The one song Brian Wilson never wanted to release: “It could never be a single”
The entire journey that Brian Wilson took in just a few years with The Beach Boys truly needs to be studied to be believed.
The fact that he could make surf songs would have been enough to put him in the rock and roll history books, but getting him to make some of the greatest love songs ever written on a whim made him look like a musical god that just so happened to be one of the most humble men in the music industry. He was only happy to have written the songs that he did back in the day, but getting the right sound on a particular song was the real difficult part when he was making his masterpieces.
The instruments on ‘Good Vibrations’ didn’t happen by accident, and when you listen to a lot of the best moments in the band’s career, he was making mini symphonies that also managed to fit into a nice musical package. But the real tragedy of the band’s career is never knowing what could have happened if Wilson had been able to complete Smile when he first had the idea back in the late 1960s.
Pet Sounds was already one of the biggest albums of the time and single-handedly changed how many people looked at rock and roll, and while Smile would have been the next great step, the fact that a song like ‘Surf’s Up’ got put on ice for years at a time was one of the greatest injustices that Wilson ever made. He had this song that would have been on par with anything from the pre-rock and roll days in terms of harmony, but Wilson had his reservations about putting it out.
Because although the story of The Beach Boys usually comes down to the fact that Mike Love ruins everything, Wilson had a decent reason for wanting to keep ‘Surf’s Up’ in the vaults. No single that had been pushed to radio had managed to be as long as his masterpiece, and while he had pushed the envelope with ‘Good Vibrations’, Wilson felt that the song would have failed if he had managed to push it to radio too much.
Even though Wilson was still proud of the final version, he felt that the song wasn’t cut out to be a single like the rest of his masterpieces, saying at the time, “[It’s] 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.” Then again, it’s not like the world wasn’t more receptive to songs that pushed the envelope back in the day.
Sure, we live in a world where it’s not all that strange for someone to play all eight minutes of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ or the entire odyssey of ‘Hotel California’, but it took a long time to get there before Wilson was comfortable with it. But even then, ‘Hey Jude’ had come out a few months before and had been one of the biggest singles that The Beatles ever had, but by that point, Wilson had already begun shelving his songs for something new.
Or maybe he was looking at the competitive streak that he was having with the Fab Four and saw them taking things further. He had already talked about being overwhelmed when he heard ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, and since the next album was going to be what everything hinged upon, seeing him crack under pressure is the one time everyone realised that he was still human under that magnificent musical mind.
But even if the rest of the world had to wait a few more years before getting ‘Surf’s Up’, what they got ended up being the ultimate Beach Boys song in many respects. The surf theme was still there, obviously, but every single line was like Wilson finally realising the kind of masterpiece he was capable of making.
