Goodbye Surfing, Hello God!

"Goodbye Surfing, Hello God!"
Cover of 2011 reprint published by Atavist.
Author	Jules Siegel
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Non-fiction
Published in	Cheetah
Media type	Print (magazine)
Publication date	October 17, 1967

"Goodbye Surfing, Hello God!: The Religious Conversion of Brian Wilson" is an article written by Jules Siegel chronicling his experiences with Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys during recording sessions for the unfinished studio album Smile and its collapse. It was first published in the magazine Cheetah in October 1967, and has since been anthologized in several formats. In 2011, it was made available by Atavist as an e-book.

In the mid-1960s, Jules Siegel had a brief, close acquaintance with Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. In addition to several others who comprised a coterie of journalists and businessmen. Siegel accompanied Wilson for much of the Smile era. Siegel, who had recently migrated from New York to Los Angeles, was impressed with Wilson, and he documented his experiences for an article which he had presold for The Saturday Evening Post. Ultimately, as Siegel claims in the piece, the magazine rejected his story due his overly enthusiastic depiction of Wilson's material. It was instead published in the magazine Cheetah, which is now defunct.

After its publication, the article propelled the resultant mythology of Smile and the Beach Boys. It is the origin of several of the project's legends, including Wilson's fear of the film Seconds, his cancelling of a $3,000 recording session due to "bad vibrations", and his irrational fear of an acquaintance whom Wilson believed practiced witchcraft (Siegel later revealed that it had been his girlfriend). Author Luis Sanchez commented: "He probably had no idea that in writing this story he was also laying the foundation for a mythology that would eventually curl back on to itself and become a snare. As long as there wasn’t a finished album that could speak for itself, the mythology that displaced it came to signify not only a broken promise, a tragic turning point in The Beach Boys’ career, but a way to reduce Brian himself to a set of eccentricities, self-destructive habits, gossip, and, finally, madness."