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Old 07-27-2017, 10:51 AM   #54
soniclovenoize
Minion of Satan
 
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Location: Minneapolis, MN
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"Surf's Up"
The centerpiece of SMiLE, I truly believe it's the greatest song written in the 1960s, possibly one of the greatest pop songs ever written. Hailed as Brian Wilson's masterpiece with a VDP lyric to match, the autobiographical song centers around the artist's journey, his heavenly inspiration and the music he creates. It's recording was filmed by a television crew for the documentary Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution, featuring cutting edge pop and rock musicians and hosted by Leonard Bernstein, who praised the song in narration. It's broadcast in December 1967 fueled the mythos of SMiLE being revolutionary pop music, with "Surf's Up" to demonstrate it. This made SMiLE's death all the more dramatic, as simply no one ever heard what was reasonably touted as Wilson/VDP's masterpiece... Until four years later of course.

Like the rest of the SMiLE songs, "Surf's Up" was to be tracked in sections and pieced together later. Unfortunately, only the first movement of "Surf"s Up" was ever recorded, on November 4th, 1966 with overdubs on the 7th. Also recorded during the overdub session was an experimental and humorous 'Talking Horn' skit, bootlegged as "George Fell Into His French Horn".

Vocal sessions for the first movement with The Beach Boys occurred on December 15th but were met with strife and were unsuccessful. Later that night, after the rest of the group went home, Brian recorded a solo piano version with his own double tracked vocal, the version which appeared on Inside Pop. Unfortunately, that is as far as Brian ever worked on the song, aside from a one-off live rehearsal recording during the Wild Honey sessions, a recording that was lost for decades, until recently found and included on The SMiLE Sessions boxset.

After negotiating a new contract with Warner Brothers in 1970 The Beach Boys hired promoter Jack Rieley as their manager, who attempted to improve the group's image--and record sales--for the decade. One of his suggestions was to finish "Surf's Up" and 1include it on their next album. Carl & Dennis could only work with what they had: overdubbing new vocals onto the November 4th, 1966 backing track of the first movement, and simply using and overdubbing Brian's December 14th, 1966 solo performance of movement two. The story goes that in 1971 while the group was arranging the vocal harmonies for the coda of the second movement, Brian (who was otherwise complacent and partially absent during this period), overheard them from his room, rushed downstairs and gave them a scrap of paper with the 'A children's song" lyric to be song on top, once again taking charge of the group and guiding them to it's arrangement. It's unknown if this was a new 1971 idea or an old 1966 idea, but it is a perfect ending that reprises the ideas implied in "Child is Father of the Man". It became the title track of their 1971 album Surf's Up, their decade's highlight album.

The song was noted by both Vosse and Van Dyke Parks himself as to close the SMiLE album, but Darian Sahanaja took a different approach when arranging SMiLE for the stage in 2003. Grouping "Surf's Up" together with "Wonderful", "Look" and "Child is Father of the Man" as a suite of songs about the Cycle of Life, it closed the second movement of the show, the album and eventually the SMiLE Sessions boxset. The later release featured a new mix of the song with Brian's original lead vocal from his 1966 piano version digitally flown into the instrumental backing track, a task SMiLE aficionados and fan-mixers had already been doing for a decade (myself 1ncluded). A piece of Carl's 1971 vocal was left in, as Brian had not initially sung the lyric in 1966.

In the Inside Pop documentary, Brian explained VDP's lyrics and the meaning of the song:
At home, as the black acetate dub turned on his bedroom hi-fi set, Wilson tried to explain the words. "It's a man at a concert," he said. "All around him there's the audience, playing their roles, dressed up in fancy clothes, looking through opera glasses, but so far away from the drama, from life — Back through the opera glass you see the pit and the pendulum drawn.'

"The music begins to take over. 'Columnated ruins domino.' Empires, ideas, lives, institutions—everything has to fall, tumbling like dominoes.

"He begins to awaken to the music; sees the pretentiousness of everything. `The music hall a costly bow.' Then even the music is gone, turned into a trumpeter swan, into what the music really is. Canvas the town and brush the backdrop. He’s off in his vision, on a trip. Reality is gone; he’s creating it like a dream.

"Dove-nested towers. Europe, a long time ago. The laughs come hard in Auld Lang Syne. The poor people in the cellar taverns, trying to make themselves happy by singing. Then there’s the parties, the drinking, trying to forget the wars, the battles at sea. While at port a do or die. Ships in the harbor, battling it out. A kind of Roman empire thing. A choke of grief. At his own sorrow and the emptiness of his life. because he can’t even cry for the suffering in the world, for his own suffering. And then, hope. Surf’s up! … Come about hard and join the once and often spring you gave. Go back to the kids, to the beach, to childhood. I heard the word of God; Wonderful thing; the joy of enlightenment, of seeing God. And what is it? 'A children's song!' And then there's the song itself, the song of children, the song of the universe rising and falling in wave after wave, the song of God, hiding the love from us, but always letting us find it again, like a mother singing to her children."

Last edited by soniclovenoize : 07-27-2017 at 10:58 AM.

 
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