The recent passing of Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys has once again brought attention to the band’s ties to Utah. Their first performance in Utah was at Lagoon’s Patio Gardens (the building which now houses Dracula’s Castle and the arcade). But the band’s popularity here started well before they played their first note in the Beehive State.
The Beach Boys formed in 1961 as the Pendletones, named after the Pendleton wool shirts that were popular among surfers, and which the band used to wear while performing. They recorded a demo of their first song, “Surfin'”, and they soon had a record deal. A promoter from the label changed their name for their first single, without telling the band, and from then on they were known as the Beach Boys.
During their formative years in Hawthorne, California, the Beach Boys consisted of brothers Brian, Carl and Dennis Wilson, their cousin, Mike Love, and their friend, Al Jardine. A long-time neighbor, David Marks, joined soon after. They were managed by the Wilsons’ father, Murry, who had made a career as a songwriter.
Murry had a friend in Utah who was the program manager at Salt Lake’s most popular radio station at the time, KNAK on 1280 AM. His name was Bill Hesterman, or “Daddy-O” as he was known on the air. The Hesterman family would visit the Wilsons during their trips to California.
The Beach Boys had become a regional success on the west coast with songs all about surfing, cars and the lifestyle of young beach-goers. As with other popular bands of the day, Hesterman was responsible for introducing Utah to their music and bringing them to Lagoon through concerts presented by KNAK.
Some say Hesterman was the first to play the Beach Boys on the radio outside of California. He built up a solid following for the band in Utah and over a period of seven years, the Beach Boys visited Lagoon (and the Lagoon-operated Terrace Ballroom) a total of 12 times. They often performed multiple times on each visit, making a total of 23 individual shows from 1963 to 1970.
Here’s a list of those appearances, followed by a breakdown of each visit.
| BEACH BOYS AT LAGOON (and The Terrace) | |
|---|---|
| 7 Sep 1963 | 1 show |
| 27-28 Dec 1963 (The Terrace) | 2 shows |
| 12-13 Jun 1964 | 2 shows |
| 29 Jul 1964 | 1 show |
| 11-12 Sep 1964 | 2 shows |
| 29 May 1965 | 2 shows |
| 10-11 Sep 1965 | 3 shows |
| 9-10 Sep 1966 | 3 shows |
| 15 Jun 1968 | 2 shows |
| 7 Sep 1968 | 2 shows |
| 5-6 Sep 1969 | 2 shows |
| 12 Sep 1970 | 1 show |
1963
After performing throughout California for a couple of years, the Beach Boys ventured away from the coast and began touring the rest of the country in 1963. They made it to Lagoon’s Patio Gardens on the park’s last weekend of the season, the weekend after Labor Day.
7 SEP 1963
Latest Single: “Surfer Girl”
Before the show at Lagoon, the Beach Boys stopped at the KNAK studio in Salt Lake City. The owner of the radio station, Howard Johnson, was known for getting a new Ford Thunderbird every year. His daughter, Shirley, was working at the station while attending the University of Utah. Howard was also a faculty member at the U and since his ’63 Thunderbird had a faculty parking sticker on it, Shirley was allowed to take his car so she could park on campus. One night she borrowed her dad’s T-Bird to go study at the library and took a detour into rock ‘n’ roll history.
“I was going to go to the library and ended up at a place called Shore’s Drive In…a hamburger shop on 33rd South and 27th East,” Shirley told KSL News in 2007. When her dad found out about it, she lost her car privileges. The next day when she went to work at KNAK, “I was kind of complaining to the staff at the radio station that I was in a bit of trouble, and the Beach Boys heard it.”
That first Beach Boys concert at Lagoon went on to surpass all attendance records for the Patio Gardens with an audience of over 4,500 people. Even advance ticket sales for the show were unprecedented, topping the pre-sale record previously held by the Kingston Trio.
After the concert, as Bill Hesterman was driving the band from their room at the Holiday Inn to the Salt Lake Airport, band member Mike Love told Brian the story about the girl at KNAK. The two then started putting together a song about it there in the car and continued working on it later.
27-28 DEC 1963 – The Terrace
Latest Single: “Little Saint Nick”
Utah fans only had to wait about three months for the Beach Boys to perform here a second time. It was right after Christmas and Lagoon was closed, but the park’s management also operated the popular Terrace Ballroom in downtown Salt Lake City where they could hold concerts during Lagoon’s off-season. A second night at the Terrace had to be added “due to the largest advanced sale ever”.
