Here's your chance to share your stories about how you "spread the word" of Jan & Dean and their music to other people.  Email them to us!!

Here at the Fan Site we are lucky enough to be huge Jan & Dean fans, sadly, we have not met Jan & Dean in the "flesh" so to speak. So, we had a few spare hours the other day and thought we'd recreate our meetings that we never had with the legendary dup.

 

Meet Mark & Dean in the first picture. This was the first attempt at adding images together, and is pretty impressive. It helps that there's just a blue sky in the background. It actually feels like Dean was there!

 

As for the second photo, meet June & Jan! This was a little more complicated for a number of reasons. First off, we don not have any high-quality large photos of Jan, and secondly we decided to use a photo with a background.

 

If you're wondering how we went about recreating these meetings, then we used a free program called "Photofiltre". This is a quality photo adjustment package and art package from which you can gain quite professional results.

 

Basically, we used photos of ourselves, and cropped the area which we needed to use. Then we found our photos of Jan & Dean and cut out Jan & Dean from the original photos. This was quite easy using the softwares advanced features. We then of course had to paste Jan & Dean into the photos. This was done with a transparancy mode which made the whole thing easier.

 

Last but not least we added the fun dialogue to the photos, and n the photo of June & Jan we also added a frame.

 

Enjoy the pictures, and if you would like one donw of  yourselves with either Jan or Dean (or both), then please send us an email and we will gladly work on it and add it to the site!

My husband and I have lunch every now and again at this great sandwich shop in Huntington Beach, where we know the owner Larry.  One day, Larry was sitting with a guy who coincidently looked a little like he does.  He told us this story about how this guy "Dean" was his older brother....and how mom and dad always liked him best.  At Christmas time, he said Dean would always get a new bicycle, and he, would get Dean's old one!!  We laughed, and got up to go down to the used book store in the same strip mall.  On our way back, we were passing by the shop, and Larry came out and told us how this "older brother" of his was really Dean Torrence from Jan & Dean fame!!!  Wow...fantastic I thought....I've GOT to get some pictures!!  I also have a friend in Ohio who's a great Jan & Dean fan.  Next time we ran into Dean at the sub shop, he gave the ok to take these awesome pictures.....and I got some really great ones!!  I brought them back after I had them developed, and Dean graciously autographed not only the pictures for me to send to Ohio, (and of course for me to keep too!!) but his greatest hits CD also!!!  I felt extremely OVER THE TOP excited to meet this really shy handsome guy who acts like he's not even famous!!  Dean is the nicest guy you'd ever want to meet.   He even called my friend in Ohio and wished her a Merry Christmas!!  I think we could hear her screaming all the way to California!!   Talk about the end to a really wonderful fantastic GREAT day!!   JAN & DEAN FOREVER!!!!

 

From Gary as posted to the forum page

 

You Asked for Memories

 

About a year and a half before the Deadman’s Curve TV biopic, I discovered Jan & Dean on a Golden Summer compilation. I bought it because it had a few other tracks that were interesting but had heard of Jan & Dean (what do you expect...I was just 5 when Jan had his accident and Spirit of America was my introduction to the Beach Boys).

 

In 1977, Capitol released the as of then unreleased in America, Beach Boys Live in London with a cover design by Dean. Rumor has it that the address on the post card was none other than Dean’s work address for Kittyhawk graphics. My parents planned a trip to the L.A. area and I asked them, if they were in the area, could they stop by that address. Little did I know how far Sunset Blvd extended.

 

But they went to L.A. and as a special effort for their just turned teen boy, they went to the address and buzzed the doorbell. Turns out that Dean WAS in that day and invited them in. They met Dean, took photos with him (and the newly designed but destined to remain unreleased Deadman’s Curve TV Soundtrack cover) and even brought home a signed 1966 Tour Book. How rare! How cool! My first celebrity signature. Dean even tried calling me but the time difference meant that I was still in school.

 

I honestly can’t remember whether this happened before or after the first airing of the TV movie, but it was before they went out on tour together for the first time in the 70s. Dean was very kind to strangers who showed up at his door and won a fan for life.

 

I have more stories but that’s enough for now. Hope it’s of any interest at all to someone.