Listening for the Divine, inside Brian Wilson's head

The powerful puzzle at the heart of his "teenage symphony to God”

I grew up near an ugly coast on the Texas-Louisiana border, where the beaches were defined by muddy, often dirty, water and swarms of mosquitoes. If the humid wind blew the wrong way, the pollution from nearby refineries was a nice touch.

Thus, I have no memories of my friends listening to the Beach Boys. The local vibe was our own Janis Joplin, Johnny Winter and ZZ Top.

However, a few years later a college friend (with a fantastic stereo, since he grew up in Japan) introduced me to the Beach Boy albums that came after “the hits.”

I have razor-sharp memories of being introduced to the whole “Surf’s Up” album, especially the title track. That song is, of course, one of the most ironically named classics — ever. One line says it all: “Surf's up, aboard a tidal wave.” Hold that thought.

From there, I moved back to “Pet Sounds,” which I consider (#DUH) a masterpiece in American culture. Then I read about the great, doomed masterpiece that was “Smile,” but could not — for years — put together the pieces to grasp what it could have been. Yes, that “missing” album was meant to pivot on “Surf’s Up” and end with “Good Vibrations.” We have the whole work now, of course, and it’s as bizarre and beautiful as one could imagine.

Readers may be able to discern that I have been trying to decide what to say about the life and death of Brian Wilson, the supremely gifted, haunted, damaged genius at the heart of all of this. We are talking about the man-child who put the word “God” on the radio, in the masterpiece “God Only Knows,” while fighting through mental illness and drugs to create works that formed (in his phrase for “Smile”) his Teenage Symphony to God.

I wonder if, somewhere, a Baby Boomer preacher dared to preach a sermon about the passing of Brian Wilson. The big question: What can we say about the God that Brian Wilson clearly believed that he heard inside his head?

The mainstream media obituaries didn’t help much, even though the word “God” played a major role — because of the song that media outlets around the world played to mark Wilson’s death, “God Only Knows.”

I did appreciate that many commentators pointed listeners to the isolated vocal tracks from that hit. I mean, turn this up and listen for the angels. (I once spent an hour talking to the late Carl Wilson. When doing the stunning lead vocal, he said he was trying to sound like his big brother, Brian.)

The New York Times obit, when discussing the Beach Boys and the mid-1960s, missed the larger point (in my opinion) by stressing the materialistic side of this very human and complex drama:

Cars, sex and rolling waves were the only cares.

That vision, manifested in Mr. Wilson’s crystalline vocal arrangements, helped make the Beach Boys the defining American band of the era. …

The round-faced, soft-spoken Mr. Wilson — who didn’t surf — became one of pop’s most gifted and idiosyncratic studio auteurs, crafting complex and innovative productions that awed his peers.

“That ear,” Bob Dylan once remarked. “I mean, Jesus, he’s got to will that to the Smithsonian.”

Later, after discussing the classic “Pet Sounds,” the Times added this:

“Smile,” Mr. Wilson’s next album project, which he made with another songwriting collaborator, Van Dyke Parks, was intended to be his supreme achievement. Mr. Wilson hyped it at the time as “a teenage symphony to God.”

National Public Radio came closer to stating the big picture, with an obituary that opened like this:

Brian Wilson, who co-founded the iconic California band The Beach Boys and turned teen pop into a poetic, modernist musical form, has died at age 82.

"We realize that we are sharing our grief with the world," Wilson's family wrote in a statement on his website Wednesday.

The most frequently invoked description of Wilson's music came from the artist himself when, playing on a phrase coined by Phil Spector, he declared that his goal was to write a "teenage symphony to God." Grounded in dreams of an idealized youth, his songs reflected vast ambition enmeshed in the belief that pop could be a conduit to the sublime.

OK, I will ask: Was Wilson’s work “grounded in dreams of an idealized youth” or was the larger reality the pain of years of emotional and physical abuse from a dominating father? Brian Wilson later claimed that his hear-total deafness in his right ear — yes, a genius music producer with one ear — was connected to a blow to the head delivered by his father, Murray Wilson.

Was the God inside Brian’s head a loving father? I don’t know. I have not read enough biographies of Brian Wilson to know if anyone ever asked that crucial question.

Let me stress that I am by no means an expert on the Beach Boys and, trust me, the experts are out there in cyberspace and they know the canon of Wilson’s art inside out. I expect to get corrections via email, after posting this.

My goal here is simple: I want readers to listen to several versions of “Surf’s Up” and wrestle with it, both the words and the music. The mysterious lyrics are by poet Van Dyke Parks — but it is my understanding that Wilson always discussed the subjects of songs with his co-writers.

Yo, experts! Which came first with “Surf’s Up,” the wondrously strange music or the even more mysterious poetry? Here are the lyrics, standing alone:

A diamond necklace played the pawn
Hand in hand some drummed along, oh
To a handsome man and baton (Bygone, bygone)
A blind class aristocracy
Back through the opera glass you see
The pit and the pendulum drawn (Bygone, bygone)
Columnated ruins domino

Canvass the town and brush the backdrop
Are you sleeping?

