The Beach Boys On CD 3: Little Deuce Coupe/All Summer Long
A revised version of this essay appears in my book The Beach Boys On CD. If you like this, please consider buying it. Hardback Paperback PDF Kindle (US) Kindle (UK) Kindle (DE) All other ebook formats
The Beach Boys’ fourth album, Little Deuce Coupe, came out three weeks after their third, Surfer Girl. A concept album of sorts, based around cars, it included four songs from earlier albums. This means that the CD ‘twofer’ pairings have a slight chronological inaccuracy – the two September 1963 albums, rather than being paired with each other, are each paired with a 1964 record, thus avoiding repetition of tracks. As I’m dealing with these records on a per-CD basis, that’s how I’ll be looking at them too.
Little Deuce Coupe
band membership – Brian Wilson, Carl Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Mike Love, David Marks, Al Jardine (uncredited)
The last album to feature David Marks, before his disagreements with the Wilsons’ father Murry led him to leave to form his own band, Dave And The Marksmen, this nonetheless has the stronger harmonies that show that Al Jardine was firmly in place. A collection of car songs, it’s clearly a rush job, but it still has its moments. It is, though, far from essential – it was recorded in a single session, and sounds it.
Little Deuce Coupe
The same recording included on the Surfer Girl album
Ballad Of Ole’ Betsy
Another rewrite of The Surfer Moon/Your Summer Dream from the previous album, this is the best of these three attempts at what amounts to the same musical material, thanks to being the only one to feature full band vocals. This brings out the Four Freshmen influence more obviously, and other than a double tracking error on ‘she may be rusted iron’ the vocals are gorgeous, especially on the a capella tag.
The lyrics, by Roger Christian, are less impressive, anthropomorphising a car – “she was born in ’32, and was she ever pretty/she rode a freight train west, all the way from Detroit city” and so on. This manages to make them both over-sentimental mush about what is, after all, an inanimate object, while simultaneously seeming to objectify women in a rather disturbing way (“Betsy took some beatings, but she never once complained”…)
But if you listen for the vocals, and ignore both text and subtext, it works as a piece of music.
Be True To Your School is a musically uninteresting piece of boosterism by Love and Brian Wilson, bearing some slight musical resemblance to Hawaii (whose tag is reused at the end). I’m not the target audience for this track as I never had the American High School experience, and I’ve always loathed both sports and expressions of in-group solidarity (especially when they’re expressed in an aggressive manner – “we’ll be ready to fight, we’re gonna smash ‘em now”). If you’re the kind of person who likes that kind of thing, you might have a less jaded impression of this track.
Car Crazy Cutie is a reworking of a doo-wop track Brian had written for another band, The Survivors, a short while earlier, with new lyrics by Roger Christian about a beautiful girlfriend who is more interested in cars than the singer – “But when I talk of lovin’ man, some kisses and hugs/She says don’t you think we’d better clean and gap the plugs”. This is actually something of a theme on this album – the disconnect between appearance and actuality. Along with the fact that so much of the musical material is reused (either from rejected earlier songs, songs given to other people, or just sticking an old record on the album to fill up the gaps), there are some quite interesting collisions of form and content going on here. The album is about taking old junk and polishing it up to make it look good, but it still being less than perfect under the hood. The fact that they take the same attitude towards women as to cars and their songs is unfortunate, but probably to be expected given their ages (the band members ranged from fifteen to twenty-two) and the culture they were in.
The lack of success with this ‘cutie’ though is probably why Brian is the lead vocalist, as otherwise this Dion pastiche would have been a perfect vocal showcase for Dennis. But his swaggering persona would never have worked with the rejection in the last verse. This is still, however, by far the best new song on the album.
Cherry Cherry Coupe is a rewrite of the then-unreleased Land Ahoy by Brian and Roger Christian, and appears to be about a particularly good car. I say ‘appears to be’ because here we run into one of the problems in reviewing this album for a British person born in 1978 who doesn’t drive, in that a good chunk of the lyrics don’t seem to be in anything I’d recognise as English. I haven’t a clue what “My coupe’s tuck and roll underneath the hood” or “Chrome reversed rims with whitewall slicks” are. Are they a good thing? “Chopped nose and deck with louvers on the hood” ?
I take it these *are* good things, because “It’s the sharpest in the town and the envy of my group”, but for all I know this could be advocating the violent overthrow of the government and its replacement with a fascist dictatorship. That might be what a cellunoid system is…
That said, this is catchy enough, and one of the first times Mike Love is allowed to really impress with his bass range – his tenor lead here is merely passable, but on the choruses his bass rumbling of “My cherry coupe eats ‘em up coming off the line/And she really gets lost when she starts to whine” makes the song.
409
The track from the Surfin’ Safari album
Shut Down
The track from the Surfin’ USA album
Spirit Of America
It shows how desperate the Beach Boys were getting for material that this and Ballad Of Ole Betsy were included on the same album, despite having near-identical melodies. This Wilson/Christian song, with Brian Wilson on lead vocal, is about Craig Breedlove’s first world land speed record, which he had acheived four weeks to the day before the recording session for this album. Given the circumstances one wouldn’t expect a masterpiece, and the fact that the track is even competent says a lot for how good Brian Wilson was at this point.
It seems at times like I’m slating this album – and it really isn’t very good by any normal standards – but to record something this adequate in the time they were given is frankly astounding.
Our Car Club
The same recording included on the Surfer Girl album
No-Go Showboat
I think this is an attempt at a comedy song – I say I think, because again this is a Roger Christian lyric, which means the lyrics are full of things like “It really rates fine in the custom clan, with hand-formed panels, tuck-and-roll rear pan”. But I *think* it’s about a car which looks good but won’t go fast (“When it comes to speed, man, I’m just outa luck, I’m even shut down by the ice cream truck”).
A Young Man Is Gone
Bobby Troup’s maudlin Their Hearts Were Full Of Spring, a song recorded by the Four Freshmen, was one of the first things the Beach Boys ever recorded, and has remained in the band’s act to this day as an a capella showcase. It’s fascinating if you have access to enough live recordings to hear how the different voices entering and leaving the line-up over the years have affected the quality of the harmonies – to my mind the best version is the rehearsal recording from 1993 with only two original members of the band (Carl and Al) plus Bruce Johnston and Al’s son Matt.
This is their only official studio recording of the song, with new lyrics by Mike Love, here bemoaning the death of James Dean, and while the original lyrics were bad, these are, if anything, worse – “For this daring young star met his death while in his car/No one knows the reason why/Screaming tire, flashing fire, and gone was this young star/Oh how could they let him die”. However, the harmonies are exquisite, and the whole thing just about works because of that.
Custom Machine
The last song on this album is also by far the most interesting, although it falls into the category of ‘interesting failure’ – Custom Machine has quite a lot of playing around with keys and tonality, with the chorus seeming to go off into some nowhere between-keys land (on the line “I’ll let you look but don’t touch my custom machine”). However, it sounds arbitrary, rather than clever – an experiment that didn’t quite come off. The track still almost works, mostly down to the band’s enthusiasm and tightness – a tightness that’s even more surprising when you realise how little time they (and the session musicians augmenting them) had to rehearse and learn the song – you can hear someone whispering the next line to Mike Love during the instrumental break.
