From: dowdlehm@idelete.allspam.unread.com   
      
   My boss alerted me to this Smile story today. I haven't seen it   
   circulating before, so here it is.   
      
   Emdeeh   
      
      
   --------------------------   
   The Nation   
   Posted October 7, 2004   
      
   PICKING UP THE PIECES   
   Brian Wilson   
      
   by Douglas Wolk   
      
      
   Brian Wilson began recording his masterpiece, Smile, in 1966; the project   
   collapsed a year later, unfinished. For the past thirty-seven years,   
   Wilson's been coasting on his reputation as The Guy Who Didn't Finish His   
   Masterpiece, But Really, It Was a Masterpiece, Honest. Which is, in a   
   way, a fortunate position to be in. A finished work is susceptible to   
   public and critical judgment, and to the brutal treatment of   
   taste-currents, backlashes, revivals, nostalgia and anti-nostalgia. But   
   an unfinished Great Work is forever what it might have been. Now, at the   
   age of 62, he's finally completed it, or something like it.   
      
   The story of the original Smile is a fascinating catastrophe. It's best   
   detailed in Domenic Priore's book Look! Listen! Vibrate! Smile!, a   
   collection of magazine articles, interviews, sheet music and other   
   primary documents from the period when Smile originally almost came to   
   fruition. The essence of it is that in mid-1966, Wilson was at the top   
   of the American pop world. His group the Beach Boys (who were, at that   
   point, under his creative control) had been making increasingly   
   beautiful, complicated records, built around exquisite harmonies and   
   Wilson's inventive way with tone color; the Beach Boys' album Pet Sounds   
   had set them up as the band to beat, and they'd followed it with the   
   song "Good Vibrations," which had raised expectations for Wilson's work   
   even higher. (Contemporary readers may need to work a bit to imagine   
   "Good Vibrations" as a revolutionary piece of music rather than as an   
   orange soda commercial, but that's what it was.)   
      
   Smile, Wilson declared, was going to be the Beach Boys' "teenage symphony   
   to God"--an epic album about the American experience, the elements,   
   physical fitness and a bunch of other stuff that nobody was ever too   
   clear on. Van Dyke Parks was engaged as lyricist, and came up with far   
   more abstract, arty words than the Beach Boys had ever sung before. (One   
   of the Boys, Mike Love, infamously objected to "over and over the crow   
   cries uncover the cornfield.") Wilson started recording overlapping,   
   interlocking fragments of vocals and orchestration, on the assumption   
   that he'd eventually assemble them all into a coherent recording. The   
   centerpiece of the album was going to be an enormous production called   
   "Heroes and Villains," which Wilson recorded and rewrote and remixed,   
   again and again, for months on end.   
      
   In December 1966, Capitol Records, panicked that Smile was taking so   
   long, pressed Wilson for a track listing, and printed more than 400,000   
   jackets and booklets for an album that wasn't entirely written yet.   
   Recording sessions continued to drag on for months, getting messier and   
   darker as Wilson's mental state deteriorated--Keith Badman's new diary   
   of the band's career, simply called The Beach Boys, includes lots of   
   details of the chaos. By mid-May 1967, all the Beach Boys had was an   
   enormous pile of shimmering, dreamy, unfinished, unfinishable scraps of   
   tape. It was the most exquisite and original music they'd ever made--but   
   it wasn't anything like an album. Most of it was barely even fully   
   composed songs, some crucial sections weren't there at all and the   
   drug-addled Wilson, who'd started canceling recording sessions on the   
   basis of "bad vibes," was in no shape to tie it together. Capitol pulled   
   the plug, and two weeks later released the cash cow it'd been waiting   
   for: the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.   
      
   Wilson never really recovered. If he'd previously earned a reputation as   
   a genius, he was now a damaged genius, and he's stayed more or less   
   damaged ever since. (His album of new material released earlier this   
   year, Gettin' In Over My Head, sounds like the work of a very badly   
   damaged old guy desperately and gracelessly attempting to reconstruct   
   the dippy bliss of "Fun, Fun, Fun"; it's painful to listen to.) The   
   Smile tapes were too good to abandon altogether, though. The Beach Boys   
   promptly banged out a breezy, druggy, spare-to-the-point-of-minimalism   
   LP called Smiley Smile, which included quick-and-dirty remakes of a   
   couple of Smile songs (and, though it bombed in the charts, has held up   
   exceptionally well). For the next few years, most of their albums   
   incorporated a fragment or two of the Smile tapes. Speculating about   
   Smile eventually became a cottage industry; virtually all the extant   
   recordings have been released or bootlegged, and avid Smileophiles have   
   started assembling their own versions of the album as it might have been.   
      
   Wilson himself has never gone back and finished the original Smile tapes,   
   but his current collaborator Darian Sahanaja recently persuaded him to   
   devise a concert version of Smile. It was performed in public for the   
   first time early this year, and then recorded (from scratch) as Brian   
   Wilson Presents Smile (Nonesuch). The Beach Boys of thirty-seven years   
   ago are mostly either dead (Dennis Wilson died in 1983, Carl Wilson in   
   1998) or more or less estranged from their former director (Mike Love is   
   still touring with various hired guns as the Beach Boys). Wilson's   
   current band, built around Sahanaja's group the Wondermints, has largely   
   reproduced Wilson's original arrangements note for note and timbre for   
   timbre, including their fantastically lush close-harmony parts. It's   
   probably as close to the real thing as we're ever going to get.   
      
   It's a lovely album -- a lot better than it might have been. Wilson, or,   
   more likely, his "musical secretary" Sahanaja, has arranged most of the   
   extant Smile music into three suites that flow remarkably smoothly. Four   
   lines of the previously undiscovered "I'm in Great Shape" turned up on a   
   demo tape some years ago, and so "I'm in Great Shape" lasts all of four   
   lines here; the Smile sessions included fragmentary versions of the   
   standards "Old Master Painter" and "You Are My Sunshine," as well as some   
   miscellaneous hammer-and-saw noise, all of which appear on the finished   
   Smile. The only significant additions are a couple of key-changing   
   orchestral segues, whose reliance on standard, unmutated instrument   
   sounds makes them stick out a bit, and Parks's new (or at least   
   previously unheard) lyrics for a handful of incomplete pieces.   
      
   One of the fuzzily conceived sections of the original Smile was to have   
   been a suite about earth, air, water and fire. The only element of it   
   whose identity is certain is an instrumental called "Mrs. O'Leary's   
   Cow," which the disturbed Wilson feared was responsible for an outbreak   
   of fires around Los Angeles shortly after it was originally recorded.   
   The third and last movement of Smile 2004 more or less follows the   
   four-elements template: "Vega-Tables" seems to represent earth, "Wind   
   Chimes" is air and a rewritten version of the deranged fragment "Love to   
   Say Da Da," now called "In Blue Hawaii," is water.   
      
      
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