I happened to look up the lyrics to “Surfin’ Safari” on line recently and noticed what I thought was an anomaly. One section is shown as, “… I tell ya, surfin’s mighty wild, it’s gettin’ bigger every day …” I have always known this as, “, surfin’s not a wow …” (meaning it’s not just a passing fad). I don’t believe this is a phrase I would have heard from listening to AM radio or even the record, rather I think I read it in the sheet music or an article many years ago.
I looked at several lyric sites, and they all show it as “mighty wild” instead of “not a wow”.
I also listened to several versions on Spotify, and while not definitive, to me it sounded closer to “not a wow”, but then one can hear what one wants in many records.
Does anyone else here hear it as “not a wow” or remember the sheet music that way?
I never have. It’s possible the music was covering up Mike Love in that passage or he was buried under the mix, or just not enunciating. It’s more likely that “mighty wild” indeed is the correct phrase.
I have not. It’s certainly not something I would have come up with on my own. A lot of lyrics were only semi-intelligible on AM. That’s why I used to look at sheet music at stores in the mall, long before the internet, and that’s where I think I got the “not a wow” idea.
Obligatory mention of Dave Barry honestly thinking that Help Me Rhonda opens with a tuneful “since she put me down, there’s been owls puking in my bed.”
I wouldn’t go looking too deeply into what the Beach Boys lyrics are. They once had a hit song about the great tropical getaway of Komomo (Indiana…) Just listen and enjoy the melody.
Don’t put too much stock in piano/vocal printed arrangements. You have no guarantee that the songwriter proofread that before or after printing. You have no guarantee that the lyrics were supplied by the songwriter, either.
It’s entirely possible whoever arranged the p/v sheet music took the lyrics from a lead sheet made for copyright purposes.
I spent more than a decade in Hollywood writing lead sheets for songwriters and publishers. Rarely did I get lyrics direct from the writer, and rarely did any writer proofread what I wrote down.
Sometimes I had a hard time figuring out what the lyrics were, so I started charging more for a lead sheet if the lyrics weren’t supplied to me in advance. It was my hope that the writer would provide those, but most successful performers were too important or too busy to bother. Often a secretary in the publishing house would listen to the song and write them down. How accurate would that be?
I guess the last straw was when Barry White heard that I wanted to have the lyrics along with the recording. His solution was to play his finished song in the background, and holding a mic, attached to a cassette recorder, speak the lyrics at the same time as the singing on the recording! Believe me, hearing Barry White speak, “Baby, baby…” while the background sang, “Baby, baby…” wasn’t much of an improvement!
So I changed my requirements to say that I needed the lyrics, typed out on paper, to be submitted along with the recording, and if they didn’t do it that way, I would not take responsibility for any mis-heard words. I made a lot of money from publishers who didn’t really care and just paid me extra anyway.
Since sheet music is rarely re-engraved, just re-duplicated, it’s entirely possible your “accurate” sheet music is the result of something I thought I heard.
The moral of the story is that printed sheet music lyrics might or might not be accurate.