Nostalgia Act

The Beach Boys' Imagined California

Last week Brian Wilson, the front man for the Beach Boys died, prompting numerous essays and tributes about the importance of Wilson and the band he led. All of this had the effect of sticking numerous Beach Boys songs in my head for the duration, which I did not entirely enjoy.

Their music is not really my thing, but I still find the whole atmosphere of the Beach Boys very hard to resist. It was, I think, profoundly nostalgic music even in the time that it was released. And I think that's why it has such a pull.

Growing up in Southern California, the Beach Boys were everywhere. Even then, their songs created an imagined California that didn’t exist and never really had. It’s a sunlit world of wide, sand beaches and surfboards casually tucked under muscled arms. A girl walks down the beach, her bright bikini framing her tanned skin. Blonde hair flashes in the summer sun. In a Beach Boys song, you’re the girl on the beach or you’re the boy who watches her and dreams about her later.

I can, for example, summon a specific time and place tied to the song, “Good Vibrations.” It’s a pizza restaurant in the main drag in Pacific Beach, California, the kind of place with straw-wrapped bottles hanging from the ceiling and fake oil paintings of Italian ruins on the walls. Dark wood chairs with red vinyl seats and tables topped with red check table clothes fill the dining room. It’s loud with people.

Golden late afternoon sun slants through the blinds on the front windows and outside, the street runs arrow-straight toward the setting sun. There’s a sit-down Pac-Man game, its blips and bloops are mostly drowned out and its primitive graphics washed by the sunlight. I drink orange crush and eat cheese pizza. The beach is right there, always on my mind and it’s right there in real life a few short blocks down the road.

By the time I heard them, the Beach Boys were old news, but it’s not surprising that songs about an imagined, more innocent world would hit when they were originally released in the 1960’s. “Surfing USA” dropped in March 1963, and by the end of that year, JFK was dead by assassination. Not long after that, the battle over civil rights for Black Americans escalated during the 1964 Freedom Summer. In December, Mario Savio stood out front of Sproul Hall and called upon his fellow students to put their bodies on the gears of the machine.

Meanwhile, the blood bath in Vietnam churned onward and by 1966, the year “Good Vibrations” released, more than 200,000 American soldiers fought there with no exit in sight. At home, protesters marched against the war, filling the streets in major cities. The good vibrations had left the building and the Beach Boys answered an escapist yearning for a simpler time.

The idea of an imagined idyll is most explicit in “California Dreamin’” and I heard the 1986 cover long before I ever heard the original. Written in 1963 by John and Michelle Philips, the song became famous when The Mamas and Papas recorded it. The lyrics tell the story of missing warm California on a bleak winter day, specifically, and it readily evokes a nostalgia for something beautiful and lost.

I’ve never really lived anywhere with a real winter, so somehow, the narrative of “California Dreamin’” has become twisted in mind. For me, it’s a story about California’s winter, that flat white light of the December sun and the sharp line of the horizon absent summer’s lazy haze.

Walk down the beach on a low-tide afternoon, on such a winter’s day. The glimpses of magic hold us here and grant resonance to the fictional depictions that in truth, aren’t entirely invented.

Over at Defector, Lauren Theissen describes Brian Wilson’s music as “the sound of something just out of reach.” The stories the songs tell may not be true, but the emotions they evoke feel authentic all the same. They sing of a California that’s never really existed but those emotions of longing and nostalgia have a near-universal resonance.

That’s especially true for surfing, where what we do in the water doesn’t bear all that much resemblance to the stories the Beach Boys tell about it. And yet, that sense of longing is one of the feelings at the heart of it. We dream of a perfect day and a magic wave, and so often, we remember our past waves as far better than they actually were. It’s really nice there in our imagined world.

And maybe that’s the appeal of the stories the Beach Boys are telling us. There’s nothing wrong with escaping for a few minutes at a time into an idyllic world even if it never existed at all. Come imagine, why not. When the song ends, the real world and its wars will still be there, right where you left it. ✨