Beach Boys member Al Jardine slammed Mike Love’s eulogy given at Brian Wilson’s Aug. 6 funeral as the feud between the former bandmates seemingly resurfaced.
“Mike wanted everybody to know that he wrote every single word of ‘Good Vibrations,’” Jardine told Rolling Stone about Love’s speech. “I didn’t feel the compassion, let’s put it that way. Mike’s got some serious megalomania problems.”
For Jardine’s speech, given at an event held after the funeral, he addressed Love’s words. “Mike, I’ve written some songs with Brian myself. We wrote one called ‘Surfin’ Down the Swanee River.’ It just wasn’t as big as ‘Good Vibrations,'” he said.
“I was focusing on Brian, and Mike was more focused on Mike,” Jardine told the outlet. “I think that is what it boiled down to.”
BEACH BOYS FOUNDER BRIAN WILSON DEAD AT 82
Fox News Digital reached out to Love for comment.
The Beach Boys began with Brian and his two brothers, Carl and Dennis. Eventually, they were joined by their cousin, Love, and their friend from school, Jardine. The band is one of the most commercially successful groups of all time, selling over 100 million records worldwide.
Despite the success, rifts between the band members have existed for decades.
“Mike is like P.T. Barnum,” Jardine told Rolling Stone. “He had these incredibly exotic ideas for tours. He was always looking at that next tour. He probably has a tour of Mars planned right now. I was going, ‘Let’s go back to the studio.’ And then he kicked me out of the band. It was pretty s—–.”
At the time, Jardine formed the Beach Boys Family and Friends. The band consisted of him along with his two sons, Wilson’s two daughters and Cass Elliot’s daughter. He was sued over the use of “Beach Boys.”
“Frankly, they were threatened by me, because my band sounded better than the Beach Boys band,” he explained. “Mike just came down on me with a s—load of lawyers. And pretty soon I was down about a million bucks. It was pretty devastating financially and emotionally. He showed me no mercy.”
A representative for Love told Rolling Stone that the musician never sued Jardine. The outlet reported the lawsuits were technically between Jardine and Brother Records, which the Beach Boys founded in the ’60s.
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The band got back together in 2012 for a reunion tour, setting their disagreements aside.
“I enjoyed hearing everybody sing again, even Mike,” Jardine recalled. “It still had political overtones, believe me, within the band, but it really proved that we could do it again, and have fun doing it.”
According to Jardine, the fun was short-lived after Love and Bruce Johnston ended the reunion tour run to play as the Beach Boys on their own.
“He cut us right off there,” the musician claimed. “We were hopefully going to continue on doing some more, but he insisted on going back to his handpicked band, and basically left Brian and I in the dust.”
Afterward, Wilson recruited Jardine and Blondie Chaplin to form their own trio and performed until the Beach Boys founder’s cognitive health began to decline.
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Wilson’s family announced his death on June 11. “We are heartbroken to announce that our beloved father Brian Wilson has passed away,” they wrote on Instagram. “We are at a loss for words right now.”
They added, “Please respect our privacy at this time as our family is grieving. We realize that we are sharing our grief with the world.”
In the year leading up to his death, Wilson had been placed under a conservatorship following a dementia diagnosis.
“Brian Wilson wasn’t just the heart of The Beach Boys – he was the soul of our sound,” Love wrote in part in a tribute to his cousin and bandmate at the time of his death. “From the first time we sang together as kids in my living room, I knew there was something otherworldly in him. His musical gifts were unmatched. The melodies he dreamed up, the emotions he poured into every note – Brian changed the course of music forever.”
Fox News Digital’s Tracy Wright contributed to this report.
