Few musicians have had a bigger impact on American automotive culture than Beach Boys mastermind Brian Wilson. While the influential musician is widely lauded for his later, more experimental work on such albums as “Pet Sounds” and “Smile,” it was a steady stream of car-related hits that really thrust the Beach Boys into the mainstream during the early 1960s. From “Little Deuce Coupe” and “409” to “I Get Around,” “Fun, Fun, Fun,” and many more, Wilson’s work captured a particularly lighthearted moment in American history when fast cars, clean waves, and good times dominated the pop music landscape. The musical icon passed away in early June at the age of 82, which marks a poignant-if-melancholy reason to review Wilson’s personal history and record of car-centric albums. Join us as we look back at Wilson’s life and legacy, explore his influence on the music industry, and review some of the classic songs that had a generation of teens racing for pink slips and taking their best girl for a cruise on a Saturday night.
The Son of Southern California
Born in sunny Southern California in June 1942, Brian Wilson enjoyed a musical upbringing thanks to his father, machinist-turned-songwriter Murry Wilson. Brian demonstrated a knack for music early on, learning the melody to Edmund Gruber’s “When the Caissons Go Rolling Along” by ear as a child. While his father originally pushed Brian into accordion lessons, the church choir was where he really started to shine, thanks to his perfect pitch. Wilson and his father had a tumultuous relationship and though Murry did initially serve as the Beach Boys’ manager, the band fired the elder Wilson in 1964. This kicked off an acrimonious period between the two generations of Wilsons, especially when Murry sold the Beach Boys’ song catalog in 1969. Murray died soon after in 1973, with his passing said to induce a complex mix of anger, guilt, and grief in Brian.
His brother Carl and uncle Charlie would also prove formative in Brian’s early musical education, exposing him to R&B and boogie-woogie piano tunes. The songwriter’s first original work was a reinterpretation of Stephen Foster’s “Oh! Susannah”, but it was the fateful purchase of a family piano that would really open the door for decades of musical innovation to come. Wilson would spend hours deconstructing the harmonies from some of his favorite songs and working to recreate them on his piano to gain a better understanding of music theory and the production process.
While it’s true that the Beach Boys weren’t the avid surfers that their songs made them out to be, Brian enjoyed the sort of average American high school experience that’s immortalized in so much of the band’s early work like “Be True To Your School.” Wilson was the quarterback of the Hawthorn High football team, ran cross-country, and played American Legion baseball throughout his teens, though his mind never strayed too far from music. In a moment that at least one record executive is bound to regret, Wilson was rejected from the Original Sound Record Company’s first release due to his age. Undeterred, Wilson soon acquired a two-track tape recorder, which he used to record songs and experiment with harmonies and new production techniques.
Wilson, his brother Carl, and his cousin Mike Love would form Carl and the Passions, performing covers and drawing the attention of eventual Beach Boy Al Jardine. After graduating, Wilson enrolled at El Camino College to study psychology and music but eventually dropped out due to a lack of support for pop music within the program. Wilson’s departure worked out pretty well, freeing him to pen his own original tunes, starting with “Surfer Girl” in 1961. It was the thematically similar “Surfin’,” which would mark the Beach Boys’—then known as The Pendletones—first hit, reaching #75 on the US Billboard Hot 100 in 1962. Candix Records would direct the band to adopt the new moniker, and the rest is history. The Beach Boys would quickly adopt a winning formula that saw them rotate between hits based on cars, women, and surfing culture, with “409,” “Little Surfer Girl,” and “Surfin’ Safari” representing some of the band’s earliest work.
Riding In Cars With (Beach) Boys
Wilson’s automotive bona fides are a little more robust than his surfing resume, with the musician often being described as an avid car collector. It all started with a 1958 Chevy Impala. Later acquisitions included some of the most timeless examples of automotive design, including a 1979 Cadillac Coupe de Ville, 1990 Corvette ZR1, Ferrari 488 GTB, Rolls Royce Phantom, and McLaren 720S. While none of these models were immortalized in a specific Beach Boys banger, the band did refer to specific vehicles and engines around 15 times throughout their long career. We’ve compiled a few of the most notable tracks, many of which are considered some of the band’s most well-known work.
Little Deuce Coupe
We’ll kick things off with one of Wilson’s most notable car-related tunes, 1963’s “Little Deuce Coupe.” A collaboration between Wilson and radio DJ Roger Christian, the song is an ode to California’s drag racing scene. Christian penned the lyrics, which single out a particularly legendary model in the 1932 Ford Coupe. The “deuce”—a reference to the last digit in the car’s model year—was a popular choice amongst the drag racing set, largely thanks to its potent flathead V8 engine. Famous for its ability to “walk a Thunderbird like she’s standing still,” the Little Deuce Coupe’s proclaimed top speed of 140 might have been a little ambitious, but it wasn’t out of the question after a few key modifications. The song was a smash hit for the Beach Boys, ranking as high as #15 on the Billboard Hot 100, which is pretty impressive given the fact that it was B-side to beach beauty bop “Surfer Girl.”
Shut Down
The Beach Boys kept the surf/car combo going with the release of “Shut Down,” which was the B-side to “Surfin’ U.S.A.” on the 1963 record. Written by Christian, the song reads like a sort of automotive opera, precisely detailing a race between a Corvette Stingray and a Dodge Dart 413 Super Stock. “Shut Down” almost serves as a sort of instruction manual for a good drag race, with Wilson & Co. recommending a set of slick racing tires and “riding the clutch” as a means of gaining traction. So, who came out on top in the battle between the Stingray and Dart? That part is a little ambiguous. While the Dodge seems to hold the lead for much of the race, the song’s last line (“Shut it off, shut it off / Buddy, now I shut you down”) seems to imply that the Corvette took the checkered flag.
