Beyond The Beach: A Conversation with Dean Torrence

By Jack Habegger

Jan & Dean sat high above the surf pack in the 1960’s, breathing the rarefied air that only The Beach Boys were privileged to share. The surf music craze may have been seen as “kid’s stuff” by the record industry, but history has proven that it was a key link between the first wave of early rock and roll and the British Invasion. In 1966, the duo took a hit when band leader Jan Berry was critically injured in an automobile accident and the prospects of Jan and Dean continuing their career were thrown into doubt. Despite huge hits like “Dead Man’s Curve”, “The Little Old Lady From Pasadena”, and of course, “Surf City”, Dean Torrence was facing the very real prospect of a career change. Luckily, he was already enrolled in college and had a back-up plan in an arts career.

Dean Torrence: Jan crashed, and I was out of a job that quickly. I had been going to USC, and I was in the school of architecture and fine arts. I was more in the fine arts part but I still did take architectural classes as well. The stuff that I seemed to have the most interest in was packaging and trademarking and branding of products, and I thought of us as being a product. Well, there was no longer us, Jan was in the hospital, in a coma, and then once he got out of the hospital it was two to three years of rehab, trying to get him back to as normal as they could get him, but I knew it was going to take a while, if ever. We weren’t even sure if he would ever be well enough to ever do music again. So meanwhile, I took my diploma, along with my degree in advertising and design, and just applied it to the music industry.

The young surf musician quickly found himself at odds with the record industry’s out of touch art directors.

D: The art department decides what’s best, and I always found that quite odd because the guys were usually older, the guys in the art department, I just thought they didn’t really have a clue. First of all, they never listened to the music, and their idea of a record cover was somebody’s face on it and some type. I instinctively knew that wasn’t very good, and that the whole idea was to use that space, that 12x12 space, to promote the actual recording artist and try and portray that recording artist, the character of that artist and the essence of what music they were doing, instead of just putting some faces on there that don’t really tell you anything. So that was always a bone of contention, I was always butting heads with the guys in the art department, especially when we started doing surfing songs.

While the band was at the height of their career, Jan and Dean saw themselves as ambassadors for a certain idea of Southern California that the rest of the country was eager to discover. Dean’s desire to give an authentic snapshot of West Coast youth culture pushed him to see the band’s music and image as two sides of the same coin.

D: Once we did records about the Southern California lifestyle and culture, I thought the kids back there in the Midwest, the landlocked places, are going to want to know what it’s like to live in California, specifically in Southern California. We should be showing some of that stuff on our record covers, because that was the only place you could show it in those days. There weren’t videos, there weren’t all those other things going on. So you kind of had to show what you were about on your LP covers. Again, I was always the one that wanted to do photo sessions actually at the beach and not in a photo studio, and go on location. Hell, they didn’t want to go on location, that means you have to drive somewhere. They were lazy, absolutely lazy people. They were used to doing it the way they were doing it, and nobody ever questioned it. I was a troublemaker, because I was questioning it. So we just started to do that, we were into it by maybe two years of trying to push the whole graphic look of our stuff, so I got into maybe two years and I still didn’t have the kind of control that I really wanted, but I was getting bits and pieces of it.

Dean’s frustrations with the industry as a musician put him in a unique position to work with other artists as a designer. He understood that his peers were looking to maintain some control over their image, and he was able to bring their ideas into reality.

D: That was kind of where most of my friends were, in the music industry. So I kind of had a built in clientele. Most of the artists that I knew were all going through what we did, they were very frustrated. They wanted to express themselves, not only musically, they were doing that, but also wanting to express themselves visually. They knew that was obviously very important. So that’s how I started my business, within I’d say about three years when I got my first GRAMMY nomination. Never got a GRAMMY nomination for music, because most of the time we were making music, Frank Sinatra was still the one who was getting the GRAMMY nominations. All the GRAMMYs were still run by 40 and 50 year olds, and they weren’t paying any attention to 20 year olds. So we never actually got nominated for any music, even though we had seven top ten records in a row, but nonetheless. Then I’m in the graphics business, and in three years I had my first nomination, over an album cover. Actually, that was the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. I’m looking at it right here on my wall, so that was 1970. So the first cover I got nominated for was in 1970, then I got nominated the year after that, which I actually won a GRAMMY, for a 1971 album cover. Then I got nominated in ‘75 again, for another Nitty Gritty Dirt Band cover. So yeah, nominated twice, won once for design. Maybe they were trying to tell me something! This is what you should be doing, screw music. I eventually got the art directors all fired. Two of those nominations were with the record company that we were on as Jan and Dean, and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band were also on Liberty Records, and so the president of the company is kinda scratching his head going “How come Dean can do this and we’ve never had any nominations for anything?” And they started paying attention to graphic design and how important record packaging was. Right about that time, the 70s, some of the best packaging came out because all of a sudden it exploded. Of course, The Beatles helped. The Beatles finally had control over their graphic design, and then of course once that happened, all artists wanted control. It was a whole new ballgame and a lot of the art directors got replaced by younger people, and I kind of started a whole fresh new movement.

