Jan & Dean
It was considered the last age of innocence, the mid-1950s. They were typical high school students wanting to get through school. Sports were the most important thing at that time. Music came second. Dean Torrence and Jan Berry were on the football team at University High School in West Los Angeles, Calif. They and a number of their teammates had a strange attraction for the locker-room showers where, after practice, they would all get together and harmonize the hit doo-wop platters of the day. “The echo sound we were able to produce in the locker room, due to the neat old tile, was just absolutely great,” says Torrence. “It made just about anybody sound good.” As the football season came to an end and the next season’s sport occupied the shower room, they were challenged to take their act elsewhere. Jan Berry’s parents set the guys up in their four-car garage. Some of the guys didn’t feel it was time well spent to now have to drive somewhere to sing, so, “It broke down to Jan and me wasting our time,” Torrence shares. “People would float in and out based on their girlfriend status at the time. Girls didn’t want to give up their guy to a bunch of other guys. Plus they knew that Jan was extremely popular with girls so they didn’t like that, either. The first thing a girl would do was pull a guy out of the group because they knew that was the quickest way to lose him. We enjoyed singing with other vocalists as a vocal band but with two guys – where we wanted to be Deon and the Belmonts – we were now the Everly Brothers.” Jan and Dean went on to become an overnight sensation when they performed “Baby Talk” on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand in the early summer of 1959. “Baby Talk” exploded on the national charts, reaching number 10 almost overnight. In high school, Torrence also had a second interest in art and art culture, which in those days was pin-striping. Teenage boys expressed themselves artistically in those days by how they put together their car or hot rod. He bought a couple of brushes and visited a few pros to see how they did it. He says, “I wasn’t that good, but my friends that couldn’t afford the best pin-stripers thought my work was pretty good. I did hand lettering on cars and got pretty good at that.” Once Jan and Dean started making music Torrence dabbled in being somewhat involved in their packaging. He felt the music and the visuals should complement each other, especially when they started producing music about the California hot rod culture and the surf culture. In those days most of the record companies had an art department and they dictated what was going to be done to the record packaging. He says, “I realized that we needed to incorporate something of what we were singing about into the packaging and the graphics. That seemed at the time so abstract to these art departments. They just wanted to put our picture on the package with some type and move on. So, it was always a big battle. They would let me do something on the back or on the liner where I could write the liner notes and maybe pick out a few pictures. That wasn’t what I really wanted to do.”
Their music defined an era that is still relevant today. It was really the only thing they knew enough about to write about [hot rods and surfing] at that time. Plus, it was something they enjoyed. It defined the late 1950s into the mid-1960s. Jan and Dean’s marketing appeal was the casual sweater-and- loafer look. “It was what we were wearing,” says Torrence. “It was the first time the ‘look’ had been done. Our managers were real slick guys. They liked the suits and the thin ties, their little tie tacks and rings. In the very beginning that kind of worked for us, but then, left to our own devices, we got tired of that and started just showing up wearing what we happened to be wearing at the time. In fact, we showed up at a television show and Jan was in a sweater because he had just gone to some school function and I had just gotten out of a girlfriend’s pool and showed up in a bathing suit and a T-shirt. I remember the host of the show looking at us and saying, ‘It’s good to see that success did not go to your wardrobe.’ That was one of the coolest compliments we had ever received. The kids coming to our concerts wanted to be like us. They wanted to wear what we are wearing. What were they going to do, go out and buy a $300 suit? I don’t think so. We did understand what we were doing – it wasn’t just by accident. It would help us to define us, that we were something different.” When surf music first hit, Jan and Dean took their long boards to New York to do a Dick Clark show. “We wanted to see if we could get them on an airplane, get them in a taxi cab and take them on the subway,” explains Torrence. “It worked great. We got all sorts of publicity for pulling that off.” Jan and Dean were the number-six-selling singles artists of 1964, just behind Elvis, The Beach Boys, The Four Seasons, The Dave Clark Five, and The Beatles. Continually pursuing their education, Berry had entered med school at UCLA and Torrence earned a BFA in Advertising Design from USC. On April 12, 1966, well into their career of making hit records, William Jan Berry, at the age of 25, crashed his Stingray into a parked truck on a side street in Beverly Hills. He was rushed to UCLA Hospital where he underwent multiple brain surgeries and was in a coma for weeks. “I could tell when Jan crashed that it was over,” says Torrence. “It wasn’t the way any of us intended it to be over. I thought it was going to be a gradual thing and we would eventually see the handwriting on the wall. This was pretty sudden. It was literally over in one day. So I packed up my stuff from college and headed out to find a job. Since my background was in design, I thought packaging would be a really neat thing. I understood the connection between the audio, visual, career building, etc. Art departments in record companies weren’t focused this way. I saw a niche market to side-step art departments and encouraged my musical friends who were still making records to hire me independently to design their album covers. In November of 1967 I opened my graphic design studio Kittyhawk Graphics.” Jan Berry beat the odds and emerged from his coma, pushing himself through many years of recovery with the support and help of family and friends. Over the next seven years he learned to sing again, and it was another five years before he and Dean attempted an official Jan and Dean comeback. Torrence continued, “I started missing Jan when he had his accident. He was never quite the same after that. After the accident Surf City Lyrics Golden Bear Live Aloha Brand he was almost a totally different person. The new guy I cared for, but we didn’t have anything particularly in common. It was fun to give him a vehicle to get out and perform live because he really loved it. As far as being a part of the team he wasn’t because he didn’t really understand anything that we were doing or why we did it. He was kind of along for the ride. But still it was a good ride and he enjoyed it, but being a part of the camaraderie, he had nothing to do with that, which was a shame, but it was what it was. “He went from having an IQ of about 175 to 68. It was very limited the kinds of things he enjoyed. For the most part he liked to get on stage and perform his songs. Other than that he liked to be in his hotel room and watch TV or sleep and have room service. “I believe that anyone else who would have suffered that amount of brain damage would have been sitting in some rehab situation until they passed away. He got an extra 20 years out of it. We played 1,500 to 2,000 concerts in those 20 years, more than we ever did in the 1960s. He traveled with us to Europe. We played in the People’s Republic of China for a month, so he got to do some pretty neat stuff. Hopefully he got some enjoyment out of it. It is a shame his accident happened, but it could have also been a lot worse.” Jan Berry died March 26, 2004. He was 62. Torrence’s graphics business took hold in the late 1960s into the 1970s when LPs were still popular. Their 12x12-inch size was a big surface for Torrence to work with. Then the gatefolds came on the scene – the album covers that opened up. Now Torrence had a 12x24-inch surface to deal with. He says, “All of a sudden, packaging became extremely important and I was right in the middle of it. By that time I was one of the experts in the field and doing quite well. I was getting published a lot. I won lots of awards, got nominated for three Grammys and won one. I never got nominated for a Grammy for music, which I thought was ironic, to say the least. Through the 1970s repackaging oldies, or ‘catalogs’ as they called it, became very fashionable, so record companies started pulling music out of their catalogs or vaults and repackaged them. There I was repackaging Jan and Dean music and designing them the way I wanted to.