1964
Back in Los Angeles, a few days after their shows at The Terrace, the band was in the studio on New Year’s Day. One of the songs recorded that day was the one inspired by the joyriding girl from Salt Lake. “Fun, Fun, Fun” became one of their signature hits after being released as a single a month later. When Shirley from KNAK heard the song, she was surprised how familiar the story was. DJ Bill Hesterman later confirmed she was the inspiration. She had no idea that one of the country’s biggest bands had been writing a song about her minor misfortune.
After disagreements and frustrations with his management style, the Beach Boys cut ties with Murry Wilson as their manager in April 1964. But he soon began managing another band led by a friend of Carl Wilson’s. They became known as the Sunrays and later headlined two of their own concerts at Lagoon.1
12-13 JUN 1964
Latest Single: “I Get Around”
Another Beach Boys concert at Lagoon and another record broken. This time they beat Johnny Mathis for tickets sold for two-day concerts at the Patio Gardens. A total of over 5,500 people showed up on that Friday and Saturday in June.
29 JUL 1964
Latest Album: All Summer Long
Just when it seemed like there were no other records left to top, this time the Beach Boys reached a new attendance record for a weekday performance, drawing 3,500 on a Wednesday night.
It had been less than two months since their previous trip to Lagoon and the band brought along other musicians to open for them. There were the Kingsmen (famous for their rendition of “Louie, Louie”), Eddie Hodges (a film and TV star turned recording artist) and Jimmy Griffin (who would later help form the soft rock band, Bread).
Lagoon manager Robert Freed noted that even though there wasn’t an enforced dress code like usual, the thousands of teenagers in attendance that night still dressed and behaved well.
As band member Al Jardine remembered in a 2010 interview, they loved to play Lagoon every year:
“It was a magical time. It was like being in a time warp. It felt like we were back in the 1940s and ’50s doing these big ballroom dances, which were so popular in that era. People actually danced to the music, they didn’t sit and listen.”
Robert often hosted a party or dinner for visiting performers at his home in Salt Lake, including the Beach Boys who autographed albums for one of his sons. In 2015, when Jardine was touring with Brian at the Red Butte Garden, he reminisced with some fans backstage and still remembered the Freeds because the family had sent him a Christmas card and a package of nuts every year.
11-12 SEP 1964
Latest Single: “When I Grow Up (To Be A Man)”
This was the Beach Boys’ third visit to Lagoon in 1964 alone. Once again it was the final Patio Gardens concert of the season in mid-September.
The Friday night show surpassed 3,000 attendees, just shy of the record for Friday night ticket sales (3,500) claimed a month earlier by the Smothers Brothers. It was still considered an impressive turnout for a concert that late in the season and they continued to hold the record for a two-night performance.
1965
29 MAY 1965
Latest Single: “Help Me, Rhonda”
It was becoming a tradition for the Beach Boys to close out the season at Lagoon, but in 1965 they were the first and last to perform at the Patio Gardens for the year.
Brian was often absent from concerts on the road in previous years, but in December 1964, he had essentially retired from touring, choosing to focus instead on writing and producing music back home. He would occasionally still perform live with the band, but even some biographers and historians of the band aren’t completely certain exactly which shows he did or didn’t show up to. It seems this may have been the first Utah performance without Brian.
Glen Campbell was part of the legendary Wrecking Crew studio session band that were involved in many of the Beach Boys recordings (as well as a long list of other top artists of the day). Glen stood in for Brian on tour for a short time. By the time of the band’s Memorial Day weekend shows at Lagoon, Glen was performing his own set as a solo supporting act and Bruce Johnston began filling in for Brian on stage. Another opening act at this show was the duo Dick & Dee Dee. (Their previous supporting act, the Kingsmen, had their own Lagoon concert the following weekend).
At the time, the Beach Boys were nearly done recording their next album, Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!), which would include another song with a Utah connection. “Salt Lake City” runs through a list of the area’s highlights like skiing, girls, groovy kids that “talk so cool” and Lagoon. Some even claim to hear “KNAK” being called out in the background after the line about the “number one radio station”. It was a rare instance of the band dedicating an entire song to a single fan base. While many outside of Utah wrote the song off as “filler”, more thorough music fans have found it to reveal some of Brian’s evolving ideas about music that would become more refined on later Beach Boys tracks.
10-11 SEP 1965
Latest Single: “California Girls”
Their return to play Lagoon’s final weekend in 1965 was an eventful trip. There was a show on Friday night, and before putting on two more shows at Lagoon on Saturday, they made a special appearance in downtown Salt Lake City. As swarms of fans crowded a section of Main Street, the city’s streets commissioner, Joe L. Christensen, presented the band with the keys to the city.