Originally credited as a solo Brian Wilson composition, this is one of the songs for which Mike Love won a co-writing credit in his 1990s lawsuit. To my ears, though, it sounds if anything like a Roger Christian lyric – Love’s lyrics usually have the virtue of being singable and in something approaching English, while lines like “A stereophonic speaker set with vibrasonic sound” just sit uncomfortably, having far too many syllables for their melody.
All Summer Long
band membership – Brian Wilson, Carl Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine
While Shut Down Vol 2 had contained two of the best tracks the band would ever record, plus one of their biggest hits, All Summer Long is the point where the Beach Boys, spurred on by at last having some real competition, became important. This was the start of their four-album golden period (this, Today!, Summer Days… And Summer Nights! and Pet Sounds) where they were not only having huge hits but making huge artistic strides forward as well.
I once played a Beatles album for a relative who didn’t really know their work, and he said to me half-way through “No, I want to hear a proper album, not a collection of hits” – All Summer Long, more than any other Beach Boys album, feels like that. While only one track became an actual hit single, four of its eleven tracks were included on the Endless Summer compilation and pretty much every hits compilation and best-of since, while another, Little Honda, became a huge hit in a note-for-note cover version by the Hondells.
While it still has its share of filler (the Beach Boys never really became an ‘album band’ til they were almost commercially obsolete), this is the earliest Beach Boys album about which one can say it’s an essential album, rather than just having essential tracks.
I Get Around
You may have heard this one…
The Beach Boys’ first number one, this is the first of their singles to show signs of having been constructed as a record first and song second. If Mike Love (who won co-writing credit for this in 1993, before which it was credited as a Brian Wilson solo track) is telling the truth, in fact, when he claims to have come up with the “round, round, get around” hook, then he can probably lay claim to 90% of the record’s success.
But that other 10% is crucial, and is all down to the structure and production, which is stunningly sophisticated. First just listen to the way the instrumental track is carefully layered. We start with two low notes on the guitar – but then there is no instrumentation for the next four seconds. Going into the chorus, we can hear a guitar and bass (a fairly poor lead guitar part was recorded but is not audible in the final mix), both essentially doubling each other (a trick Brian had learned from Phil Spector), and a very interesting drum part courtesy of session player Hal Blaine. With almost no hi-hat or cymbal at all, the part on the record consists of just a kick drum every other beat and one fill two bars in, along with some *incredibly* fast brushwork.
Rather amazingly, this brushwork is the replacement for a harpsichord part – if one listens to the session recordings (not that I would ever advocate illegal downloading of course hem hem), the same part, in more or less the same range, is being played by the harpsichord (Blaine is playing semiquavers, while the harpsichord was playing quavers, but the audible pressing and release of the keys doubled it rhythmically),
In fact the drum part seems to be a construction after the fact rather than a live performance – the basic track for the song, before any overdubbing, features a far more conventional drum pattern, with fours on the kick drum, snare for emphasis every other beat (where the kick drum is on the record) and quavers on the hi-hat. It’s only *after* the basic track is done that the drums are re-recorded (although one can still *very* faintly hear leakage from the original hi-hat track used to keep time through the a capella sections).
We then have the verse, where while Mike Love’s singing we have two bars of just guitar and bass doubling each other in a stop-start rhythm (with a stray hi-hat beat to keep them in time) under the first line, before being joined by handclaps for the second line, before a two-bar instrumental break. This break *does* feature the harpsichord, but it’s overwhelmed by the hammond organ that’s added. This two-bar break (stretching the verse to an unusual ten bar length) contains musical material found nowhere else, but which Terry Melcher (of whom much more, sadly, later) would re-use as the main guitar riff for the Byrds’ version of Mister Tambourine Man (the backing track of which was based on this song’s B-side, Don’t Worry Baby).
We then go into a repeat of the chorus, instrumentally the same as the intro, which goes into a new, short section, the ‘get around round round ooh’ section, and again we can feel the tension building as through these rising oohs we add in the hammond organ, a lead guitar solo and, barely audible, three bass saxophone notes at crucial points. We’ve gone from a single voice and ptactically no instrumentation right up to a full wall of sound, and it’s been a natural progression, like a driver slowly pressing his foot down and taking you from 0 to 100 without ever really noticing the acceleration.
And the instrumental track isn’t even what we notice on this track, it’s those five part harmonies, and Brian Wilson’s falsetto soaring like it never had before. It’s the sense of restlessness coupled with braggadoccio – of someone who knows he’s absolutely mastered the pop single, and is itching to try something better (“I’m getting bugged driving up and down the same old strip, I gotta find a new place where the kids are hip”).
Were it not that that accolade truly belongs to a single the Beach Boys would release two years later, one could easily describe I Get Around as the perfect pop record.
All Summer Long
Anything was going to be a let-down after that opener, but truth be told I’ve never been a huge fan of this song even divorced from its context. While it’s interesting from a production standpoint (the xylophone part was an inspired move) and harmonically (it’s essentially a variant on the I-vi-ii-V progression, but replacing the minor sixth with a flattened third, a rather jazzy substitution, and then extending a lot of the chords with passing sixths and augmented fifths).
While this song’s use in American Graffitti kickstarted the band’s commercial revival in the mid-70s,I have to say I’ve always found it too saccharine.
And, though it’s hardly fair to judge it on this, the trade-off between the whistle and saxophone on the instrumental break can’t help but make any British people with a love of comedy think that someone’s playing a game of Swanee Kazoo.
This is another song for which Mike Love, who sings lead, sued and won co-writing credit.
Hushabye
The only actual cover on the album (though see Carl’s Big Chance) this is a fairly straight cover of a doo-wop song, originally recorded by the Mystics. Written by the great songwriting team of Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman (responsible for roughly seventeen trillion quadrillion of the great pop songs of the late 50s and early 60s) they were having a comparative off-day when they came up with this – other than the melodic referencing of Brahms’ Lullaby in the middle eight, this is a fairly standard doo-wop song. The performance and production here is absolutely exemplary – the harmonies are heavenly, the broken drum part and driving piano bass are the missing link between what Phil Spector was doing at the time and what the Beatles would be doing by the end of the year – but this is ‘only’ a very, very pleasant trifle. Brian sings lead, with Mike on the middle eight.
Little Honda
A Wilson/Love song for which there’s never been any credit dispute, this is one of those songs where you can see what an influence the band had on the Velvet Underground. From the throbbing low-range three-chord guitar to the held organ notes (a common thing in Brian Wilson’s arrangements, often filling in what would be another harmony part in the middle of the stack), to the monotone lead vocal melody, this is musically extremely close to songs like Foggy Notion, White Light/White Heat or I’m Waiting For The Man. There’s even a drone, courtesy of the hummed backing vocals in the verse.
Of course, the Velvet Underground rarely had lyrics like “It’s more fun than a barrel of monkeys, that two-wheel bike”, but frankly that’s the Velvets’ problem, not the Beach Boys’.
