Brian Wilson - Surf's Up
The changing of the seasons brings us the end of a life extraordinary.
It makes perfect sense that his 83rd birthday -- which he missed by just a few days -- falls this year upon the summer solstice, as there will never be another musical figure, even if Delius himself were to resurrect from the tomb and sing his rendition of Good Vibrations, more associated with summertime than the unquantifiably visionary Brian Wilson.
There have been a zillion tributes, as there should be when a person of this magnitude departs the plane, so here goes one more.
Few people can lay claim to having such a multidimensional impact upon their chosen field that when the histories are written, it becomes undeniably obvious that there's their craft before them and their craft after them. The latter makes everyone ask what the heck they all thought was so great about the former, usually.
The initial, genre-defining Surfin'-era hits aside, his reputation rests primarily on two albums... one of which, technically, doesn't exist, but is considered by many to be what the YouTube documentary I just watched about it was titled: The Greatest Record Of All Time.
That's not even wrong or inaccurate to say that. It's even plausible to say that had it been issued when it was made and not abandoned in its assembly stages, it'd have fucked up the music industry so badly, all of subsequent cultural history would have been different.
It's said that when Paul McCartney received an acetate of the preceding LP, his consciousness was so altered he started to wonder what the heck he and his Moptop mates were up to... and whether or not they were any good at it. All of England agreed that it was the most revolutionary album to come from Pop music up to then, and Pet Sounds -- which was initially a commercial failure in the US -- is still one of the most beloved albums ever in Britain.
That said, Sir Paul's lucky the next one got shelved. Had he got an early pressing of SMiLE, The Beatles might have quit music altogether and gone into the actual submarine business, just to submerge and escape being outclassed by today's late, great birthday boy.
It's really one of the first and best concept albums, if you dig into it. I'm imagining it was the first one in the Pop realm to attempt the Classical pretense of different, distinct and defined movements, justifying its subtitle, A Teenage Symphony to God.
The thing I just watched postulated that Pet Sounds and SMiLE represent the beginnings of what would become Progressive Rock, and it wasn't lying. The daring orchestrations, the ridiculous harmonies, the zigzag chord progressions, the repeating of motifs through multiple tracks, and especially the mind-frying editing techniques on display ushered in the modern era of now as much as anything ever waxed, and nobody even heard SMiLE as it was truly intended for decades after it was made.
Mythologized forever, it was egged along by an appearance in a huge TV special of the time -- hosted by Leonard Bernstein and detailing the progression of Pop into more "serious" terrain -- of our hero playing the album's central song at the piano. This whetted the Pet Sounds-piqued public's appetite for what wouldn't fully surface until the next century, well after the dissolution of his masterwork led our hero to spiral on a well-documented, near-total psychic collapse into borderline catatonia.
Of course, pieces of it surfaced on subsequent Beach Boys albums, and the mythological proportions of SMiLE exponentially expanded. And beginning 50 years ago, bootlegs of the aborted sessions began to make the rounds, and over time fans began to construct their own versions of the unsurfaced masterpiece, exacerbating its rep as the single greatest lost album ever recorded.
It wasn't until the early 2000s that Brian Wilson -- born this day in 1942 -- finally got convinced to take a stab at completing it, on the heels of him resurrecting Pet Sounds and touring, for the first time in a long while, to near-universal adulation from audiences and critics alike.
The result was even greater and more positive than those reviews, and the tour that followed -- with a huge band capable of presenting music of such complexity in a live setting -- set the world on fire as the finished thing was brought out... and turned out to be even better than the intervening four decades of anticipatory hype might have suggested.
Here it is from that tour -- performed at Carnegie Hall and broadcast by NPR -- performed to perfection to close the show after a set of equally as historic hits he had with the Beach Boys and on his own.
Brian Wilson
Carnegie Hall
New York City, New York USA
10.12+13.2004
01 And Your Dream Comes True
02 Surfer Girl
03 Row, Row, Row Your Boat
04 Hawaii
05 Add Some Music to Your Day
06 Good to My Baby
07 Please Let Me Wonder
08 Drive-In
09 You’re Welcome
10 Sloop John B
11 God Only Knows
12 Soul Searchin’ (incl. NPR voice-over intro)
13 California Girls
14 Our Prayer/Gee
15 Heroes and Villains
16 Do You Like Worms? (Roll Plymouth Rock)
17 Barnyard
18 Old Master Painter/You Are My Sunshine
19 Cabinessence
20 Wonderful
21 Look (Song for Children)
22 Child Is Father of the Man
23 Surf’s Up
24 I’m In Great Shape/Workshop
25 Vega-tables
26 On a Holiday
27 Wind Chimes
28 Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow
29 In Blue Hawaii
30 Good Vibrations
31 introduction of Van Dyke Parks & Brian Wilson/Do It Again
32 Fun, Fun, Fun
33 Love and Mercy/NPR outro
34 NPR "SMiLE" feature by Bob Boilen
Total time: 1:41:01
disc break goes after Track 19
Brian Wilson – vocals & keyboards
Scott Bennett – vocals, keyboards, mallets & guitar
Nelson Bragg – vocals, percussion, whistles & celery
Jeffrey Foskett – vocals, guitar & hammer
Probyn Gregory – vocals, guitar, brass, Tannerin & whistles
Jim Hines – drums, mallets, saw & sound effects
Bob Lizik – bass guitar, guitar & beret
Paul Mertens – woodwinds, saxophones, harmonica & semi-conductor
Taylor Mills – vocals, power drill & leg-slap
Darian Sahanaja – vocals, keyboards, mallets & drill
Nick Walusko – vocals & guitar
with
Stockholm Strings 'n' Horns:
Staffan Findin – bass trombone
Andreas Forsman – violin
Erik Holm – viola
Anna Landberg – cello
Malin-My Nilsson – violin
Björn Samuelsson – trombone
Victor Sand – saxophone, flute & clarinet
Markus Sandlund – cello
224/48k audio streamed from the NPR website @ npr.org
converted to 16/44 CD Audio, edited, tracked -- with NPR announcer mostly removed/occasionally attenuated -- and remastered by EN, June 2025
578 MB FLAC/direct link
578 MB FLAC/direct link
This show circulates in ROIOland and on YouTube from a vastly inferior, off-air FM tape -- one iteration is on a boot CD that eliminates two songs! heresy! -- that only went to a paltry 9 kHz in the spectral analysis. Fortunately, NPR hoisted a whole bunch of Brian Wilson- and Beach Boys-related stuff onto the web when dude passed away 9 days ago, and this complete performance -- maxing at about 16 kHz like an FM broadcast should -- was among them.
I took the liberty of placing the NPR feature included in the broadcast, all about the story of SMiLE, at the end, in case anyone wants to give it a spin.
So one of our ultimate Maestros -- and it's well-documented how hard a time he had, battling mental illness and the music business that guarantees it, for over 60 years -- is no more.
There's no reason to be sad, though. A long life, with all the peaks and valleys longevity ensures, that made a global impact that will resonate as long as people have ears to hear. The lifetime of Brian Wilson can never, ever die, and the melodic material he masterfully metastasized into some of the most mesmeric and lasting beauty that shall ever be will still be here, ages after all of us are long and forever gone.
And God Only Knows, in times such as these, that's enough of a reason to SMiLE.
--J.
6.20.1942 - 6.11.2025
I heard the word
wonderful thing
a children's song
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