Beach Boys Cover Reviews: Surfer Girl (1963)

There is an obvious mark against 1963's Surfer Girl album cover: This is just another photo from the cover shoot for Surfin' Safari. So it gets no points for originality. It does feature an image of the band themselves, which is a step up from Surfin' USA, but in this one they look like a bunch of dorks, whereas only a couple of them looked like huge dorks on Surfin' Safari. So Surfer Girl is kind of a toss up.

The band-carrying-the-surf-board idea is a decent one, but does it work? I have some issues with it. First of all, the spacing is off. Either everyone is really trying to keep away from that pesky Marks kid, or Brian is really close to Mike. Honestly, every older picture I've seen of the Beach Boys arranged in some kind of line just comes off kind of wonky. Perhaps they were just too much of real (weird) dudes than a polished group of pop stars to do the highly-posed kind of thing. Or maybe Capitol just didn't have the time and resources to care that much. After all, their lack of coordination didn't hurt their record sales. But it does make the cover look weird, which is what we are talking about right now. So that detracts.

Still, this cover does a much better job than the first two at presenting the fun-in-the-sun image the label was trying to push. The first one gave us the boys, the second one gave us the surf, and this one gives us both. The tiki-torch font and tropical color scheme flesh this out, beyond the image itself. This is the end of the surf trilogy, and it nails the image the best. Also, the attention called to "Little Deuce Coupe" on the track list at the bottom is the first hint at the band being more than a surf band (they do car songs too!), which is a definite plus from a historical outlook. We can see what's coming next with the band. Finally, Paul is Dead conspiracy theorists will notice the bare feet on every member. Beyond this, they were absent from the previous cover. Finally, David Marks was gone altogether soon after this. I think this all suggests that the entire group died and was replaced sometime in early 1963. Bonus points for conspiracy fodder.

Still, it re-cycles a photo shoot, so it has to lose originality points. But it succeeds more than it fails, and it's nice to look at. We'll give Surfer Girl a 3 out of 5, or a Mike Love on the Beach Boys Beards scale.

Up next, we'll look at their third and final 1963 album, Little Deuce Coupe.