This is a new one that is sorta like my old website but with a few new things added. If you find any mistakes please let me know.

Thanks,
Bill

Soren, as far as Brian and Van Dyke having a larger perspective on things, you are correct. But if you'll notice, the songs that seem to have the most Lake Arrowhead influence are many of SMiLE's core numbers. SMiLE's earliest compositions. The sandbox songs; "Heroes & Villains,""Surf's Up," and "Cabin Essence." This suggests that the larger perspective may have come about after they'd been writing for a spell.

And if you consider Van Dyke Parks' comments on the "Americana" direction you'll see that they make sense given this scenario. Van Dyke said(I'm paraphrasing here), "it was decided right there in that room, by two people, that we would be American" and "we may as well be American, the Beach Boys are going to be considered American anyway."

Now, we know that when they did "Heroes & Villians" they didn't begin with this discussion. There was no prior debate. Brian simply gave Van Dyke the song's title and away they wrote. Sooooo, if they hadn't already decided to do an Americana thing then why the Old West song? The answer is that Brian had his musical direction charted by his religious/spiritual experience at Lake Arrowhead!

Here are some of the sources used for my Lake Arrowhead info in case anybody wants to check them out.

http://www.lakearrowhead.net/lakearrowhead.html

http://rimoftheworldhistory.com/lakearrowhead.htm

http://score.rims.k12.ca.us/score_lessons/lake_arrowhead/files/lakehistory.htm

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0738529184/102-7569448-0659328?v=glance&n=283155
This bottom link is to Amazon.com. If you "search inside" the book you'll see some of the Indian passages I quoted from as well as some nice pictures.

-Bill

I know that this is a pretty bold title for a post but hopefully what follows will make it true.

There are a number of ways to arrive at the conclusion that SMiLE is primarily based upon a single religious LSD experience. For example, in the SMiLE DVD Brian says that SMiLE is happy music. Brian's bio states that Brian only had one positive LSD trip, therefore, SMiLE has to based upon this single LSD experience. Or, if you like, you can reference the Surfing Saints article and deduce that since it's about the "ultimate" religious experience and Brian says "it only happened to me once" (speaking about the "moment of clear light") that there was a single event. There are other ways to work it out, but the main point to get across is that we're talking mainly about a single experience when we're talking about the main impulse, the driving force, behind SMiLE.

We don't know much about this religious event. But recently I've become pretty sure of a few things. By cross referencing Brian's bio with the Keith Badman book it appears that Brian's religious experience very likely occurred at the end of April, 1966. What is most interesting about this is that it also appears that Brian was likely not at Big Sur for this event.

David Anderle's quote (to Paul Williams) about Brian and his trip to Big Sur was picked up on by Domenic Priore and SMiLE fans everywhere. But given the logistics of late April, 1966 it seems far more likely that Brian was somewhere in the Lake Arrowhead area (that's where they shot the Pet Sounds promo film) for his religious experience. Like Anderle's description of Brian & Big Sur; Lake Arrowhead has the beach, mountains, snow, fountains, and pools that Brian apparently needed to "get into the elements." Perhaps Anderle simply got his facts wrong, or confused, or may he was deliberately mislead. In any case, it is important to note that Anderle ends his statement by saying "...the whole thing was this fantastic amount of awareness of his surroundings. So the obvious thing was to do something that would cover the physical surroundings." So then, maybe the Lake Arrowhead area is what is covered in SMiLE.

I got a book about Lake Arrowhead in the mail yesterday and it has some sort of SMiLE things in it like the well known dance pavilion and the unique street lamp design. These things could have inspired the dance scenario in "Heroes" or maybe the "light the lamp" thing or maybe Frank Holmes' many lamp drawings. "Two step to lamps light." I found some stuff online as well.

The Lake Arrowhead area was originally occupied by Native American Indians. Eventually the white man advanced into the region and pretty much took over in typical manifest destiny fashion. Chinese workers blasted through the San Bernardino mountains to connect the railroad to the region. Companies built dams in order to use the collected waters but farmers banded together (Grange style) to stop the company from taking their water. The main industry was logging and obviously led to many cabins being built in the area.

