Columnated Ruins Domino

By Paul Williams

"If he can't act upon it immediately and see it happening, it's not gonna work."

Twenty-six years ago, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys -- "one of the few undisputed geniuses in popular music," according to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum -- was picked up by the San Diego police in Balboa Park, "under a tree with no shoes on," as recollected by a family member who came from L.A. to retrieve him. "His white pants [were] filthy, obviously a vagrant with no wallet, no money."

He was a millionaire vagrant, leader, and primary songwriter of "the most commercially successful American group of the sixties" (according to The Faber Companion to 20th Century Popular Music). And next week, on September 28, 2004, one of Wilson's crowning creations, Smile ("The most famous unheard album in pop history," according to the New York Times), will be released for the first time. This is where I come in. I've been writing about this album for 37 years (since I was a teenaged rock-magazine editor), I helped make it famous, and I have Smile and Brian Wilson to thank for the fact that I'm living in San Diego today.

Brian Wilson, millionaire vagrant and auteur of the brand-new Nonesuch album Brian Wilson Presents SMILE, was found in September 1978 "lying facedown in the gutter" in Balboa Park, "without any ID, mumbling over and over, 'I want to die' " (quotes from p. 254 of Wilson's 1991 autobiography, Wouldn't It Be Nice) as a result of the unfortunate combination of substance abuse and an undiagnosed severe bipolar condition. He subsequently spent six weeks detoxing in the Alvarado Community Hospital (now called Alvarado Hospital Medical Center, located close to San Diego State University).

Substance abuse was also a major factor (along with the bipolar condition, which, as in the case of Vincent van Gogh, may also have contributed significantly to the man's universally recognized expressive genius) in Wilson's inability to complete in 1966?1967 his most ambitious (and expensive) rock-music project, the Beach Boys album Smile. Smile was intended as a follow-up to the Beach Boys' 1966 album Pet Sounds, inspired by the Beatles' Rubber Soul and in turn acknowledged by Paul McCartney as the primary inspiration for the Beatles' landmark album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band...and as a follow-up to and musical extension of the Beach Boys' boldly experimental 1966 #1 single "Good Vibrations."

How Smile brought me to San Diego: I was at a Bob Dylan concert in Los Angeles in 1992, and during the intermission I ran into my friend, British singer-songwriter John Wesley Harding. Wes was with his producer Andy Paley, whom I knew as a close friend of and sometime songwriting collaborator of Brian Wilson. (In fact, when I'd last met Andy, he'd been putting together a box set of unreleased tracks and fragments from the unfinished Smile album on assignment from Capitol Records. That box set never materialized, alas, due to opposition from some of the other Beach Boys, who thought Brian had made a fool of them, having them grunt into microphones during his amphetamine-and-marijuana-fueled extravagantly experimental Smile sessions.) Anyway, while Wes and I gossiped about Bob Dylan, Andy spotted his friend, San Diego singer-songwriter Cindy Lee Berryhill, and called her over to join our gathering.

Cindy was then in an intense stage of the Brian Wilson fascination that most young rock musicians go through sooner or later (for example, John Lennon's son Sean, who in interviews a few years back was proclaiming the Beach Boys a more seminal rock band than the Beatles). She'd met Andy through her friend Domenic Priore, then a Carlsbad resident, who'd established himself as a writer and rock-and-roll maven by assembling and self-publishing a book about the legendary Smile album called Look! Listen! VIBRATE! SMILE!

I then and there forgave Domenic for reprinting my extensive Smile writings without permission or payment because this attractive young woman whose first album I'd heard and liked (another Dylan fan had sent me a tape of it) was very excited to meet me, as she had just been reading my long interviews/conversations with producer/Brian intimate David Anderle about why the Smile album was never completed. She gave me her phone number and suggested we get together to talk about Brian Wilson. A year and a half later, after I'd introduced her to Anderle (she was on a quest to meet all the major "Brian people") and to BW-fan and Warner Bros. Records president Lenny Waronker and to Smile coauthor Van Dyke Parks, I found myself moving from Northern California to Encinitas to live with Cindy. Today we're married and have a three-year-old child...and I still live in Encinitas.

