1963 was a big year for the Beach Boys. They released three albums, two of which would go gold (including this one), and one (Little Deuce Coupe) which would go platinum. I guess you could say this was the year they really made it. And they made a lot of music, very quickly. Which brings us to their second album, Surfin' USA.
Apparently in the five months since their first album, the Beach Boys became "The No. 1 Surfing Group in the Country." The cover proclaims this, assuming that maybe you would miss the perfect-wave portrait on the front, the band's name, or the bright yellow "SURFIN'USA" gracing the cover. This claim is actually kind of charming now, as it goes against everything album covers became. Back in 1963, they were still pretty utilitarian. It also reminds me of the mid-late 00s trend of putting 3x4" "FOR FANS OF" stickers on post-hardcore commercialcore also-ran bands' cds. Anyway, this claim to surfing-band supremacy alludes to a surfing-band war which may or may not have actually happened. If it did, this cover is the only real vestige of that months-long battle. So it gets points for that.
But what else could it really get points for? Assuming Wikipedia is to be believed (my copy of Keith Badman's indefensible book Beach Boys is out of town, so I can't double check it), this album came out on March 25th, 1963. I would then venture to guess this cover was whipped up around March 24th at about 11:37PM. A guy at Capitol probably spent about ten minutes finding the good-enoughest cheap surf photo he could (no offense to cover photographer John Severenson), added that pretty cool blue border around it, and then sent it to the factory to print up.
I can say that the scan up there looks much better than the actual copy I have at home, but I still don't think it really works either way. It captures the act of surfing, but nothing about the contagious youth and charisma of the band itself in 1963, something the first album did quite well. It looks like it could just as well be a slapped-together collection of cut-rate surf jams by various nobodies rather than the work of a very talented group. Especially when trying to establish a new band into the rock market of the day, the decision not to picture them on the front cover just seems wrong. Despite all of the VERY BIG PRINT on the cover, it seems anonymous on the whole. It hits the mark trying to capitalize on a craze, but misses altogether trying to capitalize on a group, which seems much more important. And as a fan of the group, it is just disappointing. They probably didn't look much different a few months after the first release, but it would still be fun to see them looking like the Beach Boys.
The cover has a little bit of hokey charm to it, but almost no charisma. I don't think it probably worked well then, and it definitely doesn't work now. This is a real misstep, but with the turnaround time of albums in the early days of mainstream rock music, it's kind of a forgettable mistake. It's not awful, but it's not much, either. I give it 2 out of 5, or a vaguely homeless-looking later Dennis Wilson on the Beach Boys Beard scale.
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