After 37 Years Of Anticipation, The World Hears Wilson’s “Smile”

By Lloyd Carroll

The late Leonard Bernstein often called Beach Boys founder Brian Wilson one of the 20th century’s great composers. Yes, Bernstein was always more receptive to rock music far more than most of hismclassical contemporaries were, but he was not judging Wilson’s work by a lesser standard than he would symphonic music composers. The truth was that by 1966 it was not unusual for members of the L.A. Philharmonic to take part in Beach Boys session recordings because Wilson saw pop music as a way to create what he called “pocket symphonies.” The Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds” album was the perfect hybridization of catchy melodic pop hooks, wistful lyrics and sophisticated orchestration which would have impressed someone who never turned the FM dial away from WQXR. As with many who have been tagged with the “genius” label, Wilson has spent a good deal of his life battling mental demons. He stopped touring with the Beach Boys in 1965 so that he could devote his energies full-time to composing and working in the recording studio.

A perfectionist, Wilson always felt that he had to top his previous work, and to make matters worse, by 1967 he felt that he had to find a way to outdo the Beatles’ just-released “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” LP. That was of course an almost impossible feat but that did not stop Wilson from undertaking his most ambitious project yet, the “Smile” album.

“Smile” was unlike any album of its time and breaking the mold did not please either his Beach Boys bandmates nor Capitol Records executives, who failed to sense a commercial sound in Wilson’s work and were livid at the skyrocketing recording costs. Brian resented the negativity around him and he pulled the plug on “Smile” before its completion. The end result was that “Smile” became the most famous unreleased album in rock history. Thirty seven years after walking away from the project, Wilson, long freed of his relationship with the Beach Boys, decided to delve into the past with his current backing band and wound up creating a new “Smile” CD which has just been released by Nonesuch Records.

As a way of promoting “Smile,” Brian Wilson gave a concert last week at Carnegie Hall, a perfect venue for his rock and roll symphonies. Surprisingly, he began the evening with old Beach Boys favorites while opting to save the entire “Smile” performance for after intermission. The first 20 minutes of the show could have been called “Brian Wilson Unplugged,” as he and his band gave rousing versions of “Surfer Girl,” “Please Let Me Wonder,” “Drive-In” and “Wendy” utilizing only acoustic guitars and bongos to keep the beat. The band created a fuller sound with traditional electric instruments on “California Girls,” “Good Timin’,” “Dance, Dance, Dance,” “God Only Knows” and the underrated “The Little Girl I Once Knew.” Just about the only problem for Brian was that he stumbled on some of the tough rapid rhymes of “Sail On, Sailor.”

Wilson got down to the business at hand as soon as he hit the stage for the second half. It was clear that the myth that he had destroyed the original “Smile” tapes in frustration was an urban legend since most of the material presented here such as “Surf’s Up” (a song which has absolutely nothing to do with the sport of surfing), “Heroes And Villains,” “Wind Chimes,” “Vegetables” and the finale, “Good Vibrations,” found their way to other Beach Boys albums.

Sitting through the live rendition of “Smile,” I could immediately sympathize with how the Beach Boys and Capitol Records honchos must have felt back in the day as the original “Smile” sessions were occurring at Hollywood’s Western Studios. Wilson’s lyricist, Van Dyke Parks, deliberately wrote pretentious, oblique lyrics which made sense to probably only Brian and himself. There was also a plethora of loud dissonance as exemplified by the sounds of barnyard animals which made me put my fingers in my ears after a while.

The one silver lining was that Brian Wilson showed a sense of humor at times. Legend had it that he made studio musicians wear fire helmets at the “Smile” sessions as he used the sirens from fire trucks for the album. Wilson’s band wore fire department gear at Carnegie Hall in tribute to those great studio musicians known in L.A. as “The Wrecking Crew” back in the 1960s as they performed a bizarre tune called “Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow,” a song about the woman who allegedly started the Great Chicago Fire in the 19th century. Brian also broke up the monotony by singing a few bars of Astoria native Tony Bennett’s big hit, “I Wanna Be Around,” and Jimmy Davis’ “You Are My Sunshine” during the drawn-out “Heroes & Villains.”

One of the mysteries of the night was that on “Good Vibrations,” Wilson sang rather unfamiliar lyrics leading up to the “I’m picking up good vibrations” chorus. Fortunately, Wilson and a number of his bandmates appeared at the annual CMJ Music Festival extravaganza at the Javits Center the following morning for a panel discussion on “Smile.” Apparently Tony Asher, another one of Brian Wilson’s favorite lyricists, had written the original words to “Good Vibrations,” but Beach Boys co-leader and vocalist Mike Love hated Asher’s work and wrote his own lyrics. Wilson felt it was not worth fighting Love who is also his cousin. Love was also a shrewd arbiter of what could be commercially viable.

You can bet that he won’t be listening to the new “Smile.”