{"id":27985,"date":"2024-08-24T05:30:45","date_gmt":"2024-08-24T09:30:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=27985"},"modified":"2024-08-26T07:59:58","modified_gmt":"2024-08-26T11:59:58","slug":"take-five-the-beach-boys-endless-summer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2024\/08\/24\/take-five-the-beach-boys-endless-summer\/","title":{"rendered":"Take Five: The Beach Boys’ ‘Endless Summer’"},"content":{"rendered":"

The music of the Beach Boys is a cultural icon. Songs about surfing, cars, girls defined an era. Before the Beatles led the charge of the British Invasion, the group from Hawthorne, California reigned supreme. Rather than surrender to the British, songwriter Brian Wilson upped his game and embarked upon creative endeavors that ended up inspiring the Beatles themselves to greater heights. The Beach Boys\u2019 mid sixties output \u2013 most notably Pet Sounds<\/em> and the long-unreleased SMiLE<\/em> \u2013 were groundbreaking and highly influential masterworks.<\/p>\n

And while the group continued to do interesting work in the years when Brian Wilson\u2019s involvement couldn’t be reliably counted upon, by the early \u201870s the group had fallen out of fashion. But in a marketing masterstroke, Capitol Records compiled a bunch of songs from a decade earlier, from those simpler, pre-experimental days. Putting them all together in a brightly colored gatefold sleeve that doubled down on the group\u2019s surf-and-sun character, Endless Summer<\/em> was a blockbuster hit. The album\u2019s success was a two-edged sword: it put the Beach Boys back on the chart and made them a popular concert draw once again, but it had the (perhaps unintended) effect of capturing them in metaphorical amber: from 1974 onward, the Beach Boys would be thought of primarily as a nostalgia act.<\/p>\n

But what nostalgia! Even in their early days, the Beach Boys created some timeless music. On the 50th anniversary of the release of that landmark oldies collection, here are five standout tracks from the Beach Boys\u2019 Endless Summer<\/em>. (Note: original member Mike Love leads a lineup of latter-day Beach Boys \u2013 most of whom weren\u2019t even born when the songs charted \u2013 on a tour this summer, celebrating (what else) the 1974 Endless Summer<\/em> double LP.<\/p>\n

\u201cSurfin\u2019 U.S.A.\u201d (originally from Surfin\u2019 U.S.A.<\/em>, 1963)<\/strong>
\nThe second Beach Boys album is almost a conceptual work: nearly all of its twelve songs are about the beach. (The remainder are mostly about cars.) The melody of \u201cSurfin\u2019 U.S.A.\u201d is a direct lift of Chuck Berry\u2019s \u201cSweet Little Sixteen,\u201d so beginning in 1966 Berry received a co-writing credit on the Brian Wilson song. The single was Billboard<\/em>\u2019s #1-ranked song for 1963.<\/p>\n