Classic album: The Beach Boys – Surf’s Up
The Beach Boys
There are probably a few people reading this that have the following timeline in their head about The Beach Boys; early songs about girls and surfing, Brian Wilson hears Rubber Soul and replies with Pet Sounds, Brian Wilson hears Sgt Pepper which drives him to attempt to better that and he goes so far off the rails he ends up with a sand-pit in his living room trying to perfect an album that until 2004 was the most famous lost masterpiece in rock history, Smile!. He then descends into mental illness and drug addiction. In the mean time the other Beach Boys tour without him and release ‘Kokomo’.
The gap between the abandoning of Smile! and that awful 1988 single is littered with false starts and under-appreciated cult albums. 1971’s Surf’s Up is the pick of the bunch. After the relative commercial failure of Sunflower the band were divided between the more artistic and experimental Wilson brothers Brian, Carl and Dennis and the more straight laced Mike Love, Al Jardine and Bruce Johnston who were more concerned with the band reclaiming their mid-Sixties popularity. New manager Jack Riley knew that the latter’s wishes were not possible without the Wilson brothers applying themselves. So he asked firstly the band try to engage a hipper audience with more politically and socially aware songs as well as finishing the mythical ‘Surf’s Up’ from the aborted Smile! sessions. What Riley ended up with was half an hour of the most fantastically produced, melodic and soulful music you ever likely to hear. It details the depression and fragile state of both the band and its leader as he faced the pressures of being required to write material and be dictated to on the direction of it in a fragile, drug-addled state of mind.
The record opens with the first example of Love and Jardine embracing Riley’s request on the shimmering ‘Don’t Go Near The Water’, certainly not a song title that would have featured in the group’s earlier work. After years of sun, sea and surf it advises us to be both sad and wary that human chemical waste “will make the ocean a bubble-bathâ€. Love’s other song on the album Student Demonstration Time’ is a howling, rattling update of Lieber and Stoller’s ‘Riot in Cell Block Nine’ tackling the contemporary issue of student protests and the shootings at Jackson and Kent State. It’s terrible; you’d be better served listening to Neil Young’s ‘Ohio’ on the same subject.
Al Jardine provides an apt metaphor for the state of the band with ‘Lookin’ at Tomorrow (A Welfare Song)’ that compares the position of a welfare recipient to a “freight train off the tracks†and ready to run and run once back on them. He also contributes the daft knockabout ‘Take a Load off Your Feet’ which I’ve always connected to Paul McCartney’s ‘Miles Away’ (from the same year’s Ram) in my head for their inherent throwaway silliness. It also kept Denis Wilson from having a writing credit on the album as he was starting to stockpile his own material. His creative dam would burst at the end of the decade on Pacific Ocean Blue however.
The Beach Boy who never gets any credit, Bruce Johnston, came up trumps with the sublime ‘Disney Girls (1957)’ with its gorgeous harmonies making it as an integral part of their back catalogue as anything else from the seventies. Carl Wilson provides his first two significant efforts for the band with the jazz-flecked ‘Feel Flows’ collaboration with Riley and ‘Long Promised Road’ which contains one of the most appropriate and timely uses of the word ’soar’ in song.
All the Beach Boys albums that followed this one for the rest of the decade included the same traits as the songs that are mentioned above, executed almost as well. What sets this one apart is the final third, Brian’s third. The section that most captures the mood of the sagged rider and deflated horse on the cover. The only new song in it, ‘A Day in the Life of a Tree’ has manager Riley awkwardly singing, backed by a mournful pump-organ and at the end by Smile! collaborator Van Dyke Parks, an affecting, achingly beautiful, emotionally bruised yet utterly bizarre song about the perilous state of Brian’s mind as if he were a tree. No, you did read that right; this really does feature the band’s manager signing about being a tree.
Brian revisits ‘Till I Die’ that Mike Love had vetoed from appearing on earlier albums for being “too depressing”. It was written after a walk by the ocean allowed Brian to contemplate the vastness of the body of water and the inconsequential nature of his own life in the grand scheme of things. It opens with the line “I’m a cork on the oceanâ€. It’s often cited as the author’s last great song as he finally got down in writing what he wanted to say and fittingly it was recorded it in a similar manner to the lush instrumentation on Pet Sounds.
The record comes to a sumptuous close with Carl’s heroic melding together of the five-year-old demo of ‘Surf’s Up’ sung by Brian at the piano (It can be found, in full, on a 1993 box set and is worth the price of the entire package) with Carl’s new vocal on the first section and a meeting of the two versions for the final minute aided by an choral refrain of the rest of the band, a Moog and returning to the studio, Brian himself.
