Surf's Up is the seventeenth studio album by the American rock band the Beach Boys, released on August 30, 1971, on Brother/Reprise/Warner Bros. It received largely favorable reviews and reached number 29 on the U.S. record charts, becoming their highest-charting LP of new music in the country since 1967. In the UK, Surf's Up peaked at number 15, continuing a string of top-40 records that began in 1965.
The album's title and cover artwork (a painting based on the early 20th-century sculpture "End of the Trail") are a tongue-in-cheek, self-aware nod to the band's early surfing image. Originally titled Landlocked, the album took its name from the closing track "Surf's Up", originally intended for the unfinished album Smile. Most of Surf's Up was recorded from January to July 1971. In contrast to the previous LP Sunflower, Brian Wilson was not especially active in the production, which resulted in thinner vocal arrangements.
Lyrically, Surf's Up addresses environmental, social, and health concerns more than the group's previous releases. This was at the behest of newly recruited co-manager Jack Rieley, who strove to revamp the group's image and restore their public reputation following the negative reception to their recent albums and tours. His initiatives included a promotional campaign with the tagline "it's now safe to listen to the Beach Boys" and the appointment of Carl Wilson as the band's official leader. The record also included Carl's first major song contributions, "Long Promised Road" and "Feel Flows".
Two singles were issued in the U.S.: "Long Promised Road" and "Surf's Up". Only the former charted, when it was reissued with the B-side "Til I Die" later in the year, peaking at number 89. In 1993, Surf's Up was ranked number 46 in NMEs list of the "Top 100 Albums" in history. In 2000, it ranked number 230 in Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums. Session highlights, outtakes, and alternate mixes from the album were collected for the 2021 compilation Feel Flows.
Background
On the evening of July 29, 1970, Brian Wilson, accompanied by bandmates Mike Love and Bruce Johnston, granted his first-ever full-length radio interview to KPFK DJ John Frank, also known as Jack Rieley. In the interview, Wilson stated that although he was "proud of the group and the name", he felt that "the clean American thing has hurt us. And we're really not getting any kind of airplay today." Among other topics, Wilson stated that the group was not "putting enough spunk in our production and I don't know who to blame. ... Another thing is that we haven't done enough to change our image, though. ... we sort of operate a democracy thing in our productions. Maybe that's the problem. I don't know." The subject eventually turned to "Surf's Up", an unreleased song from the band's unfinished album Smile. Wilson said he did not want to release the song because it was "too long".
On August 8, Rieley sent the band a six-page memo with advice on how to stimulate "increased record sales and popularity" for the Beach Boys. At the end of August, the group's latest record Sunflower was released as their first album on Reprise Records. It became the worst-selling album in the group's history. Band promoter and co-manager Fred Vail remembered one meeting with the band in which "we were talking about ... Sunflower not charting, and they were wondering why. I said to them, 'Listen, this is a phase right now. If you stay the course, your real audience won't forget you. They won't desert you.' But the Beach Boys really didn't believe in themselves." Vail was soon replaced by Rieley, primarily at the instigation of Love and Johnston.
Some of Rieley's earliest initiatives were to end the group's longstanding practice of wearing matching stage uniforms and to appoint Carl Wilson as the band's official leader. The group spent the majority of September and October rehearsing for upcoming concerts. On October 3, at the invitation of Van Dyke Parks, the band performed two sets at the eighth annual Big Sur Folk Festival in California to an audience of 6,000. According to music historian Keith Badman, the performances "help[ed] to establish the group's image in the eyes of the rock hierarchy, and they were subsequently 'rediscovered' as an important live act." Biographer David Leaf wrote that the concert inspired an apologetic review from Rolling Stone co-founder Jann Wenner, who had previously criticized the band for pulling out of the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival. A rumor circulated among news outlets that Brian Wilson was writing music with Parks for an upcoming Beach Boys television special, H-2-0.
In early November, Brian temporarily rejoined the touring band to play four dates at the Whisky a Go Go in West Hollywood. The group had not played a concert in Los Angeles since 1966, and Brian had not performed with the touring group since early 1970, when he briefly filled in for Love.. Guitarist Ed Carter and keyboardist Daryl Dragon accompanied the band on this tour, along with supporting act the Flame. Reports from this period suggested that the group was planning to move from Los Angeles to Britain once their recording commitments were finished. From January to early April 1971, they worked intermittently on their second album for Reprise.
Production and style
Surf's Up was recorded between January and July 1971, excluding a few tracks. After the release of Sunflower, band engineer Stephen Desper assembled a collection of songs consisting mostly of outtakes deemed suitable for a follow-up LP, which he labelled "Second Brother Album". Rieley later called these selections "forgettable" and said that he was "totally perplexed ... I met with [Warner executive] Mo Ostin, a true Brian Wilson fan, at Warner Bros., who listened to the songs, and he declared: 'No way.'"
