Imagine being a teenager during the 1960s in a time and place of endless summer days, warm, sunny beaches, beautiful girls and large ocean swells while feeling nothing but those “good vibrations” all the time.
As a child growing up in Rhode Island, The Beach Boys’ music gave Christopher Mello, music instructor and director of the guitar department, the impression of California being a utopia of permanent sunshine, constant surfing and millions of beautiful girls.
From “California Girls” to “Surfin’ USA,” The Beach Boys’ music created a romanticized notion of what life was like on the West Coast, Mello said.
“Their music sold me as a kid on the idea of the Southern California beach culture growing up,” Mello said, who, over the years, formed a personal relationship with Brian Wilson, a member of The Beach Boys.
“Coming from an all-boys Catholic school in Rhode Island, my experience with girls were very limited. So after listening to ‘California Girls,’ the girls in Rhode Island were no comparison to the girls in California.”
With the recent reunion of The Beach Boys, the surviving members of the band will begin their 50-date global tour this month in commemoration with its 50th anniversary.
The Beach Boys, a 1960s American rock band that originated in Southern California, was first made up of brothers Brian, Carl and Dennis Wilson, their cousin Mike Love and a friend, Al Jardine, forming one of the most influential rock ‘n’ roll bands in music history.
The band went on to sign with Capitol Records in 1962, according to www.thebeachboys.com, and eventually produced many top 40 hits including, “I Get Around,” “Good Vibrations,” “California Girls,” “Be True To Your School,” and “Surfin’ Safari.”
Their fame, from a musical perspective, helped redefine the 1960s era of pop music, Mello said.
“If you listen to ‘Good Vibrations’ all the way through, it has a number of different sections where the field changes, where the keys change and the way the backup vocals change,” Mello said. “That was unheard of in the music of the ‘60s until The Beatles came along with ‘Sergeant Pepper.’”
But before The Beach Boys found such success, two of the band members were enrolled at EC to pursue much different careers.
Al Jardine, who attended college from the summer of 1961 to the spring of 1963, aspired to pursue a degree in the field of dentistry, according to an article published in the Warwhoop, the name of the college’s student newspaper at the time.
Brian Wilson also attended EC during the fall of 1960 through the spring of 1962 and studied history and Spanish.
While they both played football together at Hawthorne High School, it wasn’t until the two ran into each other again on the campus’s football field where they often talked about sports, cars, girls and, ultimately, music.
But according to an excerpt in Wilson’s autobiography “Wouldn’t It Be Nice: My Own Story,” he had long term plans of becoming a psychologist. Due to the abuse Wilson suffered at the hands of his father, he started to used music as a means of escape. And eventually his passion and love of music became the primary focus of his life and he left college to pursue a musical career.
After the release of The Beach Boy’s best selling album, “Surfin’” in 1962, Jardine continued to take classes at EC until he later decided to rejoin the band in 1963 and he left college behind.
Throughout the years, The Beach Boys’ creative talent came from Wilson, who wrote or co-wrote many of the band’s songs.
“I’ve known and worked with Brian before, so I know that he is the master-mind behind all of the Beach Boys recordings, the production and the whole Beach Boys’ sound,” Mello said. ”He’s just somebody that really loves music. It pours out of Brian Wilson even if you are having a conversation about anything.”
Wilson’s writings were a personalized look into his own insecurities as an angst-ridden adolescent, according to his autobiography, which is why many students said they can identify with the content of the lyrics.
“A lot of their music fits in perfectly with the way I think,” Rafael Portillo, 21, music major said. “The music that is coming out now, (such as) Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber, is unsophisticated and not very deep in its choice of what it’s expressing.”
Another student also said she relates to many of The Beach Boys’ songs
“I like some of the more obscure songs that (Brian Wilson) wrote that didn’t quite make the top of the charts,” Jessica Asbell, astronomy tutor, said.
The legacy of The Beach Boy’s music helped define an entire generation of American idealism and pop-culture, Mello said.
“The Beach Boys really started to evolve out of cars-and-girls sort of music,” Mello said. “They were really taking chances in terms of both what was happening in the studio and what they were doing in their writing. There was a lot of evolution of what they and The Beatles did.”
The Beach Boys will perform live June 2 at the Hollywood Bowl.
