I......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.
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. .........

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.

Yes- great post, Bill!
Of course  we should be careful maybe about taking specific quotes too seriously over the years- These two guys have said all sorts of things. But the gist of it is  I would guess pretty close to your interpretation
And those quotes,  and even the possibility that they are out-of context- do lead me to this observation-

Van Dyke is a "maximalist" - always drawing connections between seemingly unrelated things, looking for the Big Picture, and in interviews  he   has so MUCH  to say,  in so  many complex ways,  that often he jumps from a question  that is  specific  to an answer that is actually general, or vice versa-  i. e.
"What did SMiLE accomplish, Van Dyke?"
answer: "we... we got out of Vietnam"
meaning, in a sense, "we"  as a generation, by creating works with the perspective and vision of SMiLE, encouraged a cultural climate  that forced a government to amend a policy. Van Dyke's mind works like that- always drawing connections from the particular to the general  and back to the particular, seeing puns  and strange echoes  that others ignore.

Brian by contrast is a minimalist- in interviews and in art, he always bringing a thought or expression  down   to a specific factoid, a discrete emotional state, a mundane (but perhaps transcendant) experience ("Busy Doing Nothing", to see an example of this in lyrics form)  and avoiding  the connections   that threaten to swamp him. His M.O. in 1966  was the recording  of discrete little "feels"- pieces of music   that might just be  20 seconds or so,  fleeting snapshots  of an emotional attitude  expressed with his amazing talents  and command  of the studio.

Clearly, SMiLE needed the Maximalist  technique  of a Van Dyke Parks   to be anything  but  a chaotic  collection of fleeting impressions. And to the extent   that SMiLE  functions  cohesively,  I believe we have to thank  the  bedrock  of their complimentary collaboration  in those few months in '66.

Couldn't Smile originally have meant to be about the loss of Americas innocence or spirituality, with the indians a.o. representing the spiritual aspect, where the solution was spiritual/psychedelic regeneration a la "Surf's Up" and "Vegetables". In that way it would be a combination of the two themes.
It seems to be an age old theme among american writers and artists, that the "true" american dream has been lost and replaced by commercialism, imperialism and so forth and wasn't that also one of the agendas of the folk movement in the sixties. Couldn't Van Dyke and Brian not be just be two more lining up to explore that theme and suggesting "psychedelic enlightenment" as the solution.
Søren

I agree wholeheartedly with this!
- In fact,that interpretation is what I've always  suspected on my own and been reinforced by  Parks' own ramblings-- that is when he wasn't saying "it doesn't mean anything"-
And I believe he takes that stance  on occasion when the oblique, weird qualities of his older lyrics may sort of embarrass him as being too "druggy" and symptomatic  of his 22-year old artsiness. After all, the mature Parks lyrics (e.g. for Orange Crate Art) are still loaded with word-play  but much more "conventional"-- and in recent years he probably wants to emphasize  that he is now   a much more "accessable"  writer  (with more... universal, hence commercial, appeal-?).
BUT the question remains, to what degree did this theme of American history  as a morality-play about reconnecting with spirituality-- come only from Parks' lyrics, and to what degree did it come from WIlson's spiritual /druggy obsessions at that time?
I believe the overall theme  as described above evolved in the course of the collaboration, from maybe roughly June-through-October of '66,  but that the Americana aspect came from Parks, and they BOTH realized  how that  tied in with the zeitgeist of the times AND  what Brian was trying to emotionally express.
And I still maintain that Parks was understandably peeved that the NY RoB reviewer, by talking about Ives and Manifest Destiny etc.  in the context of Brian ONLY, was unintentionally giving the wrong impression.

BUT neither Parks nor Wilson, over the years, have felt confident that they  wanted to still expound  on that theme-- and I believe  that Wilson  never reeally signed on to it completely. (At least, not all the political/historic implications)
So they've been back-pedaling  and avoiding  the "thematic"  issues for forty years. Wilson probably forgot  the whole thing (or even repressed it)  as part of  an era  he wanted to forget.
It's up to us now in retrospect   to piece it together, which Soren did quite succinctly.

In sum: Parks had the intellectual fuel in his lyrics, Brian had the spiritual ignition...
 

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.

Yup- great find there. Even if it's semi-apocryphal (do we know who actually wrote that bio?) it sounds plausible. Yeah Parks probably did equate the Boys with America-- even if, at that point in time, it was a novel idea.

I mean I still maintain that the average fan (which was certainly NOT Parks) did not necessarily see the Beach Boys  as a particularly "American" pop group. In 1966, it was still a world where "Americanism" was represented in popular culture by Pat Boone,  Guy Lombardo,  maybe Georgie Jessel (now forgotten) wearing his uniform... the Beach Boys were a rock and roll group , and a in 1966 there were still millions of mainstream Americans over 30 years old who assumed that all rock and roll was, by definition, Unamerican.
So Parks  was once again, way ahead of his time  in recognizing  the essential "American-ness"  of the whole Murry-directed  collegiate candy-stripe-shirt-cum-surfer-hodad image thing. He saw the Beach Boys as ambassadors of a culture that he thought was doing something horrible, and he wanted to play a role in redeeming that culture, by injecting some hip, cosmopolitan world-view  into Brian's baroque-bubblegum universe. Brian may of heard his ramblings, thought "I never saw us that way, I don't know anything about Vietnam, but now that you mention it..."

