In 1961, the Beach Boys receive their first paycheck for playing three songs at the Richie Valens Memorial Concert at the Long Beach Auditorium. Most accounts say each of the five band members is paid $60 for the performance. It’s their first professional concert appearance other than an unpaid walk-on at a Dick Dale show at the Rendezvous Ballroom in Newport Beach one week earlier.
Brian, Carl and Dennis Wilson, their cousin Mike Love and friend Al Jardin comprise the group. The three Wilson brothers and Jardin attend Hawthorne High School in Southern California. In 1961, Carl and Dennis Wilson are still in high school. Jardin and Brian Wilson are in college and Love, 20, works a full-time job. Previous band names include “Kenny and the Cadets,” “Carl and the Passions” and, most recently, “The Pendletones,” after the plaid shirts then popular with surfers.
Three months before their paid gig they record their first single, “Surfin’ “ at World Pacific Studios in Hollywood. The band’s label decides their name should reflect their sound, which includes intricate harmonies like the Four Freshmen. Without telling the band, the label replaces the Pendletones with the Beach Boys.
Of their performance at the Richie Valens Memorial concert, at which the headliners are Ike and Tina Turner, Mike Love says in a July 2005 interview:
“We did three songs ‘Surfin’ and two others. I decided to go out and do my best. I made up my mind not to be nervous.”
Brian Wilson recalls the incongruousness of “five clean-cut, unworldly white boys from a conservative white suburb, in an auditorium full of black kids.”
The band signs a recording deal with Capitol in the summer of 1962 and goes on to score 36 Billboard Top 40 Hits and sell 100 million records worldwide. Paul McCartney cites the band’s 1966 release, Pet Sounds, as a key influence in his assembling of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
TOP Photo: The Beach Boys at Zuma Beach. 1970 press photo of the Beach Boys