Beach Boys

May 6, 1967 is a crucial date in pop history, the date of the obituary for something that never actually existed and yet has kept revealing itself for 41 years.

May sixth. Just under a month later, on June 2, the Beatles would unveil their most intoxicating exercise in baroque pop, “Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band“. And 1967 would see the release of an incredible number of masterpieces, from the debuts of Velvet Underground, Doors and Pink Floyd, to “Surrealistic Pillow” by Jefferson Airplane, from “Forever Changes” by Love to “Something Else” by the Kinks. The one name missing from that roll call was Brian Wilson, called upon to match the majestic grandeur of his opus maximum, “Pet Sounds“. The genius behind the Beach Boys, despite numerous attempts over the course of roughly a year to bring an equally ambitious and prophetic album to fruition, would inexorably crumble under a devastating nervous breakdown. The album in question is “Smile”, the ultimate fata morgana of 20th-century pop culture, the “teenage symphony to God” (as its creator himself called it).

But let's take things in order. “Smile” was actually conceived while “Pet Sounds” was still being finished, almost simultaneously with the band's biggest hit, “Good Vibrations”. Still conceived during the period of collaboration with Tony Asher (the lyrics were later rewritten by Wilson and Love), released in November '66 and immediately hailed by critics and audiences alike as a masterpiece, the single marked a decisive turning point both in the band's career and in the history of pop. One of the most formidable melodists of all time, Wilson nonetheless aimed at deconstructing the very idea of the song. So while “Good Vibrations”, on one hand, returned to the bright, direct, “easy” melodicism almost entirely rejected on “Pet Sounds”, on the other it came across almost as an avant-garde piece, stripping the listener of any point of reference, disoriented by the constant tempo shifts and by the song's absolute unsuitability for dancing.

“Good Vibrations” is a sibling of “I Get Around” and “Dance, Dance, Dance”, with the crucial difference that those songs speak to the body, while this one speaks to the mind (anticipating, in certain respects, IDM). The track, more a list than a song, is a string of brilliant, vividly colored sounds glued together (as confirmed by Rick Henn of the Sunrays: “I was in the studio and saw the tape of the final version. I'd never seen anything like it! It was covered in cut-and-spliced pieces. There must have been fifty or sixty visible edits!”). As if that weren't enough, “Good Vibrations” has gone down in history for introducing electronics into pop, although the frequent mention of the theremin is at best imprecise; Wilson, in fact, discovered and enlisted a musician, Paul Tanner, who, noticing the difficulty of getting precise notes out of a real theremin (an instrument played by manipulating the waves around it, never touched during performance, which makes producing clean, stable notes difficult), built something that produced a similar sound but in a more constant and precise way: it's this instrument (played by Tanner himself) that you hear on “Good Vibrations”.

This new 45-rpm triumph was, in essence, a preview of what “Smile” would become: a carnival of sonic colors, of cut-and-paste editing, of brilliant and unpredictable arrangements. Having set aside the sublime orchestrations of “Pet Sounds”, the Beach Boys' leader felt the need to raise the stakes even further, recording, across four different studios, ninety hours of music — or rather, of sonic fragments.

If “Pet Sounds” was the ultimate exaltation of the Spectorian wall of sound, “Smile” would be Wilson's personal take on Zappa-style collage or, even more so, on stream of consciousness, on free verbal-musical association. It's no coincidence that he decided not to continue his collaboration with Tony Asher, a superb interpreter of the feelings and sensations Wilson wanted to convey on “Pet Sounds” but unsuited to this new project, and instead brought in Van Dyke Parks, a young talent who around that same time was working with the Byrds and who two years later would be behind one of the most illuminating pop masterpieces of the late decade, “Song Cycle”. Parks' style is markedly different from Asher's: the latter's writing is linear, intense, lyrical, while Parks' is notable for its fragmentation, liveliness and fondness for wordplay.

