'I Knew That Would Become the Theme Song of the Beach Boys': 'California Girls'

‘200 Greatest 60s Rock Songs’ Book Excerpt

Photo byCapitol / EMI Records

A Top 10 hit for the Beach Boys in 1965, “California Girls” was conceived by Brian Wilson during his first acid trip. “The idea of ‘California Girls’ is that there’s this guy who thinks about girls all the time, so much that he starts to imagine all kinds,” Wilson wrote in I Am Brian Wilson: A Memoir. “But there’s only one kind he really wants, and that’s the kind that’s right there at home.

“The music started off like those old cowboy movies, when the hero’s riding slowly into the town, bum-ba-dee-dah. I was playing that at the piano after an acid trip. I played it until I almost couldn’t hear what I was playing, and then I saw the melody hovering over the piano part.”

“What an amazing track, beautiful arrangement, great harmonies,” said Mike Love in Rock Cellar. “He had the chorus ‘I wish they all could be California Girls’ but no other lyrics so I went out in the hallway and came up with ‘Well, East Coast girls are hip, I really dig the styles they wear, and Southern girls with the way they talk knock me out when I’m down there.’ So I wrote this poem touching on four corners of the US and then over to Hawaii and all around the world.

“Some people misunderstood the meaning of the song that we were saying California girls were the best. What we were really saying if you listen or read the lyrics, we were appreciating the fact that even though we went all around the world we’d like to bring them all back to California with us.

“And in a sense, California is a microcosm of the macrocosm of what’s out there in the world in terms of all the pretty girls. We’ve been all over the world — Japan, Australia, Germany, and England — and that was the perfect song to encapsulate all the experience. “

"California Girls" by the Beach Boys

Despite Love’s contributions, Wilson was credited as the sole writer of “California Girls.” “I wrote every last syllable of the words to ‘California Girls,’” Love asserted in Rolling Stone, “and when the record came out, it said, ‘Brian Wilson’ — there was no ‘Mike Love.’ And nowhere was my name mentioned on the record. Thank you, Brian.”

Love won a lawsuit in 1994 for songwriting credits. “I wrote a lot of those lyrics too,” countered Wilson. “It was line for line, back and forth between us. That’s what happened.”

Like many of the Beach Boys’ tunes, Wilson recorded “California Girls” with the top session musicians in Los Angeles that included drummer Hal Blaine and pianist Leon Russell. In a 1993 interview with Capitol Records, Wilson said of the “California Girls” session, “Everybody was up. The whole gang was there. It became my favorite session.

“The intro to this song is the greatest piece of music that I’ve ever written. I was looking for an introduction that would be totally different from the rest of the song but would lead into it. The song was a big record for us, but I really never liked anything but the intro.”

“It was special, I knew that would become the theme song of the Beach Boys,” Wilson told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s an anthem. That song went to №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.”

Frank Mastropolo is the author of 200 Greatest 60s Rock Songs and 200 Greatest 70s Rock Songs.