What ARE you talking about?? Love was always a wise guy on stage. Always had an attitude. He never went for the bi-sex butt-wiggle that made the Mick famous. Love was and is an original.

With whom did Carl, Al, Bruce and Dennis and the rest of The Beach Boys choose to spend their entire lives touring and doing shows for hundreds of millions of fans, even as Brian was nearly totally disabled for several decades?

Answer: Mike Love

I happen to know the high regard that Carl, in particular, held for Mike throughout his life. It was mutual. Mike thought the world of Carl, too, of course, and of Bruce, who has been with the band for, oh, about 40 years now.

As Dennis was trying to deal with his addictions and when he finally drowned in a drunken stupor who was supposed to play drums? Well, somebody who had the talent to do it and who also got along famously with the rest of The Beach Boys - John Stamos, yes.

So you think Smiley Smile was a good album, huh? That's hilarious. My Favorite Vegetables, etc.. I'll tell you what - you can spend the rest of your life listening to Smiley Smile - I'll be listening to the hits.

Your hate is pretty ugly and you're ignoring nearly 50 years of music as you go out of your way trying to pretend that the hundreds of millions of people who have flocked to see The Beach Boys for nearly half a century were doing it solely because they liked Brian and his introspective music. It is the music that Mike, Carl, Bruce and Al performed at the shows that they wanted to hear, not Smiley Smile or Fifteen Big Ones.

I've met several of Mike's children and they all think the world of their dad.

Mike was in town a couple of weeks ago with his wife and his brother Stan to watch his nephew Kevin lead UCLA into a pounding of yeat another team, this time the Oregon Ducks. After the game Mike found himself surrounded by fans. As he always does, he graciously provided autographs and pictures for a large crowd of fans which spontaneously gathered around him. It's always the case that wherever Mike goes people value very much the opportunity for a picture, an autograph, a couple of words from Mike, and especially the opportunity to thank him for his decades of performances, for keeping music of The Beach Boys alive. What the public at large thinks of Mike is clear - he is the man who brings the hit music of The Beach Boys to them in thousands of concerts and hundreds of millions of fans over nearly fifty years.

Didn't Mike write "Don't go near the water"?

Who wrote the virtually all of the lyrics to all the Beach Boys songs that were hits from their founding until Pet Sounds?

Answer: Mike Love

Who sang the lead on virtually all of the Beach Boys songs that were hits from their founding until Pet Sounds?

Answer: Mike Love

Who was the ONLY member of the Beach Boys to be present at EVERY Beach Boys concert from 1963 until the present?

Answer: Mike Love

Your effort at rewriting history is pitiful and odious.

There is no such thing as luck. It's a mental crutch that small-minded people use to pretend that they are explaining something. Your effort here to distort and diminish Mike Love's life's work and the role he has played in composing the Beach Boys sound and in perennially performing it to three generations of the band's fans is blatantly libelous.

Without Mike's Lyrics and the role he played in the band it is certain that Brian Wilson would never have benefited from the empowerment that the success of the Beach Boys as a band afforded him. The lack of this empowerment, the access to the studio, the access to the money, the access to the musicians, would have absolutely taken Brian as an individual down a markedly different path, one that would have deprived him of the achievements for which he is recognized.

gm, Eugene OR