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Nearly Unanimous 5 Star Reviews For Brian Wilson's "SMiLE" - Out Today!
Trauma-san:
Article from Paul Williams, one of the reporters who was in the studio with Brian recording it in the 60's.
Columnated Ruins Domino
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"If he can't act upon it immediately and see it happening, it's not gonna work."
Feature by Paul Williams
Photograph by Linda Eastman (the future Linda McCartney)
Published September 23, 2004
Twenty-six years ago, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys -- "one of the few undisputed geniuses in popular music," according to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum -- was picked up by the San Diego police in Balboa Park, "under a tree with no shoes on," as recollected by a family member who came from L.A. to retrieve him. "His white pants [were] filthy, obviously a vagrant with no wallet, no money."
He was a millionaire vagrant, leader, and primary songwriter of "the most commercially successful American group of the sixties" (according to The Faber Companion to 20th Century Popular Music). And next week, on September 28, 2004, one of Wilson's crowning creations, Smile ("The most famous unheard album in pop history," according to the New York Times), will be released for the first time. This is where I come in. I've been writing about this album for 37 years (since I was a teenaged rock-magazine editor), I helped make it famous, and I have Smile and Brian Wilson to thank for the fact that I'm living in San Diego today.
Brian Wilson, millionaire vagrant and auteur of the brand-new Nonesuch album Brian Wilson Presents SMILE, was found in September 1978 "lying facedown in the gutter" in Balboa Park, "without any ID, mumbling over and over, 'I want to die' " (quotes from p. 254 of Wilson's 1991 autobiography, Wouldn't It Be Nice) as a result of the unfortunate combination of substance abuse and an undiagnosed severe bipolar condition. He subsequently spent six weeks detoxing in the Alvarado Community Hospital (now called Alvarado Hospital Medical Center, located close to San Diego State University).
Substance abuse was also a major factor (along with the bipolar condition, which, as in the case of Vincent van Gogh, may also have contributed significantly to the man's universally recognized expressive genius) in Wilson's inability to complete in 19661967 his most ambitious (and expensive) rock-music project, the Beach Boys album Smile. Smile was intended as a follow-up to the Beach Boys' 1966 album Pet Sounds, inspired by the Beatles' Rubber Soul and in turn acknowledged by Paul McCartney as the primary inspiration for the Beatles' landmark album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band...and as a follow-up to and musical extension of the Beach Boys' boldly experimental 1966 #1 single "Good Vibrations."
How Smile brought me to San Diego: I was at a Bob Dylan concert in Los Angeles in 1992, and during the intermission I ran into my friend, British singer-songwriter John Wesley Harding. Wes was with his producer Andy Paley, whom I knew as a close friend of and sometime songwriting collaborator of Brian Wilson. (In fact, when I'd last met Andy, he'd been putting together a box set of unreleased tracks and fragments from the unfinished Smile album on assignment from Capitol Records. That box set never materialized, alas, due to opposition from some of the other Beach Boys, who thought Brian had made a fool of them, having them grunt into microphones during his amphetamine-and-marijuana-fueled extravagantly experimental Smile sessions.) Anyway, while Wes and I gossiped about Bob Dylan, Andy spotted his friend, San Diego singer-songwriter Cindy Lee Berryhill, and called her over to join our gathering.
Cindy was then in an intense stage of the Brian Wilson fascination that most young rock musicians go through sooner or later (for example, John Lennon's son Sean, who in interviews a few years back was proclaiming the Beach Boys a more seminal rock band than the Beatles). She'd met Andy through her friend Domenic Priore, then a Carlsbad resident, who'd established himself as a writer and rock-and-roll maven by assembling and self-publishing a book about the legendary Smile album called Look! Listen! VIBRATE! SMILE!
