Jan & Dean

Riding a wave that spanned three generations, the story of California's Jan & Dean is, in miniature, the story of American youth between the late Fifties and the mid-Sixties: a story of the conquest of freedom and the loss of innocence. Still very young, Jan & Dean were almost exact contemporaries of rock'n'roll's first season; a few years later, alongside the Beach Boys, they celebrated the summer of surf-rock; and finally, in the brief closing chapter of their arc, they shared a similar fate to Brian Wilson's band: surfboards put away, their music took on a hint of psychedelia and a nostalgia for a golden age now lost.

Today there would be more than one good reason to rediscover their catalogue, but here we'll focus on one album in particular: "Save For A Rainy Day". Like the Beach Boys' legendary "Smile", this was a record that, at the time, was never officially released (save for a mere 1,500 copies on the private J&D label), becoming instead the object of an underground cult. Then, in 1996, Sundazed bought the tapes and put out a much-needed, historically faithful reissue, with more tracks than the original.

Some records make history, and others - like this one - have a story to tell. So let's go back to the early Sixties, when California was a mythical land, celebrated by young people who seemed destined never to grow up, just as summer seemed like it would last forever... Those kids shared a passion for surfing, cars, sweet girls and, of course, rock'n'roll. In 1961, a genre was born that soundtracked their lives and fed their mythology: "surf", the final season of Fifties rock'n'roll. Alongside his friend Brian Wilson, Jan Berry was among its most gifted architects, and between '63 and '65 he crafted a string of small but precious hits.

And what of Dean Torrence? Tall, blond and athletic, Dean was a true "beach boy": more than an author of the California saga, he was its living embodiment; his musical contribution was often secondary, at times almost negligible. Rock history also remembers him for duetting with Brian Wilson on the euphoric "Barbara Ann", the famous Beach Boys song (a cover of the Regents) featured on the album "Party!" (1965). Symbolically, that "party" was the last carefree get-together among friends before the times changed. As the decade wore on, the kids who had grown up on Beach Boys and Jan & Dean songs found themselves adults: Vietnam was calling, the surfboards were hung up for good. Month after month, that world of eternal beauty and youth crumbled like a dream upon waking; the illusion of an "endless summer" was swept away by restless autumnal undertones, and, in the meantime, new musical movements were taking hold.

In mid-1966, "Pet Sounds" came out, the fruit of the genius and instability of a Brian Wilson on the verge of collapse. It was the spiritual testament of surf music: the group that had spawned the Californian myth was now mourning the end of summer and youth. After such a heartfelt album, nothing would ever be the same again. As Kingsley Abbott writes, "Save For A Rainy Day would be inconceivable if not in the wake of 'Pet Sounds'". We might add that it would also be inconceivable without what happened on April 12, 1966: Jan Berry suffered a serious car accident that left him in a coma for weeks and would leave him debilitated for life.

A strange fate befell the duo: Jan, the brilliant producer, crashed near the very location described in one of his songs, "Dead Man's Curve", and from that moment on lost his gifts; Dean, who had never shown any particular talent, conceived the most memorable chapter of their career and one of the most intense in all of West Coast music. While his partner lay in a hospital bed, Dean decided to keep the name alive, narrating the epilogue of the Californian saga. It all began with "Yellow Balloon", a gem of a song written by his friend Gary Zekley, about a rainy afternoon. Dean fell in love with the tune and thought of building a concept album around rain. Gathering a handful of musicians in a garage, he recorded a series of songs: in the original project there were ten, five originals and five covers, in mono and with an exquisitely lo-fi feel. None of the tracks, however, bear Torrence's own songwriting credit; but the project, the production and the lead vocals are his.

"Yellow Balloon", the only single released by Columbia, expresses the wonder of discovering new sensations, coming from someone who had always celebrated summer: "I never liked the rain before/ it always made me stay inside/ there's one thing that I know for sure/ I've got a reason to like it since you took me for a rainbow ride". With these words begins an initiatory journey through the rain: a symbol of loss, disintegration, regeneration.

The songs seem to spring, almost visionary, from that very sound of rain marking the passage from one track to the next: amid childhood memories and uneasy premonitions, the imagination overflows into the sweet languor (of the covers) of "Pocket Full Of Rainbows" and "When Sunny Gets Blue", into the shadows of "Like A Summer Rain", and into the faint melancholy of "Cryin' In The Rain", where the awareness of summer's end finally sets in.

The closing instrumental track, penned by keyboardist Larry Knechtel, is the last glimmer of the California sun: the album ends as it began, with the sound of raindrops bringing us back to reality or, perhaps, to a dream.

Why wasn't the album officially released at the time? Beyond the conflicting accounts of the practical reasons, there may be a deeper cause for why it remained hidden and nearly forgotten for three decades: it seems to reveal a secret, an episode erased from the consciousness of a generation that squandered its best years. "Save For A Rainy Day" tells how, on a late-summer afternoon, the golden Californian dream dissolved... like tears in the rain.

(Published in issue no. 642 of "Mucchio Selvaggio", January 2008)

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28/05/2008