I distinctly remember feeling uneasy whenever I heard the Beach Boys as a kid. I don't recall having this feeling with any other music. There was something so otherworldly to me about their songs about beaches, babes, and cars, and the exceedingly casual vocal style of Mike Love's. I used to ponder the feeling even at that young age and try to put words to it. We had no Beach Boys albums in the house, so this was always just me in a backseat of some car with the radio on as I stared out the window at some spartan North Dakota scene.
I eventually settled on the realization that the Beach Boys sounded cooler than I ever could picture myself becoming. It was, effectively, not music for me. This was a kid in the 1980s listening to '60s "oldies" pop. Credit them: the effect of cool they created back then is universal and absolute through generations.
And it had nothing to do with them being Californians and me a windswept North Dakotan. The vague alienation I felt wasn't cultural at all. I saw us all as the same people, all just Americans, I guess. It was the confidence, the swell voice of Mike Love, the swagger of their sound.
After I got into writing music myself, I eventually went back and heard their music again, hearing it with appreciation for the creation it was. In hearing it with musician's ears, I finally found my feeling of worthiness for enjoying their songs.
All this over a band of portly, insecure brothers and one leering, macho punchline of a cousin.
In 1961, the Beach Boys independently released their first single, "Surfin," which became a hit in Southern California. Less than five years later, they were stars already working on their ninth studio album.
They were known for that iconic "California sound," but had begun to tire of that limitation. Following a nervous breakdown, main songwriter Brian Wilson had resigned from live touring and focused for the first time exclusively on writing and recording. Their subsequent eighth album had abandoned the themes of beaches, surfing, cars, and tried for more autobiographical subjects. They were rewarded with a commercial failure.
The next album had to return to the subjects that made them successful, their record company people warned. And so here came "California Girls." It was the first inkling of the Beach Boys becoming the nostalgia band they eventually became after Brian Wilson's total exit from the group and its takeover by that irascible Mike Love. It also happened to be a fantastic song.
It's pretty hilarious to know the musical inspiration for the song. Here is Brian Wilson talking about it:
"I was thinking about the music from cowboy movies. And I sat down and started playing it, bum-buhdeeda, bum-buhdeeda. I did that for about an hour. I got these chords going. Then I got this melody, it came pretty fast after that."
This western idea mashed up with Bach, of all people, to give us this song.
It's such a bright song. The Beach Boys' recordings always kept that early '60s reverb, and it just elevates everything. It's kind of the musical equivalent of black-and-white photography, kind of inherently abstracting the subject and piquing attention to it.
The melodies are so rich, the ambling pace just right. The falsetto singing on the choruses is irreplaceable. The lyrics are hokey in kind of a meta way, once you understand the duress they were written under - and they sneak in a kind of world weariness. Of course David Lee Roth took them at face value (and absolutely failed to have the same weird coolness impact on my '80s self with his version).
A few recording notes: This was the band's first 8-track recording, allowing them to triple-track Mike Love's lead vocal. Multitracking the voice is such a weirdly powerful technique, something certain singers absolutely rely on to complete their sound (see Elliott Smith). The Beatles would not make the leap from 4-track to 8-track until "Hey Jude" in 1968, three years later.
Finally, that is Carol Kaye on bass in this song. By this point, Brian Wilson was demanding studio musicians to perform everything in the recordings except the vocals. Carol Kaye was a legendary studio bassist with an amazing list of credits to her name. Go read about her for a great story as one of the few women in the studio musician scene of the time.
All this for a 2:30 runtime!