Surfin' Safari

Description

The Beach Boys' first album is already its cover. The five musicians and their old jalopy in Malibu, with Dennis Wilson's surfboard and their gazes turned toward the horizon... What comes next? It's a corner of the world, the end of a journey that began seven years earlier with the first songs of Chuck Berry, and which crossed the USA from East to West. The Beach Boys are still far from the celestial songs of Pet Sounds. The sound is delicate, the melodies naive, the vocal harmonies timid. Their songs are almost all built on the model of those by Chuck Berry or doo-wop, but without the magical energy or poetic dimension. Yet, the whole is already graceful and imbued with a slight melancholy that will be the hallmark of the group. Look again at this photo: it's California but under a whitish sky, which the sun cannot penetrate.