A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Episode 99: “Surfin’ Safari” by the Beach Boys

Episode Date: September 25, 2020

This week there are two episiodes of the podcast going up, both of them longer than normal. This one, episode ninety-nine, is on “Surfin’ Safari” by the Beach Boys, and the group’s roots in LA, and is fifty minutes long. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Misirlou” by Dick Dale and the Deltones. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

A history of rock music and 500 songs By 100 Hic Episode 99 Surfing Safari By the Beach Boys Today there are going to be two podcast episodes This one, episode will be a normal length episode

Or maybe slightly longer than normal And episode 100, which will follow straight after it, will be a super-length one that's at least three times the normal length of one of these podcasts. I'm releasing them together because the two episodes really do go together. We talked recently about how we're getting into the 60s of the popular imagination, and those 60s began specifically in October 1962. That was the month of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which saw the world almost end. It was the month that James Brown released live at the Apollo,

an album we'll talk about in a few weeks time. And if you want one specific date that the 1960s started, it was October 5, 1962. On that date, a film came out that we mentioned last week, Dr. No, the first ever James Bond film. It was also the date that two records were released by EMI in Britain. One was a new release by a British band, the other, a record originally released a few months earlier in the USA,

by an American band. Both bands had previously released records on much smaller labels, to no success other than very locally. But this was their first to be released on a major label, and had a slightly different line-up from those earlier releases. Both bands would influence each other, and go on to be the most successful band from their respective country in the next decade. Both bands would revolutionise popular music, and the two bands would even be filed next to each other alphabetically, both starting the B. In episode 100, we're going to look at Love Me Do by the Beatles, but right now, in episode 99, we're going to look at Surf and Safari by the Beach Boys.

Before I start this story properly, I just want to say something. There are a lot of different accounts of the formation of the Beach Boys, and those accounts are all different. What I've tried to do here is take one plausible account of how the group formed, and tell it in a reasonable length of the group formed. time. If you read the books I link in the show notes, you might find some disagreements about the precise order of some of these events, or some details I've glossed over. This episode is already running long, and I didn't want to get into that stuff, but it's important that I stress that

this is just as accurate as I can get in the length of an episode. The Beach Boys really were boys when they made their first records. David Marks, their youngest member, was only 13 when Surf and Safari came out, and Mike Love, the group's oldest member, was 21. So, as you might imagine when we're talking about children, the story rarely starts with the older generation. In particular, we want to start with Haidt and Derinda Morgan. The Morgans were part-time music business people in Los Angeles in the 50s. Hight Morgan owned an industrial flooring company, and that was his main source of income, putting in floors at warehouses and factories that could withstand the particular stresses that such industrial sites faced. But while that work was hard, it was well-paying

and didn't take too much time. The company would take on two or three expensive jobs a year, and for the rest of the year, Haight would have the money and time to help his wife with her work as a songwriter. She'd collaborated with Spade Coolly, one of the most famous Western swing musicians of the 40s, and she'd also co-written Don't Put All Your Dreams in One Basket for Ray Charles in 1948. Haidt and Durinda's son, Bruce, was also a songwriter, though I've seen some Linda's son, Bruce, was also a songwriter, though I've seen some claims that often the songs credited to him were actually written by his mother, who gave him credits in order to encourage him.

One of Bruce Morgan's earliest songs was a piece called Prover Boogie, which was actually credited under his father's name, and which Louis Jordan retitled to heed my warning and took a co-writing credit on. make him think you never miss your water till the well runs dry you never miss me baby till i say bye bye you better heed my warning eventually the morgans also started their own publishing company and built their own small demo studio which they used to use to record cheap demos for many other songwriters and performers. The Morgans were only very minor players in the music industry, but they were friendly with many of the big names on the L.A. R&B scene, and new people like

John Dolphin, Bumps Blackwell, Sam Cuck, and the Hollywood Flames. Bruce Morgan were talking interviews about Bump's Blackwell calling around to see his father and telling him about this new song, You Send Me, he was going to record with Cook. But although nobody could have realized it at the time, or for many years later, the Morgan's place in music history would be cemented in 1952, when Heitmorgan, working at his day job, met a man named Murray Wilson, who ran a machine tool company based in Hawthorne, a small town in southwestern Los Angeles County. It turned out that Wilson, like Derinda Morgan, was an aspiring songwriter, and Heit Morgan signed him up to their publishing Company, Guild Music.

