How the San Francisco scene shaped The Beach Boys’ song ‘Good Vibrations’
When The Beach Boys first emerged, there were basically sceneless – unless you count the beach as a scene.
Either way, they weren’t even really there. Despite that sunkissed, surfer aesthetic being their entire artistic identity at first, hammered home with songs like ‘Surfin’ USA’, ‘Catch A Wave’ or simply ‘Surfin’, only one of the band members could even man a board.
“One day, my brother Dennis came home from the beach and said, ‘Hey, surfing’s getting really big,” Brian Wilson recalled in the Surfin’ Safari liner notes, “You guys should write a song about it.” That’s how it all started, and that’s about as deep as it went in their lives.
Instead, tapping into the surf culture was merely an attempt to find a basis for themselves. Not quite vanilla enough to exist in the early 1960s mainstream, and not quite countercultural enough to be amongst the hippies, their self-made somewhat imagery beach was a mid-ground they made for themselves.
That is until the release of ‘Good Vibrations’ when once and for all, they left the coast for the dry land of counterculture and went all in with that famed trippy pop song.
Specifically, they headed for Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco, the hippie epicentre of the world, where bands and burnouts collided. It was arguably right there that the peach and love era began, and by that I mean, it was there that the stronger drugs were being done, and LSD was getting popular.
In 1965, The Beach Boys played a show in San Fran and witnessed the new scene kicking off. “Scott McKenzie wrote ‘If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair,’ and there were love-ins and all that kind of thing starting to go on,” Mike Love remembered, and by the time they got home, brushing the petals out, they were inspired.
Part of it was the influence of the sights they’d seen, but part of it was also the sounds. “In 1966, that was the beginnings of the psychedelic sounds. Of psychedelic groups, they’d call them. Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and The Doors, all that was going on at that time with that influence,” Love recalled as suddenly there was a new realm of music for the group to get into. “Marijuana and LSD were starting to get more widespread, and definitely its influence was beginning to be felt in the music and the culture in certain areas,” he added.
For Brian Wilson, who first did LSD around that time, the influence was definitely felt as he set about working on ‘Good Vibrations’, a song that spirals and shines like a kaleidoscope, or like an acid trip.
Inspired by the drug and by the musicians also experimenting with it, both of those things spanned from the scene, as Wilson was undeniably impacted by the energy in San Francisco and the art it was leading to. Keen to finally leave behind the beach image that had never actually suited them, this new scene opened up the doors to a new look, and while the band never fully committed to the long hair hippie attire, their music began to take on more and more of its vibe.
