Grin and Bear It

By Devin McKinney

Brian Wilson was right to finally release his magnum opus, Smile, after all these years. Too bad he didn't leave it alone.

OK, let's go through this again:

Smile was meant to be The One. Conceived as the follow-up to the Beach Boys' groundbreaking 1966 Pet Sounds album, it was intended as the band's masterpiece, as well as writer-producer-arranger Brian Wilson's boldest challenge to The Beatles as supreme dictators of progressive mid-’60s pop-rock. For three years prior, Wilson had been combining a more refined version of Phil Spector's “wall of sound” with lyrics and vocals that insisted on despair and isolation. The result was not only gorgeous, radio-perfect pop but also a personal style both resounding and delicate, booming and haunting.

And Smile would be the perfection, the apotheosis of this. It would be a song cycle, a multi-concept album -- "a teenage symphony to God," in Wilson's summary -- with Van Dyke Parks' surreal lyrics set against the Beach Boys' most sophisticated musical textures yet. More than 70 recording sessions were held, the bulk of them between August 1966 and January 1967. Obsessing over the minutest aural details, perpetually scrapping and revising his conceptual master plans, Wilson ran the sessions like an LSD-inspired Dr. Frankenstein and worked up an anticipatory buzz around the album that was unprecedented in a pre-Sgt. Pepper pop world not yet consecrated to such major statements and grandstand plays.

But just at the moment of truth, it all collapsed. Smile had too much riding on it, and Wilson buckled under the expectations -- those he had encouraged in others, but mostly those he placed on himself. Time got away from him, his visions overwhelmed his discipline, and the project lost whatever thematic anchor it had had. Wilson went into retreat, the Beach Boys lost momentum, and both began a downward slide from which they never recovered, commercially or artistically. A few of the Smile songs were released in subsequent years on subsequent albums, but the majority of the recordings were left to molder in a mausoleum of myth, a heap of glittering rubble surrounded by whispers of what surely would have been.

Then, in the mid-’80s, Smile somehow escaped the mausoleum and began to appear on illicit vinyl, and by the ’90s, lengthy session tapes were flowing like water from some underground spring -- hour after hour of vocal overdubs, instrumental tracks, studio talk, extended suites, and perfected interludes. Work that had been so famously unheard for so long was finally put to the ear test, and myth-mongers and genius debunkers alike could decide for themselves.

Smile has always been the focus of warring orthodoxies. Any work so laden with superlatives without having been heard was bound to inspire backlash, and a consensus gradually emerged among the non-devoted that the album really wasn't anything much, was certainly not genius, nor on a level with earlier Beach Boys hits like "Don't Worry Baby" or "I Get Around." But its advocates claimed it was everything Wilson had ever promised and more: a fount of musical beauty, of humor and wonder, of dazzling vocal interplay and instrumental nuance.

For myself, I am unrepentantly of the latter persuasion, though I can see why some are unconvinced. Smile is soft and sweet, treads the line between insipid and inspired, and is best consumed in smaller quantities. Listen too long and the richness turns to goo, the invention loses its novelty, and the production brilliance grows as irritating as tinsel the day after Christmas.

But that was a risk that listeners deserved the chance to take: How draconian to withhold music that threatens to give too much, when most music of the day gives so damn little! Smile deserved to be recovered, reconsidered, rehabilitated, reconfigured -- pieces put in place, edges sanded, and gaps filled -- pretty much as it has been now, by Wilson himself, on a new release titled (imagine that!) Smile.

The one problem with this album is that it's not Smile. That is, it's not Smile as it was then, in 1966, when Wilson was at the apex of his ambition, his craziness, and his inspiration. When he was making celestial jukebox pop in the Spector-hallowed halls of Gold Star Studios in Hollywood, with history-making musicians like drummer Hal Blaine, bassist Carole Kaye, and keyboardist Larry Knechtel. When the Beach Boys' voices were young and strong, a chorus of silver surfers cruising Wilson's blue musical skies.

That was Smile as it should have been heard. But things are seldom that simple, seldom that right, in life or in the record store. The music that now appears under the Smile banner presents a unique problem because it is -- in the infamous phrase -- not the original but an incredible simulation. Wilson set out to replicate the sound, the feel, the note-for-noteness of the original recordings; to re-create, as a "new" work and as precisely as possible, what he had once created. Over backings provided by Los Angeles pop adepts the Wondermints -- most of whose instrumentation is virtually indistinguishable from its Gold Star model -- Wilson sings the same lyrics he sang nearly 40 years ago, attempting the same inflections, reaching for the same state of rapturous innocence.

