Reportedly Mike ate dosas and soup.
When you're an internationally beloved rock star who has literally seen it all, it's the little things in every city that you come to appreciate. For Mike Love, in the area to play a handful of shows with his legendary group, the Beach Boys, a trip to his favorite Indian restaurant in Boston was priority number one.
Meet the producer of Mike Love's "many album".
The Loading Zone opened for the Who at the Fillmore on the band's first American tour, hung out with Janis Joplin and the Dead, and toured with Jeff Beck. Founded by Richmond-raised organist/vocalist Paul Fauerso in 1965, the rock 'n' rhythm combo was a regular part of Bill Graham's retinue of acts. For several years Berkeley's gloriously eclectic New Orleans House at San Pablo and Cedar served as its home base, but the East Bay group never became a marquee act outside of the region.
Fauerso produced Tillery's first solo album before the band broke up for good, but by 1971 he was ready to leave the Bay Area to devote himself to teaching Transcendental Meditation. Rarely far from music, he wrote commercial jingles, did some film scores, recorded music for meditation, and produced several albums for Beach Boys' Mike Love. But his ultimate bandstand thrill was a Loading Zone gig opening for soul legends Sam and Dave.
Motor Trend has a LONG interview with Mike Love regarding the many cars he has loved (the number is quite possibly higher than the number of wives he has loved). The quote below is about higher gas mileage and alternatives to gasoline.
"A lot of us really appreciate and love the high-performance cars -- the big engines and great horsepower and fantastic handling. We don't want to sacrifice any of that, but we also don't want to be completely dependent on one or two places in the world for sources of oil to fuel our cars," Love adds. "I think we have enough land in America that we could create independence if our government and the automobile companies put their minds to it. I'm sure they'd have the support of the entire population the way the gas prices are going these days."
We chime in about predictions that there might be an end to the musclecar, with the 35-mpg CAFE standards by 2020 and 32 mpg as early as 2015.
"That's what they say, but I don't think it has to be the end of anything. It just has to be a different fuel source and that could be the biofuels. I'm sure they can figure it out -- how to make my Bentley run on sugar beets," Love laughs.
Love says focusing on Greener technology is doable. "They have cellulose biofuel technology, which is there. It just has to be the economics and the will of the people to have to move it along so we don't have to sacrifice performance just because our oil companies have got us slavishly dependent on their product."
My answer: build nuclear power plants and sell inexpensive electric cars powered by the electricity produced by the nuclear power plants. At the same time, drill for more oil here in the U.S., and build refineries in the U.S. Short term and long term solutions that are far more feasible than biofuels, which require a lot of energy to produce, make food prices high, and create their own special brand of pollution.
Mike Love sets the record straight for Uncut magazine on formulas, Parks, and Smiles.
Looking back, do you feel you've had an unfairly bad rap as the guy who told Brian not to "*** with the formula"?
Well, it's an outright lie. I mean, I wrote the words to 'Good Vibrations' for a start. And with Pet Sounds, I named the album and I went with Brian to play it for Karl Engemann at Capitol, and he turned to us after listening and said, "Gee, guys, can't you do something more like 'California Girls' or 'I Get Around'?" It was Capitol that was resisting the change, not me. We all worked very hard on Pet Sounds. That album was saying, "Okay, it's one thing to talk about a girl or a surfboard, but now you're talking about emotions and feelings and something a bit more subtle". I think that "Mike Love's the bad guy" stuff comes from writers who weren't there. And there's another component to it, which is that during that time Brian and Dennis and Carl began to experiment with drugs whereas Alan and Bruce and myself did not. So there was a bit of a Them and Us situation, and some of the people who were around Brian would be sort of negative about us. So I think that's where a lot of it stems from.
Were you as hostile towards Van Dyke Parks as he has always claimed?
Well, I asked Van Dyke what a particular set of lyrics meant and he said, "I haven't a clue, Mike". I termed some of his lyrical contributions "acid alliteration". Some of the stuff was brilliant and great and phenomenal, but I looked at things from an objective commercial point of view. Whether it's a strength or a weakness, I said, "Is it going to relate to the public to the degree that they can identify with the message and the lyrics?" From a purely artistic point of view I can appreciate some of the lyrics. For instance on 'Heroes and Villains', the line "What a dude'll do"... was very clever. Van Dyke was brilliant at taking something and, in an alliterative way, putting that into the song to go with Brian's musical contribution. But see, 'Good Vibrations' was No. 1, but 'Heroes and Villains' went to No. 50 or something. [Actually, it went to No. 12 in the US and No. 8 here in the UK.] My point of view was often misunderstood as being negative about the art of it all, whereas I liked to see artistry and commerciality merge.
What might have been different if SMiLE had come out in the way it was intended to?
I don't know the answer to that, because it was shelved by Brian. And there again was a case of Mike Love being blamed for that album not coming out at that time, which was absolutely erroneous. Brian had a breakdown and we did Smiley Smile instead, which was his own drug-rehab album. It's a trippy little record, from the dynamics of 'Heroes and Villains' to something like 'Wind Chimes'. We'll never know what the influence of SMiLE might have been, though it would obviously have been good to come out with something so unique and different. As for the SMiLE album Brian did [in 2004], I'd have preferred him to come to me and say, "Hey, let's finish the SMiLE album and pull out the original tapes", but he didn't choose that path.
Mike Love explains how to put together a successful concert.
"The songs are challenging and you have to be mentally engaged. I always preferred live appearances to recording, the spontaneous appreciation of the audience lifts you. It's nice to see the songs appreciated."
"Of course there are continual decisions being made, and different desires have to be satisfied. We get fans who are hard-core and others who have never seen us and want to hear the hits, so there's a whole range of tastes to accommodate" But the band don't exclusively play just the hits. "No, but we like to show more depth and play songs that may not have been big hits.
"We would never shun our biggest hits, though. After all, they gave us our fame. We have sections in the show that feature Pet Sounds and ballads, and it's the last part of the show where we do the up-tempo stuff. It's a balancing act really."
"We are always being told by people what the music meant to them. For example, a Naval captain told me that the night before he left for South East Asia, he spent the night with his girl and he heard our song Surfer Girl on the radio - and now it always reminds him of that night."
He also explains his relationship with Brian.
"Personally, things between us have always been OK," he claims. "It's always been other people that have caused the problems. We were together a couple of years ago at the Capitol building and he said that we should get together and I'm confident that if we could get together without any outside interference it would be great."
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