A couple of thoughts in the wake of Michael Fleming’s Deadline report about Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions having acquired U.S. and Canadian rights to Bill Pohlad and Oren Moverman‘s Love & Mercy. One, it just hit me that “I Can Hear Music,” the Beach Boys track that I’ve always regarded as their most emotionally affecting, was just a cover and was written for the Ronettes by Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich and Phil Spector. (The Beach Boys recorded it on 1969’s “20/20.”) And two, while Brian Wilson has always been a good humanistic, earth-loving, blue-minded guy, the Beach Boys band members (Mike Love, Al Jardine, Bruce Johnston) have been philosophically and politically Republican since at least the Reagan era. Consider this 7.2.12 N.Y. Times op-ed- piece by Daniel Nester (“Be True To Your School”), and particularly this passage: “For many Republicans, the rags-to-riches story of [the Beach Boys] embodies an imaginary time of consensus politics and an American Dream at once white-bread and innocent. The band tapped into this sentiment well before the Reagan era, and it’s this strain of the Beach Boys’ peculiar cultural DNA that has supplied them with steady bookings as political mascots for Republicans and conservative causes.” Again, the “Music” mp3.