From memory, he says he had a lyric from Ray Kennedy, a group of people came around one night and someone in that group rewrote the lyric but he can't remember who. Brian says something like 'I could never get with that lyric'.
Has anybody ever really said who wrote what in this song? I'm pretty sure some of the finer details have been lost to time, but man, what a mess. And I really do like the song, I feel bad because I just kinda spoke negatively of it the other day, but I really have to think that the final result probably suffered greatly from too many cooks being in the kitchen.
Yes, the lyrics are tortuous, like Riely's lyrics for "Long Promised Road" and "Feel Flows," although in spite of their overly verbose nature, those two songs' lyrics flow off the tongue much more melifluously than "Sail on Sailor's" lyric does.
"Sail on Sailor" suffers from a lyric that relies on a very simple, childlike rhyme scheme in the bridge... Grumble/Rumble/Tumble/Stumble/Blunder/Thunder/Wonder/Under... and because of the large amount of clumsy consonants in the verse lyrics, it can't be as easy to sing as it would be if, say, Tony Asher or Van Dyke Parks wrote all the words. "Gale swept seaways," for instance, is not easy to sing compared to something with more assonance.
I'd love to hear a fully-Brianized "Sail on Sailor." That would be something to behold.