Brian Wilson Remembers How To Smile

For 37 years, it’s been the most famous unreleased album in rock ’n’ roll history, the subject of countless books, articles and websites (there are still sites where you can “Make your own Smile album” from the bits and pieces that have leaked out on bootlegs and Beach Boys reissues). It’s been a painful reminder that he never completed his greatest work and instead entered a dark period of drugs, family squabbles and mental instability.

Parks, 61, has also been haunted by the ghosts of the unfinished album. “For so long,” he says, “this project brought me nothing but humiliation. It was the first question people always asked—‘How come Smile never came out?’ It brought me little money; it didn’t pay my kids’ tuition. After living the life of Job that this project gave me, I was so relieved when I heard it in London. I was so grateful that everything sounded acceptable and even had a certain charm. Something wonderful had happened back then in our state of youthful enthusiasm.”

It’s hard to remember how fast pop music was changing in the mid-’60s. Less than two years separate The Beatles’ first appearance on the U.S. charts with “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” in January 1964 from such mature works as “Yesterday,” “Day Tripper” and the Rubber Soul album by the end of 1965. In the same period, Bob Dylan had gone from acoustic protest songs such as “The Times They Are A-Changin’” to the folk-rock epic “Like a Rolling Stone.” Keeping pace with them was Brian Wilson.

“Rubber Soul blew my mind,” Wilson remembers. “I liked the way it all went together, the way it was all one thing. It was a challenge to me to do something similar. That made me want to make Pet Sounds. … I didn’t want to do the same kind of music, but on the same level. Smile. wasn’t the same kind of thing; it wasn’t anything like The Beatles. It wasn’t pop music; it was something more advanced.”

It was more advanced in that it tried to move rock ’n’ roll beyond the bounds of the three-to-five-minute song. Dylan was doing something similar with lyrics, but Wilson didn’t want to merely add more verses to the same song. He wanted to link different musical passages in a chain, much as Duke Ellington and George Gershwin had done with jazz and Tin Pan Alley in the 1930s.

Wilson wasn’t interested in merely adding string charts to rock songs; he wanted to create a musical through line so a mood or a chord progression could develop beyond the standard verse-chorus-bridge format. After all, if life didn’t always have a simple beginning, middle and end, why should music? Pet Sounds was a step in the right direction, but it was still a collection of discrete songs. The next step was a true suite.

When he first heard Pet Sounds, Paul McCartney once told a reporter, “I just thought, ‘Oh, dear me. This is the album of all-time. What are we gonna do?’” One thing he did was write “Here, There and Everywhere” as a direct response to The Beach Boys’ album. That song appeared on The Beatles’ Revolver album, which raised the ante for The Beach Boys’ next effort. Wilson’s first response was “Good Vibrations,” a number-one single that was also a landmark in studio techniques.

The late Carl Wilson, Brian’s kid brother and closest partner in The Beach Boys, explained those sessions to me in a 1982 interview: “‘Good Vibrations’ has a lot of texture on it, because we did so many overdubs. We’d double or triple or quadruple the exact same part, so it would sound like 20 voices. There’s a phase in your voice, and even if you try to sing it exactly the same, it’s not exactly the same and more overtones and harmonics come out. It has a choral sound, a choir effect.

“We recorded some bridge sections at Western, went back to Gold Star and tried some verses there and did some choruses at Sunset Sound. Each studio had a good sound for a different thing. In the end, he’d use the section that sounded best; it didn’t matter where it was recorded. It was pretty daring back then to take a chance and record a section and see if it would fit with another. But instead of making it more bulging and more raucous as Phil Spector might have, Brian refined it.”

“Brian was on his own free-thinking path at the time,” notes Sahanaja. “He would get all the musicians together and work variations on a groove or a riff or a melodic fragment. It’s what I call modular recording. For ‘Good Vibrations’ he did 28 variations on the verse and 37 variations on the chorus. Then he picked and chose the best bits to make one single. That was a great success, so he decided to make a whole album that way.”

