The Beach Boys 'California Girls'

Chart Peak: 26
YouTube

Surprisingly only reached no. 26 in September 1965 (no. 3 in America) but known to millions through the "Caledonian Girls" adverts.

In case you didn't live in the UK in the early 1980s, didn't watch commercial TV, or are just a fan of casual sexism and ethnic stereotyping, the adverts are now available on YouTube. Whilst they're the earliest memory I could plausibly have of the song, my impression is that it was already relatively well-known in the UK, not least thanks to the success of their many hits collections which feature this song. Indeed, I presume it was parodied in the ads on the assumption that people would already know it.

This is the other side of the commercial peak from 'Do It Again', but arguably comes from another transitional time in their career. It is in fact the first released Beach Boys track to feature Bruce Johnston, who famously took Brian Wilson's place in the touring band after Wilson had a breakdown and refused to travel. Johnston was not an official member of the band yet, for contractual reasons, but his presence did also allow Wilson to spend more time in the studio working on the music; the backing track for this was recorded (by top-notch session musicians) almost two months before the actual Beach Boys were available to add their vocals. The other great significance of the song is in the band's legal history; as of 1986 the writing credit was to Brian Wilson alone, but he'd already widely acknowledged that the lyric was penned by Mike Love, which ultimately led to a lawsuit in the 1990s where Love claimed co-writing credits on a large and lucrative share of the back-catalogue. In fairness, this lyric in particular has Love's fingerprints all over it, as he boasts of his success with the ladies, praises girls from various locations in vaguely lecherous tones but ultimately sucks up by saying his local audience are the best of all.

The good news is that the lyric is easily the weakest thing about this track. Already an accomplished composer, Brian Wilson excels himself here with once of his most complex and beautiful melodies to date, using the studio as an instrument to integrate the composition and arrangement more than ever before. In a particular favourite trick of this time, he starts the song with an introduction totally unrelated to the main melody and the transition is joyous. Even the delivery of the words makes up for their content, with the brilliant and complex harmonies you'd expect - Wilson famously mixed the music into mono on one track of an eight-track tape and used the other seven just for vocals. There is a stereo mix available now, which is interesting to hear for detail but it's not quite the same as the proper thing. An authentically sunny record that sounds good all year.

Available on: Summer Days (and Summer Nights) (Mono & Stereo Remaster)

The Beach Boys 'Do It Again'

Chart Peak: 1

YouTube

Their 15th Top 30 hit in Britain and their second No. 1, 'Do It Again' topped the chart in August 1968 for one week.

Ah, the Beach Boys. Is there a major act more associated with the summer? Even their name connotes the season, at least to people living in our climate, and the word is ubiquitous in the titles of their many albums and hits compilations: Endless Summer, Summer Dreams, Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!), Summer Love Songs, Summer In Paradise, Keepin' The Summer Alive... It's no surprise that they get effectively top billing on the cover of this album, the very first of the nine acts named on the front cover (admittedly they're in alphabetical order, but most people on this album don't get a mention on the front at all) and that they show up nice and early with the less familiar of their two UK chart-toppers.

'Do It Again' is here in the original version from the Mono 45, rather than the later album version with the workshop sound effects on the fade-out. It's a slightly odd record to approach now, in that it's a very nostalgic track released only a few years into a career that's now lasted more than half a century; it's tempting to overstate the extent to which this was "needed" in the historical context of 1968. But it's not hard to see why it made sense in the context of the group's own career, as in their home market the hits were getting harder to come by at this this point. An earlier demo version made this even more explicit with the lyric "let's get together and surf again", [you can still hear a stray "s" in the last chorus] but it's a tribute to Brian Wilson's record-making skills that he realised the need for an extra syllable in the chorus. Indeed, though by 1968 he was already in a declining mental state and is generally agreed to have peaked artistically, he still had moments of absolutely top form and this is one of them, a great production with inventive use of percussion and handclaps and the sort of intricate vocal arrangement that no other band seemed able to match. Despite the retro sentiment, there are even a couple of experimental touches: that distinctive drum sound on the intro (a snare drum with a long echo delay, apparently) which seems almost proto-electronic and has been illicitly sampled once or twice and a humming tone which rises and falls throughout the verse/chorus sections, only to disappear during the middle-eight and thus lend that section a slightly ethereal quality.

The song itself, though simple, has a winning conversational tone to it that seems to slide seamlessly from verse to chorus as one train of thought. For all the work that obviously has gone into it, it's a less obviously complex single than 'Good Vibrations' and in that way a somewhat more summery one. Making the surf references less prominent inadvertently aids its universality too, which was fortunate since in the event this only got to Number 20 in the US; mind you, even that was their last Top 20 there for eight years, whilst they remained Top 10 regulars over here until the end of the Sixties.

