Revenge of the Beach Boy: He's back, and he's still got it

By Colby Bogie

Shane tells me that if anyone other than Brian Wilson had recorded SMiLE, I wouldn't like it as much. He's right. Leon says that he can't understand why some people think of rock stars like they are gods. And yes, I get his point. No musician deserves a free pass, even if forty years ago he made Pet Sounds. I refuse to admit, however, that an album's cultural context should play no part in the evaluation of that album. We are talking about pop music here: more than any other art form I know of, pop music is as much about context and myth, as much about public perception and image, as it is about any tangible finished product. Pop music is, ultimately, culturally dependent. You can appreciate a sculpture or a painting by just looking at it, without knowing anything about it - but if you don't know what mainstream Rock & Roll sounded like in 1967, how can you ever understand what makes White Light/White Heat so great?

Look, it used to be that every boy growing up in America had a favorite athlete. But I think that over the past twenty years MTV has begun to replace the sports page as a supplier of childhood heroes. When my dad was 11 or 12 years old, he had Pete Rose's baseball card, and would listen to the Cincinnati Reds game on the radio almost every day during the summer; when I was 11 or 12, I had a Kurt Cobain poster on my wall, and would listen to Nevermind over and over again on repeat. That first phase of hero-worshipping doesn't last forever - one day you suddenly realize that Pete Rose might be a great hitter, but he's still just a man with a bad haircut and a worse gambling problem; or that Kurt Cobain wrote some amazing music, but he's still just a drug-addict asshole who abandoned his wife and his daughter - but we remain fans, and we continue to follow the stories behind our heroes just as seriously as we follow their work. Just like watching sports isn't all about wins and losses, listening to pop music isn't all about some sort of unemotional judgment about which melodies are good and which are bad. There's so much more to it than that.

As a reviewer, it is my responsibility to judge an album objectively. However, I don't believe that this means I have to limit myself to only those things which are on the little white disk that I'm looking at right now. Yes, I do think that SMiLE is amazing melodically and formally, which are the elements of pop music that I suppose are the most "irrefutable," so to speak - the things which are immediately contained in the album itself, the things which allow the least amount of argument . I honestly believe that, even if it were released by some other musician, at some other time, I would still enjoy it. But when you take into account the story behind the album, when you think about the terrific Rock & Roll myth swirling around it - Brian Wilson's huge ambitions, his nervous breakdowns, his final, late-life conquering of the demons that destroyed his career - you have to appreciate it more. I feel that anyone who really cares about pop music will find his or her opinion of this album inevitably colored by the history behind it.

That history, to step back for a moment, goes something like this: Brian Wilson started SMiLE in 1967; it was intended to be the follow up to Pet Sounds, and his answer to Sgt. Pepper. People who heard early tapes from the album said it was going to be the best pop album ever recorded. Unfortunately, Brian Wilson had a severe mental breakdown and halted the recording process. Singles like "Good Vibrations" and "Heroes and Villains," both products of the SMiLE sessions, solidified the album's mythic reputation; it became the most famous unreleased album in pop history. Brian Wilson continued to have mental health problems, and the rest of his work with the Beach Boys was inferior to the albums released before the disasterous SMiLE Sessions. For the next thirty-odd years, Brian Wilson enjoyed a reputation for severe introversion and mental instability, while fans tried to piece together SMiLE from a pool of bootlegs of varying completeness. Wilson seems recently to have gotten his act together, however; in 2003, he finally completed the composition of SMiLE, took it on tour in early 2004, and released a newly-recorded version of the album last month.

If you can't appreciate the pop music soap opera that is SMiLE, if you think that the album isn't that great and that everyone is getting excited over nothing, then I feel sorry for you. Because when I listen to the first words of "Good Vibrations," and I think about the lifetime of difficulties that Brian Wilson had to overcome before he was finally able to put the song in its rightful place at the end of his magnum opus, I know that I am hearing pop music at its absolute best. SMiLE is more than just a few songs that Brian Wilson wrote back in the sixties: it is the product of a forty year drama that nobody could have scripted; it is the final piece of the Brian Wilson myth. It may not be perfect, but it is, undeniably, a pop masterpiece.