“Surfin’ U.S.A.” 60 Years Later: The Single That Changed Rock ‘n’ Roll Forever

There’s a scene in George Lucas’ 1973 film American Graffiti where the Beach Boys’ “Surfin’ Safari” plays through the stereos of every car cruising down the Modesto, California streets in 1962. The camera cuts to Milner, a tough, drag-raising greaser who drives a yellow 1932 Ford Coupe and is tasked with driving Carol, a teenager struggling to fit in, around the city on the last night of summer. “I don’t like that surfing shit. Rock ’n’ roll’s been going downhill ever since Buddy Holly died,” Milner says after turning the radio off, to which Carol replies: “Don’t you think the Beach Boys are boss?”

After Holly’s death in 1959, the work of other rock ’n’ roll pioneers was fizzling out. Chuck Berry hadn’t had a Top-10 hit since “Johnny B. Goode” in 1958, and Elvis was enlisted in the Army. By the time 1963 came around, there was still an identity crisis going on in popular music. Beatlemania was still a year away in the United States, and Haight-Ashbury’s Summer of Love was four years out. There was no counterculture; the British Invasion hadn’t yet made waves in the states. Thus, it was the perfect moment for a genre like surf rock to get huge in America. Dick Dale’s instrumental rendition of “Misirlou,” an Eastern Mediterranean folk song, is credited with introducing the country to surf music in a more national way, while artists like the Ventures, Jan & Dean and the Chantays found success on the charts, too.

But no surf rock act has ever touched what the Beach Boys accomplished in the 1960s. When the band put out their first single, “Surfin’,” in late-1961, Brian Wilson, Carl Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Mike Love and Al Jardine were all still teenagers in Los Angeles County. Carl wasn’t even 15 years old when the single hit radio stations. The origins of “Surfin’” are uncertain. Some folks believe that the song’s melody was Brian’s final project for his music class at Hawthorne High, and that he went against the wishes of his teacher Fred Morgan, who required a 120-measure piano sonata. Others contend that it was Dennis’ love for surfing that inspired his brother to craft the tune. Love provided that famous “bom-dip-di-dip” hook, and Brian finished the arrangements in just a few hours. It peaked at #75 on the U.S. charts.

The next two Beach Boy songs, “Surfin’ Safari” and “Ten Little Indians,” also failed to break into the Top-10, though the former did hit #1 in Sweden. It wasn’t until “Surfin’ U.S.A.” was released on March 4th, 1963 that everything for the band changed. “[“Surfin’ U.S.A.”] really exemplified what the Beach Boys, at that time, were all about,” Love tells me over the phone. “That really did put us in the higher echelon of groups at the time.” The track soared to #3 on the charts in America and #2 in Canada, solidifying a wider eye cast on the band.

But what Love is getting at, that exemplification of the Beach Boys, dates back to before “Surfin’,” when he and his cousins, Brian, Carl and Dennis, were growing up in Hawthorne. “We lived just a few miles from the beach,” Love says. “The beach was a big deal for us. [It was] the beach, barbecues and family outings. Dennis and I would go fishing off the Redondo Beach Pier. We came back to the house where the Wilsons lived and prevailed upon Brian, ‘Let’s do a surfing song,’ because we were asked by some people to do some songs. But we didn’t really like what they were proposing, so we made up our own.”

While it has long been understood that Dennis was the only “true surfer” in the Beach Boys, the entire group was constantly at the forefront of that culture in the early 1960s. What set them apart from other acts of the time was how well they told stories of their home state. While other charting male-led acts filled their songs with themes of love, the Beach Boys tackled the things that interested them most: surfing and drag racing, picturesque depictions of Southern California for young folks who’d never come close to the West Coast. It wasn’t until “Surfer Girl” came out in July 1963 that the band penned a romantic single, but, even then, it was still a thoughtful story about the uncertainty of reciprocal attraction. Brian and Love’s songwriting stood out greatly from the consistent ick of 30-something-year-olds singing about teenage girls.

