Little Surfer/Dance, Dance,Dance/Beach Boys
I always loved these guys. Their tight harmonies and the deeply romantic lyrics squeezed my heart so much that I could barely breathe. So there will be more than one song from the Beach Boys that I want to write about.
I’m almost positive that Little Surfer was Brian Wilson’s first song. I’m pretty sure that I saw him being interviewed on television when he said this. Brian Wilson’s high pitched singing which I think could be called falsetto had an interesting effect on me. It was just so sweet and tender and it corresponded with what was stirring in my heart.
Little Surfer isn’t just about love and surfing. It’s about a kind of love that I experienced for the first time as a TAHS student. I had been on dates for a few years with very nice boys; these dates were pre- arranged, rather stiff events that you got dressed up for. But in my junior year something changed. I began spending time with one boy and it wasn’t like dating. What’s my favorite line in Little Surfer?
We would ride the surf together and our love would grow-–in my woody I will take you everywhere I go…
So it was a situation where you spent your weekends together with each other and friends, and if one of our mothers needed a loaf of bread or something to be picked up from the dry cleaners, you did it together. It was an almost family type of feeling where you felt enclosed, safe, and found endless silly things to laugh about.
Dance, Dance, Dance is another one of my favorites because it’s so expressive of that kind of energy you have when you’re that age; and now here comes the kind of crazy part. At the end of the song Brian takes you on this roller coaster of sound–very hard to describe! Ahhhhhhhhh..ahahahah..ahahahah oooooo/dance dance, dance dance, dance dance YEAH…YEAH….aHHHHH……
For a long, long time I had a double CD of their greatest hits…I played the Dance song over and over to hear that crazy wailing at the end. One day, sick of being stuck in the past–that’s the way I saw it at the time–I was walking along the sidewalk in Bloomsburg and dropped the CDs into a trash can. Time to move on?
lgmwriting 