Song or album that turned you onto The Beach Boys

[Fun Is In]

In 1966 (or 7) I travelled from the west coast of the US (one of those states north of California) to visit friends who lived in Gerard's Cross near London...they had a copy of the UK version of the first "Best of the Beach Boys".

I'd heard some/many of those songs before, but not all. Man, I was hooked.
What a GREAT compilation.

[lance]

I love this thread, but it is starting to remind me of an al-anon meeting.

[TonyW]

It started sometime in the mid 60's as a 10 year old or younger - I can remember listening to my transistor radio in bed of a night - the song was Wendy - the harmonies created some sort of chemical reaction in my body that exists to this day. Then in my early teens hanging out on the Aussie beaches I was naturally drawn to the Beach Boys hearing I Can Hear Music & H&V on the radio are stand out memories, I really got into the new albums - Surfs Up, C&TP and Holland - the In Concert album was the clincher - started to dig back through the albums and dicovered Today!, Pet Sounds and Wild Honey - there have been extended periods in my life where I have to hear the BB music eveyday - at least in some little way.

[Zack]

I loved Endless Summer when it came out (I was 10).   Then Disc 2 of the GV box tracks 18 to 28 changed my life.  Seriously changed my life.

[Loaf]

I love this thread, but it is starting to remind me of an al-anon meeting.

More like a Brian-anon meeting...

unless someone got hooked by Honkin Down the Highway (2008 version)

[kookadams]

When I was in kindergarten or first grade I'd always here the classic rock stations on the school bus and out of all the hits they played from the 50s-70s the music that stood out to me the most was that of the Beach Boys. From then on, I proceeded to buy every album of their's I could find till I finally got a discography together and bought all their albums on LP and CD. That was the beginning, now I have the cartoon woody with surfboard from the back of the Surfin' Safari album tattoo'd on my arm and their music never gets old to me.

[lance]

I love this thread, but it is starting to remind me of an al-anon meeting.

More like a Brian-anon meeting...

unless someone got hooked by Honkin Down the Highway (2008 version)

[Aegir]

When I was in 4th grade they had a laser light show in the gym featuring Surfin' USA.

[MBE]

Well they always seemed to be around. I was born in 1976 and I became a fan in 1988. Maybe because I had always liked fifties and sixties music I was a bit more aware then most. They seemed kind of cheesy though. Come Go With Me, Getcha Back, California Dreamin, Wipe Out etc. I remember those coming out and they were OK to me but no more. I knew Brian had some problems and that one of them knew Manson. I kind of knew Mike too, and had heard of an LP called Pet Sounds (which I thought was made of animal sound effects).  Then I don't know gradually I liked them a little more. I saw the RSG appearance on a VHS I had, and it was kind of cool. I then caught AAB on VH1 in 1988 it really intrigued me. I never had heard songs like, Heroes and Villians, Surf's Up, or Forever before. I bought Endless Summer and it was Girl Don't Tell Me that impressed. It had so much depth. From there I suppose I got hooked on them.
So yes their 80's persona was an obstacle to get through, but once I heard the real advanced stuff beyond the basic hits (which I grew to love too) it was all over for me. For the last twenty years they have remained my favorite band. I think that now it is easier to learn about the Beach Boys now. Many more books, much less cheese, much more critical acclaim, and I am glad their rep is basically restored.

[Alex]

First BB song I ever heard was California Girls when I was about 6 or 7 years old in the early 90s. My mom had a habit of always starting on Side 4 whenever she played her copy of Endless Summer, so the first BBs I can recall hearing is "I wish they all could be California...".

[pmugghc]

It was in September 1962 when Surfin' Safari went straight to Nr 1 in Sweden.  A couple of months later even Ten Little Indian went to Nr 6.  I've been hooked ever since the first single.

[LostArt]

Well, my experience was a little bit different than the others’ here. 