Nowadays the area is used primarily as a vacation spot. It's the kind of place one might seek out if they were "on a holiday." And Van Dyke Parks' co-star, Bette Davis, played tennis in Lake Arrowhead in the movie Now Voyager. Maybe her "tennie flew right off."

By far, the best stuff about Lake Arrowhead (there's a large arrowhead burned into the side of the hills) is the Indian stuff. Here are a few quotes from my book.

"According to Cahuilla Indian legend, the natural landmark of the arrowhead was created when the Good Spirit led them to new hunting grounds by sending an arrow of fire across the heavens. The arrow landed and embedded itself in the hillside, pointing down at the warm mineral springs above the fertile San Bernardino Valley. This was the Great Spirit's sign that the hot springs were to be a peaceful location for all, and that the valley below was given to them."

Besides the "fire" reference & the "fire across the heavens" bit which reminds me of the live SMiLE's light show, the reference to the "Great Spirit" is cool because it may be why Brian chose the "Appeal To The Great Spirit" statue for the Brother Records logo. But the real find is the stuff about "peace" and the "valley" which finally explains the "Heroes And Villains" lyric "I know there'll be peace in the valley."

The under the arrowhead in the hillside is where the hot springs are located. The Indians discovered them. The book continues, "When they fought, both sides would take their wounded to the sacred hot springs, as it was neutral ground."  See, peace in the valley.

Since the Lake Arrowhead area was used for logging this may be why SMiLE has the "Workshop" and the saw. But better yet is the original picture sleeve for "Heroes And Villains." The sawmill has the hero & villain and when you turn it over you get the Brother Records logo of the Indian on horseback. Lake Arrowhead explains there images well.

So lets think of SMiLE in a new way. Think of the Lake Arrowhead region and look at Frank Holmes' pictures of hillsides, trees, bodies of water, and arrows! Listen to SMiLE's "agriculture" come through in Van Dyke's lyrics. Think of Brian's "fantastic amount of awareness of his surroundings" and that when you dig SMiLE you're right THERE during Brian's religious experience. Try it out.

-Bill

Nice post by Barba Yiorgi who said;

Clearly, SMiLE needed the Maximalist  technique  of a Van Dyke Parks   to be anything  but  a chaotic  collection of fleeting impressions.

It is worth noting that Brain Wilson was subjected to a "chaotic collection of fleeting impressions" in late 1965, when having an acid flashback, at Pickwick Books. Brian realized that the experience was tantamount to a Zen riddle.

With SMiLE being essentally a Zen riddle capable of transmitting the spiritual experience the stage is set for individuals to have a spiritual experience. If enough individuals are affected then perhaps the larger group can produce spiritually conscious change on a national level. In this way Brian & Van Dyke are essentially "on the same page."

I realize that my blabbing comes across as a pipe dream to most readers but they too must remember that the revolutionaries during the mid sixties often innocently thought that anything was possible. And Brian Wilson's status implied a piece of work on this very level.

Tom Nolan described Brian as "...the seeming leader of a potentially-revolutionary movement in pop history....that's exactly what he is, because if you ask him where he thinks music is going, he will say one simple word. 'Spiritual'"

And if you see the tv show Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution you'll find that "Surf's Up" is directly proceeded by the following;

"Their idea is to love us into submission....As they see it, our society, while apparently healthy and certainly bountiful, is in a deep crisis of values. They are hoping for a return to the human centered community they feel modern life has moved away from. And they think that they, together with other young people like them, are forming a model upon which that society can be constructed."-David Oppenheim

It was David Leaf who noted that the word in 1966 was that "...Brian was working on this mind-blowing, unified concept album called SMiLE."

And since the late Timothy White noted that in Brian's world of the psychedelic mid sixties "nothing was impossible," then maybe we should consider the idea that these folks may all be right.

I seem to recall Parks mentioning ecology in Prioie's latest SMiLE book.

One thing that we tend to do when we analyze things is break them into categories. People tend to break SMiLE down into various categories. The spiritual experience out of which SMiLE arose most likely didn't involve a number of categories. That experience most likely offered up a new way of seeing things, a new perspective.

There is a part in an older Beach Boys book that describes "Good Vibrations" in a way that also describes this "new perspective" and also relates well to my prior post about reborn Brian ditching his fight filled past.