Never before in rock ’n’ roll had a band, or artist, conveyed such strong imagery of one place at such an impressive clip. “There are very few people that had as many charting records as the Beach Boys at that time,” Love says. He’s right, too. The Beach Boys have had 55 songs hit the Billboard Hot 100; 21 of them initially charted sometime between 1961 and 1965. They’d put out, as Love calls them, “double-sided hits”: the A-side would be a surf song, while the B-side would be a car song. “We realized that everybody didn’t have an ocean, but everybody loved those powerful Detroit cars,” he adds. “Dennis had a 409 Chevrolet, and we actually burned rubber down the street into the extension cord to a recording machine to get the sound of the tires burning rubber. The neighbors didn’t like it too much, but it found its way onto ‘409.’”

More than anything, beyond the cars and the waves and the hamburger stands and the woodies, the Beach Boys wrote about California over and over. But that theme never ran thin; it was a trend they’d continue for nearly 50 years in new, tender ways. That and the surfing imagery came naturally to Brian and Love, because they spent their youth engrossed in it. “It was easy for us to glamorize it, because we were speaking in ‘surf tongue’ and dressing a certain way, with our Pendleton shirts,” Love adds. “California, from the mountains to the oceans and the deserts, from Oregon to Mexico, there’s so much coastline. It’s just beautiful. It wasn’t really a challenge at all to extol the virtues of such a great home state.”

“Surfin’ U.S.A.” is, at its core, the Beach Boys at their most emblematic. It’s a pastoral of Southern California; a post-World War II articulation of a Baby Boomer’s American Dream. That’s why the “If everybody had an ocean” opening line is so iconic: No one in the United States, outside of California, Florida and Hawaii, had routine access to surfing, though windsurfing had been a pretty global interest up until then. The song hit the charts on March 23rd, 1963 and remained there for 25 weeks, peaking at #3. It was the Beach Boys’ biggest hit at the time, only to be topped by “I Get Around,” which would hit #1 a year later. But, with Love on lead vocals, he gives props to 15 different surfing spots: Del Mar, Ventura County Line, Santa Cruz, Trestles, Australia’s Narrabeen, Manhattan Beach, Doheny, Haggerty’s, Swami’s Beach, Pacific Palisades, San Onofre, Sunset Beach, Redondo Beach, La Jolla and Waimea Bay. A casual listener in Ohio or Alabama or Montana would likely have no idea what those places were, or if they were even real places to begin with. Yet the Beach Boys made them all sound like oases ready to be visited and adored.

Before The Beach Boys Today!, many of Brian’s arrangements came through his interpretation of other artists’ melodies. Famously, the 32-bar form of “Surfer Girl” was based off of Dion and the Belmonts’ “When You Wish Upon a Star.” “Surfin’ U.S.A.” was no different, as Brian formulated the structure, both musically and lyrically, similar to Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen.” Berry had been an influence on Carl’s guitar playing, but an even bigger inspiration to both Brian and Love, who cites the rock pioneer’s “lyrics and alliteration and the way he told those stories” as a huge motive for the band in 1963. On the phone, Love sings Berry’s “Nadie (Is It You?) and then the Beach Boys’ “Fun, Fun, Fun” to showcase how Berry’s syntax and construction played such a direct role in an era where the band was still finding their own voice.

That voice came through a slow burn. “Surfin’ U.S.A.” was the first time Brian started double-tracking the band’s vocals in the studio, but it became clear immediately that that technique would be a game-changer for them for a long time. “It elicited a certain timbre,” Love says. “There’s a tension between the two voices, but a complementarity that pleases the ear, some sort of reaction to the brain and the heart.” He cites that, while the dual-tracking kicked up in popular music in the 1950s, it’s a centuries-old practice that can be traced back to the Vedas and their psalms, which would include two notes chanted at the same time.