Wilson's tastes in music were already becoming old-fashioned, even in the very early 1950s, but given the style of music he was working in, he was a moderately talented writer. His proudest moment was writing a song called Two-Step Side Step for the Morgans, which was performed on TV by Lawrence Welk. Murray gathered the whole family round the television to watch his song being performed. That song was a moderate success. It was never a hit for anyone, but it was recorded by several country artists, including the rockabilly singer Bonnie Lou, and most interestingly for our purposes, by Johnny Lee Wills, Bob Wills' brother. Who was sitting pretty and things were bright, he had his style that seemed just right, with a two-step, side-step all of the night.

Two-step, side-step, then a whirl away, two-step-side-step, took my girl away, two-step-side-step, what a girl. Wilson wrote a few other songs for the Morgans, of which the most successful was Tabarin, which was recorded by the Tangiers, one of the several names under which the Hollywood Flames performed. Gaynell Hodge would later speak fondly of Murray Wilson, and Harry was always bragging about his talented kids. But as the 50s progressed, the Morgans published fewer and fewer of Wilson's songs, and none of them were hits.

But the Morgans and Wilson stayed in touch, and around 1958 he heard from them about an opportunity for one of those talented kids. Derinda Morgan had written a song called Chapel of Love, not the same song as the famous one by the Dixie Cups, and Art Leboe had decided that that song would be perfect as the first record for his new label, Original Sound. Leboe was putting together a new group to sing it, called The Hitmakers, which was based around Val Pollyuto. Polyuto had been the tenor singer of an integrated vocal group, two black members, one white and one Hispanic,

which had gone by the names The Shadows and the Miracles, before dismissing both names as being unlikely to lead to any success and taking the name the Jaguars at the suggestion of, of all people, Stan Freeberg, the comedian and voice actor. The Jaguars had never had much commercial success, but they'd recorded a version of The Way You Look Tonight, which became a classic when Lebo included it

on the massively successful Oldies but goodies, the first do-wop nostalgia album. The Jaguars continued for many years, and at one point had Richard Berry guest as an extra vocalist on some of their tracks. But as with so many of the LA vocal groups we've looked at from the 50s, they all had their fingers in multibular. pies and so Pollyuta was to be in this new group along with Bobby Adams of the Calvains who had been taught to sing R&B by Cornell Gunter and who had recorded for Dootsie Williams

those two were to be joined by two other singers who nobody involved can remember much about except that their first names were Don and Duke and Duke. But Art Leboe also wanted a new young singer to sing the lead and was auditioning singers. Murray Wilson suggested to the Morgans that his young son Brian might be suitable for the role, and he auditioned, but Leboe thought that he was too young, and the role went to a singer called Rodney Goodens instead. So the audition was a failure, but it was a first contact between Brian Wilson and the Morgans, and also introduced Brian to Val Pollyuto, from whom he would learn a lot about music for the next few years. Brian was a very sensitive kid, the oldest of three brothers,

and someone who seemed to have some difficulty dealing with other people, possibly because his father was abusive towards him and his brothers, leaving him frightened of many aspects of life. He did, though, share with his father a love of music, and he had a remarkable ear, singular, as he's deaf in one ear. He had perfect pitch, a great recollection for melodies, play him something once and it would stay in his brain, and from a very young age he gravitated towards sweet-sounding music. He particularly loved Glenn Miller's version of Rhapsody and Blue as a child.