I then and there forgave Domenic for reprinting my extensive Smile writings without permission or payment because this attractive young woman whose first album I'd heard and liked (another Dylan fan had sent me a tape of it) was very excited to meet me, as she had just been reading my long interviews/conversations with producer/Brian intimate David Anderle about why the Smile album was never completed. She gave me her phone number and suggested we get together to talk about Brian Wilson. A year and a half later, after I'd introduced her to Anderle (she was on a quest to meet all the major "Brian people") and to BW-fan and Warner Bros. Records president Lenny Waronker and to Smile coauthor Van Dyke Parks, I found myself moving from Northern California to Encinitas to live with Cindy. Today we're married and have a three-year-old child...and I still live in Encinitas.
That three-part interview/essay about Smile (and the fact that I was lucky enough to visit the Smile recording sessions as Wilson's guest) has brought me a lot of attention over the years (climaxing in bringing me a wife and child and a beautiful city to live in). When my first book was published in 1969, Rolling Stone wrote: "The long interview with David Anderle about Brian Wilson (itself worth the price of the book) is a short story, complete with beginning, middle, and end. The interview form becomes a sophisticated narrative device for telling the story of an artist's struggle with himself, his friends, and the limits of his art." And to my delight, I am often mentioned alongside composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein as one of the key voices early on calling the world's attention to the greatness of the Smile compositions and recordings. Of course, this was not such a happy accomplishment when Smile came to seem a sort of albatross for Brian, a legend he might never be able to live up to or escape.
But all that is in the past, now that Brian has gone back into the studio with his current band and has rerecorded Smile quite successfully and is proudly presenting it to the world on a record label best known for its classical music offerings. So now that the album, against all odds, is out and it is good and will bring happiness to most who listen to it, I can proudly share with you this 1997 pronouncement by Beach Boys historian and sometime Brian Wilson manager David Leaf, in his introduction to my book Brian Wilson & the Beach Boys -- How Deep Is the Ocean?: "While Paul Williams was not the first to put Brian Wilson 'on paper,' he may be the one to have most influenced virtually all the writers who fell in love with the artist."
There's a lot to fall in love with. But before I say more about that, I'd like to mention that Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys, symbols of Southern California to music lovers all over the world, have a significant connection to San Diego County that goes beyond acknowledging "Swami's" as a famous surfing spot in the lyrics to their first big hit, "Surfin' USA." That connection has to do with the fact that three of the five Beach Boys -- Brian, Dennis, and Carl Wilson -- were brothers and that, while they grew up in Hawthorne, just south of Los Angeles, their father, Murry Wilson, spent part of his childhood in Cardiff-by-the-Sea, where his parents settled when they came west from Kansas, and after Murry's grandfather's dreams of becoming a prosperous grape grower in Escondido fell through. So the California dream that inspired this family of Los Angelenos had strong roots in north San Diego County. The Wilsons, who would do so much to tell the world about Southern California beach and car culture, came to Hawthorne from Kansas by way of Escondido and Cardiff.
Smile, the newly recorded and just-about-to-be-released Smile, was always intended to be a Beach Boys album, but Brian's brothers Carl and Dennis are dead now, and the Beach Boys as such no longer exist, although there is still a touring group or two that performs under that name or a variation on that name. The musical legacy of the Beach Boys on record is kept alive by Brian, who, after all, wrote the music for most of the group's songs and produced and arranged most of their records. Brian Wilson, in the past nine years, has released two excellent solo albums (I Just Wasn't Made for These Times, 1995, and Imagination, 1998) and a seemingly uninspired one (Gettin' in over My Head, 2004). I say "seemingly" because I don't feel I've listened to it enough to be certain of my judgment. Maybe it will come to mean more to me if I listen to it more, if I take the time to find a way into it. He has also released several live albums that again I defer judgment on because I don't think I've listened to them enough. I can say that the live shows of his that I've seen and heard have been terrific. The music is good, the band is very good, and Brian's enthusiasm for performing is surprising and infectious. It's surprising because in the past Brian did not enjoy performing live and was notoriously uncomfortable onstage. This is a real turnaround that has happened for him in the past five years, and insofar as the new Smile is much better, much more enjoyable, and less self-conscious than I would have expected, I think primary credit must go to his current band and his relationship with them and his new relationships with his music and with his audience as a result of his breakthroughs as a performer.