After “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” Brian built on his experimentation with vocals by employing Phil Spector’s “Wall of Sound” technique on “Surfer Girl,” which found the band a ways away from their roots, which was just drum, bass, guitar and keyboard. Brian once called the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” the greatest pop record ever made, and he even recruited Spector’s (the song’s producer) de facto session band the Wrecking Crew to be his fighter pilots on “I Get Around,” “Help Me, Rhonda” and “California Girls.” As Brian’s production began getting more and more experimental, the gradual shift from surf rock novelty songs to methodical, dense concertos was inevitable. “As we wanted to express more moods and more feelings and different styles and tempos, it naturally led to wanting to use horns,” Love says. “We used saxophones quite a bit on those earlier recordings. But, then, later on, on Pet Sounds, it was orchestral. It was just a natural evolution, wanting to do more and experimenting with the different sounds.”

In the media, the time leading up to the creation of Pet Sounds has been depicted as a hostile number of months between Brian and the rest of the Beach Boys. In reality, it wasn’t so brash. By 1965, Brian had bowed out of touring completely, because he wasn’t comfortable on the road. On a flight from Los Angeles to Houston in December 1964, he had a nervous breakdown that catalyzed his decision to take a hiatus from live shows, not returning to the stage with the Beach Boys until 1983. But that move didn’t sour relations with the band like the movies make it seem. In fact, Love still finds it to have been a copacetic arrangement. “We became two groups: the recording group and a touring group,” he says. “I’ve always preferred live music and audiences to recording. Recording is great and completely necessary, but it’s not as much fun, at least for me, as seeing a crowd respond positively and euphorically to your music. Brian was brilliant in the studio with the tracking. He was so deep into the music.”

While Brian was working with the Wrecking Crew on making what would become his masterpiece Pet Sounds, Bruce Johnson filled in for him on the road in Japan. When the band returned to California, the record was all but finished. Johnson became a full-time member, Love and Brian wrote lyrics together, Carl sat in with Hal Blaine, Carol Kaye and Glen Campbell to record some guitar parts and they all tracked their vocals. “We must’ve done one section of ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’ maybe 25 to 30 [times], just to make it right,” Love adds, chuckling.

Since the release of Pet Sounds, the rivalry between the Beach Boys and the Beatles has been one of rock ’n’ roll’s greatest face-offs. But it was never a negative thing between the two bands. Johnson took an acetate of Pet Sounds and played it for John Lennon and Paul McCartney at the behest of the Who’s Keith Moon, who introduced them to him. When the Beatles came to America, Brian, Love and company all went to see them play multiple times. And, though Pet Sounds became the first Beach Boys since 1963 to not be certified gold upon its release, McCartney did say that “God Only Knows” is his favorite song of all-time. “When the Beatles came along, it just upped the ante, in terms of creativity,” Love says. “They began in a very teenage way, but then they quickly morphed into something quite creative. I think that drove us to be a bit more creative. In fact, in 1966, ‘Good Vibrations’ went to #1 in Great Britain and we were voted the number-one group in Great Britain by one of the musical polls, #2 being the Beatles.”

So few parts of rock ’n’ roll history have been as mythical as the years between 1965 and 1967, when fans got to watch the Beach Boys and the Beatles were trading punches. A sequence of Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!), Rubber Soul, Pet Sounds, Revolver, “Good Vibrations” and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band still feels unfathomable, even in 2023. But rewind to 1963, and you’ll find similar trajectories for the two bands who were separated by an ocean. “If you’re playing tennis and there’s somebody who can play it better than you, it makes you raise your game up a level. Rolling Stone, years ago, did a survey and Sgt. Pepper was [the #1 album] and Pet Sounds was #2, out of 500. That’s some pretty good territory. Of course, I demand a recount,” Love says with a laugh.

As the Beatles ditched their teen romance roots for more introspective and psychedelic musings, the Beach Boys similarly abandoned the hot rods and surfboards for spirituality, melancholia and conceptual stories of young, idealistic love and humanity. In a lot of ways, we have “Surfin’ U.S.A.” to thank for all of that. Depending on what side of the aisle you’re on in the discourse between optimism and cynicism, the song is either a sad final gasp of utopia or a memento of paradise.

