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Clean-cut vocal duo from Los Angeles, California, best known for their 1963 #1 single "Surf City." By definition, Jan and Dean, like their friends and chart rivals the Beach Boys, don't belong to the reverb-soaked instrumental surf music genre. They instead recorded catchy, singalong records about the teenage life in coastal Southern California that revolved around surfing, the beach, cars, and girls.

Jan Berry and Dean Torrence, both born in Los Angeles in the early '40s, were football teammates in junior high school, and originally recorded in the late '50s as a modestly successful doo-wop group. After the Beach Boys hit the charts in 1961, Jan and Dean began writing surf and hot rod songs. Beach Boy Brian Wilson cowrote and sang backup on Jan and Dean's "Surf City," famous for its gremmie-fantasy opening line, "Two girls for every boy!" (Torrence returned the favor with the uncredited lead vocal on the Beach Boys' 1965 hit "Barbara Ann.") "Surf City" was the first surf song to hit #1 nationally.

Jan and Dean in fact sold more records than the Beach Boys in 1963 and 1964, with hits like "Honolulu Lulu" (#11), "The Little Old Lady (From Pasadena)" (#3), "Ride the Wild Surf" (#16; the theme song from Columbia Pictures' like-titled movie), "Sidewalk Surfin'" (#25), and "Dead Man's Curve" (#8). While they didn't have an artistic second act, the way the Beach Boys did, Jan and Dean's lush, hook-filled hits were as fun as anything made at the time.

In 1964, Jan and Dean hosted the T.A.M.I. Show, at the Santa Monica Civic, and introduced one of the greatest rock-and-roll lineups ever assembled. Acts included Chuck Berry, the Beach Boys, the Supremes, Smokey Robinson, the Rolling Stones, and Marvin Gaye.

Berry did most of the duo's songwriting, sang lead and produced, while Torrence did the group's signature falsetto bits. Both somehow managed to remain full-time students during the height of their pop celebrity, Torrence as an architecture student at UCLA, Berry a graphic design student at USC.

Jan and Dean's personal lives weren't always as sunny as their hits. In 1964, Torrence made headlines as the not-fully-clued-in money man for the bungled kidnapping of Frank Sinatra Jr. Two years later, just a few blocks from the real-life Dead Man's Curve, Berry crashed his Corvette Stingray into a parked truck, killing his three passengers and leaving him brain damaged and partially paralyzed. For years afterward, he was taken to a nearby studio where he recorded demo tapes as therapy. Torrence's graphic design firm meanwhile went on to create album covers for the Beach Boys, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and Linda Ronstadt, among others.

Berry was able to perform again by 1973, and in 1982 Jan and Dean released 

, a live album. The group toured on and off over the next three decades. Berry died in 2004, at age 62, following a seizure related to his crash injuries.

, a CBS made-for-TV movie, came out in 1978.

Jan and Dean

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