Story of the song: Surf’s Up by The Beach Boys

From The Independent archive: Robert Webb on the magical but unsettling ‘Surf’s Up’

The band performing at the Fillmore East in New York in 1971 (Getty)

The Beach Boy Mike Love was not a happy surfer in early 1967. Brian Wilson’s new-found urge to fiddle with the formula of surfing, girls and cars that had made the band’s name was bothering him. Love’s main bone of contention was the experimental material his cousin had recorded for Smile, The Beach Boys’ intended follow-up to Pet Sounds. It was abandoned soon afterwards, and is still unreleased as a full work, but Smile’s painstakingly constructed soundscapes make it one of pop’s legendary lost masterpieces.

Salvaged from the Smile flotsam, “Surf’s Up” became the title track of The Beach Boys’ renaissance album, released in 1971. Recorded some five years earlier, it is one of their most intriguing songs. Its unsettling tempo changes, swelling harmonies and abstruse imagery cast a curious magic, especially in lines such as: “Dove nested towers the hour was/ Strike the street quicksilver moon/ Carriage across the fog/ Two-step to lamp lights cellar tune”.

The lyrics were penned by the maverick producer and musician Van Dyke Parks. The bespectacled 24-year-old had no track record as a lyricist, but he had helped to arrange the music for the Disney animated film The Jungle Book and he told stories of how, as a junior chorister, he was once accompanied on violin by an elderly Albert Einstein. That was enough for Brian. “He had a good personality and I thought maybe he could be a good writer,” he said. The two collaborators bedded down in Brian’s “sandbox” - a low-walled, sand-filled enclosure in the dining room of his California home - and worked away on Wilson's Chickering piano.

“It took us about an hour at most to write the whole thing. We wrote it pretty fast; it all happened like it should,” Wilson said. “I was blown out, I was really blown out by it. That guy blew me out.”

Love was very much not blown away by Parks’s writing. “At the time, I thought his lyrics were alliterate prose, which is great if you appreciated his prose and his alliteration,” he commented. “He’s brilliant. But as far as translating to mid-American commercial appeal, I don’t think so.”

The song was never going to make the Billboard top 100, but it stands as one of the band’s most critically acclaimed recordings. Ask Parks about his lines, though, and he’ll shrug. “I still can’t say what they mean,” he says. “But I know how they make me feel all things considered.”