There is, of course, a tradition of artists revisiting earlier works to see what, if anything, has changed. In the distance between first inspiration and mature reflection lies a vast field of potential -- for irony, emotion, illumination. Only two rules apply: There must be a measurable difference between the old and the new, and that difference must somehow function in favor of the work, not against it. But the sad fact is that Wilson's voice, once so high and heartbreaking, the voice of an inconsolable romantic, is now tonally all wrong for this material. It's lost dexterity and expressiveness; it lumbers, whines, and at times almost brays. Having come through parental abuse, drugs and nicotine, nervous breakdown, virtual catatonia, the heights of pop fame and the depths of mass neglect, Wilson has earned every scar and drag on his voice. But he should be singing music to make those scars quiver, to ennoble that drag. And Smile is the exact opposite of that.

It's a body of music heady with youth and optimism, the perfume of chemical inspiration and creative affluence, wrought at just the moment before everything began rolling downhill. Timeless though it may prove to be, Smile is the quintessence of its mid-’60s, southern California, über-hippie moment. But Wilson's voice jerks it out of that moment and into now, and on the love songs particularly, the transformation is as smooth as sandpaper. "Wind Chimes" and "Wonderful" -- the latter featuring one of the loveliest melodies ever composed -- were originally sung by Wilson in a sustained, weeping falsetto. Now his voice, reaching for that same tenderness but thickened and coarsened, slathers his own tunes and Parks' fragile lyrics with overemphasis, gobbets of forced feeling. Where he could once slide up to a sweet climactic note and make it sound like the most natural of ascensions (as in the "Brother John" section of "Surf's Up"), now he must all but heave the notes from his throat into a doughy middle range, where they sink indifferently. The spell of this great song, flawless in its past reading, is never cast.

The contradiction between delicate music and inelegant voice doesn't deepen Smile, it only mars it, because this is not a work that can profit from such tension. And even the backings, for all their rightness, are wrong: The Wondermints' instrumentations are precise but sterile, smooth as wax and about as vibrant. Wilson employed the original Smile mixing console in recording the new tracks, but the feel is that of today’s digital studio: Gone is the hissing depth and roomy feel of Wilson's layered, grandiose arrangements.

I don't know how this music will sound to the uninitiated, but for listeners with some familiarity (including anyone who has heard those few original Smile tracks that were released on such albums as 20/20, Sunflower, and Surf's Up), it will be impossible not to compare the new version with the old -- and to wonder why the new must exist. Why the original tapes were not polished and finished, edited and sequenced. Why a work so near consummation and still today, in its fragmented form, so alive with tenderness and invention, the brilliance of a moment that could never have lasted, was not allowed to emerge from oblivion into common embrace.

Some would say that's just what has happened. But no one would claim Brian Wilson 2004 is the equal of Brian Wilson 1966. That being the case, how is the new Smile justified? Come to that, is it possible for an artist to forge his own work? Objectively, the answer is “no.” But the miscalculation and missed chance of Smile as it now exists -- in probably the only form the mass market will ever see -- is that it makes you ask the question.

Devin McKinney is a freelance writer and the author of Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.


I had an uncle who gave me dating advice when I was single. "When a girl stops her train of thought and says, 'Oh, never mind,'" he told me, "leave it alone--don't ask what she was going to say. You don't want to know." The rule applies to both genders and transcends courting, I have learned, and I thought of it when I heard last year that Brian Wilson had had a sudden change of heart about Smile.

With his brothers Carl and Dennis dead, and with Mike Love toting around a tribute band under the Beach Boys name, Wilson has in recent years been performing and recording as a solo artist. His mental health has stabilized, by all accounts. After a successful tour of the Pet Sounds music--with the Wondermints, a California power-pop band, covering for his old bandmates--Wilson was encouraged to follow up with live performances of Pet Sounds' intended successor, Smile, and he assented. Wilson, then in his early sixties, re-united with Van Dyke Parks, a year his senior, to make something of the pieces that they had left scattered in 1967. "There are intimations of mortality here, intimations about the end of [Wilson's] performing cycle," explained Parks in a recent interview. "I get the impression that Brian knew he was running out of time."

