My mother introduced me to Jan and Dean when the "movie" "Deadman's Curve" premiered on television. My mom was a stay at home mother who worked her butt off taking care of me and my three siblings. My twin brothers both severely learning disabled and one of them legally mentally challenged could be a real handful. However, we all loved music. This movie brought all of us together, even my Dad shared with time with us. My mom did not have enough personal house money to purchase the 2 album set inspired by the movie, and I did not have enough "babysitting" money to purchase it on my own either. There was only ONE copy left at the record store anyway. YES, we split the cost and shared it, purchasing it together. BEST darn record album we ever purchased. My mom was born in 1942, I was born 2 days before her 20th birthday, in 1962. WE loved this music and we shared many musical tastes including Elvis. WE adored surfing music! Thanks for posting this clip, which my mother told me about, but I never saw until now. My Mom passed away in 2018--I miss her so much, but the music we share lives on, and I have fond memories of her, and music really keeps her memories alive for me!! God bless!
Jan and Dean aren't in the Rock and Roll of Fame because Jann Wenner, Founder of Rolling Stone, hates Surf Music. He also denied Bruce Johnston entry in the HOF, you know the guy who sang on God Only Knows with Carl Wilson and replaced Brian Wilson on Beach Boys tours.
You’re crazy if you Think they contributed enough reputable material to rock history to even wipe their ass in the bathroom at the rock and roll hall of fame.
Had to laugh, 3Ddude101! Big difference between Jan Berry & Mike Love. Jan actually was cool & knew how to dance. Mike Love may have TRIED to copy Jan's moves, but it didn't work very well. Nothing against Mike, but he always danced like a dork onstage.
Jan and Dean were California Cool. Seriously laid back. But Jan finished 2 years med. school before his car accident. Dean was a very talented graphic artist. They played off each other. They had the Wrecking Crew behind them when they recorded. Records sounded great. Jan made a courageous comeback before his condition weakened. A true tragedy played out in public and made into a very good movie.
I saw them in concert at Santa Cruz, California when I was a teenager. My folks & I, my Aunt, uncle & 2 girl cousins watched the concert after the day at the boardwalk. Jan & Dean were still singing wonderfully' at that time. I will always love the surf culture of California, even though I had to travel 2 & a half hours to the beach.
I just turned 11 when this song came out....Summer Calif Coast....Jan & Dean....comic books...Big Daddy Ed Roth....Ford Mustang....and words from the older dudes to yell out while going down a steep sidewalk on our homemade skateboards with steel skate wheels...COWABUNGA !
Yes!! Surfer Shirts (like Jan and Dean are wearing) and "Deck Pants" (white 3/4 length with rope belt) And the Beach Boys with all that nostalgia too! ;-)
Here's to all the competitors in the new Olympic discipline of skateboarding! Every one of you is a winner! And here's to us, the kids who rode our sidewalk surfboards back in the day.
I was digging through my moms cassette tapes in the mid to late 80's, and heard this song for the first time, I loved it...I played it alot in my 1969 Chevelle.
I'm relying to comments below. Jan and Dean did not steal anything they asked Brian Wilson if they could take the music from Catch A Wave and add their own lyrics to which Brian agreed. Secondly Catch A Wave wasn't a hit record because it wasn't released as a single
Jan and Dean were contemporaries of the Beach Boys, both struggling for top seed. Each band covered each other's songs but what they created was nothing short of legendary surf and hotrod music, and I still love it to this day!
@@jonnyrox116 One crucial difference: the Beach Boys had the collective talent to grow artistically beyond just surfing & car songs, whereas Jan & Dean never did. Then again, they were never really given the chance due to Jan Berry's horrific, near-fatal car accident in April of 1966. But even though Jan was a talented producer & arranger, I don't believe he had the songwriting talent that Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys had.
@@robertbykowski1398 Music was really just a hobby for them. Jan was in medical school, and Dean was preparing for what became a successful graphic design career. Jan also produced hit records for other artists - something that isn't widely known. He was also a gifted producer, recording multi-track sound-on-sound while still in high school.
Did the Same thing, took my sisters steel skates apart and nailed them on a 2x4 . In San Francisco there was a lot of hills . If you hit a pebble you were screwed.
I don't think there's a bad hot rod \surfin record ever made that I didn't like! Why doesn't the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame respect Surf Rock as a legitimate genre
Wow! all these songs I've been hearing from them made me think all along that they were the beach boys singing. Never thought of Jan and Dean. This is gold!