I might not be the best person to tell you how good this new, long-awaited Smile album is or is not. After all, I've been in print proclaiming how great it would be for 37 years now; I might be pretty invested in proving I was right all along. And on the other hand, I heard those extraordinary tracks (recorded music without voices) Brian played for me in late '66, and I've heard the sublime pieced-together Smile songs that have been included on Beach Boys albums over the years ("Surf's Up," "Cabinessence," and half of the second disc of the 1993 box set Good Vibrations)... So I could get caught in comparing my memories of those delights with what I'm hearing now. No, the right person to assess this new album is your child or your friend's child between ages 4 and 14, who is almost certain to be grabbed and thrilled by the Beach Boys' (and Brian Wilson's) 1960s hits, as heard on discs 1 and 2 of that box set or on all sorts of greatest-hits compilations. Music that will live forever and speak across the ages. Is this new Smile more of the same?; different flavor but just as irresistible? I think it could be. But play it for a child if you want to know for certain.
Smile 2004 is a triumph, I think. These were always good songs that Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson wrote, albeit that the jilted lover, Brian Wilson's cousin and heretofore primary lyricist, Mike Love, is on record as saying, " 'columnated ruins domino,' what the fuck is that supposed to mean?" Mike's point was that Van Dyke and Brian were going to lose the universality, the appeal to a mass audience, that had made the Beach Boys millionaires. But he missed Van Dyke's point, which is that Beach Boys music is both as highbrow and as lowbrow as J.S. Bach and that if you call a song "Surf's Up" and return gracefully to that phrase, you can have it both ways. This, after all, was the song that had won over Leonard Bernstein, a man who presumably had never hung ten or watched from the shore as someone else did.
What makes it a triumph? The beauty of the melodies and of the language and the way melodic and verbal motifs weave in and out through the whole tapestry of music and of American history. The way the phrase "child is father of the man" has become so central to this rendering of Smile, as though it were a celebration of Brian's rebirth thanks to living with his adopted infant daughters. The richness of the music pictures and the word pictures blended together here. The excellence of Brian's singing on the album, in spite of his 62 years of hard living. The profound Mozart-like simplicity achieved in this composition for voices and instruments. The remarkable lack of self-consciousness in this work and these performances despite the history of the album/composition...
In our famous conversation about Smile that appeared in three parts in my magazine Crawdaddy!, David Anderle said, summing up our discussion of Smile and why the glorious, ambitious album was never completed in 1966 and 1967, "It has to happen immediately with Brian, the idea comes to the mind and he understands it instantly. If he can't act upon it immediately and see it happening in front of his eyes, it's not gonna work. That's what happened with Smile." So it wasn't just the drugs and Brian's mental/emotional condition and the doubts of the other Beach Boys, though those were delaying factors...
And how, after all these years and against all odds, has he managed to put Humpty Dumpty together again? To me it is clearly the result of the man's, the artist's, rebirth as a performer. Onstage it happens immediately: you play the music and the audience receives it and responds. Brian had this experience and obviously found it very fulfilling when he went on tour in 1999 with his new band and again the following year when he performed his masterpiece, Pet Sounds, live at the Hollywood Bowl and in Europe and Japan. A hard act to follow...but he did have another masterpiece, the legendary unrecorded Smile, waiting in the wings, and he decided to perform it in England, where his most adventurous music had always been warmly appreciated. Having performed Smile live successfully and to a warm response took the edge off it. Now he could go into a studio not feeling that he had something to prove or some kind of impossibly challenging task ahead of him. He could sing and perform in the moment, as one does onstage, knowing that the musicians with him understood this and him and his music. Now it was free to happen immediately. The result is, as I say, a triumph. One that will certainly serve to seal Brian Wilson's place among the great composers of the western world, a man with a body of work that will live and move listeners forever.
