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- [00:00]
Alexis Taylor
I was wondering if you both know what was going on immediately before this record that meant that they decided to make what we would now. I mean, I'm saying it kind of in inverted commas, but what. What we would now call like a woke record. Like, what's the reason? What's the reason they. They all of a sudden are like, we need to talk about ecology and. And the state of the world. Sorry if that's so stupid of me to ask.
- [00:29]
Jack Riley
No, that's a great question. I think that leads to just a little bit of history to deliver here. The key figure to understand in the Surf's up saga is one Jack Riley, radio DJ in Los Angeles, who came in to manage the Beach Boys. At this time. Sunflower had been a complete flop. Brian took an interview with Jack Riley right around the time of its release and six weeks or six days, I think after the interview, Riley sent Brian a letter, sent all the Beach Boys a letter. Because Brian had spoken at length about the Beach Boys kind of commercial failings. Riley sent them like a six page letter detailing all of the problems with the Beach Boys and why they were no longer selling records or, you know, making money or anything. And the Beach Boys decided, hey, this guy, he's got some ideas here, let's bring him on. And it was his direction, you know, in large part that led them to do a lot of the songwriting on this Surf's up record.
- [01:30]
Alexis Taylor
Which makes sense with him writing A day in the Life of a Tree.
- [01:34]
Jack Riley
Day in Life of a tree, exactly. Yeah. So he.
- [01:37]
Alexis Taylor
He just happened to be focusing on those topics of the environment and wanting to tell the kind of. Was he just preaching to them about that or something?
- [01:48]
Jack Riley
Yeah, I think he. Honestly, he was. He was approaching it from a literally, like, commercial aspect. Like people thought the Beach Boys were old and square and lame and part of the last wave no longer relevant whatsoever with 1970s rock taking off. And so Riley saw this opportunity to come in and remake them in a new image, whether or not it was kind of true to who they really were. Just to quote a little bit from this book, however, Riley may have eventually damaged the Beach Boys finances. There's plenty of problems with Riley we'll get into later. His initial ideas were the perfect solution to their image problem. Jack got the group to play many political advantageous concerts, changed the focus of the lyrics to reflect the concerns of the day, and basically made the Beach Boys more relevant. It was a clever public relations effort. Riley remembered that one of the things was to just say it right out in A series of advertisements. And these were actual advertisements that they were running for this record at this time with the statement the phrase, it's now safe to listen to the Beach Boys. More and more people were beginning to believe that quite a way to pitch your band. It's now safe to listen to.
- [03:02]
Alexis Taylor
It's so interesting to me the way that they would have been perceived at the time. For them to go so out of fashion for them to now be talked about all the time. Since I. Since I read those best of, you know, the. The kind of greatest albums of all time articles when I was a teenager, it doesn't feel like much has changed that much. So that the Beach Boys records that people hold up, like Pet Sounds and Smile, are still there. They're in the canon of great records. And it doesn't feel like there's been a major turn against them since then. So. So to think to a time when they was actually releasing the music and potentially becoming just a very unfashionable past. It kind of band is interesting to me because I just don't. I don't really fully know why. Why that happened, but I guess they're a very unusual group, aren't they, With Mike Love and all the different, like, things going on with what they represent.
- [04:10]
Jack Riley
Yeah, I think they were just kind of representative of a very particular kind of moment. You know, they were like. They had this whole kind of cultural scene era. Very heavy concepts just loaded into their imagery and the songs that they wrote. And as soon as people turned on that, you know, once the San Francisco scene started going, like, in the late 60s and it became more about free love, hippie, dippy, you know, kind of drug shit, the Beach Boys just seemed so hopelessly passe, you know, Disneyland, cupcake type of shit.
- [04:43]
Unknown Speaker
Well, they really do away with that on this record, don't they?
- [04:48]
Jack Riley
But it's so funny how fast that happens in that just, like, tiny little chunk of time thinking about, like, Pet Sounds was just five years earlier than this record. Like. And I'm. I guess I would be curious to hear from you on that subject, Alexis, like. Cause Hot Ship has been going for decades at this point. Like, do you ever feel the need to kind of, like, try to actively reorient the band in the direction of whatever happens to be going on in the cultural zeitgeist at any given moment?
- [05:17]
Alexis Taylor
For best or for worse? No, we don't try and redirect ourselves in that way, but maybe we ought to. I don't know. I mean, I think that if we Were to make any very conscious moves, I think it would go wrong. So if you, like. If you go, oh, well, we need to get. Get with, like, what the kids are doing and, like, work with this kind of producer and make a record that sounds like whatever it might be. That's the hot new thing. I think it would just really quickly be apparent to any audience that we just didn't know what we were doing. Whereas to kind of gracefully grow older. I don't know if we are doing it gracefully, but to, like, not. Not kind of get too caught up in that, whilst also still listening to new music, that feels like the only way that we can really work. So we. We definitely are aware as we're making albums that perhaps this is irrelevant to younger people. Perhaps we are still doing a kind of thing that we've been doing for a while, that our career, that we're known for in our career. What if we do need more of a, like, seismic shift? I mean, actually, that. That question of, like, how to change is very relevant to us, but we don't always know what we want to do to answer it. And I think, actually, not that this really explains it that well, but I think sometimes a lot of the things we do outside of the band in other projects is a place where we do more experimentation or going further away from our, like, safety zone. And in a way, it might be better actually if we were to do some of that within Hot Chip. And then the records that Hot Chip release would seem more different from previous ones. And it seemed like we're changing more radically.
- [07:15]
Jack Riley
Interesting.
- [07:16]
Alexis Taylor
Instead, we kind of get some of that out of our system elsewhere and then we come back again. But, yeah, with the Beach Boys, I mean, I suppose I have to remember also that Pet Sounds didn't do very well commercially right when it came out.
- [07:32]
Unknown Speaker
It's really funny to me, though, that the more timely, topical content of this record was what saved it and made it cool again. Cause I think that's the least beloved stuff on it now. Well, one song in particular.
- [07:50]
Jack Riley
One song in particular, yeah.
- [07:51]
Unknown Speaker
Catches that flag. But, yeah, it feels a bit. I mean, hopelessly anachronistic or like, kind of, like stuck in it. Dates the record. Not in a way that I mind personally, but what actually saves it in the long run, I think, is that, for the most part, there's a lot of stuff that doesn't do that, even if some of it does. The big things on the album, for me, are the ones that sort of use that maybe as a thematic jumping off point. Like the intensity of the times in which it was made. Yeah. There's one song, as we'll get to, that really seems to, like, try to tackle big issues, but Day in Life of a Tree, you know, you could think of that as, like, oh, it's about ecology and, you know, environmental issues. It's really much more of a. An emotional, spiritual statement on some level. Or the song surfs up itself and Till I Die and even Long Promise Road. You get a little bit of that timeliness on the record, but the strength of it really is the way that it extends those concerns into a poetic realm.