Gidget the All-Powerful

The Rebel Next Door

Hobie vs Velzy vs the IRS

Better Surfing Through Chemistry

Summer on the Inside

Surf Fashion, Lightly Salted

Surfing the Newsstand

Process of Elimination

Oil City Showdown

The Jazz Stylings of Phil Edwards

Technicolor Surf Boom

Heroes and Villains

Blackball Blues

Dick Dale, Destroyer of Amps

Surfing in Five-Part Harmony

Tokyo to Tel Aviv

Flight of the Larrikin

Bob Evans Means Business

Midget Wins It All

But Will it Play in New York?

Houses of the Holy

We Own the Sidewalks

Beautiful from any Angle

Duke's Big Contest

Can You Handle the Penetrator?

Girls, Don't Panic!

David Nuuhiwa Walks on Water

An Invincible Summer

Ten-Year Boom

Surf music in the 1960s came in two forms. Dick Dale and his turbocharged guitar personified the instrumental style. The genre’s second, more popular, and arguably less pure form was vocal surf music. It was launched in 1961 with a prosy little tune by the Beach Boys called “Surfin’.” The melody hobbled along, the chorus did nothing except repeat the song title over and over, and the lyric flubbed its surfing references (“Yeah my surfer knots are rising and my board is losing wax”). But "Surfin'" was catchy, and custom-made for its place and time, and it became a regional hit. A few months later the Beach Boys signed a contract with Capital Records.

The group came from Hawthorne, California, about six miles northeast of Hermosa Beach and its Pacific Coast Highway “Miracle Mile” of surfboard manufacturers. Songwriter and bassist Brian Wilson led the group, which was made up of his two younger brothers, Dennis and Carl, his cousin Mike Love, and Hawthorne High classmate Al Jardine. Brian was eighteen in early 1961, a big gentle-faced oddball who liked nothing better than to come home after school, queue up a Four Freshman record, and spend the next few hours at the family piano doing a note-by-note dissection of the vocal tracks.

The Wilson brothers all had different ways of coping with their overbearing father, Murray, who yelled at them during Little League games, laid on with frequent belt-whippings, and allegedly made a point about the world’s inherent cruelty by thumbing out his glass eye and forcing each son in turn to peer into his empty eye socket. Carl, the youngest, grew quiet and serious and stayed close to their mother. Brian retreated into music. “I was so scared of my dad,” he later recalled, “that I actually got scared into making good records.” Dennis cut school, went to the beach, and learned to surf. In the summer of 1961, hearing that Brian wanted to write a novelty song, Dennis told him to do one on surfing and offered to clue his brother in on the latest surf lingo. Brian and Mike Love banged out “Surfin’” in one night, music and lyrics. Four months later, calling themselves the Pendletones (named after Pendleton shirts, a must-have “surfer look” fashion item), they went to the studio and recorded the song. Just before the record was pressed, the band changed its name to the Beach Boys.

In the summer of 1962, the Beach Boys had a double-sided hit with “Surfin’ Safari” and a hot-rod ditty called “409,” and released their debut LP, also called 

. Instrumental surf music was taking off, so the group hedged their bets by including note-for-note covers of Dick Dale’s “Miserlou” and “Let’s Go Trippin’.” 

 made the top 40, and even sold well in New York.

Six months later, in early 1963, the Beach Boys’ scored their first real hit. Brian slightly altered the melody to Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen” and put in his own surf lyrics, including a chorus that swapped out the original across-American roll call (“Deep in the heart of Texas/And round the Frisco Bay”) for an inventory of hot surf breaks (“Haggerty’s and Swami’s, Pacific Palisades”). “Surfin’ USA” was the liveliest tune the group had yet recorded, and it had the marketing advantage of sounding both familiar and new at the same time—it zoomed to number three on the national charts.

Just before “Surfin’ USA” was released, the group was hired to back a vocal duo named Jan and Dean at a concert in Redondo Beach, next door to Hermosa. Jan Berry and Dean Torrence were both a few years older than Brian Wilson. They’d already had a hit single and performed on 

 but that was back in 1959; their latest records had bombed, and the two were looking for a new sound. The Redondo show was a success. Jan and Dean loved the Beach Boys sound, and got along famously with Brian; within weeks they were in the studio doing versions of “Surfin’” and “Surfin’ Safari” for their next album, 

. Best of all, Wilson graciously handed them a not-quite-finished new song called “Surf City.” Jan and Dean rushed into the studio, double-tracked Brian’s voice with Berry’s on the lead vocal, then stood back and watched it rocket to #1 that summer—the first surf song to hit the top.

