Pros: Carl Wilson's best work and "Til I Die," one of the Brian Wilson's best songs.
Cons: Inconsistency, "A Day in the Life of a Tree," "Take a Load off Your Feet."
The Bottom Line: Brian Wilson's and Dennis Wilson's lack of involvement hurts this album and is a sign of things to come, but Carl Wilson helps considerably with two great tracks.
sandford's Full Review: Surf's Up by The Beach Boys
“Surf's Up” marked the beginning of three unfortunate trends that would haunt The Beach Boys for the rest of their album-making careers: 1.) Brian Wilson’s lack of involvement, 2.) sporadic production by Dennis Wilson, and 3.) the band’s subsequent need to cannibalize its catalog of unreleased songs.
After Dennis wrote four outstanding tracks for “Surf’s Up’s” predecessor, the pop masterpiece “Sunflower,” his absence on “Surf’s Up” is confounding. Many strange things were afoot in The Beach Boys’ camp at the time, though, not the least of which being Jack Reiley elbowing his way in as the band’s manager, leaving behind a trail of backstabbing and betrayal among other Beach Boys employees. Reiley’s sparkling resume includes lying to the band about wining a Pulitzer Prize for work at a TV network’s Puerto Rican bureau (the network had no bureau in Puerto Rico), persuading the band to record an album in the Netherlands, then remaining there to “remotely manage” The Beach Boys, driving Bruce Johnston out of the band (Bruce would return in 1978) and telling the band he had a terminal illness and had to stay overseas, only to re-emerge several years later and claim to have been miraculously cured.
But I digress. The Beach Boys were working on a follow-up to “Sunflower” called “Landlocked” that comprised “Sunflower”-era outtakes (many of which were quite good) and a few new songs. “Sunflower” had sold more poorly than any previous Beach Boys album and hadn’t helped the band’s “unhip” image, so Reiley hatched a plan to create a more socially conscious and psychedelic-sounding album.
For all of Reiley’s personality flaws, his business acumen proved to be right on the money this time. “Surf’s Up” garnered heaps of critical praise, sold well and boosted the band’s “hipness quotient” considerably. However, the album’s sales success can’t mask its considerable flaws, most notably its inconsistency.
“Don’t Go Near the Water” trips all over itself; it’s like leading off a baseball game with a bunt. An average melody courtesy of Al Jardine and silly lyrics by Mike Love (“Don’t go near the water, to do it any wrong. To be cool with the water is the message of this song. Let’s all help the water. Right away.”) precede the song’s one saving grace: a 42-second ending featuring a beautiful, hummed group harmony that starkly contrasts the song’s first two minutes of drivel.
“Long Promised Road,” meanwhile, is the first of two Carl Wilson masterpieces on this album. The track starts with a bell toll and proceeds to bounce back and forth between thoughtful, reflective verses and an exploding chorus of “I hit hard at the battle that’s confronting me, yeah. Knock down all the roadblocks a-stumblin’ me. Throw off all the shackles that are binding me down,” nearly shouted by a triumphant-sounding Carl. Some fans dislike Reiley’s mind-bending lyrics, but for my money, “So hard to lift the jeweled scepter when the weight turns a smile to a frown” beats the pants off of any words Mike wrote for this album. The words “long promised road” appear only in the bridge, which, with its surreal-sounding background, is this great song’s highlight.
The cannibalization I mentioned earlier starts with “Take Good Care of Your Feet,” a silly “Sunflower”-era outtake in which Al Jardine signs about proper foot care (no joke). The song was revamped for “Surf’s Up” using a few computer tricks to make Al’s voice sound a touch “psychedelic,” and I’ll confess that I really enjoyed this track the first 15 or 20 times I heard it. But the tune’s simplicity, reliance on silly sound effects (such as a pair of flip flips scooting from one speaker to the other) and juvenile content can quickly wear down a listener.
“Disney Girls (1957)” is Bruce’s masterpiece, which isn’t saying much. Bruce’s best-known song outside of “I Write the Songs,” the Barry Manilow-performed schlockfest for which Bruce won a Grammy in the late 70s, “Disney Girls” is a sentimental favorite among many Beach Boys fans. This slow, plodding tune features lyrics such as “Now I’ll fill your hands with kisses and a Tootsie Roll,” and “It’d be a peaceful life with a forever wife, and a kid someday.” Bruce rarely collaborated with other Beach Boys on his songs, the one exception being “Deirdre” from “Sunflower,” which he co-wrote with Brian. Those of us who roll our eyes at his overly sentimental words wish he’d have written the music, then turned to Reiley or even Mike for lyrics.
