Surfin' Safari/Surfin' U.S.A.

Great album

A really good beach boys cd. I used to buy their LP's in the 60's and saw them when they came to Manchester on a rare visit. There are several tracks Ive not heard before. A couple of my favourites are 409, Farmers Daughter (best version by the Summer Set though) ,Lets Go Trippin and Shut Down. Most tracks good and well worth a listen.

Awesome album! Songs about cars, surfing & chicks. That's the world right there! Treat your ears and mind - go on!

Got this as a gift for my grandfather and he loved it. Great gift.

this is history of modern music. A must !!!

This is the first 2 beach boys albums on 1 CD with 3 bonus tracks. Being a big fan of the band for a few years and this being on my wish list for over a year this was an obvious buy for me. It's a quality collection of not just a piece of beach boy's history but a piece of music history itself with the Beach boys being the 1st major surf band to make it. They were well marketed as a surf band as you can see from the liner notes and artwork! The booklet has some very informative and detailed liner notes from David leaf (author of a Brian Wilson biography). There's also notes for both albums from Brain Wilson, quotes from interviews and original advertisements for both albums and some nice pictures of the band. The first 12 tracks are from the debut Surfin' safari. As Brain tells us it's his `first adventure into song writing' and it shows. The tracks are very much experimental and rough around the edges. They are proper recordings but they're not up to the quality of the band that I was expecting but well worth listening to nevertheless! Brain Wilson (main songwriter) was shaping the sound for the band and didn't really have a specific sound for the band yet. Surfin' safari (which was their first single) is definitely the stand-out track on the album. It's got that surf rock sound with lyrics about getting out there on the waves and meeting girls. Country fair is a humorous track; simple but enjoyable. Ten little Indians is very repetitive and corny sounding. Chug-a-lug depicts the personalities of the band members but it's hardly classic BB! Little Miss America was Dennis' first lead vocal attempt and it's pretty corny also! 409 is about a car and the boys really reflect their teenage spirit. It's better. The staple harmonies are hardly great and the boys didn't really hone their skills until the next album. Surfin' is a catchy song and the 2nd best on the record but it is pretty repetitive. Heads you win is another simple sounding song but there's something about it. Summertime blues is a take on the Eddie Cochran classic. It has it's own vibe to it and is quite different to the original. Cuckoo clock has a cuckoo sound in the chorus! Moon dawg is the band's first attempt at an instrumental. It's pretty impressive but not great. The shift picks up the pace and has much more of the Beach boys sound that I like but the lyrics are a little questionable. Surfin' USA begins with my favourite Beach boys song - Surfin' safari. The song has the song structure from Chuck Berry's Sweet little sixteen but with lyrics about surfing around the continent. Funnily enough it's credited to Chuck Berry even though he wrote none of the lyrics! Farmer's daughter has some very high pitched vocals from Brian but automatically I noticed the quality of the sound had changed. The band seem to be working far better with their harmonies and the sound has improved. Brian learnt how to write really good songs and developed the sound for the better. What sort of spoils this album is the amount of instrumentals! There are 5 instrumentals out of 12 tracks so nearly half the album is made up of instrumentals! The band were obviously concentrating a lot more on their instrumental side and maybe Brain and his co-writers didn't have enough time for lyrics. Misirlou is a cover of a classic surf instrumental which I was familiar with from hearing the Black eyed peas' Pump it! Stoked is a cool surf number. Lonely sea is a ballad by Brian and is very haunting sounding. The band show they can do slow ballads just as well as rock songs. Shut down I had heard before and it's a pretty great sounding song once again about cars. Noble surfer is good but not great. Honky tonk is a more showy instrumental. Lana shows the band working well together vocally. Surf Jam and Let's go trppin' are the last 2 instrumentals with some impressive guitar work. Enjoyable if you can appreciate it. Finders keepers is ok but even though it doesn't have that 'single' quality it's more enjoyable than the debut's tracks. The 3 bonus tracks are worth a listen being tracks that didn't make it to album. There's some good work here. This album is definitely worth picking up if you are a serious fan of the band with some enjoyable and interesting songs to add to your collection.

