OK, let's go through this again:
Smile was meant to be The One. Conceived as the follow-up to the Beach Boys' groundbreaking 1966 Pet Sounds album, it was intended as the band's masterpiece, as well as writer-producer-arranger Brian Wilson's boldest challenge to The Beatles as supreme dictators of progressive mid-'60s pop-rock. For three years prior, Wilson had been combining a more refined version of Phil Spector's “wall of sound” with lyrics and vocals that insisted on despair and isolation. The result was not only gorgeous, radio-perfect pop but also a personal style both resounding and delicate, booming and haunting.
And Smile would be the perfection, the apotheosis of this. It would be a song cycle, a multi-concept album -- "a teenage symphony to God," in Wilson's summary -- with Van Dyke Parks' surreal lyrics set against the Beach Boys' most sophisticated musical textures yet. More than 70 recording sessions were held, the bulk of them between August 1966 and January 1967. Obsessing over the minutest aural details, perpetually scrapping and revising his conceptual master plans, Wilson ran the sessions like an LSD-inspired Dr. Frankenstein and worked up an anticipatory buzz around the album that was unprecedented in a pre-Sgt. Pepper pop world not yet consecrated to such major statements and grandstand plays.
But just at the moment of truth, it all collapsed. Smile had too much riding on it, and Wilson buckled under the expectations -- those he had encouraged in others, but mostly those he placed on himself. Time got away from him, his visions overwhelmed his discipline, and the project lost whatever thematic anchor it had had. Wilson went into retreat, the Beach Boys lost momentum, and both began a downward slide from which they never recovered, commercially or artistically. A few of the Smile songs were released in subsequent years on subsequent albums, but the majority of the recordings were left to molder in a mausoleum of myth, a heap of glittering rubble surrounded by whispers of what surely would have been.
Then, in the mid-'80s, Smile somehow escaped the mausoleum and began to appear on illicit vinyl, and by the '90s, lengthy session tapes were flowing like water from some underground spring -- hour after hour of vocal overdubs, instrumental tracks, studio talk, extended suites, and perfected interludes. Work that had been so famously unheard for so long was finally put to the ear test, and myth-mongers and genius debunkers alike could decide for themselves.
Smile has always been the focus of warring orthodoxies. Any work so laden with superlatives without having been heard was bound to inspire backlash, and a consensus gradually emerged among the non-devoted that the album really wasn't anything much, was certainly not genius, nor on a level with earlier Beach Boys hits like "Don't Worry Baby" or "I Get Around." But its advocates claimed it was everything Wilson had ever promised and more: a fount of musical beauty, of humor and wonder, of dazzling vocal interplay and instrumental nuance.
For myself, I am unrepentantly of the latter persuasion, though I can see why some are unconvinced. Smile is soft and sweet, treads the line between insipid and inspired, and is best consumed in smaller quantities. Listen too long and the richness turns to goo, the invention loses its novelty, and the production brilliance grows as irritating as tinsel the day after Christmas.
But that was a risk that listeners deserved the chance to take: How draconian to withhold music that threatens to give too much, when most music of the day gives so damn little! Smile deserved to be recovered, reconsidered, rehabilitated, reconfigured -- pieces put in place, edges sanded, and gaps filled -- pretty much as it has been now, by Wilson himself, on a new release titled (imagine that!) Smile.
The one problem with this album is that it's not Smile. That is, it's not Smile as it was then, in 1966, when Wilson was at the apex of his ambition, his craziness, and his inspiration. When he was making celestial jukebox pop in the Spector-hallowed halls of Gold Star Studios in Hollywood, with history-making musicians like drummer Hal Blaine, bassist Carole Kaye, and keyboardist Larry Knechtel. When the Beach Boys' voices were young and strong, a chorus of silver surfers cruising Wilson's blue musical skies.
That was Smile as it should have been heard. But things are seldom that simple, seldom that right, in life or in the record store. The music that now appears under the Smile banner presents a unique problem because it is -- in the infamous phrase -- not the original but an incredible simulation. Wilson set out to replicate the sound, the feel, the note-for-noteness of the original recordings; to re-create, as a "new" work and as precisely as possible, what he had once created. Over backings provided by Los Angeles pop adepts the Wondermints -- most of whose instrumentation is virtually indistinguishable from its Gold Star model -- Wilson sings the same lyrics he sang nearly 40 years ago, attempting the same inflections, reaching for the same state of rapturous innocence.
There is, of course, a tradition of artists revisiting earlier works to see what, if anything, has changed. In the distance between first inspiration and mature reflection lies a vast field of potential -- for irony, emotion, illumination. Only two rules apply: There must be a measurable difference between the old and the new, and that difference must somehow function in favor of the work, not against it. But the sad fact is that Wilson's voice, once so high and heartbreaking, the voice of an inconsolable romantic, is now tonally all wrong for this material. It's lost dexterity and expressiveness; it lumbers, whines, and at times almost brays. Having come through parental abuse, drugs and nicotine, nervous breakdown, virtual catatonia, the heights of pop fame and the depths of mass neglect, Wilson has earned every scar and drag on his voice. But he should be singing music to make those scars quiver, to ennoble that drag. And Smile is the exact opposite of that.
It's a body of music heady with youth and optimism, the perfume of chemical inspiration and creative affluence, wrought at just the moment before everything began rolling downhill. Timeless though it may prove to be, Smile is the quintessence of its mid-'60s, southern California, über-hippie moment. But Wilson's voice jerks it out of that moment and into now, and on the love songs particularly, the transformation is as smooth as sandpaper. "Wind Chimes" and "Wonderful" -- the latter featuring one of the loveliest melodies ever composed -- were originally sung by Wilson in a sustained, weeping falsetto. Now his voice, reaching for that same tenderness but thickened and coarsened, slathers his own tunes and Parks' fragile lyrics with overemphasis, gobbets of forced feeling. Where he could once slide up to a sweet climactic note and make it sound like the most natural of ascensions (as in the "Brother John" section of "Surf's Up"), now he must all but heave the notes from his throat into a doughy middle range, where they sink indifferently. The spell of this great song, flawless in its past reading, is never cast.
The contradiction between delicate music and inelegant voice doesn't deepen Smile, it only mars it, because this is not a work that can profit from such tension. And even the backings, for all their rightness, are wrong: The Wondermints' instrumentations are precise but sterile, smooth as wax and about as vibrant. Wilson employed the original Smile mixing console in recording the new tracks, but the feel is that of today's digital studio: Gone is the hissing depth and roomy feel of Wilson's layered, grandiose arrangements.
I don't know how this music will sound to the uninitiated, but for listeners with some familiarity (including anyone who has heard those few original Smile tracks that were released on such albums as 20/20, Sunflower, and Surf's Up), it will be impossible not to compare the new version with the old -- and to wonder why the new must exist. Why the original tapes were not polished and finished, edited and sequenced. Why a work so near consummation and still today, in its fragmented form, so alive with tenderness and invention, the brilliance of a moment that could never have lasted, was not allowed to emerge from oblivion into common embrace.
Some would say that's just what has happened. But no one would claim Brian Wilson 2004 is the equal of Brian Wilson 1966. That being the case, how is the new Smile justified? Come to that, is it possible for an artist to forge his own work? Objectively, the answer is “no.” But the miscalculation and missed chance of Smile as it now exists -- in probably the only form the mass market will ever see -- is that it makes you ask the question.
Devin McKinney is a freelance writer and the author of Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
