Brian Wilson Finally Flashes 'Smile'

Posted 10:30 p.m., Aug. 23, 2004

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My children were raised / you know, they suddenly rise. / They started slow, long ago, / head-to-toe healthy, wealthy and wise.

-- Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks,
"Heroes and Villains"
from the unreleased album "Smile" (1967)

Brian Wilson's lost "children" finally are coming home.

I'm talking about the suite of songs and eccentric musical fragments that were to have formed the infamous--and long unreleased--1967 "Smile" album, which is miraculously finding its way to market after 37 years. For Baby Boomers--or people like me who, while faring from a later generation, simply are in love with Wilson's celestial harmonies and incredible composing skills--it's as if Socrates' private memoirs had been unearthed.

Few believed it could happen. Wilson was left badly damaged by an abusive father, the pressures of performing as the one-man music factory behind the Beach Boys, the 1960s drug culture and, finally, a serious schizoaffective mental disorder that produces threatening voices in his head, voices he hears to this day. For decades, even after he got out of his famous bed, Wilson refused even to discuss "Smile," an album scorned by fellow Beach Boy Mike Love as "a whole album of Brian's madness."

Given all that, the question of whether those wayward songs on "Smile" might arrive healthy, wealthy and wise remains a matter of conjecture, but we'll find out when the finally finished, completely rerecorded "Smile" album is released in late September with newly finished lyrics and all those fascinating, frustrating, spooky, freaky, silly and frightening shards of sound from all those bootleg recordings tied together into--we can only hope--a genuinely unified whole.

Judging from the English reviews of the live shows Wilson has done in the U.K.--he began playing the album in concert overseas before re-recording it in February--there is reason to be hopeful that this music will live up to the legend. I will be among the first Americans to see it all unfold, at Wilson's U.S. debut of "Smile" at Minneapolis' Orpheum Theater on Sept. 30.

'Smile' Turned Upside Down

As the follow-up to "Pet Sounds," expectations for the record in late '66/early '67 were immense--and the pressure on Brian Wilson crushing. At that point, the Beach Boys had graduated from surfer nerds to the "psychedelic barbershop quartet," as Jimi Hendrix rather ruefully called them, by releasing the ineluctably lovely "Pet Sounds" album. Then they managed to top that record with the three-minute single "Good Vibrations," the simultaneously commercial and avant-garde miracle of a tune that saw Wilson promoted to the title of pop "genius."

As the follow-up to "Pet Sounds," expectations for the record in late '66/early '67 were immense--and the pressure on Brian Wilson crushing. At that point, the Beach Boys had graduated from surfer nerds to the "psychedelic barbershop quartet," as Jimi Hendrix rather ruefully called them, by releasing the ineluctably lovely "Pet Sounds" album. Then they managed to top that record with the three-minute single "Good Vibrations," the simultaneously commercial and avant-garde tune that saw Wilson promoted to the title of pop "genius."

Jules Siegel, a former Saturday Evening Post writer who was dispatched to spend several months with Wilson during the "Smile" sessions, chronicled the saga in Cheetah magazine's October 1967 edition, when the album was still considered merely "delayed." In it, he defines what the curious term "genius" means in connection with someone like Brian Wilson.

Not only was Brian going to produce a hit, but also, one gathered, he was going to show everybody in the music business exactly where it was at; and where it was at, it seemed, was that Brian Wilson was not merely a Genius--which is to say a steady commercial success--but rather, like Bob Dylan and John Lennon, a GENIUS--which is to say a steady commercial success and hip besides.

-- "Goodbye Surfing, Hello God:
The Religious Conversion
of the Beach Boys,"
Jules Siegel (1967)

"Smile," as Brian Wilson said at the time, was to have been his "teenage symphony to God," a meditation on the meaning of Americana, and the perfect pop album. Whether or not you agree, the Beatles actually claimed that "perfect pop record" mantle--many believe by default because of Wilson's failure--with "Sgt. Pepper" during the Summer of Love. (It was Sgt. Pepper's release and Wilson's realization that the Beatles' had won the race for "the new sound" that led him finally to give up on "Smile.")

Boot Strapping

I've long possessed many of the existing recordings from those sessions--some released legitimately in 1993, others bootlegs purchased at used record shops euphemistically labelled "imports." What exists truly are mostly fragments, though some of them--particularly the harpsichord-dominated coming of age fantasy "Wonderful," the haunting "Wind Chimes" and Wilson's solo demo of "Surf's Up"--are breathtaking. Some like "I Love to Say Da Da" and "Do You Like Worms," are alternately weird and beautiful. The instrumental "Fire" portion of what was to have been the album's "Elements" suite (the section usually labeled "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow" on the bootleg recordings) is genuinely alarming.

Among the many problems besetting such a monumentally complex project is that Wilson, as chronicled by Siegel, began manifesting the mental illness that later overwhelmed him.

"What's the matter, Brian? You're really strung out," a friend asked.

"Yeah, I'm really strung out. Look, I mean I really feel strange. A really strange thing happened to me tonight. Did you see this picture, 'Seconds'?"

"No, but I know what it's about; I read the book."

"... I walked into that movie ... and the first thing that happened was a voice from the screen said 'Hello, Mr. Wilson.' It completely blew my mind. You've got to admit that's pretty spooky, right?"

"Maybe."

"That's not all. Then the whole thing was there. I mean my whole life. Birth and death and rebirth. The whole thing. Even the beach was in it, a whole thing about the beach. It was my whole life right there on the screen."

"It's just a coincidence, man. What are you getting all excited about?"

"Well, what if it isn't a coincidence? What if it's real? You know, there's mind gangsters these days. There could be mind gangsters, couldn't there? I mean look at [Phil] Spector, he could be involved in it, couldn't he? He's going into films. How hard would it be for him to set up something like that?"