Stoked is probably the coolest song in rock history.

a

家宝 『Pet Sounds』と『smile』だけがビーチボーイズではない

Beach boys para sempre, a melhor banda da história

Starting my comments I want to tell that I was a teenager at times when Rolling Stones, Beatles etc. surprised us with a new style of music. During a few months when I stayed in UK as exchange student especially the British band were my favorites. Like many youngsters I played in different bands and music became real part of my life. The Beach Boys' music was different from the British. Summer, fun, girls, California and surf was the message how to enjoy life. We also had some of their songs on our playlists. One song I liked most is the rather unknown "Farmer's daughter." Why, I leave it up to your fantasy. For long time I was looking to find this song for my huge music collection and finally found it on "Surfin'USA." Price was good and as there weren't too many of the songs of "Summerdreams" I bought it. Now I can only say: GREAT ! Many pearls besides "Farmer's daughter." Taste surely is something which may be different, but this cd really exceeded my expectations. A great version of "Summertime Blues", the funny story of"Ten Little Indians" or the instrumental "Let's go trippin`" are my recommendation and....not to forget "Cindy, oh Cindy" as Bonus track. I only knew this song in German from late of the 50s when we had music sessions in our house. My uncle, who was great playing the accordeon, and one of his friends performed these former German songs of homesickness and yearning to travel into far a way countries in their own way. Cindy was one of my favorites. Cindy , left in sadness, because the one she loved had to leave her.........I haven't heard this song for a hundred of years nearly and now it brought me back to my days as a boy. Sounds greasy ? I don't mind !

