Beach Boys

The Beach Boys

“Feel Flows: The Sunflower & Surf’s Up Sessions, 1969-1971” Super Deluxe Edition

(5xcd Capitol, 2021)

Regarded by many as "America's most important surf music band", the Beach Boys had to face a profound transformation as early as 1964. The fragile Brian Wilson, brilliant author of the band's music and arrangements, suffered a psychological breakdown caused by the excessive pressure exerted on him by record executives, family and fellow musicians, and decided to stop performing live. The group, driven by the need to keep promoting its work, was thus forced to split into two units: the first, active exclusively in the studio, consisted of Brian alone, who threw himself into composing and recording new, revolutionary ideas; the second was made up of the rest of the band, who chose to focus on touring. This split intensified the already-existing artistic rift between Wilson, a visionary experimenter, and his cousin Mike Love, the band's lead voice, who was reluctant to shed his role as the archetypal Californian everyman singing about youth, fast cars and ocean waves. Wilson came out on top, despite having been, up to that point, the author of seemingly carefree songs like "409" (1962), "Surfin' Safari" (1962), "I Get Around" (1963), "Little Deuce Coupe" (1963) and "Fun Fun Fun" (1964). The band's precarious balance began to falter with the release of "California Girls" (1965) which, despite its classic Mike Love-style lyrics, hinted at the introspective, experimental and melancholy musical shift that the Beach Boys, like it or not, would soon undertake.

While Mike Love, Carl Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Al Jardine and Bruce Johnston performed on America's most famous stages singing the praises of tanned Californian girls, Brian, together with lyricist Tony Asher and the prestigious L.A. session musicians now known as "The Wrecking Crew", created the album that would mark the Beach Boys' definitive transformation into a sophisticated, elite project. We're talking about "Pet Sounds" (1966), an intimate, refined work that reveals its worth gradually, listen after listen, not least because of the complexity of its arrangements. Songs like "Wouldn't It Be Nice", "Don't Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder)", "God Only Knows", "I Know There's An Answer", "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times" and "Caroline No" had a profound impact on entire legions of musicians, the Beatles first among them, and are today regarded as genuine cornerstones of 20th-century popular music.

"Pet Sounds" was among the first works of baroque or symphonic pop, or whatever we want to call that branch of popular music marked by grandiose arrangements that flourished throughout the Sixties, becoming a genuine stylistic reference point (among its disciples we should at least mention The Association, The Box Tops, Eternity's Children, The Free Design, Harpers Bizarre, The Left Banke, Love, The Millennium, Mortimer, Sagittarius, right up to more recent acts like Stereolab, Jellyfish, Wondermints, Cardinals and The High Llamas). A far from immediate, let alone carefree, proposition which, in the eyes of the record label and an inattentive public, was perceived as a sudden and damaging change of course for the Beach Boys.

Brian Wilson decided to respond to the failure of "Pet Sounds" by aiming even higher, attempting to compose an absolute masterpiece that would sound like a "teenage symphony to God". For the new project he brought in as lyricist Van Dyke Parks, a young and eccentric intellectual from Mississippi, whose hermetic style fueled tensions with the rest of the band. Needless to say, that ambition, combined with a dissolute lifestyle and serious mental health issues, drove Brian to the brink of madness through the creation of a great deal of remarkable material that remained temporarily unfinished. After negotiating with the label a delay in the release of the new, mythical album (it was to be called "SMiLE", as Capitol made sure everyone knew through an expensive promotional campaign), Wilson was overwhelmed by the frustration of being unable to bring it to completion. Across the ocean, it was the Beatles who dealt the final blow, with the success of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" (1967) – itself significantly influenced by "Pet Sounds".

That same year, CBS produced the three-part documentary "Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution", directed by David Oppenheim and hosted by Leonard Bernstein, about the impact of rock on popular culture. During the second episode, Brian performed a moving solo piano version of "Surf's Up". Bernstein called Wilson "one of the most important musicians of our time", but evidently that wasn't enough to instill confidence in the young composer. The ambitious project was therefore shelved, and this failure caused a rift with Capitol.

Of all the material conceived for "SMiLE", only half a dozen tracks were salvaged, which, properly reassembled, formed the backbone of the partially successful "Smiley Smile" (1967) (see "Heroes And Villains", "Vegetables", "Fall Breaks And Back To Winter", "Good Vibrations", "Wind Chimes", "Wonderful"; also meant to be part of "SMiLE" was the wonderful "Surf's Up" which, at Al Jardine's suggestion, lends its name to the second album included in the box set under review here, and represents its expressive high point).