We’ll Run Away
A weak filler track, this is the last Brian Wilson/Gary Usher song to be recorded and released by the Beach Boys (though the two would collaborate again in the 80s on some material, most of which was unreleased, but some sneaked out as very obscure Brian Wilson solo tracks). A 12/8 ballad in the mould of Tears On My Pillow and similar 50s hits, this would have sounded dated even at the time – but Wilson and Usher were probably thinking of the string of Phil Spector songs about being too young to get married around this time (e.g. Not Too Young To Get Married by Bob. B. Soxx And The Blue Jeans, Why Don’t They Let Us Fall In Love by Veronica (Ronnie Spector) and especially So Young by Veronica, which the band would cover on their next studio album). However, all these songs had more energy and seemed more up-to-date.
There’s also an annoying bit of shoddy craftsmanship in that the second and third verses try to shove too many syllables into their first lines, forcing the band to come in slightly behind the beat after dropping out. This is especially noticeable at the start of the second verse (“They warned us that we can’t live on love forever”).
Brian’s voice is also in his weakest point here – right at the top of his head voice where it turns into falsetto. When his voice started to deteriorate a few years later it was this range that went first, and this is the only range he’s never really recovered. Here, it means he’s drifting between a slightly off-pitch high head voice and a slightly nasal low falsetto more or less at random, occasionally singing in different ‘voices’ in each of his double-tracked vocals.
Carl’s Big Chance
This is credited to Brian and Carl Wilson, but is in fact a filler instrumental whose backing track is clearly the vamp from Marvin Gaye’s Can I Get A Witness, over which Carl plays some fairly rudimentary lead guitar – strangely sounding closer to Chet Atkins (albeit Chet Atkins as played by a teenager) than to the surf sounds on previous albums. Pointless.
Wendy, another Wilson/Love lawsuit track, is a very strong opener for side two of the original album. Other than its stuttering opening, and the studio noise (most notably a cough) heard during the Hammond solo, there’s little to talk about here, but that’s not to say it’s not good – it’s an excellent song, performed well, with a great lead by Brian. It’s just that it’s not a song that’s improved by analysis – its good points are all obvious ones, and there’s little to dig into below the surface.
Do You Remember? is Brian Wilson’s tribute to the music he’d listened to growing up, and clearly based on At The Hop. Lasting barely a minute and a half (and that with an extended fade) there was clearly very little inspiration here.
What’s interesting about it (the only thing, really) is that this is rock nostalgia from before there was a ‘canon’ and official history of rock, as reported by someone who was a teenage music fan of the time. So in ‘the guys who gave us rock & roll’, along with Elvis, Little Richard and Chuck Berry we have the terminally uncool TV DJ Dick Clark and “Danny and the Juniors hit a groove, stuck as sharp as a knife”.
Girls On The Beach is a rewrite by Brian of Surfer Girl, but a much less pleasant one – where Surfer Girl was a romantic song of love for one individual, this is attempting to give the same romantic feeling to a song which is lyrically not all that far removed in attitude from Peaches by the Stranglers – “The girls on the beach are all within reach if you know what to do” and “we love to lie around girls with tans of golden brown”.
It’s not the sexist lyric itself that’s the problem with this song – it’s no worse in that respect than, say, California Girls – but it just doesn’t go with the warm, romantic closely-harmonised melody. There’s a cognitive dissonance there that there just isn’t in California Girls‘ leering swagger. Lead vocals are by Brian, with Dennis on the middle eight.
Drive In
Another lawsuit-credited Wilson/Love song, with Mike on lead vocals, this is a comedy song of sorts, about teenage life – the Drive-in is ‘a groovy place to talk and maybe watch the show’ when on a date, (“If you say you watch the movie you’re a couple o’ liars”), and how you shouldn’t “sneak your buddies in the trunk ’cause they might get caught…And they’d look kinda stupid gettin’ chased through the lot”. Love’s vocal carries this off with the appropriate humour (and a wonderfully goofy Smokey Bear impression on “remember only you can prevent forest fires”), and the track, while not wonderful, is a pleasant improvement after the last two songs.
Incidentally, the Spectoresque backing track, one of the fullest arrangements on the album, was originally recorded several months earlier at the same session as the Christmas single Little St Nick, and a version of the backing track with the Little St Nick lyrics was released on the Ultimate Christmas compilation in the nineties. There’s some debate about whether that version was intended as a joke, or whether two backing tracks were cut for the same lyric and the better one chosen. The presence of prominent sleigh bells on this leads me to suspect the latter.
Our Favourite Recording Sessions is filler. It’s the equivalent of a film ‘blooper reel’, containing various breakdown takes and studio arguments (though only the more family-friendly ones – nothing like the argument over who spat in whose mouth that broke out during vocal overdubs on Little Honda for example). While other tracks have been relatively weak, this is the only real evidence that the band were still under immense pressure to crank material out by the yard.
And after a relatively weak run of songs, the album finishes with one of the best tracks, Don’t Back Down. Written by Brian and (you guessed it) with a co-writing credit won by Mike in 1993, this is a reworking of Hawaii (with which the current touring ‘Beach Boys’ often perform this as a medley). It’s very easy to imagine that on the choruses Brian is singing about himself when he sings “You gotta be a little nuts/but show ‘em how you’ve got guts/Don’t back down from that wave”. Right now, Brian was feeling challenged by his rivalry with the Beatles (a rivalry which they had not yet noticed themselves, though they would by the next year), but soon the fear would start to take over…
This was the last surf song the Beach Boys would record for four years.
CD Bonus tracks
Be True To Your School (single version)
A rerecording of this song, released as a single, it takes whatever simplistic charm the album version had, and bludgeons it to death, then runs over it with a steamroller to make sure. It takes the basic template of the album track, and adds a guitar solo, a marching band, an instrumental break to the tune of On Wisconsin, a cheerleading team (performed by The Honeys, a vocal group featuring Brian Wilson’s fiancee, her sister and her cousin), a kitchen sink and Uncle Tom Cobbley and all.
All Dressed Up For School
This is absolutely astonishing. Between the opening Louie Louie riff with Mike Love’s wonderfully stupid doot-doot-doots and the closing Papa Oom Mow Mow bit, there are musical ideas here that would sustain many other bands for a lifetime – the verse melody was later recycled into two songs (I Just Got My Pay and Marcella), the chorus became a Honda commercial, the guitar solo seems to contain within it the seeds of the later hit Dance Dance Dance, part of the lyric was reused for The Little Girl I Once Knew, and a little bit of it at the end seems to point the way towards some of the Smile period Heroes & Villains vocal sessions. And it’s a rare lead vocal at this point for Carl Wilson.
So why wasn’t it released? With such a catchy chorus, you just can’t help singing along… “All dressed up for school/ooh what a turn on/she’s so fine/what a turn on/all dressed up for school”
Ah.
I see.
Moving swiftly on…
Little Honda (Alternate Take) is almost indistinguishable from the released version, except for the backing vocal arrangement – instead of singing “Honda Honda going faster faster” they sing “Go little Honda, faster little Honda”, and Brian’s falsetto is more prominent. The change was an improvement. The only other change (changing the word ‘champ’ to ‘matchless’) was less so.
