Two days before Christmas in late 1961, a heaving crowd converged at the Rendezvous Ballroom, a sprawling venue on Newport Beach’s Balboa Peninsula that overlooked the glittering Pacific Ocean. The block-long dance hall, frequented by swing dancers in the 1930s and ’40s, had become a host to “surfer stomps,” parties where local wave-riding teenagers bounced along to frothy instrumental riffs. Often headlined by guitarist Dick Dale, these dance nights brimmed with the propulsive sounds of surf rock washed over from the surfing craze gripping the Orange County coastline.
That winter night, thousands packed into the ample ballroom to see Dale and his band thump through fizzy standards like “Misirlou.” When the band stepped away for a break, five sheepish teenagers, quivering in their matching sport coats, filed onto the stage with their guitars, drums, and bass. They introduced themselves as the Beach Boys. Just two weeks before, the group had released their first single: “Surfin’,” a wide-eyed ode to the swells with harmonies similar to those of a barbershop quintet. The song lit up the singles chart in California and garnered airplay across the country. But the Beach Boys—composed of three brothers, their cousin, and a high school pal—had only ever performed for family. They had written “Surfin’ ” to appease a prospective producer; only one of them even surfed.
This article appears in Issue 34 of Alta Journal.
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The crowd was unimpressed. By some accounts, partygoers politely shrugged; others swear that the audience grew irate about this group of interlopers making commercial-sounding music about their culture. (It did not help that the Beach Boys, at that point, barely knew how to play their instruments.) Another apocryphal story holds that onlookers booed the Beach Boys offstage after two songs because they dared to sing over chugging surf instrumentals—the music merely backup to their harmonies.
Whatever really happened, no one in that long-gone dance hall, not even the Beach Boys, understood the magnitude of that first performance. Within a few months, the group would transform the growing West Coast surf sound into an amorphous genre, later called sunshine pop. Recorded by dozens of California-based groups and songwriters, like the Mamas & the Papas, the Association, the 5th Dimension, and Harry Nilsson, these songs, despite their warm melodies and swelling orchestral sounds, revealed an inherent spikiness.
A less tenacious group might have quit after the Rendezvous fiasco, but the Beach Boys were back onstage a week later in Burbank. “I think it hastened them into becoming more professional,” says Jon Stebbins, coauthor of The Beach Boys in Concert, of the disastrous show. By 1962, the Beach Boys were gigging at a merciless clip: sock hops, roller derbies, hot rod shows, and high school auditorium appearances up and down the coast. They also had a brief residency at the Sunset Strip club Pandora’s Box, later a locus for clashes between young people and the Los Angeles Police Department over a curfew law, the 1966 events immortalized in Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth.” The Beach Boys sometimes shared bills with Jan and Dean, a vocal duo drawing from similar wells of doo-wop, Midwestern R&B, surf guitar, and pop.
“It was just this constant goodwill, showing dependability [and] that we’ll show up for this shitty gig, and we’ll do it for nothing, and we’ll be early,” says Howie Edelson, the Beach Boys’ catalog producer. Their doggedness, combined with Brian Wilson’s preternatural abilities as a songwriter and arranger, helped the Beach Boys quickly lap their peers.
A LITTLE DARK CLOUD
As concerns about the intensifying Cold War and the threat of nuclear weapons seized the nation, the band heel-turned away from surf rock toward complex songs circling loss and alienation, daubed with string sections and dripping minor chords. In 1964, Brian Wilson began writing more ambitious songs, often with the help of the Wrecking Crew, session musicians who’d played on gems like the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” and Ritchie Valens’s “La Bamba.” The Wrecking Crew’s background in jazz and classical music contoured Wilson’s work, introducing new instruments and rhythms to his pop sound.
The Beach Boys’ 1966 album Pet Sounds, a gobsmacking array of layered instrumentals and vocal harmonies, inspired legions of imitators to make their own lushly arranged jams, like the Turtles’ “Happy Together” and the Association’s “Never My Love.” In a burst of reverse engineering, some producers recorded these songs with session musicians, then formed bands of floppy-haired young men to take the songs to rock clubs like the Hollywood Palladium, the Cloister, and the Party (which later became the Whisky a Go Go).
