The Beach Boys: Do It Again - on Beat Club (1969) (My "Stereo Studio Sound" Re-Edit)

The Beach Boys: Do It Again - on Beat Club (1969) (My "Stereo Studio Sound" Re-Edit)

"Do It Again" is a song by the American rock band the Beach Boys that was released as a standalone single on July 8, 1968. It was written by Brian Wilson and Mike Love as a self-conscious callback to the group's earlier surf image, which they had not embraced since 1964. Love and Wilson also share the lead vocal on the song.

The song was issued only two weeks after the release of the band's album Friends, with the album track "Wake the World" as its B-side. It reached number 20 on the United States' Billboard Hot 100 and became their second number-one hit in the UK. A slightly edited version of the song, using an excerpt from the Smile outtake "Workshop", subsequently appeared as the opening track on the Beach Boys' 1969 album 20/20.

"Do It Again" is a self-conscious callback to the band's earlier surf-based material. Originally titled "Rendezvous", the lyrics to the song were inspired after a day Mike Love had spent at the beach in which he had gone surfing with an old friend named Bill Jackson. Love then showed the lyrics to his cousin Brian Wilson, who proceeded to write the music to Love's lyrics of nostalgia. Wilson stated that he believes the song was the best collaboration that he and Love ever worked on. Love commented, "He remembers it being at my house. I remember it as being at his house. He starts pounding at the piano, I was summoning up the words and we got a chorus together, which was basically a bunch of doo-wop inspired harmonies. We created that whole song in fifteen minutes." Other inspiration came from Hank Ballard's & The Midnighters 1960 song "Finger Poppin' Time". Carl Wilson recalled in Melody Maker:
Yes, I suppose it has got the old Beach Boys surfing sound. It's back to that surfing idea with the voice harmony and the simple, direct melody and lyrics. We didn't plan the record as a return to the surf or anything. We just did it one day round a piano in the studio. Brian had the idea and played it over to us. We improved on that and recorded it very quickly, in about five minutes. It's certainly not an old track of ours; in fact it was recorded only a few weeks before it was released. We liked how it turned out and decided to release it.

Conversely, Bruce Johnston told a reporter in September 1968 that he shared the reporter's underwhelming opinion of the song. "I don't like it either. I don't think that the group were entirely happy with it, but everyone else was going back to basics, so I suppose it was inevitable that we should."

During the mixdown, engineer Stephen Desper came up with the drum effect heard at the beginning of the track. He explained that he had "commissioned Philips, in Holland, to build two tape delay units for use on the road (to double live vocals). [he] moved four of the Philips PB heads very close together so that one drum strike was repeated four times about 10 milliseconds apart, and blended it with the original to give the effect you hear."