Don’t Back Down (alternate take) is in many ways the most interesting of these bonus tracks, although musically the least listenable. It also provides quite a bit of justification for Mike Love’s claim to have had input on at least this song. The backing track is identical to the finished version – obviously they kept the instrumental track – and the main theme of the lyrics is similar, but everything else is different. The melody here is actually the one Brian used for a song for The Honeys, Hide Go Seek, some time earlier (you can hear that song at this youtube link – it’s far and away the best thing The Honeys ever did), and the lyrics are totally different. Obviously the original idea was to reuse an unsuccessful but good song from a side project, before it was reworked in the studio. Given the speed with which Love has been known to work (writing lyrics in taxi-cabs to recording sessions on occasion) it wouldn’t surprise me at all had he reworked the lyrics (though the new melody still has Brian’s fingerprints all over it).
Next up, we skip (for now) the Christmas and Concert albums (I’ll get to them eventually, but they’re not part of ‘the story of the Beach Boys’ artistic evolution’, just appendices) and get to The Beach Boys Today!, often regarded as the band’s best album…
The Beach Boys On CD 2: Surfer Girl/Shut Down Vol 2
A revised version of this essay appears in my book The Beach Boys On CD. If you like this, please consider buying it. Hardback Paperback PDF Kindle (US) Kindle (UK) Kindle (DE) All other ebook formats
It shows how fast the pop music industry moved in the early 1960s that the Beach Boys released their third and fourth albums in the same month, September 1963, less than a year after their first. Little Deuce Coupe, their fourth album, suffered as a result – a concept album of sorts, based on car songs, it shared two songs with Surfer Girl and also took one each from the previous two albums, as the band simply couldn’t come up with material fast enough.
This means that the CD ‘twofer’ pairings have a slight chronological inaccuracy – the two September 1963 albums, rather than being paired with each other, are each paired with a 1964 record, thus avoiding repetition of tracks. As I’m dealing with these records on a per-CD basis, that’s how I’ll be looking at them too. These albums can be heard on Spotify here
SURFER GIRL
band membership – Brian Wilson, Carl Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Mike Love, David Marks, Al Jardine (uncredited)
The pressure to produce new music at an incredible pace had made Brian Wilson want to give up touring and concentrate on writing and production. As a result, Al Jardine, who had sung and played bass on the band’s first single, was drafted in to replace him on the road and augment the band in the studio. This line-up wouldn’t last long, however, as shortly after the release of this album David Marks fell out with Murry Wilson, the band’s manager and father of the Wilson brothers (and Mike Love’s uncle), and was either sacked from or quit the band, leaving Jardine as his replacement and Brian Wilson back on tour for the moment.
Jardine’s return saw the band’s style finally gel – adding a strong tenor vocal part to the mid-range of the band’s harmony stack finally allowed the band to be the vocal group Brian Wilson had always intended them to be – from this point on the four- and five-part harmonies start to resemble less the simplistic records of Jan & Dean and more the sophisticated jazz harmonies of Brian’s teen idols the Four Freshmen.
Surfer Girl
Supposedly the first song Brian Wilson ever wrote (though presumably the lyrics were only added after the band started writing surf songs), this song had been demoed at the same sessions that produced Surfin’ Safari and 409, and it remains a mystery why this was left off the earlier albums when so many terrible songs were included.
A rewrite of When You Wish Upon A Star, with the same arpeggiated guitar feel as The Lonely Sea, this is the first real harmony work-out for the band, sung as a close harmony number with Brian’s falsetto soaring across the top. It’s not a perfect performance – the middle-eight double-tracking is slightly sloppy – but it’s far more assured than anything they’d done previously.
It’s also the most harmonically interesting thing the band had done to date. While it’s mostly just a I-vi-IV-V7 doo-wop progression, it does have a minor sixth (v6) at the end of every other line (‘undone’ and ‘ocean’s roar’) which anticipates the later use of minor sixths in songs like God Only Knows. It’s also the first of the Beach Boys’ records to feature a key change (unless I missed one last time, but I don’t think so) – having a semitone step up for the last verse.
Released as a single, this became the band’s last surf-related single to be released during their American chart peak, as well as the first to be credited to Brian Wilson as producer.
Catch A Wave
Comparing this song to any on the previous two albums shows just how far the band had come in production terms. Harmonically simple, this insanely catchy track is nonetheless a far more sophisticated record than anything they’d done before, with a piano doubling the two guitars in an early example of a technique Brian had learned from Phil Spector, an overdubbed ‘Palisades Park’ organ riff, harp glissandi (provided by Mike Love’s sister Maureen), and a traded-off organ/guitar solo that presages the similar solo used in Fun, Fun, Fun. This would have been a stand-out track on the earlier albums, but here it’s just another track.
A Brian Wilson/Mike Love song, Love’s lyrics would later be replaced by Roger Christian and turned into Sidewalk Surfin’, a minor hit for Jan & Dean.
The Surfer Moon
The second Brian Wilson solo composition of the album is an unsuccessful rewrite of the first. The verse chord sequence is almost a clone of that of Surfer Girl, right down to the minor sixth, although the middle eight is surprisingly sophisticated. It’s let down though by the lyrics, which literally resort to moon/June rhymes, and the string arrangement (the first on a Beach Boys record) which apes the muzaky sound of the Four Freshmen and other 50s easy-listening acts. A solo vocal performance by Brian, this is still far ahead of anything from the first two albums, and points forward to the romanticism of later works like Today! and Pet Sounds, but doesn’t really work.
South Bay Surfer, credited to Brian and Carl Wilson and Al Jardine, is a rewrite of the old Stephen Foster song Swanee River, which must have been on Brian Wilson’s mind at the time, as he also recorded a track with his wife’s band, the Honeys, based on the same tune (Surfin’ Down The Swanee River).
Nothing special, this is mostly notable as being the first song where Al Jardine is really noticeable in the vocals, singing the top line of the harmonies (such as they are, being mostly Brian, Carl and Al chanting in near-unison).
The Rocking Surfer
One of the last of the surf-style instrumentals the band did, this alternates a simple hammond organ statement of a rather dull melody with some relatively competent guitar work. The whole thing’s drowned in hiss too, due presumably to poor quality tape. Another Brian Wilson solo credit, this at least has the decency to be credited trad. arr, as presumably nobody could believe this actually needed to be written.
Little Deuce Coupe
The B-side to Surfer Girl, this charted separately itself at number 15 in the US. Written by Brian Wilson and Roger Christian, this is one of the songs Mike Love sued over, and if you compare the lyrics on the demo (on the Hawthorne, CA rarities CD) you can see that there were certainly alterations made before the recording.
Recorded at the last session before Al rejoined the band (and the first where Brian was credited as official producer), this track shows the band’s influence shifting from Chuck Berry to more groove-based shuffle music like Fats Domino. To the ears of an Englishman (and one, furthermore, who can’t drive) the lyrics are utter gibberish, but I am reliably informed that “She’s got a competition clutch with four on the floor and she purrs like a kitten til the lake pipes roar/and if that ain’t enough to make you flip your lid, there’s one more thing I got the pink slip daddy” is in fact in English…
One of the best of the band’s early hits.
In My Room
This is one of the most beautiful songs ever written, by Gary Usher and Brian Wilson. A refinement of the Surfer Girl formula, and like that based on arpeggiated triplets following something akin to the standard doo-wop changes (though extended and altered) with block harmonies, this is one of the times when utter simplicity is the most effective musical and lyrical technique.