In My Car
The title of “In My Car” might sound a lot like 1963’s “In My Room,” but the two songs couldn’t be more different subject-wise. The latter saw the famously agoraphobic Wilson waxing poetic about the simple pleasure of domestic isolation, “In My Car” allows the songwriter to find a similar sort of satisfaction behind the wheel of a classic Corvette: “The highway is my home / In fiberglass and chrome / Fantasy car shiny Corvette.” The song was never one of the Beach Boys’ more popular numbers, and it boasts an odd history, with the story going that the tune was actually forced onto 1989’s album “Still Cruisin'” by Wilson’s less-than-reputable psychiatrist Eugene Landy. That said, the song does hold two important distinctions. It was the Beach Boys’ last album on Capitol Records and the last car-inspired song in the band’s catalog.
Spirit of America
Wilson and Christian continued their string of high-octane collaborations with 1963’s “Spirit Of America.” While most of their work concerned Southern California’s youth-oriented hot rod scene, “Spirit Of America” saw the focus shift to Utah’s famous Bonneville Salt Flats. The Spirit of America was a jet-powered car built and driven by Craig Breedlove. The vehicle was certainly worthy of its own ballad, reaching a top speed of 407.5 mph in 1963 to set a new land speed record. That would be fast enough for most drivers, but Breedlove kept breaking records throughout the decade, topping out at 600.6 mph in 1965 behind the wheel of the Spirit of America – Sonic 1. Wilson’s “The Spirit of America” almost reads like a classic folk song despite his pop roots.
Our Car Club
A drive is always a little more fun with some buddies in tow, a truism immortalized in 1963’s “Our Car Club” (side note: has any band ever had a more productive year than the Beach Boys’ MCMLXIII? It’s difficult to imagine). The song describes a youthful gang of friends hitting the open road and deciding to form the aforementioned car club. It features the classic braggadocio for which many of the band’s car-specific songs are known. Vowing to “really put you through the grind” and boasting their ability to log “some really low ETs” (elapsed times), “My Car Club” references a few specific models, including a Jaguar XKE, a Corvette Stingray and, of course, the beloved Deuce Coupe.
Fun, Fun, Fun
The rivalry between the Beach Boys and The Beatles is a little one-sided when it comes to sales and overall legacy, but the two bands routinely battled it out on the top of the Billboard charts and famously spurred one another’s greatest creations. When The Beach Boys’ iconic “Pet Sounds” hit stores in 1966, it floored musical industry juggernauts, including Paul McCartney. Macca was blown away by the album’s complex harmonies and cutting-edge production, which is said to have inspired The Beatles’ own masterpiece in “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”
“Fun, Fun, Fun” preceded “Pet Sounds” by a few years, but the song does have the distinction of reaching #5 on the charts in the same week that The Beatles dominated the top three spots. Inspired by Chuck Berry’s “Nadine,” “Fun, Fun, Fun” details a teenage joyride that was inspired by true events. Dennis Wilson heard a story about the daughter of a Salt Lake City radio station owner taking her father’s prized 1963 Thunderbird out for a spin, and the rest of the song wrote itself. While the teen claimed to be at the library, she instead cruised down to the local hamburger stand, got her kicks, and then dealt with the aftermath as “Daddy took the T-Bird away.”
409
Few songs have led to more speeding tickets than the 1962 hit “409.” Sometimes credited with kicking off the 1960s hot rod music craze, the 409 in question isn’t a car as such, but rather a particularly powerful engine that was dropped into many of the era’s hot rods, specifically Chevy’s 409 cubic inch “big block” V8. The engine was offered in the Impala SS, Bel Air, and Biscayne, though it’s tough to know which specific model inspired the song. For this song, Brian Wilson worked with Gary Usher, a music producer and car enthusiast who helped the Beach Boys follow up Christian’s earlier work. The song features one notable cameo in the opening bars, with Usher recording the roar of his own Chevy V8 to help kick off the track (although his car was a mere 326).
RIP to the Legend
Wilson was no one-trick pony, and while his car and surfing-based songs might have hewn to a pretty traditional pop mindset, the band’s success allowed him to experiment with new production techniques that left a lasting impression on decades worth of music to come. From unusual key changes and unique instrumentation to layered arrangements and especially his modular recording techniques that saw him build songs based on separately recorded parts and sections that were then cut together to form a cohesive final product, Wilson almost treated the studio as its own instrument. “Pet Sounds” wasn’t the first true concept album—a record where all of the tracks form a unifying theme or narrative—but it did lend the format a lot of credence and paved the way for such classics as “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and David Bowie’s “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust.”
Sadly, Wilson’s genius came at a price. The songwriter battled both depression and schizoaffective disorder throughout his life, leading to long periods of isolation and flagging musical productivity. The musician’s rise to fame and mental struggles are perhaps best portrayed in the 2014 film “Love and Mercy,” where actors Paul Dano and John Cusack portray Wilson. Despite these hardships, Wilson is still regarded as a towering figure in modern pop music, inspiring generations of musicians and songwriters to take chances and blaze a new path. Wilson’s passing marks the end of a prolific career that encapsulated every corner of American culture, and there’s little doubt that the musician’s work will continue to emit good vibrations for decades to come.
