It's a rite of passage for students of pop music history: At some point, you learn that the Beach Boys weren't just a fun 1960s surf band with a run of singles that later came to be used in commercials; at their best, they were making capital-A Art. The record that convinces most is Pet Sounds, that understated 1966 masterpiece that articulates a specific kind of teenage longing and loneliness like nothing before or since. Once you've absorbed that record, you find yourself going back through songs like "Don't Worry Baby", "The Warmth of the Sun", and "I Get Around", finding a deeper brilliance where you once heard only pop craftsmanship. As you make these discoveries, you come to learn about the auteur at the center of it all, Brian Wilson, who shouldered the burden of being the creative force in one of the most successful and musically ambitious pop bands of the era. And then you find out about SMiLE.
Conceived, recorded, and ultimately abandoned in 1966 and 1967, SMiLE was to be something like Brian's Sgt. Pepper's, his attempt to make the great art-pop album of the era. He followed his muse to the ends of the earth, putting a grand piano in a massive living room sandbox, outfitting another room with an Arabian tent, making session musicians wear fireman's hats for the recording of a song about the elements, freaking out when an actual fire broke out down the street from the studio around the time of recording of said track, and, no surprise, taking enough drugs to amplify the whole scene and turn it into something terrifying. But the record was not to be. The music recorded for SMiLE was too far-out for the rest of the band (lead singer Mike Love hated the lyrics penned by Wilson's collaborator, Van Dyke Parks, an opinion he still holds) and Wilson had trouble finishing tracks. Eventually, he shelved the record for good and the band issued the low-key, weird, and supremely stoned Smiley Smile. By setting the record aside, Wilson became afraid to indulge his talent, and his contributions to the Beach Boys would never again be central to the band.
If you're wired a certain way, once you learn the SMiLE story, you long to hear the album that never was. It looms out there in imagination, an album that lends itself to storytelling and legend, like the aural equivalent of the Loch Ness Monster. And the songs from the sessions that eventually made it out on other records-- "Surf's Up", "Cabin Essence", "Heroes and Villains", and more, including material on the 1993 Beach Boys career-overview box Good Vibrations-- were so brilliant that the lack of proper release becomes almost painful. So you might start hunting down bootlegs, poring over the fragments, and finding competing edits and track sequences, which only feeds your desire to know what the "real" SMiLE could have been.
Only in 2003, when long-time Beach Boys fanatic and tape trader Darian Sahanaja and his band the Wondermints collaborated with Brian on a live version of SMiLE and 2004's Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE album did the lost record assume a definitive shape. But as exciting as that record was at the time, the lure of the originals never went away. So there was naturally a great deal of excitement when, early this year, we heard that the original tapes were being assembled for official release. This epic story finally has an ending, and it's a very happy one. As archival projects go, SMiLE is as surprising, generous, and successful as anything in recent memory. The version of the album, based on the Wilson/Wondermints sequence, feels remarkably complete and whole, even though it was largely built from unfinished scraps.
During this period, Wilson and Parks were working on an enormous canvas. They were using words and music to tell a story of America. If the early-60s Beach Boys were about California, that place where the continent ends and dreams are born, SMiLE is about how those dreams were first conceived. Moving west from Plymouth Rock, we view cornfields and farmland and the Chicago fire and jagged mountains, the Grand Cooley Damn, the California coast-- and we don't stop until we hit Hawaii. Cowboy songs, cartoon Native American chants, barroom rags, jazzy interludes, rock'n'roll, sweeping classical touches, street-corner doo-wop, and town square barbershop quartet are swirled together into an ever-shifting technicolor dream.
Befitting an album concerned with history, SMiLE feels strangely adrift from time, using the technology of the day and an avant-garde approach to pop song form to make the past look both familiar and strange. In 1966 and 1967, old-timey music, if you squinted at it just so, could be imbued with a haze of psychedelia. And this is a deeply psychedelic album, though disorientation mostly comes from its juxtapositions, how the orchestral miniatures (or "feels," as Wilson called his modular melodic ideas) bump into each other and find their way from one song to the next, the "Heroes and Villains" refrain here, the "Child Is Father of the Man" refrain there.
