Mike Love has never been shy about defending his place in Beach Boys history, and in a new interview, he’s made perhaps his boldest claim yet: that the kaleidoscopic 1966 masterpiece Good Vibrations owes every single lyric to him.
Love, often cast in the shadow of Brian Wilson’s revered studio wizardry, insists the popular narrative overlooks his creative fingerprints. “In ‘Good Vibrations,’ I wrote every word of it,” he told The Los Angeles Times. “I even came up with (sings) ‘I’m thinking of good vibrations / She gave me excitations’ with the chorus melody as well as all the lyrics.”
It’s not as if the song arrived to him as a blank slate. Early versions, before Love’s involvement, contained scraps of phrases and the embryonic “Good Vibrations” hook, a refinement of Brian Wilson’s original “Good Vibes” courtesy of lyricist Tony Asher. Asher himself confirms that Wilson came to him without a title and only a vague “I get vibes” idea. He began shaping it into something coherent, but Wilson rejected the result and turned to Love instead. The overhaul stuck, though Wilson apparently tried to get “excitations” edited out, a request Van Dyke Parks refused.
Love also used the interview to push back against the decades-old notion that he was resistant to the bold experimentation of Pet Sounds. “There’s a lot of misinformation… that says I didn’t like the Pet Sounds album, which is bull—,” Love said, claiming credit for even naming the record. He recalls Capitol Records being baffled by Brian’s creation, but he stood behind it.
The Beach Boys’ last studio outing, That’s Why God Made The Radio (2012), saw a partial reunion of the surviving members. With Brian Wilson’s passing earlier this year at 82, Love isn’t ruling out the possibility of more music: “Anything’s possible. We don’t have immediate plans, but I do think of that kind of thing from time to time.”
For Love, it seems the fight to shape The Beach Boys’ legacy is as enduring as the harmonies themselves.