And it's not only about surfing. It's also about surviving, which is where Brian's Balboa Park experience -- a low point in his life -- comes into it. On the new album, on Smile, Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson via "Surf's Up" claim surfing as a universal metaphor, as most San Diegans could have told them it is.
And I'll mention, because though it shouldn't be necessary to know this, it could add to the album experience to learn that songs 11 through 16 on the new album are the remains of a composition known as the "Four Elements Suite." "Vega-Tables" and "I'm in Great Shape" are the earth, "Wind Chimes" is air, "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow" is fire (one of the factors that originally made it difficult for Wilson to complete Smile was his conviction that this piece of music in its original form was responsible for a fire that broke out near the recording studio), "In Blue Hawaii" is water, and (I think) "On a Holiday" represents the interface between water and air.
Get the album, let your kids hear it, and if you want more, you can't go wrong with the box set Good Vibrations. This is your chance to hear tomorrow's classical music today. And if it seems light and popular, that of course is exactly what Mozart was in his era.
How did Brian Wilson of Beverly Hills end up in a gutter in Balboa Park? you might be wondering. It's a typical Southern California story. According to his autobiography, Brian was talking with "a nicely dressed man" in a hotel bar in Century City. The man "was a salesman, and his mom and dad had a place in San Diego where he sometimes stayed." So they drive south, and the next day Brian walks to a local bar where people buy him drinks and then he goes for a hike in the park. It sounds like a scene from "Heroes and Villains" as performed on the new Smile album.
It's a wonderful record, I tell you. I haven't changed my tune. Neither has Brian, though he's not drinking now. The album was named from an American Indian saying, "The smile that you send out comes back to you." I'll testify to that.
Brian Wilson will perform Smile at Spreckels Theatre on Saturday, October 30.
Trauma-san:
Entertainment Weekly - Grade : "A"
Beach Party
Brian Wilson's latest was worth the (37-year) wait.
by Chris Willman
Once, Todd Rundgren recorded an exact replica of "Good Vibrations", just because he could. Now Brian Wilson's recorded his own note-for-note "Vibrations" copy--a few rewritten lyrics or extended passages notwithstanding--with a better excuse: He's painstakingly duplicating an entire 1967 Beach Boys album that never quite actually existed. SMiLE got consigned to the trash heap, and became the holy grail of rock projects, after other band members openly groused about its wigginess. But though it remained legendarily incomplete, several classic numbers ("Heroes and Villains", "Surf's Up") did see daylight, and lesser scraps have been widely bootlegged. Hearing its original architect re-create this treasure trove of lost-and-found material with ringers (Wilson's touring band almost does the Beach Boys better than the Beach Boys), you may wonder if this is SMiLE-mania--not the real SMiLE, but an incredible simulation!
But screw all that, because the mirth and beauty of the work trump any concerns about reassemblage. As "finished" by Wilson and lyricist Van Dyke Parks, SMiLE fulfills its 37-year promise, detailing what'd happen if you threw Stephen Foster's parlor folk, Aaron Copland's orchestral Americana, the Four Freshmen, some kiddie pop, and a sound-effects record into an acid-laced blender. With a new melodic idea occurring every 45 seconds on average, it's a gorgeous trip back to a time when anything seemed possible, rendered only slightly melancholy through a four-decade filter of diminshed musical expectations. Purists will suggest SMiLE was better off as myth, but I'll take this version of the story where Shubert not only gets to finish his eighth symphony, but tours and sells t-shirts behind it.