As part of the festivities, shoppers received a special promotional single featuring “Salt Lake City” when making a purchase at one of 15 stores in the Downtown Merchants Association.
The single was backed with another track from Summer Days, called “Amusement Parks U.S.A.”. According to Jardine, the track was possibly inspired in part by their time at Lagoon, which would explain its inclusion as the single’s B-side. Lagoon isn’t one of the parks named in the song, but two references to a relatively unknown Utah park on the same album would’ve seemed odd to most listeners.
Only 5,000 copies of this 7-inch single were available and it’s now considered to be one of the more valuable Beach Boys releases. In 2010, Goldmine magazine valued the record at $200 and more recently, a copy was sold for nearly $500 on Discogs.com.
1966
9-10 SEP 1966
Latest Single: “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”
For the fourth year in a row, Lagoon ended its season with the Beach Boys at the Patio Gardens. It was their only visit to Lagoon that year, but they put on three shows in two days. They wouldn’t return until 1968.
Within the month following this show, the complex and groundbreaking “Good Vibrations” was finally completed. It had taken an unheard amount of money and seven months to record. When it was released as a single, it altered the world of pop music and record production in its wake.
1968
15 JUN 1968
Latest Single: “Friends”
During 1967, the Beach Boys tour schedule kept them mostly in the eastern half of the United States and Europe. But the band returned to Lagoon twice in 1968, starting in June.
On a previous trip to Utah, Al Jardine had sought out the old ruins of the storied Saltair on the Great Salt Lake. He described the “weird atmosphere” to his bandmates and on the day after the concert at Lagoon, they went out exploring with KNAK’s Bill Hesterman in his Toyota Land Cruiser. They were accompanied by Cyril Maitland, a writer and photographer for England’s Fabulous 208 magazine, who recounted the excursion in the August 31, 1968 issue.
“…we arrived in one bumpy jeep and one air conditioned Cadillac. First thing to investigate was the charred ballroom and pier. Next we set off towards the salty waters of the Salt Lake itself, where I took some pix of the boys atop some deserted structures.”
With the help of a local, Dennis found some quicksand and tried it out, sinking up to his thighs. As they attempted to leave, Hesterman’s Land Cruiser got stuck in two feet of mud.
“We tried to push, but that didn’t help. There was plenty of timber around and the boys, mostly stripped to the waist by now, knuckled to. All in vain, however.”
Dennis decided they could only get out with some form of leverage and scavenged a large beam and smaller pieces of wood to create a fulcrum. Each of the Beach Boys stood on the beam one by one to lift the vehicle out and soon they were on their way to catch their flight back to L.A.
Photos from the shoot were later used for a reissue of one of the band’s albums in Europe, as well as for a bootleg compilation years later.
7 SEP 1968
Latest Single: “Do It Again”
The band returned for a second 1968 visit, once again bringing Lagoon’s season to a close. This time they were touring with the Box Tops whose hit songs at the time included “The Letter” and “Cry Like A Baby”.
1969
5-6 SEP 1969
Latest Single: “Break Away”
The Beach Boys made a single, two-day trip to Lagoon in 1969, this time sharing a bill with Paul Revere & The Raiders, a band that originated in Boise, Idaho and rose to success with hits like “Good Thing”, “Kicks” and “Hungry”.
Concerts at Lagoon were being phased out due to the less-than-family-friendly atmosphere that modern bands attracted, as well as the building’s size in comparison to the larger venues that top artists were starting to prefer. The Patio Gardens had been turned into a roller skating rink that year, but a few, low-risk musical acts were brought in to perform there on occasion.
1970
12 SEP 1970
Latest Single: “Slip On Through”
There’s a chance that Brian appeared with the band at this final Beach Boys performance at Lagoon. However, Dennis was likely absent as he was in the middle of filming for the movie, Two-Lane Blacktop.
This may have also been one of the last concerts ever held at the Patio Gardens. If that’s true, what better band for the occasion than “Lagoon’s all-time record breakers…the sensational Beach Boys”.
UTAH SHOWS AFTER LAGOON
The Beach Boys have maintained a constant presence in Utah in the decades since their last Patio Gardens show. But there was a four-year gap between their final Lagoon appearance and their return to Utah in April 1974 when they performed at the Spectrum at Utah State University.