But his big musical love was a modern harmony group called the Four Freshmen, a group made up of two brothers, their cousin and a college friend. Modern harmony is an outdated term, but it basically meant that they were singing chords that went beyond the normal simple triads of most pop music. While there were four, obviously, of the four freshmen, they often achieved an effect that would normally be five-part harmony by having the group members sing all the parts of the chord except the root note. They'd leave the root note to a bass instrument. So while Brian was listening to four singers, he was learning five-part harmonies. The group would also sing their harmonies in unusual inversions. They'd take one of the notes from the middle of the chord,

and sing it an octave lower. There was another trick that the four freshmen used. They varied their vocals from equal temperament. To explain this a little bit, musical notes are based on frequencies, and the ratio between them matters. If you double the frequency of a note, you get the same note an octave up,

so if you take an A at 440 hertz, and double the frequency to 880, you get another A an octave up. If you go down to 220 hertz, you get the A an octave below. You get all the different notes by multiplying or dividing a note. So A sharp is A multiplied by a tiny bit more than one, and A flat is A multiplied by a tiny bit less than one. But in the middle ages this hit a snag.

A sharp, which is A multiplied by one and a bit, is very, very slightly different from B flat, which is B multiplied by 0.9 something. And if you double those, so you go to the A sharp and B flat the next octave up, the difference between A sharp and B flat gets bigger. And this means that if you play a melody in the key of C, but then decide you want to play it in the key of B flat, you need to retune your instrument,

or have instruments with separate notes for A, sharp and B flat, or everything will sound out of tune. It's very, very hard to retune some instruments, especially ones like the piano, and also sometimes you want to play in different keys in the same piece. If you're playing a song in C, but it goes into C sharp in the last chorus to give it a bit of extra momentum, you'll lose that extra momentum if you stop the song to retune the piano.

So a different system was invented and popularised in the baroque era, called Equal Temperament. In that system, every note is very, very slightly out of tune, but those tiny errors cancel out rather than multiply like they do in the old system. you're sort of taking the average of A-sharp and B-flat and calling them the same note. And to most people's ears, that sounds good enough, and it means you can have a piano without a thousand keys. But the four freshmen didn't stick to that,

because you don't need to retune your throat to hit different notes, unless you're as bad a singer as me anyway. They would sing B-flat slightly differently than they would sing A-sharp, and so they would get a purer vocal blend, with stronger harmonic overtones than singers who were singing the notes as placed on a piano. Please note, by the way, that I'm taking the fact that they use those non-equal temperaments somewhat on trust. Ross Barber of the group said they did in interviews, and he would know, but I have relatively poor pitch. So if you listen to that and thought,

hang on, they're all singing dead on equal-tempered concert pitch, what's he talking about? Then that's on him. When Brian heard them singing, he instantly fell for them and became a major, major fan of their work, especially their falsetto singer, Bob Flanagan, whose voice he decided to emulate. He decided that he was going to learn how they got that sound. Every day when he got home from school, he would go to the family's music room, where he had a piano and a record player. He would then play just a second or so of one of their records,

and figure out on the piano what notes they'd. were singing in that one second and duplicating them himself. Then he would learn the next second of the song. He would spend hours every day on this, learning every vocal part, until he had the four freshmen's entire repertoire burned into his brain, and he could sing all four vocal parts to every song. Indeed, at one point when he was about 16, around the same time as the Art Leboe audition, Brian decided to go and visit the four freshmen's manager. to find out how to form a successful vocal group of his own, and to find out more about the group themselves.

After telling the manager that he could sing every part of every one of their songs, the manager challenged him with The Day Isn't Long Enough, a song that they apparently had trouble with. And Brian demonstrated every harmony part perfectly. He had a couple of tape recorders at home, and he would experiment with overdubbing his own voice, recording on one tape recorder, playing it back and singing along while recording on the other.

