Show caption Staying on the straight and narrow ...<em> (clockwise </em><em>from top left) </em>Johnny Marr, Mick Jagger, Roger Waters and Mike Love. Composite: Getty/Rex Music From Mick Jagger to Mike Love: all hail the money-grabbing men of rock The Beach Boys, Pink Floyd and the Smiths all benefited from business-minded members, so why don’t responsible rock stars ever get their dues? Michael Hann @michaelahann Wed 11 Oct 2017 14.02 BST Share on Facebook

Share on Twitter

Share via Email

Music celebrates the wild ones. It hails the people who put themselves out there in pursuit of their art. It eulogises the addicts, the ill, the unpredictable, the ones in whom the flame burns bright. It tends not to lavish such affection on those who keep the fire alight, doing the grunt work of going outside to chop up the logs, drying them out and putting them on the fire to feed the flames.

Hence the lack of excitement about the Beach Boys’ Mike Love announcing his solo record Unleash the Love. Admittedly, it’s hard to get enthusiastic about an album that includes a rerecording of Do It Again featuring former ER star John Stamos on drums, but lack of excitement turned into open mockery on social media, where music writers rolled their eyes at the latest hubristic gesture from the man who is rumoured to have told Brian Wilson, as he stretched his artistic wings in the 1960s: “Don’t fuck with the formula.”

No, really, don’t ... Love’s rerecording of Do It Again, featuring John Stamos.

But lots of bands have their Mike Love. That’s because they need one. The Mike Love keeps the band going. The Mike Love makes sure all the members are in the right place at the right time (or makes sure there is someone capable of doing that on the band’s staff), makes sure there is a right place – a gig or a studio – to be, makes sure everyone will be able to make a living.

But being the Mike Love means being the enemy of rock’n’roll. If you’re the Mike Love, you’re the breadhead with no art.

Mick Jagger is a Mike Love. As Keith Richards drifted further into drug addiction, it was Jagger who kept the wheels on the Rolling Stones’ bus. It was Jagger who had to salvage the band’s career when Richards was arrested for possession of heroin in Toronto, causing the record companies who had been queuing up to sign the band to flee in terror. It was Jagger who had to deal with not only Richards, but also Ronnie Wood freebasing cocaine. It was Jagger who oversaw the Stones’ transformation in the 1980s into rock’s most efficient moneymaking machine – thereby ensuring lifelong security for Richards, Wood and everyone else connected with the Stones. His thanks for that was to be mocked in Richards’ autobiography for having a small penis – and to feel the audience direct their love towards his bandmate every times the Stones play.

‘Johnny kept the band on the road’ ... the Ramones outside fabled New York club CBGB. Photograph: Danny Fields

Johnny Ramone was a Mike Love. Throughout much of the 1980s, he was leading a band in which Dee Dee Ramone was a committed heroin addict, Marky Ramone was an alcoholic and Joey Ramone struggled to function, owing to his obsessive compulsive disorder and other mental health problems. Oh, and Johnny and Joey barely to spoke to each other after Joey’s girlfriend left him for Johnny, whom she duly married.

Through that, Johnny kept the Ramones working and on the road, making money, despite never achieving stardom, and helping to secure their legacy. He even consented to Joey’s song The KKK Took My Baby Away – the KKK being Johnny – appearing on their album Pleasant Dreams. Of course, it’s Joey who was loved, while Johnny was viewed as the martinet Republican taskmaster.



Roger Waters was a Mike Love: he had to take responsibility for forcing out Pink Floyd’s co-founder, Syd Barrett, and recalibrate them into something different, something that could last. He might be regarded as capricious, controlling and cold, but no Waters means no Wish You Were Here and no The Dark Side of the Moon. No ongoing career for David Gilmour, the former Floyd member of whom it’s OK to think well.



Mike Love, naturally, is the ultimate Mike Love and he is widely despised for it: for being a bully, for forcing Brian Wilson into things he was unfit to do, for claiming credit for things he deserves no credit for, for turning the Beach Boys into his personal fiefdom. Well, faced with the incapacities of Brian and the wildness of Dennis Wilson – the man who, let’s not forget, brought Charles Manson into the Beach Boys’ camp – what was he meant to do? Love, as the Beach Boys might put it, kept the summer alive. When Brian was barely able to write, he reinvented the Beach Boys as “America’s band”, making them as popular in the mid-1970s as they had been in their heyday.

‘No wonder he decided he had had enough’ ... Johnny Marr with Morrissey. Photograph: Sipa Press/Rex Features

The musicians who become Mike Loves do so because they are the ones who have the clearest understanding that music is a career. They have to concentrate on the tedious logistics because, if they don’t, nobody is going to eat. That’s when they become regarded as the money-grubbing jerks. But there are Mike Loves who have avoided the fate of becoming despised. Johnny Marr was the Smiths’ Mike Love – he had to manage the band, deal with Morrissey’s caprices, face up to the fact that Andy Rourke had slipped into heroin addiction and keep the group churning out music. No wonder he decided he had had enough and slipped away to just be a guitar player.