The Beach Boys brought something new to the musical table when they introduced the surf sound to the Top 40 lists during the early 1960s.
An early Beach Boys song leaned heavily into a carefree world of catching a wave and chasing bikini-clad females during an endless summer, but they did not forget the car hobby during their heyday on Top 40 radio.
Jim Sutherland
Legendary fictional car guy John Milner of ‘American Graffiti’ fame was not a Beach Boys fan and instead mourned the passing of rock and roll icon Buddy Holly and his brand of late 1950s music. However, the Beach Boys were still the new kids on the musical block in 1962 and maybe Milner had not yet softened his views on their car songs.
Remember the tag line for the famous coming-of-age movie was “Where were you in ’62?”. Consequently, the Beach Boys were still experimenting with their surf tunes in 1962 -but the car tunes were already on their pop song playlist that year.
The California culture was not all about surfing and instead included a strong car hobby because the state has a warm and dry climate compared to most of the continental US, so hot cars became a hot topic in Beach Boys songs.
The beauty of a car song was that it reached a much larger audience of car guys and, since most of them were not surfers, they could identify with big horsepower instead of big waves. The Beach Boys recognized this reality and began to churn out car tunes to catch another wave of success.
One of the mainstays of car shows long after the end of the Beach Boys’ biggest years was a generous array of their songs at every event. The Beach Boys had cemented their bond with their car guy audience because Beach Boy songs reminded them of their wild younger days when they took a pedal-to-the-metal approach to life.
The net result was a host of Beach Boys car songs that sent them back to those youthful misadventures as soon as the band’s famous harmony was heard in a car tune.
We at MyStarCollectorCar attended many events in the past where Beach Boys car tunes blasted over the speakers and led the older car guys right down Memory Road, so we decided to list some of their most famous automotive-friendly songs.
1963 marked the debut of ‘Little Deuce Coupe’, a love song dedicated to one of the most popular hot rod choices in the hobby, namely the 1932 Ford platform. The song’s deuce coupe had its famous flathead hot rod engine massaged into a beast mode ride that dominated the streets. One would assume John Milner may have changed his mind about Beach Boy music if ‘American Graffiti’ took place in 1963.
However, the Beach Boys did release ‘409’ in June of 1962, so maybe it was this song that had the potential to soften up Milner about their music because it was all about a brute force big block Chevy V-8 with roots in GM’s truck division. ‘409’ was a Chevy tribute tune that took no prisoners in the street wars and its message was clear to all car guy listeners in ’62: destroy the competition.
The final addition to our classic Beach Boy car guy song list is ‘Shutdown’, a song they released in 1963. It’s about a race between a 1963 Corvette Stingray and a Super Stock Dodge equipped with a 413 big block engine.
It is another example of the Beach Boys’ frantic scenarios about fast cars-but this time the song is a showdown between two road beasts that tangle on the pavement. Neither car would give ground, and the winner is never identified by the song’s end, so listeners could draw their own conclusions.
The Beach Boys were pioneers in surf sound, but they also became legends as the band behind the car guy sound during the early 1960s. And nothing could catch them then or now.
Jim Sutherland
BY: Jim Sutherland
Jim Sutherland is a veteran automotive writer whose work has been published by many major print and online publications. The list includes Calgary Herald, The Truth About Cars, Red Deer Advocate, RPM Magazine, Edmonton Journal, Montreal Gazette, Windsor Star, Vancouver Province, and Post Media Wheels Section.
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