Since then, they’ve also performed at the former Salt Palace, Abravanel Hall, the Delta Center, the Gallivan Center, Red Butte Garden, the Utah State Fair, Cache County Fair, Park City, Deer Valley, Sandy, Layton, the University of Utah, BYU, Weber State, Snow College, Dixie College, SUU and other venues around the state. They also performed on Washington Square during the 2002 Winter Olympics. But the only Utah venue that has come close to hosting the Beach Boys as many times as Lagoon is Tuacahn Amphitheatre where they have put on 10 shows across seven visits.
One of their more notable Utah concerts in recent years was at the Stadium Of Fire in Provo on 4 July 2012. It was the Beach Boys’ 50th Anniversary Tour and they were promoting a new album titled That’s Why God Made The Radio. It was also the last tour to feature Brian and all of the other remaining founding and early band members on stage together. The show at Lavell Edwards Stadium ended with three songs with Utah connections – “Barbara Ann” (a song they didn’t write, but used to dedicate to Bill Hesterman’s wife, Barbara, at Lagoon performances) and part of “Salt Lake City” leading into “Fun, Fun, Fun”.
Today, the legacy of the Beach Boys at Lagoon continues. In 2011, the park opened a surf-inspired family coaster, near Lagoon-A-Beach. Bombora was designed in-house by Lagoon and the on-board sound system includes several surf rock classics. Among the tracks that can be played on the ride are three Beach Boys songs as well as a Jan & Dean song co-written by Brian Wilson. So, more than 50 years since they last performed at the Patio Gardens, the sound of the Beach Boys still rings out at Lagoon.
SPECIAL PLAYLIST
Listen to this curated playlist including songs mentioned in this article, including live versions. You can also save it for later in the Spotify app.
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References
Lagoon Advance On Beach Boys Setting Record. Deseret News, 5 Sep 1963.
Beach Boys Schedule 2-Day Run. Ogden Standard-Examiner, 26 Dec 1963.
Fads In Focus. Davis County Clipper, 17 Jan 1964.
Mathis At Lagoon 2 Nights. Deseret News, 30 Jul 1964.
Close Lagoon’s Season. Deseret News, 11 Sep 1964.
Beach Boys Again. Deseret News, 12 Sep 1964.
The Sunrays, Beatles And Presley. Deseret News, 10 Aug 1965.
Newspaper ad. Deseret News, 9 Sep 1965.
‘Sound Music,’ Beach Boys, Ice Capades. Deseret News, 10 Sep 1965.
Youths Greet S.L. Idols, Beach Boys. The Salt Lake Tribune, 12 Sep 1965.
Beach Boys At Lagoon. Deseret News, 5 Sep 1969.
Freed Chavre, Jo Ann. The Bob Book: A Collective Memory of Robert E. Freed. Salt Lake City, Utah, 1999.
Lambert, Philip. Inside the Music of Brian Wilson. Continuum, New York. 2007.
McCord, Keith. Beach Boys’ Hit Inspired by a Utah Gal Having All the Fun. KSL-TV, 11 Feb 2007.
Prince, Patrick. Relive those ‘Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!)’ with Al Jardine. Goldmine, 20 Jul 2010.
Thomsen, Clint. The story behind those Beach Boys photos at Saltair. BonnevilleMariner.com, 14 Jun 2012.
Wharton, Tom. Utah’s long love affair with the Beach Boys. The Salt Lake Tribune, 29 Jun 2012.
Lagoon: Rock And Rollercoasters. KUED, Jun 2016.
MacKimm, Danielle. ‘Fun, fun, fun’: SLC girl inspired famous Beach Boys song. ABC4, 8 Apr 2022.
Gigs. BeachBoysGigs.com, accessed 11 Jul 2025.
The Beach Boys Concert Setlist at Stadium of Fire 2012. Setlist.fm, accessed 10 Jul 2025.
The Beach Boys – Salt Lake City / Amusement Parks U.S.A. Discogs.com, accessed 14 Jul 2025.
Notes
- After the Beach Boys fired Murry Wilson as their manager, Murry began managing another band in 1964. The lead singer, songwriter and drummer, Rick Henn, was a friend of Beach Boy Carl Wilson and they were known as the Renegades until Murry changed their name to the Sunrays.
They were much like the early Beach Boys, singing about the same subject matter that made the Beach Boys famous. They even performed in matching striped shirts like the Beach Boys did for years (a style the Beach Boys actually adopted from the Kingston Trio). They released seven singles and one album, but they have largely been lost to time. For a time they toured with the Beach Boys as the opening act. The Sunrays performed at Lagoon as headliners on 10 August 1965 and 9 April 1966, but by 1967 they had disbanded.
April 1966 newspaper ad. ↩︎