The centerpiece of SMiLE, I truly believe it is the greatest pop song written in the 1960s, possibly one of the greatest pop songs ever written. Hailed as Brian Wilson's masterpiece with a Van Dyke Parks lyric to match, the autobiographical song centers around the artist's journey, his heavenly inspiration and the music he creates. Its recording was filmed by a television crew for the documentary Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution, featuring cutting edge pop and rock musicians and hosted by Leonard Bernstein, who praised the song in narration. Its broadcast in December 1967 fueled the mythos of SMiLE being revolutionary pop music, with "Surf's Up" to demonstrate it. This made SMiLE's death all the more dramatic, as simply no one ever heard what was reasonably touted as Wilson/Van Dyke Parks' masterpiece... Until four years later of course.
Like the rest of the SMiLE songs, "Surf's Up" was to be tracked in sections and pieced together later. Unfortunately, only the first movement of "Surf’s Up" was ever recorded, on November 4th, 1966 with overdubs three days later. Also recorded during the overdub session was an experimental and humorous 'Talking Horn' skit, famously bootlegged as "George Fell Into His French Horn".
Vocal sessions for the first movement with The Beach Boys occurred on December 15th but were met with strife and were unsuccessful. Later that night, after the rest of the group went home, Brian recorded a solo piano version with his own double tracked vocal, the version which appeared on Inside Pop. Unfortunately, that is as far as Brian ever worked on the song, aside from a one-off live rehearsal recording during the Wild Honey sessions, a recording that was lost for decades until recently found and included on The SMiLE Sessions boxset.
After negotiating a new contract with Warner Brothers in 1970 The Beach Boys hired promoter Jack Rieley as their manager, who attempted to improve the group's image--and record sales--for the decade. One of his suggestions was to finish "Surf's Up" and include it on their next album. Carl & Dennis could only work with what they had: overdubbing new vocals onto the November 4th, 1966 backing track of the first movement, and simply using and overdubbing Brian's December 14th, 1966 solo performance of movement two. The story goes that in 1971 while the group was arranging the vocal harmonies for the coda of the second movement, Brian (who was otherwise complacent and partially absent during this period), overheard them from his room, rushed downstairs and gave them a scrap of paper with the “A children's song” lyric to be song on top, once again taking charge of the group and guiding them to its arrangement. It's unknown if this was a new 1971 idea or an old 1966 idea, but it is a perfect ending that reprises the ideas implied in "Child is Father of the Man". It appropriately became the title track of their 1971 album Surf's Up, their decade's highlight album.
The song was noted by both Vosse and Van Dyke Parks himself as to close the SMiLE album, but Darian Sahanaja took a different approach when arranging SMiLE for the stage in 2003. Grouping "Surf's Up" together with "Wonderful", "Look" and "Child is Father of the Man" as a suite of songs about the Cycle of Life, it closed the second movement of the show, the album and eventually The SMiLE Sessions boxset. The later release featured a new mix of the song with Brian's original lead vocal from his 1966 piano version digitally flown into the instrumental backing track, a task SMiLE aficionados and fan-mixers had already been doing for a decade. A piece of Carl's 1971 vocal was left in, as Brian had not initially sung the lyric in 1966.
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