NB: Copying an old manuscript is so much easier than actually writing fresh stuff. Most of the text that follows was published originally under the title "THE WONDERFUL RESURRECTION AND TRANSFIGURATION OF SMILEY WILSON" by ESQ in May, 1988. Coincidentally, I do have another ms. titled "Fall Breaks..." on another topic entirely. A dilemma wrapped in an enigma, etc.
It reveals an author who was snarky, precious, and without doubt completely stoned at the time of writing. More than twenty years later, I reread it with some irony.)
This 2011 CD remaster comes in a cardboard sleeve.The first eleven tracks display the original monaural version of the album; the following eleven are in true stereo. Because of the circumstances surrounding the master recording of "Good Vibrations," a digital-electronic trick had to be played to obtain a stereo version.
I've never quite understood the carpers who write about Smiley Smile as if it were a piece of shit. Yes, I too was disappointed when it first came out in 1967, especially in the light ofJules Siegel's article in Cheetah ("Goodbye Surfing, Hello God"). Nobody, of course, has any problem with "Good Vibrations" or "Heroes and Villains." But it has taken me twenty-one years to catch up to and begin to understand most of the rest.
Jules Siegel
The first thing I came to realize is that the album's primitivism (compared to the group's prior work and the contemporaneous music ofGeorge Martin's clever lads) was its response to the dizzying gyrations of the mid-Sixties scene. It reflects, moreover, the protracted identity crisis of the Beach Boys, tearing their sound down to an essence and recombining it on a plane altogether the antithesis of all that went before, particularly the baroque confection/ confession that was Pet Sounds. But in 1967, on first listening to shards of "Fall Breaks and Back to Winter,""Little Pad," and "Gettin' Hungry" in the dorm (this was the summer of Jimi Hendrix and the rest of those mostly-boring San Francisco acid heads), you mainly felt the pain of its creator, Brian Wilson, picking up the cross he would carry for the rest of his life.
Siegel's aforementioned account, along with nearly everything else devoted to the SMiLE, period, laments what we never had heard, the legendary tracks across the prairies and up to the stars, the album started out to be. Many years ago, I received a cassette from my little brother on the west coast. It turned out to be the first installment of a yardstick with which to compare to the album that finally appeared in the fall of 1967. The tape, a fifteenth-generation dub by the sound of it, included about forty-five minutes of karmic redemption, with stuff I'd never heard before, labelled "Barnyard," "Do You Like Worms," "Can't Wait Too Long" (straight from the heart of Jesus), "The Old Master Painter," "Tones," "Bicycle Rider," and the flaming "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow," coming at me like Beelzebub himself. Including some of the few genuine SMiLE pieces to emerge in the late '60s, different and/ or incomplete verstions of "Surf's Up,""Good Vibrations,""Cabinessence/ The Iron Horse, Grand Coulee Dam,""OurPrayer,""Child Is Father of the Man," and"Wonderful."
This last tune, in its first-released version is more than a remarkable work of art and must be singled out for special attention. Surely, it should be our national anthem.
On Smiley Smile, the tune features one of the most appealing and revealing combinations of melody and lyric ever to appear on a Beach Boys record. The span of this song, an entire lifetime, gives at the same time a mere "day in the life":
She belongs there left with her liberty,
Never known as a non-believer.
She laughs and stays in the
Wah, wah, Wonderful.
All of Carl's vocal proceeds above a bed of childhood noises, toys, etc., as does the following:
She knew how to gather the forest when
God reached softly and moved her body.
One golden locket, quite young,
And loving her mother
And father.
Farther down the path was a mystery,
Through the recess, the chalk and numbers,
A boy bumped into her
Won, won, won Wonderful.
Na na na na na
Now comes the insert: the disarming simplicity of Carl's voice against a cracked piano and muted harmonica gives way to a few bars of jazzy doo-wop-- actually taken from one of SMiLE's versions of "Vegetables"-- led by Mike's "hey poppa rebop" scat riff, suggesting all the righteous joy of our lifetimes.
After a chorus of this, we are returned to Carl's voice and the ontological liberty with which the song begins:
She'll return in love with her liberty
Never known as a non-believer.
She'll smile and thank God for
One, one, one Wonderful.
This is the sort of song-- a kind of androgynous poppa mom mow mow OM, mind you-- that changed the course of my life and, in the lingo of my onetime roommate Bloy, an axis mundi that one could fight and die for. We lit another nutmeg cigarette as "Whistle In" whisked us to the exit groove and speculated upon the dumb and the brilliant, the sacred and profane.
Flash forward to my first hearing of the original SMILE version in 1986: picture an embittered old fart, fat and married, oppressed by seeing trampled everything he loves and respects in this world* and wondering whether, indeed, he will live to see the Revolution. He slips this cassette into his AKai CS-797D, little knowing he is about to experience the Second Coming. "Wonderful" arrives on the heels of "Our Prayer," but gone is the childlike simplicity of the Smiley Smile arrangement. The stentorian bass tones of a harpsichord introduce the more urgent voice of Brian and are answered, as in a Bach fugue, by another harpsichord and flugelhorn in counterpoint. The pastoral elegy of the released version now, suddenly and unexpectedly, darkens into a narrative of sin and redemption. After "A boy bumped into her..." there is no longer the cosmic rave-up the old fart has replayed since the summer days (and summer nights!!!) of virginity. There is, instead, a new fourth chorus and a significantly different final chorus:
"Heroes and Villains"
Brian raps about Smiley Smile
"Fall Breaks and Back to Winter"
All fall down and lost in the mystery
Lost it all to a non-believer,
And all that's left is a girl
Who's loved by her mother and father.
She'll return in love with the liberty
Just away from the non-believer.
She'll sigh and thank God for
One, one, one Wonderful.
"She'll sigh and thank God... " Brian isn't very smiley here in the original version. The song, no longer in love with the liberty, is consumed by the mystery, but Brian promises to return. He is, for now, on the dark side of the moon; yes, there is another side to this life.
Suddenly, apparently from about the early 1980s, there has been an explosion of bootlegged Beach Boys material, ranging from uncatalogued demos pirated from Brother Recordsto completed album-length unreleases. How much SMiLE is potentially out there has been estimated many times over the years, by Brad Elliot, Domenic Priore, and others, but very little of it has been in circulation, and some of it may have been destroyed. (There is at least one bootleg LP-- "Brother ST2580, but alas, it doesn't include the mind-bending version of "Wonderful." However, it does have a more finished version of "... Worms"/ "Bicycle Rider" and two additional tracks, the stately brass chorale "Holidays" and the humorous brass conversation called "George Fell Into His French Horn,"a sort of updated "Our Favorite Recording Sessions."
"Vegetables"
Now comes the big news: Rick Edgil swears to God that I can die happy at last. Brian Wilson himself, not content with recording "Love and Mercy," is going to smile once more alongside Van Dyke Parks: their album is scheduled for release this year. What should be the final product be like to match our dreams? The possibilities are stretched between issuing a session-by-session SMiLE of all existing tapes (the collector's Nirvana, but not likely from a commercial point of view) and the staggering thought that Brian may really complete the damned thing at last, having achieved the liberty to solve the mystery, so to speak.
Brian could not fail us twice, in two successive incarnations, could he? Only one thing is certain: people will still go on bitching about Smiley Smile. Brian, forgive them; they don't know what they're doing.***
NOTES:
* All the more so in 2020.
** Not until three years later would Wilson and Van Dyke begin their project at all. The result was Orange Crate Art in 1995.
