The Fun, Fun, Fun Years.

Surfer Girl had been Brian’s first ballad composition back in 1961, inspired by When You Wish Upon A Star. Perhaps he waited until he and the band could do it justice before committing it to record. If so, he timed it just right as it is a classic early Beach Boys performance. In My Room, wasted as a B-side, is an equally evocative song featuring a lead vocal from Brian, Mike Love now featuring mainly on the more up-tempo material. They both share lead on the embarrassing South Bay Surfer, a rewrite of Swanee River, and an all-time low point, and Dennis’ obligatory lead is on Surfers Rule. The album closer is an instrumental called Boogie Woodie that features some intense boogie woogie piano from Brian on an arrangement of The Flight Of The Bumblebee.

According to the liner notes the double-sided single Surfer Girl and Little Deuce Coupe was recorded on 12 June 1963 and the other 10 tracks that make up the album Surfer Girl were entirely recorded at Western Studios in Hollywood on 16 July 1963; quite a feat. Some of the tracks are quite throwaway, but others such as Catch A Wave and The Surfer Moon, which features a string arrangement, seem to be the result of a lot of care and craft to achieve a tight sound, and indicate considerable musical growth and maturity on the part of Brian Wilson and the group. In the Track-By-Track notes for Our Car Club it states that as Chuck Britz did not engineer the track, as per normal, it “was probably cut at Gold Star with Larry Levine at the dials”, calling into question the accuracy of both studio and date information as given.

Shut Down Volume 2 (1964) is ostensibly a collection of hot-rod and car related songs, some re-cycled, some new, intended as a rebuke to Capitol Records for including their song Shut Down as the title track on an ill-chosen hot-rod compilation without their acquiescence. In practice the subject matter was far wider than that.

The album kick starts with some Chuck Berry guitar licks which lead into Fun, Fun, Fun, their current hit single and one of their classics, although the best song on the record was Don’t Worry Baby. Brian Wilson had written this for the Ronettes as a follow-up to Be My Baby but the idea had not been taken up by a controlling Phil Spector. It isn’t known whether the Ronettes got as far as recording the song at the time (Ronnie Spector recorded it many years later), but Brian was spending a lot of time at Gold Star with Phil Spector picking up production tips, and played piano on a few sessions, so it is possible. If it was I would love to hear it. The Beach Boys version was later the B-side of I Get Around.

Brian Wilson first put what he had learned from Spector into practice on the flip of Fun, Fun, Fun. Why Do Fools Fall In Love? was a brilliant revival of the Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers hit, given a comprehensive and complex Spector-sound makeover using the famous session musicians at Gold Star, and fully realised by Brian Wilson, who may have still had Ronnie Bennett much on his mind, as Frankie Lymon was her vocal hero and the model of her own style in the Ronettes.

The liner information is incorrect here as the included version is actually the mono B-side version (which begins with an acappella vocal edit cheekily tacked on by Capitol Records, albeit 10 seconds longer than on the single), and not the stereo album version as claimed. One other track is mono for some reason, the lamentable Denny’s Drums, on which Dennis Wilson fails to do anything interesting on the drums or to keep time. The album low point, however, is “Cassius” Love Vs. “Sonny” Wilson, a piece of “comic” filler that hastened the invention of the Skip button.

Carl Wilson contributes an instrumental, Shut Down, Part II, which has no connection with the earlier recording, and Dennis sings This Car Of Mine. More interesting is The Warmth Of The Sun, a break-up ballad written hours after the Kennedy assassination, so capturing a double sense of loss, and a version of Louie Louie, which is unique in that the lyric is decipherable.

The slightly longer single mono mix of Fun, Fun, Fun is included as a bonus track, though one wonders why they didn’t just create a full-length stereo mix from the master, which would have made it redundant.

All in all, there is a great sense of fun and freedom captured in these grooves, with something considerably more substantial beginning to peep through.