17/09/2025
ON THIS DATE (62 YEARS AGO)
September 16, 1963 – The Beach Boys: Surfer Girl is released.
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Surfer Girl is the third studio album by The Beach Boys, released on September 16, 1963. It reached #7 on the Billboard 200 Top LP's chart during its chart stay of 56 weeks, and features three Billboard Hot 100 hits - "Surfer Girl" ( #7), "Little Deuce Coupe" ( #15), and "In My Room" ( #23).
This was the first album by The Beach Boys for which Brian Wilson was given full production credit, a position Wilson would maintain until the end of the Smile sessions in 1967. Brian Wilson himself turns in, along with Mike Love, Gary Usher and Roger Christian's help, some of his most cherished songs.
The front cover of Surfer Girl features (from left to right), Dennis Wilson, David Marks, Carl Wilson, Mike Love and Brian Wilson holding a surfboard from the same 1962 photo shoot that produced the cover of their album debut Surfin' Safari. The picture was taken by Capitol photographer Kenneth Veeder at Paradise Cove, north of Malibu.
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LINER NOTES (reissue)
SURFER GIRL
When the Beach Boys went into the studio to record their third album, Surfer Girl, the time had come to formally recognize what everybody tacitly acknowledged …that Brian Wilson was the musical leader of the Beach Boys. From now on, he would not only be in charge in the studio but he would be in publicly credited as the group’s producer.
Surfer Girl, the first album to bear the credit “Produced by Brian Wilson,” was a landmark in the group’s career. On this record Brian encapsulated his first musical agenda. One thing was for sure: before you had heard the first four bars of this LP, it was clear that the Beach Boys were no longer a three-chord garage band.
Once Brian was given control to do exactly what he wanted the way he wanted to do it, it didn’t take long for him to make a quantum leap musically. Suddenly, on Surfer Girl, the group’s vocal sound had jumped to a new level. There was now a very special, undefinable quality to the music. The Beach Boys sound had entered a new dimension in rock.
Beach Boy historian Peter Reum points out the chief source of Surfer Girl, inspiration. “Brian idolized the Four Freshman. His vocal arrangements on the Surfer Girl album make this LP the prototype for most of the complex harmonies that would be the building blocks of the Beach Boys recording career.”
How did the Beach Boys, in the days of technologically-limiting three-track recording, manage to get such a full vocal sound… a sound that gives these records their timeless quality? Brian’s chief engineer Chuck Britz claims that from a technical point of view, “it sounds a lot harder than it really is if you can get a really good balance on the first pass. They had that wonderful ability to balance themselves. I’m not saying I didn’t move guys around to get a better perspective, but you gotta remember that they were really close (physically). Carl, Dennis and Al were around a mike. And Brian would be right next to ‘em on his own mike (for leads). But when it was harmonies, he leaned in on their mike. And Mike was always on a mike by himself, because he works very close to the mike.”
Explaining the comparatively primitive equipment of the time, Britz fills in the details. “You gotta remember the board I was working on was the first modular board ever built. I was very limited as far as what I could do. We had the old tube U-87 microphones for the guys, and Brian would be on a little ol’ 545…a cheap microphone, but he sounded fantastic on it. It was this real directional mike so that he could do anything he wanted to, and for some reason, Brian’s voice sounded beautiful on that li’l cheap son of gun.”
But, as Britz points out, it wasn’t the equipment or the microphones or really anything that he could do at the engineering console even though he “was adding echo and EQ and doing the whole thing live.” Basically, Britz notes, “it was them. They’re probably one of the finest groups I’ve ever heard that could sing. And when you overdub it, you’d have ten voices going. It’s a wonderful sound.”
Britz’s home base, Western Studio 3, was the site of almost all of the Beach Boys vocal sessions from 1963-1966. When the Beach Boys came in for a vocal session, Britz recalls, “they would rehearse to the track, which was actually better for them because then they could hear all the different pieces that were going on that enhanced the voices a lot of times because that’s the way Brian would write.”
Characterizing the feel of those session, Britz explains that “doing the vocals, Brian was more in the type of mood where this has gotta be just right, which is the way it should have been. Brian was very adamant about pitch.”
