(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)

Not everything The Beach Boys did was known to be tame and family-friendly. Compared to the songs about having fun in the sun and going out in your new car burning down the road, the background of their story also included some of the harshest realities any band faced, from Brian Wilson suffering under his abusive therapist to Charles Manson writing tunes for them. While the group could still bring the good times whenever they hit the stage, Wilson remembered one massive fight going down midway through a performance.

For a brief time, though, there was a moment when Wilson wasn’t even part of the band’s touring lineup. Since he was the resident genius known for working magic in the studio, their management figured they would split the difference between Wilson’s time in the studio and onstage, sending the rest of the group out while he worked on albums like Pet Sounds.

Now, with limitless options at his disposal, Wilson was free to do whatever he wanted, only to crack under the pressure when working on the album Smile a few years later. That’s not to say that Wilson would never step out onstage ever again, though, eventually coming back in the late 1970s with the rest of his brothers.

Time had changed since Wilson had last been on the stage with his family band. Whereas Wilson had turned the studio into his playground, The Beach Boys had turned their rock and roll show into one of the biggest well-oiled machines, treating the massive productions like the business they were. And just like big business, there are always a few assholes, and for The Beach Boys… it all comes back to Mike Love.

Although Love had a brilliant knack for writing melodies and adding his signature sound to those Beach Boys classics, he was also the one who ran their stage show. While Love may have been on good behaviour a bit more when Wilson joined the group again, one night sent him into a frenzy and left the outfit in fisticuffs.

As Wilson remembered in his book I Am Brian Wilson, everything started with a dustup between Love and drummer Dennis Wilson, saying, “In the middle of a concert, Dennis threw a drumstick, and it hit [Mike] in the back. He covered up the microphone and said, ‘Dennis, meet me offstage’. They went to the side of the stage and had a fistfight right in the middle of the concert. Dennis won. After the fight, they came back and finished the show.”

Then again, that tense atmosphere may have also been due to Dennis’ problems keeping things together. Outside of being an absolute monster drummer, his interaction with the Manson family was something he never recovered from, eventually passing away after trying to retrieve belongings that fell off a boat and drowning. 

Just because he lost a fistfight didn’t mean that Love was going to stop running his mouth. When being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Brian would claim that he was embarrassed when Love said that artists like Mick Jagger were too “chickenshit” to play with them during his acceptance speech. Wilson may have spent years trying to downplay his ego, but the different personalities between him and Love have kept him at a distance for the past few years.