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At the very beginning, for a few months in 1961, the Beach Boys still called themselves The Pendletones. Named after the clothing company “Pendleton” from Oregon, which produced patterned shirts of cotton shirts. According to today’s standards, a cult brand that fit perfectly with the early sixties. Previously, the teen film series “Gidget” had already mixed Beach Girls, Hot Rods and massive wooden surfboards into a brightly colored beach utopia. The kitschy start of the “Endless Summer”.
A photo with a surfboard from that early phase shows the Wilson brothers, cousin Mike Love and Al Jardine in that pendleton outfit of their first hits “Surfin ‘Safari” or “409” (the souped-up engine of a Chevrolet impala). In the meantime in Beach Boys, the band became “Low Key Style Gods”. Ami-boys from the West Coast, which should be “high key” style in their own way in just a few years.
The teenage band was willingly put into bad -sitting show suits. What they regarded as a necessary evil to assert themselves in the world of adults. She was not interested in fashion in the sense of expression or self -realization.
A nerd who became the king of anti-styles
You can see that in their private photos, which would live up to today’s perspective of the “Normcore” category. They wanted to make their music. Mastermind Brian Wilson in particular cultivated his quirky appearance beyond the surfing of surfing. A nerd who became the king of anti-styles.
The Beach Boys played live and on TV in broadly striped shirts that are inserted in chino pants. Always short -sleeved, with a few open buttons. Still healthy and still looking, Brian Wilson wore his cheeky, mod-like great. With just a few updates, this uniform would look pretty cool in the retro-sound world of Instagram and Co.
In the year until 1966, until the groundbreaking album “Pet Sounds”, not only the sound became more complex. The Beach Boys had left the beach behind for the time being. The coversation of the album shot in the San Diego zoo brought with it some remarkable outtakes. Posing in front of a giraffe, Carl Wilson looks like a field service of an IT company. The rest of the band could be an investigator team from a TV thriller of that time. Dennis Wilson in Barkeper-West and Cowboy boots. On the cover, this fits into a merger between the beat and early psychedilia, as they also maintained the San Francisco colleagues from Beau Brummels.
It was again Brian Wilson, who brings his very own note into this bizarre in his blue-black Peacoat Seemanns jacket with a double button strip. The hairstyle now piled up to the helmet, he casually gives the captain. A rapidly grown-up genius that leads the beach boys command behind his mixer bridge in the studio.
This moment of sovereignty should soon go with the failed recordings to “smile” in the summer of 1967. The iconic pictures of Brian Wilson with the children’s fire brigade helmet stand for the beginning of his creative and mental rumpel route. A time document of a cropped phase that unleashed the inner demons of the stylish nerd. His appearance slipped into the bearded shagginess of the 1970s, as with the rest of Beach Boys …