Even so, there was no yelling. “Brian was very laid back. His thoughts on a session were that he wasn’t going to rush. He wanted to take his time. See, he knew in his brain exactly what he wanted to hear. He knew it even before he walked in the studio.” Britz ruefully remembers the time he questioned Brian about a vocal sound. “I made the mistake one time of stopping a vocal (take). I said, “Brian, that sounds terrible, man. What’s going on here? He said, ‘Whatya mean, Charlie?’ He comes (out of the studio and into) the booth, and he listens to it and says, ‘That sounds fine,’ I said, ‘What’s happening? I mean, what’s gonna take these sour notes (away), Brian said, ‘wait ‘til we overdub. You’ll hear it come together.’ I was trying to be helpful, after which I never did again because (after the overdub) I realized then that there were parts that would be discordant and all come together.”
Basically, Britz summarizes, Brian’s main concern was to get a real tight group sound.” On the Surfer Girl album, the Beach Boys magnificently achieved that goal.
TRACK BY TRACK
Side one
1. “Surfer Girl”
Lead Vocal: Brian
Highest Chart Position: #7
Everything that would make Brian the preeminent arranger and produce of this time is on “Surfer Girl.” The lush vocals, the full instrumental sound, the brilliant chord changes and the heartbreaking falsetto that came to characterize the soft side of the band’s rock ‘n’ roll heart.
“Surfer Girl” was the first ballad that Brian ever wrote, and the roots of all his subsequent compositions can be heard here. If George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody In Blue” is the music that most affected Brian in his youth, then “Surfer Girl” is his “California Rhapsody,” all of his feeling pouring out in two minutes of magic. That said, it’s not surprising to learn that “Surfer Girl” wasn’t written about any specific girl on the beach. As Brian admits, “Surfer Girl” was inspired by Jiminy Cricket’s fantasy, “When You Wish Upon A Star.”
Brian: “Back in 1961, I’d never written a song in my life. I was nineteen years old. And I put myself to the test in my car one day. I was driving to a hot dog stand, and I actually created a melody in my head without being able to hear it on a piano. I sang it to myself; I didn’t even sing it out loud in the car. When I got home that day, I finished the song, wrote the bridge, put the harmonies together and called it “Surfer Girl.”
2. “Catch A Wave”
Lead Vocal: Mike
It was on tracks like this that Brian, even though he wasn’t a surfer, certainly created music that gave the listener a rush almost equal to catching the perfect wave.
Mike’s sister Maureen plays the harp on this song (and on “In My Room”). In 1964, Jan and Dean had Roger Christian rewrite the lyrics of “Catch A Wave” to reflect a more earthbound point-of-view, and they scored with the top thirty hit “Sidewalk Surfin’.” Brian co-wrote a number of Jan and Dean’s biggest hits, including their only number one, “Surf City.”
3. “The Surfer Moon”
Lead Vocal: Brian
Written with college friend Bob Norberg, “The Surfer Moon’ was cut by Norberg and his sister under the name “Bob and Sheri” on a 1962 release. It was one of the first records that was ever to bear the credit, “Produced by Brian Wilson.”
The Beach Boys production of “The Surfer Moon” is notable for being the first Beach Boys record with a string arrangement. The instrumentation is very polished for the period. Listen to how Brian utilized studio technique to both double-track his lead vocal (on the first verse) and harmonize with himself on the rest of what is one of the prettiest songs he’s ever written.
4. “South Bay Surfer”
Lead Vocal: Brian and Mike
To understand the lyric of this song, as surf music historian Domenic Priore points out, “you have to know that Hawthorne, California, is in the South Bay section of Los Angeles. The Beach Boys were one of the many groups that played around the South Bay, and this song addresses the competition the group felt in their early days.”
5. “The Rocking Surfer”
Priore: On ‘The Rocking Surfer,’ the Beach Boys here find a new approach to surf instrumentals by prominently featuring the Hammond organ for the melody, followed by one of Carl Wilson’s better guitar solos and ending with interesting guitar and drum interplay.” This song was originally titled “Good Humor Man.”
