"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 shelved 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 part 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.
Background and composition
"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.
The second movement largely consists of a solo piano and vocal performance by Wilson. Its key suggests E-flat major in the beginning, then traverses to F major before returning to E-flat major and settling at C minor. This part was originally intended to feature a more elaborate arrangement. When asked what he had remembered of the song's second movement in 2003, Wilson responded that it was supposed to feature a string ensemble. 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
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."
Artwork Artist Frank Holmes, who designed the Smile cover artwork, created two illustrations that were inspired by the song's lyrics, "Diamond necklace play the pawn" and "Two-step to lamp's light". Along with several other drawings, they were planned to be included within a booklet packaged with the Smile LP. In 2005, Holmes shared a background summary of his design choices:
"Diamond necklace play the pawn"
"Two-step to lamp's light"
Recording history Smile sessions 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).
There are at least two known "Surf's Up" recordings that have been presumed missing or lost: a vocal session at Columbia Studio from December 15, 1966, and two sessions at Western from January 23, 1967. 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." Asked decades after the fact, Wilson responded that he did not think that he ever recorded it. In 2011, Linett commented, "It’s interesting because there’s a session sheet indicating that the second half of 'Surf’s Up' – the backing track was recorded. But there's never been any taped evidence of it, and obviously there was no taped evidence when the Beach Boys went to finish it in the Seventies. And nobody, including Brian, can confirm that it ever happened. So it may have been a session that was mislabeled, or a session that got canceled."
Inside Pop premiere and aftermath
Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution, hosted by composer Leonard Bernstein, premiered on the CBS network on April 25, 1967. Brian's segment in the documentary featured him singing "Surf's Up" at his piano without any interview footage or references to Smile. Oppenheim declared through voice-over that the song was "poetic, beautiful in its obscurity" and "one aspect of new things happening in pop music today. As such, it is a symbol of the change many of these young musicians see in our future." He further described Wilson as "one of today's most important pop musicians." According to Badman, Wilson's segment aroused "great expectations" for Smile, while journalist Nick Kent wrote that Wilson was "freaked out" and "broke down" over the praise he was afforded in the documentary.