Sixty years since THE BEACH BOYS signed to Capitol and released their first defining discs, MOJO celebrates the group’s formative phase. From page 64, BRIAN WILSON, MIKE LOVE, AL JARDINE and BRUCE JOHNSTON reflect on the road to Pet Sounds. But first, How 1962 Changed Everything – an extract from the upcoming new edition of DAVID LEAF’s legendary Brian Wilson biog, God Only Knows.

Board dreams: The Beach Boys in summer 1962 (from left) Carl Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Mike Love, Brian Wilson, David Marks.

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AS 1962 BEGAN, THE BEACH BOYS HAD A NAME AND A HIT. But they were soon to be without a record label. The industry attitude was that surfing was just a fad, and one wonders if the group would ever have gotten a recording contract without the persistence of Murry Wilson. Years later, Brian Wilson would take note of his dad’s push and recognise its importance. As a father, Murry may not have been ideal, but as a manager of a rock group, he had unrelenting drive and ambition. He hadn’t made it as a songwriter; no matter, his boys would make up for his failure. He’d see to that – and he did.

Surfin’, released on Candix (a small, local label) the previous November, had made it into the Top 3 in the LA radio hit charts and peaked in Billboard magazine’s national charts at Number 75. The record sold somewhere between 10 and 50,000 copies, and the group received a royalty check for less than a thousand dollars. Murry Wilson added a few bucks from his own pocket to make the total an even grand, so that each Beach Boy – the three Wilson brothers, cousin Mike Love and Al Jardine – got two hundred dollars.

The next step would be what were called “personal appearances”. One of the earliest Beach Boys concerts took place in the early spring of 1962. William F. Williams, one of the disc jockeys at KMEN in San Bernardino (over 75 miles inland of the Pacific Ocean), recalled their performance. “Harris department store had a ‘Deb-Teens’ department and the girls at the area high schools who bought their clothes there became members of a ‘club’. Harris had a fashion show/concert each year for the girls who were members.

KMEN was in charge of putting together the talent for Harris’s concert, and I remember Murry Wilson came to us and literally begged us to let The Beach Boys be the opening act. As I recall, they barely knew which end of the guitar case was up. They looked very badly, played ver y badly, and sang very badly.”

Candix Records was having financial trouble, and it folded sometime before the summer of 1962. Russ Regan, then working for Candix’s distributor, Buckeye, remembered that “Candix sold their masters to ERA Records. Because of that, Murry had the right to terminate. They had a clause in their contract that The Beach Boys couldn’t be sold to another record company.”