How the Beach Boys Were Inspired for 1965's 'California Girls'

The Beach Boys are synonymous with California; more specifically, the vibrant, sun-soaked, tanned-skin, carefree coast.

And where there is a beach, there are probably cute girls. But California is also just about as Westward as you can get in America, conjuring up images of outlaw cowboys who save pretty damsels in distress. How does one combine all these elements into a song?

For Brian Wilson, that process started with a trip on LSD.

"The music started off like those old cowboy movies, when the hero's riding slowly into town, bum-ba-dee-dah," Wilson wrote in his memoir. "I was playing that at a piano after an acid trip. I played it until I almost couldn't hear what I was playing, and then I saw the melody hovering over the piano part."

The rest of the song did not come as easily to Wilson, but the introduction was key.

"It took me some time," he admitted to Goldmine in 2011. "I wanted to write a song that had the traditional country and western left-hand piano riff, like an old country song from the early '50s. I wanted to get something that had a kind of jumpy feeling to it in the verses."

A Little Help From Brian Wilson's Cousin

To the rescue came Wilson's Beach Boys bandmate Mike Love. (Amazingly, Love didn't know that acid had been involved in Wilson's inspiration — Wilson only told him about it in 2012 when the Beach Boys went on the road for a 50th anniversary tour.)

"[Wilson] had the chorus 'I wish they all could be California Girls,' but no other lyrics, so I went out in the hallway and came up with 'Well East Coast girls are hip I really dig the styles they wear, and Southern girls with the way they talk knock me out when I'm down there,'" Love recalled to Rock Cellar in 2013. "So I wrote this poem touching on four corners of the U.S. and then over to Hawaii and all around the world."

(Note: there are conflicting accounts between Love and Wilson in regards to who wrote which lines. Love later sued Wilson in 1994 and successfully gained songwriting credits for 35 different songs, including "California Girls.")

Listen to the Beach Boys' 'California Girls'

The resulting "California Girls" was released as a single on July 12, 1965, backed with "Let Him Run Wild," and it went to No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100. But one thing both Wilson and Love continued to emphasize over the years whenever asked about the song, was that it was not meant to say women from California are the best on the world.

"What we were really saying if you listen or read the lyrics," Love said in 2013, "we were appreciating the fact that even though we went all around the world we'd like to bring them all back to California with us."

Wilson knew he'd come up with something special.

"I can't write a song to save my life," he admitted to Rolling Stone in 2015, turning up the radio when "California Girls" came on it. "I sit at the piano and try, but all I want to do is rewrite 'California Girls.' How am I gonna do something better than that? It's a fucked-up trip."

Still, it was something to be proud of.

"Everybody loves girls, right? Everybody loves California and the sun," Wilson said to the Los Angeles Times in 2007. "That's what I wanted from the song. And to mention all the parts of the country, that's fun, people will like that."

Watch Brian Wilson Perform 'California Girls' Live in 2005