The Beach Boys' "Amusement Parks U.S.A."

This morning I listened to a compilation album of the Coasters.  A spoken line at the beginning of "Little Egypt" caught my attention:  "Just one thin dime, one tenth of a dollar."  I had to reference the recording to get the exact phrase, but word-for-word, this is almost the same exhortation that's in the Beach Boys' "Amusement Parks U.S.A." on the Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) album.  There, it's "One thin dime, just one tenth of a dollar."

Last time I did Collection Audit, I postulated that that phrase in "Amusement Parks U.S.A." came from the song "Broadway," specifically the line "One thin dime won't even shine your shoes."  This song by the Coasters seems much more likely to be the actual origin though.  While I don't know if the Beach Boys were familiar with this song, both it and "Amusement Parks U.S.A." have a carnival-esque atmosphere.

Johnny Rivers' "Memphis" and "Help Me, Rhonda"

Between yester-day and to-day, I listened to the two discs of a Johnny Rivers compilation titled Secret Agent Man: The Ultimate Johnny Rivers Anthology.  I found some interesting things about two of his covers.

The liner notes mention Rivers' "flair for interpreting and rearranging other people's material" and explain that he took the riff for his version of Chuck Berry's "Memphis" from "Tommy Tucker's recent R&B hit 'Hi Heel Sneakers.'"  Aside from Berry's original and Rivers' cover, the only other version of "Memphis" I'm really familiar with is a live version by the Searchers (slightly re-titled to "Memphis, Tennessee") that appears on the 40th Anniversary Collection.  (I have two versions by the Beatles, but I haven't listened to them that much.  They're both closer to Berry's original, so are irrelevant to my point here anyway.)  Until reading the liner notes for the Rivers anthology, I hadn't fully realized that his version and the Searchers' version have the same riff.  The liner notes for the Searchers album don't give an exact date for their version; they mention only that it's from a live appearance on Swedish radio from 1964, although based on the track listing - which is more or less chronological - it seems that it's from December 1964.  So Rivers' version, released in May 1964, is older, and the Searchers probably modeled their version after his.  (It seems unlikely that they would use the same riff - and in the same way - that Rivers did.)

It's hard for me to wrap my head around that because not only am I more familiar with the Searchers' version, but I've always thought that the Searchers were older than Johnny Rivers.  I knew that both had long careers, but I'd always placed the Searchers' pinnacle of success in the early '60s and Johnny Rivers' in the mid- to late-'60s.  The Searchers' taking inspiration from Johnny Rivers certainly illustrates that I was wrong and that they overlap more than I'd thought.

Secondly, I think Rivers' cover of the Beach Boys' "Help Me, Rhonda" is particularly interesting because it adheres more closely to the album version ("Help Me, Ronda," from Today!) rather than the single version (which was also released on the Summer Days (and Summer Nights!!) album).

Rivers' cover re-instates the harmonica that appears on the Today! version (it doesn't appear on the Beach Boys' single version), and he replaces shattered with ruined in the line "but she let another guy come between us and it shattered our plan," which - again - is what the Today! version has.  The Beach Boys changed it to "shattered our plan" for the single version.

According to the liner notes, Rivers' version of "Help Me, Rhonda" was released in 1975, which is well after the Beach Boys' versions and well after their single version became a hit.  The liner notes also mention that Brian Wilson contributed backing vocals to Rivers' version.  Rivers' basing his version on the older, album version and Wilson's appearance on the track both seem to suggest that Rivers recorded the song because he genuinely liked it and not because he was just trying to get a hit song (although it apparently did well in the charts anyway).

The Beach Boys' "Amusement Parks U.S.A."

I skipped ahead to listen to the Beach Boys' Summer Days (and Summer Nights!!) because to-day is Brian Wilson's birthday.

I think "Amusement Parks U.S.A." references "On Broadway."  In the spoken part, the carnival barker says that the attractions cost only "one thin dime," which is also a line in "On Broadway."  "One thin dime won't even shine your shoes."

So either that line is a reference to "On Broadway" or "one thin dime" is a more common phrase than I'd thought.

Palisades Park is also mentioned in the song ("At Palisades and Salisbury Parks the roller coasters are flyin'").  It might be a reference to Freddy Cannon's "Palisades Park," which is also about an amusement park, but Palisades Park is apparently also a real place, so it might not be a viable connection.