“Fun, Fun, Fun” would tread similar daydreams of tropical liberty in 1964, but songs like “Surfer Girl,” “In My Room” and “Don’t Worry Baby” were these blissful, beautiful hummings with tinges of sadness that are still unparalleled in popular music. No other American rock band from the 20th century has mastered that balance quite like the Beach Boys, and that’s because, through Love’s colorful vision of California and Brian’s thoughtful, confessional ruminations on romance and sorrow, they built perfect pop songs that dug deep into the honesty of the human condition. “Do my dreaming and my scheming / Lie awake and pray? / Do my crying and my sighing / Laugh at yesterday?” Brian sang on “In My Room.”

All doo-wops and bom-dip-di-dips aside, not every wave the band caught crested into an arc of euphoria. Brian’s magnum opus Smile was scrapped, his lifelong struggles with mental illness led to months, sometimes years, of absence from the band and the Beach Boys found themselves at a crossroads when they left Capitol for Brother Records. Their inability to outrun the Beatles, no matter how hard they actually tried or didn’t try to, cast a shadow on their legacy for a short while. Even Rolling Stone wrote an article in 1967 denouncing the band as “just one prominent example of a group that has gotten hung up on trying to catch The Beatles. It’s a pointless pursuit.” At the same time, the epicenter of rock music in California had migrated from Los Angeles to San Francisco, seemingly leaving the Beach Boys behind.

After Pet Sounds, the Beach Boys still couldn’t truly escape the surf rock sound that made them legends. On one of Love’s best songs, “Big Sur,” he delivers a beautiful kaleidoscope of imagery and professes his love for the coastline where the Santa Lucia Mountains tower over the Pacific Ocean: “Big Sur I’ve got plans for you / Me and mine are going to / Add ourselves to your lengthy list of lovers / And live in canyons covered in springtime green / Wild birds and flowers to be heard and seen / And with my old guitar / I’ll make up songs to sing,” Love sings. On the flip-side, Brian attempted to completely dismantle his band’s surfing image on “Surf’s Up,” which was originally conceived during the Smile sessions but not released until 1971, through a psychedelic, spiritual awakening, in which the song’s narrator becomes God through a storm of enlightenment emitted through a children’s song. “Surf’s up / Aboard a tidal wave / Come about hard and join / The young and often spring you gave / I heard the word,” Brian sings atop a staccato piano breakdown.

But in 1969, Love would write “Do It Again” after going surfing with his friend Bill Jackson and dreaming of the imagery he and his cousins spun into gold records. “Suntanned bodies and waves of sunshine / The California girls and a beautiful coastline / Warmed up weather, let’s get together / And do it again,” Love sang, atop Brian’s arrangements that were fit perfectly for the song’s nostalgia trip. Brian once said that writing the “Do It Again” with Love was the best collaboration they did together, as they paired doo-wop harmonies with a drag race-style instrumental. It wasn’t the most polished-sounding Beach Boys song, but it evoked the purest part of their legacy, years after all but leaving it behind.

The Beach Boys are eons away from the surfing havens and drag races that gave them the ammunition to become the most beloved American band of the 1960s. Yet, there’s still something so modern and perfect about “Surfin’ U.S.A.” Without it, Pet Sounds, one of the best—if not the very best—albums of all-time wouldn’t exist. The California Brian and Love wrote about is different now; it’s much more of a melting pot that’s unlikely to yield any one musical act that defines the entire state—or any place in North America, for that matter—again in the same way the Beach Boys once did. We’ve gone through decades of surfing and surfers being satirized in film and television, so much so that it’s sometimes hard to salvage what the authentic parts of the culture and its legacy actually are. But that line, those five words we all remember, “If everybody had an ocean,” still elicits hope. Somewhere, there’s a place we can all still go and be gone for the summer.