Goodbye Surfing, Hello God!

AMG Review of Goodbye Surfing, Hello God!

Bruce Eder
All Music Guide

On its face, parts of this five-CD box seems a little like overkill, what with four dubdown takes of "Friends" on disc two; 25 fragmentary takes of "Little Bird," nine of "Never Learn Not to Love," and seven of "Be With Me" helping to fill up disc three; and 23 fragmentary takes of "Bluesbirds Over the Mountain" and 23 of "Time to Get Alone" on disc four. On the other hand, they're not bad songs -- in fact, they're mostly beautiful -- and even for the fan who doesn't need to hear every nuance of the group's work, they make for good room ambience, almost total immersion in the Beach Boys. And the rest of the box is absolutely dazzling on its face, even to non-fans. The highlights include unused outtakes (one sung by Brian Wilson and the other, the best ever heard by this reviewer, sung by Carl Wilson), and the instrumental track of "Breakway," and a live-vocal television performance of the same song; a crisp and informal run-through of "Surfin' USA"; a live version of "Wendy" from The Ed Sullivan Show; and a series of alternate mono mixes of three songs off of Pet Sounds. Disc two is the real treat, however, a nearly perfectly recorded November 1967 concert from Washington, D.C., on which the band introduces such new and upcoming songs as "Wild Honey" and "Darlin'," and give a lovingly informal rendition of "Graduation Day" -- this show is a match for any live Beach Boys concert recording of the 1960s, and presents the group in a very lighthearted mood, having fun at the expense of the language restrictions imposed on them by the Daughters of the American Revolution, who operated the hall in which they were playing (perhaps this was the occasion through which former Secretary of the Interior James Watt got his hostile take on the group?); that show, incidentally, closes with a powerhouse version of "Johnny B. Goode" that is one of the best ock & roll tracks ever left behind by the band, with a big, muscular sound that must've amazed audiences in late 1967 -- its existence makes one wonder what other live tapes of the group survive from this era, and why Capitol or the band don't compile them legitimately and offer them to fans themselves, the way Robert Fripp releases King Crimson's concert legacy and the Grateful Dead are doing with theirs. It's followed by a lost three-minute wordless harmony track intended for the album Friends that never made it out -- it is an enchantingly surreal and gorgeous glimpse at a lost moment in the group's oft-overlooked psychedelic era, and as pretty as one could possibly imagine. Even more significant is disc five, which includes the group's complete performance from the October 1970 Big Sur Folk Festival -- the mix of repertory offers the Beach Boys as a vital contemporary group rather than an oldies act, freely mixing their early repertory, such as "California Girls," with then-current singles such as "Aren't You Glad," "Cottonfields," and "Country Air," not to mention a hard, heavy, and utterly delightful version of the Coasters' "Riot in Cell Block #9." The set is expensive, but the makers have also delivered amazingly high quality -- the fidelity is excellent throughout, and the live material is in stereo and extremely high-resolution sound, which reveals some flaws in the 1967 concert tape but nothing that listeners can't handle. It all comes in a box that's a little awkward to open and use, but which is accompanied by a beautiful color book with full session information and annotation, as well as a beautiful array of photos. It is expensive, at well over 100 dollars retail (and it is done on CD-R's, which means it isn't usable on DVD players), but there are about six hours of musical gold by the band in differing degrees of purity, and this is perhaps the ideal companion to and extension of Capitol Records' authorized Beach Boys five-CD box.