-- "Goodbye Surfing, Hello God:
The Religious Conversion
of the Beach Boys,"
Jules Siegel (1967)

His paranoia became so intense, that he wound up allegedly destroying most of the "Smile" master tapes. Siegel personally recounts that after the intense recording sessions for "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow," a fire broke out across the street from the studio; several other fires occurred around Los Angeles shortly thereafter. Wilson attributed them to the bad juju unleashed by his furious music.

So he destroyed the master recording.

"I don't have to do a big scary fire like that," he later said. "I can do a candle and it's still a fire. That would have been a really bad vibration to let out on the world, that Chicago fire. The next one is going to be a candle."

-- "Goodbye Surfing, Hello God:
The Religious Conversion
of the Beach Boys,"
Jules Siegel (1967)

Parable of the Cave

In a recent Slate article, Jeff Turrentine aptly describes the "Smile" debacle in terms of a parable: "It's the story of the emotionally fragile genius beset by knaves, forced to abandon his magnum opus rather than allow it to be compromised."

Wilson himself alluded to this when he very tersely commented about the "Smile" project during the Aug. 20 taping of "Larry King Live."

"We got some of it done then. But we junked it, because I thought it was too advanced for people to hear. ... It had a very avant-garde feeling about it. It was a little bit too advanced."

-- Brian Wilson,
"Larry King Live," Aug. 20, 2004

Certainly, the legend goes, too advanced for Beach Boy Mike Love, who had a particularly difficult time making the leap from singing "She'll have fun, fun, fun 'til her daddy takes her T-Bird away" to warbling the weirdly obscure "Smile" line, "Over and over the crow cries, 'Uncover the cornfield!'" His rebellion forced the exit of Wilson's lyric collaborator Van Dyke Parks, which in effect killed the project, Parks' contribution being crucial.

I think Turrentine has a point when he says that the collapse of "Smile" also represented the caving of Wilson to commercial pressures that, ironically, led to the Beach Boys' stunningly sudden disappearance from the music charts. Suddenly, arty ambition was abandoned and fun puffery, like the surf-rock redux "Do It Again" was back in. Brian Wilson's own sporadic contributions, like the spooky "I Went to Sleep," and his bossa nova ode to boredom, "Busy Doing Nothing," rettained the power to enthrall. But, by now, mostly no one cared.

Lesser albums followed, some like "Friends" and especially "Surf's Up," quite nifty, each a more group-focused effort, none of them again to be dominated as before by Brian's musical architecture.

This allowed for the surprising emergence of Dennis Wilson as a songwriter of note (his "Forever" on the "Sunflower" record is the equal of all but the greatest of Brian's works). Meanwhile, the Beach Boys as a group finally caught on, too late, that the strange musical realm where Brian Wilson was trying to take them in 1967 was exactly the place they needed to go. They subsequently made vain efforts to recapture the lost cachet by releasing some "Smile" tracks on subsequent records. But except for the novelty 1987 song "Kokomo," they never again had a bona fide hit.

Heroes or Villains?

So Wilson, recovering from his torment, has decided to call Parks back into the studio to finish "Smile."

What will it turn out to be?

I'm of two minds here. I'm thrilled for Wilson that he feels strong enough to finish the meisterwerk. I agree with Jules Siegel that this represents Wilson realizing his dream. And perhaps that's enough, all it needs to be.

But I also worry, as does Turrentine, that maybe it would be best to leave "Smile" in the vaults, unfinished like that famous portrait of George Washington. It certainly cannot be what it would have been--it would have altered the direction music took in the fruitful 1960s, might have rendered the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper" to second-tier status. That kind of impact is impossible now.

And it is true that, while Wilson has recovered enough to function in the world and even to make nice music, nothing he has recorded since 1971's anguished "'Til I Die" has fully tapped his creative powers. His illness leaves him apparently wary of laying bare his passions musically the way he did in his finest music--and it is evident even in its fragmentary state that "Smile" was all about passion. Also, while critics often forgivingly chirp about Brian's still pristine vocal pipes, the fact is that he has lost many steps from what was once an angelic voice.

But Wilson has commented intriguingly that he is bringing "Smile" out now because the time finally is right for that music. That's fascinating considering what "Smile" wanted to be--an album that would simultaneously encapsulate, satirize, glorify, mythologize and eulogize Americana--using the voices of the all-American band, the Beach Boys at the height of the Vietnam era.

Well, the Beach Boys are gone. But what if Wilson is right, and "Smile" really does make more sense in today's war-fatigued, polarized, riven America, where The American Dream is for so many such a distant memory that it can only be understood in terms of mythology?

And what if the more saddened, even more fragile voice that Brian Wilson now possesses in his 60s is even more appropriate to that fragile music than the gymnastic falsetto he possessed 37 years ago?

What if the time really is right for "Smile?" Wouldn't it be nice?

-- Kevin Featherly

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Kevin Featherly, a former managing editor at Washington Post Newsweek Interactive, is a Minnesota journalist who covers politics and technology. He has authored or contributed to five previous books, Guide to Building a Newsroom Web Site (1998), The Wired Journalist (1999), Elements of Language (2001), Pop Music and the Press (2002) and Encyclopedia of New Media (2003). His byline has appeared in Editor & Publisher, the San Francisco Chronicle, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Online Journalism Review and Minnesota Law and Politics, among other publications. In 2000, he was a media coordinator for Web, White & Blue, the first online presidential debates. Currently is news editor for the McGraw-Hill tech publication, Healthcare Informatics.

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Copyright 2004, by Kevin Featherly

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