By Jorge Casuso
June 12, 2025 -- Beach Boys leader and composer Brian Wilson, a supreme genius of popular music whose death was announced by his family Wednesday, had long ties to Santa Monica.
His odes to an endless summer of sun, surfing, cars and girls found an early venue in the beach city where The Beach Boys made their first media splash in 1961 and were showcased in a legendary show.
The group that hailed from nearby Hawthorne also opened a studio in Downtown Santa Monica in the mid seventies, where they recorded what Wilson once called his favorite Beach Boys album.
The band's first appearance on local television took place on Saturday, December 30, 1961 on the P.O.P. Dance Party at Pacific Ocean Park's Aragon Ballroom.
The show hosted by Bob Eubanks ran from 6 to 7 p.m. on KTLA-TV, Channel 5, according to “Becoming the Beach Boys, 1961-1963,” by Jim Murphy.
By the time the band made their next Santa Monica appearance in March 1962, their single "Surfin" had made its debut on Billboard's Hot 100 chart. The three day weekend appearance took place at the Monica Hotel, 1725 Ocean Front, which was later converted into the Sea Castle Apartments.
A week later, the Beach Boys would make their debut at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium during the Second Annual Surf-O-Rama, a surfing industry trade show.
They would return to the venue as a featured act on the legendary T.A.M.I. Show filmed on October 28 and 29, 1964, where they performed their hits "Surfin' USA," "I Get Around," "Dance, Dance, Dance" and the ballad "Surfer Girl.'
Plenty of Santa Monica teens were at the show -- which included performances by the Rolling Stones and James Brown -- after free tickets were distributed to local high school students.
By 1971, Brian was no longer performing and "watched it all from the wings" when The Beach Boys returned to the Civic Auditorium for a January 30 concert, wrote LA Times music critic Robert Hilburn.
"Since the Beach Boys are one of the handful of best rock groups in history and this is their home town, it is no wonder they received a series of standing ovations over the weekend at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium," Hilburn wrote in an article that ran on February 3, 1971.
"Though the group played the Whisky a few nights last fall, the Saturday night concert was in a real sense a homecoming for the group that popularized Southern California girls, surfing and other teen-oriented activities during the 1960s," Hilburn wrote.
By the time the Beach Boys opened Brother Studios in early January 1974 in Downtown Santa Monica, Brian's deteriorating mental health and years of hard drug use had taken their toll.
The Beach Boys, who had been relegated to the status of a touring oldies band, brought their former leader into the studio at 1454 5th Street as a publicity stunt, but there was little Brian could contribute when they recorded their 20th studio album in early 1976.
It was the first time Brian Wilson was given sole producing credit since he had spent months in the studio painstakingly creating his masterpiece recordings, the number 1 hit single "Good Vibrations" and the album "Pet Sounds," ten years earlier.
The hastily recorded album, which included a mix of new songs and covers of rock and R&B standards, was released in July 1976 to mostly negative reviews but still became the Beach Boys biggest selling new album since their heyday in 1965.
Brian would return to the Santa Monica recording studio in late 1976 to record a final album where he would write nearly all of its 14 songs and play most of the instruments.
"The Beach Boys Love You" -- originally titled "Brian Loves You" -- sold poorly, but Wilson's foray into synthesized punk has become a cult classic. In a 2006 interview with the music magazine "Uncut," Brian Wilson would call his last Santa Monica recording, “My favorite album we ever did.”
