"All that is old and already formed can continue to live only if it allows within itself the conditions of a new beginning."
SMiLE: Wilsonian Democracy
Posted 6:43 p.m., Sept. 28, 2004
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By now, if you've had even a passing interest in today's release of Brian Wilson's fabled "SMiLE" album, you've heard ad nauseum the story of that project's torturous creation, collapse and disappearance in 1967. So let's skip that and talk music.
Thanks to a friendly record-store clerk, on Friday I bought an advance copy of "SMiLE." I haven't listened to anything else since, and don't expect to until after I join the privileged Minnesotans who will witness the first-ever American concert performance of "SMiLE" on Thursday night.
"SMiLE," we can finally say with authority, is a revelation. That's true even for someone who has spent years memorizing the discrete, unfinished shards of this work that have leaked out over the decades.
Gap-toothed Grin
The various "SMiLE" tapes that surfaced from those exhaustive 85 "Smile" sessions between April 1966 and May 1967 always hinted at what enigmatic music was intended for The Beach Boys' unfinished "masterpiece," the follow-up to the sublime 1966 "Pet Sounds" album.
A few weeks ago, I worked with my digital recorder/editor for about 12 hours to fashion my own "authoritative" version of "SMiLE," drawing both from the various historical accounts of which tracks were to comprise the final release and using what I felt were the best of the fragmentary recordings I possessed. (Unfortunately, in all my searches, I never came across one proposed song, "Holiday," which is contained on the 2004 version.)
Of course, it was something of a fool's errand. My reconstructed "SMiLE" was fascinating enough that I listened to it for weeks before I obtained the real thing. But it only faintly resembles what Wilson actually constructed in the final version released today, though I will credit myself with guessing right on how all those little bridge snippets of music would be used.
I chose to pick apart and reedit the many instrumental variations of the "Heroes and Villains" theme, and to cut-and-paste unrelated instrumental themes together with other pieces, such as the incomplete, instrumental-only version of "Barnyard."
No surprises here; my imagination for what "SMiLE" could be was no competition for Wilson's vision. But with "SMiLE" only about 80 percent written at the time it was abandoned, it was impossible to do anything beyond compiling a play list and working small tricks with the music. My edit only made all those quirky shards even more fragmentary, even more beguiling and strange, even more illogical.
It comes as something of a shock, then, that Wilson's sanctioned version of "SMiLE" turns out to be a brilliantly cohesive whole--if not a fully coherent one; it was never meant to be logical. But it very nearly fulfills the grandiose expectations so many cultists--including me--held for it for so many years. That it even comes close to meeting those lofty expectations is almost miraculous.
A Children's Song
When Wilson and lyrical collaborator Van Dyke Parks set out to construct "SMiLE" as a series of "modular" mini-compositions, they had several aims for the work. One was to beat back the Beatles, who at the time were working up the "Sgt. Pepper" record. Secondly, Wilson had to outdo himself. His "Pet Sounds" and follow-up single "Good Vibrations" had moved Wilson into the pantheon of "pop geniuses"--a silly tribute, to be sure, but at least more justly applied to Brian Wilson than the 30 people per issue to whom it is ladeled in the pages of Mojo magazine.
Third, and paramount, the collaborators' ambition was to move rock music into a new sphere of artistic accomplishment by producing the "perfect" pop album--Wilson's "teenage symphony to God."
Forgive a muso-worshiper's testimony that, while this is no perfect pop record, it manages to achieve Wilson's spiritual and musical ambitions. This is often incredible music, springing every bit as much from the influences of George Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland--and Jesus--as from Check Berry, Bob Dylan or Paul McCartney.
It can only be guessed what this music would have meant to the world had it appeared in December 1966, its original scheduled release date. The unresolved debate sparked by the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper" ("Can pop art be fine art?") would have been rendered moot. No one need ever have asked.
Brian's America
In some sense, "SMiLE" wants to do for rock music what DeToqueville did for democracy--fashion a benchmark celebratory social appraisal. Certainly, the major theme is identical: What does it mean to be America?
