In 1963, the acclaimed producer Russ Titelman went to visit Brian Wilson at his office in a bank building on the southeast corner of Sunset and Vine in Los Angeles. Wilson told Titelman that he was working on a song called “Run, Run, Run.” That song eventually morphed into “Fun, Fun, Fun,” one of the most popular and enduring songs recorded by the Beach Boys.

Speaking of fun, it’s always fun to do some research on the history of a good pop tune. There are several stories about how this one came about. In the song’s plot, a teenage girl asks her father for the keys to his Ford Thunderbird—a sexy and impressive car at the time, especially in its third generation (1961-63). The story she gives him is that she’s going to the “library,” but she ends up going somewhere else with her boyfriend. When her father discovers the deception, he takes the car keys away.

In one of the stories behind the story, the Beach Boys used to spend a lot of time in Salt Lake City, Utah. The station manager for KNAK Radio, Bill “Daddy-O” Hesterman, was an early champion of the group. Hesterman regularly brought the band to Utah for radio appearances and concerts. As it turns out, the station owner’s daughter, Shirley Johnson, had indeed borrowed her father’s (brand-new) 1963 T-Bird, which had a University of Utah parking sticker. When Shirley asked to borrow the car, she told her dad that she was going to the university library. However, she instead took the wheels to Shore’s Drive-In, a hamburger stand that was on 33^rd South and 27^th East. When he found out, her dad took the keys back.

More than four decades later, Shirley Johnson said in a radio interview on KSL that she worked at KNAK as a part-time secretary in 1963 and happened to be complaining loudly about this incident with the T-Bird at a time when the Beach Boys were at the station for an interview. Hesterman reported that Wilson and Mike Love not only thought the story was funny, but they even started jotting down the beginnings of a song idea as he took them to the airport that afternoon.

Drummer Dennis Wilson tells another story. In his version, he was dating a rich girl from Rancho Palos Verdes, whose dad had a Thunderbird. She also told her father that she was going to the library, but instead she went to hang out with Dennis at his apartment. Dennis would say, “We’ll have fun ‘til her daddy takes the T-Bird away,” and there you have a lyric. There’s no reason that this one and the Shirley Johnson tale couldn’t both be true!

As for the music itself, I found myself becoming more and more impressed with it as I dug into the research for this blogpost. While it’s easy to think something patronizing such as “Oh, it’s just another early Beach Boys song with not that much in it,” the song masks its sophistication and careful construction with its breezy tone. It skillfully combines many of the elements that were making hit singles in those days and adds its own secret sauce on top. First is the opening guitar lick; Brian Wilson called for something that sounded a like a Chuck Berry “hook,” reminiscent of “Roll Over, Beethoven” or “Johnny B. Goode,” and he got it from brother Carl Wilson. The drum fills are inspired by the work of producer Phil Spector—indeed, the extra drums that complement Dennis Wilson’s work were provided by Hal Blaine, one of L.A.’s great studio musicians and a member of Spector’s legendary session-player group known informally as the “Wrecking Crew.” In the middle instrumental break, Brian Wilson throws in a crazy organ solo on the Hammond B3 that evokes the “surf rock” genre. Finally, Brian’s legendary vocal harmonies make the song its own unique creation.

In almost any other month, a song like this would have ruled the pop charts. Keep in mind that the Beach Boys were the only American pop group to be chart-toppers before, during, and after the British Invasion. However, when released in February 1964 as a single in the USA, the song was competing directly with a flood of Beatles tunes. By the time the song reached its crest at #5 on the charts, it was beaten by “She Loves You,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and “Please Please Me”—along with “Dawn (Go Away)” by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. The song became iconic in later years when it was included in the soundtrack to “American Graffiti.”

What were you listening to in February and March 1964? Drop us a comment and let us know.

Thanks for research help to Donald A. Guarisco from AllMusic.com, our friends at Songfacts.com, and the loyal people who populate the open-source Wikipedia repository of human knowledge.