Grade: A
Trauma-san:
Sunday Times - London - 5 out of 5 stars
BRIAN WILSON
Smile
Nonesuch 7559798462
I assume we all know the story: Smile was destined to be the Beach Boys' follow-up to Pet Sounds, but Brian Wilson suffered a breakdown and the project was aborted, becoming pop's great "lost" album. Now, 37 years later, Wilson has re-recorded the entire album, working with his original collaborator, Van Dyke Parks, and his own current band. There are no Beach Boys on this Smile. So how do we approach such a singular artefact? If we owned the many bootlegs, we could quibble over the track listing. Or we could admire Wilson's courage, but moan that he shouldn't have messed with our fantasies by making the album real. But why should we be so churlish? Smile's journey through myriad American musical styles means that it was never bound to the time of its (intended) release, so it hasn't actually dated. It stands alone and apart. If you only know the Beach Boys' big hits, you might feel nervous about jumping into Smile's three extended musical suites; but you can embark on this unique musical voyage safe in the knowledge that the more idiosyncratic territories are balanced by magnificent pop songs, including Heroes and Villains, Surf's Up, Wonderful and Good Vibrations. And yes, the oooh-bop-bops on that track still send shivers up the spine. Five stars
Trauma-san:
Interview from the Springfield Republican
'Smile' the 'Holy Grail' of rock'n' roll
Sunday, September 26, 2004
By KEVIN O'HARE
kohare@repub.com
He called it "a teen-age symphony to God."
That was 37 years ago, when Brian Wilson - feeling the pressure of worldwide anticipation but deep personal torment - decided to put one of the most eagerly awaited albums in the history of pop music on the shelf, half-finished and in shambles.
The "symphony" was called "Smile" and it was slated to be the follow-up album to "Pet Sounds," the 1966 masterpiece Wilson had created for his band, The Beach Boys. He'd quit the road by that time, opting for long, arduous hours of studio craftsmanship, while the rest of the Beach Boys traveled across the globe, singing their songs of fast cars, surfing and beach babes amid the endless summers of sun and fun.
Inside the studio, Brian Wilson's world was filled with darkness, despair, drug abuse and depression.
Now, in one of the most unfathomable stories of this or any year, the ongoing rehabilitation of Wilson has taken another huge step forward, as the once-reclusive genius has capped a decade-long comeback by doing something he once said he'd never do - he's finished "Smile."
The album, which has been partially re-written and completely re-recorded in the studio, is being released Tuesday by Nonesuch Records. It's remarkable to hear it in its entirety, especially after listening to scattered bits that appeared on Beach Boys' albums through the years, as well as on bootleg copies that only added to the set's mythic status.
What's even more amazing is how well Wilson has made it flow.
The album is pretty darned fabulous.
Speaking by phone from Beverly Hills recently, the 62-year-old Wilson was proud, relieved and at peace concerning "Smile," which to many hard-core fans is more than just the final piece in a puzzle, it truly is rock's "Holy Grail."
For years, Wilson wouldn't even talk about "Smile," in interviews or anywhere else.
"I just had bad memories about it from the drugs I was taking," Wilson said.
He was reportedly ingesting vast amounts of hashish at the time, acting increasingly bizarre and zoned out so much that he resorted to such madcap antics as insisting all his backing musicians wear fire helmets during a "Fire" segment ("Mrs. O'Leary's Cow") while recording "Smile."
He recalled that exact moment in 1967 when he abandoned the project.
"We were recording the fire segment. We even put a fire in the middle of the studio," Wilson said. "And a half-hour later I heard a building down the street burned to the ground. I thought that our doing the fire segment was responsible for it burning down. That's when I finally broke down and shelved the album."
It probably didn't help that his fellow Beach Boys felt Wilson had gone off the deep end with the project, which their leader had been working on from the late summer of 1966 until May of 1967.
"Mike (Love) and Carl (Wilson) didn't like it at all," Brian Wilson recalled. "Alan (Jardine) and Dennis (Wilson) were just sort of like neutral about it. But Mike and Carl were very, very against it."
All these years later, it seems hard to believe that anyone could be against an album that was anchored on one end by "Heroes and Villains," held up in the middle by the beyond-brilliant combination of "Child is Father of the Man," and "Surf's Up," and which closes with "Good Vibrations," the latter released by the Beach Boys in 1966 as a single - a precursor to "Smile."