Available on: 50 Big Ones: Greatest Hits

Status Quo With The Beach Boys 'Fun Fun Fun'

Chart Peak: 24

YouTube

Quo's cover of the Beach Boys 60s classic 'Fun Fun Fun' actually features the legendary Amerian outfit on Backing vocals... It entered the chart at No. 24 in 25th February 1996.

It's an inevitable consequence of the Now! albums starting as late in pop history as 1983 that there are several acts who appear in the series long after their best work is behind them. And here we get two for the price of one; it's unlikely to be widely disputed that Status Quo perfected their heads-down no-nonsense mindless boogie at some point in the 1970s, even if you don't prefer the earlier psuedo-psychedelic sound. And as for the Beach Boys, well, there are many who consider them the greatest American act of the rock era and who feel that Pet Sounds is the best album ever. The good news is that the five surviving members of the line-up who made that album seem to have been involved here: Brian and Carl Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine and Bruce Johnston, with what I believe were Brian Wilson's first UK performances for fifteen years. The bad news is that, well, they're backing singers for Status Quo on one song. But the Quo certainly got their money's worth for the airfares, as a quick scan of YouTube finds them on a whole slew of ITV programmes, including little-remembered game show Talking Telephone Numbers. When Emma Forbes jokes about them threatening to sue in the intro, it's not a reference to the any lawsuits between the various Beach Boys (not even to the then-recently-settled one about the authorship of this very song) but to the Quo's notorious attempt to sue Radio 1 for not playlisting this track. They've subsequently claimed that this was a publicity stunt instigated by their management, and some people might even believe them, but the whole notion seems even more absurd now than it did at the time.

The elder Wilson (and Jardine) had returned to California before some of the other appearance, including this one on GMTV, which is fortunate as the thought of Brian Wilson being interviewed by Eamonn Holmes is really too horrible to think about. But that clip is notable for its reference to a listener unused to the amount of pre-release publicity records were starting to get in those days, presumably because the potential market for this record would not be regular singles buyers in the mid-1990s. Or Radio 1 listeners.

It's unlikely that you'll be unfamiliar with the original of this song, but in all honesty I needed to hear it after researching all the clips of this new version. Here's a genuine live version from 1964 as a bonus. You might not know that it was never a hit in the UK, though it was the title track of a successful EP; it was certainly a well-known number at the time, as I recall my Mum recounting that she'd enjoyed hearing the song (as a very young person, I hasten to add) despite having no idea what a "T-Bird" was. Predictably enough, Status Quo interpret the song in their usual mode of the time, simplistic but not actually all that rocky somehow. Mike Love sings a new verse not in the original, presumably in order to pad the song out to a more conventional length for the modern era. Needless to say, it's not actually any good, and doesn't even offer the same sort of stupid fun as the other Beach Boys collaboration to wind up on a Now! album, 'Wipeout' with the Fat Boys. It's a bit of a sad end to their UK singles chart career, and indeed to the oeuvre of Carl Wilson, who died less than two years later, fifteen years ago next month in fact. I had to listen to Holland while I was writing most of this to make myself feel better.

Status Quo also appear on: Now 4, 8, 14, 18, 53
The Beach Boys also appear on: Now 10 (with the Fat Boys)
Available on: The Platinum Collection

The Fat Boys (and the Beach Boys) 'Wipeout'

Chart Peak: 2

YouTube

It's hard to know which is the more surprising cameo in a video: Andy Warhol in 'Misfit' or Brian Wilson in this. He certainly looks pretty staggered by it.

Now, there's no getting away from the fact that I enjoyed this record in 1987. At that point, I really knew nothing about musical history other than the Beatles. I can't have not heard any Beach Boys songs, but I don't think I realised they were a band from olden days until my mum happened to mention it. I didn't know there'd been a time without hip-hop music, and I'm pretty sure I've never heard the original of 'Wipeout' - if I even realised that was an old song, I didn't know it was an instrumental and that getting some veterans who weren't the original group to sing a chorus that wasn't even part of the original was in any way an odd thing to do.

So, how does it sound now? Well, it goes without saying that it's not the first Beach Boys record my adult self would want to draw your attention to, but by the standards of their 1980s recordings, an honest novelty song is actually quite a relief. It's certainly less embarrassing than Mike Love schmaltzfests like 'Getcha Back' or 'Kokomo', to say nothing of the justly forgotten 'Problem Child'. I'd resent this were it all the Beach Boys were known for, but luckily it isn't.

The Fat Boys also appear on: Now 13 (with Chubby Checker)
The Beach Boys also appear on: Now 33 (with Status Quo)
Available on: The Beach Boys Collection