Good Vibrations

Mike Love has been singing with the Beach Boys for more than fifty-five years, and he is the only member who was there for every stage of the band's history. In this memoir he tells it from the front of the stage: how a sheet-metal apprentice from California became the lead singer of one of America's most successful rock groups, performing more than 5,600 concerts in twenty-six countries.

The Beach Boys' story runs from sudden fame to remarkable staying power, and through musical genius, self-destruction, spiritual searching, betrayal and forgiveness. Love gives close portraits of his cousins Brian, Dennis and Carl Wilson, whose gifted and turbulent lives were bound up with his own. His songwriting partnership with Brian is among the most productive in American pop. Love cowrote the lyrics to eleven of the twelve original Beach Boys songs that reached the Top 10, and he sang lead on ten of them.

He also explains how some of the best-known songs came together, including "Good Vibrations," "California Girls," "Surfin' USA" and "Kokomo." Along the way the book shows how American culture and attitudes shifted over fifty years, and how extreme his own experiences were, from threats by Charles Manson's "family" to the calm he found with the Maharishi.

Love is also a husband, a father and a committed environmentalist, and those parts of his life run through a story that is as layered as the band's famous harmonies.