"'The new pastoral landscape suddenly being uncovered by the young generation provided a quiet, peaceful, harmonious trip into inner space. The hassles and frustrations of the external world were cast aside, and new visions put in their place. "Good Vibrations" succeeds in suggesting the healthy emanations that should result from psychic tranquility and inner peace. The word "vibrations" had been employed by students of Eastern philosophy and acid-heads for a variety of purposes, but Wilson uses it here to suggest a kind of extrasensory experience.'" ~Bruce Golden, The Beach Boys: Southern California Pastoral

So if Brian's personal vision is painted by Van Dyke Parks using American imagery there may be a message to be had. Brian's personal past had been filled with many battles with his dad and the spiritual vision had offered relief from and a break with that past. Similarly, America's past had also been filled with battles. We have the Old West style gunfights, or the taking of the Native American's land, or the battle to conquer nature. Many of these battle have been waged in the name of God.

Brian's "teenage symphony to God" seems to have come out of an experience that Bruce Golden sums up nicely.

'The new pastoral landscape suddenly being uncovered by the young generation provided a quiet, peaceful, harmonious trip into inner space. The hassles and frustrations of the external world were cast aside, and new visions put in their place. "Good Vibrations" succeeds in suggesting the healthy emanations that should result from psychic tranquility and inner peace.

And if we apply that same vision to America one would see a past they would not be particulary proud of. But one would also see a vision for a better future.

When Domenic Priore asked Brian and Van Dyke about SMiLE in the late 80s Brian responded, "if it helped out spiritually then I'm glad we did it" and Van Dyke said "we accomplished something. we got out of Viet Nam." These comments seems right on target with the thoughts that preceed them.

Some people have said that BWPS was important for America NOW! And I agree, it is.

Based upon my research it seems highly probable that Brian Wilson's spiritual transformation had something to do with putting a bad past behind him. Being reborn implies ditching some of your past and this sort of thing would have helped Brian given his troubled upbringing.

So for instance, in BWPS we have the fire music which is related to his 2nd LSD trip (in which he revisits his embattled past, reliving fights with his dad--check it out in Brian's bio!). After this Brian has the ego death thing "if I die before I wake I pray the Lord to take my misery" somewhere "in a plastic pool, and sink" only to find that he is really reborn and "in the pink."

Or take, if you will, "Surf's Up" with the openining battle scenes. We follow the same basic scenario. The embattled past, ego death, and then rebirth (see some of my above posts for more "Surf's Up" ego loss stuff).

And since I said that those same basic three things (birth and death and rebirth) are also essentially SMiLE's 3 movements then we must conclude that the first movement of BWPS is the embattled past movement. And sure enough, we have the battling "Heroes & Villains," and then the  Native Americans vs. the Manifest Destiny driven Eurocentric bicycle rider in "Roll Plymouth Rock," and then the strong musical contrasts of "CabinEssence" dipicted by Frank Holmes' contrasting the cabin with the teepee, it's nature vs the machine, the crow vs the thresher. To sum, I think that the Americana stuff (which is set in the past) depicts Brain Wilson's spiritual experience by using American imagery.

Here's a bit of Brian Wilson's explanation of "Surf's Up" from Goodbye Surfing, Hello God. Brian explains;

"He's off in his vision, on a trip. Reality is gone; he's creating it like a dream."

Okay, we know that the spiritual work, SMiLE, was inspired by a very religious LSD trip and sure enough the above explanation of a "Surf's Up" lyric seems to properly locate us "on a trip."

Then there's the ego loss kind of stuff that Brian alludes to;

"A choke of grief. At his own sorrow and emptiness of his life, because he can't even cry for the suffering in the world, for his own suffering."

After this, his explanation heads towards "childhood" which, as I stated before, comes with being reborn.

Then comes the main thing;

"...the joy of enlightenment, of seeing God."

So, I'm afraid I do not think that "Surf's Up" is about EVERYTHING. "Surf's Up" is about the spiritual experience.

It is really interesting how Brian explains Van Dyke Parks' "Surf's Up" lyrics in an interpretive manner.