The 2004 sequence divided the album into three "movements," with songs connected thematically, and this reissue wisely puts each on its own side of vinyl (if you want only the record proper, the 2xLP, with key outtakes added on the fourth side, is absolutely the way to go). Each movement has at least one pop masterpiece. On the first, there's "Heroes and Villains" and "Cabin Essence", both exploring western themes in Parks' bent style. Here and especially on side two's "Surf's Up", the level of Parks' writing is astounding. He had the sound-driven jumble of imagery of contemporaneous Dylan, but his words were far tighter and more disciplined. He also understood the power of a good pun. Sounds are slurred together to take on new meaning through clusters that extended beyond the spaces between the words. So, "The music hall, a costly bow," in "Surf's Up" also sounds like, "The music holocaust," and lines like, "canvas the town and brush the backdrop," layer image atop image with breathtaking efficiency.
Each side's arc also serves to push forward the record as a whole. Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE has made this sequencing seem canonical, and there were enough raw materials in the vault available to piece together a worthy approximation. Once in a while, you can hear a stitch or shift that would have no doubt been done over later, but those moments are rare and ultimately only add to the record's charm. By the time the tense and throbbing neo-classical piece "Fire (Mrs. O'Leary's Cow)" comes along in the third movement and then leads into "Love to Say Dada" (mostly an instrumental, it was meant to have lyrics; they were added for Brian Wilson Presents Smile, the song titled "In Blue Hawaii") and then to the extended "Good Vibrations", the strength of the album as a full piece is staggering.
But part of the allure of SMiLE will always be the pieces, and the deluxe box has a lot of them. There's almost a full disc of "Heroes and Villains" fragments and another entire CD with bits of "Good Vibrations". Given the nature of this release, the extras are illuminating, arguably more essential than most outtakes included with bonus albums. Having source materials hints at roads not taken, and also offers insight into the difficulty of actually creating a record on this scale, given how much we've heard about all the bouncing and layering that SMiLE entailed (the complexity of which is partly to blame for the project's being late and ultimately abandoned) and how many of the basic tracks were recorded live in the studio with a dozen or more musicians at once. There were only four and eight tracks to work with on the tape of the time, so one of them would need multiple instruments just to have voices and overdubs added later. Not to mention that these modular sections were eventually going to be stitched together with tape and razorblades. Beyond the fragments, there are brilliant single performances, like the two demo versions of "Surf's Up". To my ears, the song is a high-water mark of pop songwriting, positively haunting with its melodic twists and turns. And Brian's vocal performances, with wild leaps into the upper reaches of his falsetto, give the track an almost unbearable poignancy. It's incredible to think that "Surf's Up" would remain in the vault for five years, until it appeared in re-worked form on the 1971 album of the same name.
On the sessions material, you also get to hear Wilson running the show in the studio, and apart from a few asides where he talks about hash and LSD, he sounds excited, patient, and kind, offering encouragement about mood, timing, and tempo. He surely wasn't an easy guy to work for, but hearing his voice on these tapes, it's remarkable how together he seems and how willing he is to work with these musicians to make something great. Most of all, his studio patter provides a nice counterbalance to SMiLE's prevailing narrative, of a crazed genius unraveling in the face of trying to create his masterpiece. We love crack-up stories. There's something in the Western psyche that loves to romanticize the alleged connection between madness and genius. And someone like Wilson-- fragile, paranoid, childlike, and dreamy-- fits one template of the crazed genius to a T. Never mind that he was a student of music, put in twice as many hours of extremely hard work as anyone else in the band, and relied greatly on collaboration and outside inspiration. When thinking of SMiLE, the guy in the fireman's hat thinking his music could burn down buildings is who we remember. But now we have the full picture. SMiLE was never finished, and it still isn't, but we can safely say this is as close as it'll ever come. What's here is brilliant, beautiful, and, most importantly, finally able to stand tall on its own.