The collaboration hit the ground running. The first song born from the pairing was in fact “Heroes And Villains”, one of the five “Smile” tracks to be officially released on the substitute album, “Smiley Smile”. Discussing it, however, is exceedingly difficult: it's well known that the version released as a single in July '67 and included in September on “Smiley Smile” is a truncated, re-arranged and re-recorded version compared to the one (never released) that was meant to appear on “Smile” (a fate shared by every track later revived on subsequent albums, with the exception of “Good Vibrations”).

In 1990, on the occasion of the CD reissue of “Smiley Smile” and “Wild Honey”, Capitol included among the bonus tracks the first of the two parts that, according to engineer Chuck Britz, were meant to make up the track and be released as a single, while the second section can easily be found on bootlegs. The doubt remains legitimate, if not inevitable: whether these two parts, totaling six and a half minutes, are actually the definitive edition of the track or merely a “work in progress”, there's no way to know. What is certain, however, is that the musical quality of both sections is of the highest order: the complexity of the vocal interplay, the musical textures, the sound collages (the most striking example being the main theme that flows into the segment known as “Cantina Scene”, unfortunately removed from the official version) reaches heights perhaps unmatched even by “Good Vibrations”. All of it is framed by a riot of grunts, lo-fi laughter, 50s doo-wop quotations (“Gee”, a hit by the Crows), for a decidedly disorienting result: if American fans (unlike their British counterparts) struggled to make sense of “Pet Sounds”, one wonders how they would have reacted to experiments like these.

The rapport between Wilson and Parks proved excellent right away, and within a few months, between the spring and summer of '66, they wrote numerous pieces for the new album, initially titled "Dumb Angel". The pair's idea was to create an unmistakably American record, in response to the British Invasion that was increasingly sweeping the charts. A journey across America not just geographically (departing from Plymouth Rock and arriving in Hawaii), but historically and culturally too. This is why the use of quotations and covers takes on particular significance: from the aforementioned "Gee" to "The Old Master Painter", from "You Are My Sunshine" to the main theme of "Woody Woodpecker".

Collage, just as in the contemporary work of Zappa and the Mothers, takes centre stage not only within individual tracks but across the album as a whole. The variety of pieces is remarkable: from the a cappella choir of "Our Prayer" to the revelry of "Heroes And Villains", from the extravagantly arranged old-style melody of "Barnyard" to the goofy tomfoolery of "He Gives Speeches", from the infinite sweetness of "Wonderful" (perhaps the most mangled of the tracks later reissued) to "Bicycle Rider", a most worthy successor to "Let's Go Away For Awhile", from the vocal tour de force of "Cabin Essence" to "Good Vibrations", from the titanic suite "The Elements" (unfortunately largely incomplete: while "Vegetables" — featuring the band and Paul McCartney, visiting his friend Brian, who munched on vegetables and used the resulting sound as percussion — represents earth, the intro and the sections concerning fire and water have been lost, while the one for air, though likewise lost, was replaced by "Wind Chimes") all the way to the sublime "Surf's Up". The two authors' hat, in short, seemed capable of holding an endless number of rabbits to pull out.

With "Smile", then, Brian Wilson was ready to turn the pop world upside down just as he had managed to do with "Pet Sounds". Perhaps even more so.

May 6th. Derek Taylor, the Beach Boys' press agent, announces at a press conference that "Smile" will not be released. The reasons for this abandonment are tied solely to the author's psycho-physical collapse. But what caused such a debacle?

