You know that chapter in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas that starts with the Art Linkletter quote? The one where Hunter S. Thompson talks about the death of the ‘60s dream and how the youth generation was riding a seemingly inexorable wave of momentum that broke and rolled back with the deaths of Martin Luther King and RFK Jr. and Richard Nixon’s election as President? I’d always held that chapter dear to my heart—it’s the demarcation line between what the book is (an intense deconstruction of 1970s “silent majority” America) and what it could have been (“hey, aren’t people stupid when they’re fucked up?”), one of the most cogent pieces of what the 1960’s meant to the people that lived through them. You can actually feel Thompson’s pain as he describes what it felt like to have the future stretch out before you, vast, exciting, and all for the taking, only to have it snatched away by the vagaries of fate.
I think about that when I hear Brian Wilson’s solo take of “Surf’s Up,” recorded for Leonard Bernstein’s World of Music in November of 1966. It’s just Wilson at his piano, debuting what would be the final track of his fabled Smile album, his heart-meltingly beautiful voice wrapped around Van Dyke Park’s brilliant word paintings. Free of Wilson’s studio conjuring, the Beach Boys’ gliding harmonies absent, Wilson alone with his two favorite instruments, you can truly get a sense of how amazing the song really is, the perfect capper to Wilson’s unfinished symphony.
At that moment, the Beach Boys, and especially Wilson, had reached the peak of their own massive wave, both creatively and popularly. Behind him were “Surfer Girl,” Summer Days and Summer Nights, “I Get Around,” “California Girls,” “Good Vibrations” (yet to be released), and the masterpiece Pet Sounds. Ahead were the painful valleys of drug abuse, the rejection and dismembering of Smile, tragic deaths, increasingly brutal albums, the band’s descent into a creatively bankrupt nostalgia act, and Wilson’s sad, ugly downfall in the 1970s. But before those would come, we would have this moment, taped for a nation to watch on CBS, Brian Wilson’s final moment in the sun before the clouds, and the shade, and the darkness.
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