At this point it's hard to figure out what to say next about The Beach Boy's Smile album. Part of the problem is that everyone thought there was nothing left to say about it at least twice previously. The first time was when the album didn't come out in 1967 and they released Smiley Smile instead. Everyone knew (or thought they knew) that Smile as originally conceived would have been better, but hey — that's not the album that came out. That happens.
We knew at the time the original concept of Smile was some kind of rock “symphony” or at least a suite, combining shimmering pop numbers — “Good Vibrations," “Vegetables," “Wonderful” — with “long form” poetic meditations on the meaning of America and life in general, like “Heroes and Villains.” All to be woven together in a seamless celebration with fanciful arrangements and instrumentation, including a “new” type of pop music construction based on small interpenetrating musical “modules.” But when the album was half-way done, or all-the-way-done, or only a little bit done (depending on which story you heard or believed), Brian Wilson, driven to madness by experimentation with drugs and his own inner demons and resistance from the rest of the band to his new direction, destroyed the tapes. The band released Smiley Smile, with edited versions of some of the songs, and that was that. Those were the sixties, crazy things like that happened all the time.
Smile seemed to be relegated to music-geek legend (one writer called it “the most famous unreleased album in rock history”), the rock equivalent of obsessing over the forgotten remainder of Coleridge's Kubla Khan, and for the most part everyone moved on. For example, Paul Williams, writing for the influential rock magazine Crawdaddy in 1967 stated, “Smile will not be forgotten, it will never be. But I am comfortable with Wild Honey [the Beach Boy's austere follow-up to Smiley Smile] now, celebrate Wild Honey now, because it is new and fresh and raw and beautiful and the first step in the direction of even greater things than what was once to be.”
Well, that was what we thought. But gradually, over the years, something else happened. It became clear that the masters were not destroyed, just never finished. The Beach Boys released truncated versions of more of the songs over the next few years, with the songs popping up on the albums Wild Honey (“Mama Says”), 20/20 (“Our Prayer," “Cabinessence”), and the title song of 1971's Surf's Up. And then there were the bootlegs, hours and hours of them, of the tracks in various stages of completion. And partially because of the mystique of this “lost masterpiece," Brian Wilson's “hipness” reputation started to grow. Thousands of words about Wilson and his oeuvre were expended in magazines like Bomp and Goldmine. Former Velvet Underground member John Cale wrote a song about him. The music that had not been permitted on the stage at the Monterey Pop Festival because it was “too square” was now considered prescient, almost avant-garde. Musicians and critics were falling over themselves proclaiming the “importance” of the 1966 album Pet Sounds. There was even a 1976 TV special put together by the Saturday Night Live crew (the apogee of TV hipness at the time) starring Brian and the other Beach Boys along with John Belushi and Dan Akyroyd.
Cut to 2003. The intervening years kept Smile's and Wilson's reputation frozen in time, helped in some ways by Wilson's continued mental problems that kept him out of the spotlight, and the dearth of new material after 1979. But suddenly — no one seems to agree on quite why or how — Wilson was contacting his old friends and making plans to resurrect Smile as a solo project. In a frenzy of activity (especially for a guy who had done almost nothing for 25 years) he re-assembled the album, hired and trained a (Beach Boy-less) backup band, got back together with co-writer Van Dyke Parks, recorded the album and took it on the road. And so here it was again! Writers that had been using typewriters the last time they had to pen 2,000 words about Brian Wilson's genius now were using laptops to write the same story. Acclaim was pretty much universal. And then everybody put the CD (and in this case, also the box set and DVD) back on the shelf and went back to assessing American Idiot and Jay-Z and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and whatever else was popular that year.
Which brings us to 2011. A week ago Capitol Records, in an undisguised money grab, released a hard bound book, five CD, two vinyl LP and two vinyl single box set of pretty much all the bits and pieces. It even has a 3-D “shadowbox” lid, in case you suddenly realize that you are about to pay $140 for a bunch of not-quite-finished sections of a 45-year-old album that was never released, and need additional enticement.