After “Smiley Smile” the Beach Boys released a handful of records of uneven quality: “Wild Honey” (1967), the excellent “Friends” (1968), “20/20” (1969), “Sunflower” (1970) — their sixteenth studio album and, inexplicably, the band's biggest commercial flop — and “Surf's Up” (1971). The last two came out on Reprise, a Warner Bros. subsidiary that took over from Capitol, in partnership with Brother Records Inc., the group's own label. From this point on, the Beach Boys would put out largely mediocre records, badly affected by Wilson's instability: often absent and stripped of his fabled creativity by repeated breakdowns, he would even shut himself away at home for long stretches. It was John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, on a 1976 episode of Saturday Night Live, who brought Brian back out into the light, staging a deliciously funny sketch that's easy enough to find on YouTube.

More than thirty years after the double-CD reissue of “Sunflower” and “Surf's Up” (the famous “twofer” that thrifty boomers loved so much), on August 27th of this year Capitol — which has since reacquired the rights to the Beach Boys' catalogue — marks the fiftieth anniversary of “Surf's Up” with the release of “Feel Flows: The Sunflower And Surf's Up Sessions, 1969-1971”, in four different formats: a 5-CD Super Deluxe box set, a 4-LP Super Deluxe box set, a simple 2-CD edition and a simple 2-LP edition.

We'll be looking at the 5-CD Super Deluxe edition, which contains 135 tracks, a great many of them previously unreleased. Alongside the two original albums, live performances of the same material, and a cappella versions of numerous songs, the box set includes a disc devoted entirely to valuable unreleased material, alternate takes, demos and assorted gems, such as the brief instrumental rendition — Brian Wilson alone at the piano — of the very Beatles-esque “You Never Give Me Your Money”. “Feel Flows” was produced by Mark Linett and Alan Boyd, who ten years ago oversaw the release of the essential “SMiLE Sessions”.

The box set, on sale on Amazon for around €80, isn't particularly fancy: it's built like a medium-sized hardback book. Inside are around fifty pages, roughly thirty of which are devoted to the story of how the two albums came together, written by critic and musicologist Howie Edelson. The many pleasant contributions come in the form of quotes from the musicians involved, recalling the mood of the period in which the albums were conceived and the key moments of the sessions held in the studio set up inside Brian Wilson's home in Bel-Air, at 10542 Bellagio Road. These are followed by three pages of commentary from the producers and a detailed tracklist, noting who sang what, where and when. Previously unseen photos, reproductions of manuscripts and other niceties round out an edition that is understated but substantial, both for the music it contains and for the quality of its liner notes.

Both “Sunflower” and “Surf's Up” are genuinely valuable works, capturing Brian, Carl and Dennis Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine and Bruce Johnston at the height of their powers — perhaps, for the first and only time, truly united throughout the various stages of the recording process. Each of them made a deep personal contribution to both records, in terms of both writing and performance of the new songs. The lyrics, too, grew sharper and more biting, poking fun at girls with padded bras (“Good Time”) or sinking into post-hippie moods reminiscent of “Strawberry Statement” (“Student Demonstration Time”, Mike Love's reworking of “Riot In Cell Block Number 9”, the iconic Leiber-Stoller rhythm'n'blues standard, which also marks the first appearance — for now only as an instrumentalist — of South African musician Blondie Chaplin of the Flame).

Tracks like “Slip On Through”, “This Whole World” (written by Brian and sung by Carl, it's a song that “seems to touch on every key there is. And it's exactly that universality that belongs to the Beach Boys' music,” as Bruce Johnston puts it), “Deirdre”, “Tears In The Morning” (one of the finest moments in Johnston's entire career), “All I Wanna Do” (a magnificent vocal performance from Love, with arrangements that seem to anticipate hypnagogic pop by thirty years), “Forever” (Dennis, as ever touching and evocative, here in one of his most intense and accomplished performances), “Our Sweet Love”, “Don't Go Near The Water”, “Disney Girls”, “A Day In The Life Of A Tree” and, above all, “Feel Flows”, the extraordinary “'Til I Die” (initially dismissed by Love as a “depressing dirge” and later reappraised by Johnston as “the last truly great song Brian ever wrote”) and, naturally, “Surf's Up” rank among the most compelling achievements in the group's entire output.

“Feel Flows: The Sunflower And Surf's Up Sessions, 1969-1971” is a major box set that deserves a place among the best reissues of 2021 (and beyond).

(17 October 2021)

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28/04/2026