Surf's Up (song)


"Surf's Up" is a song recorded by the American rock band the Beach Boys that was written by Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks. It was originally intended for Smile, an unfinished Beach Boys album that was scrapped in 1967. The song was later completed by Brian and Carl Wilson to serve as the closing track of the band's August 1971 album Surf's Up.
Nothing in the song relates to surfing; the title is a double entendre referring to the group shedding their image. The lyrics are told from the perspective of a narrator who experiences a spiritual awakening during a concert hall performance and resigns himself to God and the joy of enlightenment, the latter envisioned as a children's song. Musically, the song was composed as a two-movement piece and avoids conventional harmonic resolution. It features a coda based on another Smile track, "Child Is Father of the Man".
The only surviving full-band recording of "Surf's Up" from the 1960s is the basic backing track of the first movement. There are three known recordings of Wilson performing the full song by himself, two of which were filmed for the 1967 documentary , where it was described as "too complex" to fathom on a first listen. Several years after Smile was scrapped, the band added new vocals and synthesizer overdubs to Wilson's second piano performance as well as the original backing track. Decades later, the third recording was found at the end of a 1967 tape reel; this version was released for the 2011 compilation The Smile Sessions.
"Surf's Up" was ranked number 122 on Pitchforks 2016 list of the 200 finest songs of the 1970s, and in 2011, Mojo staff members voted it the greatest Beach Boys song. However, the song failed to chart when it was issued as a single in November 1971 with the B-side "Don't Go Near the Water". Wilson rerecorded "Surf's Up" as part of his 2004 album, Brian Wilson Presents Smile, with new string orchestrations that he had originally intended to include in the piece.

Background and composition

"Surf's Up" was the second song Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks wrote together. It was composed as a two-movement piece, most of it in one night while they were high on Wilson's Desbutols, and originally intended for the Beach Boys' album Smile. According to Parks, the song did not have a title until after the touring members of the band returned from a November 1966 tour of Britain. He said he had witnessed Dennis Wilson complaining that the group's British audiences had ridiculed them for their striped-shirt stage outfits, which inspired him to write the last lines of the song and suggest to Brian that the piece be titled "Surf's Up". Brian remembered that when Parks made the suggestion, he felt it was "wild because surfing isn't related to the song at all." However, AFM track sheets indicate that the song had already received its title before the group returned from their UK tour.
Wilson commented that the song's first chord was a minor seventh, "unlike most of our songs, which open on a major – and from there it just started building and rambling". It contains some key ambiguity. The beginning of the song alternates between the chords Gm7/D and Dm7/G, followed by F/C and other chords that suggest a key of F major, but ultimately ends at D/A. During one bar, the horn players perform a melodic phrase that replicates the laugh of the cartoon character Woody Woodpecker.
The second movement largely consists of a solo piano and vocal performance by Wilson. This part was originally intended to feature a more elaborate arrangement. When asked what he had remembered of the song's second movement in 2003, Wilson responded that it was supposed to feature a string ensemble. In his 2016 memoir, it was written that he was unable to finish the song in the 1960s because it was "too rhapsodic" and "all over the place".