That “fresh new movement” included a shift toward the far-out design aesthetic of psychedelia and the hippie counter culture. Dean’s first album cover design was for The Turtles of “Happy Together” fame.

D: I designed a cover for The Turtles. “The Turtles’ Golden Hits”, probably volume one, which had “Happy Together” on it and the rest of their stuff. Very psychedelic. I never understood it, but you know, it was their idea, and that’s what I was there for, letting the artists decide what they wanted to put on it, and I wanted the artists to be happy with it and proud of it. I would suggest things to artists if they tried to do something a little too goofy, that most people wouldn’t understand, so I was kind of a nice balance between what the record company would like and what the artist would like. But I had always hoped to please the artists because they’re the ones that have to live with that album cover for the rest of their lives. And the art director was on to the next cover.

Dean’s work in design extended beyond album covers. Other artists felt comfortable with him enough to throw any idea at him. One such artist was singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson. The brilliantly creative Nilsson was a favorite of John Lennon, and is best known for his string of hits in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Dean felt an immediate artistic kinship with Nilsson.

D: Harry and I were blood brothers. He also was a rebel. Didn’t really like doing anything that the record companies would want him to do, because he knew they were a bunch of fools.

Dean and Harry’s friendship eventually led to collaborating on Harry’s 1971 film, “The Point”.

D: I loved everything about The Point. The movie was inspired by something I did for him for his birthday, actually it was his wife’s idea to animate one of his songs. I just didn’t have the knowledge, I knew how animation was done, but you have to have all the right equipment to do it. I figured I could do clay animation. I told his wife Diane what kind of camera to rent, so she got a 16mm movie camera and put it on a tripod. And I just shot frames at a time, and made the thing. I timed it all out, so that the thing I was doing in clay would match the song. I came pretty close. So I did a whole clay animation to the song “Think About Your Troubles”, and at his birthday party, of course this was a surprise, we showed it and he became unglued! It actually worked, I was so surprised. He was so inspired, he said “I should do a whole concept around this”. And that’s how The Point got started. Then we just decided not to do clay animation, because it didn’t have color to it, so we had a professional animator animate it.

The two men forged an artistic alliance that grew through informal brainstorming sessions.

D: We would just sit around and come up with the concepts for the stuff. I never got any credit for it particularly. I never went into the animation studio, but Harry and I would work on stuff at his house, how we wanted things to look, and then it was given to the animator. I kind of like the animation, kind of not, but it was what the record company could afford at the time, or I think the television network paid for it. But it was good, it was good enough, certainly I loved the music. The music was spot-on. And the concept was brilliant. I thought that animated little movie should be shown to elementary school kids.

The finished film was shown on network television in February of 1971. It is a delightful, modern fable with a great lesson promoting individuality. The accompanying album art presented an opportunity to extend the artistic concept even further.

D: Then, in designing the album cover, of course we had gotten into the concept of The Point and that everything must have a point, so we “spoke in pointillism”, everything had the point in there in any sort of talking and conversing that we did. Just because we enjoyed trying to do it, so of course the album cover needed to be something to do with the point, and my sister and my mom were doing needlepoint. I thought, “There you go.” I let my sister do the cover, and let my mom do the back, and then they’ll get credit in it. I pretty much designed the cover, how I wanted it, and then my sister executed it in needlepoint, did a beautiful job. I have that sitting in my closet, because I don’t want it to get bleached out. The original piece of art, which is pretty neat.

The Point wasn’t the only project Dean worked with Nilsson on that fell outside of the scope of what the average musician was doing. A stunt of theirs that never saw the light of day was a promotional billboard in the desert.