Doing this, he could do his own imitations of the four freshmen, and even as a teenager, he could sound spookily like them. While Brian shared his love for this kind of sweet music with his father, he also liked the rock and roll music that was making its way onto the radio during his teen years, though again he would gravitate towards the sweet vocal harmonies of the Everly brothers, rather than to more raucous music. He shared his love of the Everleys with his cousin Mike Love,

whose tastes otherwise went more in the direction of R&B and Dewwop. Unlike Brian and his brothers, Mike attended Dorsey High School, a predominantly black school, and his tastes were shaped by that. Other graduates of the school include Billy Preston, Eric Dolphy

and Arthur Lee, to give some idea of the kind of atmosphere that Dorsey High had. He loved the Robbins and later the coasters, and he's been quoted as saying he worshipped Johnny Otis, as did every R&B lover in L.A. at the time. He would listen to Otis' show on K-Fox, and to Huggy Boy on KRKD.

His favourite records were things like Smokey Joe's Cafe by the Robbins, which combined an R&B groove with witty lyrics. He also loved the music He also loved the music of Barry's a passion he shared with Brian's youngest brother Carl who also listened to Otis's show and got Brian listening to it.

While Mike was most attracted to Barry's witty lyrics Carl loved the guitar parts. He'd loved string instruments since he was a tiny child and he and a neighbour, David Marks, started taking guitar lessons from another neighbour, John Mouse. Mouse had been friends with Ritchie Valens and had been a pallbearer at Valens's funeral. John was recording at the time with his sister Judy, as the imaginatively named duo John and Judy. John and Judy later took on a bass player called Scott Engel, and a few years after that, John and Scott changed their surnames to Walker and became two-thirds.

of the Walker brothers. But at this time, John was still just a local guitar player, and teaching two enthusiastic kids to play guitar. Carl and David learned how to play Chuck Berrylicks, and also started to learn some of the guitar instrumentals that were becoming popular at the time. At the same time, Mike would sing with Brian to pass the time, Mike singing in a bass voice while Brian took a high tenor lead. Other times, Brian would test his vocal arranging out by teaching Carl and his mother Audrey vocal parts. Carl got so he could learn parts very quickly so his big brother wouldn't keep him around all day and he could go out and play. And sometimes their middle brother Dennis would join in, though he was more interested in going

out and having fun of the beach than he was in making music. Brian was interested in nothing but making music, at least once he quit the school football team, American football, for those of you like me who passed the word to mean what it does in Britain, after he got hurt for the first time. But before he did that, he had managed to hurt someone else, a much smaller team mate named Alan Jardine, who's like Brian broke in a game. Despite that, the two became friends, and would occasionally sing together. Like Brian, Alan loved to sing harmonies, and they found that they had an extraordinarily good vocal blend. While Brian mostly sang with his brothers and his cousin, all of whom had a family vocal resemblance, Jardine could sound spookily similar to that family, and especially to Brian.

Jardine's voice was a little stronger and more resonant. Brian's a little sweeter, with a full of falsetto, but they had the kind of vocal similarity one normally only gets in family singers. However, they didn't start performing together properly, because they had different tastes in music. While Brian was most interested in the modern jazz harmonies of the four freshmen, Jardine was a fan of the new folk revival groups, especially the Kingston Trio. Alan had a group called the T-Kees when he was at high school, which would play Kingston Trio-style material like The Rec of the John B, a song that, like much of the Kingston Trio's material,

had been popularised by the Weavers, for which the trio had recorded for their first album. Jardine was inspired by that I feel so break up I want to go I step the johnny's sales See how they make sense Jardine was inspired by that

To write his own song The Wreck of the Hesperus Putting Longfellow's poem to music One of the other T-Kees had a tape recorder And they made a few stabs at recording it They thought that they sounded pretty good And they decided to go around

To Brian Wilson's house To see if he could help them Depending on who you ask, they either wanted him to join the band, or knew that his dad had some connection with the music business and wanted to pick his brains. When they turned up, Brian was actually out, but Audrey Wilson basically had an open-door policy for local teenagers, and she told the boys about Haidt and Dorinda Morgan.