That three-part interview/essay about Smile (and the fact that I was lucky enough to visit the Smile recording sessions as Wilson's guest) has brought me a lot of attention over the years (climaxing in bringing me a wife and child and a beautiful city to live in). When my first book was published in 1969, Rolling Stone wrote: "The long interview with David Anderle about Brian Wilson (itself worth the price of the book) is a short story, complete with beginning, middle, and end. The interview form becomes a sophisticated narrative device for telling the story of an artist's struggle with himself, his friends, and the limits of his art." And to my delight, I am often mentioned alongside composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein as one of the key voices early on calling the world's attention to the greatness of the Smile compositions and recordings. Of course, this was not such a happy accomplishment when Smile came to seem a sort of albatross for Brian, a legend he might never be able to live up to or escape.

But all that is in the past, now that Brian has gone back into the studio with his current band and has rerecorded Smile quite successfully and is proudly presenting it to the world on a record label best known for its classical music offerings. So now that the album, against all odds, is out and it is good and will bring happiness to most who listen to it, I can proudly share with you this 1997 pronouncement by Beach Boys historian and sometime Brian Wilson manager David Leaf, in his introduction to my book Brian Wilson & the Beach Boys -- How Deep Is the Ocean?: "While Paul Williams was not the first to put Brian Wilson 'on paper,' he may be the one to have most influenced virtually all the writers who fell in love with the artist."

There's a lot to fall in love with. But before I say more about that, I'd like to mention that Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys, symbols of Southern California to music lovers all over the world, have a significant connection to San Diego County that goes beyond acknowledging "Swami's" as a famous surfing spot in the lyrics to their first big hit, "Surfin' USA." That connection has to do with the fact that three of the five Beach Boys -- Brian, Dennis, and Carl Wilson -- were brothers and that, while they grew up in Hawthorne, just south of Los Angeles, their father, Murry Wilson, spent part of his childhood in Cardiff-by-the-Sea, where his parents settled when they came west from Kansas, and after Murry's grandfather's dreams of becoming a prosperous grape grower in Escondido fell through. So the California dream that inspired this family of Los Angelenos had strong roots in north San Diego County. The Wilsons, who would do so much to tell the world about Southern California beach and car culture, came to Hawthorne from Kansas by way of Escondido and Cardiff.

Smile, the newly recorded and just-about-to-be-released Smile, was always intended to be a Beach Boys album, but Brian's brothers Carl and Dennis are dead now, and the Beach Boys as such no longer exist, although there is still a touring group or two that performs under that name or a variation on that name. The musical legacy of the Beach Boys on record is kept alive by Brian, who, after all, wrote the music for most of the group's songs and produced and arranged most of their records. Brian Wilson, in the past nine years, has released two excellent solo albums (I Just Wasn't Made for These Times, 1995, and Imagination, 1998) and a seemingly uninspired one (Gettin' in over My Head, 2004). I say "seemingly" because I don't feel I've listened to it enough to be certain of my judgment. Maybe it will come to mean more to me if I listen to it more, if I take the time to find a way into it. He has also released several live albums that again I defer judgment on because I don't think I've listened to them enough. I can say that the live shows of his that I've seen and heard have been terrific. The music is good, the band is very good, and Brian's enthusiasm for performing is surprising and infectious. It's surprising because in the past Brian did not enjoy performing live and was notoriously uncomfortable onstage. This is a real turnaround that has happened for him in the past five years, and insofar as the new Smile is much better, much more enjoyable, and less self-conscious than I would have expected, I think primary credit must go to his current band and his relationship with them and his new relationships with his music and with his audience as a result of his breakthroughs as a performer.

I might not be the best person to tell you how good this new, long-awaited Smile album is or is not. After all, I've been in print proclaiming how great it would be for 37 years now; I might be pretty invested in proving I was right all along. And on the other hand, I heard those extraordinary tracks (recorded music without voices) Brian played for me in late '66, and I've heard the sublime pieced-together Smile songs that have been included on Beach Boys albums over the years ("Surf's Up," "Cabinessence," and half of the second disc of the 1993 box set Good Vibrations)... So I could get caught in comparing my memories of those delights with what I'm hearing now. No, the right person to assess this new album is your child or your friend's child between ages 4 and 14, who is almost certain to be grabbed and thrilled by the Beach Boys' (and Brian Wilson's) 1960s hits, as heard on discs 1 and 2 of that box set or on all sorts of greatest-hits compilations. Music that will live forever and speak across the ages. Is this new Smile more of the same?; different flavor but just as irresistible? I think it could be. But play it for a child if you want to know for certain.

