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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Last week, Brian Wilson performed the Beach Boys' unreleased album "Smile" for the first time. How did the 1966 concept LP become the stuff of myth, anyway?
Feb 25, 2004 | Had it been completed in 1966 as planned, "Smile," the Beach Boys' legendary unreleased album, would have begun with a song called "Prayer": a minute and a half of wordlessly angelic brotherly harmony, pure and rising. The band's leader, Brian Wilson, called "Smile" his "teenage symphony to God," and despite the mess that his abandoned masterpiece became, there's no mistaking "Prayer." The song is an invocation. It must be the beginning, or it must not be at all.
According to "Look! Listen! Vibrate! Smile!" -- Dominic Priore's exhaustive sourcebook of clippings and "Smile" arcana -- Wilson began tracking "Prayer" several days after beginning the "Smile" sessions in earnest in October 1966. Most of that summer had been devoted to the 18 studio dates that yielded the Beach Boys' classic "Good Vibrations," Wilson's triumphant so-called pocket symphony, which -- in turn -- had followed the "Pet Sounds" LP, the ethereally tender response to the Beatles' "Rubber Soul" that he had crafted in early 1966.
All in all, 1966 was a busy year for Wilson. By the end of it, however, "Prayer" wasn't finished. It wouldn't be until November 1968, when it was completed for a different Beach Boys album, "20/20." And though Wilson promised Capitol Records that "Smile" would be ready for release on Jan. 1, 1967 -- cover art was prepared and the label began a promotional campaign -- it wasn't finished by the end of that year, either. Nor, for that matter, by the end of that decade, the three that followed, or even the century.
Eventually, the "Smile" reels leaked, and over the years a network of Beach Boys geeks have traded reconstructed versions of the LP like Deadheads exchanging live tapes. Those fan versions, along with the many promises of "Smile's" true completion -- it was a stipulation of the band's contract with Reprise Records in the early '70s, and tracks were unearthed for a possible touch-up in the late '80s -- make it difficult to know what tense to describe the album in. The past ("Smile" contained several ambitious song-suites co-written with lyricist Van Dyke Parks...) is too etched in stone for an album never finished; the present ("Smile" is rock's first concept album, pre-dating "Sgt. Pepper"...) too inaccurate. It is a poetic irony of grammar, then, that the only appropriate voice is the future perfect.
But now, "Smile" is taking a big step toward the present tense. Last Friday, in London, Wilson performed the album for the first time in front of a live audience. He will repeat the performance in a tour through Europe over the next few months and, in the fall, the United States. Wilson and the 18-piece band that backed him received a five-minute standing ovation after their London performance, but they are playing against history. Wilson's voice is no longer what it once was, and the brotherly harmonies literally do not exist anymore. His brothers are dead (Dennis, via a drunken drowning in 1983; Carl, from cancer, in 1998) and Wilson is estranged from the other two founding Beach Boys (cousin Mike Love amid a snarl of songwriting legalities, and former neighborhood friend Alan Jardine in a lawsuit over remarks made in Wilson's ghostwritten 1991 autobiography -- "Wouldn't It Be Nice?" -- produced under the watch of Wilson's then-Svengali psychiatrist Eugene Landy).
Then again, except for their vocals, the Beach Boys barely played on "Smile," anyway. The later-named Wrecking Crew, a conglomeration of Hollywood's best session musicians, including drummer Hal Blaine and bassist Carol Kaye, performed the music. Mike Love was especially opposed to the project, deriding Wilson's "drug music" at every turn, urging Brian to stick with the successful girls 'n' cars formula. The wound of their leader's seemingly abandoning them at their peak still festers -- leaving the Beach Boys family in a deep decades-long feud of love, money, death and sex -- and will make difficult any stand-alone release of the original sessions.
Internal band strife is only one explanation for why "Smile" never got made. Wilson's struggles with addiction (to drugs, to food), the Beach Boys lawsuit against Capitol Records for back royalties, and their attempt to start to their own label and install a studio in Brian's mansion also played a role. Somewhere, "Smile" got lost. That somewhere was probably inside the song "Heroes and Villains."
"Heroes and Villains," most likely, would have followed "Prayer." Though it was eventually issued in shortened form as a follow-up single to "Good Vibrations," the song began as something grander. Some versions of the story have it taking up 18 minutes and filling the projected LP's entire first side. In every possible way, it was symbolic of the album's successes and failures.
"Heroes and Villains" was one of several song umbrellas conceived by Wilson and Parks. Structurally, it was a surreal comic opera, with intertwining musical and lyrical themes that drew on American history and popular melody. Realistically, it was a collection of song fragments with repeating motifs, such as "Bicycle Rider," whose "Bicycle rider see, see what you've done / To the church of the American Indian" chorus evoked Manifest Destiny and the blues number "C.C. Rider" in one trippy breath. As he did with "Good Vibrations," Wilson wrote "Heroes and Villains" in sections, planning to assemble them later. He never did.