The T-Kees took their tape to the Morgans, and the Morgans responded politely, saying that they did sound good, but they sounded like the Kingston Trio, and there were a million groups that sounded like the Kingsden. and trio. They needed to get an original sound. The Teakies broke up, as Alan went off to Michigan to college, but then a year later he came back to Hawthorne and enrolled in the same community college that Brian was enrolled in. Meanwhile, the Morgan's got in touch with Gary Winfrey,

Alan's Tekees bandmate, and asked him if the Teakies would record a demo of one of Bruce Morgan's songs. As the Teakies no longer existed, Alan and Gary formed a new group along the same lines, and he invited Brian to be part of one of the sessions. That group, the Islanders, made a couple of attempts at Morgan's song, but nothing worked out. But this broke Brian back to the Morgan's attention. At this point they'd not seen him in three years. Alan still wanted to record folk music with Brian, and at some point Brian suggested that they get his brother Carl and cousin Mike involved, and then Brian's mother made him let his other brother Dennis join in. The group went to see the Morgans, who once again told them that they needed some original material.

Dennis piped up that the group had been fooling around with a song about surfing, and while the Morgans had never heard of the sport, they said it would be worth the group's while finishing off the song and coming back to them. At this point, the idea of a song about surfing was something that was only in Dennis's head, though he may have mentioned the idea to Mike at some point. Mike and the Wilsons went home and started working out the song, without Al being involved at this time. Some of the rehearsal recordings we have

seemed to suggest that they thought Al was a little overbearing and thought of himself as a bit more professional than the others and that they didn't want him in the group at first. While surf music was definitely already a thing, there were very few vocal surf records. Brian and Mike wrote the song together, with Mike writing most of the lyrics and coming up with his own bass vocal line,

while Brian wrote the rest of the music. Surfing. Surfing is the only life the only way for me. So come alone, baby, and surf with me. None of the group other than Dennis surfed. Mike would later start surfing a little, and so Dennis provided Mike with some surfing terms that they could add into the song. This led to what would be the first of many, many arguments about songwriting credits among the group, as Dennis claimed that he should get some credit for his

contribution, while Mike disagreed. Yeah, well, we got a few ideas like the music and most of the words. The credit was eventually assigned to Brian Wilson and Mike Love. Eventually they finished the song, and decided that they would get Al Jardine back into the group after all. When Murray and Audrey Wilson went away for a long weekend and left their boys some money for emergencies, the group saw their chance. They took that money,

along with some more they borrowed from Al's mother, and rented some instruments, a drum kit and a stand-up bass. They had a party at the Wilson's house where they played their new song and a few others in front of their friends before going back to the Morgans with their new song completed. For their recording session they used that stand-up bass, which Al played, along with Carl on an acoustic guitar, giving it that Kingston trio sound that Al liked. Dennis was the group's drummer, but he wasn't yet very good, and instead of drums, the record has Brian thumping a dustbin lid as its percussion.

As well as being the lead vocalist, Mike Love was meant to be the group's saxophone player, but he never progressed more than honking out a couple of notes, and he doesn't play on the session. The song they came up with was oddly structured. It had a nine-bar verse and a 14-bar chorus, the latter of which was based around a 12-bar blues, but extended to allow the Surf Surf with Me hook. But other than the unusual bar counts, it followed the structure that the group would set for most of their early singles.

The song seems, at least in part, to have been inspired by the song Bermuda shorts by the Delroys, which is a song the group we've often cited and would play in their earliest live shows. They're kind of wild And then someone yell, what can it be? And all the chicks start whistling me. I say, baby, hey, dig them shot.