Beach Boys had a song that sounded exactly like this called "Catch A Wave", where the lyrics were "Catch a wave and you're sittin' on top of the world"~ Also, Brian Wilson wrote this song~
@@Buttermilkjug Yeah, Brian Wilson and Roger Christian first wrote Catch a Wave for the Beach Boys. Jan asked Brian and Roger if he could use the music with different lyrics which Roger wrote. The song became a hit (and Capitol Records surely weren't happy with Brian Wilson handing over a hit to Jan & Dean, who were on a different label, haha)
I love these guys. And it breaks my heart when it see Jan looking so hot and happy. I really enjoy watching these guys too cuz they have a great sense of humor. And then Jan's accident. But it didn't seem to break his spirit. He got back on stage with Dean and kept on going. Gotta give them both a lot of credit. We still listen an
What most don't know is Jan Berry's dad's name was William "Bill" Berry. Bill was an incredible aerospace engineer and really good person. My dad worked both with him and for him....he was the Vice President of Hughes Aircraft Company Missile Systems Group... Based in Canoga Park California. He was one on the many engineers who allowed us to and was credited to ending the cold war. Everybody actually knows the programs Bill and Ken Richardson (President of HAC MSG) led and are still used today.... Sparrow, sidewinder, falcon, phoenix, maverick and the early concept of the amraam (which in essence was the next gen Phoenix) missile systems.
These guys were my first concert ever..they appeared with the Supremes and other groups on a Dick Clark show at Steel Pier in Atlantic City right around the time of this show..
Jan and Dean originated karaoke, the term" lip sync" didn't come out until these guys were hasbeens...I wore through several 45's of these and many other surfer bands of that era and I still love it!
What down to earth guys...a sense of humor for sure. Funny when Dean missed his ending lip sync and Jan started laughing. Great songs from these guys and great memories.
You know from what I read about their relationship, and how Jan looked down upon Dean constantly, he was probably saying to himself "dumb ass you are lucky to be here"
"SIDEWALK SURFING" LIKE this song started in CALIFORNIA ! Around the early 60's kids were puting the wheels from a pair of roller skates on a board and came up with a skateboard and there you were, "SIDEWALK SURFING" !
Jan & Dean's surf-pop song "Sidewalk Surfin' " was released on June 30, 1964, and was on the pop charts through the summer of '64, along with their other hit song "Ride The Wild Surf" in August. They were getting ready to promote their own line of Jan & Dean Skateboards. I had one. "Sidewalk Surfin' " was written by Brian Wilson, Jan Berry and Roger Christian. Originally it was a Beach Boys song, "Catch A Wave". From Dick Clark's American Bandstand in its last season on WFIL-TV in Philadelphia (You'll notice the kids are not dressed in hip California clothing), on August 22, 1964.
Jan and Arnie [who finished Jenny Lee when Dean was in the reserves got caught up in a publicity stunbt gone sour to bolster the career of Frank Sinatra Jr. with a fake kidnapping; the studio was pissed so they were dropped from the movie, but the theme song was already out; there were to have been in the movie, etc.
Really neat. Jan and Dean , the Beach Boys and all the other surf groups. Great times 1961-1963. Graduation, college at L.A. Pierce college and a letter from Uncle Sam.
@Clyde Suckfinger Staying in college as long as possible would have prevented the letter from Uncle Sam. I had a professor at Marquette University who went to Berkeley from 1965-72, and he flat out admitted that the only reason he got his PhD and became a professor was to avoid being drafted into Vietnam.
Yeah really - here is what they really sound like - live, no playback, no backing choir: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-FHTUKcniD2U.html
@@scootergeorge9576 It seems, however, that at least one of them had some talent for arranging and mixing i so that it sounded pretty good. Some of the voices are probably theirs, but only the two of them, unplugged, is really not impressive.
@@scootergeorge9576 The funny thing is - I do remember them from my early childhood, but had no idea who they were. I probably confused some of what I had in memory with the Beach Boys. Then I stumbled over a clip from an old TV show where they are singing unpluged -and I thought, WTF!!!?? How could those two vocally untrained school boys in any way have made hit records? Then I realized that some of what came out on the records sounded pretty good. But I doubt that anyone would have put so much effort into those two guys if one of them had not been producing it. Hence the conclusion: At least one must be e pretty good arranger. Besides, it is obvious, when you listen to Surf City that there are about five voices and they are not just overdubbings. I don't know if they even used overdubbings back then - and the character of the single voices are so different ... It is probably a bit like "Modern Talking" - although at least one of them has a great voice. But Dieter Bohlen - can he sing, can he play well? He is good at picking the right people and putting it all together in the studio.
I'm NOT an expert, but I heard that the urethane skateboard wheel was probably the biggest single improvement ever made to skateboards. It made them really popular and much safer in the 1970s.
When you want to copy "Catch a Wave" but want to change the words a tiny bit. It's literally the same song. 😂 They both inspired the Beach Boys and then owe Brian Wilson their later careers. Seems like it was friendly collaboration and not cut-throat competition, which is refreshing.
