A few months back, I wrote an article about the history of Smile and the upcoming box set for my school paper. The focus was to introduce Smile to a student body that had probably never heard of it before, in addition to talking about the new box set. I don't think it ever got published, so I might as well post it here. Tell me what you think:
Beach Boys release Smile - 45 Years In The Making
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Flash back to 1966. The Beach Boys have released their biggest single to date, “Good Vibrations”, and in a period where The Beatles had retreated from the stage and been facing the backlash of declaring themselves “bigger than Jesus”, The Beach Boys were on top of the popular music world. It was in this brief window that their main songwriter Brian Wilson began work on what would become the most legendary musical project of his entire career, in his words, a “teenage symphony to God”: Smile.
Fresh off the creative spark of both “Good Vibrations” and his earlier masterpiece of an album Pet Sounds, Brian Wilson's path towards Smile started with the recruitment of bohemian clarinet player Van Dyke Parks as his lyricist. Together, they wrote some of the most artistically brilliant songs of Brian Wilson's entire career. Van Dyke's lyrics evoked a sort of psychedelic Americana, going from Plymouth Rock to Hawaii and along the way reflecting on the treatment of the Native Americans by colonialists, and the opening up of the landscape by railroads. The lyrics also evoked a playful humor ripe with clever wordplay and a grand emotional sweep exemplified with powerful metaphors. This worked well with Brian Wilson's music, which was rapidly moving beyond the scope of the surf-and-car songs he had been writing previously, and even beyond the scope of conventional pop songs; all the songs on Smile are composed of short musical vignettes that are arranged in sequences to create songs. This powerful union of creative forces creates an amazing and impressionistic soundscape. These forces are helped along by Brian Wilson's unmatched production quality and The Beach Boy's immaculate vocals.
However, as time went on, Brian began facing a number of problems in the pursuit of his musical vision. One of these was his own mental state. The stress of writing and recording combined with undiagnosed schizoaffective disorder combined with his copious drug intake deteriorated his already fragile psyche to the point that he started hearing voices in his head, as well as creating a mounting paranoia that caused him to believe that fellow producer Phil Spector was trying to steal his ideas. At one point, while recording an instrumental called “Fire”, which was meant to be part of a song sequence dedicated to the four classical elements of nature, a number of fires started up around the LA studio where the piece was being recorded. Brian was convinced that the song was somehow causing those fires, and depending on who you ask, he either locked the session tapes in a vault somewhere or burned them. Either way, it was becoming clear that his mental state was fracturing.
Another problem standing in the way of Smile was The Beach Boys themselves. Of the other five members in the band at that point, the only one who really supported Brian's vision was his brother Dennis Wilson (who would go on to have an acclaimed solo career in the 70's), and the rest of the band were in varying degrees of opposition to the project. The worst of this, however, came from lead singer and Brian's cousin Mike Love, who, when presented with this music that was so different from the usual Beach Boys style, flat-out told Brian “don't f*** with the formula”, and also got into arguments with Van Dyke Parks over such lyrics as “columnated ruins domino” and “over and over, the crow cries uncover the cornfield”. Eventually, this drove Van Dyke Parks into quitting the project and leaving Brian on his own. As would soon become apparent, this was not the right move, as without such a dynamic creative partner to work with, the project became more and more disorganized and hopeless.
It doesn't stop there, either. At about the same time all of this was happening, The Beach Boys were filing a lawsuit with Capitol Records over unpaid royalties, Brian's brother and fellow Beach Boy Carl Wilson was nearly drafted into the Vietnam War, Brian's father Murry had convinced the FBI to bug Brian's house, Capitol Records was mounting pressure on Brian to finish what was quickly becoming a very overdue album, and The Beatles were re-entering the pop charts with “Strawberry Fields Forever”. In short, everything that could've gone wrong did, and on May 6, 1967, The Beach Boys announced to the world that Smile would not be released. A few weeks later, The Beatles would release Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
In the wake of this travesty, The Beach Boys tried to stay popular in the eyes of the public by recording newer, more back-to-basics music, but the fallout from Smile and the resulting perception that the band were has-beens had already done its damage. It would be seven years before the band would regain the popularity it had once had (with the 1974 greatest hits album Endless Summer), and by that point, there had already been a few attempts by the band to restart the Smile project and get a finished product out there, none of which were successful. As time went on, however, the legend of the album began to take hold among music enthusiasts, and what work had been done on the album was widely bootlegged and traded among the underground music scene. Then in 2004, a newly-recuperated Brian Wilson re-arranged and re-recorded most of what he had done on the album into a new three-part suite that was performed to sold-out concerts and recorded into one of the most critically-acclaimed albums of the decade.
But now, forty-five years after the project was begun, we finally get the privilege of hearing the original 1960s Smile recordings as they were meant to be heard, in much better sound quality than any bootleg on the market today. Beach Boys engineers Alan Boyd Mark Linett will be compiling the tracks, and the box set itself will come in three versions: a two-CD set, an iTunes digital album and a limited-edition boxed set containing four CDs, two vinyl LPs, two vinyl singles and a 60-page hardbound book written by Beach Boys historian Domenic Priore, Alan Boyd and Craig Slowinski.
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