Beach Boys

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Beach Boys' Bio: American rock group whose dulcet melodies and distinctive vocal mesh defined the 1960s youthful idyll of sun-drenched southern California. The original members were Brian Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Carl Wilson, Michael Love, and Alan Jardine. Significant later members included David Marks and Bruce Johnston. Initially perceived as a potent pop act—celebrants of the surfing and hot rod culture of the Los Angeles Basin during the 1960s—the Beach Boys and lead singer-bassist-producer Brian Wilson later gained greater respect as muses of post-World War II American suburban angst. Notwithstanding sales of 70 million albums, their greatest achievement was their ability to express the bittersweet middle-class aspirations of those who had participated in America's great internal westward movement in the 1920s. The Beach Boys extolled the promise of a fragile California dream that their parents had had to struggle to sustain.

Growing up in suburban Los Angeles (Hawthorne), the Wilson brothers were encouraged by their parents to explore music. Their father, Murry, who operated a small machinery shop, was also a songwriter. While still teenagers, Brian, drummer Dennis, and guitarist Carl joined with cousin Love and friends Jardine and Marks to write and perform pop music in the alloyed spirit of Chuck Berry and the harmonies-driven Four Freshmen and Four Preps.

Dennis, a novice surfer and adolescent habitué of the Manhattan Beach surfing scene, goaded Brian and the rest of the group (then called the Pendletons) into writing songs that glorified the emerging sport. The regional success in 1961 of the Beach Boys' first single, “Surfin',” led in 1962 to their signing as Capitol Records' first rock act. Brian's latent ambitions as a pop composer were unleashed; for years he would write almost all the group's songs, often with collaborators (most frequently Love). The Beach Boys soon appeared on Billboard's U.S. singles charts with such odes to cars and surfing as “409” and “Surfin' Safari,” while their debut album reached number 14. After the commercial triumph of the follow-up album and single, “Surfin' U.S.A.,” in 1963 (the year in which Jardine, back from school, replaced his replacement, Marks), Brian assumed complete artistic control. Their next album, Surfer Girl, was a landmark for the unheard-of studio autonomy he secured from Capitol as writer, arranger, and producer. Redolent of the Four Freshmen but actually inspired by “When You Wish Upon a Star” from Walt Disney's film Pinocchio (1940), the title track combined a childlike yearning with sophisticated pop poignance. Like his hero, pioneering producer Phil Spector, the eccentric Brian proved gifted at crafting eclectic arrangements with crisply evocative rock power (e.g., “Little Deuce Coupe,” “Fun, Fun, Fun,” “I Get Around,” and “Don't Worry Baby”). … Read more