The Beach Boys’ Mike Love Wrote a Song About George Harrison
Some of the best Beatles tribute songs came from unexpected places. The Beach Boys’ Mike Love decided to pay tribute to The Beatles’ George Harrison through song. Love explained why he had had so much respect for the “Got My Mind Set on You” singer. He also compared the way audiences reacted to his band and The Beatles during the 1960s.
Mike Love compared his song about George Harrison to The Beach Boys’ song about JFK
During a 2023 interview with Forbes, Love said his song “Pisces Brothers” is a tribute to George. Love felt that the two of them were “pieces brothers” because of their shared astrological sign. Love released the tune in honor of what would have been George’s 71st birthday in 2014. The Beach Boy revealed that “Pisces Brothers” is one of Love’s favorite tunes to perform and one of his favorite tunes in general.
“It’s a poem that I put to music,” Love explained. And I love doing it every night. It just takes me back to those times, you know. There’s very few songs touch me as emotionally as that, although the ‘Warmth of the Sun’ is one.” For context, “The Warmth of the Sun” is the song Love wrote with Brian Wilson about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
What Mike Love said about George Harrison when he released the song
In a 2014 article he wrote for HuffPost, Love revealed he had a lot of respect for George as a musician. He cited George’s solo hit “My Sweet Lord,” The Beatles’ “Something,” and the music of The Traveling Willburys as examples of George’s musical prowess. He also praised George the humanitarian, mentioning the time George raised money for the survivors of the 1971 Bangladesh genocide through The Concert for Bangladesh.
Love revealed he recorded “Pisces Brothers” shortly after George’s death. He didn’t release the track for a long time but it was made available on bootlegs through internet leaks. The Beach Boys said “Pisces Brothers” is for anyone who ever loved George.
Mike Love said The Beach Boys inspired their own Beatlemania
In the Forbes interview, Love compared and contrasted The Beach Boys with The Beatles. “I always liked the live music, you know, performing and seeing the reaction of people,” he said. “People jumping up and down going crazy for our songs. I mean, our first live album Sacramento Memorial Auditorium, we rode Hondas, little Hondas, out on the stage. We had a song called ‘Little Honda,’ and the girls were screaming and everything like that.
“They talked about Beatlemania, but The Beach Boys had their own kind of Beatlemania,” he added. “It was pretty fun. Nowadays, it’s not like that for us. Maybe it is for somebody else. But we still have multiple generations who love our music, and we love seeing that — entire families coming out to shows. It’s very uplifting to me.”
The Beatles and The Beach Boys both enthralled audiences and Love still paid homage to George all those years later.