"Heroes and Villains," along with a few other re-worked cuts from the scrapped sessions, subsequently appeared on the disappointing Beach Boys' album "Smiley Smile" in late 1967. "Surf's Up," served as the title song to the 1971 album that remains one of the Beach Boys' most underrated recordings. But the entire "Smile" album had never been completed and put into its proper context until now.
When Wilson abandoned "Smile" he also all but abandoned life, building an infamous sandbox in his living room for his piano, gaining a tremendous amount of weight, and spending most of his time in bed while falling deeper and deeper into psychological distress.
"The drugs I was taking slowly deteriorated my creative process," Wilson says now.
His recovery took decades. But with a lot of help from his wife, Melinda, as well as his management and friends, Wilson began resurfacing and, in the 1990s, teamed with the great L.A.-based power-pop band The Wondermints, led by Darian Sahanaja. Wilson started playing live again with an expanded musical lineup. D uring the March 2001 "All Star Tribute to Brian Wilson" at New York's Radio City Music Hall, he even performed "Heroes and Villains."
At a restaurant in L.A., surrounded by his wife and his management, he was finally coaxed into giving "Smile" another try.
"They had a gut instinct that the world was finally ready for it," Wilson recalled. "So I figured I'd give it a shot. We listened to the original tapes from 1967 and then created a third movement for it. Then Darian Sahanaja and I put all 30 segments together in sequence."
As Wilson and co-writer Van Dyke Parks (who was also brought in to help finish the project) see it, "Smile" tells a story of a journey across the U.S. from one end - "Roll Plymouth Rock" - to the other - "In Blue Hawaii." It ends with "Good Vibrations," and while the new version of that song is exceptional, it does contain some different lyrics than the more-familiar hit.
"We used Tony Asher's original lyrics, not Mike Love's lyrics," Wilson said.
There's apparently no love lost between Wilson and his cousin Love, the latter who still tours under the moniker of The Beach Boys, along with former Beach Boy Bruce Johnston.
Has Love heard the new "Smile"?
"No," Wilson said. "We haven't talked for about 10 years now. And after Carl died (in 1998) things even got worse."
Wilson doesn't sound thrilled with Love's continued touring under the Beach Boys' name, but he'd rather talk about why he re-recorded "Smile," instead of doing what some Beach Boys' devotees advocated - just patching together the old tapes.
"I wanted to get better musicianship," he said dryly. "My musicians are better than the original musicians that did it. They're playing sharper notes, clearer beats and the rhythm was right. The sound was better. All that made for a better 'Smile' album."
When the work was finished, he admitted feeling an immense weight off of his shoulders.
"I was so relieved I actually cried in the studio," Wilson said. "Because I was so relieved that we got it done. It was quite an emotional experience for me."
Together with his band, he premiered the piece on stage in London earlier this year.
"I was scared to death," Wilson said of the first night. "I didn't know how it would go over. Remember when Gershwin premiered 'Rhapsody in Blue' in 1924? That's how this was for me in 2004 in London. I was very nervous. But we got a standing ovation after the first concert and the next five (concerts). I was very proud of how it was accepted."
The British press hailed it, with The Guardian referring to "Smile" as "The grandest of American Symphonies" and The Daily Telegraph saying "the music echoed everything from Philip Glass to Kurt Weill to Chuck Berry ... Leonard Bernstein said Brian Wilson was one of the greatest composers of the 20th Century. He was not wrong."
Now Wilson brings "Smile" to the U.S., not only with the CD release, but also with a tour that runs into early November.
And the once-reclusive artist says he's feeling better every day.
"I was pretty mentally in a bad state of mind there for awhile. But I'm starting to get back into it ... I'm exercising again, I'm running and I'm going to buy an exercise machine that costs $15,000. In four minutes of exercise it's the equivalent of a half-hour of aerobic exercise - in just four minutes. It builds your body up to give you endurance."
After the band returns from an Australian leg of the tour in December, Wilson wants to work on "a rock'n' roll record inspired by Phil Spector's records."
