The Beach Boys' Postwestern Dirge: The Haunting Terminus of the Beach Boys' Aquatic-Asphalt New Western Frontiers

Abstract

In 1962, shortly after Candix Records released the Beach Boys' first, largely forgettable and mostly forgotten, single—A-side, "Surfin"/B-side, "Luau"—Capitol signed the embryonic surf band and quickly produced their first Billboard Top 40 hit on their second single, "Surfin' Safari," while scoring another regional success in several western states with its flip B-side, "409." While their debut single can easily be dismissed as mere juvenilia—a lightweight, parochial expression of the local Southern California surf scene—the Capitol release represents something much more significant: an early articulation of a budding, energetic post-WWII Southern Californian youth culture; a bold, anthemic declaration of an emerging western optimism epitomized by Southern California—including both a new way of understanding the American West and a new way of being western within it—and a landmark expression of a nascent regional West Coast Pop modernism.