Brian Wilson Remembers How To Smile

What would have happened if, as planned, The Beach Boys had released the Smile album in the summer of 1967? For starters, people would have been less impressed with The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper when it came out that fall.

Don’t get me wrong: Sgt. Pepper is a great record. With its accessible tunes, it would undoubtedly have outsold Smile; the Beatles’ record, after all, is essentially a bunch of likable British music-hall numbers decked out in psychedelic garb. There are some terrific songs, but if you subtract “Within You, Without You” and “A Day In the Life,” and allow for the then novel, now commonplace arrangements, the album is 11 three-minute pop songs—not all that different from Meet The Beatles.

Smile ultimately would have had the greater impact, being something else entirely—as different from Surfin’ U.S.A. as Aaron Copland was from John Philip Sousa, as the Miles Davis and Gil Evans collaborations were from early Dixieland. Here was a rock ’n’ roll album that wasn’t just a collection of songs; it was a true suite in which one song flowed into another, in which themes were repeated and developed, in which the harmonic scope of the music justified the chamber orchestra treatment. If Smile had been released in 1967, it would have been unprecedented.

And now that it’s finally being released this fall, it still sounds unprecedented. Because no one in the 37 years since has blended rock ’n’ roll and art music as the Beach Boys’ Brain Wilson did on Smile. There have been countless rock-opera, art-rock and prog-rock projects, but most have merely dressed up mediocre rock ’n’ roll in the gowns of grandiosity. But Wilson used the moving parts and shifting textures of art music not to show off but to reflect adulthood’s mixed emotions. He used the through-line of classical composition not to replace pop’s intimacy but to reinforce it, linking one personal moment to the next.

“We wanted to make it sound like it all went together,” Wilson says today. “We wanted it to sound like a continuum, because I like it when music flows. Bach’s music did that. To do that, though, you have to have the knack for it; you have to know your classical music. My favorite was Bach, because he used simple chords and simple forms, but got such complex results. That’s what I was trying to do.”

When Wilson oversaw the first-ever public performance of Smile at London’s Royal Festival Hall this past February, you could finally hear the fluidity he sought. The piece opened with “Our Prayer,” a gorgeous, wordless, a cappella hymn. It had the moving counterpoint parts of a Bach cantata, but it also had roots in the wide-open vowels of ’50s doo-wop, which Wilson underlined by segueing into The Crows’ 1954 hit, “Gee.” With the smack of a snare drum, “Gee” moved into “Heroes and Villains,” the Beach Boys’ 1967 Top-15 single. The verses, with their dizzying descending line set against a rising chord progression, were sung to the original lyrics and then repeated with even more dizzying scat variations. The theme of American heroes and villains was further refined in the “Cantina” section, which had been edited out of the original single and the version on Smiley Smile.

This circled back to “Heroes and Villains,” which slid into “Do You Like Worms” and “Cabinessence,” a series of American snapshots from the Caribbean isles to Plymouth Rock, from the cabin on the hill to the first trains on the Western plains. Tying them all together were snatches of “Home On the Range,” “You Are My Sunshine” and the chorus melody from “Heroes and Villains.” This section gave the impression of flying low over the entire American continent.

Then it was back to earth for the lovely romantic ballad, “Wonderful,” which bloomed into “Child Is Father to the Man,” heard for the first time with its verse lyrics. This melted into “Surf’s Up,” the world-weary lament of a grown-up surfer who finds himself “heart hardened—a broken man too tough to cry.” He longs for a lost innocence and finds its echo in a reprise of “Child Is Father to the Man.”

It was more than 19 minutes of continuous music, tightly woven together, and it was only half of Smile. Still to come was a second movement featuring “Vega-Tables,” “Wind Chimes,” “Cool, Cool Water,” “Good Vibrations,” Frank Sinatra’s “I Wanna Be Around” and the return of several motifs from the first movement.

The Smile CD being released this fall is a studio re-creation of those London shows. Due to the long history of litigation between Wilson, his fellow Beach Boys and Capitol Records, none of the original recordings were used for this version. But those original tracks were closely consulted by Wilson, Smile lyricist Van Dyke Parks and Wilson’s music director, Darian Sahanaja, as they constructed first the live version and then the studio version.

“I was amazed when I finally heard it,” Wilson admits. “It brought back a lot of memories. It sounded the way I anticipated it would when I first wrote it. We wrote a bit of new music because we didn’t think it was complete. We wanted to make it a little bit longer. People call it a rock symphony, but it’s more a cantata, a rock cantata.”

Wilson, now 62, talks in truncated sentences, in bursts of child-like enthusiasm. He’s wary of attempts at musical analysis, but he does acknowledge a sense of relief that Smile has finally been finished.