Lyricism

The lyric espouses themes related to childhood and God, similar to other songs written for Smile. In Jules Siegel's October 1967 memoir for Cheetah magazine, "Goodbye Surfing, Hello God", he quoted Wilson offering a lengthy explanation of the album's lyrics. Reportedly, the song is about "a man at a concert" that is overtaken by music. "Columnated ruins domino" symbolizes the collapse of "empires", "ideas", "lives", and "institutions". After the lyric "canvas the town and brush the backdrop", the song's protagonist sets "off on his vision, on a trip". He then suffers a "choke of grief" at "his own suffering and the emptiness of life". At the end, he finds hope and returns "to the tides, to the beach, to childhood" before experiencing "the joy of enlightenment, of seeing God", which manifests in a children's song. Wilson concluded his summary, "Of course that's a very intellectual explanation. But maybe sometimes you have to do an intellectual thing."
Singer-songwriter Jimmy Webb interpreted the song as "a premonition of what was going to happen to our generation and... to our music—that some great tragedy that we could absolutely not imagine was about to befall our world." Academic Larry Starr wrote, "Van Dyke Parks’s poetic and allusive lyrics articulate the progression from a condition of disillusionment with a decadent and materialistic culture to the glimpse of a possibility for hope and renewal. This is all conveyed via an abundance of musical references and imagery." He further described it as "a very serious song, with an underlying somber tone for much of its duration that is leavened by wordplay... and the near-miraculous turn toward hope as it ends. Its dark atmosphere is perhaps its greatest deviation, among many, from the features typical of the Beach Boys’ work". Lambert said that the song prophesies an optimism for those who can capture the innocence of youth. In the view of journalist Domenic Priore, the song was "a plea for the establishment to consider the wisdom coming out of youth culture in 1966."

Artwork

Artist Frank Holmes, who designed the Smile cover artwork, created two illustrations that were inspired by the song's lyrics, "Diamond necklace play the pawn" and "Two-step to lamp's light". Along with several other drawings, they were planned to be included within a booklet packaged with the Smile LP. In 2005, Holmes shared a background summary of his design choices:

"Two-step to lamp's light"

"Diamond necklace play the pawn"

1960s recordings

"1st Movement" and missing tapes

Wilson held the first tracking session for "Surf's Up" at Western Studio 3, with usual engineer Chuck Britz, on November 4, 1966. It was logged with the subtitle "1st Movement". Musicians present were upright bassist Jimmy Bond Jr, drummer Frank Capp, guitarist Al Casey, pianist Al De Lory, bassist Carol Kaye, and percussionist Nick Pellico. Between November 7 and 8, overdubs were recorded with Capp, Pellico, and a horn ensemble consisting of Arthur Brieglab, Roy Caton, David Duke, George Hyde, and Claude Sherry. The November 7 session was dedicated to experimenting with horn effects, including an exercise in which Wilson instructed his musicians to laugh and have conversations through their instruments. The tape of this experiment was later given the label "George Fell into His French Horn". Journalist Rob Chapman compared the piece to experiments heard on the 1965 album The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, Volume One.
A fully-developed recording of the song's second movement has never been found. In 2004, Darian Sahanaja said that a tape for the instrumental tracking of the section was rumored to exist somewhere, while Mark Linett stated, "If it does exist, we haven't found it." As of 2020, there are at least two known "Surf's Up" recordings that have been presumed missing or lost: a vocal session at Columbia Studio from December 15, 1966, and two sessions at Western from January 23, 1967. According to Badman, the December 15 session included vocal and piano overdubs onto the first movement backing track, as well as further recording on the song "Wonderful". Siegel later claimed that the session "went very badly".
The January 23 session featured additional instrumental tracking, including a 16-piece string and horn section overdubbed onto the tape from December 15. In 2011, Linett commented, "It’s interesting because there’s a session sheet indicating that the second half of 'Surf’s Up' – the backing track was recorded. But there's never been any taped evidence of it, and obviously there was no taped evidence when the Beach Boys went to finish it in the Seventies. And nobody, including Brian, can confirm that it ever happened. So it may have been a session that was mislabeled, or a session that got canceled."

Solo piano performances

On the evening of December 15, 1966, Wilson was filmed at Columbia Studio singing and performing "Surf's Up" on piano for use in David Oppenheim's CBS-commissioned documentary . Wilson and Oppenheim were dissatisfied with the footage, and decided to reshoot the sequence at Wilson's home on December 17. His performance that day, executed in one take with a candelabrum placed on his grand piano, was captured by three film cameras and deemed satisfactory for use in the documentary.
Wilson recorded several takes of another piano-vocal performance at his home studio during the late 1967 sessions for the album Wild Honey. The forgotten demo was rediscovered several decades later when archivists searched through the contents at the end of the multi-track reel for the song "Country Air". Mark Linett stated: "No explanation for why he did that and it was never taken any farther. Although I don’t think the intention was to take it any farther because it's just him singing live and playing piano."