They messed around with the structure in various ways in rehearsal, and those can be heard on the rehearsal recordings. But by the time they came into the studio, they'd settled on starting with a brief statement of the chorus hook. Surfing is the only life, the only way for me. Now I surf. Surf. It then goes into a verse with Mike singing a tenor lead

with the rest of the group doing block harmonies and then joining him on the last line of the verse. And then we have Mike switching down into the bass register to sing wordless do-what bass, the blues-based chorus, while the rest of the group again singing Block Harmony. That formula would be the one that the Beach Boys would stick with for several singles to follow. The major change that would be made would be that Brian would soon start singing an independent falsetto line over the top of the choruses, rather than being in the block harmonies.

The single was licensed to Kandik's records, along with a B-side written by Bruce Morgan, and it became a minor hit record, reaching number 75 on the national chart. But what surprised the group about the record was the name on it. They'd been calling themselves the Pendletones, because there was a brand of thick wool and shirt called Pendleton's which was popular among surfers and which the group wore. It might also have been intended as a pun on Dickdale's Deltones, the preeminent surfers. music group of the time. But Heit Morgan had thought the name didn't work, and they needed something that was more descriptive of the music they were doing. He'd suggested the Surfers, but Russ Regan,

a record promoter, had told him there was already a group called the Surfers, and suggested another name. So the first time the Wilson's realised they were now in the Beach Boys was when they saw the record label for the first time. The group started working on follow-ups, and as they were now performing live shows to promote their records, they switched to using electric guitars when they went into the studio to record some demos in February 1962. By now, Al was playing rhythm guitar, while Brian took over on bass, now playing a bass guitar rather than the double bass Al had played. For that session, as Dennis was still not that greater drummer, Brian decided to bring in a session player, and Dennis stormed out of the studio. However, the session player was

apparently flashy and overplayed, and got paid off. Brian persuaded Dennis to come back and take over on drums again, and the session resumed. Val Palliuto was also at the session in case they needed some keyboards, but he's not audible on any of the tracks they recorded, at least to my ears. The most likely song for a follow-up was another one by Brian and Mike. This one was very much a rewrite of surfing, but this time the verses were a more normal eight bars, and the choruses were a compromise between the standard 12-bar blues and surfins 14, landing on an unusual 13 bars. With the electric guitars, the group decided to bring in a Chuck Berry influence, and you can hear a certain similarity to songs like Brown-eyed Handsome Man in the rhythm and phrasing.

Blue Jean, because we're a Come on, baby. Waiting this time is, I'm going to take you. Surfing's a for it. Presumably, given that he'd already co-written surfing, he means that it was the first song he wrote on his own, words and music.

was inspired melodically by the song When You Wish Upon a Star from the Disney film Pinocchio. The song came to Brian in the car and he challenged himself to write the whole thing in his head without going to the piano until he'd finished it. The result was a do-what ballad with four freshmen-like block harmonies, with lyrics inspired by Brian's then-girlfriend Judy Bowles, which they recorded at the same session as that version of Surf and Safari. At the same session, they also recorded two more songs, a song by Brian called Judy, and a surf instrumental written by Carl called Karate. However, shortly after that session, Al left the group.

As the group had started playing electric instruments, they'd also started performing songs that were more suitable for those instruments. like, What Did I Say? And the Twist. Al wasn't a fan of that kind of music, and he wanted to be singing Tom Dooley and Rec of the John B, not, come on baby, let's do the twist. He was also quite keen on completing his university studies.

He was planning on becoming a dentist, and didn't want to spend time playing tons of small gigs when he could be working towards his degree. This was especially the case since Murray Wilson, who had by this point installed himself as the group's manager, was booking them on all sorts of cheap dates to get them exposure. As far as Al could see, being a beach boy was never going to make anyone any real money, and it wasn't worth disrupting his studies to keep playing music that he didn't even particularly like.

