Jan & Dean's comedy bits were an integral part of their act between 1959 and 1966... THE T.A.M.I. SHOW, Dean's liner notes to Golden Hits Vol. 2, all the liner notes to the Jan & Dean Anthology album, both TV pilots, Schlock Rod... Bucket T... Little Old Lady from Pasadena... Anaheim, Azuza... Horace the Swingin' School Bus Driver... Submarine Races... One Piece Topless Bathing Suit... Hang On Sloopy... Folk City... all of JAN & DEAN MEET BATMAN (both versions), all of FILET OF SOUL... and all of their concert appearances, all of their radio promos and, especially, DEAD MAN'S CURVE, which showed just how dark they were willing to go. Dean calls it their "FARGO." They were billed as the Laurel & Hardy of rock & roll and their public personas were very much like Stan and Ollie. Jan was "Ollie" and Dean was Stanley, the "dumb one." And like Stan Laurel, Dean was actually the brains behind their comedy presentation. Jan was equally adept at brilliant musical satires so subversive that they actually became hit records. It's still astounding that he crafted such a deft send-up of drag racing songs like Little Old Lady From Pasadena and it became a number 3 hit with record buyers (including a hell of a lot of gear heads).
I suspect neither one of them would ever claim to have created something as brilliant as PET SOUNDS. That wasn't the game to these guys. You want a laugh, check out the way they gleefully savage their own work on FILET OF SOUL - and poke fun not only at Beatlemania but their own willingness to exploit it for fun and profit.
In the Radio Shack ad, the line about Dean is a throwback to his stage persona.
Look at their work through the prism of their humor and you see what they were all about. Farm team isn't really the best analogy. If you think of The Beach Boys as the champion riders at the rodeo, Jan & Dean were the rodeo clowns. They got plenty of laughs - and they were damned skilled at wrangling angry bulls when the stakes were high.
Thanks for that info, Steve, that makes a lot of sense then. Out of context it seems much odder, but in context it's clearly a throwback like you're saying.
