Call it eerie, call it prophetic, call it tragic, they are all appropriate for what happened on April 12, 1966.
Jan Berry, half of the duo Jan and Dean, crashed his Corvette into a parked truck not far from “Dead Man’s Curve,” the dangerous stretch of Sunset Boulevard he made famous in a song by the same name two years before.
Police thought Berry was dead when they reached his mangled car. He suffered a severe head injury and spent two months in a coma.
He had to learn to live again, learning to talk and walk. He lived with permanent brain damage until he died in 2004, but he never stopped making songs and touring.
Jan and Dean had four top ten singles in 1963-64 including “Dead Man’s Curve,” “Surf City,” “Drag City” and “Little Old Lady From Pasadena.” They, along with the Beach Boys, popularized the surf and California music of the early 1960s. They painted a picture of an idyllic California for teenagers to dream of.
Beach Boy Brian Wilson, Artie Kornfield, who organized the Woodstock music festival, DJ Roger Christian and Berry were credited with writing the song. Wilson and Kornfield started writing it after crashing Wilson’s Honda motorcycle.
The song was about a drag-race incident that turned deadly. The driver of a Corvette is stopped at a light on Sunset Boulevard when a driver in a Jaguar pulls up and challenges him to a race.
The song doesn’t end happily. The driver of the Jag dies after going off the road at Dead Man’s Curve.
The song reached number eight on the Billboard Hot 100.
Song of the Day is created by Sheldon Zoldan, and produced by Pam James for WGCU. To receive the Song of the Day in your inbox every day, email shzoldan@comcast.net with the subject line ADD ME TO SOTD.
