The one song Brian Wilson calls The Beach Boys’ anthem: “One of my favourite songs”
It’s impossible for anyone to go into a songwriting session looking to write an anthem. Even if people try their best to capture the feeling of the times in one fell swoop, often what ends up coming out tends to be much more clunky than many would have probably thought. Brian Wilson was already a genius well before The Beach Boys hit their stride, though, and he thought every single piece of ‘California Girls’ would be synonymous with what the band were all about.
For the first few years of the band’s career, you would swear that the band would have been the corniest relic the 1960s music scene ever spat out. While most of their odes to surfing and cars were terrific for what they were at the time, it tended to get more than a little bit old when you started hearing eight different songs about the same topics every time you turned on the radio.
Wilson probably had the same idea when going into the studio for albums like The Beach Boys Today. Even though his father, Murray, didn’t approve of the more experimental stuff he was making, Wilson was on the verge of musical history when putting together the basis for songs like ‘California Girls’.
No longer relying on the same bluesy styles that he had in the past, Wilson somehow managed to take his influences from everything from classical music to jazz to pop and shoehorn them into this wonderful ode to the ladies of the Sunshine State. Although Pet Sounds was just around the corner, Wilson already knew he had broken new ground.
When talking about his library of songs in I Am Brian Wilson, Wilson thought that ‘California Girls’ ranked as one of the best of the band, saying, “How could I forget ‘California Girls’? It’s one of my favourite songs of anything we ever did. It’s our anthem song. If you ask people to name one Beach Boys song, that’s probably the one they’ll name”.
Outside of the casual surfing songs, this was also one of the first times where Wilson talked about seeing the music well before he had written it, explaining, “I was playing 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”.
Looking back at the song, this is practically what rock and roll would have sounded like had classical musicians gotten ahold of it first. It doesn’t necessarily follow the format of any typical rock song, and even occasional Beach Boys and permanent nuisance Mike Love admitted that the intro even sounded like an overture for a vast opera.
Once you write just one song that good, you’re going to want to write something even better. For the rest of Wilson’s career, he would continue to make even greater strides, eventually abandoning the road and using the studio band The Wrecking Crew as an instrument to make sonic masterpieces like ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’ and ‘God Only Knows’. The Beatles may have helped expand the minds of millions of rock fans, but Wilson proved what was possible when you open your heart to the melodies from God.
