c'mon bill, spiritualism and GOD and the self and its death/rebirth -- this is what i meant by EVERYTHING.  that is the STUFF, man!  i totally agree, but you gotta call it what it is -- which is ALL THINGS>   i am down with it, i am down with SMILE as the psychospiritual trek.  it is the TREK of ALL THINGS given american trappings. 

and brian all along had ideas about it, like you say, interpretative points and feelings that accumulated over those months of composition and recording.  he should deservedly be endowed with "envisionment", cos the guy had a vision, and van dyke had what it took to set that vision in stark lyrical relief.

check this out, the British paper The Guardian comments briefly on this "skirmish":

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1679924,00.html

· Expect more skirmishes from the old debate as to the literary value of pop lyrics - most usually formulated as Is Dylan Better Than Keats? Published this week is Bob Dylan and Philosophy (Open Court Press) in which 18 philosophers interrogate the work of a man who once warned that "counterfeit philosophies have polluted all of your thoughts". Soon after comes not one, but two new biographies of published poet Pete Doherty and then a re-issue of Paul du Noyer's We All Shine On: The Stories Behind Every John Lennon Song. There's ammunition for both sides of the debate in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books. In a letter responding to a review of Brian Wilson's album Smile, 30 years in the making and eventually released last year, Van Dyke Parks, the Smile lyricist, complains that his contribution was downplayed in the review, and sheds some light on the alchemical process that occurs when words and music combine. "Brian sang: 'da da da da da da da da dah'. I wrote 'Columnaded ruins domino'. I've lived to regret it for the majority of my adult life. Now, I'd like to enjoy it justly."

it's hard to discern a *logical* narrative from the songs in any sequence, but i think any way you cut them you get an earnest examination of a romantic relationship in its various phases and guises, in both its lightheartedness and devastating heaviness.  that's why i don't mind people trying to read closely whether the album genuinely tracks the development of a relationship from its first joyful throes to the dissolution of its innocence.  i think it adds up to that, and more; it's as sympathetic and understanding a portrait of adolescent preoccupation and angst as there is in popular music -- a real "growing up" record.

Bill, straight up, i see what you're saying, but we should should lay things plainly.  check what you unfold in your post, which i think you don't see for all the simple beauty:

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.

What about teh above makes you think "Surf's Up" is necessarily outside of the American aspect of Smile, when it's direct (whether mythologhical or not, see above quote) inspiration is a musing on a parable of the Beach Boys as symbolic United States of America, suddenly out of step with the new cultural reality, changing so fast. 

I agree with your suggestion that "Surf's Up" is about EVERYTHING.  but it's also famously a meditation on the defeat of empires and the cultural realities they determine (aristocracies, opera, diamonds and chandeliers.... war), as well as THE FALL of these empires/realities ("columnaded," "adieu or die" etc.).  there is an image of America in the midst of what many regarded as a senseless war, sacrificing the innocence of its citizens.  it is also about teh loss of self and the meeting with god, the RETURN, with the children's song, etc.  it is the psychospiritual ARC, that song.

so it all seems to me to be of a piece.  take the elements.  "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow" is a specifically AMERICAN piece of folklore.  the "I wanna be Around" element is a quote from an American pop standard.  the brassy explosions of Wind Chimes and flute whistly parts of Holiday sound like oldfashioned Barnum and Bailey circus music. 

and frank's pictures are totally meaningful, i agree -- whether to him or anyone else.  just like all this other stuff.  and it all seems pretty clear to me that brian was involved in all of this, and van dyke brought the sharpness and intrepretive, gonzo depth to the lyrical texture of SMILE>  Brian famously went around telling people what certain songs "meant" at any given time, everything was laden with representation -- which is what made SMILE so cool and mysterious to begin with.  what was going to be the sum of all of this "significance"?  do you think it would have been right to say that Brian was n't envisioning crazy ideas about all things, in collaboration with Van Dyke and not? 

so isn't it really just splitting hairs when people suggest, 40 years later, with the guy mentally ill and in the throes of a crazy comeback, saying anything in front of microphones, being both honest and clueless, that he wasn't *responsible* for envisioning the record?  i mean, that's kind of what Van Dyke snootily says, "Manifest Destiny and such were the last things on Brian's mind when he asked (*guess who*) ME to take a FREE HAND in the lyrics and *thematic direction." 