But Wilson and Parks are artists, not political scientists, so they set out an impressionistic vision of America. "SMiLE" was intended to be literate, but not literal American history. It is an idealistic, self-contained, alternative America replete with Indians, bicycles, "Iron Horse" locomotives, the Grand Coulee Dam, barnyards, talking crows, heroes and villains, an opera house, even the Great Chicago Fire. It was to play partly as ceremonial rite, partly as cartoon commentary, partly as Vietnam-era meditation on Americana. (The sinister screeching violins and pulsating drums that summon both flame and fire engine in "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow," for instance, can also easily recall conflagrations in Khe Sahn or, for more modern ears, Fallujah.)
What all those old "SMiLE" bootlegs don't reveal is that there truly was a grand design for this music. The Don-Ho-plays-Coney-Island oddity known on bootlegs as "Do You Like Worms," truly the weirdest thing Wilson ever wrote, emerges in finished form not as a flight of drug-addled fantasy, but as a parable, now titled "Roll Plymouth Rock." Its new lyrics reveal what Wilson was driving at all along.
Plymouth rock is rolling, to the accompaniment of a brilliantly visual descending bass line, to America's manifest destiny, the shores of Hawaii. It makes no literal sense, but the line, "Once upon the Sandwich Isles / the social structure steamed upon Hawaii" is like a stab of light momentarily illuminating what a subversive intellectual exercise this really is.
Much of the material here is familiar stuff, old songs like "Heroes and Villains," "Cabin Essence," the utterly goofy "Vege-tables" and the astonishing "Surf's Up," all of which were reprised as singles or sprinkled on late '60s Beach Boys albums when the band, belatedly, realized their mistake in helping to quash the record, a decision that precipitated their commercial demise. But it's all re-recorded, note-for-note perfect from the old recordings, but benefiting tremendously from modern digitization that brings the instruments and voices to stunning life. It's as if a thick layer of dust has been lifted off the old recordings, bringing out their intrinsic beauty.
Occasionally even more stunning are the unfamiliar pieces, many of which previously had only half-formed lyrics, or no lyrics at all. Alternately sunny and anxious "Song for Children," flows with a kind of inevitability from the gorgeous "Wonderful," before drifting into the amazing, buoyantly optimistic "Child is the Father of the Man," known before only as the spiraling coda to the original "Surf's Up," one of the 1960s' landmark recordings.
"I'm in Great Shape" starts out like a Stephen Foster march before morphing quickly into the whimsical "I Wanna Be Around," a song about a broken heart (originally featuring Dennis Wilson's soulful vocal) that ends humorously, with the sounds of a hammers and saws in a carpenter's shop. "On a Holiday" is Brian Wilson at his happiest, most focused and engaged, a quality that in itself no small miracle, given his immense struggles.
"SMiLE" is undoubtedly not what it would have been--and since it was unfinished, there's no saying what it might have been. There is no doubt that in part, this is Brian Wilson, present tense. The opening lyrics to "In Blue Hawaii" that sound immediately after the panic-stricken "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow" are clearly a pained acknowledgment of the original, breakdown-provoking "SMiLE" sessions:
"Is it hot in hell in here, or is it me? / It really is a mystery. / If I die before I wake, / I pray the Lord my soul to take; / my misery."
-- "In Blue Hawaii,"
Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks
Beach 'Byes
On my second listen to this disc, I began to miss the voices of the original Beach Boys, especially that of Carl Wilson, whose angelic vocalizations sometimes outshone his more talented brother's, particularly on the original bootleg version of "Wonderful," on "Good Vibrations" and on "Surf's Up." Even Mike Love, the villain of the "SMiLE" saga is missed. His voice made the biggest impression on the wordless, entrancing chorale "Our Prayer," and on the "Cabin Essence" coda.
But the repeated listens demanded by this disc shake away those reservations. "SMiLE" is the songs, not the singers.
To the New York Times reviewer who most thoroughly missed the point of this record, accusing Wilson of having degenerated into a Brian Wilson cover artist, let me say this: "SMiLE" is a modern-day pop symphony, ragged and sloppy in some places, yes, but of a piece, an organic whole. Perhaps it doesn't shape up to the bootleg tapes in your collection, though it strains the imagination to understand that. I'd simply point out that most people haven't heard those illicit recordings. And "SMiLE," as this brilliant document proves, was always a piece of music that deserved the place in the sun it now will receive.
We should all thank the stars that we finally have it. And we should all thank God for the miracle of Brian Wilson's psychological and artistic rebound.
-- Kevin Featherly
- American Heritage magazine has a great story on the Beach Boys' saga, including the SMiLE era.
