639 Jan and Dean “Surf City” 1963

“In the mid 1960s, Jan Berry (1941-2004) was the golden boy of Southern California pop: tall, blond and handsome; a medical student with a genius-level IQ; and a million-selling star as half of the surf-rock duo Jan and Dean. As a singer, producer and song-writer, Berry scored ten Top Thirty hits from 1963 to 1965 with Dean Torrence (1940- ), his best friend since high school…Then, on the morning of April 12th, 1966, nine days after his twenty-fifth birthday, Berry plowed his Corvette into a parked truck in Beverly Hills. He narrowly survived the accident; his career did not. Berry suffered severe brain damage from which he never fully recovered. But despite partial paralysis and impaired speech, Berry fought to make music for the rest of his life” (David Fricke, Rolling Stone, 2004). 

Jan and Dean “Surf City”