Love actually

Mike Love gets an extremely bad press in Nick Kent's The Dark Stuff as a talentless meathead who saw his cousin Brian Wilson as a meal ticket and who bemoaned the direction Wilson took the Beach Boys in with Pet Sounds (the focal subject on Episode 7 of Sounding Bored, I should add) - so I was interested to see how he might come across in his own words when interviewed by Rolling Stone. The answer? Not particularly well. The man who very improbably retains the right to use the Beach Boys brandname (and is eagerly litigious in his determination to protect that right) seems embittered and passive-aggressive. Cue an old article by the Guardian's Alexis Petridis to remind us of the incidents that have made Love one of the most reviled men in rock.

In the late 1960s, while Love threw himself into meditation after meeting the Mahareshi Mahesh Yogi and Brian Wilson began a downward spiral that ended in the ignominy of being a drug addict barred from his own house and instead living in the swimming pool changing hut, Dennis Wilson made friends with (or was befriended by) Charles Manson - with the Beach Boys even recording a Manson composition, 'Cease To Exist', on the album 20/20. The extraordinary tale of this relationship is told in an episode of the You Must Remember This podcast.

(Thanks to Rob and Amy for the links.)