The theme of redeeming a shamed America has played a role in all of Parks' work- especially in the form of redeeming the specifically Southern cultural forms like the maligned minstrelsy (see "Jump!") that Parks identified with as a Southerner (with all the attendant guilt etc.).
It probably played a role in his early involvement in the Folk scene, in his embrace of Calypso, and in his attempts to collaborate with rock musicians.

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 ...
  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. 

Hmmm. Well we're on the same page but here's the thing-
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 whole "America's Band" thing , I think we'd agree, was a much, much  later image.

Now,  there WAS a fair amount of fear/consternation aimed at the British Invasion acts and I think that's what Van Dyke refers to in a lot of these interviews.  The established Top 40 artists in the States were a little worried. Foreign acts were all over the map. Spector was worried, the Wilsons, the A&R guys, everyone was thinking "what the hell is up with these Brits owning the charts all of a sudden?"  The year before (in '65)  the U.S had "answered back" in the form of Folk-Rock-- The Byrds, The Lovin'Spoonful. The Turtles, Sonny & Cher- a flash-in-the-pan  which had provided  a paycheck for more than a few of the starving pseudo-intellectual stoned folkies that Van Dyke hung with, like his pal David Crosby, who graciously introduced him to  one of those worried Top 40 chartbusters, a certain Brian Wilson.  Wilson wanted someone with the hippie anti-establishment folk-rock juice that he lacked, to help  him in his desire to "catch up " with the Brits.

After Parks came on board, being a conceptual punster, he clearly saw the irony in a "surf music band" trying to get Meaningful so as to continue the Folk-Rock  backlash against the endlessly inventive but commercially vulnerable Beatles, (this is now june or so of 66. pre-Revolver)  and encouraged Brian's already dry-witty tendencies. Parks' first batch of lyrics- for the tune Surf's Up--  established this ironic idea:  a "surf's up" tidal wave  triumphing with the charm of a New World "children's song"  over the Opera House decadence of the  Old World. Brian was knocked out by the idea  that he had inspired something so Artistic  and Heavy,  and probably encouraged Parks  to press ahead in a similar vein. So Parks gladly wrote more stuff around his personal historic/asthetic passions, implying  an "americana" framework  that I seriously do not think Brian would have ever come up with on his own, but which he nonetheless embraced wholeheartedly.
Anyway, that's my take on why Parks wants  credit for his lyrics suggesting some grand Americana concept, if there IS any grand Americana concept (and reviewers will always be inclined to create one even if the composers were actually "whistling in the dark").

<
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.">

--Whoa, what is up with this impression that Van Dyke is being "superior" or something because the above description peeved him? It takes nothing away from Brian  to say that that passage gives what is very likely a wrong impression.
It makes sense that he's peeved.
"an affectionate critique of America's mythic past, a cartoonish representation of Manifest Destiny from Plymouth Rock to Hawaii"--
IF THAT is not  a summation of some of VDP's abiding concerns in his life in music, I dunno what is.
Clearly, what VDP is implying is, folks, Brian was a genius composer and he had some great but vague notions about what to do for a monster-Pop Music project in the Spring-summer of '66;  but it was VDP,  his hired lyricist, in the course of trying to fit words to  melodies, who drew on his own obsessions to come up with words that would later suggest--
"an affectionate critique of America's mythic past, a cartoonish representation of Manifest Destiny from Plymouth Rock to Hawaii"--

Now of course Brian had plently of ideas, (Like maybe recording  odd cover tunes, or tracks for a comedy album or a health-food album etc.) but it's hard to  believe that the "Americana"  concept was NOT instigated by Parks in the course of writing the lyrics. After all, Parks in '66 already was a   folk musician, coffee house  bohemian armchair-historian and  Americana collector-fan who travelled in circles where this concept  would already be discussed and appreciated. Consider that  after seeing the intellectual framework   of the SMiLE project scuttled in the subsequent  12 months, Parks immediately started work on his own   to realize that vision, in the form of a series of Americana-fantasy projects, starting with the magnificent cartoon-acid-music masterpiece Song Cycle.

I think what is going on here is that VDP, in the course of seeing the accolades mount for the now completed project, wants to stake out the portion of SMiLE turf that he feels the most emotionally and intellectually bound up in. Make no mistake, Parks  seems to want us to know-- of course the project was a collaboration--but the "critique of American history"  was his critique,  and the Americana concept, the references to Charles Ives and Carl Stallings (Warner Brothers cartoon composer) et cetera are postcards from HIS musical homeland, as is evident  in Song Cycle and forty subsequent years of composing, arranging & performing.