I was 9 years old in the autumn of ’65.  My local radio station played the hits of the day, so I had heard all those immortal early Beach Boys songs.  I, however, preferred The Beatles, and when Columbia/Screen Gems manufactured The Monkees just for kids my age, I was hooked.  That autumn I got the Barbara Ann single as a gift, though, and I played it, but when I turned that record over and heard the Beach Boys doing their impression of the Beatles (Girl Don’t Tell Me), I ended up playing that side more.  Still, I liked lots of other groups better, so I didn’t own any more Beach Boys records until many, many years later.  I do remember liking Good Vibrations quite a bit when I heard it on the radio, but even then I wasn’t hooked.  As I got into my teen years, my tastes went in a different direction, and I got into heavier, weirder stuff.  I still liked the Beatles, because they were doing Sgt. Peppers, MMT, White Album, etc., but I also got into Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, the Who, and stuff like that.  By the time I was in high school, I was listening to more complex fusion stuff like Mahavishnu Orchestra and Zappa, or ‘prog’ rock like Yes or King Crimson. 

Fast forward to 1988….I was working with a guy who started talking about Brian Wilson.  I knew who Brian Wilson was, but knew little about him.  My friend started telling me about the whole Smile saga, and a little about Brian Wilson’s life, and one day he brought me a cassette that he’d made for me.  On side one was Brian’s ’88 solo album, which I found strange, quirky, but very good.  But then...on side two of that tape was an album called Smiley Smile.  Now, I had heard Heroes and Villains before, and obviously I had heard Good Vibrations, but the rest of this stuff was completely foreign to me.  What the hell?  Wind Chimes, Wonderful, Little Pad, and Fall Breaks just knocked me out.  I could not believe that this was the Beach Boys.  I listened over and over.  I played that tape to anyone who would listen and to some who wouldn’t listen.  I wore that tape out (but I still have it).  Well, after that I started obsessing over the Smile material, then I bought Pet Sounds (which was another WTF moment…how did I miss this?), then the twofers, then the box (which caused a huge verbal fight between me and my girlfriend at the time…”You paid how much for this?”), and then I got internet access, and the rest is, as they say, history.

So, yeah, Smiley Smile.

[Beach Boy]

When I was in 4th grade they had a laser light show in the gym featuring Surfin' USA.

Oh yeah, in my school was a dia show about California, and several hundreds kids were there, and they started playing "Surfin' USA" and I got goose gimples, after school I bought the Platinum Collection. 

[brianc]

"Smile." Heard about it in 1985, when my dad read David Leaf's book sitting on the beach in Monterey. I didn't get serious about seeking it out until the early '90s, but I got obsessed with "Smile" after seeing the black & white documentary about Brian Wilson. Not in the same league as the Chet Baker documentary, but mysterious enough to intrigue. Especially seeing Thurston Moore in it.

Seeing that Brian Wilson had any tie to the counter-culture at all... I loved his sweet voice on "Don't Worry Baby" my whole life, so when I heard him sing cryptic lyrics on "Wonderful" and "Surf's Up," I just felt like I found the music I'd always wanted to hear, but never knew existed.

[lance]

when I heard him sing cryptic lyrics on "Wonderful" and "Surf's Up," I just felt like I found the music I'd always wanted to hear, but never knew existed.

Nice.

[Peadar 'Big Dinner' O'Driscoll]

"In my room" - just channel hopping and came across the endless harmony doc on TV

[shelter]

"I Get Around". I was in a car with a few friends on a nice summer day, that song came on the radio, everybody in the car started singing and clapping along and that's when I first realized of a Beach Boys song that it was something special.

The album that made me realize that the Beach Boys were more than a band with a few cool golden oldies was when I heard "Sunflower".