Unlike other pop subgenres cropping up then, such as bubblegum and soft rock, sunshine pop contained poignancy. “Those songs about cars and surfing had next to nothing, really, to do with cars and surfing,” says Peter Ames Carlin, the author of the Brian Wilson biography Catch a Wave. Consider a song like “Good Vibrations,” with its groaning organ, disquieting electro-theremin, and cello rumbling skittishly, like a stalling car, over lyrics about sunlight playing upon a romantic interest’s hair. While the instrumentation varies, Carlin says, sunshine pop songs are distinguished by “a little dark cloud floating across the sky”—a darkness lurking amid the sunshine that gave them a deeply human, universal appeal.
After Wilson had a nervous breakdown in 1964, the band’s lyrics became more overtly despondent. The wrenching “Help Me, Rhonda,” released after he stopped touring with the band, conveyed the pang of depression that can accompany heartbreak. To kick off the song, Wilson croons, “Well since she put me down, I’ve been out doin’ in my head.” Sunshine pop “is grounded not in a naïve belief that life is great and everything’s wonderful, but in a sense that life fucking sucks and everything’s horrible,” Carlin says. “But maybe if we keep moving into the western horizon, we’re going to find the part of the frontier that’s beautiful.”
BEYOND THE BREAKERS
By the early 1970s, listeners were seeking pop sounds elsewhere, in the vocal stylings of the Carpenters, the R&B of the O’Jays, and the pop rock of the Partridge Family and Fleetwood Mac. But even after its moment passed, sunshine pop appeared in unexpected places: the Ramones’ rough-edged punk tunes, the soft rock ballads of James Taylor, and even the yacht rock forged in Los Angeles–area studios by groups like Seals & Crofts and the Doobie Brothers.
The genre’s relevance can be attributed in large part to its use in advertisements. The 5th Dimension’s “Up, Up and Away,” about leaving the world behind, landed in a spot for the airline Pan Am. Don Randi of the Wrecking Crew recalls the Beach Boys’ “The Warmth of the Sun” soundtracking an ad for a spray tan product and Wrecking Crew members getting hired to play on Kellogg’s commercials and ABC spots.
Songwriters who grew up surrounded by sunshine pop—on TV and oldies radio or through their families’ record collections—have come to thread it into their music. Younger bedroom pop artists like the duo the Lemon Twigs have carried the torch in songs like 2016’s “I Wanna Prove to You” by drawing on the Beach Boys’ introspective harmonies; when Brian Wilson died in June 2025, the band covered three Beach Boys songs at a concert in New York City. Groups like Best Coast have blown out sunshine pop jams with feedback-laced guitars first at venues throughout Southern California and then internationally. Nathan Williams’s noisy pop project Wavves embraced the genre’s hazier, sunbaked spirit on their 2010 album, King of the Beach—a nod to Williams’s San Diego origins and fear of the ocean.
But while artists can now self-distribute music, performing live has become a more challenging prospect than when the Beach Boys were hauling gear to the Rendezvous. There are fewer venues around, let alone ones catering specifically to this style of music. FTG Warehouse, a DIY venue in Santa Ana that welcomed audiences of all ages, and the Newport Beach bar Hogue Barmichaels, which the Los Angeles Times dubbed “one of the few stages for local musicians in Orange County” in 2015, have both closed. Still, bright spots remain. Double Wish, an Orange County–based band creating “dark-sunshine-pop,” say that small venues like Costa Mesa’s the Wayfarer are critical to sustaining new acts.
The gumption to make it happen, manifested by bands from the Beach Boys with their flailing first performance to the bedroom pop musicians now taking the stage for the first time, speaks to what still makes sunshine pop so eminently listenable, decades after it first emerged: In spite of its gloomy undercurrents, this pop music still bends toward a sense of hopefulness. That’s what drove the Beach Boys, anyway. “They were literally paddling out beyond the breakers to go even further and to establish themselves,” Carlin says of the band. “To build a society that was based around daring and risk and achievement.”•
Paula Mejía is a Colombian American writer and editor from Houston. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, GQ, the Atlantic, Texas Monthly, and other publications. She teaches graduate arts writing at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and lives in Los Angeles.