6. “Little Deuce Coupe”
Lead Vocal: Mike
Highest Chart Position: #15 (It was the B-side of the “Surfer Girl” single)
In a sense, this record was the real follow-up to “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” and it solidified Mike as the hit lead voice.
Side two
1. “In My Room”
Lead Vocal: Brian
Highest Chart Position: #23 (It was the B-side of “Be True To Your School.”)
If Brian fantasized about a “Surfer Girl,” the place he did that dreaming was “In My Room.”
Gary Usher, who co-wrote this with Brian, recalls how the song came together. “’In my Room’ found us taking our craft a little more seriously. Brian and I came back to the house one night after playing ‘over the line’ (a baseball game). I played bass and Brian was on organ. The song was written in an hour…Brian’s’ melody all the way. The sensitivity…the concept meant a lot to him. When we finished, it was late, after our midnight curfew. In fact, Murry came in a couple of times and wanted me to leave. Anyway, we got Audree (the Wilson brothers’ mother) who was putting her hair up before bed and we played it for her. She said, ‘That’s the most beautiful song you’ve ever written.’ Murry said, ‘Not bad, Usher, not bad,’ which was the nicest thing he ever said to me.”
Brian: “I had a room, and I thought of it as my kingdom. And I wrote that song, very definitely, that you’re not afraid when you’re in your room. It’s absolutely true.”
It’s one thing to feel that way about your room. It’s quite another to be able to create music that expresses that feeling, and the Beach Boys did just that with the sensational group harmonies that help make this a classic track.
2. “Hawaii”
Lead Vocal: Mike and Brian
Priore: “Surfers would save every nickel to pay for an airplane ticket to Hawaii because it wasn’t just the coolest place to surf, it was the best place to live too. It’s a great example of how the Beach Boys could write a song about a locale other than their own and make it seem very desirable, even though they’d never been a part of the Hawaiian surfing experience.”
“Hawaii,” like “Catch A Wave,” features incredible falsetto vocals from Brian.
3. “Surfers Rule”
Lead Vocal: Dennis
Priore: “It’s a very important song, because it has a lot to do with the idea of ‘the hodads’ vs. ‘the surfers’ inherent to Southern California. A hodad is basically a greaser, and oil and water don’t mix. It’s also interesting to note that Dennis was chosen to sing lead on this one, as he was the one true surfer in the group.”
For Brian, who was neither “hodad” nor “surfer,” they lyric at the end of the song showed that the rivalry he was most concerned with was musical, not social. He was expanding his horizons from local to national competition as you’ll hear, when Brian sing the Four Seasons’ “Walk Like A Man” as a challenge to the Beach Boys then-rivals in the east, the Four Seasons.
That tag made “Surfers Rule” a call to falsetto arms to the Four Seasons (who would later respond in kind), but the Beach Boys eventually left the Seasons in their artistic wake.
Listen for the great group vocal on the vocal intro (repeated in the middle of the song), which established another Beach Boys trademark…brief, full-blown vocal hooks that drew the listener in quickly.
4. “Our Car Club”
Lead Vocal: Mike and Brian
Musically similar to Mongo Santamaria’s 1963 hit “Watermelon Man” (which was written by Herbie Hancock), “Our Car Club” is filled with great rhythms, unlike anything the Beach Boys had recorded to that point.
“Our Car Club” was one of the most sophisticated arrangements that Brian had yet come up with. In fact, the music that was pouring out of him was getting so complex that he needed the best players in town to put it down. On songs like “our Car Club,” much to Brian’s dismay, he was already finding it necessary to replace the Beach Boys with studio musicians. On this cut, listen to one of the earliest Beach Boys appearances of world-famous “Drummer Man” Hal Blaine.
On the original session tapes for “Our Car Club,” this song was called “Rabbit Foot.” But as Chuck Britz explains, a lot of times the titles used to call out takes didn’t mean anything because frequently, at the instrumental stage, songs didn’t have real titles because no lyrics had been written. Britz didn’t engineer the backing track for this one, meaning it was probably cut at Gold Star with Larry Levine at the dials.
