The Beach Boys – ‘Surfin’ U.S.A.’
It was crossover time for The Beach Boys in 1963. The previous year, their debut LP Surfin’ Safari showcased the first time that surf rock music was combined with barbershop harmonies. Previously thought to be the home of proto-metal riffs and slight genre music, surf rock suddenly became a major concern for teenagers across America. The new faces of the genre reflected most of the listeners: they were just kids.
Even Mike Love was only 22 when the band’s sophomore album, Surfin’ U.S.A., was released. There wasn’t a single Wilson brother who was over the age of 20, with Carl Wilson being all of 16 years of age. The Beach Boys were riding a wave, to borrow an obvious metaphor, and they needed to build on the momentum that came from landing their second single, ‘Surfin’ Safari’, in the top 20.
That’s how Surfin’ U.S.A. was born: a shameless retread that was rushed into the market as fast as it could possibly be. The five surf rock instrumentals and lack of shared vocal duties prove that Surfin’ U.S.A. was a rush job. And yet, there’s still that undeniable excitement that comes from The Beach Boys working right in their early wheelhouse.
When you listen to the album’s title track, you inevitably feel a frisson of giddy, childlike excitement. Kicking off the album with another monster earworm single, ‘Surfin’ U.S.A’ is a ferocious call-and-response rock number that stops and starts in a gloriously simple fashion. Sure, it’s just Chuck Berry’s ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’ with an oceanic sheen, but those infectious “Inside, outside, U.S.A.” chants that the band’s five vocalists pull off in harmony are completely their own.
If only the rest of the album kept that energy up. Wilson shows off the wild scope of his falsetto vocals on ‘Farmer’s Daughter’, but the song proves to be the first in a series of slight compositions that barely last over two minutes. That’s the thing about Surfin’ U.S.A.: it’s early-1960s schlock but done at the highest possible level by the very best band. The twee and somewhat shallow nature of the album keeps it from ever being in the conversation of the band’s best records, but for what it is, Surfin’ U.S.A. is fun and silly in a sort of irreverent way.
Carl Wilson should surely get credit for mastering Dick Dale’s hand-cramping guitar opus ‘Miserlou’ at such a young age. It’s songs like this that show that The Beach Boys were just a teenage garage band covering some of their favourite songs. When they couldn’t cover basic surf rock instrumentals, they created their own, like the bare-bones ‘Stoked’.
‘Lonely Sea’ sees Brian step back up to the mic for an impassioned ballad co-written with surf rock impresario Gary Usher. At this point in their career, Wilson and Love hadn’t achieved anything close to maturity in their lyric writing, so a random assortment of lyricists float into Surfin’ U.S.A. Roger Christian, the man who provided the lyrics for ‘Little Deuce Coup’ and would reach his peak with ‘Don’t Worry Baby’ the following year, provides the words for the forgettable ‘Shut Down’.
There really aren’t that many moments on Surfin’ U.S.A. that could truly be called memorable. After the potent opening of ‘Surfin’ U.S.A.’, the only real intrigue to be found on the album’s first side is the novelty of hearing The Beach Boys play ‘Miserlou’. Without a monster pop song to keep them afloat, side two of the album completely sinks under the weight of repetitive material, a notable lack of ambition, and three separate instrumentals. The fact that The Beach Boys would purposefully ignore their biggest asset at the time – their unique vocal blend – is unforgivable.
‘Noble Surfer’ is Love’s dedication to the perfect surfer. ‘Honky Tonk’ is an old-school rock and roll instrumental from 1956 that almost hit number one in the pre-Hot 100 days of the Billboard pop chart. Brian then breaks up the monotony with a rollicking piano rocker, ‘Lana’. As the most interesting part of the album’s B-side, ‘Lana’ at least has all the elements that you want from a Beach Boys song, with perfect harmonies intact.
‘Surf Jam’ is exactly what it purports to be: another goddamn surf rock instrumental. As if that wasn’t enough, ‘Let’s Go Trippin’ continues the trend. New key, a slightly different tempo, but the same old boring filler. Surfin’ U.S.A. at least ends on an upbeat note with ‘Finders Keepers’, the most complex song on the album – if by “complex” you mean that there are two different tempos to account for between the song’s two different sections. Still, that’s Dennis Wilson back there on drums keeping things on track as a bunch of teenagers attempt to add some variety to their songs. He might not be flashy, but he’s keeping things together.
It seems impossible to argue against the fact that Surfin’ U.S.A. should have been a single, or at most, an EP. But EPs weren’t a popular commercial format at the time in America. Besides, The Beach Boys signed an insane contract with Capitol Records (thanks to their manager, Murray Wilson, father of three band members) that kept them working at a non-stop pace. Simply put, there had to be a Beach Boys album out in the first quarter of 1963, and Surfin’ U.S.A. is the result.
Landing somewhere after the earnest beginnings of their very earliest years but before any kind of complexity began to filter into their writing, The Beach Boys created Surfin’ U.S.A. as a band in transition. Less than six months after the album’s release, David Marks would quit and Al Jardine would rejoin, sending The Beach Boys barrelling toward their first major turn away from surf music. Other than its title track, nothing about Surfin’ U.S.A. makes The Beach Boys look like one of the most important bands of all time. It’s not fun enough or meaty enough to stand up to anything else in the band’s catalogue, but it’s an interesting snapshot of just how busy the band was once they hit it big.
