The Best Vibrations

It is noon on a routine Saturday: I wear leopard-print pajamas as I sit atop my polka-dot bedspread. Crinkled-up foil at the foot of my bed serves as the last remnant of the caramel cake I ate for breakfast. Some bells toll beyond my dormitory window.

And on the phone, I chat with Mike Love, the smashingly successful, historically polarizing lead singer of the Beach Boys. Perhaps “routine” is the wrong word—it is not every Saturday that I interview a musical legend, a towering giant of rock-n-roll history. To my delight, he begins to sing the chorus of one of his most iconic hits, a tune that he has crooned thousands of times for crowds far larger than his current audience of one: “I'm pickin’ up good vibrations. She's giving me excitations.”

Love lists “Good Vibrations,” the innovative track for which he penned lyrics, as his favorite song in the Beach Boys’ massive discography. “[I wrote it] as a flowery poem: ‘I love the colorful clothes she wears, and the way the sunlight plays upon her hair,’” Love recalls. “This was 1966, so I was envisioning a girl who was all into peace and love and flower power.”

Love has countless other stories to tell from his illustrious career at the helm of one of America’s most celebrated bands. His new memoir, “Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy,” published in time for the 50th anniversary of the titular song, allows him to tell those stories on his own terms. “There have been millions of words written about the Beach Boys and the various individuals from time to time over the years, but never anything by me,” he says. “All of my experiences are going to go away with me unless I leave some kind of a legacy, a document—that kind of got me off my procrastination mode, which I am very good at.”

During our conversation, Love responds at length to questions that hundreds of journalists—from bell-bottomed writers in the 1960s to this pajamas-clad college kid in 2016—must have asked him in the past five decades. He speaks thoughtfully about the good periods of Beach Boys history and talks candidly about the bad. That history is ongoing: He hopes to release new music next year, and he is on track to play 160 performances in 2016. “We’re slacking off,” he jokes, for last year’s tally totaled 172.

The brightest parts of the Beach Boys’ saga concern the beauty of the music and the ongoing devotion of the fans. “[Our] music had the newness and energy of the rock genre, which was new to that time,” Love says. He thinks that the group’s distinctive harmonies—such as the exuberant chords in “Be True to Your School,” the soft trills in “God Only Knows,” and the doo-woppy blends in “Kokomo”—gave the band its remarkable staying power. “I think the secret ingredient is harmony,” he says. “We got together because of the love of creating those sounds… as a family harmonizing at Christmas parties or birthday parties.”

The Beach Boys—which Love asserts was the first boy band in history, ahead of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones—offered a love letter to California that helped make the state the paragon of sun-speckled happiness that it remains today. “No one prior to the Beach Boys had ever written a song that sang about surfing, the lifestyle of surfing,” Love says. “If the surf was up and you had an afternoon class, you might miss a class or two.” They idolized their cars and their girls and their waves, and America found itself longing for the same things.

Their sound matured as they did. “As we experienced more life and life experiences, we got into more subjectivity,” Love adds. “For instance, the ‘Pet Sounds’ album… [deals] more with the subjective and the emotional rather than the objective of a car or surfing.”

Love knew he had a hit on his hands during a 1963 performance at a ballroom in Lake Minnetonka, Minn. “We took a break after the second set that we had done, and we walked outside. We could see the cars coming down the road for a mile… and kids literally breaking in to get into the show because it was sold out,” Love reminisces. “I said to one of the guys, ‘This must have been what it was like when Elvis was starting out.’”

The darkest parts of the Beach Boys’ story involve Love’s infamously fractured relationship with Brian Wilson, his troubled cousin-turned-bandmate who many heroize as the brains behind the music. Love theorizes that his blunt condemnation of the Wilson brothers’ drug usage led fans to take Wilson’s side in the Love-versus-Wilson narrative that emerged. “When you’re a family member and somebody has experienced alcoholism or drug addiction, it affects the whole family, and our family was a group,” says Love. “At one time, we had separate planes. We had smoker and nonsmoker planes when we were going off to shows... It was a schism in the group.”

That schism culminated in a 1993 lawsuit in which Love sued Wilson for writing credits that the late Murry Wilson, his uncle and manager, denied him on ditties like “California Girls,” “I Get Around,” and “Help Me Rhonda.” Love uses the memoir to correct a few of the “fallacies and misunderstandings and outright inaccuracies” that surround episodes like that one in Beach Boys lore.

But Love, a fervent practitioner of transcendental meditation since December 1967, insists that he is not the antihero that some folks have made him out to be. “At one time, I went to a six-month meditation course, and I’m living like a monk,” he says. “There’s another aspect of me other than the outspoken, sometimes sharp-tongued person. I’m somewhat introverted and very idealistic and altruistic as well.”

As the call nears its end, Love asks about my last name—“It’s Polish,” I reply, hoping it’s Polish—but his surname is the poetic one. The Beach Boys’ songs are the rhythms of romance and rejuvenation, the soundtracks of sunshine and seashores. They are the tunes that still, after all these years, buoy our spirits and return us to a halcyon version of the 1960s that may have only existed in our record players. And they are the products of love, as well as Love: The singers’ love of the craft and the listeners’ love of the melodies that have sustained a shimmering artistic (if not interpersonal) legacy, propelling half a century of fans to wish they all could be California girls and boys.

Mike Love will sign copies of his memoir at the Harvard Book Store on Thursday, Oct. 13, at 7 p.m.