5. “Your Summer Dream”
Lead Vocal: Brian
Brian’s double-tracked vocal (with lots of echo) highlights the harmonic complexity of this jazzy ballad that features surprising and sophisticated chord changes in the bridge and a beautiful melody that clearly has no roots in surf music.
6. “Boogie Woodie”
The pun in the title aside, this track is the aural evidence to back up what Brian’s high school friend Rich Sloan remembers “Brian loved to play is boogie woogie music. I enjoyed it very much. And if you enjoyed hearing it, Brian would play it as long as he could, and at such a fierce pace and for such a long duration that his forearm muscles would get hard as rocks. He would just bang on the piano.” While this is the only released example of the influence boogie woogie had on Brian, it’s likely that some of his rock ‘n’ roll songs had their creative seeds in a rockin’ boogie woogie session.
“Boogie Woodie” is arranged by Brian, based on Rimsky-Korakov’s “The Flight Of The Bumblebee.”
Liner Notes by David Leaf (© 1990 David Leaf)
(David Leaf is the author of the critically-acclaimed Brian Wilson biography, The Beach Boys & The California Myth.)
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Surfer Girl was a good step in the right direction. The single, “Surfer Girl,” was my group’s ballad theme song. It means a lot to me, spiritual, and it is really a song about how the group first started singin’ pretty harmonies. The introduction to this song is, at first, a simple one but if you study the form, it is original. To me, it represents the start of music when we first got movin’. “Catch A Wave” represents my first big Beach Boy vocal arrangement. I am proud of it and I can remember how excited I was when I first arranged it. I jumped up from my piano and yelled for my mom and dad to come hear it. They flipped. The boys loved recordin’ it with me. We were so wired when we did it that a little extra bit of juice was flowin’. It was where The Beach Boys were at during that time. We love doing “Little Deuce Coupe.” It was good “shuffle” rhythm, which was not like most of the rhythms of the records on the radio in those days. It had a bouncy feel to it. Like most of our records, it had a competitive lyric. This record was my favorite Beach Boy car song. I also enjoyed producing “In My Room.” There is a story behind this song. When Dennis, Carl and I lived in Hawthorne as kids, we all slept in the same room. One night I sang the song “Ivory Tower” to them and they liked it. Then a couple of weeks later, I proceeded to teach them both how to sing the harmony parts to it. It took them a little while, but they finally learned it. We then sang this song night after night. It brought peace to us. When we recorded “In My Room,” there was just Dennis, Carl and me on the first verse…and we sounded just like we did in our bedroom all those nights. This story has more meaning then ever since Dennis’ death. “Hawaii” features me on falsetto. “Our Car Club” is my production ability brought to a higher level. I really felt this one as a saxophone trip. “Surfers Rule” was a big competitive step when we said in the fade-out, “Four Season, you better believe it!” we started some trouble around town and we haven’t been able to stop ever since. This attitude we had was liked by some people and not liked by others. I have heard some positive feedback and some negative feedback over the years. I did for competitive music what Jack LaLanne did for health. Anyway, as usual, the album, Surfer Girl, has a bit for everybody. Enjoy.
Brian Wilson, Los Angeles (March, 1990)
TRACKS:
Side one
1 Surfer Girl (Brian Wilson) - 2:26
2 Catch a Wave (B. Wilson/Mike Love) - 2:07
3 The Surfer Moon (B. Wilson) - 2:11
4 South Bay Surfer (Foster, B. Wilson, C. Wilson, Jardine) - 1:45
5 The Rocking Surfer (trad. arr. B. Wilson) - 2:00
6 Little Deuce Coupe (B. Wilson/Roger Christian) - 1:38
Side two
1 In My Room (B. Wilson/Gary Usher) - 2:11
2 Hawaii (B. Wilson/Love) - 1:59
3 Surfer's Rule (B. Wilson/Love) - 1:54
4 Our Car Club (B. Wilson/Love) - 2:22
5 Your Summer Dream (B. Wilson/Bob Norberg) - 2:27
6 Boogie Woodie (trad. arr. B. Wilson) - 1:56
