The Beach Boys - Long Promised Road
A lot of people tend to write off the Beach Boys’ post-Pet Sounds output. The ’70s are considered a lost decade for the band, and when they finally did resurface, it was with “Kokomo” (yuck). Oddly, it turns out that most of the records I considered their ’70s cannon came out in a quick four year succession, from 1967 to 1971. Smiley Smile, Wild Honey, Friends, 20/20 - their output alternates between rehashing Brian Wilson’s weird Smile outtakes, and crass stabs at AM radio hits by Mike Love. With the current flux of weird indie vocal pop drawing fresh comparisons to the Beach Boys heyday (Grizzly Bear, Fleet Foxes), I thought I would revisit one of their records I hadn’t gotten very deep into previously, Surf’s Up.
“Long Promised Road”, the second track on the record, grabbed me hard - it had some of the later Beach Boys’ inventive instrumentation, and the insistent pop hooks that the band had made its name with (and a sweet, sweet dueling-moog-and-guitar solo). It wasn’t really a surprise that it was neither Brian Wilson nor Mike Love behind the song; both had played their hands, and it would take some fresh ideas to make the Beach Boys shine again.
“Long Promised Road” was written by Carl Wilson and Jack Rieley, who had been hired on as The Beach Boys’ new manager in 1970, after the commercial failure of their last album, Sunflower. Rieley, a DJ, had impressed the band with his falsified credentials (a supposed Peabody Award-winning stint as NBC bureau chief in Puerto Rico) and ideas on how to regain respect from American music fans and critics. His first initiative was to have The Beach Boys record songs with more socially aware lyrics. Rieley also insisted that the band officially appoint Carl Wilson “musical director” in recognition of the integral role he had played keeping the group together since 1967.
“Long Promised Road” was first released as a single in May of 1971, and did not chart. It was then released on their 1971 album Surf’s Up, and was rereleased as a single, with a different b-side, “‘Til I Die”, in October of the same year. This time it made it to #89 on the Billboard Hot 100. Aside from a few guitar solos written in the early days of the band, the song is Carl Wilson’s first composition recorded by the band.