One of the Only Times Brian Wilson Actually Went Surfing Was With Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi
One of the true musical geniuses of the 20th century, Brian Wilson, just ed away at the age of 82. The Beach Boys legend is best ed for masterpieces like Pet Sounds and the troubled Smile — and not for the time he serenaded the Tanner family on Full House, which Wilson himself didn’t doing.
The Beach Boys obviously had a ton of songs about surfing, from “Surfin’ U.S.A.” to “Surfer Girl” to “Surfin’ Safari.” Then there’s the hauntingly beautiful “Surf’s Up,” which feels more like a rainy funeral than a day at the beach.
But despite the fact that his music was at the forefront of surf culture in the ‘60s, Wilson didn’t actually surf. As he told David Letterman in 1988, he tried it only once, but quickly abandoned the activity when the board nearly took out his eye.
Wilson has told this anecdote multiple times over the years, and the only evidence we have that Wilson ever did ride the waves, is a comedy sketch starring Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi.
The 1976 TV special, The Beach Boys: It's OK!, combined concert footage, interviews and some more comedic bits. As Far Out Magazine pointed out, The Beach Boys were trying to appeal to “a younger audience” at the time, and enlisted the help of Saturday Night Live’s Lorne Michaels, who produced and co-wrote the special.
Also on board were SNL cast Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi. In addition to co-writing the show with Michaels and Alan Zweibel, the comedians appeared in a scene, dubbed “Brian’s Nightmare,” in which they play officers with the highway patrol “Surf Squad,” who cite Wilson for “failing to surf, neglecting to use a state beach for surfing purposes, and otherwise avoiding surf boards, surfing and surf.”
The cops then drive a reluctant Wilson, who’s still wearing his bathrobe, to a beach where they force him to go for a quick surf.
While the special may be largely forgotten today, a clip from the scene was shared by the Blues Brothers Instagram following the news of Wilson’s death.
The segment was no doubt funny, but Wilson didn’t really enjoy the experience. “He was not happy about it,” Michaels once told Rolling Stone. “It was almost a baptism.” Incidentally, that same day, photographer Annie Leibovitz was at the beach, and snapped a shot that would be used on a Rolling Stone cover that year.
Thankfully she was able to crop out the two fake surf cops.