Quit prancing 'round the floor, Mr. Parks.  we always gave you love, and you always said you were working with and for brian and that the whole thing was cool and Brian was in control and it was about this and that, blah blah, and now you're gonna say, "this guy didn't do it.  those are my ideas."  boo hickey. 

brian gave up his mind in the psychedelic FALL of teh self, he gave up a lot of himself because of SMILE.  "Surf's Up" preludes his FALL from greatness and the end of what had for him been a cozy reality.  that is just another reason why SMILE is truly Brian's, that's why it's his name on the finished album and not "Beach Boys" or "and Van Dyke Parks".  cos it's HIS and everything on it is his, and if you can't say that while giving proper props to Van Dyke for the special quality he brought and not offend him (Van Dyke), well then GOOD GRIEF. 

CS

first, from Van Dyke MOUTH (www.ascap.com /audioportraits/vandykeparks.html).
< "I was trying to follow his instincts, unquestioning, like a dog. Just be devoted and work hard to try to provide words to the phrases he came up with." >

second, from Scott Staton's piece on SMILE published in the New York Review of Books (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18264):

< A work unified by recurring musical motifs, Smile was imagined as a collection of three suites composed of discrete musical segments that would evoke themes of frontier Americana and childhood, as well as the four natural elements—the movement of air could be heard, for example, in the song "Wind Chimes." Wilson intended the album to be the preeminent psychedelic pop-art statement.

The psychedelic era produced rock music's most recklessly innovative work. The use of the drug epithet "psychedelic" suggested the recording and arranging of songs in ways that would approximate aspects of an altered state of awareness. The result was music whose bizarre conventions demanded (and often rewarded) close attention from the listener. For Wilson, this psychedelic element had a spiritual quality. As he related in a 1966 interview,

"About a year ago I had what I consider a very religious experience. I took LSD, a full dose of LSD, and later, another time, I took a smaller dose.... I can't teach you, or tell you, what I learned from taking it. But I consider it a very religious experience."

Wilson hoped the release of Smile would set off the commercial eruption of psychedelic music that he and others (such as the Beatles) anticipated. "Psychedelic music will cover the face of the world and color the whole popular music scene," he declared. "Anybody happening is psychedelic." >

i personally wondered about the "3 movement" assertion in the passage above, thinking maybe that wasn't accurate.  but then i saw the following on the SMILE FAQ < http://www.thesmileshop.net/history_faq.html >:

< Q: What is this about 3 movements? Is that something he had planned from the 60s?

A: According to Peter Reum, yes. He apparently spoke to Brian around 1980, and Brian had revealed that a 3-movement structure for the song had always been planned. Darian and others have anecdotally confirmed that.

The 3 movements deal with the three main themes of the album. The first movement is basically the "Americana" movement, and its songs deal with the old west, western expansion, and American history. The second movement is the "Childhood" movement, and its songs deal with childhood, innocence, loss of innocence, and growing up. The final movement is the "Elements" suite. >

i don't believe that Van Dyke's lyrics don't "mean anything."  Few things in this world genuinely have no meaning, and no i don't think that Van Dyke lyrics, on Smile or otherwise, qualify.

CS

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.

here we go again.  nothing against bill, but the thoughts didn't seem particularly out of place to me or thrown in to justify anything.  enthusiasts have posited the Americana bicycle rider trek since the beginning of the Smile saga, and it was always presumed that the cross-country conceit (with reference to the railroads and old west) was meant to give the album some kind of narrative/conceptual arc.  therefore it's no surprise that the documentary would have said as much.  also, again, "Beautiful Dreamer" was produced and directed by David Leaf.  so I don't agree he was blithely unaware of what was in the documentry's narrative script -- in fact, i don't doubt he had a lot to do with it's writing. 

strong posts on the "America" aspect of the Beach Boys by Bill and Barba.  i like those ideas about the uniforms and the lyrical accentuation Van Dyke brought to the Beach Boys' American quality.  Barba knows his stuff, but i still think, in agreement i think with some of teh other posts, that the Beach Boys were straight-up, California sun, blue-eyed manifestations of the American experience.  i mean, they perfectly encapsulated the adolescent flush of postwar prosperity in American culture, even emerging out of the sunny planned communities of California, land of Hollywood and the stuff of dreams the world over (inc. in Britain).  And they prominently wrote about American-centris fads like surfing and hotrods, both native cultural trends to America, and broke real big with zanily patriotic songs like "Surfin' USA" and "California Girls."  so i think there was no question that the beach boys were especially *American* in the moment of the sixties.  i don't agree that the "America's band" thing came later -- it was an outgrowth of what they always were.

and then another point i was thinking, which is really just a point of info -- remember the David Leaf "Story of Smile" documentary on Showtime and now DVD?  we've all seen it, it's what it is, etc.  in it 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 remember very much that it said that in the documentary, and David Leaf is probably the most unimpeachable Beach Boys authority.  why didn't anyone raise a fuss then if it's such a big deal when the New York Review of Books (www.nybooks.com / not the New York Times) basically says the same thing>? 

you guys can check the Leaf description if you have a copy of the doc.