According to Parks, Brian wrote " da, da, da, da ,da, dah" and then Van Dyke wrote "columnated ruins domino" and then, based on the Jules Siegel article we know, Brian read Van Dyke Parks as "Empires, ideas, lives, institutions--everything has to fall...."

NOW THEN! If you then jump to the Surfing Saints article where Brian talks about the "Ultimate Religious Experience" you'll find Brian saying "...everything is always changing and time never repeats itself" which isn't all that different from "everything has to fall...." and then you wonder if the "Ultimate Religious Experience" is ultimately responsible for " da, da, da, da ,da, dah." And we know, by Brian's own statements to Tom Nolan about his inspiration for SMiLE, that this is precisely what Brian had in mind all along. It all finally fits together.

Another thing to consider with regard to the ego loss thing is Brian's claim that the Beatles' album REVOLVER is "religious" (this claim is from the Tom Nolan article). If Brian is thinking that the ego loss process is religious then he may very well have picked up upon such lyrics as "I know what it's like to be dead" and "it is not dying" from "She Said, She Said" and "Tomorrow Never Knows" respectively. REVOLVER would indeed appear as religious to Brian Wilson!

So, as you can see, by taking a more spiritually oriented approach to SMiLE some of the confusing statements from the past seem to start making some sense.

And when Brian said, "Reality is gone; he's creating it like a dream" that may have been similar to  Brian's instructions for Van Dyke at the outset of SMiLE.

Well, Van Dyke DID say that the lyrics have meaning for him (meaning Van Dyke himself) in Domenic Priore's latest SMiLE book. Similary, Frank Holmes' SMiLE pictures often contain meanings only known to Frank himself (this is documented in 1997's ESQ).

Here's something to consider. In the "stage outfits" story in Brian's bio Van Dyke says, "We should hit it head on."

One night while we were working, Dennis came to the house, complaining that the Beach Boys' stage outfits, the candy-striped shirts and straight-legged slacks that my dad had picked out in the band's infancy, had elicited ridicule in some of London's hipper circles. I sympathized, while Van Dyke immediately interpreted Dennis's tale on a much broader level. He saw it as a small example of the shame the U.S. was suffering throughout the world as a result of the Vietnam War.
"We should hit it head-on," he said.
"I like it," I said. "I don't know much about it, but my instincts tell me you're right."
Popping some speed, Van Dyke and I stayed up the rest of the night and wrote "Surf's Up," a song whose title was so utterly cliche and square that it couldn't be anything but hip.

You'd think that if they were going to "hit it head on," given the context, they would have come up with one of SMiLE's Americana type pieces. But when they "hit it head on" they come up with "Surf's Up" instead. Not exactly Plymouth Rock or Manifest Destiny.

But if you go with the spiritual interpretation of SMiLE then you DO think that "Surf's Up" is hitting it head on! "Surf's Up" seems to me to be the ego loss spiritual event in one song. The singer is "a broken man too tough to cry" who becomes transformed, and emerges a child (because he is reborn).

In the Jules Siegel article (Goodbye Surfing, Hello God) Brian is cited as saying "it was my whole life...life, death, and rebirth" and it seems that these three sections of Brian's life are played out in "Surf's Up" and, on a larger scale, in the three movements of SMiLE.

But, like I said, this stuff is the heaviest of the heavy & the deepest of the deep and probably not something the general public is going to understand. It is a lot easier, I guess, for most people to dig SMiLE as the American saga and to see Brian as an eccentric artist.

Scott Staton replied to Park's letter;

For his part, in his 1991 autobiography Wilson recalled playing early recordings of Smile songs at a dinner and explaining the material to his guests. "The whole album is going to be a far-out trip through the Old West," he said. "Real Americana. But with lots of interesting humor." In spite of his failure to complete the work in 1967, it seems Wilson had an idea of Smile's thematic underpinnings.

The big problem I have with this is calling the Americana stuff "Smile's thematic underpinnings." I think that this is the big mistake that slews of SMiLE people make.

During the "SMiLE era" Brian Wilson made it clear that his new music was "spiritual music." Songs of faith, religious music, that was "the whole movement." And at the same time Brian also stated that "psychedelic music" was going to be the new "happening" music.  There is no contradiction here. The mostly LSD inspired psychedelic movement used spiritual texts as a guideline and Brian's metaphysical literature endeavers go hand in hand with all of this. Brian believed that laughter could help prompt a spiritual experience and so laughter fits in there as well. Brain also believed that vegetables were an "important ingredient" in heath and "spiritual enlightenment." There are no contradictions here. If anything, the spiritual angle is SMiLE's "thematic underpinning"!!!!!!!!!!

