The Smiley Smile Message Board

from the L.A. Times

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-ca-socalsong12aug12,1,2909131.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

Beach Boys extol 'California Girls'
By Geoff Boucher, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
August 12, 2007


IT was late at night and Brian Wilson, who had just taken LSD for the first time, was in the bedroom of his Hollywood apartment with a pillow over his head. He was stricken. He had images of his mother and his father in his mind and, most of all, fear. Then he managed to push all those thoughts aside. He walked downstairs to the piano.

"I was thinking about the music from cowboy movies. And I sat down and started playing it, bum-buhdeeda, bum-buhdeeda. I did that for about an hour. I got these chords going. Then I got this melody, it came pretty fast after that. And the rest was history, right?"

Yes, the rest was history. Wilson, then 22, kept working the keyboard and, turning his thoughts to fashion magazines, he came up with one of the most famous opening lines in pop music. "Well, East Coast girls are hip, I really dig those styles they wear. . . "

The next day, Mike Love came by the apartment on Gardner Street and the pair -- one a troubled auteur, the other the commercial-minded driving force behind the Beach Boys -- took turns building a hit that would define the sun-tanned promise of L.A. as the center of American glamour and youth. "Every other line was his or mine," Wilson said.

Wilson recounted all this a few weeks ago over a cellphone on his way to Laguna Beach. He and his wife and their three children have encamped at a tony resort for the summer, and most days you can find him there sitting stiffly at poolside behind sunglasses and a smile. "We're going down to sit by the water," he explained. "The weather's great out."

Wilson is a beloved and tragic figure in pop, and at the core of his life story is the painful paradox that some of the sunniest music ever recorded came out of man who, mentally and emotionally, spent years of his life squirming in a dark and lonely corner. "California Girls" is part of that paradox. It's a carefree teenage ode to girls; it was also written the night that Wilson said he first heard another voice in his head, one that was threatening and stayed with him for years.

Wilson is enjoying a well-documented career renaissance. He's feeling more confident too. When asked about the accepted lore that it was Love who had written almost all the lyrics to "California Girls," he said that was a fallacy he had let go unchallenged for too long. "I wrote a lot of those lyrics too; it was line for line, back and forth between us. That's what happened."

The basic notion for the lyrics, Wilson said, was his belief that some truths are self-evident. "Everybody loves girls, right? Everybody loves California and the sun. That's what I wanted from the song. And to mention all the parts of the country, that's fun, people will like that."

In the studio, Wilson recalled, he channeled a bit of the sonic feel of "On Broadway," a hit for the Drifters two years earlier.

The music of "Girls," like so many of Wilson's compositions, was equal parts symphony hall and amusement park, 2 1/2 minutes of nuanced musical complexity and beach-blanket simplicity.

The West Coast has the sunshine

And the girls all get so tanned

I dig a French bikini on Hawaii island dolls

By a palm tree in the sand

"Good Vibrations," recorded a year later, may be Wilson's otherworldly masterpiece, but he knew he had a crowd-pleaser the moment the harmonies were finished on "Girls."

"It was special, I knew that would become the theme song of the Beach Boys. It's an anthem. That song went to No. 3 in the country. I think if anything, that song speaks louder than ever. Everyone knows about California girls, and that song is the reason."

California Girls does not have a spot on my MP3, but the song still rules.....even though the girls from NY are pretty freaking hot........!!!! but they often don't have that California state of mind..........

Somebody (Brian or Mike) somewhere said that "California Girls" wasn't meant to be a 'diss' to any other women, it was more in the vein of The BB's lived in California so they wished all the girls they talk about in the song lived in California too.  Some of the lyrics kind of blow that out of the water, though. 

I reckon Mike used the song so he could try and pull the ladies, a bit of flattery... :smokin

That's actually how I've always interpretated it.

Carl said that too in a 1981 interview.

I don't see the On Broadway connection particularly, but it's interesting that Brian dates that first LSD trip as the first time he heard the "voices" in his head - 1965!  That's earlier than I had thought.

That struck me as well. Like Syd Barrett, I think he unlocked a lot of mental issues-that may have stayed more subdued otherwise-as a result of the dreaded LSD.

Especially this time of year, brother!

I can't put my finger on it, but when he said that, I thought "Ohhhh yeahhhhh". . . There's something going on in California Girls that has an 'on broadway' vibe to it.  I'll think about it!

One of my favorite lines ever written by a music critic said that the difference between Roth's version and the Beach Boys' was the difference between "a leer and a sigh".

Brian's been saying for over 30 years that Mike wrote the lyrics - all of them. Now, suddenly, he's changed his tune. I'm thinking a 'wife & managers' scenario here.

How come every time Brian does something questionable, it's the wife and managers? Brian has changed his story about so many things so many times. It could just be him.

Seems to me I remember Brian saying he wrote ALL the lyrics in more than a few interviews...  :o

Brian always said he wrote the first line.