I spent some time at Barnes and Noble today because my new school is having a “Book Fair” there. Basically, teachers all submit a wish list, and their items are placed on a bookshelf near the front. If a parent or a family wants to buy things for you (either for personal or in-class use), they just take the item to the counter. Also, 20% of any store-wide purchase goes back to the school. It’s nice.
Anyway, one of my purchases — finally! — was the two-DVD set of Brian Wilson’s “Smile.” I’ve been wanting this for awhile now, but I’ve passed it by every time.
The first disc is a two-hour documentary about the aborted attempt to make the original “Smile” back in the 1960s. (It’s a fascinating documentary; it ends with the groundbreaking 2004 performance.) I was most interested to learn that the project de-railed when Mike Love heard three of Van Dyke Parks’s lyrics for my favorite Brian Wilson song, “Surf’s Up.” Love couldn’t understand those lyrics — “columnated ruins domino” — and Parks wouldn’t explain them. As the rest of the Beach Boys rebelled against the project, and as Parks et al. abandoned it, Wilson sunk deeper into depression and to his eventual nervous breakdown. (He’s still not recovered — just watch the documentary. He hears voices and everything. It’s incredible.)
But I was really interested in the fact that Love hated my favorite Brian Wilson lyric of all time. He couldn’t understand that it, like much of the “Smile” project, wasn’t supposed to make sense. It was just supposed to BE.
Here are the lyrics to “Surf’s Up.” It’s a perfect song. (Go onto iTunes or eMusic or whatever to download the whole “Smile” album if you don’t already have it.)
I’ve never heard a song like it, I never will, and the thing was written in 1967!
A diamond necklace played the pawn
Hand in hand some drummed along, oh
To a handsome man and baton
A blind class aristocracy
Back through the opera glass you see
The pit and the pendulum drawn
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
The music hall a costly bow
The music all is lost for now
To a muted trumpeter swan
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
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…





