Before the harmonies, before the sunshine catalogue of regions and girls, there is forty seconds of orchestra: a slow, stately prelude that sounds less like a surf record than like the opening of a film about the American West. California Girls was the moment Brian Wilson stopped writing songs for the beach and started building them like symphonies in miniature — a record he would call “a hymn to youth” and, eventually, the Beach Boys’ anthem. It took forty-four takes, an argument with his father, a brand-new member singing his first notes with the group, and a lyric written in a studio hallway. It also stalled at No. 3 behind two of the most famous records ever made — and outlasted them both in the affections of the man who wrote it, sort of. Wilson’s verdict was characteristically double-edged: the introduction was the greatest piece of music he had ever written, and he never much liked the rest.
Cowboy Chords
Wilson’s accounts of the song’s conception have never quite agreed with each other, which is part of the record now. In the 2004 documentary Beautiful Dreamer he confirmed that he wrote it during his first acid trip, supervised by his friend Loren Schwartz; in the 2021 documentary Long Promised Road he said he wrote it during the week after the trip, when he was sober. What is consistent is the scene: Wilson at a piano, thinking about women and about the music from cowboy movies. “I sat down and started playing it, bum-buhdeeda, bum-buhdeeda,” he recalled in 2007. “I did that for about an hour. I got these chords going. Then I got this melody — it came pretty fast after that.” He wanted the shuffle feel of the Drifters’ On Broadway, and said the beat owed something to Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.
The next day, Wilson and Mike Love finished the song together. The lyric — a travelogue of appreciation, East Coast girls who are hip, Southern girls with the way they talk, the Midwest farmer’s daughter — grew out of the band’s first European tour in November 1964. Love later insisted he wrote nearly every syllable, in less than an hour, in the hallway of the studio while the backing track was being cut; Wilson remembered a line-for-line collaboration. What is certain is that the famous closing wish — that they all could be California girls — was Wilson’s, and that Love was not credited at all until his songwriting lawsuit of the 1990s put his name beside Wilson’s. Wilson blamed the omission on his father Murry, the band’s publisher, and partly on himself.
Forty-Four Takes at Western
The backing track was cut on 6 April 1965 at Western Studio in Hollywood, with a dozen or more of Los Angeles’ finest session players and Wilson conducting like an orchestra leader. The song had no title and no finished lyric — on the session tape Wilson calls it “We Don’t Know,” “Oh Yeah,” and “You’re Grass and I’m a Power Mower.” The introduction caused the trouble: tempo problems and the guitar part exhausted Wilson, engineer Chuck Britz, and the musicians, and it took forty-four takes before Wilson heard a performance he would accept, in a session that ran past midnight. Britz’s solution for the twelve-string guitar in the intro was to bring Carl Wilson into the control booth and record him there, standing beside his brother. Carol Kaye, who played bass on the track, later said the music was all Wilson’s — her only contribution was a bass fill she invented at the end of the bridge.
Murry Wilson urged his son to cut the orchestral prelude altogether, judging it too complex. Brian refused, and the prelude became the record’s signature — biographer Peter Ames Carlin would call it “as spare and stirring as anything by Aaron Copland.” Wilson explained his own judgment years later with startling economy: “The intro to this song is the greatest piece of music I’ve ever written… The song was a big record for us but I never really liked anything but the intro.”
A New Voice in the Blend
California Girls also marks a quiet changing of the guard. Wilson had retired from touring after a panic attack the previous winter, and his stand-in on the road was Bruce Johnston. When Johnston came home from the tour on 1 June, the band invited him to sing on the next album. “The first song I sang on was ‘California Girls’,” he remembered. “At this point I still wasn’t a proper member of the group.” The vocals were overdubbed on 4 June at Columbia’s studio, where a new eight-track recorder let Wilson double-track the leads and spread the group’s harmonies across three further tracks — the record still lacked a settled title, with Wilson heard on tape calling it “Yeah, I Dig the Girls.”
The song led the second side of Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) on 5 July 1965, and Capitol issued it as a single a week later, backed with Let Him Run Wild. It entered the Billboard chart at No. 28 and by the end of August had peaked at No. 3 — held from the summit by the Beatles’ Help! and Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone, which is about as distinguished as a blockade gets. It was a top-ten hit in several other countries, and that autumn the group sang it over its backing track on The Andy Williams Show and then, in a comic sketch with Jack Benny and Bob Hope dressed as bewildered old surfers, on The Jack Benny Hour.
Underneath the sunshine, the record is stranger than it looks. Musicologist Walter Everett has pointed to the chorus’s chromatic swerve — a flattened seventh chord sliding to the fourth — and theorist Daniel Harrison compared the song to God Only Knows for the way it refuses to resolve: the refrain rocks between two chords and never reaches the dominant it seems to promise, an elegant musical joke, since the singer’s wish that they all could be California girls is, of course, impossible to fulfil. Writer Maury Dean called it “an adventure in chromatics” that would defeat any garage band without sheet music. None of this was lost on the trade papers of the day — Cash Box heard “an easy-going shuffle,” Record World “an extremely strong item” — but the complexity was the point. Wilson was smuggling an orchestral imagination into a two-minute-and-forty-six-second single, and his dissatisfaction ran the other way from his father’s: where Murry found the record too complex, Brian found the singing not good enough. “If I could, I’d re-record that one,” he said in 1970. “We rushed the beat on that one.”
Anthem
The honours accumulated slowly and then all at once: induction into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2010, a place on Rolling Stone‘s list of the 500 greatest songs, a spot in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll. Biographer Mark Dillon called the orchestral passage “one of pop music’s great intros,” the Los Angeles Times heard music “equal parts symphony hall and amusement park,” and historians of power pop count the record among that genre’s founding documents. The Beatles saluted it with the bridge of Back in the U.S.S.R.; Wilson said the parody blew his mind before he even realised it was one. David Lee Roth’s faithful 1985 cover matched the original’s No. 3 peak. In concert it has served as the band’s opening number thousands of times — the performance attached here comes from Knebworth in June 1980, the last time all six core Beach Boys stood on a British stage together. “You could call it our anthem,” Wilson said in 2010. The cowboy chords still walk in first, stately as ever, and the hymn to youth does the rest.
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