D: Harry wanted it to be on I-5 or whatever freeway goes out towards Vegas. We found a billboard in a spot that would get half a million cars going by it a day, and we thought, “That’s a lot of exposure.” Of course the record company said, “Why do you want to be out there?” Well, the Hollywood ones were ten times more expensive and only a couple thousand people would see them a day. Wouldn’t you want to be someplace where 500,000-600,000 people a day would look at something? We even had– it said “Free records at the next gas station.” People could stop, fill up their tanks, plus get a free record. Because you know, we figured “How many people are actually going to do that?” What if you got one or two a day? The record company could afford to give away one or two records a day, just for the publicity of “check this out.” I’m sure the media, if they knew about the story, would have loved it. That you could actually pull into the next gas station and fill up, maybe you had to fill up, you couldn’t just go into the gas station and get the record, you had to fill your gas tank and then you’d get a free LP. What would have cost the record company? Nothing, and the amount of publicity that you’d get for it would be priceless. But see, record companies didn’t really think like that particularly, believe it or not. It was so abstract to them, but Harry had forced them to do stuff they didn’t want to do, and every time they did it, it worked. Then they’d take credit for it.

Dean enjoyed a successful, albeit short, career performing with Jan & Dean. He shared his journey with bandmate Jan Berry, a close friend as well as collaborator.

D: All the time we were making music together, we got along great. I was his roommate when he kicked his girlfriend out, at the time of his accident. I had been living probably at his house for 2 years or so. For people being business partners for 7 years, sometimes you don’t get along, but we got along great. I enjoyed his company, and obviously he enjoyed mine. He let me move in, gave me a great room right opposite the pool. We hardly ever had an argument. We’d have disagreements like anybody would, the only thing we would ever disagree about is music. Rest of the stuff we pretty much thought the same about. The only time we had any problems about music was I would sometimes tell him the song was ok, I’m not criticizing the song, or even what you want to do with it, in my mind, I was thinking of branding. I don’t think Jan understood branding yet, he would just pick out a song that he liked, and I would say, well, that’s ok but Jan and Dean need to be doing a certain kind of music. Even if there is a song that we could record that we would like personally, it may not be a song that Jan and Dean should be doing. I don’t think he really ever grasped that. He just liked music for music’s sake, and I can understand that, but that doesn’t mean that we have to do it. So that was the only disagreements of musical things that we would do from time to time. I didn’t think that Jan and Dean should be singing ballads, especially after we were doing pretty hardcore southern california, car culture, surf culture songs. We didn’t need to be Frankie Avalon. Leave that to Frankie. We liked Frankie Avalon’s songs, that didn’t mean we needed to be singing them. So again, those battles were just, you know, we’d never get pissed off at it, but I just figured I had time for re-endoctornating him in terms of how to think about branding. I didn’t even know the word branding at the time, but that’s later what I realized was exactly what I was doing. But all the guys, with everybody that was doing the other album covers, then I really got good at branding. Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, everything was always a whole lot of stuff that was brown, dirt brown. You get a certain look, a certain color scheme, and you keep doing it, because the more you do it, people get used to seeing it, and know almost immediately when they see it, oh that’s a Nitty Gritty Dirt Band LP. They can tell by glancing at it. I think I saw that first with Peter, Paul and Mary. I enjoyed folk music, and I liked Peter, Paul and Mary’s stuff, and I noticed they were using the same font, the same lettering, on multiple covers, and I went, boy that’s interesting. They’re treating their career as a real business, with real branding, and they're doing their branding by using that type style, which was kind of a folk, hippie type style. I thought that was really brilliant. So that’s what I wanted to keep doing. I later used the word “continuity” a lot. Put the continuity between the visuals, the spoken word, your liner notes had to look like they came from the same people that decided what the art should be. When we first started, one department did liner notes, another department did the photography, another department did the actual covers, and the publicity department did something totally different. I went holy cow, this is really stupid. Nobody’s talking to one another. You need continuity if you want to brand! It all has to look alike, and every part of it needs to look like all the elements are all the same, and they fit together. So unfortunately, I didn’t get to do it for Jan and Dean, but I got enough stuff done, but not quite what I would have done had Jan not crashed.

While Jan & Dean’s career didn’t last as long as some of their contemporaries, Dean Torrence left an indelible mark on the music industry, both in the spotlight and behind the scenes. This year, Dean celebrated his 84th birthday in his home of Huntington Beach, CA, where “Surf City” is the official town theme song.

Jack Habegger is a regular contributor to Low Profile.