Fun, fun, fun, ‘til daddy takes the T-Bird away! Also, Beach Boys songs are fun until you stop listening to them as background music at Johnny Rockets and view them as a viable source of life guidance.
While it is often said that the music of the 1960s is the poetry of a generation, it turns out that listening to the Beach Boys just leads to waking up fully clothed at the bottom of a drained swimming pool more often than you’d care to remember.
“You know she digs you and thinks you’re a real groovy guy/ But yet I’m not sure that I feel the same” – Don’t Hurt My Little Sister: Word to the wise, walking up to a guy who went out with your sister a couple of times in high school and drunkenly ordering him to prove he’s a real groovy guy has consequences, the biggest of which is he and his friends chasing you out of the bar, across a highway, and into the abandoned Wet City Water Park, where you trip into the dried out wave pool and wake up hours later.
“If you brought a big brown bag of them home/ I’d jump up and down and hope you’d toss me a carrot” – Vegetables: If you get excited when your community-supported agriculture box arrives and demand the farmer throws you a carrot but he actually has a hell of an arm and you have to go long and end up back at Wet City and then wake up with a seagull poking you, it’s time to stop taking Brian Wilson at face value.
“Gotta keep those lovin’ good vibrations a-happenin’ with her” – Good Vibrations: Good vibes at a party are all well and good, but deciding to maintain them by spontaneously jumping into a pool at a backyard party only works if you’ve checked if it has currently been emptied for retiling.
“Never had a lesson I ever learned” – Never Learn Not To Love: Technically, this is a Dennis Wilson solo track, but turns out that doing anything like the hardest-partying member of the Beach Boys is a lesson that ends up with you fucking trashed at the bottom of a kiddie pool and 911 being called.
“The Southern girls with the way they talk/ They knock me out when I’m down there” – California Girls: I don’t really want to get into this too much, but this girl from Alabama takes some things as a personal challenge and then you wake up missing teeth, somehow at Wet City once again.
Despite leaving me near dead at the bottom of a pool, ussually for hours at a time, at least none of these songs are “Kokomo.” Fuck “Kokomo.”