[Mooger Fooger]

I actually got started with Jan and Dean, thanks to the movie "Dead Man's Curve". I was in an El Cheapo goods shop and they had a K-Tel LP with all the J&D hits re-recorded in 1976 (I didn't realise most of the hit tracks were Beach Boys tunes). Several months later the Beach Boys Medley hit the charts and I asked Santa for the "Greatest Hits" compilation which came out in Australia at the end of 1981. The cool thing was 1: The LP was solid songs from start to finish. Nothing where I thought I had to skip the tracks, and 2: there was a promo sleeve included which listed all the Capitol double LP reissues up to Wild Honey/Friends (and including several greatest-hits LPs as well). My mission was slowly to acquire these records (Summer Days/Party! being my first). I vividly recall upon first playing Pet Sounds how I didn't like it!! About a year later traying to scavenge as much info on the band as possible (this was the '80's and they band were extremely passe) I began to read snippets about Smile and the legendary "Fire" song. I at first thought they meant "Smiley Smile". I recall once playing H&V and Good Vibrations  back to back and remarking how they had similar instruments playing. My young mind theorized perhaps they were done at the same session?! Then came the fateful day where I acquired the first Smile LP boot which had the Byron Preiss reference tape tracks on it and I was blown away. The rest is history.

[Dave in KC]

Liked most music of the 60's but The Beach Boys the most. When 20/20 came out, my life was definitely changed musically. It was a very dramatic emotional shift for a 19 year old. Those were tough years with my social life and I was mostly laughed at, that is until Surf's Up came out. The rest is history as I molded my career path to let me in the world of The Beach Boys. Yes, it was that important.

[PS]

California Dreaming (you had to ask...)

The Beach Boys existed for me initially as the purveyors, as David Leaf says, of “the California Myth”. Growing up in the suburbs of NYC, the mythical vision of the eternal sunshine of the SoCal mind worked its way from the TV set, record player, and the movies into my noreaster bones. I grew up loving those Sam Arkoff AIP Beach Party films. The first 45 that I ever bought was DAWN by the 4 Seasons, but it was the flip side, NO SURFIN' TODAY, that really haunted me –  kind of an inside flip of the bird at the Boys, but an oddly haunting, ghostly song ("Angry sea, took my love from me...). There they were, the California Girls, all over the movie screens. Sandra Dee as GIDGET (but especially in the wonderfully icky TAMMY AND THE DOCTOR, w/ future hipster Peter Fonda), innocent and guileless Carol Lynley in UNDER THE YUM YUM TREE, smart cookie (Mother) Dolores Hart in WHERE THE BOYS ARE…The Golden Girls girls, the blonde hair/blue eyed shiksa goddesses who etched themselves onto my impressionable young brain as the vision of the Eternal Surfer Girl that I have probably been daydreaming about most of my life since (and have occasionally fallen in love with). RIDE THE WILD SURF was also a primal scene for my city boy liquid dreams - still a great surf-buddy film fantasy (and later, the end of the dream and the nostalgia for time lost with its darker mirror, Milius' BIG WEDNESDAY), pacific pipe-dreams for this skinny surfless jewish kid from Queens. The west coast was indeed the Promised Land for east coast dreamers who watched tv shows and went to Saturday matinees in the early 60's.

My formative years of pop music were shaped primarily by my big sister’s record collection found in her tan 45 case – now we’re talking about that bland “pop idol” period between Elvis’ Army and February 9/64 that every critic hates, but I happen to LOVE, mostly  from early imprinting and the particular production sounds – Bobby Vee, James Darren, Bobby Rydell, the Girl Groups, Paul Peterson and Shelly Fabares ...the sound of the production of JOHNNY ANGEL, to be precise, that ultra-white, creamy dreamy fetishized and Spectorized, petticoated, reverbed, high heeled and stockinged sound – David Lynch knows it only too well, evident from his smart use of Connie Stevens’ 16 REASONS in MULHOLLAND DRIVE. The sound of the studio-made star doing essentially what were publicity singles from COLPIX records (love those drenched-with-reverb-to-hide-the-weak-voices productions) and the Philly teen Idol driven CAMEO/PARKWAY record company. Unlike Brian, I never cared much for Annette, however…(but do love Spring).

