Mike Love - Good Vibrations: my life as a beach boy

G rowing up in Southern California, I loved watching the sun descend across the calm waters of the Pacific. I infused its disappearance with something cosmic and mystical. Darkness fell. The earth spun. And then dawn broke, bringing light and renewal to all.

Ive tried to maintain that attitude in all aspects of lifeto recall the warmth of the sun even on the coldest of nights. My approach toward music bore that out. As a member of the Beach Boys, I was the one most apt to find the positives, the silver lining, even in moments of despair. My parents were responsible for that. They gave me every reason to be hopeful.

My moms side of the family came from the dry prairies of Kansas, while my dads forebears arrived from the cotton fields of Louisiana. All my ancestors, poor and desperate, were lured westward by the promise of a better life: flowers in bloom, lush farmland, green mountains, clean beaches, warm sunshine, jobs in oil, agriculture, and constructionSouthern California in the first quarter of the twentieth century. This image rightfully endured for the next fifty years, hallowed in The Grapes of Wrath, memorialized on film, promoted on radio and in popular music. That image lingers to this day. Southern California was and still is a land where the American dream can become a reality. Yes, those words are a clich, and its easy to ridicule the California myth: from the Spanish settlers to the gold hunters to the Okies, all migrating to what was once known as the maana country, the country of tomorrow. But to me it wasnt a mythI saw how much could be achieved in one generation. The big house. The fancy cars. The nice vacations. All of it, plus newfound respect.

Make no mistake, I wasnt raised at Disneyland. I also saw hard times and understood how ephemeral, how random, success could be, and those experiences shaped my life as well. I knew that the streets of California were not paved with gold, but Ive gone through my life believing that if you had the imagination, the ability, and the work ethic, you might find the beaches sprinkled with some gold dust.

It was a fine omen that my mothers first residence in California was a beach.

Born in Hutchinson, Kansas, in 1919, Emily Wilson was named after her mothers favorite sister. But as the story goes, on the night she was born, her mother attended an opera featuring Glee Starr, so she gave her newborn the middle name Glee. That story must have been true, as it prefigured her lifelong devotion to the opera, and Glee became the name by which she was known.

My moms father, Coral Buddy Wilson, was a plumber, volatile and restless, who traveled far beyond his Kansas roots seeking work at Army camps in the Southwest while also visiting California in search of his own fortune. My moms mother, Edith, was Swedish (I take pride in knowing that I come from a long line of Swedish pacifists). She was born on a farm and had to quit school to help her family plant potatoes. Marriage didnt rescue her from poverty, however. With her husband often gone, Edith was left in Hutchinson to take care of her young family, and Glee, her fourth child, and her older brother, Murry, were briefly sent to live with their second cousins. Then in 1924, Buddy sent Edith a telegram, $200, and instructions to take a train to California. Glee was too young to remember the trip, but her mom later told her how kind the other passengers werethey pitied her, traveling with five children, and they would bring food for all of them. The Wilsons settled in an oceanside hamlet called Cardiff-by-the-Sea, but unable to find a landlord who would rent them a room, they pitched a tent on a windswept beach and lived there for nine weeks. That sounds harsh, but the complete novelty of the ocean provided its own variety of excitement. The family finally rented an apartment in Pasadena and eventually a small house in Inglewood, southwest of downtown Los Angeles.

Buddy and Edith had nine children, though one died in infancy. Buddy eked out a living working in the Huntington Beach oil fields and later as a freelance plumber. Suffering chronic allergies and sinus problems, he sought relief by traveling to the desert, which further isolated him from his family. (When I was a boy, my grandfather joined us for dinner and used an empty Campbells soup can as a spittoon.) His temper often got the better of him, as did the alcohol. He never did strike it rich in California and, betrayed by his own illusions, became abusive, lashing out at his wife but saving his severest whippings for his four sons. One of them, Charles, was once beaten so relentlessly that his older brother, Murry, had to yank Buddy off the boy and temporarily lock the enraged patriarch outside his own house. Murry frequently came to blows with his father, at times to protect his siblings. But Murry also inherited his fathers paranoid, combustible wrath, which he carried into the parenting of his own three sons: Brian, Dennis, and Carl. My mom despised her father for his savage treatment of his own family and his derelictions as provider and protector, and her childhood left her with feelings of insecurity, anxiety, and even abandonment. She battled these fears for the rest of her life. She did, however, have a sturdy role model in her own mother. In addition to raising eight children, Edith brought in extra income by taking in washing and eventually worked as a presser for a garment manufacturer. She lived with us when I was in junior high school, a heavyset woman who was tender but tough and baked killer cinnamon rolls and butterscotch pies. After she was diagnosed with breast cancer, she prepared for surgery by taking long swims every morning in the Pacific, the same body of water that served as the adventuresome gateway for her homeless young family upon reaching California. After her mastectomy, she showed me the gruesome scar as a badge of survival.