Jan Berry and the beauty of summer

"Two girls for every boy ..."

Are there still summer songs?

I don't know, but if there aren't songs that sing of the sweetness of summer, of sunny days, balmy nights and the girls on the beach, it would be a real shame. Because there's nothing like a summer song to help you rejoice in the time that stretches through June, July and August until the evenings get chilly and school beckons.


I think the first summer song I remember was "Surfin' Safari," which I heard in the summer of 1962 on "high-flying WING" radio in Dayton, Ohio. I believe it was 1410 on the AM dial, but it has been nearly 50 years and I'm not sure. I had a cheap little table radio that I had won selling band candy, and I listened to it day and night that summer.

A few hundred yards north of our house, they were building Interstate 70, which eventually would run from Baltimore all the way to the Great Salt Lake. I'd never been to either of those places, but I knew I would someday.

I was 12 in 1962, and I loved those summer songs. The one that was maybe the greatest of all came out the next summer, after we had moved to Virginia. I don't think I had heard much by Jan and Dean at that point, but as soon as I heard the first line of "Surf City," I was hooked.

"Two girls for every boy ..."



I was a huge Beach Boys fan at that point, and "Surf City" was supposedly a song Brian Wilson had given Jan and Dean to record. I remember the record label gave him the writing credit, although at that point I didn't know the politics of such things. I just loved the music.

I had never been near the Pacific Ocean when I was old enough to remember -- I was born in California -- but listening to Jan and Dean and the Beach Boys started a lifelong desire to return that finally came true in 1990.

It wasn't the greatest song musically, even though the melody would be recycled for "Drag City" later that same year, but nothing could match it for exuberance and joy.

Of course, exuberance and joy are pretty ephemeral. They rarely last long, and when I heard in 1966 that Jan Berry had been critically injured in an automobile accident, I thought of "Dead Man's Curve" for a few minutes and then moved on.

I figured that was it, but years later I heard that Berry had made a partial recovery and that Jan and Dean were touring again. I never got the chance to see them, but I just finished reading Bob Greene's wonderful book, "When We Get to Surf City," and it was so poignant it brought tears to my eyes.


You see, Jan never made it all the way back. If you watch the video, you can see him as he looked both after and before the accident. He talked a little slower and he battled all sorts of physical problems from the head injuries he suffered in the accident.

He had to relearn the lyrics of his songs every morning and there were times when he fell in his room and couldn't get up until someone came to help him.

But he toured and he sang. He kept doing what he loved the most and at one point he put together an album of songs all by himself.

Berry died in March 2004, and Greene, who had been touring with Jan and Dean since 1992, wrote of how much he had loved summer. In fact, for 38 years he had lived from summer to summer, battling to keep going. You could probably sum it up with one line from another song, "Ride the Wild Surf."

"Gotta take that one last ride ..."

If you're lucky, you get 75 or 80 summers in your lifetime. Some will be disappointing, others pretty good. If you're lucky, you get a few that are memorable.

Bob Greene has been called "America's poet laureate of summer," which seems to me like a pretty good thing to me, so I'll close this piece with something he wrote.

"If all of life were summer, then our world would have no texture, no context. Summer would not taste the way it does if we thought it would last forever."

"Two girls for every boy."