Boys of summer

Sugar Ray and blink-182

by Matt Ashare

blink-182

Dennis Wilson was the only Beach Boy catching waves on a regular basis back when the Southern California band were sitting atop the charts with early-'60s novelty hits like "Surfin' Safari," "Surfin' U.S.A.," and "Surfer Girl." But the fun-in-the-sun the Beach Boys were selling had little to do with real sand on real beaches: it was an idealized endless summer of the collective teenage imagination. And it sold a lot of records.

It still does. Brian Wilson may be a basket case and the Beach Boys a harmless nostalgia act, but sunny Southern California fantasies haven't lost their pop appeal. "Do you remember summer?/It lasted so long/June till September was our time/To sing all those songs," Sugar Ray frontman Mark McGrath croons in "Under the Sun," a groovy mid-tempo ode to summer loving from the LA band's new Lava/Atlantic album that taps into the same good vibrations the Beach Boys discovered. And in the first single from the new Blink-182 CD Take Off Your Pants and Jacket (MCA), the playfully snotty San Diego punk-pop trio offer their own version of seasonal bliss: "Hanging out behind the club on the weekend/Acting stupid, getting drunk with my best friends/I couldn't wait for the summer and the Warped Tour/I remember it's the first time that I saw her . . . there." It's Grease 2001, with hunky bassist Mark Hoppus as John Travolta and Gwen Stefani in the Olivia Newton-John role.

Like a lot of contemporary So-Cal punk-popsters, Blink-182 are descendants of the Descendents, the Orange County pranksters who invented the form in the '80s by cleaning up punk's unruly guitars, tightening its brisk rhythms, injecting it with sweet bubblegummy melodies, and being the kind of lovable teenage creeps who are tenderly romantic one minute and making fart jokes the next. And from its boneheadedly humorous title down to the almost touching undercurrents of uncertainty (and poor English) that surface in "First Date" ("When you smile I melt inside/I'm not worthy for a minute of your time"), Take Off Your Pants and Jacket is a platinum-plated modern-rocked update of a blueprint that's been around at least since the summer of '87, when the Descendents had a big college-radio hit with a revved-up cover of the Beach Boys' "Wendy."

High-school crushes and first dates must be a distant memory for the blink boys -- they've been punking around since '93. Not that you'd know it from the way Hoppus and singer/guitarist Tom DeLonge rail against the jocks, preps, and "hippie fuckin' scumbags" in "Give Me One Good Reason," or from the sophomoric dick jokes that pepper "Happy Holidays, You Bastard" ("I'll never talk to you again/Unless your mom will touch my cock"). But that's the premise of blink's appeal: high school, like surfing, is just another state of mind.

LA's Sugar Ray learned some of the same So-Cal punk-pop moves on their way up the alterna-rock ladder, but by the summer of '97 they'd graduated to a more complex modern-rock hybrid with the hip-hop-inflected, Caribbean-tinged single "Fly," which turned their second album, Floored (Lava/Atlantic), into a double-platinum breakthrough. Even they seemed willing to concede that their 15 minutes of fun in the sun were almost up with the title of their next CD, 1999's 14:59 (Lava/Atlantic), but it was an even bigger success. So they've done away with clever titles -- their new one's simply called Sugar Ray -- and, with just a little tongue in cheek, embraced mainstream-pop respectability. Having already parodied the Beatles' first US landing (see the back cover of 14:59), they seem to be going for a Beach Boyish look on the cover of the new album: clean-cut singer Mark McGrath is wearing a sporty white ensemble that shows off his bronzed complexion, and bassist Murphy Karges is in a trad white suit with a green-and-blue-striped be-true-to-your-school tie.

The first single, "When It's Over," is supposed to be a break-up song, but the regret in McGrath's voice doesn't go much deeper than his tan -- everything from his relaxed tone to the comfortably strummed acoustic guitar to the mid-tempo hip-hoppish groove suggests just a reflective walk on the beach. "Under the Sun" uses a similar sonic backdrop, bolstered by cresting power chords that break over the chorus, for a sandy stroll down memory lane that namechecks Culture Club, the Clash, and Men Without Hats. It's music to have a summer by because, as Blink-182 so eloquently put it in "Reckless Abandon," "Everybody would waste it all/To have a summer that they could call/A memory that's full of fun . . . "