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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
To the extent that battles can ever really rage between dorks lovingly obsessed with music recorded nearly 40 years ago, the battle over "Smile" does so. In addition to threads on discussion boards like the Smile Shop, Jeff Turrentine weighed in on Slate: "No band of touring musicians and singers, even one as talented as the group that backed up Wilson in 2000, will come close to capturing the magic that these kids from the ticky-tacky suburbs of Los Angeles were able to achieve in the studio [then]. To return to this now-mythic collection of songs is to gild the rarest, wildest lily in pop music. 'Smile' is dead; long live 'Smile.'"
Paul Williams disagrees. "If you are not imprisoned by your own or other people's expectations, [the old material] is just a jumping-off place for creative work," he says. "Brian is, on the face of it, completely free of any of the pressure that could have been on him over the years regarding 'Smile,' because -- just as for any other artist -- when he's doing something as a live show, he's free to do with it whatever comes to him and whatever works for the show right now. Of course, in doing that, he also gets to discover what the music is for him right now, and that directs him towards the freedom to [possibly] make a record out of it."
"Smile" and its story appeal to fans for many reasons. It is drama spread over nearly 40 years. The stakes are high: Somebody tried to achieve something momentous and didn't. One fears "Smile" because he fears failing at his own life's work. But that fear exists only for the same reason that "Smile" attracts him to begin with: Everything about it reeks of potential energy. One fantasizes of getting to the brink of achievement, but one is equally terrified of collapsing there, suddenly unable to do what had once been second nature. If people project notions of what a great album should be, then Brian Wilson becomes the avatar for it, one's own fortunes lashed to his journey. It's difficult not to root for him.
If "Smile" were to be released tomorrow, it would likely be a blip on the cultural radar. "Frankly," Paul Williams says, "I'm not sure what impact 'Sgt. Pepper' would have if it were released today, just because contexts change. 'Smile' was a project that was sincerely and earnestly the next step in a body of work. It was specifically the next step in a sequence that we'd heard as 'Pet Sounds' and 'Good Vibrations.' I think that it's inevitable that there will be a lot of good music in 'Smile' in whatever form it takes. Obviously, that doesn't guarantee sales, but I think it's just natural that it will be listened to respectfully by a lot of different people, most significantly musicians."
Yo La Tengo's Ira Kaplan owns an edition on colored vinyl. "Man, it's everything," raves Will Cullen Hart, founding member of the Wilson-devotee collective the Elephant 6 Recording Company and current leader of the Circulatory System. "Conceptually, the musical stuff [is amazing], the idea of the sections, each of them being a colorful world within itself. [Wilson's] stuff could be so cinematic and then he could just drop down to a toy piano going plink, plink, plink and then, when you least expect it, it can just fly back into a million gorgeous vocals. Of course, you've got Van Dyke Parks' lyrics..."
Williams observes, "It's ironic that we're talking about the [first] great album that never was at a time that the very form of the pop album is itself falling on hard times." While this is certainly true, the return of the single has also brought the return of the producer, with musicians such as Timbaland and the Neptunes entering the spotlight. Wilson is a precursor to them just as much as to today's indie rockers, working so successfully as he did (for a time) within the California scene's studio system, employing every modern tool at his disposal.
Ultimately, "Smile" is a patriotic album. The Beach Boys were a patriotic band. But "Smile" oozes with a different kind of patriotism, calling on American nostalgia the same way the Beatles employed music hall on "Sgt. Pepper." Despite celebrating an America that was great then and is, goshdarnit, great now, it points a ring-bejeweled finger toward a blissfully ethereal future with Uncle Sam as spirit guide. Profoundly uncynical, if "Smile" were to be released now with the attention it would have received in 1966, it might be deeply relevant as an album to rally behind for malcontent liberals accused of being America-haters for their beliefs.
Had it been completed in 1966 as planned, "Smile," the Beach Boys' legendary unreleased album, would have ended with a song titled "Surf's Up." It still might -- preferably one that weds Brian's 1966 transcendent solo vocal to backing tracks and an ending finished by Carl in 1971. The song crests gorgeously before swooping down to a lone Brian: "Surf's up, mmmmhmmmhmmm, aboard a tidal wave...," all the longing in the world -- of an individual, of a member of a family, of an American -- somehow evident in that middle "hmm." And then the Beach Boys are singing, all of them, absorbing Brian's lead in a levee-breaking swirl of harmony. If the opening to "Surfin' USA" posited the United States as a coast-to-coast ocean, then the ending to "Surf's Up" -- and "Smile" -- posits the wave that will make it so and pulls us out to sea with it.