Obviously there were several causes. Wilson had suffered for years from anxiety linked to depression (perhaps inherited from his family), to the point that he had already stopped touring with the rest of the group back in 1964. The pressure exerted by Capitol, the press and public opinion reached levels he found unbearable. The situation worsened exponentially following the release of "Pet Sounds": unsatisfactory sales (at least by the Beach Boys' standards), combined with the huge stir the album caused among critics and industry insiders, "forced" Wilson to go even further, to try to raise the quality of his music even higher. Not helping matters were the increasingly heavy doses of LSD and weed the composer was consuming at the time. And making things even more unbearable was the much-discussed rivalry with the Beatles: while Lennon and McCartney experienced the whole affair positively, Wilson began to suffer under this long-distance duel, without even enjoying the support — moral or otherwise — that the two Beatles could count on (Martin chief among them). One might in any case wonder what this rivalry between two profoundly different bands actually consisted of, to the point that the "duels" of "Revolver" vs. "Pet Sounds" and "Sgt. Pepper" vs. "Smile" turn out to be entirely pointless.

Lastly, for Wilson, there was the increasingly painful thorn named Mike Love. A brilliant and gifted businessman in the ruthless world of the music business but a blind and mediocre musician, Love neither understood nor supported the new direction his cousin had taken starting with "Pet Sounds". In particular, during the "Smile" sessions, he did everything he could to flaunt his displeasure to Wilson and Parks: Love didn't grasp his cousin's intentions, caught up as he was in that pile of bizarre fragments, and didn't appreciate Parks' lyrics in the slightest, finding them, in his view, insubstantial and vacuously cryptic. The two even ended up arguing heatedly during the "Cabin Essence" sessions, with Love demanding that Parks explain the meaning of the lyrics.

A born opportunist, Mike Love years later denied all of this, claiming to appreciate both "Pet Sounds" and "Smile", even going so far as to sue (and win) for co-writing credit on the lyrics of some "Pet Sounds" tracks (despite Asher's vehement denials of any involvement on his part in the writing of "Wouldn't It Be Nice") and to sue (and lose) Wilson and the "Mail On Sunday" newspaper for improperly using his image and the Beach Boys' name to promote the 2004 "Smile". Parks, quite shrewdly, refuted him on every front, laying the blame for the project's abandonment squarely on him.

In any case, all of this further undermined Wilson's peace of mind, as he suffered from the lack of support from the group's "deputy leader" (in 2004 he let slip in an interview a laconic "The reasons I didn't release 'Smile': first, Mike didn't like it..."). In other words, by the end of '66 the musician had become paranoid and increasingly unstable. There were several episodes of imbalance; three in particular verged on the grotesque. During the sessions for "Fire", the unfortunately lost segment of "The Elements" suite, besides asking the musicians to wear fireman's helmets, Wilson became convinced that the music he was creating was responsible for some fires that broke out near the studio (the anecdote claiming he burned the session tapes, however, appears to be false); he also became convinced that the opening line of John Frankenheimer's thriller "Seconds", "Good Morning, Mr. Wilson", was directed at him; at the peak of this clouded mental state, Wilson went so far as to claim that Phil Spector was trying to kill him.

Too many obstacles, in short, for such an ambitious and fragmented project, one that demanded an enormous expenditure of psycho-physical energy, even more so than "Pet Sounds", which was equally complex but more readily reducible to a finished, unified form.

The watered-down "Smiley Smile", recorded in haste under the dreadful production of an increasingly alienated and depressed Wilson, and the exhumed and made-up corpse of 2004, are nothing more than two further pieces of a puzzle that continues to enchant, irritate, and enthral. Two further, mocking apparitions of an elusive Fata Morgana.

Ultimately, if "Smile" continues to be talked about, it's because it represents defeat — the dwelling place of a genius who succumbs to his own genius, of the most intense light that burns only for itself, of the artist who surrenders in all his humanity and solitude.

Note: the version reviewed, released as a bootleg in 2002, was assembled by Ryan Guidry, and its track listing is just one of many that have circulated over the decades. Three years after this article was published, however, Capitol released the box set "The Smile Sessions", on whose first CD the project's curators attempted to reconstruct the original track listing with Brian Wilson's help. Although there's no certainty that the album would have seen the light of day in 1967 with that sequencing, it remains the closest thing to an official version of "Smile" we will ever get. This box set was in turn reviewed on OndaRock.

Revision by Federico Romagnoli

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12/10/2008