PrettyFakes

I’ve been in this little town so long that back in the city I’d be taken for lost and gone, and Ive been taking a hard look at things that I believe in: especially those little pieces of music that you define yourself with, the invisible skeleton you hang your life on. Lets get this out in the open: Brian Wilson isnt who you think he is. Whats worse—and unknown for a long long time—hes not even who you want him to be.

I wanted him to be the secret genius, an American alchemist that gave us a rival to the blinding twin lights of Paul and Johnthat created his own little pocket symphonies with chimes and love and one million part harmonies that nobody could rival.

So as a card-carrying member of the blind class aristocracy, the indy rock cognoscenti, I bought me a copy of Pet Sounds when there was perfectly good Pavement and Superchunk albums to go around. To anyone born later than 1970 many of the songs are relics and staples of youth: just a muted trumpeting swan that snuck into your head during the annual trip to Gatlinburg, or Panama City (before it got too trashy), or Louisiana to see your cousins. As you get a little bit older, that back-seat context can fade, and you can feel in your guts the power of Wouldnt It Be Nice or the delicate questioning of Caroline, No. But thats itthats all you get. Pet Sounds is just fourteen songs long, even counting the alternate life of I Know Theres An Answer as Hang on to Your Ego (which some feel is superior: see Mr. Frank Blacks excellent version from 1993).

Sometime after the 1966 debut of Pet Sounds the Wilson boys started working on a follow-up. They recorded through the end of 1966 into 1967 butnothing ever worked. There were aborted runs at Pet Soundslike instrumental tracks that halfassed vocal tracks would be taped to later, some with almost nonsense half-finished lyrics by Van Dyke Parks. The Beach Boys had churned out thirteen albums in the minuscule five years of their existence. Maybe Brian knew thats all they really had in them, and that he’d probably milked it too much already.

Listening to the fragments and bootlegs of Smile (I refuse to spell it SMiLE) is like throwing away the candy bar and eating the wrapper: it looks pretty, it sounds pretty, its supposed to be so wonderful, but your belly ends up empty. For every finished symphonette like the elegiac and triumphant Heroes and Villains or Surfs Up there are a half-dozen incoherent songs with chanted place-marker lyrics (think Phil Collins Sussudio, a nonsense-phrase he developed just to hold the place of the girls name in the chorus). I love the colorful clothes Smile tries to wear, but they fit all wrong: tight around the belly, loose around the neck.

The Beach Boys werent fools: they were canny veterans of stage and studio, superstars of the time. They knew they didnt have jack to sell, so they didnt release the album. And so the great myth of Smile was born like Big Stars lost Sisters Lovers (or Third or Alex Chiltons 19th Nervous Breakdown, whatever you prefer): the legend came scraping out of the ashes of failure. And it was a failure—Brian knew that.

Contrary to Big Stars momentous rise in the wake of their allegedly-brilliant lost album, the Beach Boys released some of their hidden songs as Smiley Smile on September 11, 1967. Smiley Smileby its very name obviously meant to replace the acid-drenched studio discards of Smileincluded four songs that were meant to be on Smile: Heroes and Villains, Vegetables, Good Vibrations (released almost a year before in single form, in October of 1966, and intended for the May 1966 release of Pet Sounds before Brian realized it had a ways to go), and Wind Chimes. Surfs Up materialized four years later as the title-track and coda to Surfs Up, although with some alterations (mostly a new Carl Wilson vocal).

Of course, thats using the tracklisting on the Smile album art that we have, which has been attributed to Brian simply listing off a standard album-cycle of songs because Capitol Records was asking for it. Frank Holmes period-perfect cartoon art and lettering cannot hide the unfinished product it was meant to contain, at least not with the edge-of-psychedelic See label for correct playing order disclaimer on the back of the album.

Brian was notoriously close-mouthed about Smile for nearly thirty years, perhaps because he knew it for what it was: a half-assed failure that simply provided the basis for the last few decent records the Beach Boys would ever create before they faded to infinite repeats of Good Vibrations on oldies radio and nostalgia-circuit touring. It was Brians failure to best John and Paul in their ragged pursuit to drag pop music into the future. And maybe Brian—at best, a bronze-medalist in the Legends of Pop Olympics—realized he could sneak a gold by keeping his mouth shut.

