"California Girls" is among the Beach Boys' most commercially successful songs globally. It has been performed thousands of times in concert as the band's opening number. Carlin called the orchestral introduction "as spare and stirring as anything by Aaron Copland". Dillon referred to the passage as "one of pop music's great intros" and "Brian's proclamation to the rest of the music biz that he was a composer to take seriously". "Los Angeles Times" journalist Geoff Boucher, writing in his article about the song, said that the opening lyrics were "one of the most famous ... in pop music" and described the music as "equal parts symphony hall and amusement park, 2 1/2 minutes of nuanced musical complexity and beach-blanket simplicity." The song was also influential in the development of the power pop genre.