Tide and emotional

A long-promised box set tells the complete story of the Sunflower and Surf’s Up era. By

“Brian forces Love to sing, ‘Doughy lumps, stomach pumps, enemas too.’”

“WE’RE JUST updating ourselves a little,” Al Jardine told NME in November 1970, as The Beach Boys arrived in Britain on tour. A month earlier, the band had played the Big Sur Folk Festival, realigning themselves with the hippies and roots music fans who’d long found their music anathema. A week earlier, The Beach Boys had headlined a series of dates at Los Angeles’s Whisky A Go-Go, as part of a plan by their new manager Jack Rieley to make them, of all things, “hip”. The preppy stage outfits had been retired; the beards were getting longer. Environmental politics would be a priority. And while the working title for that August’s Sunflower had been dropped, the sentiments remained an imperative: The Fading Rock Group Revival.

Sunflower and Surf’s Up, the albums The Beach Boys released in 1970 and 1971, found them at a challenging inflection point, even by their standards. A new record deal with Warner Bros had resulted in one submitted album, Add Some Music, being rejected by label head Mo Ostin, only to be overhauled as Sunflower. That proved to be a commercial disaster, too. Brian Wilson rarely ventured outdoors, so recording sessions took place at his home on Bellagio Drive, Bel Air, in the “man cave” directly beneath his bedroom. His bandmates, though, were unexpectedly flourishing as songwriters. Via revamped albums and aborted solo projects, The Beach Boys suddenly found themselves blessed, or cursed, with a surfeit of new material.

Not ideal for a band struggling with internal democracy, perhaps, but perfect for box set compilers half a century on. Hence

Feel Flows, a 5-CD survey of this rich and complex Beach Boys phase. Across these five discs, you get Sunflower and Surf’s Up remastered, 11 live tracks (dating from 1970 to 1993), a cappellas, session outtakes, radio ads and a whole heap of formally unreleased songs, some of which might be familiar from the long-cherished Landlocked bootleg.

If there’s a dominant Beach Boy here it’s Carl Wilson, a natural peacemaker acting as executive producer with Brian only sporadically engaged. But while Carl’s Long Promised Road and Feel Flows nailed the mature, aware sound the band were aiming for on Surf’s Up, his songwriting contributions were sparse. The Beach Boys vault, though, is full of Dennis tracks, and

Feel Flows makes a great showcase for that Wilson’s unlikely gifts, and the inconsistent strategies that bedevilled the band.

On Sunflower, Dennis has four songs, including It’s About Time, as ferocious a rocker as anything in their canon, and Forever, a ballad of surprising tenderness John Mulvey. that stands comparison with Pet Sounds-era Brian. Two more from the period cruelly missed the cut: San Miguel, bracing revivalism in the vein of Do It Again; and Celebrate The News, a woozy baroque piece surfacing early as Break Away’s B-side in 1969.

Surf ’s Up, though, featured none of Dennis’s songs, hoarded for a solo project that only manifested one superb 1971 single, Sound Of Free/Lady (both, fortunately, included here). The material Dennis was working on would’ve suited the ambience of

Surf ’s Up, privileging as it did a kind of mystical California grandeur over boardwalk kitsch. The harpsichord-anchored Behold The Night, Medley: All Of My Love/Ecology, Before – these songs marked a line in the sand. While spiritual intensity had been Brian’s terrain in the late ’60s, now it belonged to Dennis. It would take him until 1977, and Pacific Ocean Blue, to make that explicit.

His bandmates were not always so cosmically inclined, or invested in the advantages of hipness. Al Jardine quietly excelled as a foil to Brian when the latter roused himself, collaborating on cutesy and occasionally misogynistic (Susie Cincinnati; Good Time) trinkets. Bruce Johnston’s high-grade schmaltz favoured nostalgia for the prerock’n’roll era rather than empathy with ’70s progressives: in the Tootsie Roll fantasia of Disney Girls (1957), he sounds blissfully ready for retirement, at 29. And Mike Love, that most belligerent of Transcendental Meditators, was busy fomenting obedience on Student Demonstration Time. “I thought the atmospherics at these concerts [like Woodstock] – the drugs, the mayhem, at times the violence – were getting out of hand,” he writes in his 2016 memoir.

Brian, meanwhile, was more productive than his sedentary retreat might have suggested. In Feel Flows’ sleevenotes, Jardine remembers their notional leader drawn downstairs by the Moog being used on Cool, Cool Water. Some of his contributions were extracted from Smile, like the hook from Love To Say Dada on Cool, Cool Water, or the extraordinary Surf’s Up. Elsewhere, the banality of Brian’s oddness can be unnerving. My Solution is a novelty Halloween song that’s like a cross between Smile’s Elements Suite and Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett’s Monster Mash. H.E.L.P. Is On Its Way, ostensibly an ad for a health food restaurant, at least forces Love to sing the line, “Doughy lumps, stomach pumps, enemas too.”

This wouldn’t be The Beach Boys, though, if beauty didn’t emerge amidst the frat boy gags and psychological trauma. Won’t You Tell Me is an engulfing romantic melodrama akin to Please Let Me Wonder, credited to Brian and his father Murry Wilson and originally recorded in 1965 by The Sunrays. Reclaimed by The Beach Boys in ’71, it appears here in two versions: as a lavish, chiming Brian and Carl duet; and as a solo Brian demo, with control room interjections from his father that only enhance the pathos.

Then, of course, there’s Til I Die. In Brian Wilson’s untrustworthy 1991 autobiography, Wouldn’t It Be Nice, he claims the song was written after he’d “ordered the gardener to dig a grave in the backyard and threatened to drive my Rolls off the Santa Monica pier.” Feel Flows is full of little revelations, glimpses of The Beach Boys’ haphazardly evolving, still magical process in the early ’70s. None, though, hit as hard as a long (4:47) version of Til I Die, with a two-minute vibraphone intro that magnifies its otherworldly shimmer, and significantly different lyrics. Instead of “How deep is the ocean/I lost my way,” Brian sings, “How deep is the ocean/That holds me up,” and in the next verse, replaces “It kills my soul” with “I’ve found my way”, the song recast as a calmer reckoning with mortality. The door out of the bedroom was there all along, but it would take years for Brian Wilson to consistently locate it.