Surf’s Up: Darkness on the Sand
By Thomas Fraki.
Few musicians have been able to capture a place and time as well as the Beach Boys did with the idyllic America of the middle-1960s. But as the decade came to a close, so did the quixotic “peace and love” dream that drove that time. By 1971, there was a lot to unpack in terms of harsh truths and unrealized hopes for what could have been. Surf’s Up was the product of work going all the way back to the Smile recording sessions.
The album touches lyrically on a variety of issues and feels like a more mature and serious effort to face the societal darkness that developed during the years of its creation. Surf’s Up is often considered critically as being in the shadow of the potential that Smile had. While it may be fair to say that Surf’s Up can be hit or miss at times with what it tries to accomplish, that doesn’t take away from the fact that as a whole the album succeeds in producing a memorable, bittersweet eulogy for the innocence of youth.
An Album Falls Apart
The story of Surf’s Up begins five years earlier with The Beach Boys’ failure to produce Smile. What was supposed to be the answer to The Beatles’ record-selling juggernaut, Smile was plagued by a myriad of problems from the beginning. The recording sessions for Smile ran from late 1966 to early 1967. However, many of the aspects of the band’s structure that worked for them in the past were not in place going into the sessions. The largest contributors to this falling apart revolved around Brian Wilson. There was a general resentment toward new people that he associated with socially. Along with increased drug usage in the band and a contract dispute with Capitol Records, the growing list of production problems escalated Wilson’s mental health issues. These manifested in the form of missed deadlines and paranoid delusions regarding the recordings.
One other major hindrance to the production was the band’s other members’ lukewarm feelings toward Wilson’s new experimental tracks. Among those particularly not happy with the change in direction was Mike Love. In an October 1971 Rolling Stone article, Love was reported saying, “don’t fuck with the formula.” This was referring to the “formula” of process and content that had made the band successful in the past. Love denies that he ever said it, but the quote became famous nonetheless. The failure of the Smile sessions to yield any significant work is often cited as the professional tipping point for both The Beach Boys and Brian Wilson.
In the end, Wilson determined Smile’s subject matter too inaccessible for the public’s ear. He instead opted to produce a stopgap during the summer of 1967. These new recordings became The Beach Boys’ Smiley Smile. The Smile tracks wouldn’t be released on any official album until several decades later. But it was in those sessions that the rough sketches of what would become Surf’s Up’s titular song were first recorded.
Chance Encounter at the Radiant Radish
Two years and several albums after the collapse of Smile, Brian Wilson briefly owned a health food store in West Hollywood called the Radiant Radish. While managing the store, he met Jack Rieley, a radio broadcaster and journalist. During a radio interview, Rieley pressed Wilson on whether “Surf’s Up” would ever get a release. Up to that point, the track had a lot of notoriety in certain press circles since the Smile sessions. Wilson had no intentions for such a release.
In August of 1970, Rieley released a lengthy memo on how The Beach Boys could improve on their record sales and image. The band, facing down lackluster sales of Sunflower, hired Rieley as their manager shortly after the memo. Rieley’s first pushes as band manager included getting the members to write more topical lyrics and a guest appearance with the Grateful Dead at the Fillmore East auditorium.
A new album underway with the working title, Landlocked, Rieley was determined to have the group revisit “Surf’s Up.” On their way to meet with Warner executives, Wilson finally gave in. “Well, OK, if you’re going to force me, I’ll … put ‘Surf’s Up’ on the album.” Recordings sessions wrapped up in July 1971 and “Surf’s Up” became the album’s eponymous track.
The Formula Changes
During the recording sessions, the group called on outside assistance with lyrics and vocals on several of the tracks. Rieley himself ended up singing lead on Wilson’s “A Day in the Life of a Tree.” Progressive pop singer/songwriter, Van Dyke Parks, was brought back from the Smile sessions to help finish writing “Surf’s Up” and provide vocals.
The final product of Surf’s Up was released in late August 1971. The album received a generally positive response from critics. Surf’s Up was viewed as a turnaround for the group compared to the releases leading up to it. It was issued to much more anticipation and success than the band’s previous album, Sunflower.
Have You Listened As They Played?
As a whole, Surf’s Up represents The Beach Boys committing to stylistic risks and putting forward more socially conscious lyrics. Surprisingly, the album falls flat on two of the most obviously topical tracks, “Don’t Go Near the Water” and “Student Demonstration Time.” The former, written by Mike Love and Al Jardine, was intended to put an ecological twist on The Beach Boys’ traditional surf lyrics. However, the simplistic melody and weak lyrics make it stand out compared to the rest of the album.
“Student Demonstration Time” is Mike Love’s reworking of “Riot in Cell Block No. 9” by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. This track also sticks out, but more so due to its rock and roll stylings. Still, this is not to its benefit because it merely comes off as a cheap imitation of The Beatles’ “Revolution.” The lyrics also touch events like the Kent State shootings. But the irreverent tone of the song seems misplaced for something that happened only a year earlier.
Carl Wilson’s two contributions to the album, “Long Promised Road” and “Feel Flows,” seem more at home with what the group was trying to accomplish. “Long Promised Road” offers the listener a deeply soulful, melancholy ballad that, in lyrics and music, rivals Brian Wilson’s. “Feel Flows,” on the other hand, brings a psychedelic pastiche with rippling instrumentation and vocals.
Landlocked
Finally, there is Brian Wilson’s three-song progression that closes out the album; “A Day in the Life of a Tree,” “‘Til I Die” and “Surf’s Up.” This suite of tracks is what really sets the album apart. “A Day in the Life of a Tree” is the strange and heartbreaking autobiography of a tree in the city. It takes on the perils of pollution without being as heavyhanded as parts of the album. “‘Til I Die” calls back to the classic Beach Boys style of Pet Sounds, but places exceedingly bleak lyrics on top of an otherwise catchy tune.
Finally, there is “Surf’s Up.” The track was composed by Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks between the Smile and Surf’s Up sessions. Its lyrics are far and away the densest on the album, making literary allusions to Tennyson and Maupassant. Despite the esoteric language, the combination of words and music hung over a simple piano part result in a beautifully haunting and dreamlike piece.
In a sense, the working title for Surf’s Up, Landlocked, seems more fitting when looking at all of its contributors. The album shows a new Beach Boys looking to find themselves in a new environment. While not all of the songs on Surf’s Up hit their mark, the ones that do manage it so gracefully that they etch out a corner for the album in its own place and time.
- Side One
- “Don’t Go Near the Water”
- “Long Promised Road”
- “Take a Load Off Your Feet”
- “Disney Girls (1957)”
- “Student Demonstration Time”
- Side Two
- “Feel Flows”
- “Lookin’ at Tomorrow (A Welfare Song)”
- “A Day in the Life of a Tree”
- “‘Til I Die”
- “Surf’s Up”
Thomas Fraki is a Minneapolis-based journalism grad, music aficionado, book nerd, hiker, amateur photographer, and beer drinker with an overgrown wall of records.