He's already got seven songs penned for the project including, "You Could Make A River Flow," "Heaven," and "I Saw Her Again Last Night."
Spector, famed producer known for his "wall of sound" studio techniques, is facing charges in connection with the alleged murder of a woman at his West Coast mansion.
"I haven't talked to Phil in 20 years," Wilson said. "I understand he had an accident with a gun or something."
There's also been some speculation about Wilson working more with Paul McCartney, who has stated that "Pet Sounds" was an inspiration for the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" album, which was released in 1967. McCartney appeared on a relatively lackluster duet with Wilson on the latter's "Gettin' In Over My Head," album earlier this year.
"We haven't talked about it really at all lately," Wilson said. "I'm gonna call him in a few weeks and ask him about it (collaborating again)."
But for now, he's enjoying "Smile."
"It was a sentimental experience to recreate 'Smile,'" Wilson said. "I hope people in all the different cities we play enjoy it, and appreciate all the hard work that went into learning 'Smile' for them. I'm very proud of it."
Trauma-san:
The Detroit Free Press - 4 out of 4 stars
PUT ON A HAPPY FACE: In the dustbin for more than 30 years, Brian Wilson's 'Smile' is finally finished and released -- brilliantly
September 26, 2004
BY TERRY LAWSON
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
Remember Doonesbury's Andy Lippincott, the AIDS patient who refused to die until the Beach Boys' pop masterpiece "Pet Sounds" was released on CD?
Brian Wilson
'Smile'
FOUR STARS
out of 4 stars
(Nonesuch)
He might still be around if he had even the vaguest inkling that Wilson someday would actually finish its follow-up "Smile," without doubt the most legendary lost album in history. In what may be the most unimaginable comeback in pop history, Wilson, following a three-decade, often-exploited battle with mental illness, has followed his brilliant concert performances of "Pet Sounds" with a fine live album and a credible studio record. And now we get this reconstruction of "Smile," which was famously saddled with the sobriquet "a teenage symphony to God" in a legendary magazine story before the project was abandoned more than 30 years ago in a drug and dislocation breakdown from which Wilson has never altogether recovered.
Fragments have been officially released, and some of the songs, including the unlikely hit "Heroes and Villains," and "Surf's Up," the impressionistic art ballad that led Leonard Bernstein to declare Wilson a master composer, intended for the record were released on the substituted "Smiley Smile" and later Beach Boys albums. Bootleg reconstructions from the studio sessions have floated around for years. But with much help from his original collaborator Van Dyke Parks and his simply remarkable touring band, "Smile" has been re-imagined, and is one of those rare things in life that turns out to be nearly everything it was cracked up to be: An original, idiosyncratic and unabashedly American song cycle that deserves its oft-made comparison to the work of Aaron Copland, as well as to that of late '60s Lennon and McCartney.
For Wilson fans, the familiarity of most of this material makes initial enjoyment easier. (I've been listening, thanks to a friend, to a bootleg of the first live performance of the album for months, making it even easier for me.) Yet anyone with open ears will be hard-pressed to argue that the anticipation was all based on hype, or that the music isn't brilliant. Parks (presumably) has tied together once-random pieces of music with passion and precision employing orchestral links to take us on a time-suspended train trip of a Carl Sandburg America -- where even impenetrable lyrics like "And sunny down snuff I'm alright" become poignant and meaningful, and the abstract harmonies of "Wind Chimes" provoke summer dreams far removed from surfing and hot-rod fantasies, but oddly dependent on them as well.
Through studio magic or force of will, Wilson's vocals are beautiful and heartbreaking. And while it would be professional of me to find some fault with some overly ornate arrangements or too-precious word-smithing, it's just not in my heart. I love this music. It makes me smile. In Stores Tuesday.
Brian Wilson and his band will perform "Smile" and other songs at 7:30 p.m. Oct. 4 at the Michigan Theater, 603 E. Liberty, Ann Arbor. 734-668-8397. $42.50-$85.
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