The two groups were pop chart fixtures for the rest of 1963 and all of 1964, piling up one falsetto-tinged hit after the other: Jan and Dean with “Honolulu Lulu,” “Ride the Wild Surf,” “Drag City,” “Sidewalk Surfin’,” and “Deadman’s Curve”; the Beach Boys (Wilson now producing and arranging as well as songwriting) with “Surfer Girl,” “Catch a Wave,” “I Get Around,” and “Little Deuce Coup.” Jan and Dean were 

 magazine’s “Duo of the Year” for 1964. The Beach Boys toured Europe, and over the course of twelve months released 

Americans were getting a better look at California beach life through these new songs than from any of the beach movies then playing in theaters across the country. Jan and Dean were both handsome and blond, and the leading purveyors of what had already been named the “West Coast look”—an alternative to the dark-haired Philly-based “teen dream” stars like Frankie Avalon and Fabian. (Dick Clark, as if to underscore the point, moved his 

 studio set from Philadelphia to Los Angeles in 1964.) They talked differently, too. Part of it was all that bouncy surf-slang: “gremmie” and “goofyfoot” and “cowabunga.” But it was also the tone and inflection; a casual, lightly-drawled Southern California beach accent, with pinched vowels that turned “get” to “git” and “can” to “kin.”

Vocal surf music, like instrumental surf music, was a short-lived craze—Bob Dylan, the Beatles and Motown saw to that. In 1966, Jan Berry almost died in a Sunset Boulevard car crash, just a few miles down the road from “Deadman’s Curve.” Brian Wilson had already gone through the first in a series of mental breakdowns, and was more or less locked away in the studio, perpetually working and often stoned. The greatest Beach Boys music was still to come, but it wouldn't be surf-themed. “Don’t Back Down,” the group’s last surf song, came and without notice in mid-'64.

Surfers never embraced the Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, or any of the other one-hit-wonder vocal surf music groups. Surf shop managers politely accepted Beach Boys promo LPs from traveling Capital Records marketers, then sidearmed the records out the back door toward the dumpster. Bruce Brown, John Severson, Bud Browne—nobody used Jan and Dean songs on their surf movie soundtracks. Surf magazine editors aggressively ignored both groups, even though the music and image was perfectly aligned with the clean-cut, USSA-supported view of the sport everybody was pushing.

Surfers themselves had invented the Stomp, brought the Rendezvous back to life, and named Dick Dale’s new style of music. The Beach Boys and the rest, on the other hand—this was being foisted on them by outsiders, like the beach movies. Exasperated surfers didn’t know where to start with their complaints. Jan and Dean at least looked the part—tan, thin, blond, barefoot; T-shirts and white jeans—but the Beach Boys were soft and chubby and fully geeked out in their matching candy-stripe button-down shirts. Both groups were in magazines like 

. Put a gun to his head, and Dick Dale still wouldn’t sing a ballad.

More than anything, surfers’ disregard for the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean came down to authenticity—or lack thereof. “I was riding in a car with a friend when we first heard ‘Surfer Girl,’” Los Angeles surfer and 1964 world championship finalist Mike Doyle once recalled. “It was this whiny, cornball music, and we stated hissing and hooting, saying ‘What a rip-off!’ Years later I realized how good the Beach Boys’ songs actually are. But at the time, it was like they were pretending they’d made it down the stairs at Malibu and were part of the crew—except they couldn’t even surf, and everyone knew it.”

While Doyle and his friends picked apart the Beach Boys for their manifest transgressions against the sport’s code of cool, they missed the part where the music went past the brainless two-four rock of “Surfin’” and “Don't Back Down” and into the shifting major-to-minor tonal splendor of “Don’t Worry Baby” and “The Warmth of the Sun”—and the rest of what Brian Wilson would later justifiably call his “teenage symphonies to God.” The Beach Boys never did cut it at Malibu. But by the end of the 1960s, it was obvious that, of all the surf boom cultural artifacts, it was Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys—not Gidget, or the USSA, or Frankie and Annette, or Dick Dale, or even Malibu itself—who had made the strongest bid for immortality.

The Beach Boys never cut it at Malibu. But by the end of the 1960s, it was obvious that, of all the surf boom cultural artifacts, it was the Beach Boys—not Gidget, or Frankie and Annette, or Dick Dale, or even Malibu itself—who had made the strongest bid for immortality.

Chapter: 4

Ten-Year Boom

Surfing in Five-Part Harmony

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