Dean Torrance Shares Tales of the Glory Days

Dean Torrance admitted that he did have a few regrets. This came after I asked him if he’d ever met any of the Beatles. Torrance is the Dean in Jan and Dean, the surf music band that had its heyday in the early sixties, when their songs like “Surf City” and “Little Old Lady from Pasadena” were chart toppers. When Dean met Paul McCartney at Brian Wilson’s birthday party in the ’80s, the Beatle offered him a phone number to attend a Wings concert as his guest. But Dean had a volleyball game, so he declined.

I had lunch with Dean at an outdoor restaurant in Huntington Beach called Sharkeez, where he’s a regular. We were joined by Don, who works at his design firm and is an avid collector of the artwork once painted for California fruit crates. We ate lobster tacos and fish burritos and watched a parade of Ferraris and a Lamborghini saunter by on Main St.

We talked about the music business and it was clear that he is pretty much disgusted with how the record companies treated him and how they handled them over the years. “We might be selling our songs on iTunes,” he said, “I just don’t know. The problem with the business was that it was always geared to making albums, not singles, and very few bands can make an entire album of great songs….We would spend months trying to get a really great single done but then we’d have to rush to finish many more songs to make the album.”

He and his songwriting partner Jan, who was in a car crash in 1966 and was unable to continue in the band, were tapped by the label to do a Christmas song. “Frosty the Snowman,” was the saccharine, yet durable result.

Nowadays, the 67-year old Torrance is a fixture in Huntington Beach, where he is a volunteer on the Convention and visitor’s bureau and very active in the real estate business and also runs a design agency. He created the Beach Boy’s logo and continues to hammer his fellow board members on the importance of branding. Design is something central to him, and it comes up again and again.

The city got a trademark on the name Surf City USA in 2004, and now licenses the name on products like a beach cruiser bike and countless apparel items. But Torrance feels very strongly that design and branding is crucial to successful marketing of this tourist mecca, sometimes to the objections of the other board members who often are more concerned with other matters. He makes a good point—one of the most visible landmarks on the beautiful eight-mile long wide beach in the city is a natural gas power plant, that belches huge columns of smoke and looks terrible. There must be a way, suggests Torrance, to make that look a little nicer. Screening, paint, anything to take away the sheer ugliness of the massive structure. It’s about design, and branding, he says again and again.

He’s lent his time and his name to burnishing the city’s Surf City moniker, even enduring the wrath of the people in Santa Cruz, who make the same name claim to their city.

In the small Surfing Museum on a Huntington Beach Side street, Torrance helped collate an exhibit of Beach Boys memorabilia, including one fascinating artifact–a blow up of the hand written words to one of his big hits, written first by Brian Wilson, then edited by Torrance. You can see the changes where Wilson’s words were changed and improved by Dean.

He’s been in Huntington Beach for eighteen years, raising two daughters now ages 14 and 18, and he describes the city “as good as it gets.” Though he’s always been known for his surfing songs, he hasn’t been on a board for four years. “Hawaii spoiled me,” he said, “it’s just too cold.”