A song about both comfort and loneliness, this track is much more ambiguous than it might seem, being about both Brian Wilson’s escaping from his abusive father by hiding away in the music room and about sharing his bedroom with his brothers (the first two voices we hear after Brian’s) growing up and harmonising with them as they sang themselves to sleep, but Gary Usher’s simple lyric manages to take these experiences and universalise them.
Featuring all six Beach Boys plus Maureen Love on harp, this is the stand-out track of the band’s first four albums, and if they’d never recorded anything else this track would still have been enough to make the Beach Boys’ reputation.
Hawaii
Recorded the same day as Catch A Wave, much like that song Mike Love’s vocals show evidence of a sore throat, and he sounds spookily like his cousin Dennis for much of the song.
A great little pop song by Brian and Mike that can never quite decide whether it’s in C, D or G, this is a standout track that could easily have been a hit single and remains in the touring ‘Beach Boys’ repertoire to this day.
Surfers Rule is a filler track about how ‘surfers’ are better than ‘hodaddies’, written by Brian and Mike with a rudimentary lead vocal by Dennis. It’s mostly notable for the fadeout, where the song turns into a challenge against the band’s East Coast rivals the Four Seasons, with the band singing “Surfers rule (Four Seasons, you’d better believe it” while Brian imitates Frankie Valli’s Walk Like A Man falsetto over the top.
Our Car Club is a not-especially-good Wilson/Love song turned into a rather interesting production, all low Duane Eddy throbbing guitar and sax and pulsating drums. The young-sounding falsetto vocals don’t really work well with the backing track, but it’s an interesting experiment.
And again, I might appreciate the song more if I had any idea what lines like “We’ll really cut some low ETs” meant. Or maybe not.
Your Summer Dream is a more effective attempt at The Surfer Moon, a solo Brian vocal over lush chords (almost all minor 7ths). While not one of the best songs on the album, this is much better than the earlier track, as not only is the chord sequence slightly more original, with a nice melancholy tinge to it, but Bob Norberg’s lyrics are far better than anything Brian Wilson could come up with on his own.
And to finish an album that, while still patchy, is exponentially better than either of the first two, is the generic instrumental Boogie Woodie. Credited to Rimsky-Korsakov arr. Brian Wilson, this is supposedly based around Flight Of the Bumble-bee, but sounds far more like Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie to my ears.
SHUT DOWN VOL 2
Band members – Brian Wilson, Carl Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine.
The band’s first album of 1964 was also the first by what is now regarded as the ‘classic’ five-man line-up of the band (which would stay in this formation for not much more than a year). A mixed bag, this album more than any other shows how bands still weren’t thinking in terms of albums – the best material on here is as good as the best music recorded by anyone ever, and the worst is so bad as to be laughable.
The album’s title is a subtle dig at Capitol records, the band’s label, who had put out a cash-in compilation called Shut Down, featuring a couple of Beach Boys tracks alongside people such as Robert Mitchum.
Fun, Fun, Fun
One of the most exciting of the band’s early hits, this song was almost begging for another lawsuit from Chuck Berry, having an intro that is note-for-note identical to that of Johnny B Goode. Rather amazingly the lawsuit never came. (I’ve also heard it claimed that the verse melody was taken from Berry’s Carol, but I can hear very little resemblance).
Based on a true story (which happened either to a girlfriend of Dennis Wilson or the daughter of a radio station in Utah, depending on whose story you believe), this is one of several songs on this album whose creation is the subject of wildly differing accounts – Mike Love claims it was written in a cab in Salt Lake City, while Brian Wilson says they wrote it in Australia, after seeing the Beatles on TV.
Either way, the competition from the Beatles (who had not yet had a hit in the US when the song was recorded, but who were known to the band by this point after their Australian tour) clearly motivated the band to up their game, and everything about this track is exceptional, from Mike Love’s lyric (one of his very best) to the backing vocals acting as a Greek chorus, to the duelling Hammond and guitar solo, to Brian’s falsetto soaring over everything as the track fades.
The single mix (included as a bonus track on the CD) is the superior one, but this is a wonderful track in either form.
Don’t Worry Baby, the second track on the album, is even better. Based loosely on the Ronettes’ Be My Baby (with a little of Walking In The Rain for good measure), which Brian Wilson considers the greatest single ever recorded, this changes that adolescent sexual longing for something altogether more personal.
We see time and again in Brian Wilson’s music the figure of the woman who can save a man who is let down by his own weaknesses, and this is in fact the key to pretty much everything Wilson did (and one reason why although people compare him to Paul McCartney he is far closer to John Lennon, the only other songwriter in popular music to be as obsessed with masculine weakness being saved by a strong woman). This is the first time this figure appears, and it’s probably no coincidence that this song was written around the time of two pivotal events in Wilson’s life – his first nervous breakdown (on the ‘plane on the way to an Australian tour) and his engagement to his first wife, Marilyn.
Roger Christian puts this vulnerability and need for help into a typical Beach Boys context – someone afraid to drive in a drag race, but unable to back out because of his own bragging – but what really matters is just that this is a man trapped in a traditional masculine role, and only the unnamed ‘she’ can help him escape, when she says “Don’t worry baby, everything will turn out all right”
Musically, as well, this is very typically Brian Wilson. I’ve talked before about how he’s very much a piano-based composer and chords out with his right hand while playing melodies with his left, and this can be seen here better than anywhere else. On the chorus, Mike Love is clearly singing the moving left hand piano part (“Now don’t/now don’t you wo/rry ba-by”), the rest of the band are singing the block right-hand chords (“Don’t worry baby/Don’t worry ba-by”), while Brian is singing the melody line he would have been singing while playing the piano, on top (“Don’t worry baby/everything will turn out all right/Don’t worry baby”).
This is just a stunning, beautiful song and performance, and when released as the B-side to I Get Around managed to chart at number 24 in the US in its own right. In fact MOJO magazine, in the late 1990s, did a ‘hundred greatest singles of all time’ list and this came in at number 15, despite being a B-side.
In The Parkin’ Lot, another Wilson/Christian song, is filler about which there is essentially nothing to say, except that the intro and outro have nice harmonies.
“Cassius” Love vs “Sunny” Wilson is even less essential, being a ‘comedy’ spoken-word section where the band pretend to be rehearsing for a show, with bits of their hit records interspersed with Mike and Brian making fun of each others’ voices.
The Warmth Of The Sun, however, gets us back to Don’t Worry Baby levels of quality. Written by Brian and Mike either the night before or the night after the JFK assassination, depending on who you believe, this is the most sophisticated, complex version of the Surfer Girl formula the band ever did.
It sounds at first like a simple rewrite of that song, being another 12/8 arpeggiated track with block harmonies, starting out with the familiar doo-wop changes, but those changes soon go in a radically different direction.
The I-vi-ii-V (or the variant I-vi-IV-V) chord progression (doo-wop changes or ‘four chord trick’) is the basis of literally tens of thousands of songs, from Blue Moon and Heart And Soul to Please Mister Postman, This Boy and I Will Always Love You. And this song’s first two chords, C and Am, follow that pattern precisely.