But the wealth of material only makes it more difficult to know what to say about it. One thing that comes to mind is that anyone who bought the 2004 Brian Wilson Presents Smile can now retire it to the attic and leave it there. It's nice that Brian finally revealed to the world how the songs were supposed to go together and what order he thought they should go in, but comparing that to these sessions demonstrates that in this case you can't go home again. The 1966 Beach Boys tracks, unfinished as they are, have a depth (both sonically and emotionally) that the remade songs don't even approach. Check out the 2004 version of “Cabin Essence” and compare it to the original 1966 tracks. Most noticeable is the lead vocal — an aging Brian Wilson replacing the youthful Mike Love. And the multilayered chorus in the original evokes a combination of anger, beauty and melancholy that is almost frightening. The 2004 version mainly sounds “real pretty.”
The 1966 tracks had the “benefit” of being recorded in the middle of a creative maelstrom — a combination of drugs, artistic ambition, infighting within the band, and the weird desperation of musicians chasing the elusive vision of a “grand creation,” pushed along (sometimes unwillingly) by Brian's Ahab-like quest to record what he was hearing in his head. And there was pressure from the record company, which was expecting something commercial to be delivered on time for release. You can feel this tension in a solo piano demo recorded by Wilson for the ballad “Surf's Up” — the song that became the centerpiece of the album (full version here — probably the most ethereal four minutes in the history of popular music).
The other distinguishing feature of the 1966 tracks is that they were recorded as small discrete sections, to be assembled into songs later. The 2004 versions were recorded as whole songs. That's certainly more logical, but these structural changes have musical consequences. In the original recordings, each section was a sort of musical adventure, being worked out as it happened (you can hear some of this on the unedited tracks in this collection). This infuses each little track with a sense of consequence that could not be duplicated later on.
But what does all this add up to? Would the album, if released, have lived up to its billing? Well, going by the evidence we have, probably not. For one thing, it has a Van Dyke Parks problem. Parks, as Wilson's collaborator, was a critical instigator of the project, but also crippled it as a work of art with his purposely obscure, emotionally distant lyrics. In an interview years later, Parks complained that Mike Love “never could get a lyric such as 'Over and over the crow flies uncover the cornfield' into his head, let alone out of his mouth.” Well, Mike happened to have been right about this one—you can check out the Cabinessence lyrics here. Parks might have thought he was rock's Wallace Stevens, but this is mostly just psychedelic hokum. He also set the tone for the album's attempt to comprehend “all of America” by mentioning various people, places, and events, signifying very little. Compared to Tony Asher's deeply introspective lyrics on Pet Sounds, songs like “I Just Wasn't Made For These Times," or almost anything from the same period by The Beatles (or, at the other end of the spectrum, Bob Dylan), most of these songs don't resonate, despite their beauty and experimental structure.
Let's face it — instead of a set of 10 or 12 strong songs that create a 3-D world you can set yourself in (like the aforementioned Pet Sounds, or for instance, Revolver, Blonde On Blonde, Aftermath, and even Zappa's Freak Out — all from 1966) Smile comes off as a mush of various related and semi-related parts, some brilliant, some not, all tossed together in a grand scheme that's only partly visible.
I've often thought that if the album had actually come out when it was supposed to, it would be remembered today as an interesting but not overly significant musical experiment from the sixties, probably with its own cult following (as John Bush also noted on the Allmusic Blog). Sorry, as devoted as I am to the Beach Boys' oeuvre (and I have every BB studio release through 1977 — the earlier ones in Mono and Stereo), I'll always be a doubter on this one — except for some of the great songs, it just doesn't move me, and I think its pretentiousness eventually overwhelms its delights.
I'm starting to think, based on these tracks and the volumes of articles and interviews on the subject, that nobody could have assembled the modules into a coherent whole — that this might have been the album that not only wasn't finished, but couldn't be finished. Unlike the middle 60s Beatles or Stones or San Francisco bands, this was not a group of musicians cooperating in order to get to a new space. Smile seemed to have become too big for the people involved — Brian wasn't together enough, the band wasn't enthusiastic enough, Van Dyke Parks wasn't talented enough, and there was nobody else who could step in and put the puzzle pieces together when the people involved couldn't work together. And what we have here is the result of that. Which is sort of OK, but there's a big difference between a finished work of art and the pieces of one, which someone might have been able to put together into something.
Here's hoping that this is the last time we have to write about Smile. Now go listen to "Good Vibrations."
Tony Are is a writer, critic, and occasional musician who lives in New York City. He started playing in bands in 1967 and finally gave up in 2003. Now he sits in a rocking chair and tells the young whippersnappers how much better it used to be in his day. His poetry is at http://tonyare.weebly.com/index.html.
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