How the Beach Boys took 'small town' Phoenix by storm in 1964: 'It was a big thing'
The Beach Boys were still riding high on the forward momentum of “I Get Around,” their first chart-topping entry on the Billboard Hot 100, as they made their way to Phoenix to headline a Summer Safari event at the Arizona State Fairgrounds.
It was Friday, Aug. 7, 1964, and the fresh-faced California boys whose latest hit had topped the charts on Independence Day, were being hailed as “America’s answer to the English Beatles in the recording field” in an item announcing the concert that ran in The Arizona Republic not quite two weeks earlier.
The headline read “Beach Boys to dock here” and the item positioned the show as their Phoenix debut, although some local fans recall them having played a smaller venue here in 1963 and the setlist.fm website shows The Beach Boys at Unknown Venue, Phoenix, AZ, USA on July 5, 1963.
One fan remembers them playing at an ice skating rink that day. Another says it was a teen club.
“I saw them in 1963 at a teen club with a $5 admission,” Stephen Cameron says. “As I recall, the club was on Seventh Street. They had a hit that had a lot of play time on the Phoenix radio stations. We heard the drummer had a new Jaguar XK-E but was too young to drive.”
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The Beach Boys were a huge pop-cultural phenomenon by 1964
By the time the Beach Boys hit the fairgrounds stage, they had run 11 classic singles up the pop charts, starting with “Surfin’ Safari” in 1962 and following through with “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” “Shut Down,” “Surfer Girl,” “Little Deuce Coupe,” “Be True to Your School,” “In My Room,” “Little Saint Nick,” “Fun, Fun, Fun,” “I Get Around” and “Don’t Worry Baby.”
We were witnessing a huge pop cultural phenomenon in its supernova stage.
As The Republic noted at the time, “In addition to sales in the recording field, the Beach Boys have been breaking records on their current concert tour. In a recent appearance in Omaha, they drew more than 10,000 fans, breaking a 14-year record that was held by Lawrence Welk. They also broke Johnny Mathis’ record at the Salt Lake City Lagoon last week drawing more than 12,000 fans for a two-night appearance.”
Tickets to the Beach Boys were $2.50 in advance
Presented by KRUX-AM, the Phoenix concert also featured Eddie Griffin, who went on to fame as a member of Bread and won an Oscar for the song “For All We Know”; Eddie Hodges, a former child actor who'd starred in the Broadway Musical “The Music Man”; and the Kingsmen of “Louie Louie” fame, billed as Lynn Easton and the Kingsmen.
Newspaper ads shouted, "Hey kids! Don't miss the show of the year."
Tickets were $3 at the door, $2.50 in advance when purchased at the Linde Box Office in the Sahara Hotel lobby on First Street.
The Beach Boys were pushing their new album, 'All Summer Long'
Janice Buxton was there. So was her brother Glen, who formed the Earwigs that same year at Cortez High School with fellow future members of the Alice Cooper group Vince Furnier and Dennis Dunaway.
“We all loved the Beach Boys,” Janice says.
She was 11 and this was her first concert.
“Glen went with his friends Dave and Nick," she says. "I went with my friends Nora and Mary Lou. We were walking in and saw Dennis Wilson talking to someone outside the gate. We rushed over and got autographs. I have a vague memory of climbing the big cement stairs to our seats.”
She doesn’t remember what songs they played but does recall them pushing their latest long-playing release, "All Summer Long.”
“I bought it with my own money!," she says.
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'I had a huge crush on Dennis. Well, all of them, actually'
Mary Carlton Bickerton has vivid memories of the concert.
She was 15 and about to start her sophomore year at Arcadia High School.
"I had a huge crush on Dennis," she says. "Well, all of them, actually, but him particularly. They were very Southern California stylish. And it was a fabulous show. They didn’t have some of the huge hits they’ve had since then, but they had a lot of them. Everybody was standing up and there were a lot of people there."
She recalls the stage being set up in front of the racetrack.
"And there was a fence between us and them, like a hurricane fence," she says. "I don’t remember anybody trying to storm the fence or anything like that. But it was awesome."
