Music: Out of the Sandbox

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A potential hit, Surf's Up is also a song that documents the kind of personal dilemma that can afflict a rock star if he is not careful. Beginning in 1965, Brian could no longer find any satisfaction in sunny days, surfing and driving. He seemed to his friends to be lost and shattered, obviously convinced that the world was too much to cope with. Accordingly, Brian quit public life. Though he continued to make recordings (including the cleverly innovative Pet Sounds), he sometimes would not come out of his Bel Air house for six months at a stretch. Among other things, he erected a tent that filled his living room (for top-secret Beach Boy pow-wows), and covered the floor of his dining room with a huge sandbox.

It was in that sandbox, back in 1966, that he first wrote Surfs Up in collaboration with Van Dyke Parks (Song Cycle). Though Surf's Up was programmed by Leonard Bernstein on a TV special, Brian soured on the song. It was never commercially recorded, and, so the story went, Brian suppressed all taped copies. Last spring, after a four-year interval, a tape turned up in the Beach Boys' vault. Brian liked it again. "I have to admit, it's not bad," he said. And he rerecorded it for the new album.

Virile Sound. The essential message of Surf's Up—a celebration of the return to childhood—may exasperate mature listeners but seems to have worked wonders for gloomy Brian. His music has a high, soaring, quasi-religious vocal and instrumental character that even the Beatles of Abbey Road could envy. At long last, he may be on the verge of coming out of his house. Brother Carl reports that Brian has pledged to appear at a Beach Boys concert in Manhattan's Carnegie Hall this month.

That may take some doing. One afternoon last week, TIME Correspondent Timothy Tyler was invited out to the Wilson house for what promised to be Brian's first interview in four years. Brian never came downstairs. "The meeting was a test for him," reports Tyler. "He thought he could do it, but he failed." Brian did manage to phone down to Tyler as he sat in the backyard with Carl. "I'm sorry I couldn't make it down, but I just got to sleep," Brian explained. "Let me talk a while on the phone before I drift off again . . . What'm I doing? Getting back into arranging, doing that more than writing right now . . . I'm really excited about Surf's Up—as a single—it has a very virile sound . . . Well . . . um . . . I'm drifting off again . . ." Click. Whatever Brian does, Surf's Up is doing well enough. Barely out, it is fast approaching $250,000 in sales.