In concert appearances, members of Wilson's troupe hold him by the arms and guide him to and from the chair he sits in when he sings. To prepare Smile for presentation, many of the same colleagues provided the composer with essential musical support. Darian Sahanaja, keyboardist for the Wondermints, scored musical passages to connect the disparate bits of Smile material, and he smoothed out the endings of pieces and their tempos to give the myriad bits cohesion. Parks, a composer and arranger in his own right--he wrote the scores for the Jack Nicholson movies Goin' South and The Two Jakes--also contributed ideas to complete the elements of Smile and organize them as a coherent unit. In addition, Parks brought in quite a few lyrics not in the original recordings, perhaps reconstructed from memory or old notes, perhaps newly written.

Despite Wilson's fanciful description of the project, it was never a symphony any more than it was an _expression of teenage identity or a message to God. (Only "Good Vibrations" evokes the adolescent experience; and just one piece, the lush wordless opener "Our Prayer," is overtly connected to faith, although one could arguably call just about any composition a kind of sacred communication.) The Smile archaeologists who have been generating the bootlegs, fanzines, e-mail lists, and scrapbooks on the subject (including a 299-page paperback collection of news clips and miscellany, Look! Listen! Vibrate! Smile!, edited by the "Smile historian" Domenic Priore) largely agree that the original record was to be packaged as a relatively conventional collection of discrete songs, along with one suite to be called "The Elements." (Around 1980, one of several times Wilson revisited Smile for possible completion and release, he talked about wanting to organize all the tunes in three sections.)

The version prepared for concert performances and adapted for CD, by contrast, is something more advanced and elaborate: a three-movement work of components arranged to flow as of a piece; themes recur, as in formal music--almost always in the new interstitial segments and orchestral flourishes that are the result of recent collaborating by Wilson, Sahanaja, and Parks. The work seems reverse-engineered to fulfill not only the historical promise of the original but also the larger myth that has grown around it. The CD is a compelling argument for Smile's singularity as a masterwork of long-form pop; but it cannot be mistaken for evidence of it.

Unlike the early Beach Boys records that made Wilson's outsized reputation, the new version of Smile is essentially a performance piece documented on CD, rather than a work inextricable from the recording medium. The basic tracks were taped in segments over five days' time, with all the musicians, including those in the sizable horn and string sections as well as the rock players, performing live together in the studio. In 1966, Wilson and the Boys spent six months to make the ninety hours of tape that provided the three minutes and thirty-five seconds of "Good Vibrations." The mise-en-scène of the new Smile is the concert hall, not the studio; and so the CD denies Smile the essence of Wilson's aesthetic.

The biggest problem with Brian Wilson Presents Smile is the absence of the group for which the music was composed. "The thing is," Wilson explained in an interview in 1966, "I write and think in terms of what the Beach Boys can do." Smile was conceived for and geared to their voices--the exquisite blend of their literally related vocal instruments, the muscular grace of Carl Wilson's lead singing, and Mike Love's contrapuntal bite. The Wondermints, who are highly proficient musicians, do not have the personality of the Beach Boys; they have a personality of their own, a snarky one that gives their CDs of original material an ironic kick, but they keep it in check here. What they are doing on Smile--superbly--is mimicry, which is a difficult job, but something intrinsically devoid of the veracity and the individuality that made the Beach Boys wonderful. Brian Wilson was never the best singer in the group, and he is trying to carry all the lead vocals some four decades after his prime. His voice, a game old soldier too weak for duty, trudges through the new Smile, struggling to stay in key, swallowing words.

For all the hazards inherent in the task, artists such as Wilson certainly have the prerogative to return to old work years after the fact. Hell, they're the artists, and it is their work. If Manet could go into people's houses and repaint sold canvases, an aging Beach Boy can re-record "Heroes and Villains." But another question remains: does a different person have the right to take up another artist's incomplete work and attempt to finish it or to restore it? That is closer to the point with Smile.

Brian Wilson is a vastly different man today than he was when he left the music unfinished. We all change over time, though rarely as much as Wilson has as an artist. A few months ago, he released the most recent of his solo CDs, Gettin' in Over My Head, an assemblage of new recordings so bland, formulaic, and corny that they are irreconcilable with the work of the man who set out to create Smile years ago. They were done by someone else, and that person is clearly not functioning on the same creative level as Wilson was in 1966. It is no wonder that Wilson relied upon colleagues to help bring Smile to the stage and now to CD. What they did is well meant, but it is also at once indistinctive and excessive, like the scene of Turandot added by another composer after Puccini's death.

Toscanini famously dropped his baton when he reached the last bar that Puccini wrote. We could do something roughly comparable and listen only to the original Smile recordings--if a legitimate record company would release them. In the meantime, we have only Brian Wilson Presents Smile. Brian Wilson's Smile, masterpiece or not, is still lost.