Dean Ormsby Torrence is the "Dean" of Jan and Dean. Dean Torrence has designed the covers for many albums including several of Harry Nilsson's albums such as The Point!. The original needlepoint artwork for Nilsson's The Point! cover hangs in Torrence's child's bedroom.
Dean Torrence created a short clay animation film as a birthday present for Harry Nilsson. It is included as a Special Feature on the Blu-Ray release of The Point!.
Jan and Dean were an American rock duo consisting of William Jan Berry (April 3, 1941 – March 26, 2004) and Dean Ormsby Torrence (born March 10, 1940). In the early 1960s, they were pioneers of the California Sound and vocal surf music styles popularized by the Beach Boys. Among their most successful songs was 1963's "Surf City", the first surf song ever to reach the #1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 in the US. Their other charting top 10 singles were "Baby Talk" (1959), "Drag City" (1963), "Dead Man's Curve" (1964; inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2008,) and "The Little Old Lady (from Pasadena)" (1964). In 1972, Torrence won the Grammy Award for Best Album Cover for the psychedelic rock band Pollution's first eponymous 1971 album, and was nominated three other times in the same category for albums of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. In 2013, Torrence's design contribution of the Surf City Allstars' In Concert CD was named a Silver Award of Distinction at the Communicator Awards competition.
This article uses material from the Wikipedia article "Jan and Dean", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.
