Surf's Up Again

After the Beach Boys' first record for Reprise, "Sunflower", flopped, they got a new manager, Jack Rieley.  Rieley's plan to get people to take them seriously again was to record more socially conscious songs.  It actually worked, a little.  Unfortunately the social consciousness was not always to the benefit of the songs, and songs like Mike Love's "Student Demonstration Time" come of as slightly disingenuous, not to mention awful.  Worse, Dennis Wilson, who was reaching his peak as a songwriter, recused himself from the album when "Surf's Up" was selected as the last track in preference to his own "Wouldn't It Be Nice To Live Again".  "Live Again" is a fantastic song.  "Surf's Up" is better.

So, can something be done to take a patchy record and turn it into something consistently good?  Maybe.

First, we have to throw out all the songs that aren't by Carl or Brian.  Carl's songs, his first, are great - the best songs he ever wrote, in fact.  The songs by Bruce, Mike, and Al, however, aren't.  Bruce's "Disney Girls", a sappy paean to monogamy, is at least well-recorded and produced.  Al never wrote a decent song in his life and the only redeeming qualities of his songs are the synth farts.  And Mike's song is flatly terrible.

Which means we're throwing out any pretense to a record that could actually be released, even assuming Dennis could be convinced to release his songs without making "Live Again" the album closer.  That's fine.  This isn't a history project.  We're trying to make a good record here, and as soon as you start putting Dennis' songs back on the inadequacy of the non-Wilson tunes only serves to make the record more patchy.  They've all got to go.

So we need a lot of Dennis songs, because we have half an album here.  We can just about do this, though.  We've got the December 1970 Rumbo single with Daryl Dragon - both of those songs were great.  Distribution was zilch so there's no problem putting those on.  We've got 4th of July, which was probably written at Rieley's behest because of the social consciousness themes.  Great fucking song, though, one of the best anti-Vietnam songs I've heard - and I've heard a lot of fucking good anti-Vietnam songs.  And of course we've got "Live Again".  A great song.  It would've flopped.  First off people would've confused it with "Wouldn't It Be Nice", which is why I'm just calling it "Live Again" here.  Second off people were only into them, in '71, for the novelty of them doing "socially conscious" material.  Them releasing a record of great songs wasn't going to be enough then.  Just look at Xgau's ridiculous review of the record for proof of that.  Fuck it.  We're not trying to make a record people in 1971 would have bought.

Even though the songs here are on the longish side, we're gonna need at least ten songs to justify this as a record, which means we'll need one more song.  Since Dennis now has four songs, Brian should get an extra song too.  I'm importing in "Sweet Mountain" from the American Spring album.  The Beach Boys don't sing lead vocals on this, so it's a cheat, but oh who's that singing on "A Day in the Life of a Tree"?  Yeah I have no regrets.  Well, throwing it on does really highlight how much Brian was into his tags during this period, but the released album ends with three songs in a row like that, and they're all fucking great songs.

So we have ten songs and about 36 minutes, which is a more defensible album length than the 33 of the released version.  So, track order.  I'm not inclined to fuck with the track order of the songs I haven't cut.  Brian's three-punch of a closer isn't something I'm inclined to alter.  The only question is whether we want to cut it up into a "Dennis Side" or a "Brian Side" or try to give a little more balance.  Three Brian tags in a row is great, four would be pushing it, I think.  So my inclination is to sub out Dennis' "4th of July" for Al's welfare song and put "Sweet Mountain" as a ringer on the A side.  This gives us a tracklist looking something like:

Fallin' in Love
Sweet Mountain
Long Promised Road
Sound of Free
(Wouldn't It Be Nice To) Live Again

Feel Flows
4th of July
A Day in the Life of a Tree
'Til I Die
Surf's Up

Versions: I'm using the "Summer Love Songs" mix of "Fallin' in Love" rather than the '70s mix because it sounds better as an album opener.  Of course we're doing the '71 version of "Surf's Up" - this isn't Smile and we don't care about singer-songwriter "visions", we can just enjoy Carl's great vocals.

I like this record.  No songs about ecology or student demonstrations or welfare, a lot of ballads with just a couple uptempo numbers, a massive fucking downer of a B-side.  Wouldn't have sold for shit, just like Sunflower didn't, but today we'd be falling all over ourselves to declare it "Better than Sunflower!"

If you want to put this together yourself, you can do it with "Spring Plus" by American Spring and the following Beach Boys releases: "Summer Love Songs", "Good Vibrations", "Made in California", and of course the original "Surf's Up" record.