MIKE LOVE of THE BEACH BOYS on His New Solo Album ‘Unleash The Love’ and Beach Boys Re-Issues

Formed over 55 years ago in Hawthorne, California, the band known as The Beach Boys is in rare company when it comes to not only longevity, but also commercial and critical success. Vocalist Mike Love may have put out a few solo efforts over the years — the latest of which being 2017’s Unleash The Love via the BMG label — but Love has been the only constant member of The Beach Boys for all these years. The group is seemingly on-tour more often than not, and continues that incessant touring on February 11th with a date in Coral Springs, Florida.

Beyond Unleash The Love and the endless touring, Love is also featured on two new Beach Boys re-issues, 1967 – Sunshine Tomorrow and 1967 – Sunshine Live. When talking with Love by phone, I inquired about the possibility of more unreleased material coming from the Beach Boys vaults. Fortunately, more seems to be coming from both the Beach Boys and Mike Love vaults in the near-future.

Check out the “Do It Again” video featuring Mike Love, John Stamos and Sugar Ray’s Mark McGrath.

Your latest album Unleash The Love, the first disc is made up of originals and then the second disc re-records of classics. Do you have a favorite of the new songs that are on the album?
Mike Love: Wow, that’s a pretty tough one. “All The Love In Paris” is in a pop music sense, I think that’s a big favorite. I love the way that turned out. I think it’s a very romantic song, a very very sweet and nice arrangement, everything. I hope other people feel the same way.

On the more philosophical part of things, there’s “Unleash The Love” which is the title song. I loved having The Waters Family sing with us on that. There’s one called “Only One Earth,” my daughter Hayleigh [Love] does the recitation of an American Indian poem and but she also sang with us on “Pisces Brothers,” which is a tribute to George Harrison. Because George’s song “My Sweet Lord” has the girls sing “hare hare” on the chorus of that song, so I wanted the girls’ voice because I wanted emulate some of the things that were important to George, one of them being the Hari Krishna people.

He was a devotee, as well as he loved Maharishi and his meditation. We experienced that together, a really nice experience being in the Maharishi’s presence for a couple of months in 1968. He and I both had our birthdays in India that year, he on February 25th, I on March 15th, so to have my daughter sing with me on that and doing the opening recitation and singing with us on “Only One Earth”… For me it was a wonderful experience to record that album.

My daughter Ambha [Love] sings on “Warmth Of The Sun.” She does a beautiful job singing the lead… The song “Kiss Me, Baby” is maybe not that well-known, but it’s a great little song. I love the way it came out the girl’s voice on there. It really makes a whole new incarnation of the song, I believe. I just love her phrasing and her tone and everything and it complements the record so well. So it was really like a family affair, as Sly Stone would say.

That’s not your only new release, because every year you guys seem to put out two or three things from the vault. I have been noticing a pattern that they have all been 50-year-old releases. Do you foresee the next few years having a lot more reissues and live albums to put out?
Love: I don’t know the answer to that, honestly. Some of the reason for putting some of these songs out is that you have to do it to protect the copyright of some of the songs. So that is, from the writers’ and the group’s standpoint. That’s one of the significant reasons for releasing some of those songs, but also we have celebrated the 50th anniversary of Pet Sounds.

This whole last year we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Wild Honey album. I wrote the song, the lyrics of the song “Wild Honey,” as well as “Darlin,” as well as “Aren’t You Glad.” I was involved with writing with Brian [Wilson] and that was a fun song to do. We did it as Brian’s studio at his home in Bel Air, and just for some reason or another, it would seem to be the anniversary of the band.

Something else that I find very intriguing about you and The Beach Boys is that there came a certain point in time when you guys no longer needed hits or singles to stay on the road and be essentially “America’s Band.” When was it that you realized that?
Love: You know, I don’t know if we ever realized that in quite that way… Well, for one thing there were two bands. Brian Wilson quit the touring group in 1964 for a few months’ time. Glen Campbell took his place. Glen was an amazing guitarist but he also played bass with us and sang high parts, and until Bruce Johnston joined our group in 1965, Glen took Brian’s place.

So it became two groups, one was the studio group — of which we are all a part of — and one was the road warriors, the live guys. I’ve always, honestly, liked the live performances, recreating most songs. It creates so much happiness with so many people all over the world, not just in California, all over the country and all over the world. I became a student early on of how to do these shows. I would go to the agency a couple times a week when I was home and we would decide which shows we would sell to a promoter and which shows we would promote ourselves. It was just quite an education that I got early on in the 60s about the whole touring thing

Here’s The Beach Boys performing a medley of hits:

To this day, the studio is a great tool, but the live response and energy of an audience and the sound that you’re recreating that is placed with good acoustics is an incredibly fantastic thing for me. I think so many millions of people have come out to see us in-person and experience some happiness, and 90 percent of the people are having a great time. Maybe there are a few people in the audience who aren’t particularly Beach Boys fans, but maybe hopefully after we perform our show they will walk away thinking, “Hey, those guys are pretty good,” you know?

The people focus on the harmonies and I don’t mind doing places big and small. I mean, we have played to over a million and a half people in one day back in the 80s. We did two shows, one in Philadelphia and one in Washington D.C. on July 4th, and the Philadelphia Inquirer said there were 900,000 people in the streets and the economic impact was $22 million dollars to the city back then. That evening we played Washington D.C. in front of the monument. You could see the South Lawn of the White House from the stage, so that’s an amazingly-spectacular enormous thing to do, to play for that many people in person in one day.

But also, you were there at the listening party the other night in New York and we enjoyed that immensely… Just doing it stripped down, it wasn’t full production. It was kind of just, you know, a little bare-bones production. But it featured the voices and the songs and it was really fun.

Some of your earlier solo recordings like Country Love and Celebration are currently out of print. Is there any chance of a re-release of those?
Love: You know there is, because now we have this relationship with BMG, and they’ve already asked us. Well, they’re looking into a lot of things we’ve done in the past and we’ll see what happens there… The record industry has had its challenges, that’s for sure. But the music industry in itself — because of you know all the online stuff, the Spotifys and the Amazons and everything and all that — there’s a way to release a lot of things and get a lot of listenership all over the world. We’ll be looking into the archives, both my own personal ones as well as of the Beach Boys archives, and see what we can come up with that might be of interest to people.

Mike Love visits The Dan Patrick Show: