When they were on the top of the charts, the Beach Boys played once a year in Reno. My older sister Wendy & I saw them at their peak at the State Building downtown. After the concert, she talked me into waiting with her to meet them as they walked out. It seemed like forever as we stood there in the cold Fall air. But finally they appeared. They walked past us hurriedly -- except for the lead singer Mike Love, who broke away from the pack, chatted with Wendy & then invited us to join him at a restaurant across the street. My sharpest memory of the night was his passing his unfinished Pie a la Mode to me.
After this encounter, and a long letter that Mike Love later wrote to my sister from Manhattan Beach --which I proudly showed off to my friends--an urban legend arose at my grade school that the song "Wendy", on the latest Beach Boys album at the time, was written for my sister. I knew the song came out before they met, but when I heard the rumor, I didn't disabuse anyone of the notion as it was passed around. It gave me what little notoriety I had.
However, on the "Beach Boys Party" album, recorded after Wendy & Mike Love met, her name is called out as they sing a their cover version of the song "There's No Other (Like My Baby)". It occurs at about the 2:20 point of the following clip. When I first heard this song, and the shout out to Wendy, I was stunned. I pointed it out to my friends, but they were deeply unimpressed. After all, they already thought she'd had an entire song written about her! There's a moral in here somewhere.