Hung velvet overtaken me
Dim chandelier awaken me
To a song dissolved in the dawn (Bygone, bygone)
The music hall, a costly bow
The music, all is lost for now
To a muted trumperter swan (Bygone, bygone)
Columnated ruins domino

Canvass the town and brush the backdrop
Are you sleeping, Brother John?

Dove-nested towers the hour was
Strike the street quicksilver moon
Carriage across the fog
Two-step to lamp lights cellar tune
The laughs come hard in Auld Lang Syne

The glass was raised, the fired rose
The fullness of the wine, the dim last toasting
While at port, adieu or die

A choke of grief heart hardened I
Beyond belief, a broken man too tough to cry

Surf's up, mm-mm, mm-mm, mm-mm
Aboard a tidal wave
Come about hard and join
The young and often spring you gave
I heard the word
Wonderful thing
A children's song

A children's song (Child, child, child, the child is father of the man)
Have you listened as they played? (Child, child, child, the child is father of the man)
Their song is love (Child, child, child, the child is father of the man)
And the children know the way (Child, child, child, the child is father of the man)

A children's song (Child, child, child, the child is father of the man)
Have you listened as they played? (That's why the child is father of the man)
Their song is love (Child, child, child, the child is father of the man)
And the children know the way (Child, child, child, the child is father of the man)
A child ….

Here is the original recording, as released on the album of that name.

If you search online, you will find several versions of what many people call “Brian Wilson’s annotated Surf’s Up lyrics.” Here is one version and here is a Reddit take on the same material.

The following is a sample of what you will find, in a version drawn from a Cheetah Magazine essay titled “Goodbye Surfing, Hello God.” The person who posted it says this is from Byron Preiss’ 1979 authorized biography, “The Beach Boys.” I cannot find my copy of that book, this soon after our family’s move a few months ago.

This is long, but essential. Please don’t blame me for the punctuation:

At home, as the black acetate dub turned on his bedroom hi-fi set, Wilson tried to explain the words.

“It’s a man at a concert,” he said. “All around him there’s the audience, playing their roles, dressed up in fancy clothes, looking through opera glasses, but so far way from the drama, from life — ‘Back through the opera glass you see the pit and the pendulum drawn.’”

The music begins to take over. “Columnated ruins domino,” Empires, ideas, lives, institutions — everything has to fall, tumbling like dominoes.”

He begins to awaken to the music; sees the pretentiousness of everything. “The music hall a costly bow.” Then even the music is gone, turned into a trumpeter swan, into what the music really is.

“Canvass the town and brush the backdrop.” He’s off in his vision, on a trip. Reality is gone; he’s creating it like a dream. “Dove-nested towers.” Europe, a long time ago. “The laugh’s come hard in Auld Lang Syne.” The poor people in the cellar taverns, trying to make themselves happy by singing.

Then there’s the parties, the drinking, trying to forget the wars, the battles at sea. “While at port a do or die. “Ships in the harbor, battling it out. A kind of Roman Empire thing.

“A choke of grief.” At his own sorrow and the emptiness of his life, because he can’t even fry for the suffering in the world, for his own suffering.

And then hope. “Surf’s Up!...Come about hard and join in the once and often spring you gave.” Go back to the kids, to the beach, to childhood.

“I heard the word” — of God. “Wonderful thing” — the joy of enlightenment ... and what is it? “A children’s song!” And then there’s the song itself; the song of children; the song of children; the song of the universe rising and falling in wave after wave, the song of God, hiding the love from us, but always letting us find it again, like a mother singing to her children.”

Once again, people need to deal with the song itself. This is the version from the edited master tapes of the “Smile” recording sessions.

The larger question, for me, is this: “What was Brian Wilson thinking — during concerts in the later years of his life, after “Smile” was recovered — when he sang those lyrics?

Think about that when you watch this live performance. Obviously, this is not the legendary voice of Brian Wilson’s youth. Still, this is rather amazing, methinks.

Finally, here is the version of “Surf’s Up” that I have been listening to the most since his death.

This is from “Brian Wilson: At My Piano,” released in 2021. This is an elderly Brian Wilson, a few years from turning 80, playing — solo — many of his most famous works as he heard them in his head at a piano keyboard.

By all means, get that disc. It isn’t a classical piano CD. It’s a revealing trip into the ear of Brian Wilson.

OK, here is one more YouTube link. Check out the following exercise in musical courage.

Stop, for a second, and try to name a more spectacular male voice in contemporary music than that of Vince Gill. He agreed, before hearing “Surf’s Up,” to sing that song during a 2001 Brian Wilson tribute concert at Radio City Music Hall (with additional vocals from Jimmy Webb and David Crosby).

Check out this interview, in which Gill explains how he quickly realized that he had jumped into surf that was way over his head. Simply stated, Gill said that this was the hardest song he had ever tried to learn in his life.

That’s saying something, right there.

That’s all, for now.

Beach Boy experts! Please be kind with me. Yet I welcome any comments, especially from readers who have never heard this song before. Welcome to the mysteries inside the head of a great American musical genius.