...ish. The surviving Beach Boys deliver their own, typically contradictory takes on their irresistible rise to TOM DOYLE.

“THERE WAS A STRENGTH TO BEING DIFFERENT”

MIKE LOVE on drugular differences, and writing knee-to-knee.

“BRIAN AND I were close friends. He would come over to my house and we would play on the piano.

Then, because my dad [a sheet metal worker] had to get up to go to work so early, 5.30, 6 in the morning, he would tell us to shut up. So, we’d go out in the car and listen to the radio and sing Everly Brothers songs and stuff. Then we gravitated towards The Four Freshmen. So, you have the doo wop influence, the Everlys’ blend and then Chuck Berry’s lyrical [influence] and tempo and his style of guitar, which influenced Carl.

Brian is amazingly adept at chord progressions and coming up with harmonies and so on.

I was pretty quick on the lyrical side, and the hooks. So, we were just a very good partnership at that time. Whether it’d be Fun, Fun, Fun, or I Get Around or Help Me Rhonda, or any of those hits at that time that we co-wrote, it was literally I would sit next to him at the piano. And we would work out both the musical and the lyrical components, which complemented the musical mood that was going on at the time.

The Warmth Of The Sun we wrote the night before President Kennedy was getting up to go on this final drive in Dallas in 1963. It had a mystical mood to it. It was very melancholy, and I came up with the lyrics and that was something that was really poignant because we woke up to the news next morning that President Kennedy had been assassinated. It’s always had that haunting feeling and association with it.

Murry Wilson was very helpful in the very early days, getting us gigs and airplay to establish us somewhat. What he wasn’t so great at was putting my name down for co-writing the songs (laughs). That was terrible. Because I relied on him. I trusted him as my uncle. I never envisioned that he would eliminate my participation. So, it said, ‘I Get Around by Brian Wilson,’ but I came up with, ‘Round round, get around, I get around’ and wrote many of the words and so on.

It was very disheartening. Murry, he was very overbearing, but he was also not very kind to his nephew, Mike.

[The recording of Help Me Rhonda and argument that led to the band sacking Murry Wilson in 1964] was very uncomfortable. Because Brian and myself and the rest of the group, we knew what kind of sound we wanted to get on the recording. But Murry differed with us in his thoughts. He was very disturbed when Brian would play the bass with a little bit of fuzz on it.