Surf's Up (song)

Song written by Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks for the Beach Boys

"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 as the closing track of the band's 1971 album Surf's Up. Nothing in the song relates to surfing; the title is a play on words referring to the group shedding their image. The lyrics describe a man at a concert hall who experiences a spiritual awakening and resigns himself to God and the joy of divine illumination, the latter envisioned as a children's song. Musically, the song was composed as a two movement piece that modulates key several times 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 Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution, where it was described as "too complex" to comprehend on a first listen. Several years after Smile was scrapped, the band added new vocals and synthesizer overdubs to Wilson's first piano performance as well as the original backing track. Another recording from 1967 was found decades later and released for the 2011 compilation The Smile Sessions. "Surf's Up" failed to chart when issued as a single in November 1971 with the B side "Don't Go Near the Water". In 2004, Wilson rerecorded it for his solo version of Smile with new string orchestrations that he had originally intended to include in the piece. Pitchfork later included the song in separate rankings of the 200 finest songs of the 1960s and 1970s, and in 2011, Mojo staff members voted it the greatest Beach Boys song.

"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. In a self penned 1969 article, Wilson's former personal assistant Michael Vosse wrote that "Surf's Up" was to be the album's closing track, and that the song would have been followed by a "choral amen sort of thing." Biographer Byron Preiss wrote that the song was envisioned as part of "The Elements" and was "briefly considered" to be paired with "Love to Say Dada". 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. There is a weak sense of tonal stability throughout the piece; musicologist Philip Lambert's analysis indicates that the composition may contain up to seven key modulations. Wilson commented that the 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". 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. Lambert was unable to determine if the section ends in the key of F, G, or D. During one bar, the horn players perform a melodic phrase that replicates the laugh of the cartoon character Woody Woodpecker. 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".

Lyrics in "Surf's Up" reference artifacts of the patrician period, such as diamond necklaces, opera glasses, and horse drawn carriages. It quotes the titles of the short stories "The Diamond Necklace" by Guy de Maupassant and "The Pit and the Pendulum" by Edgar Allan Poe. The lyrics also espouse themes related to childhood and God, similar to other songs written for Smile ("Wonderful" and "Child Is Father of the Man"). The title is a play on words referring to the group shedding their image. In surfing, "surf's up" means that the conditions of the waves are good, but when the phrase arrives in the song, it is used to conjure an image of a tidal wave. 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." Music historian Clinton Heylin suggests that Wilson had merely repeated an explanation that was originally given by Parks. 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." 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." Starr 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". Journalist Paul Williams interpreted the song as partly a commentary on the band's musical legacy, writing that the moment in which Wilson sings the line "surf's up" is "a pivot on which everything that's come before in the song wheels and turns, and maybe everything the Beach Boys and Brian have sung and played and done up to this moment."

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, drummer Frank Capp, guitarist Al Casey, pianist Al De Lory, bassist Carol Kaye, and percussionist Nick Pellico. Wilson instructed Capp to play jewelry sounds from what was possibly a ring of car keys. 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 (1965). 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". That evening, Wilson had been filmed at Columbia Studio singing and performing "Surf's Up" on piano for use in David Oppenheim's CBS commissioned documentary Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution. According to Siegel,

Wilson and Oppenheim were dissatisfied with what they had filmed, and decided to reshoot the sequence at Wilson's home two days later, 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. The lost sessions from January 1967 reportedly involved additional instrumental tracking, including a 16 piece string and horn section that was overdubbed onto a bounced tape of the backing track from December 15. 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." In a 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." During a 1970 interview, Wilson 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 late 1967, Wilson recorded several takes of another piano vocal performance of "Surf's Up" at his home studio, presumably during 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 Wild Honey track "Country Air". Mark Linett stated: "No explanation for why he [Brian] 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."

Early in 1971, the Beach Boys were recording their second album for Reprise Records, tentatively titled Landlocked. 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. 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." A final lyric was then devised, "A children's song / Have you listened as they play? / Their song is love / And the children know the way". Desper credited Brian with the line, while Rieley credited himself. although most listeners at the time were unaware that the song derived from a lost Beach Boys album. The band had also 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 Surf's Up 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". Rolling Stones Arthur Schmidt judged the song to have lived up to its legend, although its placement on the record gave "something of the effect of Brian saying: 'Oh yeah, that’s our new album, but hey, you wanna hear something we had left over around here? He added that while it "would have more than given a run to anything on Sergeant Pepper", the song was "dazzling" to a fault. "Surf's Up" was also issued as the album's third single in the U. S., in November, and failed to chart. Record World rued that the song was "both enigma and musical masterpiece." Cash Box likewise called the single a "masterpiece."

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." 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. Love & Mercy, the 2014 biopic of Wilson's life, features a recreation of the Inside Pop performance with actor Paul Dano portraying Wilson. Dano told a Rolling Stone interviewer, "My second day of filming, I had to perform 'Surf’s Up' over and over. It remains one of the best days I’ve ever had a film set but it's tough [to play]. I simplified a lot of the left hand work on the piano. Brian’s left hand work is pretty complicated."

Writing in his book Inside the Music of Brian Wilson (2007), 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." Record Collectors Jamie Atkins said it was "so far ahead of the work of their contemporaries that it is not entirely surprising Wilson found himself recoiling from its sophistication and majesty; the songwriting equivalent of scaling Everest, only to find yourself thinking, 'Well, what now? 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.

In 2006, Pitchfork ranked Wilson's solo piano performance of the song at number 134 in its list of "The 200 Best Songs of the 1960s". 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 2016, Pitchfork ranked the Surf's Up version at number 122 on its list of "The 200 Best 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."