Speaking of Mike, his lyrics did stink for “Don’t go Near the Water,” but his lyrical reworking of the next song, an altered version of Mike Leiber’s and Jerry Stoller’s “Riot in Cell Block 9,” is quite good in spots. With its sirens, screeching guitar and screamed words, “Student Demonstration Time” is one of The Beach Boys’ musical low points. However, lyrics such as “The violence spread down South to where Jackson State brothers … learned not to say nasty things about Southern policemen’s mothers” and “America was stunned on May 4, 1970, when rally turned to riot up at Kent State University” aren’t just decent; they were extremely relevant in 1971, when “Surf’s Up” was released.
Carl’s “Feel Flows,” the psychedelic cousin to “All This is That” from “Carl and the Passions,” is his best song. His computer-altered voice weaves between echo effects, faint background vocals, bass and an ever-present tambourine, singing Reiley lyrics such as “Unbending never-ending tablets of time … record all the yearning … unfearing all-appearing message divine … eases the burning.” A long flute, guitar and saxophone solo in the middle adds to the song’s hypnotic charm. “Feel Flows” was featured twice in the 2000 movie “Almost Famous,” serving as the backdrop to the movie’s closing credits.
“Lookin’ at Tomorrow (A Welfare Song)” is one of Al Jardine’s best songs. The tune, about a down-on-his-luck man whose failure to find work has forced him to sweep floors for a living, is melancholy both in lyrical content and in sound; the softly strummed guitar and Al’s quiet vocals are almost ghostlike.
“A Day in the Life of a Tree” probably is the worst song in Beach Boys history. The song, sung by Reiley (who has no business being behind a microphone, as he proves here), is sung from a tree’s perspective. Seriously. The tree complains about how pollution is killing it, the music gets steadily worse as an organ is replaced by a more conventional rhythm pattern … it’s just awful. The only noteworthy thing about “Tree” is that Van Dyke Parks, legendary among Beach Boys fans for collaborating with Brian on the ill-fated “Smile” album, makes his only vocal appearance in a Beach Boys song at the end of this tune.
The stunningly beautiful “Til I Die” is another “Sunflower”-era leftover, but man, what a gem to have “in the can” for a future album! Incredibly, Mike didn’t like this song, calling it a “downer,” and won his argument to have it trimmed from its original length of more than five minutes. Mike’s motives may have been misplaced, but the result does pack more punch than the original version, in which the same instrumental pattern is repeated twice before the vocals kick in. “Pet Sounds” may have been Brian’s most personal album, but this, featuring lyrics about Brian’s tortured state of mind, is his most personal song. Brian describes himself as “rock in a landslide, rolling over the mountainside” and wonders, “how deep is the valley?” The incredible group vocals drive this song, and Mike’s great bass vocals really boost the ending, in which he repeatedly remarks, “This things I’ll be until I die.” This is a 26- or 27-year-old Brian coming to terms with the fact that the problems he’d hoped would be a mid-20s crisis aren’t going to disappear after all. This artistic triumph should have closed this album.
Instead, the band dusted off a song that evoked painful memories of the aborted "Smile" project for Brian, and although Dennis sided with him against including the song, the band re-worked “Surf’s Up” (rather well, I must say) and tacked it onto the end of the album.
Not good. The "Smile" music was special, and as I stated in my "Friends/20-20" review, and should have been released on a "Smile" album or not at all, not as add-ons to end inferior records. "Our Prayer" and "Cabinessence" met the same fate as "Surf's Up," added to the end of an album just to fill space. "Smile" songs deserve better than this.
Anyway, “Surf’s Up” features some of Van Dyke Parks’ best wordplay and a roller-coaster melody that’s nearly impossible to describe. When Brian performed the song in 1967 at a piano for a TV special, the host was so moved at the end that he remarked that he’d just heard the finest rock song ever written, only adding fuel to the what-if? mystique surrounding “Smile.”
If you see a Caribou CD version of “Surf’s Up” in a used bin for $5 or less, buy it. Otherwise, get the remastered “two-fer” that also features Sunflower, The Beach Boys’ finest album.
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