The Beach Boys song Brian Wilson called a masterpiece: “We had done something special”
When you talk about Brian Wilson and trying to determine what his masterpiece is, there are a lot of candidates to choose from. Throughout his career with The Beach Boys and in parts of his solo career, there is a gamut of material that stood leagues above that of his contemporaries, and while some might argue that there are a handful of tracks that ought to be regarded as his finest work, some would also declare that entire albums are his true masterpieces.
Wilson’s entire ethos was that he had to create perfection in his songs, and while that was ultimately the mindframe that drove him to have a nervous breakdown, the songs that he came up with as a result of this drive were unquestionably beyond the imagination of anyone else making music contemporaneously. What could have been his opus, the song suite Smile, was ultimately canned when he was unable to finish it to his own high standards, and the outstanding songs that would have featured on the record suffered different fates.
There were plenty of songs proposed for the elaborate concept album that he managed to find homes for on other albums shortly after, with the compromise replacement album Smiley Smile featuring some of the record’s highlights in ‘Good Vibrations’, ‘Heroes and Villains’ and ‘Wonderful’ all making the cut, albeit in different forms to how Wilson had envisaged them. However, some of the record’s other proposed compositions took ages to see the light of day, despite the fact that they were among Wilson’s finest works.
Their absence isn’t due to them not being up to Wilson’s high benchmark for quality, but was more down to the fact that they were tonally and stylistically so far removed from what the rest of the group considered to be their signature sound. It was no secret that certain members of the band felt as though Wilson’s increasingly ambitious compositions felt like they were abandoning their commercial viability, and the more introspective moments of the proposed Smile tracklist wouldn’t have provided the group with the chart hits they so desperately wanted.
‘Surf’s Up’ would eventually get released on the album of the same name in 1971, five years after Wilson had written the song as the centrepiece of Smile. Composed by Wilson with lyrics from his collaborator, Van Dyke Parks, ‘Surf’s Up’ represents a much darker side to The Beach Boys, and is reflective of Wilson wanting to distance himself from the upbeat positivity that characterised their early chart success.
It was ironic in that it symbolised the death of the fun-loving group while referencing their past as a ‘positive vibes only’ surf-pop outfit, but Wilson himself saw it as a creative masterpiece of a song. Supposedly, the song only took 30 minutes for Wilson and Parks to finish, and in The Beach Boys, an official biography of the band’s career, Wilson said that the process was unlike anything else he had worked on.
“We just wrote it spontaneously,” he claimed. “It was a masterpiece of a song. It opened on a minor seventh, unlike most songs, which open on a major. From there it just started building, I thought it rambled beautifully and said a lot in the end.”
Explaining the inspiration behind it, Wilson added: “It’s a song of freedom, Van Dyke and I really thought we had done something special when we finished that one.”
Despite this, it wasn’t initially well-received by the rest of the group, especially Mike Love, who proclaimed that the dour nature of the track and its oblique lyrics were an obstacle to the song having any chance of becoming a hit. In a 2008 interview with Uncut, he claimed: “Some of the stuff was phenomenal, but I looked at things from an objective commercial point of view. Whether it’s a strength or weakness. I said, ‘Is it going to relate to the public to the degree that they can identify with the message and the lyrics?’”
It may have represented a significant maturation in their sound, with growth and adapting to adulthood and its trappings being major themes in the track, but it was clearly an artistic leap of faith that the rest of the band weren’t willing to take alongside Wilson in 1966. When it was eventually released as a single five years later, it failed to chart, but the album that ‘Surf’s Up’ sits on is perhaps one of the band’s finest records because of how mature it sounds compared to their earlier work. They might not have found a balance between commercial and artistic ambitions, but Wilson was still producing absolute gold regardless of how well it performed.