''Inside Pop'' segment

Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution, hosted by composer Leonard Bernstein, premiered on the CBS network on April 25, 1967. Wilson's segment in the documentary ultimately only featured him singing "Surf's Up" at his piano without any interview footage or references to Smile. In the film, Oppenheim declared that "Surf's Up" was "one aspect of new things happening in pop music today. As such, it is a symbol of the change many of these young musicians see in our future." According to Badman, Wilson's segment aroused "great expectations" for Smile.
After Smile was scrapped, Wilson neglected to include the song on the replacement album Smiley Smile. He said that his decision to keep "Surf's Up" unreleased was one that "nearly broke up" the band. During a 1970 interview, he commented that the song was "too long to make it for me as a record, unless it were an album cut, which I guess it would have to be anyway. It's so far from a singles sound. It could never be a single." In a contemporary review of Smiley Smile for Cheetah, a critic bemoaned the album's absence of "Surf's Up", writing that the song is "better than anything that is on the album and would have provided the same emotional catharsis as that 'A Day in the Life' provides for Sgt. Pepper."

''Surf's Up'' sessions

The recording sessions for the band's second album for Reprise Records, tentatively titled Landlocked, initially concluded in April 1971. Band manager Jack Rieley had asked Brian about including "Surf's Up" on the record, and in early June, Brian suddenly gave approval for Carl and Rieley to finish the song. While on a drive to meet record company executive Mo Ostin, Brian said to Rieley: "Well, OK, if you're going to force me, I'll... put 'Surf's Up' on the album." Rieley asked, "Are you really going to do it?" to which Brian repeated, "Well, if you're going to force me." According to Rieley: "We got into Warner Brothers and, with no coaxing at all, Brian said to Mo, 'I'm going to put 'Surf's Up' on the next album.'"
From mid-June to early July, Carl and Rieley retrieved the Smile multi-tracks from Capitol's vaults, primarily to locate the "Surf's Up" masters, and attempted to repair and splice the tapes. Brian joined them on at least two occasions. Afterward, the band set to work on recording the song at their private studio, located within Brian's home. Brian initially refused to participate in the recording of "Surf's Up" and insisted that Carl take the lead vocal. The group attempted to rerecord the song from scratch. "But we scrapped it", Rieley later said, "because it didn't quite come up to the original." An unsuccessful attempt was also made to mashup Brian's 1966 vocal to the instrumental track. According to Linett, a tape showcasing this effort still exists in the group's archives.
Carl ultimately overdubbed a lead vocal onto the song's first part, the original backing track dating from November 1966, as well as backing vocals. Two organ overdubs were also recorded. The second movement was composed of the December 15, 1966 solo piano performance by Brian, augmented with vocal and Moog synthesizer overdubs. Carl reworked the refrain from another unreleased Smile song, "Child Is Father of the Man", into the coda of "Surf's Up". Bruce Johnston recalled, "We ended up doing vocals to sort of emulate ourselves without Brian Wilson, which was kind of silly." Rieley said, "we all got involved in .... Even I'm on it. So is a guy who worked for us part-time. He just sings 'Hey, hey.' But it is vital to the tag on the record. It was a lot of fun doing ." Writing in a 1996 online Q&A, he wrote that Brian had "stated clearly that it was his intent all along for Child to be the tag for Surfs Up."
To the surprise and glee of his associates, Brian emerged near the end of the sessions to aid Carl and engineer Stephen Desper in the completion of the coda. As Desper recalled, "Brian didn't want to work on 'Surf's Up'. But after three days of coaxing, and of him walking in and out of the studio, he was finally convinced to do a part." Brian contributed the song's final lyric, "A children's song / and we listen as they play, their song is love / and the children know the way". With the song completed, Landlocked was given the new title of Surf's Up. The occasion marked the last time the group reworked material that was originally written for Smile.