Rieley encouraged the band to write songs with more socially conscious and topical lyrics, although he stated in a 2013 interview that they "never had any 'What are we gonna write about?' meeting. Never once did anything like that ever occur." He assigned the project the working title of Landlocked to represent "a demarcation line, separating striped-shirted bullshit that had become irrelevant, an object of public scorn, from artistry, creativity and great new songs." An album cover was designed with this title, featuring white sans-serif letters printed atop a photograph of a dark field.
The Landlocked cover was ultimately discarded in favor of a different design. Rieley said that the final cover "was something that caught my eye at an antique record shop near Silver Lake. It was a painting and I bought it. It reminded me a bit of the Brother Records logo, but it was different." Conversely, Desper recalled that a print of a painting of End of the Trail, "use[d] to hang in Murry Wilson's office behind his desk, as Brian recalls from his childhood. Brian always like[d] the painting as it was part of Denny's, Carl's and his youth." Surf's Up was the first album for which the group printed the lyrics of each song on the record sleeve.
In 1974, Rieley stated that his growing involvement with the songwriting process attracted the ire of Love, Johnston, and Al Jardine, who "tried to force me to march into Mo Ostin's and sell him on their 1969 track 'Loop De Loop'. I refused and Brian, Dennis, and Carl backed me up." Due to Brian's reduced involvement, the vocal arrangements were not as dense as those for Sunflower. Johnston recalled, "It was strange to be doing vocal arrangements to make it sound like the Beach Boys when we were the Beach Boys. That's a little weird to me."
Songs
"Long Promised Road" and "Feel Flows" were Carl Wilson's first significant solo compositions and were recorded almost entirely by himself. "Student Demonstration Time" (a topical reworking of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller's "Riot in Cell Block Number 9") and the environmentalist anthem "Don't Go Near the Water" found Love and Jardine embracing the group's new socially conscious direction.
"Til I Die" was a song Brian Wilson had been working on since mid-1970. It was written while he was suffering from an existential crisis, and he took weeks to refine the arrangement, using a drum machine and crafting a harmony-driven, vibraphone and organ-laden background. "A Day in the Life of a Tree", written by Brian and Rieley, is about a tree succumbing to the effects of environmental pollution; the accompaniment includes an antique pump organ and a smaller pipe organ.
Johnston said that he wrote "Disney Girls (1957)" "because I saw so many kids in our audiences being wiped out on drugs," and wanted to capture the feeling of an era in which people were "a little naive but a little healthier." Jardine contributed "Take a Load Off Your Feet", a Sunflower outtake, and "Lookin' at Tomorrow (A Welfare Song)", both co-written with longtime friend Gary Winfrey. Biographer Timothy White wrote that the latter song was "a poignant mini-soliloquy from a jobless rounder, seems like a coda to 'Long Promised Road,' the pioneer busted in his starry-eyed ambitions but still 'looking at tomorrow' for fresh potential." Jardine said that it was "actually an old folk song" to which he "rewrote the lyrics to reflect the times".
Rieley had asked Brian about including "Surf's Up" on Landlocked, and in early June, Brian suddenly allowed Carl and Rieley to finish the song. Carl overdubbed a new vocal track in the song's first part, the original backing track dating from November 1966. The second movement consisted of a December 1966 solo piano demo recorded by Brian, augmented with vocal and Moog synthesizer overdubs. Johnston recalled, "We ended up doing vocals to sort of emulate ourselves without Brian Wilson, which was kind of silly." With the song completed, Landlocked was given the new title of Surf's Up.
Leftover material
The Dennis Wilson compositions "4th of July" and "(Wouldn't It Be Nice to) Live Again" were recorded in early 1971 but left off the record. In a September 1971 interview, Dennis stated, "I have a belief in my music. And it sounds nothing like it should on the album – it should have a flow from one song to another ... It didn't sound like The Beach Boys. They thought it did. I said ‘Bullshit’ and pulled my songs off." According to Rieley, the absence of any these songs on Surf's Up was for two reasons: to quell political infighting within the group concerning the album's share of Wilson-brother songs, and because Dennis wanted to save material for a solo album, projected for release in 1971.
In 1993, "4th of July" was included on the box set Good Vibrations: Thirty Years of The Beach Boys. "(Wouldn't It Be Nice to) Live Again" was written with Stanley Shapiro. According to Beach Boys biographer Jon Stebbins, Dennis had wanted the song to close the record, following Til I Die", but Carl objected. In 2013, it was released on the box set Made in California, along with a 1974 recording of "Barnyard Blues", a song that Dennis had composed during the Surf's Up sessions. Dennis also recorded "Barbara", a piano demo named after his then-girlfriend, and a track called "Old Movie". "Barbara" was released in 1998 for the Endless Harmony Soundtrack, while "Old Movie" would be released on the 2021 box set Feel Flows.