Smile 2004 is a triumph, I think. These were always good songs that Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson wrote, albeit that the jilted lover, Brian Wilson's cousin and heretofore primary lyricist, Mike Love, is on record as saying, " 'columnated ruins domino,' what the fuck is that supposed to mean?" Mike's point was that Van Dyke and Brian were going to lose the universality, the appeal to a mass audience, that had made the Beach Boys millionaires. But he missed Van Dyke's point, which is that Beach Boys music is both as highbrow and as lowbrow as J.S. Bach and that if you call a song "Surf's Up" and return gracefully to that phrase, you can have it both ways. This, after all, was the song that had won over Leonard Bernstein, a man who presumably had never hung ten or watched from the shore as someone else did.

What makes it a triumph? The beauty of the melodies and of the language and the way melodic and verbal motifs weave in and out through the whole tapestry of music and of American history. The way the phrase "child is father of the man" has become so central to this rendering of Smile, as though it were a celebration of Brian's rebirth thanks to living with his adopted infant daughters. The richness of the music pictures and the word pictures blended together here. The excellence of Brian's singing on the album, in spite of his 62 years of hard living. The profound Mozart-like simplicity achieved in this composition for voices and instruments. The remarkable lack of self-consciousness in this work and these performances despite the history of the album/composition...

In our famous conversation about Smile that appeared in three parts in my magazine Crawdaddy!, David Anderle said, summing up our discussion of Smile and why the glorious, ambitious album was never completed in 1966 and 1967, "It has to happen immediately with Brian, the idea comes to the mind and he understands it instantly. If he can't act upon it immediately and see it happening in front of his eyes, it's not gonna work. That's what happened with Smile." So it wasn't just the drugs and Brian's mental/emotional condition and the doubts of the other Beach Boys, though those were delaying factors...

And how, after all these years and against all odds, has he managed to put Humpty Dumpty together again? To me it is clearly the result of the man's, the artist's, rebirth as a performer. Onstage it happens immediately: you play the music and the audience receives it and responds. Brian had this experience and obviously found it very fulfilling when he went on tour in 1999 with his new band and again the following year when he performed his masterpiece, Pet Sounds, live at the Hollywood Bowl and in Europe and Japan. A hard act to follow...but he did have another masterpiece, the legendary unrecorded Smile, waiting in the wings, and he decided to perform it in England, where his most adventurous music had always been warmly appreciated. Having performed Smile live successfully and to a warm response took the edge off it. Now he could go into a studio not feeling that he had something to prove or some kind of impossibly challenging task ahead of him. He could sing and perform in the moment, as one does onstage, knowing that the musicians with him understood this and him and his music. Now it was free to happen immediately. The result is, as I say, a triumph. One that will certainly serve to seal Brian Wilson's place among the great composers of the western world, a man with a body of work that will live and move listeners forever.

And it's not only about surfing. It's also about surviving, which is where Brian's Balboa Park experience -- a low point in his life -- comes into it. On the new album, on Smile, Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson via "Surf's Up" claim surfing as a universal metaphor, as most San Diegans could have told them it is.

And I'll mention, because though it shouldn't be necessary to know this, it could add to the album experience to learn that songs 11 through 16 on the new album are the remains of a composition known as the "Four Elements Suite." "Vega-Tables" and "I'm in Great Shape" are the earth, "Wind Chimes" is air, "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow" is fire (one of the factors that originally made it difficult for Wilson to complete Smile was his conviction that this piece of music in its original form was responsible for a fire that broke out near the recording studio), "In Blue Hawaii" is water, and (I think) "On a Holiday" represents the interface between water and air.

Get the album, let your kids hear it, and if you want more, you can't go wrong with the box set Good Vibrations. This is your chance to hear tomorrow's classical music today. And if it seems light and popular, that of course is exactly what Mozart was in his era.

How did Brian Wilson of Beverly Hills end up in a gutter in Balboa Park? you might be wondering. It's a typical Southern California story. According to his autobiography, Brian was talking with "a nicely dressed man" in a hotel bar in Century City. The man "was a salesman, and his mom and dad had a place in San Diego where he sometimes stayed." So they drive south, and the next day Brian walks to a local bar where people buy him drinks and then he goes for a hike in the park. It sounds like a scene from "Heroes and Villains" as performed on the new Smile album.

It's a wonderful record, I tell you. I haven't changed my tune. Neither has Brian, though he's not drinking now. The album was named from an American Indian saying, "The smile that you send out comes back to you." I'll testify to that.

Brian Wilson will perform Smile at Spreckels Theatre on Saturday, October 30.