Dean Ormsby Torrence’s and William Jan Berry’s music collaboration produced a song regarding a once-fictional place called ‘Surf City’. Their 1963 song, which they wrote with Brian Douglas Wilson, is the first-ever surf genre track to become number one on the music charts. Around 3 decades later, it became a real city as Torrence lobbied for Surf City USA to be his own adopted hometown Huntington Beach’s nickname. The name stuck ever since, and it has helped to cement Huntington Beach as the number one beach in Orange County.
Anyhow, life has not been wonderful for Torrence at all times. In the late 1960’s, the musician was associated with a kidnapping case that attracted much public attention as well as a tragic vehicle collision with Berry that halted his music career.
Unlike almost all performers of the 1960’s, Dean and Jan treated college as more important than music. That is why they recorded songs and participated in public events at the same time as college. In the year 1963, Torrence attended the USC School of Architecture for an advertising design degree, whereas Berry went to UCLA for medicine.
After they met Wilson, the music duo gained commercial success more quickly as compared to their advisers. Surf City started what turned out to be a long collaboration between Wilson and Berry. As the Hawthorne-based Beach Boys band’s co-founder, Wilson was thrilled about the hit track, but it angered his manager father. Why? Because his father Murry Wilson believed that he wasted his group’s number one record.
The old man described the music duo as ‘pirates’. When he knew how furious Wilson was, Berry reportedly entered a Western Studios session of that Hawthorne band in a pirate costume and eye patch. It annoyed Murry Wilson. The band from Hawthorne and the music duo made the surf music language popular.
At the peak of their popularity in 1964, the duo performed live at the TAMI Show, plus they sang the film Ride the Wild Surf’s title song. For the uninitiated, it is regarded as the finest Hollywood surfing film of the decade in which it came out.
They were chosen to act with Fabiano, a celebrity with a considerable teenage fan base. However, Columbia Pictures removed them from that assignment when news associated Torrence with Barry Keenan, a businessman known for masterminding Frank Sinatra Jr.’s kidnapping. Torrence experienced bad fortune when his West Los Angeles Uni school best friend convinced him to lend $1,200 for the kidnapping.
Frank Sinatra’s son was reserved at the Harrah’s Lake Tahoe hotel when some armed men abducted him from his room there. His father Frank Sinatra paid the kidnappers $240,000 as a ransom, which Barry Keenan intended to repay after putting it into a business enterprise. The kidnapping plan went off the expected course.
At the eventual trial, Torrence initially asserted that Keenan was just his friend and that he was unaware of his kidnapping plan with that amount. Anyhow, following the afternoon court recess, Torrence came back for a different testimony, where he said that he knew about the abduction plot. Torrence escaped punishment for it, but that controversial event resulted in his Surf Scene TV show pilot’s cancelation.
In 1964, Dean and Jan released a solo track named ‘Dead Man’s Curve’. It became a hit track about a deadly accident with a Chevrolet Corvette Stingray along a Sunset Boulevard stretch. In 1966, life imitated art when Jan crashed his Corvette Stingray car in an almost fatal incident on the same boulevard stretch.
When Jan was recovering from severe physical damage, Torrence recorded a psychedelic album called “Save For A Rainy Day.” Torrence created the album with rain-themed tracks on his recording device from his garage. He photographed with Jan’s sibling Ken Berry for the album’s cover and left the door open for a performative comeback with Jan.
Despite the several physical issues Jan had to deal with, Dean and he performed live once more at the 1985 Orange County Fair. Back in 1989, Torrence moved from Hollywood Hills to Huntington Beach permanently. Two years afterward, he played a part in making elected officials nickname it Surf City. Following many lawsuits with the City of Santa Cruz, it got the trademark name of Surf City USA back in 2006. After that came a big marketing campaign for rebranding the city.
Terrence quit surfing, but he runs a graphic design firm from the big office in his residential building and performs over 40 gigs yearly with his Surf City All-Stars band. In 2012, Terrence performed with the aforementioned Hawthorne band for its semicentennial celebrations at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre.
The octogenarian main is still a highly-admired and lively musician around California’s Huntington Beach city. In 2018, he started a business enterprise with his friend and founder of Ruby’s Diner restaurant Doug Cavanaugh. During breakfast, Cavanaugh recommended making the whole second level of his restaurant in the city a tiki bar. Torrence loved that recommendation. Huntington Beach native and world-renowned tiki restaurant designer Bamboo Ben designed it, swapping Ruby’s Diner’s walls for bamboo walls, dim lighting, and tiki-inspired poles with totems. Those design elements grabbed the eye of visitors to the windows that faced the stunning Pacific Ocean swells.
Dean and Jan’s Tiki Lounge started its operations one year after the said morning meal. The opening ceremony featured a Hula Girls live gig. The colorful and stylish menu of that tiki bar promoted a fine cocktail and tropical food selection, which included coconut shrimp, piña coladas, pain killers, a specialty beverage known as ‘Dean’s Dream’, and mai tais. Torrence and Cavanaugh considered opening four more locations of Tiki Lounge at Ruby’s Diner in Southern California.
More than 56 years have passed since Torrence’s recording of “Surf City.” It is still a track that Torrence feels he has probably performed in front of a live audience over 800 times. Torrence is still the most important person in making Huntington Beach popular, plus in Southern California’s surfing lifestyle.