Release

"Surf's Up" was released as the closing track on the LP of the same name on August 30, 1971. It was also issued as the album's third single in the US, in November, and failed to chart. Most listeners at the time were unaware that the song derived from a lost Beach Boys album. The band incorporated "Surf's Up" into their live set at the time. Circus reported that, at one concert, the group performed the song as a closer "after numerous requests" from the audience. In another concert review from the NME, Tony Stewart reported that the band said "Surf's Up" was "a most apt title, implying they had deserted the surfing days".
Reviewing the album for Melody Maker, Richard Williams wrote that the title track, "had it been released back at Pepper-time... might have kept many people from straying into the pastures of indulgence and may have forced them to focus back on truer values. I've rarely heard a more perfect, more complete piece of music. From first to last it flows and evolves from the almost lush decadence of the first verses to the childlike wonders and open-hearted joy of the final chorale." Don Heckman wrote in The New York Times that the song "bears easy comparison with the best of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper songs".
Conversely, Geoffrey Cannon of The Guardian opined that Parks' lyrics were "pretentious", but compared the song favorably to "You Still Believe in Me" and "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times" from Pet Sounds: "Its subtle shifts of pace and timing, and delicate harmony singing, put it in the top flight of Beach Boys' numbers." Writing in The Rolling Stone Record Guide, Dave Marsh bemoaned the hype that continued to surround Wilson and the Smile project throughout the 1970s and opined that "Surf's Up" "was far less forceful and arguably less innovative than Wilson's surf-era hits."

Recognition and legacy

Writing in his book Inside the Music of Brian Wilson, musicologist Philip Lambert named the song "the soul of Smile" and the "sum total of its creators' most profound artistic visions" with its "perfect marriage of an eloquent lyric with music of commensurate power and depth." Musician Elvis Costello said that when he discovered a bootlegged tape of Wilson performing the song, "It was like hearing a tape of Mozart. It's just Brian and his piano and yet it's all there in that performance. The song already sounds complete."
In 1995, the Wondermints – a band that included Sahanaja as a member – performed a live cover of "Surf's Up" at the Morgan-Wixon Theater in Los Angeles with Wilson in the audience, who was then quoted saying "If I'd had these guys back in '66, I could've taken Smile on the road." In 2000, Radio City Music Hall held the All-Star Tribute to Brian Wilson, a concert that included a performance of "Surf's Up" by Jimmy Web, David Crosby, and Vince Gill. Wilson rerecorded the song as part of his 2004 album, Brian Wilson Presents Smile, with new string orchestrations arranged by himself, Parks, Sahanaja, and Paul Mertens.
"Surf's Up" was ranked number 122 on Pitchforks 2016 list of the 200 finest songs of the 1970s. Contributor Andy Beta stated, "'Surf's Up' bade farewell to the Beach Boys' outdated surf-boy personas, right there in the title; it was complex, impressionistic, and the crowning achievement of Wilson and lyricist Van Dyke Parks’ collaboration. The lyrics alight on Tennyson, Maupassant, and children’s songs; the coda of 'The child is the father of the man,' easily the most effervescent chorus the Boys ever harmonized on, is also a stunning quote of a William Wordsworth poem." In 2011, Mojo staff members voted it the greatest Beach Boys song. The song's entry stated, "Not so much timeless but a song out of time, Surf's Up is an elegy the richness and mystery of which only deepens with age."
In a 1995 radio interview, Wilson referred to his singing on the recording as an "atrocious" performance. He said, "I'm embarrassed. Totally embarrassed. That was a piece of shit. Vocally it was a piece of shit. I was the wrong singer for it in the first place.... And in the second place, I don't know why I would ever let a record go out like that." A few years later, he added that his vocal "was a little bit limited. It's not my favorite vocal I ever did, but it did have heart." In a 1975 interview, Mike Love voiced appreciation of the song's musical form and content, which he believed went beyond what was normally expected of commercial pop music.