Brian Wilson's "Smile"
With David Leafs "Beautiful Dreamer" movie the dust finally settles on SMILE. This biopsy of the original events surrounding Brian Wilson's SMILE LP and its subsequent re-recording forms the coda to a laborious cultural pregnancy. Wilsons LP took him in the region of 36 years to realise. Unfortunately the movie cements the superficial observation that here is a project whose time has long past. Throughout the documentary we're greeted by people sitting, sitting in studios, sitting in serrid audiences, sitting heads talk, sitting slumped in sofas; all vital energy appears to have been sapped. The "quality" AOR press huffs and puffs, struggling with the events empty portent. The record pips in at respectable mid-twenties in critics end-of-year round ups and is roundly ignored by the yoof, an audience it was once squarely aimed at. Of what possible consequence is SMILE in the year of Bruza?
SMILEs history is so well known as to be concrete lore. In spite of not having been released the LP can still inspire flights of lunacy like Domenic Priores "Look! Listen! Vibrate! SMILE!" which 300-page tome collects a vaste mass of data surounding the record. Brian Wilson attempts to outdo his own achievements on "Pet Sounds". With the rest of The Beach Boys on tour he sets about crafting a "religious white spiritual music.....a teenage symphony to God." The cream of LAs session musicians improvise freely under his direction at $100 an hour, pianos are placed in sandpits and slowly marijuana accelerates Wilsons psychosis (this dismissed in the movie). Brian begins to lose sight of the structure his jigsaw of overdubs and fragments is supposed to ressemble, suspecting "Mrs O'Learys Cow" to be the cause of a spate of fires around LA. With lyricist Van Dyke Parks departure and the return of a freaked out Beach Boys clan, headed by Brians sceptical cousin Mike Love, there aren't enough people around on Brians trip to keep the ball rolling and the record is canned.
In Paul Williams book "How Deep is the Ocean?", Williams points out in conversation to David Anderle, Wilsons confidant through the Smile-era and the founder of Wilsons Brother records, that "...one way of finishing it would have been to break up the group." Anderle replies: "...it was easier, I think, to get rid of the outsiders like myself than it was to break up the brothers. You can't break up brothers." The cult of Brian Wilson tends to ignore that Brians destiny was tied up with that of his beloved siblings the spiritual Carl and rugged Dennis. Indeed SMILEs eventual gestation may be a slow response to their deaths, Dennis drunk while surfing in 1983 (literally drowning) and Carl more recently of brain cancer in 1998. It is almost as though he were, at last, free to strike out alone. With Brians touching dedications in the sleevenotes to his wife, children, son-in-laws and grand-children it's clear that central to the motif of psychic regeneration and dogged loyalty to a creative vision, is the alchemy of relations within the Wilson family.
Over the years Beach Boys fans have been weaned on SMILE bootlegs, Pet Sounds offcuts, and the half an hour of original SMILE material released on the Good Vibrations Boxset in 1993 (this curated by the selfsame David Leaf). It was an easy mistake to sleep on the records re-incarnation as this critic did, disheartened by the delibidinising spectacle of the Pet Sounds tour and Brians robotic appearance at the Queens BIrthday party concert. However, the new SMILE record is an unabated joy. The most significant thing about it is the materials thematic organisation. At last the adage about SMILEs symphonic status rings true, here is a suite worthy of Copland or Ives, the broken urn is glued together. Don't have misgivings about Wilsons band either, this charming bunch of balding misfits perform with aplomb.
There are holes in this vision of SMILE. The version of "Mrs O'Leary's Cow" (aka "Fire") one finds on the bootlegs is markedly more deranged than todays, full of genuinely disturbing sonics and edgy keening strings. Likewise "George Fell Into His French Horn", in which Wilson confidently enters the territory of the Avant Garde is airbrushed from history. Charming tracks like "The Woodshop Song" with its clattering carpentry sound-effects disappears, as do significant touches like the cod Red Indian chants on "Do You Like Worms?" pointing as they do to Brians engagement with an America prior to the arrival of The Founding Fathers. Saddest of all is the absence of the Beach Boys own banshee-wail vocals audible on the original version of "Prayer", the truest and most perfect collision of Brians aural hallucination and his brothers unmistakeable harmonies.