That album was Smile. Wilson had a concept for the lyrics but, as in so many areas, he was insecure about his abilities as a wordsmith. Just as he’d recruited a young L.A. ad man named Tony Asher to write the lyrics for Pet Sounds, so he recruited a young L.A. session musician named Van Dyke Parks to write the lyrics for Smile.

Born in Mississippi and schooled in Pennsylvania, Parks had migrated to California at the end of 1962 to play in the same folk coffeehouses as David Crosby, Jim McGuinn and Jackson Browne. When folk-rock supplanted folk, Parks put away his acoustic guitar and used his schooling in jazz and classical music to become one of the top keyboardists and arrangers on the progressive-rock scene.

“There was a tremendous urgency in the air at that time,” Parks remembers. “Vietnam and the Civil Rights Movement forced everyone to make a decision: Either you were happy to remain in the Eisenhower era or you were willing to plunge ahead into the space age. Music was changing, responding to Dylan and The Beatles. When folk music went electric, a music industry developed out here [in L.A.] with people who thought that lyrics and music had other purposes than simply entertainment.”

Parks was playing a lot of sessions with Terry Melcher, who was producing records for everyone from Paul Revere & the Raiders to The Byrds. Melcher, an old surf-music colleague, had spoken to Wilson about Parks’ lyrics. One day, Parks was visiting Melcher when Wilson happened by and off-handedly invited Parks to write some lyrics for him. Out of such chance meetings, history is born.

“I didn’t know much about The Beach Boys,” Parks admits, “but I liked anything with imaginative chords and melodies—I liked Lou Christie and The Four Seasons. I wasn’t so interested in the topics of The Beach Boys’ songs—I never celebrated sexual conquest, and fast cars were just a means of getting some place—but Brian was obviously interested in getting beyond those topics.

“On the other hand, I wasn’t joining the counter-culture whole hog. The counter-culture had no respect for America, because so many shameful things were being done in its name—there’s a parallel to our own time. I did not believe the lyrics should be oblivious to that, but should respond with a guarded optimism. I thought the lyrics should confirm something of the American Dream and not just dump on it.

“The first thing we did was we knocked off ‘Heroes and Villains’ in one day,” Parks continues. “Brian sang the melody, and it sounded like Marty Robbins to me, so I wrote about the American West. I made it a policy not to change one note of the melody, because each stone in the melody is essential to the architecture. Melody is feeling, and feelings are important; they speak even to the comatose.”

Some of Parks’ lyrics crossed the line into artsy pretension, but they boasted so many aphorisms, puns and sly rhymes that they recovered from every stumble. He evokes the allure of the open frontier with lines like, “Nestle in a kiss below there; the constellations ebb and flow there and witness our home on the range.” He conjures up a schoolyard romance with this image, “Through the recess, the chalk and numbers, a boy bumped into his wonderful.”

“I thought Van Dyke was a genius,” Wilson says today. “We wanted to capture the mood of early Americana, Plymouth Rock and all that. Van Dyke had a lot of knowledge about America. I gave him hardly any direction. We wanted to get back to basics and try something simple. We wanted to capture something as basic as the mood of water and fire.”

Parks claims that Wilson has a “cartoon consciousness,” and he means that in the most admiring way. It’s no great trick, he says, to make complex art out of complex subjects; all you have to do is hold up a mirror. Anyone can tack pops-orchestra charts onto songs about “Topographic Oceans” or “Brain Salad Surgery”; the trick is to reveal the complexity in things as simple as “Vega-Tables” or “Wind Chimes.” Wilson, Parks argues, made music that was as easy to grasp as a cartoon and yet rewarded repeated listening as much as Bach.

“My friend Lowell George [of Little Feat] once described it as smart/dumb,” Parks adds, “smart and dumb at the same time. Just as the best comic books can turn cliché into high art, so can the best pop music. Brian does that. He can take common or hackneyed material and raise it from a low place to the highest, and he can do it with an economy of imagery that speaks to the casual observer—bam! It’s no coincidence that he was working at the same time that Warhol and Lichtenstein were doing pop art.”