His place was taken by David Marks, Carl's young friend who lived nearby. Marks was only 13 when he joined, and apparently it caused Ray's eyebrows among some of the other musicians who knew the group, because he was so much younger and less experienced than the rest. Unlike Al, he was never much of a singer. He can hold a tune and has a pleasant enough voice, but he wasn't the exceptional harmony singer that Al was. But he was a competent rhythm player,

and he and Carl had been jamming together since they both got guitars, and knew each other's playing style. However, while Al was gone from the group, he wasn't totally out of the picture, and he remained close enough that he was part of the first ever Beach Boys' spin-off side project a couple of months later. Derinda Morgan had written a song inspired by the new children's doll Barbie that had come out a couple of years before, and which, like the Beach Boys, was from Hawthorne. She wanted to put together a studio group to record it, under the name

Kenny and the Cadet. And Brian rounded up Carl, Al, Val Palliuto and his mother Audrey to sing on the record for Mrs Morgan. But after that, Al Jardine was out of the group for the moment. though he would be back sooner than anyone expected. Shortly after Al left, the new line-up went into a different studio, Western Studios, to record a new demo. Ostensibly produced by Murray Wilson, the session was actually produced by Brian and his new friend Gary Usher, who took charge in the studio and spent most of his time trying to stop Murray interfering.

Gary Usher is someone about whom several books have been written, and who would have a huge influence on West Coast music in the 60s, but at this point he was an aspiring singer, songwriter and record producer who had been making records for a few months longer than Brian and was therefore a veteran. He'd put out his first single, Driven Insane, in March 1961. So, my, leave and find someone new what words can express

the sharp raging thing that pierces your heart and dry insane Usher was still far from a success but he was very good at networking and had all sorts of minor connections within the music business as one example his girlfriend, Sandra Glanz

who performed under the name Ginger Blake had just written You Are My Answer for Carol Conners who had been the lead singer of the teddy bears but was now going solo Conners too would soon become important in vocal surf music while Ginger would play a significant part in Brian's life Brian had started writing songs with Gary

and they were in the studio to record some demos by Gary and some demos by the Beach Boys of songs that Brian and Gary had written together along with a new version of Surfing Safari Of the two Wilson Usher songs recorded in the session one was a slow do-wop style ballad called The Lonely Sea which would later become an album track. But the song that they were most interested in recording was one called 409,

which had been inspired by a new, larger engine that Chevrolet had introduced for top-of-the-line vehicles. Musically, 409 was another song that followed the Surf and Safari formula, but it was regularised even more, lopping off the extra bar from Surf and Safari's chorus, and making the verses as well as the choruses into 12-bar blues. But it still started with the hook,

still had Mike sing his tenor lead in the verses, and still had him move to sing a boogie-ish bass line in the chorus, while the rest of the group chanted in block harmonies over the top. But it introduced a new lyrical theme to the group. Now, as well as singing about surfing in the beach, they could also sing about cars and car racing. Love credits this as being one of the main reasons for the group's success in landlocked areas,

because while there were many places in the US where you couldn't surf, there was nowhere where people didn't have cars. It's also the earliest Beach Boys song over which there is an ongoing question of credit. For the first 30 years of the song's existence, it was credited solely to Wilson and Usher. But in the early 90s, Love won a share of the songwriting credit in a lawsuit

in which he won credit on many, many songs he'd not been credited for. Love claims that he came up with the She's Real Fine My 409 hook, and the giddy-up bass vocal he's. sang. Usher always claimed that Love had nothing to do with the song, and that Love was always trying to take credit for things he didn't do. It's difficult to tell who was telling the truth, because both obviously had a financial stake in the credit, though Usher was dead by the time of the

lawsuit. Usher was always very dismissive of all the Beach Boys, with the exception of Brian, and wouldn't credit them for making any real contributions. Love's name was definitely missed off the credits of a large number of songs to which he did, make substantial contributions, including some where he wrote the whole lyric. And the bits of the song Love claims do sound like the kind of thing he contributed to other songs which have no credit disputes. On the other hand, Love also overreached in his claims of credit in that lawsuit, claiming to have co-written songs that were written when he wasn't even in the same country as the writers. Where you stand on the question of whether Love deserves that credit