It is when people throw the American thing into the mix that SMiLE becomes disjointed and problematic. What folks don't realize is that when Van Dyke Parks told Mike Love that the SMiLE lyrics "...don't mean anything," he wasn't kidding.

When London's hipper crowd criticized the Beach Boys' stage outfits in 1966 they were missing the point of how musically cool and hip (and DEEP) the Pet Sounds/Good Vibrations era Beach Boys really were. The same crowd probably would have missed the point again when SMiLE came out. But that may have been part of Brian's and Van Dyke's plan to show that beyond that surface appearance lay the heaviest of the heaviest, the deepest of the deep! If you are going to get hung up on appearances your aren't going to understand anyway.

From Van Dyke's letter to the NY Times;

...Manifest Destiny, Plymouth Rock, etc. were the last things on his (Brian's) mind when he asked me to take a free hand in the lyrics and the album's thematic direction.

The above poster noted that in David Leaf's SMiLE flick;

the narrator himself describes Smile with words that basically say that Smile was going to follow the movement of a "bicycle rider from Plymouth Rock to Diamond Head."

I'm pretty sure that the "bicycle rider" quote and the "how great America could be" quote from the DVD are not really David Leaf thoughts but rather thoughts from a knowledgeable Beach Boys authority. You'll notice that those two thoughts don't seem to fit neatly into the SMiLE DVD, they seem out of place. I tend to think that they were "throw in" thoughts used to justify the Americana thing because there wasn't any Americana stuff being offered up by the film's participants (the major SMiLE people; Anderle, Parks, Wilson, Schwartz, Vosse, etc).

Doesn't that speak volumes about SMiLE and the Americana angle.

I don't have Van Dyke's exact "pan-patriotic/trans-presidential" quote in front of me but I think most folks know that one. Essentially Van Dyke says that the Beach Boys' pan patriotic, trans presidential, vibe was the perfect medium for Brian and Van Dyke to "talk about what we knew."

Van Dyke's comment appears to say that they could talk about "what they knew" using American (and therefore Beach Boys) imagery.

This summation is consistant with that derrived from Brian's bio quote from the above posts.

Another thing to consider regarding Van Dyke's letter to the NYT is that Parks seems to indicate that the American bit was not front and center in the Brian Wilson's mind. It was not the driving force behind SMiLE.

And because of this, popular interpretations of SMiLE that point to the Americana thing probably should rethink things a bit.

Above post said;

First off I don't think saying "the beach boys were resolutely AMERICAN " is necessarily relevant here cause in the mid sixties, the Beach Boys  did not come across as any more "American"  than the Four Seasons or Bob Dylan or The Supremes, to pick at random acts that they shared the charts with at that time.

The following passage from Brian's "biography" may help show where Brian's and Van Dyke's heads were at concerning the "American" thing.

One night while we were working, Dennis came to the house, complaining that the Beach Boys' stage outfits, the candy-striped shirts and straight-legged slacks that my dad had picked out in the band's infancy, had elicited ridicule in some of London's hipper circles. I sympathized, while Van Dyke immediately interpreted Dennis's tale on a much broader level. He saw it as a small example of the shame the U.S. was suffering throughout the world as a result of the Vietnam War.
"We should hit it head-on," he said.
"I like it," I said. "I don't know much about it, but my instincts tell me you're right."
Popping some speed, Van Dyke and I stayed up the rest of the night and wrote "Surf's Up," a song whose title was so utterly cliche and square that it couldn't be anything but hip.

If I'm reading the above correctly, Van Dyke Parks equates the Beach Boys' image (the stage outfits) with the United States of America.

The Beach Boys cannot escape the fact that they are American, and therefore, you may as well BE American because people are going to view you as American no matter what you do.

That's why we have the Americana thing in SMiLE, because, it's a Beach Boys album and Van Dyke Parks is thinking that the Beach Boys are inescapably American.