Why are these guys not in hall of fame they were the best even better than beach boys to me Jan was a sexy genuous guy their hits are priceless let's give them the respect they deserve
Story is/was...Jan and Dean hung out with Brian Wilson, who liked them and foolishly gave up some killer tunes to them Surf City and apparently this tune. Brian's father and the rest of the Beach Boys were not happy with Brian at all.
growing up my sister and i both got skateboards, and what i remember is that the trucks had the name torrance on them. I think they were made in torrance california, but given that Dean's surname was Torrance i am not so sure now.
Hmmm. The skateboard in the video looks like an early Hobie. I had one. The board was straight hardwood. It never cracked or broke. The wheels were not steel or plastic, but rather a very strong brownish material. Though they wore, my wheels never cracked or broke. High quality stuff, in those days. Since the wheel assembly or board scarcely tilted, trying to go around curves, or turn hard, was a real challenge.
Great to see Jan and Dean. They were talented and fun. Brian Wilson learned a fair amount about record production from Jan. Of course he returned the favor by writing Surf City for them as well as letting them rework Catch a Wave into this little ditty. Good times and fun tunes.
Jan and Dean always had a great sense of humor. I noticed that "Sidewalk Surfin" has the same melody as "Catch a Wave". I'm guessing that the Beach Boys wrote it and recycled the melody, as they did with at least one other song I can think of.
My Humble Place In The History Of Skateboarding! Skateboarding had an interesting evolution which seemed to ebb and flow throughout my life, largely centered on reactions to well founded safety concerns. It took 20-30 years to really come of age, but it started out as a sudden craze, at the perfect time to grab the neighborhood that I grew up in. Our Neighborhood Sidewalk Surfing Craze I'm sure it happened earlier in some little pocket or other, especially on the West Coast, but where I lived in suburban CT skateboarding first really hit when Jan And Dean sang their "Sidewalk Surfing" song in 1964-65. By that summer, East Coast boys like us were ready to do what the song said and " Grab your board and go Sidewalk Surfing" Commercially available skateboards pretty much didn't exist, so we had to make our own. They were real death traps! Skateboard Construction I was 12 years old, and I had five sisters, so the basement was filled with old metal clamp on roller skates that hadn't been used in years. We laid them up-side down on the sidewalk and savagely went at them with the our father's hammers, banging them as flat as possible. Then we got hold of some extra thick plywood for the board, and nailed the wheels to the bottom. Yes, it was usually done with nails that only went in about 5/8 inch or so. Those nails then got bent over, with the head also banged in as a sort of staple thing. It was all very crude, and we had to keep adding new nails as the old ones loosened up. All the while, our sisters were standing around whining about how we were stealing their roller skates ..... which they hadn't used for years! Skateboarding Turf War! Our neighborhood had lots of sidewalks. Of course, there were certain ones that had just the right grade for a nice long ride. Poor Mrs Walletinski was a very nice lady, but she was cursed with the best sidewalk in front of her house. She was scared stiff that we would get killed, and she was probably justifiably concerned. For a few days, we politely kept our mouths shut when she shooed us off, but then we started grumbling among ourselves about how "It was a free country", and "Nobody really owned the sidewalks anyway!" At that point it became an issue of our individual manly courage. After Mr W went off to work, we would brazenly go over there with brooms and sweep off the sand that he had spread all over the sidewalk to keep us away. Mrs Walletinski's head would peer out the window at us, but we were thrilled to see that she was obviously too frightened to come out and face us head on. For about a week or so, we loudly clattered down her hill, thrilled that we had obviously escaped the hand of authority. The Heavy Hand Of The Law Little did we know that Mrs Walletinski had a few tricks up her sleeve. My parents were the first to be approached, since we lived right across the street. My mother calmly but definitively asked me to please stay away from the Walletinski's sidewalks. For a few days I had to sit over at my house while my bold buddies still careened down the forbidden hill, and they looked over at me like I was a pitiful speciman of manhood. As the week went on, more and more boys would come over and join me, as Mrs Walletinski made her way through the neighborhood and systematically spoke to one parent after another. I recall that there was one boy who she didn't know because he lived a few blocks away, and he was the last holdout. Pretty soon he joined us all at my house, although our slight downward sidewalk wasn't anywhere near as good for skateboarding. Looking back, I suspect that it might have had something to do with how my multiple sisters and their friends had gradually become a very appreciative audience to our dare-devil moves. Subsequent Skateboarding History Those few months of summer of 1965 were over soon, and we stopped skateboarding in Connecticut when school days started and the weather got colder. Our cohort of boys went through our teens without skateboarding again, but 3-4 years later I started seeing them show up in stores. They were lightyears ahead of the boards we had used in 1965! Another shortlived boom hit in the mid 1970s, while I was too busy in college. In fact, from 1974?-1977? I saw ads for a fledgeling commercial venture in a sand pit that came and went in the town of Colchester, but the word got around that liability issues shut it down. It seemed that skateboarding went underground for a while, with law enforcement clamping down as a dangerously deviant counter culture rose, boldly trespassing everywhere without any parental supervision whatsoever. From the 1980s on I was shocked to see towns building actual skateboard parks to coax the renegade daredevils into safer surroundings, and then watched as the proffesional sport even showed up on TV. I tried out my son's early 1990s boards, which were unbelievably stable, but still undeniably dangerous, and layed down the law when they rode without helmets. All the while, I chuckled at old memories of the summer of 1965, and marvelled at how we somehow hadn't killed ourselves! Mike Carbonneau 2024 [Age 70]
I'm questioning the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, cause I'm wondering if Jan and Dean have been enlisted and if not, WHY!!!. To me and many more who grew up listening to this popular dual would wonder why they have been overlooked...something tells me they have and that in itself is worth noting of this so called Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Thanks4 posting an excellent video on the skateboard/ha. .Never seen one for myself until the disco era, honest (Vancouver, Canada). Now there everywhere and so are the skateboard parks.
