The Beach Boys: “Surf’s Up” (1967; first released on Surf’s Up, 1971)
I’ve been putting off listening to the recently released “official” version of SMiLE, the long-lost Beach Boys opus we’ve been waiting decades to hear.
It’s not that I don’t want to listen to it. I do. It’s just that I’ve become so attached to the version I assembled myself a few years ago that I’m almost afraid I’ll spend my time editing the official version in my head to make it more like my own.
My version of SMiLE came together starting three or four years ago, back when I still used Soulseek (I haven’t been on a peer-to-peer in over three years—I swore them off, and I’ve never engaged with the world of Torrent sites). I found three repositories of SMiLE fragments, downloaded them all, and set about building an album out of a little more than three hours of material. I came up with a track listing that emphasized the experimentalism of the project, though this isn’t really what I set out to do.
I imagine it split over four fairly short sides, and I did go through many other iterations before I arrived at the one I ultimately decided was my favorite.
One thing all my versions had in common, though, and one thing they don’t share with the new official version, is that, like the 1971 LP Surf’s Up, they all led up to “Surf’s Up.” Granted, that LP prefaces it with the brilliant and moving “Til I Die,” which wasn’t around during the SMiLE sessions, and that makes it even more powerful, but it just seems to make sense at the end, summing things up. I can’t figure out the reasoning behind putting it in the middle.
“Surf’s Up” is, for me, the most powerful song in the whole Beach Boys catalog. It’s not just because the song is so striking on its own terms, though. It’s because of how the song comments on everything the Beach Boys were in the public imagination and turns it on its head. The words “surf’s up” have never been uttered more dolefully or reflectively.
The Beach Boys in their early days presented a mythology of Southern California built around the beach and the board, with a healthy infusion of teenage lust and romance, not to mention nods to the burgeoning culture of American suburbia. It’s not a fluke that the girl in “Fun Fun Fun” cruises through a hamburger stand.
In a sense, they were the greatest mid-20th Century explainers of the pull of the West. After World War II, the United States felt it had secured its place in the world. Its Manifest Destiny was fulfilled. With no further west to go, the new destiny seemed to be to perfect a way of life, and we thought we could do it one subdivision and one technological innovation at a time.
We know now that the TV dinners and pre-fab buildings of the Jet Age weren’t the quick ticket to paradise we sought, and we never got the moving sidewalks and floating cars that filled the issues of Popular Mechanics that cluttered the coffee tables of the modernist homes in Hollywood Hills when the Beach Boys were rising in the charts.
If the early 60s in America embodied futurist optimism, by the late 60s, when “Surf’s Up” was recorded, the reality that we were in some ways a broken and fragmented society had sunk in, at least in some quarters. Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks were trying to create a panorama of American history with SMiLE—it’s wrong in my mind to end such a project with anything other than a reflection that acknowledges that things are not perfect, and that there are more complicated realities underlying the myths.
If Pet Sounds introduced new emotional complexity to Wilson’s teenage symphonies, “Surf’s Up” is the moment where they cease to be teenage at all. “Good Vibrations” revisits the West Coast dream in its full glory one last time, and “Surf’s Up” awakens from the dream to dance darkly in the ruins. “Surf’s Up” needs to come after “Good Vibrations.”