Bickerton says she's pretty sure she remembers them playing “Surfin’ Safari,” “Little Deuce Coupe” and “In My Room," but it's been almost 60 years.
"I don’t know why I didn’t try to get their autographs," she says. "I was so shy when I was in early high school that I probably just couldn’t stand it. I sure wish I had."
'It was kind of a big thing for 1964 in Phoenix'
The Beach Boys' first appearance at the fairgrounds was also Scott Salter's first concert.
He was heading into sixth grade at Greenway Middle School.
"I was a kid at my first concert," Salter says.
"And everybody was just Beach Boy nuts at the time. It was standing room only, I know that. I remember standing for it. It didn’t seem real fancy to me, though. There wasn’t any giant sound system or anything. They were pretty much up on a stage with amplifiers and guitars. And we just had a good time."
He does recall being impressed at how close to the records they sounded.
"The music was real authentic," he says. "It’s not like they changed it up much from their albums. I remember thinking, 'Oh boy, it really sounds like them, too.' And they looked like they did on the album covers."
The surf craze had the Valley in its grip in those days, Salter says.
"That was some good times. We’d have school dances or pool parties, whatever. It was all beach music. And of course, we'd wear our surfing T-shirts."
Seeing a band as big as the Beach Boys in the summer of '64 felt like a major event for the kids in what Salter remembers as "a pretty small town" at the time.
"Kids were talking about it the next day," he says.
"Everybody was jazzed up to be there, all us kids. It was kind of a big thing for 1964 in Phoenix. For my peer group anyway. Sixth graders. There wasn’t a whole lot going on. And to see the Beach Boys, that was a big deal. I can say that for sure."
The Beach Boys stopped by Govway discount store to sign autographs
The Beach Boys also squeezed in an autograph session at Govway, a chain of discount stores that billed itself as Arizona’s largest membership department store, the day of the fairgrounds concert.
As Steve Fresener, who was playing bass in an instrumental surf-rock band, recalls, “I was at Coronado High School and they were announcing on the radio that the Beach Boys were gonna be at Govway signing autographs. So a bunch of us got together and went down.”
Fresener says he didn’t have a record on him, so he stole one from the store.
“I hate to admit to it,” he recalls with a laugh. “But they had a little record department with the record bins so I walked up to one of the bins, turned my back to it and reached behind me and ripped the cellophane off and threw it under the counter. Then I had them autograph the record.”
He still has the record — their first album, “Surfin’ Safari.”
“I kept it all these years,” he says. “Why would you get rid of that?”
How the Tucson Citizen reviewed the Beach Boys show that summer
Although no reviews of the Beach Boys show at the Arizona State Fairgrounds appear to exist, the Tucson Citizen had a writer named Dan Pavillard review their appearance the previous month at the University of Arizona auditorium.
“Five bright-faced lads fresh from the beaches of California brought a tidal wave of entertainment to Tucson last night,” he began. “The Beach Boys, America’s homogenized answer to the British Beatles, rode into the University of Arizona auditorium atop the crest of a towering wave of popularity with the surfin’ set and paddled out again with a beach buggy full of loot.”
He credited their sound with having “just one beat… with the quiet insistence of a jackhammer” and found Mike Love’s enthusiasm to be wildly contagious.
“These wailing boys are far from tone deaf, but certainly are running the risk of becoming stone deaf,” Pavillard rhymed. “The decibel level in the auditorium was sky high. Only with difficulty could one catch enough of the words from amidst the amplified whanging of steel guitars even to fit a song with a title — as if that mattered.”
He was able to decipher enough lyrics over the “shrieks, squeals and whinnies (that) greeted the initial chord of every number” to give a hint of what a Beach Boys setlist might include at that point.
According to Pavillard’s review, their set included their take on the Rivingtons’ “Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow,” “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” “In My Room,” “Let’s Go Trippin’” and “I Get Around.”
Reach the reporter at ed.masley@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4495. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @EdMasley.
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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Beach Boys 1st Arizona State Fairgrounds concert remembered
