Hits U Missed #4: Unreleased Beach Boys: "We Got Love"

After Surf's Up, the Beach Boys were back on the road quite a bit. I even managed to interview the late, great Carl Wilson when they played at SUNY Fredonia in 1972.

By that time, Bruce Johnston was gone and Blondie Chaplin and Ricky Fataar were in the band. During those shows, they regularly performed an unfamiliar song called "We Got Love," though it only showed up on the terrific 1973 live album. What I didn't know was that it had been intended for Holland and was replaced by "Sail On Sailor," which was somewhat hastily completed and recorded, then added to the album and issued as a single.

From Wikipedia:
Holland was rejected by Reprise Records for not having a potential hit single. It was decided to add an old unfinished Brian Wilson song, "Sail On, Sailor", which he had co-written with Van Dyke Parks. After some re-working, Brian delivered what would become Holland's most famous track. "Sail On, Sailor" was one of two songs recorded at home (the other was Ricky Fataar's and Chaplin's soulful and moog-tinged "Leaving This Town") and added at the last minute to a re-sequenced and re-submitted Holland. One of the casualties of this tracklist reshuffling proved to be another Fataar/Chaplin tune, written with Mike Love, called "We Got Love", which would resurface later in 1973 in a live context. Early test pressings of Holland, made in the USA and in the UK feature the album in its original group-intended running order. Side one kicks off with "Steamboat", then the three-part Saga, followed by "We Got Love". The German distributor for Reprise records failed to implement the changed side-one line up correctly and mistakenly pressed 300-400 copies with the earlier running order. Early French and Canadian pressings of Holland still mention "We Got Love" on the sleeve, although the song is not on those albums.

Here's the "original" studio version of "We Got Love," still surprisingly unreleased, except for bootlegs, of course.

The Rolling Stones and Brian Wilson

Two short music-related book reviews by me.
Originally published in The Miami Herald in October 2006.



Exile On Main Street: A Season In Hell With The Rolling Stones. Robert Greenfield. Da Capo. 258 pages.
Some works of art and commerce are immediately appreciated but others grow into it. The Rolling Stones’ now-legendary two-record set, Exile On Main Street, yielded one hit, “Tumbling Dice,” when it came out in 1972. But the dense and diverse collection of boozy blues and hot-wired pop eventually attained mythical status. Robert Greenfield, author of “STP,” a chronicle of the Stones’ star-studded tour of America in support of that album, returns 35 years later with this dusky and gossipy eyewitness account of the kinky sex and toxic drugs behind the ferocious rock and roll.

The book evokes the noble rot, restlessness and audacious decadence of the British band, in particular Keith Richards and his partner, Mick Jagger, as they parried and partied while the album slowly came together, mostly in the basement of tax-exile Richards’ rented villa in the south of France. Greenfield’s world-weary voodoo prose resurrects those long-dead days in this sleazily addictive memoir, featuring a memorable cast of characters that you’d never admit to knowing.


Catch A Wave: The Rise, Fall & Redemption of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson. Peter Ames Carlin. Rodale. 342 pages.
Carlin, the TV critic for the Portland Oregonian used his fan’s passion for the Beach Boys and its troubled creative source, Brian Wilson to fuel the relentless research and deft writing that resulted in this, the best musical biography since last year’s massive Beatles book by Bob Spitz. For all his adulation, the author casts a suitably skeptical eye on the legends that make up the Shakespearian tragedy that is Wilson’s life. While generously acknowledging earlier literary attempts to part the roiling seas that nearly drowned the former king of surf music, Carlin adds his own original journalism to complete the story, including a rare recent interview with Wilson’s erstwhile musical partner and frequent nemesis, cousin Mike Love.