![]() ![]() Entrusting him to a controversial (OK, let’s be frank: exploitative and megalomaniacal) psychiatrist named Eugene Landy, the rest of the Beach Boys hit the road to make yet more money off the back of Wilson’s talent, desecrating his legacy as they did so. By the late seventies he weighed over 300 pounds and was a psychological cripple. Obscure lyrically but captivating melodically, Surf’s Up cast a long shadow over the music Wilson made afterwards – he never again wrote songs that balanced his experimental urges and his commercial pop sense so successfully. The song, meanwhile, had taken on semi-legendary status among fans.Ī 3-section suite, Surf’s Up contains some of Parks’s greatest lyrics, a stream of consciousness so pure it’s indistinguishable from surrealism, as well as three remarkable lead vocals: the initial section by Carl (replacing Brian’s 1967 effort, which was for some reason considered lacking), the middle section with Brian’s original vocal (the part that Brian had performed for Leonard Bernstein’s TV programme, Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution) and the ‘child is father of the man’ section, lead sung by Al Jardine. But the unfinished record’s other masterpiece, Surf’s Up, wouldn’t surface until 1971, and then against Wilson’s wishes he remained scared of the work he’d created four years earlier and wished to keep it all under wraps lest its bad vibes overwhelm him again. Two of Smile’s greatest achievements, Good Vibrations and Heroes and Villains, were of course known to the public anyway, having been released as singles. Smile, as the album would be retitled, went unfinished, and the effort (against a backdrop of band in-fighting) nearly finished Wilson, but some of the songs found their way on to other projects: several were packaged together in sketchy demo form on Smiley Smile, which was savaged in 1967 as half-baked and slapdash, but is actually an excellent record with an almost singular atmosphere. Together the pair began work on what Wilson had alluded to in the press as “a teen symphony to God”, to be called Dumb Angel. Unfortunately, it also allowed him the time and freedom to ingest industrial quantities of marijuana and LSD.Īfter Pet Sounds (a record whose melodic grace and complex arrangements have inspired volumes of scholarly analysis) flopped commercially in the US, having already created a rift in the band by “fucking with the formula” (as the always fearlessly artistsic Mike Love put it), Wilson retreated further into drug use and found a new lyricist to work with: Van Dyke Parks. This allowed him to journey deeper inside himself as a writer and arranger. The leader of a phenomenally successful band yet overawed by Phil Spector’s records from a few years earlier and increasingly envious of the critical and commercial success of the Beatles, Wilson quit touring in 1965 to concentrate on turning the Beach Boys into a genuine artistic force in the studio, while his band (brothers Carl and Dennis Wilson, cousin Mike Love and schoolfriend Al Jardine) went on the road to promote the group’s records. It doesn’t seem a particularly deep insight to suggest that he was damaged by his relationship with his abusive, domineering father or that rarely was there a psyche less suited to full-scale immersion in the world of hallucinogens and psychotropic drugs. Brian Wilson (the Beach Boys’ songwriter, arranger, producer, lead singer, bass player and guiding artistic force) is a fragile soul, a naïve and unworldly man. ![]()
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