CS

also, i hate to keep going on (although this topic is hot i gather because this question is fundamental to the SMILE collaboration), but this quote of Parks in the reply also made me think a sec:

 "we just kind of wanted to investigate...American images.... Everyone was hung up and obsessed with everything totally British. So we decided to take a gauche route that we took, which was to explore American slang, and that's what we got." Parks's liberal use of the word "we" to describe Brian Wilson and himself implies that they shared an understanding of the album's thematic direction.

i wonder what the big deal is, if in this interview Van Dyke is all about identifying the American preoccupation (of which "manifest destiny" and "Plymouth rock" can be seen as extensions) as being *shared* by Brian and him -- he doesn't at all say that the preoccupation with American themes was his own.  other people seem to be trying to rationalize the collaboration on his behalf (that he came up with everything American), when he should be held to the words he has spoken and the way he presents *their* "exploration of American slang".  let's face it, if Van Dyke had always wanted to say he was given free reign to come up with the theme of SMILE before, he shouldn't have said different and then waited until 2005 to right the record.  if anyone has good Van Dyke quotes from the past that demonstrate otherwise they should post them up. 

but, adversely, and seriously -- i don't think one whit of recognition or credit should be taken from Van Dyke. 

i agree with the summation as well.  still, there's no changing the fact that in interviews and the like van dyke has always presented smile as being predominantly the work of brian wilson ("brian's baby").  and his line in his letter, where he states "i wrote 'columnaded ruins domino' and want to enjoy it justly", implies that the reviewer didn't identify him as a lyricist and somehow suggested that Brian was working alone, which is not the case at all if anyone reads the proper piece.  but i wholeheartedly agree that van dyke had everything to do with the lyrical articulation of the americana theme.  at the same time, however, the beach boys were resolutely AMERICAN well before van dyke came on the scene, and the whole thematic question, i think, proceeds from that nature of their music.  and the intimation, by van dyke and others in this thread, that brian was completely uninvolved with the "conception" of the american scope of the record also strikes me as both unlikely and a little silly. 

I think you guys need to re-read Van Dyke's letter. He is merely clarifying a point. The writer mistakenly assumes that Brian was the source for the manifest destiny aspects of SMiLE. Van Dyke simply points out the fact that Brian gave him no such framework. I still don't see the arrogance that some of you are sensing. 

i think readers should also see the piece on Smile by Scott Staton published in the New York Review of Books.  Here is the passage in "questsion":

<After releasing the brilliant Pet Sounds in 1966, a personal meditation on love and growing up that bore no trace of either surfing or hot rods, the twenty-three-year-old Wilson conceived of Smile, the highly anticipated follow-up (originally titled Dumb Angel), as his "teenage symphony to God."

He envisioned the album as an affectionate critique of America's mythic past, a cartoonish representation of Manifest Destiny from Plymouth Rock to Hawaii. Like the American composer Charles Ives, whose unconventionally impressionistic work sometimes seemed to attempt to include and interpret all of American culture, Wilson made wide reference to American history and music, from the folk songs of Woody Guthrie and the familiar "You Are My Sunshine" to pop standards like "I Wanna Be Around.">

i think that since the album is bascially "Brian's baby", in the words of Van Dyke, and since Van Dyke has always made much of his role being subordinate, this loose critical reference to the American scope of the record is harmless.  Staton does give proper respect to Van Dyke, which is why Parks's letter struck me as somewhat pedantic.  and he also kind of suggests Brian had no idea about the American element of the recording, which is hard to believe.

i also think his "superioirty" or "envy" or whatever comes through in his remark in his letter about "columnaded ruins domino", which suggests that Staton didn't give him credit for the line.   In the piece, Staton says more than once that Van Dyke wrote the words to Smile, so again it seems as if Van Dyke is just looking to make a big deal out of nothing when he writes that he "wants to enjoy [having written those words] justly." 

i don't know, maybe the literate and intellectual Parks just wanted a piece of the New York Review of Books action>!

CS