By then, the Beach Boys were no longer a small-town band recording and requesting their own song on the radio - “Good Vibrations” hit number one. “Good Vibrations became our psychedelic offering of the time, in 1966,” said Love, who penned the lyrics along with Brian Wilson’s avant-garde experimental track. “Who wouldn’t want to go on a Surfin’ Safari?” asks Love. It worked, garnering more plays and more attention, and “Surfin’” eventually wound up on their 1962 album “Surfin’ Safari.” Love recalls recording the song in a little California studio, and when it finally got air time on the local radio, each of the band members would call in doing different voices to request the song. ![]() The duo wrote the band’s first single, “Surfin,’” which was released in 1961. While the Beach Boys’ music is populated by the imagery of shiny eternal youth– surfing, girls, cars, school spirit-their daring genre-bending, unlikely composition and catchy harmonies made it anything but anodyne.ĭennis, the drummer and only true surfer, brought the California culture and surf scene into the rooms and creative spaces of brother Brian and cousin Mike. ![]() “I wrote a song about a girl who wanted to borrow her dad’s car,” says Love,“and I told Brian I had the idea of doing the Chuck Berry guitar intro.” It was “Fun Fun Fun.” We were just a few miles from the beach, and how do you get to the beach? A car.” “Those influences gave us the elements, but we chose the subject matter,” Love said, “from what we were living in Southern California. Or the doo-wop songs we heard on the radio.”Ĭiting influences from Chuck Berry and Little Richard to the Everly Brothers and The Four Freshmen, Love said they found inspiration for the style of music but plucked subject matter from their daily lives. Love’s narration of the early days is fond: “Brian and I and my sister Maureen used to go to Wednesday youth night at Angeles Mesa Presbyterian Church, and we’d sing the church songs and then walk home singing Everly Brothers songs. How did that all spark from a family garage band? They’ll play on Thursday, April 4, at the Sunset Green Event Lawn in Key West. Love, along with his son Christian and a cadre of talented musicians including Brian Eichenberger (of “The Four Freshmen” fame), Bruce Johnston, Jeffrey Foskett, Tim Bonhomme, John Cowsill, Keith Hubacher and Scott Totten, are touring the country performing old and new classics. “We are so much more blessed than we were cursed,” said Love, longtime front man, lyricist, and tour de force behind the Beach Boys’ current incarnation. Mike Love remains at the front of the stage as a quintessential Beach Boy. He’s responsible for the lyrics behind hits like “California Girls” and the voice leading them, too. There is one band memberwho has persevered to bridge the gap to today’s audiences. ![]() Skyrocketing from family garage band to uber-fame, they created a new music genre dubbed “California Sound.” Yet while The Beach Boys sang songs of sunny days, the real story wasn’t always so. The band was formed with brothers Brian, Carl and Dennis Wilson, cousin Mike Love and friend Al Jardine, in the hamlet of Hawthorne, California in 1961. The ongoing cultural relevance of the song, and it's fabricated geographic reference are a testament to the power of song to evoke a state of mind and nostalgia for a time and place.The Beach Boys are the soundtrack to a perfect California summer-or creating the feeling of one at any time, in any place. Users post photos of sun-dappled beaches with palm trees and seas in various shades of blue dotted with sailboats."ĭiaz suggests that this song is still much more strongly associated with the Florida Keys than Kokomo, Indiana, or even a community named Kokomo in Hawaii. "On Instagram, there are more than 116,000 hashtags dedicated to #kokomo. "Using social media, tourists and fans of the song mark the spots that look and feel like the alluring destination The Beach Boys reference, even though you won’t find Kokomo on a South Florida map," reports Johnny Diaz. More than 30 years after the song became a nearly ubiquitous earworm that stayed on the Billboard charts for 28 weeks, the Chicago Tribune commemorates the song's popularity by noting the still very real cottage industry of armchair Kokomo tourism. That's the first verse off a late-career smash hit for the Beach Boys called "Kokomo," released in 1988. If you're a child of the '80s and '90s like me, you know these lyrics well:
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