So I was well aware of the Beach Boys in the early sixties, of course, but mostly through all of their attending cultural influence - didn't buy the singles. The Beatles ruled everything on our side of the street. Starting in 1966, however, I was really taken by the Wouldn’t It be Nice/God Only Knows single (I distinctly remember hearing it on a radio during hayride with a lovely girl at a dude ranch, back when ‘dude’ had a different meaning), but I only had a vague notion of PET SOUNDS and certainly had no idea what it was, just knew that it had a rather uninviting cover and I still couldn't afford to really buy lps anyway ( I would later get into PET SOUNDS on an 8 track tape in my best friend's brand new GTO as we drove across the country to...Big Sur). GOOD VIBRATIONS, of course, was everywhere that year, but I don’t think I even had the single at the time. The Four Seasons, those Jersey Boys were IT for me in those early days, blasting out of the transistor speakers like no one else. Loved Frankie’s falsetto then even more than Brian’s at that time, and the studio drumming and tom-tom fills of the great unheralded Buddy Saltzman and Bob Crewe's  punchy sound... OPUS 17 (DON’T YOU WORRY ‘BOUT ME), WALK LIKE A MAN, BIG MAN IN TOWN, TELL IT TO THE RAIN and their version of SILENCE IS GOLDEN still rock my world - east coast pocket symphonies with only one movement but incredible tension and drive toward climax (the falsetto arising from the unison background vox); this ItaliAmer street romanticism that would eventually fulfill its promise with Springsteen's soft summer nights...

Pete Fornatele and Jonathan Schwartz on the great FM station from NYC, WNEW-FM, both loved the Beach Boys and gave them hip cred on the burgeoning cool FM airwaves (you cannot believe how creative and relaxed those stations were – such an education and so hip in their choices and they had a great sense of leisure and silence around them compared with the non-stop barrage of gapless noise that fill current airwaves), and I can remember hearing SMILEY SMILE being played without interruption one afternoon and thinking how very strange this was – and then a wonderful WNEW DJ named Roscoe played Wind Chimes and I taped it on my SONY reel to reel deck and kept listening back to the exquisite deep-welled chorale at the tail. Again and again, like Brian's BE MY BABY. I was a pretty straight kid (viz. drugs) in high school (graduated in ‘71) but I knew something was going on here, Mr. Jones…

I had a great job in the record department of a huge department store during 1968-69, when it all broke open – and that’s when my Beach Boys and Brian Wilson awareness really took off. My primal scene was, oddly enough, the (stereo!) single of BREAKAWAY (with CELEBRATE THE NEWS on the flip side) on the new, ugly, orange, non-Beatled Capitol logo. Couldn’t play it enough (“found out it was in my head”) – especially the sheer SOUND of it (and wasn’t it great to hear BW cover it again on the last few tours?). And who was this Reggie Dunbar, I wondered?? From there, I went backwards in my Beach Boys education. 20/20, Friends, Wild Honey, etc. I started reading whatever I could about Brian Wilson (you have to remember that any serious rock press was still in its infancy) and became somewhat aware of The Myth (though SMiLE didn’t really enter my consciousness until I later found the infamous Siegel article reprinted in a book I found by chance in the campus bookstore at college).

Great pop music has been the greatest and most consistent pleasure of my life. The records that thrilled me when I was a kid still do - the rush comes right back (especially in the car). Brian's melodies and his transcendent  musical spirit has always cut the deepest, as it has for all of us - bypassing all interference, bodiless, going straight for the soul...."feels" indeed.

- PS



 

[Roger Ryan]

One afternoon in the summer of 1974 I was seated in the backseat of some old car with a friend of mine being driven to mini-golf by his older brother. ENDLESS SUMMER was playing on his cassette deck and by the time it got to "I Get Around" I asked the brother who it was.  I ended up buying  a small handful of BB singles that summer ("Help Me Rhonda" was the first). While I never ended up buying ENDLESS SUMMER, I did purchase the songbook and remember playing "Girl Don't Tell Me" over and over on my Optigon organ (a strange keyboard that reproduced different sounds depending on which flexible disc was inserted). I hadn't even heard the actual song at that point, but loved the melody so much. I eventually bought the first two BEST OFs and was seriously into those when I first heard "Good Vibrations" on the radio. I couldn't believe it was the same band and started seeking out what I considered their more "mature" music. By the time LOVE YOU came out I had all the original albums.