The early 90's CD reissues of the Beach Boys' catalog with two albums on each disc is one of the best reissue series ever and a fine tribute to the band. In most cases they are pared chronologically, so naturally the first disc has Surfin' Safari and Surfin' U.S.A. The sound is impeccable with much work going into replicating the original productions. The excellent booklets have informative notes by David Leaf, short reminiscences by Brian Wilson, great photos and full-size album cover replicas instead of trying to show both covers in postage stamp size, which no one ever liked. It's a premium presentation that will never really be topped. By now nearly everybody knows that the real surf crowd didn't go for surf vocals and even resented their part in creating a rage for surfing that was bringing far too many newbies to the beaches. Surf music originally was raucous rock'n'roll party music, usually with a major sax part , though when guitars became more amplified the saxophones vanished. But the surf boom of the early 60's was about something bigger than surfing. It was a celebration of the prosperity and lifestyle, particularly for young people, that had developed in postwar America. The music of the Beach Boys paralleled this theme, first adding cars, then high school and the whole teen scene to itself. The surf craze preceded the Beach Boys' national breakout and originated more or less with Gidget (1959) and merited a large photo spread story in Life Magazine in September, 1961, about the time the Beach Boys were having their first regional hit in Surfin'. But if surf music was ever to go national it was going to have to be vocal because American Pop was vocal music. Instrumentals had a very peripheral existence on the pop charts and were usually novelty tunes. Even in 1962-64, the peak of the whole thing, there were only three genuine national surf instrumental hits: Pipeline, Wipe Out and Penetration. The early Beach Boys albums are not much by the standards of their later work, but they and the industry both grew together in the amazing years of the mid-sixties. But the first four albums were all early-sixties products. This was a time when labels rushed albums out to capitalize on a hit single, when rock;n;roll albums really didn't sell well and the LP charts were dominated by soundtracks, Broadway shows and band leaders like Ray Coniff and Nelson Riddle Surfin' Safari is not considered a very good album by critics and even the Beach Boys laughed at it in retrospect. It's very much the product of a bunch of kids, but it's very endearing, being the start of a great career and very fun, too. Every first album has a long saga of how it got to be made and Surfin' Safari is no exception; it's a fascinating story, but too long to go into here. Capitol took a chance with the group in 1962 and was immediately rewarded with the national success of Surfin' Safari. They rushed the not quite prepared band to make an album, probably thinking this surfing thing would only last a few months. Capitol's hottest producer, Nick Venet, was put in charge of the project.The band didn't have that much material yet and had to stretch to get twelve songs together. The album is almost a comedy album with a lot of intentionally humorous songs like County Fair (with Nick Venet as the barker); Ten Little Indians, which was a side of Brian that liked to make songs out of children's tunes; Chug-a-Lug, about root beer; Heads You Win-Tails I Lose; and the almost unforgivable Cuckoo Clock. The Shift would seem like another car song until you find out it's about a dress. Surfin' had to be licensed from Hite Morgan's Guild Music to have a hit to start side two, a standard practice.409 was their first car song and reached a wider audience than surfing. There were only two covers: an alright version of Eddie Cochran's Summertime Blues and the lone instrumental, the Gamblers Moon Dawg. The Gamblers had been put together and produced by Nick Venet who did the barking and howling here as he had done on the otriginal. Composer-guitarist Derry weaver was also at the session but whether he played on it is debated. Dennis got lead vocal on Little Miss America, the only retro-sounding song on the album, and he sings it with great warmth and sincerity. Whatever you can say about the album, it's original and it's virtually all theirs. Capitol wisely let them be themselves where another label might have overloaded them with production or loaded them down doing covers. Whether it was out of respect for the band or out of knowing that they didn't understand the teen market, they kept their distance, which was a good thing. The arrangements are a little too similar with Mile on a very forward lead and the guys fairly far back behind him. The group harmony was capable of sounding absolutely professional as far back as Lavender, a song from the old Pendletones days, but that took practice and this album was rushed out. The Paradise cove album cover and back cover studio photos perfectly conveyed the image of the Beach Boys. Surfin' Safari was moderately successful. Surfin' U.S.A. was a juggernaut.It established the Beach Boys as one of the two biggest groups in the country (the other being the Four Seasons), and the one that was at the epicenter of the latest national craze. Not only did the song go to #3 in the country, but the album went to #2, a virtually unheard of feat for a rock'n'roll album (unless your name was Elvis). The album was also a major leap in style and content. There is much more of the group singing in harmony and less dependence on Mike. Brian finally lets loose with his melodious falsetto. There aren't the gimmicky joke-songs that prevailed on Surfin' Safari and an absolutely melancholy mood is set by the Usher-Wilson song Lonely Sea. Shut Down is the already-mandatory car song. Finders Keepers deliberately imitates the Four Seasons' Big Girls Don't Cry in friendly rivalry. There are five instrumental tracks on the album out of twelve songs. This was not, I feel, due to them not having enough vocal material as it was perhaps the band wanting to put out a real surf album, which by now in the public's mind, meant a number of surf instrumentals. There are two Dick Dale covers, a genuine tribute to the man who really was the best surf guitarist on earth (it was really tragic he didn't get a national hit out of the surf craze).The other cover is Bill Doggett's 1956 hit, Honky Tonk, an odd choice (I would have thought they's do Mr. Moto or Underwater).Original instrumental tracks Stoked and Surf Jam show Carl and David getting pretty good on their guitars. Misirlou, like Moon Dawg on the first album was a little held back and not as explosively wild as the original, but still a decent version. The now-famous cover most unusually did not feature a photo of the group, but a shot of a solo surfer on a very big wave, the actual surfing experience. Somehow this image of sun and surf did more than any photo of the group would have done. Of course they were on the back cover. By now it was common knowledge that the Beach Boys weren't for the most part real surfers and didn't look boyish either. David Marks and Dennis Wilson fortunately were able to lend some credibility to the beach boy image. With these two albums the Beach Boys had established themselves as a real presence on the radio and not just one hit wonders. The real accomplishment was how original it all was. No one else sounded like this in '62 or '63. Don't mention the Four Freshmen because no one caught on to that connection for years. The Four Freshmen's heyday was in 1955-56 and by this time mostly sang in lounges and clubs. Beach Boy fans were too young to even know about the Four Freshmen and Four Freshmen fans would have never been listening to stations that played the Beach Boys. Nothing with much of that sound turned up until the Surfer girl album, anyway. It hardly needs to be said that any Beach Boy fan should have these albums from this excellent collection.

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