All posts tagged: Mike Love

Presenting the Book to the Beach Boys

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On August 20, 2015, my wife, Bernadette, and I saw the Beach Boys at Maryland Live Casino in Hanover, Maryland, and presented a copy of Becoming the Beach Boys, 1961-1963, to Mike Love and Bruce Johnston.  Not realizing he would be there, I offered to send a copy to David Marks.  They thumbed through it, commenting on some of the photos and the early days.  They could not have been more gracious.  It was a bit surreal when Mike asked me to autograph his copy of the book.  Mike, Bruce, and David also signed the cover of my personal copy of the book. On August 30, on the Beach Boys Britain message board, Bruce commented, “Until now, the only book about the Beach Boys I thought was worth reading was The Nearest Faraway Place by Timothy White.  I am finding Becoming the Beach Boys, 1961-1963, looks like it will be a great worthwhile read, too!  Becoming the Beach Boys, 1961-1963, is a must read and I could not put it down.  There are a lot …

The Recoup Book Review

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REVIEW BY JOSEPH KYLE on SEPTEMBER 14, 2015 • ( 0 ) The Recoup Becoming The Beach Boys, 1961-1963 James B. Murphy McFarland The Beach Boys had finished playing a concert. Though the splash they made on the West Coast was just starting to ripple through to the rest of America, the boys were busily playing every show they could get. Back at their hotel room, they awaited their post-show per diem, expecting their usual fifty dollars. To their amazement, their promoter brought in a large trash bag and poured it out on the bed. It was nearly three thousand dollars in cash. The five young men stared wide-eyed and silently; had they really just earned all this money? Were they really popular enough to have made all that cash? Yes, indeed they were. This story is but one of the many interesting, compelling, and, frankly, unknown stories from the nascent days of “America’s Band” that can be found in the in-depth and quite essential biography, Becoming The Beach Boys. Though the band’s earliest music has …

Bruce Johnston

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O n June 27, 1959, one year and eleven days after Alan Jardine and Brian Wilson graduated from Hawthorne High School, future Beach Boy Bruce Johnston turned seventeen years old and also graduated from high school (a year early as Bruce had skipped ahead a year in the fourth grade!). Bruce, originally named Benjamin Baldwin, was born June 27, 1942, in Peoria, Illinois.  His unwed mother from Madison, Georgia, gave birth to Bruce in the Florence Crittenton Home for unwed mothers and, three months later, he was adopted by William and Irene Johnston from Chicago. Bruce’s “new” father was senior Vice-President of the Chicago based Walgreens Drug Store chain. The Johnstons had two older daughters, Bette Jean and Joy Rene. In September 1946, the Owl Rexall Drug Company began building their new national headquarters in Los Angeles (located at Beverly and La Cienega Boulevards and it included a Rexall drug super store which Life magazine called “the world’s biggest drugstore”).  In 1946 William Johnston accepted the position of president of the Owl Rexall Drug Company.  He moved …