ARCHIVE
THE BEACH BOYS
Feel Flows: The Sunflower & Surf’s Up Sessions 1969-1971
Weighty boxset uncovers the full extent of a wonderfully fertile transitional period for “America’s Top Surfin’ Group”.
By Rob Hughes
“You’re sittin’ in a dentist’s chair/And they’ve got music for you there”
REISSUES | COMPS | BOXSETS | LOST RECORDINGS
CAPITOL/UME
ON 15 August 1970, The Beach Boys repaired to Brian Wilson’s house in Bel-Air, setting up in the studio downstairs. Sunflower, their new album, was due out in a fortnight, but the band were already sketching ideas for a follow-up. Wilson laid down a basic track for “’Til I Die”, a song he’d been struggling with for some time but was yet to perfect. Mike Love, meanwhile, unveiled the quietly rapturous “Big Sur”.
Trailed this June ahead of Feel Flows –a major compilation centred around Sunflower and its 1971 successor, Surf’s Up – “Big Sur” finds the band in their preferred milieu: hymning the glory of a California that’s part real and part fantasy, where crimson sunsets are followed by dutiful golden dawns and bubbling mountain springs feed inexorably into the ocean.
A less mellifluous version of the song would surface as the opening section of Holland’s “California Saga” in 1973, but the original is far more persuasive. Much bootlegged but widely unavailable until now, its belated appearance teased the possibility of a trove of hidden revelations within The Beach Boys’ catalogue. Feel Flows makes good on that promise. Produced by Mark Linett and archive manager Alan Boyd – the capable hands who delivered 2011’s The Smile Sessions – it’s a set as vast as it is remarkable, containing no fewer than 135 tracks, 108 of which have never been officially released before. Strung across five CDs are various live cuts, outtakes, demos, alternate mixes and isolated backing tracks that show the full extent of The Beach Boys’ endeavours at a critical point in their history.