But then rather than go to the expected Dm, the song changes key to Eb (a tone-and-a-half up), *restarts* the progression, and continues *that* until it gets to Dm, where it stays twice as long as it ‘should’ before finishing the original progression in C, so we have I-vi-IIIb-i-ii-ii-V-Vaug (the Beatles did something similar to this in Day Tripper, but using a 12-bar blues rather than doo-wop changes).
As well as being musically clever, though, this also suits the mood of the song – the song is about loss, and hope after loss, and by moving from C through to Cminor back to C again, that feeling of loss followed by renewed hope is conveyed in the chords – musically it’s like going through the night and getting to the dawn again.
Warmth Of The Sun is one of those songs that by rights should be a standard, one of the most perfect songs ever written.
This Car Of Mine is a Dion-esque song by Mike and Brian, written to give Dennis a vocal spot. It’s catchy enough, but has nothing of any real interest about it.
Why Do Fools Fall In Love? is a fairly straight cover of the Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers classic from the fifties, with a nice added a capella statement of the title in the middle of the song. One of the band’s best covers, but not hugely different from the original.
Pom Pom Play Girl is Carl Wilson’s first solo lead vocal, on a Wilson/Usher song that has little to recommend it – musically it’s a rewrite of Little Deuce Coupe while lyrically it’s a rather nastily misogynist portrait of a cheerleader who “doesn’t really know why she’s waving her hands”.
Keep An Eye On Summer is another 12/8 doo-wop based song, written by Brian Wilson and Bob Norberg (with Love gaining credit in his lawsuit). Bearing a slight resemblance to the Four Freshmen’s Graduation Day, which was in the band’s live repertoire at the time, this is nothing special. Strangely, this was one of two Beach Boys songs Brian chose to rerecord for his 1998 solo album Imagination.
Shut Down Part II is another generic surf instrumental, credited to Carl Wilson but again the kind of thing any band knock outs in a jam session. It starts with Mike Love reprising his two-note sax ‘solo’ from Shut Down, presumably to justify the title.
Louie Louie is a pretty poor cover, with Carl Wilson actually enunciating the lyrics, although Love’s dumb ‘duh-duh-duh’ bass vocal has just the right kind of stupidity (sounding very like some of the backing vocals on early Zappa records).
Denny’s Drums is a solo drum performance, supposedly by Dennis Wilson, who is credited as composer, but suspicious minds *might* think it was actually session player Hal Blaine…
BONUS TRACKS
Fun, Fun, Fun (single mix)
This is a slightly different mix to the album mix, with Brian’s vocal higher in the mix on the fade, and a drum overdub, but little other difference.
Ganz Allein is In My Room sung in German, to the same backing track.
and I Do is a Brian Wilson song that was eventually given to The Castells, a harmony-pop band whose lead singer later joined the Gary Usher-produced Hondells. Recorded around the time of the Surfer Girl sessions, this sounds like it was influenced by some of Phil Spector’s work with the Crystals, and would have made a better album track than many of the filler tracks that did get released.
The Beach Boys: A Guide, Part 1: Introduction and Surfin’ Safari/Surfin’ USA
I’m going to review every available Beach Boys CD, including the solo albums, to try to provide a buyers’ guide to the band’s music. (I’m also restarting my Doctor Who reviews and trying to do at least one comics post per week.) If these are popular I may turn them into a book like my Beatles book.
The reason for doing this is that I want to have somewhere people can go to get some kind of consistent critical look at the band’s music. There are only two books I know of that attempt to analyse the band’s music in any detail, as opposed to concentrating on a single album or the more lurid aspects of their personal lives, and I would recommend both, but both have their problems. Doe & Tobler’s Complete Guide is a decent overview for beginners, and Andrew Doe is both probably the most knowledgeable person on the band and someone with a good ear for the band’s music at its various points, but it’s too short and (I believe) out of print. Meanwhile Philip Lambert’s Inside The Music Of Brian Wilson is one of the best books I’ve read in many years, and provides a far more in-depth musicological analysis than I would be capable of, but the author has a tendency to remake Brian Wilson in his own image, and the focus is specifically on Brian Wilson (rather than the Beach Boys) and solely on the pre-1967 work.
And this is unfortunate, because the general critical line on the Beach Boys is wrong in two important ways.
Firstly, it treats the Beach Boys as being Brian Wilson and a bunch of sidemen. While this was arguably true during the band’s commercial heyday (though it’s notable that with the exception of the already-famous Jan & Dean, none of Wilson’s outside productions troubled the charts at all), the fact is that Mike Love was a better lyricist and bass vocalist than he’s given credit for, Carl Wilson and Al Jardine had two of the best voices of the rock era, and Dennis Wilson was a songwriter almost the equal of his big brother.
The other problem is the way it treats Brian Wilson himself.
Wilson as a musician is almost an embodiment of the fable about the blind men and the elephant, something that was borne out to me by a terrible article in Uncut magazine in 1998, in which the author wanted to prove that Joe Thomas (the producer with whom Wilson was then working) didn’t understand Wilson’s music and was a bad collaborator. So he asked Wilson’s other collaborators, and other musicians.
Bruce Johnston, of the Beach Boys, said “Yes, Brian shouldn’t be working with Joe Thomas. That’s not Brian’s *real* music. He should be making Beach Boys music. Thomas doesn’t understand him”.
Andy Paley, Spector-influenced powerpop songwriter, said “Yes, Brian shouldn’t be working with Joe Thomas. That’s not Brian’s *real* music. He should be making music like Phil Spector and Chuck Berry. Thomas doesn’t understand him.”
and Sean O’Hagan, who makes exotica/lounge-influenced experimental pop, said “Yes, Brian shouldn’t be working with Joe Thomas. That’s not Brian’s *real* music. He should be making exotica/lounge-influenced experimental pop. Thomas doesn’t understand him”
The general critical consensus has another of these partial views of Wilson’s work. Everything before Pet Sounds was either dreck or ‘classic pop’ (either way unworthy of analysis). Pet Sounds was The Best Album Ever. Smile not being finished heralded Brian’s Collapse. Everything between Pet Sounds and 1974 was rubbish, unless you can apply the word ‘lush’, in which case it was A Return To Form. Everything after that was rubbish, unless you can apply the word ‘lush’, in which case it was An Unsuccessful Attempt To Trade On Past Glories.
Actually, WIlson’s art can’t fit into these neat categories. My own take is that the best way to think of Wilson is as an outsider musician, but one who actually happens to have a huge amount of talent. Much like, say, Wesley Willis, Wilson is focussed on having huge commercial success, but has little to no idea what actually counts as ‘commercial’. He’s very easily swayed by people around him, so if he’s told he should be doing three-minute pop songs, he does three-minute pop songs, and if he’s told he should do epic suites about the American Dream, he does those.
But at all times there are two things that remain true about him – he has an unerring ability as an arranger, and a directness that makes his music more communicative than any other music I’ve ever heard.
But I note that that is only one way of looking at Wilson’s music – my way.
