Tunesday : Surfin' USA

Surfin' USA

(Chuck Berry) Performed by The Beach Boys

If everybody had an ocean
Across the U.S.A.
Then everybody'd be surfin'
Like California
You'd see 'em wearing their baggies
Huarachi sandals too
A bushy bushy blond hairdo
Surfin' U.S.A.

You'd catch 'em surfin' at Del Mar
Ventura County line
Santa Cruz and Trestle
Australia's Narrabeen
All over Manhattan
And down Doheny Way

Everybody's gone surfin'
Surfin' U.S.A.

We'll all be planning out a route
We're gonna take real soon
We're waxing down our surfboards
We can't wait for June
We'll all be gone for the summer
We're on surfari to stay
Tell the teacher we're surfin'
Surfin' U.S.A.

Haggerty's and Swami's
Pacific Palisades
San Onofre and Sunset
Redondo Beach L.A.
All over La Jolla
At Waimea Bay

Everybody's gone surfin'
Surfin' U.S.A.

Everybody's gone surfin'
Surfin' U.S.A.

Everybody's gone surfin'
Surfin' U.S.A.

At some point after we moved to Stouffville, Dad brought home one of those ugly old cabinet-style stereos; probably something he found at the side of the road. To go with it (maybe they were even found with the record player itself) were a few old albums, and to my brothers and me, the most interesting was a greatest hits compilation from The Beach Boys. I don't remember my parents ever using that stereo -- stuck as it was down in the basement rec room -- but when the mood took us, Ken and Kyler and I would would pop on some Beach Boys and sing and dance along. I remember feeling brazen during California Girls: there was something very naughty to me about "Northern girls with the way they kiss" keeping their "boyfriends warm at night". To me, that hinted at keeping each other warm all night long, if you know what I mean, and as a Canadian, I was definitely a Northern girl (even if skinny little 10-year-old me wasn't who the Beach Boys meant...) 

Our very favourite song, though, was Surfin' USA. When the opening guitar riff would start, each of us would jump up on the arm of a sofa or easy chair and start surfin'; crouched and smoothly balanced with arms straight out; singing at the top of our lungs; never getting the words anywhere near right (forget all the foreign place names, we wouldn't even have known what baggies or huarachi sandals were). 

We had other surf music down there in the basement, too. We collectively thought that the opening to Wipe Out was about the coolest thing in music, and when we'd surf along to this song, the balancing would be less assured; us always aware of the danger of the waves; the imminent crash (and diving off the arm of a sofa in a watery wipe out was even more fun than hanging ten in the first place). 

                  

Surf music also introduced me to the concept of tragic irony: After listening to Jan and Dean's Dead Man's Curve once (okay, not technically surf music), my mother told me how Jan had been in a terrible car accident not far from the real Dead Man's Curve, and even though it had left him with brain damage, Dean stuck by his side and they continued to record and perform together. The coincidence at the heart of that story gave me the heebie jeebies, and with the vague knowledge of even James Dean having died in a spectacular car crash on the Pacific Coast, I wondered at these California boys: singing bubble gum pop about girls in bikinis while risking their lives in too-fast cars on curving highways and on thin waxed planks in the unforgiving ocean. 

But The Beach Boys, man, that was all happy time music to us. Ken starting out the deepest voice on Bababa Bababra Ann, Kye joining in with a higher Bababa Bababra Ann, me going falsetto with Oh Barbra A-a-ann, ta-ake ma ha-a-and...it was all fun, fun, fun to us.