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. 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". Īccording 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. 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". 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. "Surf's Up" was the second song Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks wrote together. According to Parks, the title "Surf's Up" was inspired by Dennis' complaints regarding British audiences' reactions to the group's stage uniforms. 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.īackground and composition Dennis Wilson performing with the Beach Boys in 1964. 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. "Surf's Up" failed to chart when issued as a single in November 1971 with the B-side " Don't Go Near the Water". Another recording from 1967 was found decades later and released for the 2011 compilation The Smile Sessions. 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. 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. The only surviving full-band recording of "Surf's Up" from the 1960s is the basic backing track of the first movement. It features a coda based on another Smile track, " Child Is Father of the Man". Musically, the song was composed as a two-movement piece that modulates key several times and avoids conventional harmonic resolution. The lyrics describe a man at a concert hall who experiences a spiritual awakening and resigns himself to God and the joy of enlightenment, the latter envisioned as a children's song. Nothing in the song relates to surfing the title is a play-on-words referring to the group shedding their image. The song was later completed by Brian and Carl Wilson as the closing track of the band's 1971 album Surf's Up. It was originally intended for Smile, an unfinished Beach Boys album that was scrapped in 1967. " 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.
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