Smile has to be seen in context, and the most powerful context of that time period, and arguably the only commercial rival to the Beach Boys, were the Beatles. While Brian got smashed in the studio and pounded along on the piano, trying to put some sort of sense behind Van Dyke Parks delicate but increasingly bizarre lyrics, the boys across the pond let forth a little sally named Revolver.

While Brian demanded trombone players do take after take to nail down bits of Smile, Sir George Martin smiled at an orchestra, recording notes no human could hear: A Day in the Life would appear, with the rest of its brothers and sisters on Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, in June of 1967. That date was the death of Smile, if there ever was a Smile. What we hear from Brian and the Beach Boys from then on is nothing more then fragments from those 66-67 sessions, and pale reminders that they might have become our American Beatles.

Might have become. They didnt become them, no matter how much we want them to, and the scattered bits of Smile that remain dont really do themor that hope—justice. Criminally overlooked is who wrote those bits of Pet Sounds and Smile that we often adore and fixate on: the sublime lyrics. There are dozens of fan sites for Brian Wilson, and at least three books devoted to his biography, with well over a dozen concerned with the Beach Boys themselves. Tony Asher had to author a book about Pet Sounds to rank any sort of headline, and Van Dyke Parks may as well not exist. Yet one might still hear vehement conversation about whether John or Paul wrote the middle nine of A Day in the Life, while Wouldnt It Be Nice is a Brian Wilson classic. Tony Asher is not even a cactus in the stampede to crown Brian Wilson our king, despite having written nearly every word sung on Pet Sounds.

Our king. I mean the smart folks: the indy rockers and the real rock fans. John and Paul are owned by everybody now, you see: theyve got the taint of the mainstream all over them, even to the millions born after John Lennon was murdered (if a kid was born the day after Mark David Chapman clutched his Catcher and pulled the trigger, hed still be 23). So we have to have somebody else: we need our own idols. We need somebody to come along when our rock and roll retro-hearts are broken by chart-topping sales of 1 and Forty Licks.

So mythology takes over where the truth isnt quite as nice. What can you tell people, and what can you say, that wont make them defensive? We needed a legend. So a handful of enthusiastic journalists and a strong and intelligent fan base with a taste for collecting minutiae help make Pet Sounds become another Revolverwhich its just not, folks, its just not that deepand we let Smile become something not even the Beatles have: a lost masterpiece.

Maybe it just seems worse to live without Smile, and so we talk about it. We write about it. Theres at least fifty bootlegs of the non-album, even though many of the songs and fragments from the sessions are legally available. We want legends, and hidden majesty, and hundreds of crystal-perfect teenage symphonies to God: Brian Wilsons greatest failure was not that he failed, but that tried to give us even more than the two-dozen or so he already had.

But he did give us a few. I’ve got about four different versions of “Heroes and Villains”—one is this little piano demo Brian did, where he’s still figuring out the melody, tumping the same keys on his home piano, but it’s got so much promise. I put that on sometimes and then listen to the nearly-ten-minute long version, complete with hummed choruses and symphony fadeouts, and I drink too much cold beer and shut my eyes and get drunk and just grin along.

Maybe Brian and the Beach Boys aren’t as good as the Beatles. Maybe Smile isn’t real and “In My Life” is better than all the Beach Boys songs ever. But the myth of Brian, and of Smile, is still ours.

Dumb Angel was the original working title for Smile, and a sometime-nickname for the handsome and doomed Dennis Wilson.

Portions of this essay are quotations from or based on lyrics and phrasing created by Tony Asher, Van Dyke Parks, Russ Titelman, Terry Sachen, and Mike Love. Some of the rhythmic cadences of this essay are based upon melodies created by Brian Douglas Wilson.

Chronological information for this essay was culled from allmusic. Beach Boys lyrics are from cabinessence. The Smile Shop has some good FAQ’s. Brian Wilson’s website provided his middle name.

Albums and songs listened to included various Smile takes and outtakes, Smiley Smile, the Laughing Gravy’s version of “Vegetables,” and Glen Campbell’s “Guess I’m Dumb.” The latter two were both produced by Brian Wilson and are available on Pet Projects: The Brian Wilson Productions. That version of “Vegetables” is notable for the fact that the vocals were performed by Dean Torrence (of Jan & Dean), Brian Wilson, his wife Marilyn, and her sister Diane (who comprised the Honeys, later renamed American Spring).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2003 at 1:33 pm and is filed under Gorjus. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.