[Mr. Wilson]

JEEZ.. After reading all your thoughts its amazing how diverse our experiences are... And im old as dirt..!!..1st time i heard BB.. Spring 62.. Santa Monica Beach..CA..Heard Surfin ..S safari...409..Im 9 1/2 yrs old...By spring of 63..Susa + shut down are hits..Im still not buying records yet..My mom"s collection was Country + Teen Idols + novelty records..The HIPPEST thing on the radio was BB..Jan + Dean..4 Seasons..Summer of 63.. 1st record i EVER bought...WAS...Surfer Girl LDC..Its over with me now.. A lifelong OBSESSION with music..! Begged my uncle for a guitar.. Went down to Mcarthur park ..{LA}
He bought a KAY f hole acoustic guitar.. 26.00 !!..Lotta money back then..!!..Then joined school band ..Learned drums..From that point on i bought every BB single + played on my one speaker record player.. Lip synching in my room in front of a mirror pretending to BE..The BB..LOL...!!!.. Every holiday i asked for BB albums as gifts + got them all.. My favorite time period was when 64 hit + all the singles had PIC SLEEVES.. The race was on ..Beatles + BB..!!...The first BB lp that hit me over the head that i didnt skip tracks was..All Summer Long..The previous lp"s had some filler.. Pic sleeve to I Get Around + DWB hit me hard.. These were guys from my neighbour hood...And my obsession for the harmonies has driven me nuts all these years..ANGELS..!!..In late 60"s to early 70's i took TONS of flack for BB music..What turned the tide was ..Surfs Up lp..I remember being at my friends older brothers house..He never talked to me..to young ..The lights were low + smokin herb..Big brother owns Surfs up lp but im not aware of it.. He puts this on + plays it + the whole room goes REAL Quiet..Everone in room is trippin on the sounds.. Thats the lp that turned the fence sitters into fans..After that nite i NEVER took flack for BB music..i cant name my favorites too many for here..Plus it shifts from mood..I will say that when i get down inside..BB music lifts me up + takes the pain away for awhile.. BW 88 solo lp played on my stereo for months..Went thru a terrible divorce.. I just hope when things get down ..the BB have their own music to listen + escape...Cause the roughest times in my life the BB soundtrack kept me sane...Paul

[Amanda Hart]

This seems like a good topic for my first post on this board...

My first Beach Boys experience was in kindergarden (1991).  For our class play we had everyone in the class be a different letter of the alphabet and then as we went through we were also like traveling from east coast to west coast.  We must not have had enough people in the class to do the whole alphabet because I was "W" and went last.  I got to pull out a wheelborrow with a watermelon in it and be from California.  I came out in a little one-piece bathing suit and sunglasses, said my little line about "W" and then the rest of the class came out and we all sang "Surfin' USA".

What really turned me on to it in fanatic status was when Sounds of Summer came out.  To promote it they were showing An American Family on VH1 classic.  I didn't know much about the Beach Boys aside from the hits, and as inaccurate or whatever as that movie is, it was what got me more curious.  So I got Sounds of Summer, fell in love with the songs I hadn't heard before like H&V, Darlin' and Wild Honey and a few months later bought Pet Sounds and the Smiley Smile/Wild Honey twofer and that was were it really took off.

[RONDEMON]

Oddly enough, "Sail On Sailor" and "Be Here In The Mornin'"
I had Pet Sounds, wasn't a fan at first. I bought the "Classics selected by Brian Wilson" CD and was hooked on the later BB tunes on there ("Busy Doin' Nothin," "Surf's Up") but as I was listening to sound samples on Amazon.com I heard "Be Here In The Mornin'" in it's 20-second sample format. It was so different from anything I heard. So many great little hooks and Carl's quirky line sung through a leslie in second chorus. I bought Friends and Sunflower immediately and have been crazy about em' since. I went backwards as far as their discography, I think it was a good way to see the devolution of sorts from the more complex to the surfin' tunes. I love it all. Even the '80s stuff.

[PMcC]

Best of the Beach Boys, Vol 1. That is when the snowball started rolling downhill.