OLD GOODY: Brian Wilson - "Surf's Up"

Since I've poked fun at Brian Wilson previously--in two separate posts so far, it's only fair that I give him his due as a birthday celebration. A friend turned me on to this clip from the 1967 doc, Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution, hosted by an emphatic Leonard Bernstein. "Surf's Up"--especially in this bare, voyeuristic piano recording--is a great look into the heartbreaking psychomeanderings of a chaotic, yet brilliant, musical mind. Bernstein was a little right and a little wrong; Wilson was blazing trails, but at the same time, he was--and remains--a total island of pop genius, rarely to see an equal. So much can be pulled from this song: the collapse of the Beach Boys as a band, Holocaust stuff, "Frere Jacque," general '60s cultural anxiety, the descent of Wilson himself, etc.

Below is the remastered, and famously unreleased version of the original '67 recording. Below that is the 2004 recording from the final cut of SMiLE. And below that is a YouTube comment from one of those videos.





If only Brian Wilson hadn't done a shitload of drugs and suffered a nervous breakdown in 1967, we'd have had SMiLE come out in 1967 to challenge Pepper and who knows how many more classic BB albums in the 68-72 period would have been?