By Howie Edelson
Summer.
A feeling and string of moments synonymous with joy and freedom.
It’s an experience and a place The Beach Boys scored and defined for all time.
Six decades ago, the group acheived their biggest studio set, Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!), which was propelled by two of Brian Wilson & Mike Love’s greatest collaborations – the band’s second chart-topper, the Al Jardine-sung, “Help Me, Rhonda” and “California Girls,” a Top Three masterpiece that gave new meaning to the terms “instant classic” and “universally beloved.” The Beach Boys – with Brian Wilson then-recently off the road and concentrating solely on composing, arranging, and producing -- were swinging for the fences, completely restructuring the way American pop was created and reshaping the role rock music had on a generation. These songs were banners. They spoke for a generation.
Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) was released on July 5th, 1965, entered the Billboard Top 10 at Number Eight on August 7th, while its predecessor, The Beach Boys Today! sat at Number 10. Five weeks later, the album reached its peak spot at Number Two – marking the highest charting original studio album of the group’s career.
Brian Wilson nearly always had a soft spot for all the band’s ‘60s albums – but he admitted he was stretching his creative muscles in a way he never had before for the 1965 sessions:
“Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) was a rock n’ roll album. When I wasn’t nervous, I wasn’t quite so afraid of things being complicated. Maybe some of it was learning more about songwriting and producing and how I could put more musical ideas into the songs I was making. ‘California Girls’ was a huge pop hit, but it had another piece of music at the beginning that was nothing like a pop song. And even though Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) was further towards the pop side of things, there was a little symphony on there called ‘Summer Means New Love.’ That was me on grand piano with a whole string section. There were times I thought I was building on the foundation and times I thought I was tearing down what we had built and starting a whole new foundation. What did that new foundation look like? It looked like it sounded. It was complicated, with many parts that stuck out in all directions, but if you looked at it from the right angle, you didn’t see anything sticking out at all. You just saw that it was beautiful.”
Mike Love shed light on how he and his cousin came up with the signature song for the “Golden State”:
“We toured quite a bit of Europe and so on and came up with this little concept to do a song, whereby -- at least in our fantasies and minds -- we would wish that all the pretty girls that we'd seen everywhere could become California girls. Some people have misinterpreted ‘California Girls’ to think that we were being chauvinistic in that California girls are the greatest and stuff. Which. . . California holds its own (laughs)! What the song actually states is that we wish they all could be California girls.”
Al Jardine, who in addition the massive hit lead vocal on “Help, Me Rhonda,” was center stage for the band’s cover of The Crystals’ “The He Kissed Me” (revamped into “Then I Kissed Her.”) He revealed that upon returning from the road, the group was equally shocked and impressed with the level of Brian Wilson’s production work:
“We were fundamentally just keeping up with the pace of Brian’s productivity. You could feel it growing at an accelerated rate. He was always waiting for us to come home from touring. He got impatient and began experimenting with other musicians. This was the turning point. ‘California Girls’ is such a grand, episodic thing. And the 12–string guitar makes such a nice overture for the song and the chord structures are so wonderful. And it's so very western. And there's just something about it that's so uniquely California. It encompasses the whole California myth. It was just a tremendous vocal and arrangement that subsequently became our opening number for the rest of our career.”
Legendary session bassist Carole Kaye – a 2025 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee - recalled pulling studio duty as part of the famed “Wrecking Crew” for Brian Wilson’s Beach Boys production dates:
“I'm sitting there thinking, well, he's a little sharper than the rest -- because we didn't have to really make up as much stuff for him as we did the other groups. He brought in parts. They weren't written out very well and that’s what made me believe that he was not schooled or anything. But the kid had something. And he kept getting better and better and better. I thought, ‘Ooh man, this guy's into something.’ I mean, one bat of the eyelash told you a lot about a person. And he was that sensitive. We were a bunch of jazz players and we would clue into him in a very quiet way. It didn't even have to be words. But there was a communication going on that was very quiet there, y’know? And so, we felt very much at home with Brian.”
“California Girls” marked the first time Brian Wilson’s road-replacement Bruce Johnston contributed to a Beach Boys harmony grouping – with Brian offering him a key vocal part in the chorus:
“Brian just said, why don't you come to the session, we're recording a song called ‘California Girls.’’ So that was the first recording that I did with The Beach Boys, and he actually gave me my own little part in it, and I did the whole album. (The music) was getting more sophisticated, but it was still not in the ‘art house land.’ It was still sophisticated -- yet commercial. I mean, the intro to is magnificent.”
Brian Wilson only had good memories regarding the writing and recording of the signature track:
“The ‘California Girls’ sessions were very, very up. Everybody was really up. That was my favorite session I ever did. I balanced the guitars, the pianos perfectly to sparkle. They just sparkle.”
Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) built on the pop sensibilities of the band’s previous 1965 effort, The Beach Boys Today!, with such standouts as “Salt Lake City,” the almost garage rock of “The Girl From New York City,” as well as such stop-in-your-track beauties as the instrumental Pet Sounds precursor, “Summer Means New Love” and the acapella “And Your Dream Come True.” Over a decade later, fans would finally get a chance to see Brian, Dennis, and Carl Wilson perform the hysterically poignant “I’m Bugged At My Old Man” during The Beach Boys’ 1976 self-titled NBC TV special. Although fan favorites from the start, it took 1974’s chart-topping Endless Summer compilation to elevate a trio of the album tracks – “You’re So Good To Me,” the Carl Wilson-sung “Girl Don’t Tell Me,” and the exquisite “Let Him Run Wild” to timeless status.
Al Jardine still breaks into a smile when recalling some of the album’s arduous vocal sessions:
“I remember how hilarious the session for ‘You’re So Good To Me’ was. We started laughing around the microphone so hard that I couldn’t stop. The muscular effort required to sing the ‘la la la la la la’s’ after the exertions of being on the road for so many months made my tongue start to seize up. I completely lost control of myself and fell on the floor laughing.”
Carl Wilson always maintained that he considered the album a creative fork in the road for The Beach Boys:
“Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) sticks out as a turning point. Brian was really getting into a very expansive stream of energy. We could see that he was opening up and making very serious music, and it was serious rock n’ roll music. It was the last studio album before Pet Sounds. Songs like ‘Let Him Run Wild’ are indicative of him getting into orchestration. Brian’s influence is much greater than anyone would know. He inspired a lot of musicians and writers to get into orchestration and get into doing a higher sort of music. Brian was one of the first to see an album as an art piece. I think that Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) was the first indication of it. Pet Sounds was the obvious next step.”
It doesn’t need to be summer for this album to work its magic – but it doesn’t hurt. Here’s to the next 60 years of Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!)
“One more summer and your dream comes true. . .”