I’m going to examine, over the next few months, every Beach Boys studio album, every solo album that’s in print (by the ‘classic’ Mike/Al/Carl/Brian/Dennis line-up – I’ve not got the time or inclination to provide thorough reviews of Dave Marks or Blondie Chaplin’s records), and the compilations Endless Harmony and Hawthorne, CA, and try to explain why the Beach Boys rival the Beatles for musical importance. I’ll be doing this by CD, not by album (at least for the early albums, which are full of filler) – most Beach Boys albums are currently available as ‘twofer’ CDs. But if you want the short version, buy the 5-CD box set Good Vibrations. It’s absolutely essential, cutting out all the rubbish and providing a near-perfect summary of the band’s career.
But now, on to the reviews.
Surfin’ Safari/Surfin’ USA (Buy from Amazon / Listen free on Spotify )
The Beach Boys’ first albums were recorded during a time of line-up flux for them. While most bands start recording only after a few years’ touring, usually in their early twenties, the Beach Boys were in their teens – rhythm guitarist David Marks being only thirteen. And they had their first hit record, Surfin’, before ever having performed live. As a result, it took a while to settle on their ‘classic’ line-up – while their first single featured that line-up (Brian, Carl and Dennis Wilson, Mike Love and Alan Jardine), the rest of the album, and the next few albums, featured David Marks in place of Jardine. Marks had been part of rehearsals from the start and both Jardine (who returned a year later) and Marks regard each other as ‘original’ members.
But that it would take a year or so to sort out who was really in the band shows the problem – this is a garage band, quite literally. This is a bunch of teenagers who somehow, accidentally, managed to become huge rock stars at a point where the concept of the rock star was just being formed. What’s amazing is that some of this music is competent, or even good, not that most of it’s poor.
Surfin’ Safari
line-up – Brian, Carl, Dennis, Mike, David, Alan (Surfin’ only). All lead vocals by Mike unless otherwise stated.
Surfin’ Safari
The title track of the band’s first album is their second single, and first for Capitol Records. Essentially a rewrite by Mike and Brian of their earlier single Surfin’, it takes all that single’s elements and tightens them into a formula that would be repeated in several huge hits for the band (plus Surf City, Brian Wilson’s number one hit for Jan & Dean) – start with the hook, then have a short verse, mentioning as many different places and pieces of surf slang as possible, sung by Love in his nasal tenor range, followed by a twelve-bar chorus with Love singing a variant of a boogie bassline while the rest of the band chant. Add in a Chuck Berry guitar solo (the only new element in the mix, and a vital one) and fade.
Other than the brief move to V-of-V in the hook, the only thing of musical interest is the chorus, where the lead vocal takes the bass part, rather than staying on top. Even this early, we’re already seeing one of the things that makes Brian Wilson’s music different – he writes on the piano, and his left hand is vastly more mobile than his right, playing intricate, complex melodies while his right hand just blocks out chords.
Later on, when he has five or six voices in the mix, this is what leads to some of his most beautiful vocal parts, but at this point the band were vocally limited – Dave Marks wasn’t much of a singer, Dennis was behind the drum kit, and Carl’s voice had barely broken. So we have rudimentary harmonies here, and the lack of more complex vocal parts is what makes this now sound primitive compared to the singles the band would do even a year later. At this point though, six months before the Beatles even recorded Love Me Do, this was a genuinely fresh, interesting sound.
County Fair Written by Brian and his friend Gary Usher, this story of a date gone wrong features vocal cameos from Andrea Carlo (apparently Dave Mark’s aunt, though only 17 at the time) and ‘producer’ Nik Venet (the A&R man who signed the band to Capitol and took nominal production responsibility for their early recordings) as, respectively, a whining girlfriend and a carnival barker. A rewrite of the Freddie “Boom Boom” Cannon song Palisades Park (which the band would much later cover themselves), this was itself later rewritten as I Do.
Ten Little Boys a rewrite by Brian and Gary Usher of the nursery rhyme, this is a two-chord song about little ‘indians’ trying to woo a ‘squaw’ who ‘loved the tenth Indian boy’. It features the band singing “kemo sabe” repeatedly and making “wah wah” noises with their hands. In 1962, this was considered acceptable material for a single.
Chug-A-Lug Another Wilson/Usher song (though Love is also credited, see below), based around the same structure as Surfin’ Safari, but this time featuring an organ/guitar solo trade-off. An ode to root beer, the verse lyrics are quick pen portraits of the band and their friends (“Carl says hurry up and order it quick, Dave gets out to chase that chick”). It doesn’t really work.
Little Girl (You’re My Miss America) is the band’s first cover – a song co-written by Herb Alpert, for Dante And His Friends. (The Dante in question was session singer Ron Dante, later better known as the lead vocalist on The Archies’ Sugar Sugar, and later still Barry Manilow’s record producer). A simple Dion-esque ballad, this marks Dennis Wilson’s debut as lead vocalist, and he actually does a much better job than anyone else on the record, making this a stand-out track.
409 The B-side of Surfin’ Safari and written to much the same formula (and, like that track, recorded by the band as a demo before they were signed to Capitol) this is really the start of the Beach Boys we know – far more assured-sounding than anything else on the album (partially thanks to the sound effects recorded in Gary Usher’s garage), this shows what the band were capable of when they weren’t having to quickly knock out filler.
This was also the start of a run of double-sided singles by the band, where one side would be about surfing (to appeal to the coasts) while the other side would be about cars (to appeal to landlocked middle America) – the car songs tending to be the most popular.
This is one of a number of Beach Boys songs whose authorship is disputed. Until the 1990s it was credited to Brian Wilson and Gary Usher, but in a lawsuit brought by Love this was one of thirty-nine songs for which Love gained co-writer credit. Some of those songs (for example California Girls) were undoubtedly co-written by Love. On others, such as Wouldn’t It Be Nice, one of the other co-writers (in that case lyricist Tony Asher) claimed that Love had no input. In the case of the Usher collaborations, it’s hard to know – at the time of the trial, Wilson was mentally unwell, and Gary Usher had died some years earlier. For the record, Love claims in this case to have come up with the ‘hooks’ “She’s real fine, my 409″ and “giddy-up 409″, with Wilson and Usher writing the rest.
Surfin’ the band’s first recording, originally released on tiny indie label Candix, this sounds like the work of a different band, and in many ways it is. At the time this was recorded, the band were still forming, and at this point it sounds like Al Jardine – a folkie and fan of the Kingston Trio – was having a strong influence. The instrumentation is all acoustic – a single acoustic guitar, stand-up bass and one snare drum – and the harmonies are fuller thanks to Jardine’s presence. It’s little more than a demo, and is a mere sketch of the formula they’d refine on the later early singles.
This version is sped up compared to the original recording (the idea of Murry Wilson, the Wilson brothers’ father, who was also the band’s first manager and another ‘producer’, to make them sound younger). The original version can be heard on the Good Vibrations box set.
Heads You Win, Tails I Lose is a fairly nondescript Wilson/Usher track, notable mostly for managing to make the line “Why can’t we arbitrarily resolve a fight?” work in context.
Summertime Blues a cover of the Eddie Cochrane song, with lead vocals sung as a unison duet by Carl Wilson and David Marks, this sounds exactly like you’d expect a fourteen- and a fifteen-year-old singing this song in unison to sound. Mike Love injects some wit and panache when he takes the low “No dice, son” parts.
Cuckoo Clock is an utterly undistinguished Wilson/Usher track, notable only for being Brian Wilson’s first lead vocal to be released.
