Beach Boys reunion ruined by outside forces, says Mike Love

Singer claims unspecified ‘people’ got in the way of creative reconciliation with Brian Wilson and Al Jardine

Mike Love has blamed outside forces for ruining last year’s Beach Boys comeback, complaining that “the people who were running [the reunion]” got in the way of his creative reconciliation with Brian Wilson and Al Jardine.

“It was great to be in the studio and listen to those harmonies coming back, but it wasn’t the opportunity it was supposed to be, which I’m upset about,” Love said in a new interview with Billboard. But the 72-year-old isn’t disappointed with Wilson or any of his other band-mates: the problem seems to have been interference by the Beach Boys’ label, management, or another third-party stakeholder.

“The way it was run and the people who were running it I have serious issues with,” Love said. “I have no problem with my cousin Brian and I in a room with a piano, but it’s not that uncomplicated.” Love alleges that more than a year before recording That’s Why God Made the Radio, he and Wilson agreed to collaborate on songs. “We were supposed to be allowed to get together to write songs from scratch like we did in the 60s … and he was excited about doing it, but it never came to fruition at all,” Love said. “It was given another direction – not by me and not by Brian but by others.”

Love also alluded to outside meddling in a recent interview with the Guardian: “I was hoping to get together with Brian … but a guy who was involved in the production of that album engineered it otherwise,” he said.

Apparently the frustration from this process spurred Love to quit the reunited Beach Boys and resume gigging with his touring band, which also includes Bruce Johnston. Although Jardine and Wilson claimed they had been “fired”, Love said he is open to reuniting the classic line-up, so long as he “can do it with people who I trusted and liked and were honourable”.

In the meantime, the various Beach Boys continue their separate tours. Later this month, the band will issue a massive career-spanning box set, with more than 60 unreleased songs. “I was pretty involved in the sequencing and the song selection and the overall concept,” Love said. “There may be a couple of things missing that I would have liked to have seen in there, but then everybody else [in the band] would probably have the same point of view.”

Source: The Guardian