The Story of the Beach Boy Who Actually Surfed

He also (as mentioned) was in a real, live band. A good one. So, to his surfing friends he had the added cache of being a musician. And Dennis was the cool guy in the band. The soulful one. The surfer. His brothers Brian, 19 and Carl, 15, had tried surfing but it never stuck. Cousin Mike Love, the groups lead singer and saxophone player (a must have in the early surf instrumental period), had also given surfing a go. The only non-family member in the original lineup was guitarist David Marks. A neighborhood friend and frequent participant at their family get-togethers, Marks was only 13 at the time and didn't surf either.

They had all tried it. But none of them took to surfing the way Dennis did. They had other preoccupations. "Carl spends money, Brian writes songs, and I just like speed and competition," Dennis explained in a rare 1965 interview with the Harvard Crimson, the Ivy League university’s newspaper. "I like Redondo Beach and Hawthorne and Inglewood, the places I grew up in. That's all."

Shortly after they recorded their first track the band changed their name to The Beach Boys. And that would upend Dennis's youthful world and open the doors to a whole new universe.

His recollections of the first recording session and appearances are very vivid. They performed "Surfin” for the very first time “at a dance at the local Veterans of Foreign Wars,” he told Linda G. Mcveigh, the writer for the Harvard Crimson. “The crowd either foxtrotted or stood around not knowing how to move," Dennis remembered.

The band appeared at a Hawthorne Youth Canteen dance a month later, where a high school classmate in charge of the event was initially against them playing at the venue, preferring to hire any other group for $75, rather than get the Beach Boys for nothing. Two weeks afterward - July of 1962 - "Surfin'" was the number one  hit single in Los Angeles.

From there, it was a high speed elevator ride from the garage to the penthouse with an ocean view. By 1966, The Beach Boys were the biggest band in the world, selling millions of records that personified the California dream and the surfing lifestyle. Wilson was a wildman, an icon, and a car lover. He would, he said, “drive my Ferrari down Hawthorne Boulevard, go home, drive the Cobra along the same street, and do the same thing with the Aston-Martin and my brother's old T-Bird."

It was fun, fun, fun, but Dennis Wilson never forgot his roots. He was a diehard ocean lover who would spend the rest of his short life on the California coast. He was once asked, "What is more beautiful than a 20 foot wave?”

He answered “a 21 foot wave.”

His short-lived surfing life was a pivotal time, a youthful but carefree spree, where, as the song lyrics go “Surfin’ is the only life the only way for me.” And for those couple of years, he was a high school dropout, holed up in the garage sweeping floors , banging on his drum-kit all night and sneaking off at dawn to ride waves at the South Bay beaches. He was a surfer.