Moon Dawg is a cover of a track by The Gamblers. The original is interesting for several reasons, as it features both Bruce Johnston (later himself a member of the Beach Boys) and Elliot “Winged Eel Fingerling” Ingber (later of the Mothers Of Invention and Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band) as well as having, on its B-side, the very first song ever to reference LSD (LSD-25 – in 1962, remember!). The original was also produced by Nik Venet, who is credited on early pressings of the Beach Boys’ record (but not the original Gamblers track) as the composer (later pressings credit Derry Weaver, the Gamblers’ guitarist).
Unfortunately, it’s a generic surf instrumental, and the Beach Boys’ version is a rather amateurishly-played generic surf instrumental.
The Shift The band’s first exercise in sexism finishes the album up. Apparently if you “get your girl a shift and she’ll look real fine” and “[a girl] wearing a shift really turns me on”. They repeat how much this particular one-piece bathing suit “turns [them] on” in case we didn’t realise. Mike Love wrote the lyrics, unsurprisingly.
Surfin’ USA
line-up – Brian, Carl, Dennis, Mike, David.
Surfin’ USA Rather surprisingly, at least for non-fans, this was the last uptempo surf-themed hit single the band recorded (not counting 1968′s nostalgia track Do It Again) – while Brian Wilson would keep hammering away at his formula with Jan & Dean for a couple of years (Surf City, Ride The Wild Surf etc), this track is it, as far as the Beach Boys’ uptempo surf hits go. They’d have one more surf-themed song, the ballad Surfer Girl, and that would be it.
This is also the first Beach Boys track to feature Brian Wilson’s falsetto being given a quick solo spot, something that would become an increasingly prominent part of the band’s sound, though Love takes the lead apart from that one line.
While this was the work of many hands, including Wilson, probably Love, and Wilson’s girlfriend’s brother (who provided the place-names), Wilson was credited as sole songwriter originally. But then Chuck Berry sued, on the not-unreasonable grounds that the whole melody and arrangement (right down to the stop-start guitar) was stolen from Sweet Little Sixteen, so Berry is now credited as sole author.
Farmer’s Daughter is a Wilson/Love song with Brian Wilson taking a solo falsetto lead. A mildly smutty (for the time) song from the point of view of a traveller who stops off for a couple of days and ‘help[s] you plough your fields’. Hem hem. For some unknown reason, Fleetwood Mac (the Rumours version) used to cover this live.
Misirlou. The first of five (count ‘em!) surf instrumentals on the album, this is a very careful, reverent cover of Dick Dale’s version of this old instrumental. One can practically hear Carl Wilson sticking his tongue out in concentration as he plays the difficult bits.
Stoked This instrumental is credited as written by Brian Wilson. That’s assuming anything quite so rudimentary ever needed ‘writing’.
The Lonely Sea is a Wilson/Usher ballad that anticipates much of Wilson’s later work, being a bridge between Surfer Girl (written but not released until the next album) and In My Room,with its slow guitar arpeggios and falsetto lead. The words are utterly rudimentary, and there’s a bathetic brief spoken section (“this pain in my heart/these tears in my eyes/please tell the truth”), but somehow it still manages to have an incredibly haunting effect.
One piece of advice though – don’t listen to the stereo mix with headphones. The lead vocal and all instruments are in one channel, and the backing vocals isolated in the other. Which would be fine, except the backing vocals only come in half-way through, but the mic was open the entire time, picking up coughs, salival noises and breaths. If Mike Love heavy-breathing in your ear for 90 seconds sounds like fun, go ahead, but otherwise stick to speakers…
Shut Down – the B-side to Surfin’ USA, this shows the Chuck Berry influence in a different way. Where the A-side had just stolen one of Berry’s melodies, this one has its own melody (a development on from that of 409) but the words are an attempt to write a Chuck Berry car-race song in the style of Maybelline or You Can’t Catch Me.
That they work that well is thanks to the lyricist, the DJ Roger Christian, who Brian Wilson had heard critiquing the lyrics to 409 on the radio and who became a frequent collaborator with Wilson, Jan Berry and Gary Usher (together and separately) for the next few years. Christian’s car-song lyrics (and Love’s car songs, when he’s imitating Christian) were more sophisticated than the surf lyrics had been, frequently having a plot with some kind of conflict and resolution.
While this is based on 409, we can see clear traces of this song in Little Deuce Coupe (similar melody), I Get Around (“round, round get around, I get around” and “tach it up, tach it up, buddy gonna shut you down” having similar functions in the songs) and Fun Fun Fun (the backing vocals acting as a Greek chorus in the second verse), among others – this was a big step forward for Wilson.
While it’s not perfect – Love’s lead vocal is horribly double-tracked in the last verse – it’s charming enough that things like Love’s two-note sax honking ‘solo’ sound endearing rather than amateurish, and it’s a great little single.
This is another song over whose credits Love sued and won in the 1990s.
Noble Surfer because, you see, “noble” sounds a tiny bit like “no bull”, which if you’re in 1962 is a tiny bit rude. This astounding realisation which changed the course of humour forever was hit on by Mike Love, and Brian Wilson set the mirth-tastic laugh-riot to music that fits it perfectly.
Honky Tonk. Bill Doggett’s original of this (with guitarist Billy Butler) is a rock & roll classic, one of the great R&B instrumentals of all time, slow, dark and grooving over two sides of a 45. This is two minutes and four seconds of teenagers playing with too much echo. By this point Carl Wilson was a *VERY COMPETENT* teenage guitarist, but this is still absolutely pointless.
Lana is a rewrite of Farmer’s Daughter with a little of The Shift thrown in, musically. Lyrically, though, it’s a bland love song. Brian Wilson takes both lead vocal and solo composition credit.
Surf Jam Is ostensibly written by Carl Wilson. Which is odd, because the only Wilson on the credits for Wipe Out by the Surfaris is Ron Wilson.
Let’s Go Trippin’ is a cover of a Dick Dale track that is distinguished from every other generic surf instrumental ever by the truly strange reverb effect on Dale’s guitar. Guess which feature of the track they didn’t copy? They did add the sax ‘talents’ of Mike Love though…
and Finders Keepers rounds out the biggest load of tossed-together nothing the band would release in the first twenty-five years of their career with a rewrite of Heads I Win, Tails You Lose from the previous album, but done slightly more interestingly. Not much more, though. A Brian and Mike track.
CD Bonus Tracks
Cindy, Oh Cindy is a cover of a nondescript fifties pop ballad about going to sea and missing one’s girl. Brian turns in a decent vocal performance, and while this is far from exciting it’s much better than half of what was on the Surfin’ USA album, and should probably have been released rather than left in the can.
The Baker Man is another unreleased song, which sounds like an attempt to rewrite Hully Gully as a girl-group dance song in the style of The Locomotion. Brian turns in a surprisingly good gruff vocal, but the song itself is fluff and overlong. That said, it’s still better than half of Surfin’ USA.
Land Ahoy is a Brian Wilson song in a similar style to Cindy, Oh Cindy, another song of sailors pining for their love. It was rerecorded a few months later as Cherry, Cherry Coupe but neither track is hugely successful. Mike Love sings lead.
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