When The Jesus and Mary Chain covered The Beach Boys’ ‘Surfin U.S.A’
In 1987, The Jesus and Mary Chain’s dangerous reputation came to a head at a gig at the RPM Club in Toronto. After being heckled throughout the show by a particularly lively group of revellers, frontman Jim Read picked up his microphone stand and thrust it into the crowd, hitting the ringleader on the head. Unsurprisingly, the singer wound up in jail. On being discharged, he promised to donate £500 to a Salvation Army charity and apologise to the heckler.
With a court case hanging over the band, The Jesus and Mary Chain decided to put out a collection of B-sides and oddities in the form of Barbed Wire Kisses – released in April 1988. One of the tracks featured on the record is this brilliant rendition of The Beach Boys’ 1963 classic ‘Surfin U.S.A’. The track features Jim and William Reid on guitar and vocals, Douglas Hart on bass and Richard Thomas on drums, the latter of whom replaced an extensive selection of drum tapes in the first months of ’88.
Based on Chuck Berry’s 1958 single ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’, Surfin’ U.S.A is one of The Beach Boys’ earliest singles and followed their first hit ‘Surfin Safari’. By this time, Brian Wilson was gaining confidence as a producer, and many regard this track as marking the dawn of what would become the group’s signature sound, a sound achieved through heavy use of double-tracking, especially of vocals, complex harmonies and bright jangling guitars. The Jesus and Mary Chain’s rendition rests on the glorious subversion of the summer-bound optimist that defines the original.
When The Beach Boys wrote this particular number, Chuck Berry was in jail for transporting a minor across state lines, so Wilson and co. didn’t bother to get his permission to mimic ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’. When Berry threatened to sue the group, The Beach Boys decides to hand over the majority of the royalties and add his name to the list of the song’s composers. The credit was essential in building Berry’s reputation while he served his sentence.
This rework of ‘Surfin U.S.A’ evokes a land far away from the sun-dappled landscapes of California, a land far more drizzly and post-industrial, a land where the sun shines about once every three years. That land is, of course, Scotland, where The Jesus and Mary Chain formed in the early 1980s. Interestingly, their early influences were groups like The Stooges, and The Velvet Underground – bands that represented the very antithesis of West Coast pizzaz.
As a result, this rendition serves as a sort of thought experiment in which The Beach Boys rose to fame, not in California, but in downtown New York.
