Day 145: Beach Boys – Surfin’ Safari
Today, I thought I’d go for Surfin’ Safari because on this cold January night in Scotland, I’d like to imagine I’m surfing on a beach somewhere in Southern California, or it’s 23:00 when I started listening and the album is 25 minutes long and I’m a little bit pressed on time, pick whichever excuse you’d prefer – personally, I think it’s a little bit of column A, a little bit of column B, heavy on the B.
Album cover courtesy of Capitol Records
I wrote a little bit about the Beach Boys in my Brian Wilson review from early on in the project on day 27, but I left out some of the basics. The Beach Boys were formed in Hawthorne, California by brothers Brian, Dennis and Carl Wilson, along with their cousin Mike Best and their friend Al Jardine. Surfin’ Safari was the group’s debut after they were signed on a seven-year contract with Capitol after one of their executives branded the band as teenage gold.
It’s not exactly an unfair assessment, nothing about the record screams mature – it’s all simple pop songs with uncomplicated lyrics about their stalwart topics of girls, cars, the beach and surfing, despite there only being one member of the band who surfed. It was a sea change from other surf music that was mostly instrumental, the Beach Boys had their own teenage bubblegum pop sound, combined with the lifestyle they were selling of spending your days with California girls and surfing all day.
I said in my Brian Wilson review that I find it curious how much of these songs that were written by Brian Wilson and Mike Lov about topics that were probably unattainable to them due to the strict and abusive manager and father of the Wilson boys, Murry Wilson. This feels especially apparent in their first albums when he was still managing them. There’s such a naïve element to what they’re doing, an example of this is their song “Chug-A-Lug” where they must specify that what they’re chugging is just root beer.
Genuinely, as an album it’s only just fine. There are not really any glimmers of future virtuosity, it’s just a nice record with some OK pop songs, but nothing to write home about. I’d listen to it either on or on the way to the beach and that’s about it. It feels like the kind of substandard record that you have to churn out before you as an artist can get to the good stuff. Interesting to listen to as a part of Beach Boys history, but other than that, it’s neither here nor there. 6/10.