usually depends on your views of Wilson, Love and Usher as people, and it's not a question I'm going to get into, but I thought I should acknowledge that the question is there. While 409 was still following the same pattern as the other songs, its head and shoulders ahead of the Heit Morgan productions, both in terms of performance and in terms of the sound. A great deal of that clearly owes to Usher, who is experimenting with things like sound effects,

and so 409 starts with the recording that Brian and Usher makes, of Usher's car driving up and down the street. Meanwhile, the new version of Surf and Safari was vastly superior to the recording from a couple of months earlier, with changed lyrics and a tighter performance. So at the end of the session, the group had a tape of three new songs, and Murray Wilson wanted them to take it somewhere better than Kandik's records. He had a contact somewhere much better, at Capital Records. He was going to phone Ken Nelson.

Or at least Murray thought he had a contact at Capital. He phoned Ken Nelson and told him, Years ago you did me a favour and now I'm doing one for you. My sons have formed a group and you have the chance to sign them. Now, setting aside the question of whether that would actually count as Murray doing Nelson a favour, there was another problem with this. Nelson had absolutely no idea who Murray Wilson was and no recollection of ever doing him a favour.

It turned out that the favour he'd done in Murray's eyes was recording one of Murray's songs, except that there's no record of Nelson ever having been involved in a recording of a Murray Wilson song. By this time, Capital had three A&R people in charge of different areas. There was Royal Gilmore who recorded soft pop, people like Nat King Cole.

There was Nelson, who, as we've seen in past, episodes had some rockabilly experience but was mostly country. He produced Gene Vincent and Wanda Jackson, but he was mostly working at this point with people like Buck Owens and the Lovin brothers, producing some of the best country music ever recorded, but not really doing the kind of thing that the Beach Boys were doing. But the third and youngest A&R man was doing precisely the kind of thing the Beach Boys did. That was Nick Vennay, who we met back in the episode on LSD 25, and who was one of the people who had been involved with the very first surf music recordings.

Nelson suggested that Murray go and see Renee, and Renee was immediately impressed with the tape Murray played him, so impressed that he decided to offer the group of contract, and to release Surf and Safari backed with 409, buying the masters from Murray rather than re-recording them. Renée also tried to get the publishing rights for the songs for Beachwood music, a publishing company owned by Capital's parent company EMI, and known in the UK as Ardmore and Beachwood.

but Gary Usher, who knew a bit about the business, said that he and Brian were going to set up their own publishing companies, a decision which Murray Wilson screamed at him for, but which made millions of dollars for Brian over the next few years. The single came out and was a big hit, making number 14 on the Hot 100, and 409 as the B-side also scraped the lower reaches of the charts. René soon got the group into the studio to record an album to go with the single,

with Usher adding extra backing vocals to fill out the harmonies, in the absence of Al Jardine. While the Beach Boys were a self-contained group, Renee seems to have brought in his old friend Derry Weaver to add extra guitar, notably on Weaver's song, Moondog. It's perhaps unsurprising that the Beach Boys recorded that, because not only was it written by Renee's friend, but Vennay owned the publishing on the song.

The group also recorded Summertime Blues, which was co-written by Jerry Capehart, a friend of Renée and Weavers who also may have appeared on the album in some capacity. Both those songs fit the group, but their choice was clearly influenced by Factus other than the purely musical, and very soon Brian Wilson would get sick of having his music interfered with by Renee. The album came out on October 1st, and a few days later the single was released in the UK, several months after its release in the US, and on the same day, a British group who had signed to have their single published by Ardmore and Beachwood

put out their own single on another EMI label, and we're going to look at that in the next day. episode. A history of rock music and 500 songs is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Each week Patreon backers will get a 10

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