elmo michaels I'm thinking that their omission into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has everything to do with them being dismissed as just Beach Boys clones.
elmo michaels Being born at the end of 61 somehow, no act has shaped my liefe in those early years as a grade schooler, more than the Beatles and Jan and Dean. Inexplicable, and I'm all for them in the hall. I have Dean's autograph on an obscure album and Jan unfortunately missed that show due to a fall, and I think he unfortunately passed within a year. What a treasure I have
I've just looked up Jan and Dean and the Beach Boys on Wikipedia and apparently Jan and Dean were releasing records *before* the Beach Boys. Their first single came out in 1958 and their first album was released in 1960. The Beach Boys' first single was released in 1961 and their first album in 1962 - a full 3 years behind J&D. Having said this, Sidewalk Surfing which is remarkably similar to the Beach Boys' Catch a Wave was recorded in 1964 - a year after Catch a Wave so Jan And Dean coulkd have been sued for breach of copyright over this if The Beach Boys had the copyright of their song. I don't anything to suggest that J&D were ever sued over this or anything else. Maybe the two hits were recorded so close to one another that The Beach Boys were satisfied that the similarity was a genuine coincidence, or maybe the dates were so close together that they were advised not to enter into a legal battle.
A neighbor dad of my friend fashioned a peace of wood with I think a coping saw and we attached wheels bought in a store to the board. We had to clean the wheels which had ball bearings. Nothing like today. Those wheels if they hit even the tiniest pebble you would crash. I won a third place ribbon in the neighborhood skateboarding contest on a street called Huerta Verde in Glendora, California 1965. It was yesterday.
Back in the early 60's, skateboards weren't available to purchase locally, so we just made our own. We'd get some old roller skates & hammer the toe & heel grips flat & attach them w/ screws to a sanded & painted board. Then you'd make it your own by adding racing stripes, Rat Fink & racing decals, etc. What fun it was! You could get some great speed w/ those old type skinny, all steel, roller skate wheels, but as in the song, man, "if the sidewalk's cracked, ya' better pull out quick" sure applied. Also, w/ those skinny wheels, if you hit a lose piece of gravel, it would stop your board in its tracks & then a wipeout usually followed : )
You crack me up! Yes, the lyrics are different, but it is the same song. And I don't want to correct you but fee the need to. "Side walk surfin" was released in 1964 and was a parody of "Catch a wave". Catch a wave was released in 1963, Although not released as a single.
Brian Wilson(REALLY?) answered my question about what song came first here, thanks. J&D do more "sidewalk surfin(as well as perform it live)" in the T.A.M.I. Show film. Is that how they commuted to the gig? Was that also the first hit tune to feature posterior slang? The art of skateboarding(which I so far haven't tried my hand-I mean legs-at)has come a long way since then. How much credit do J&D deserve? "Bandstand" was in A.C. here. Must have been just before the big move.
Been missing this song!! We'd walk up to the top of our street, which was quite a big hill, then set our wooden longboards down. (Thought the brand was Conn -?) We always rode barefoot. We'd all be in a line, 5-6 of us, and all push off at the same time. It sure wasn't easy on the rough asphalt street, but we usually all made it to the end of the street together. Then, walk back up to the top to do it again. We'd blast the song on a single, had the record player by the sidewalk. Good times
Sidewalk surfing is so much more popular today and 15 years ago (circa 2000), then it was in 1963. Today in the city I live in I can rarely go out of my house and not run into some teen-ager who is sidewalk surfing and whizzing right by me at a 100 miles an hour. When I was a kid rolling skates and sidewalk surfing was for sissies. My how time changes things. This would make a great song 52 years later in 2015 with many many more real sidewalk surfers. And they don't even know that they are sidewalk surfers today.
