Undoubtedly, The Beach Boys changed music forever when the original lineup of Brian Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Carl Wilson, Mike Love, and Al Jardine formed in 1961. Thanks to Brian Wilson’s innovative songwriting techniques (like transforming his dining room into a giant sandbox), the band perfectly bottled that California beach sound. On this day in 1965, Wilson’s first LSD trip became one of the band’s biggest hits.
Brian Wilson Dreamed Up This Beach Boys Song The First Time He Took LSD
High on LSD for the first time, Brian Wilson walked down to the piano in his Hollywood apartment and began to play.
“I was thinking about the music from cowboy movies. And I sat down and started playing it, bum-buhdeeda, bum-buhdeeda,” Wilson told The Los Angeles Times in 2007. “I did that for about an hour. I got these chords going. Then I got this melody, it came pretty fast after that. And the rest was history, right?”
That history became “California Girls,” released July 12, 1965, as part of The Beach Boys’ ninth studio album, Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) Reaching No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100, it’s easily one of their most recognizable songs six decades later.
In a 2004 interview, Wilson declared the song’s intro “the greatest piece of music I’ve ever written.” He had mixed feelings about the res of the song, however.
“If I could, I’d re-record that one,” he said in 1970. “We rushed the beat on that one.”
Later, he called “California Girls” the band’s finest record. “You could call it our anthem,” Wilson told Mark Dillon in 2010.
That Time The Beatles Parodied “California Girls”
Rising to fame at the same time, The Beach Boys had a bit of a friendly rival with The Beatles. In fact, the Fab Four even parodied “California Girls” in 1968’s “Back in the U.S.S.R.”
“I just liked the idea of Georgia girls and talking about places like the Ukraine as if they were California, you know?” Paul McCartney told Playboy in 1984. “It was also hands across the water, which I’m still conscious of. ‘Cause they like us out there [in Soviet Russia], even though the bosses in the Kremlin may not.”
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