo. A rare instance of taking a thread nobody asked for and making some succinct, astute points that could actually turn the thread around.

Question:


Did Mike getting screwed by Murry, and then Brian not doing anything about it and possibly being complicit beyond that....

Did that help make Mike the litigious, thin skinned, screw me once shame on you screw me twice shame on me type of guy that he is today?

Yeah, I'd say that's part of it. Mike should never have had to experience that, it was messed-up and wrong. Few if any people would deny that. But the diehard Kokomaoists would like to believe that, unlike most people (who when experiencing a traumatic experience often exhibit behavioral repercussions down the road, such as the Wilson brothers), Mike somehow came out of this screwjob emotionally unscathed, and never acted out in any way as a result. Makes perfect sense, right?

People are pretty unfairly harsh on Mike, so lots of people compensate by making audacious statements in Mike's favor, which balance it out. 

Someone above mentioned that they don't understand why he didn't speak up for himself back then.

I think we have plenty of evidence that mike was kind of a prick then, as he is now, but it was much different.... up until hell the late 80's Mike was still on pretty good terms with Brian.

From Mike's perspective, Brian had helped screw him out of money, and then didn't do his fair share of lifting for years. 

So eventually all the pent up aggression in Mike blew up and he went nuclear, now he's so pissed about everything he won't give Brian the half inch of grace you'd give a bum on the street.

Mike Love co-wrote most of the songs on "Wild Honey," their greatest album.  He's okay in my book.

Thank you.

I'd say that Mike was far, far more scarred by the events of the early sixties, when his mother - literally - threw him out of the palatial family home on learning his girlfriend was pregnant, and later when the family business hit hard times and filed for bankruptcy, which resulted in the loss of the Baldwin Hills house. That's gotta mess with anyone's head.

Now wait a minute, there are three or four songs on 15 Big Ones that are miles above everything on Summer In Paradise.

A few solid ones. One was written by Mike. But to be sure, I am not a Mike apologist. I don't like Summer in Paradise. I love Love You. With a few exceptions, can't stand 15 Big Ones.