I was given this for Christmas in 2001. I think what must have happened is that I added it to my Amazon wishlist in an unguarded moment, forgot about it, and then Christmas day rolls around, I open the familiarly-shaped package, and… oh! Did I? I guess I must have done… That's an internal dialogue, of course. The rictus grin never slips from my lips as I ooze gratitude and stifle any semblance of WTF on my face.
As you're probably bored of me saying now, I got so many new albums in 2001 and 2002 that hardly any of them got listened to at the time. I've played this one (or these two, depending on how you want to call it) about four times in the last few days, and I reckon that's probably two and a half times more than I'd ever listened to them previously.
So I'm just about getting to know them at last. You see, the reason the CD was ever a candidate for my wishlist was tenuous in the first place, and linked to the other Surf's Up that I own, by David Thomas and the Two Pale Boys. David Thomas is drenched in Beach Boys lore. I'm not. When Brian Wilson did all those shows at the Royal Festival Hall a few years back, first playing Pet Sounds (was it?) and then Smile, I didn't pay any attention. I doubt that I even realised that David Thomas was paying homage to Surf's Up, the song from the (then) unreleased Smile album, rather than Surf's Up, the album.
It takes me a while to absorb this music — it's just as "difficult" for me in some ways as obscure leftfield sampling like John Wall, because I've lived a life that has been almost entirely free of Southern Californian soft rock from the early 1970s, so it takes me a while to work out how to parse it. Initially, I have to say, I thought it was all rather tedious and turgid. And some of it I still think is: both albums have an "upbeat rocker" of a song at the end of what would have been Side 1, and in the case of Student Demonstration Time it's pretty embarrassing stuff. But with a few listens, the original and innovative bits — and what I guess you'd call the charm — become apparent.
I still wouldn't want to predict when, or indeed if, the CD is going to make it back into the player; but I feel a little less nonplussed than I did on Christmas Day 2001.
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