Indulgence Ahoy: Personal SMiLE Liner Notes

Hi all (or whoever is foolhardy enough to ignore the disclaimer in the subject line):

Some of you might remember, or even have heard, that I put together an approximation of a '66-era SMiLE a few years back, which I've just been doing another polish on. (Mainly volume levels and tightening up the cuts.) As part of this, and just to fill in a couple of lazy summer hours today (I'm in NZ, and it's STINKING HOT) I decided to write a brief set of liner notes for the sequence. It ended up being 1500 words, and I think pretty good. So here it is - please bear in mind it does follow the logic of the assembly I put together, though I think some of the observations on certain songs stand up outside that context.

Enjoy - or please accept my apologies for wasting your time!

It’s about Manifest Destiny, the corruption of the land, the white man’s arrival and rise to power. It’s also a comedy record about vegetables, though not yet. It’s a beautiful miniature, or rather, a collection of tiny perfect things that may or may not add up to something much larger. It certainly became about something larger, about a particular band in a particular half of a particular century, but surely that’s not what those pieces were intended to add up to, no sir. Anyway. It begins, this particular tinkly Picaresque, with an overview, a panorama. Do You Like Worms the title of this song asks you – it’s an enquiry and a provocation, just those four words in ink – and I don’t pretend to have an answer, but sailing into or away from the bay (“In America, you’ll have food to eat…” is Randy’s version, and at least there the oppression is dressed up as a come-on) it’s the whole history of the New World, blood and debt and all. Being an overview, being a tidal wave, history being a flood, the song sweeps by: murky, churning, details indistinct. “Bicycle Rider”- perhaps referring to the first playing cards distributed widely through the Old West, a premonition of vice and ruination, of reservation Casinos, of later reluctant attempts at reparation. Or an actual Bicycle Rider, a first person perspective, enjoying the Ribbons of Concrete now cutting across the land, strangling it, dividing the Old from the New. Making things neat. Accessible. Boy-meets-girl. Which they do, we see it for ourselves, as the camera tracks in on Heroes and Villians (and why is “Villains” spelt wrong? A mistake left in the mix? A particularly esoteric joke?) but even then it’s just a flashback, flickering sepia snippets from a silent movie. The soundtrack is suitably rinky-dink: barroom piano, the thud of hands on wood. So we remain ourselves removed from the drama; the flood of images slowing down but still a kaleidoscope. In the first verse our hero falls in love; in the second she dies, a rain/reign of bullets sunny-down snuffing her out. Then we enter the Cantina, and he’s in love again. Is this how they met? Are we flashing back within the flashback? Or is this a new woman, a new hope? A brawl ensues – fists flashing, sirens screaming, the cops arriving. Our hero is thrown in stir. Is this the altercation which caused Cotillion to square the fight? Or a reaction to a true love’s death? They don’t matter - the song tells us - the petty squabbles of a single life, even the end of love: it’s continuance that counts. “My children were raised” he sings, joy punching holes through his throat and pounding fingers over the tack piano. “They suddenly rise. They started so long ago, head to toe, healthy, wealthy and often wise.” The past is passed, in other words. Through the daily travails and minutiae of living – feeding the pigs, fetching breakfast, raising a family – time heals all wounds, and mends all hearts. I’m in Great Shape, right now – and it’s always right now somewhere. Which is just where we end up, right now, back where we began – with roads and railways stretching out across the country, lines separating the noughts from the crosses. And, here at the end, the camera finally slides to a stop – finishes on an old couple, though they feel no older, looking up at the sky and across the cornfields; their home, their Cabin Essence behind and all around them. Far above, circling the clouds, is a thin black splodge of crow. For all they know, for all the difference it makes to the old couple, this could be the same crow as last year, and the same crow as the year to come. Indeed: for all the difference it makes to the crow, they could be this generation’s old couple, or the next’s. But some things do change – have you seen the Grand Coolie working on the railroad? – and the bird looks down to see the ribbons of concrete continue to spread and multiply, over and over. Over the cornfield. We fade to black. End of part one.

What were we saying, about children? Wonderful says it much better. A sweet, sad voice, endless warmth and infinite variety, sings a small song about all existence. A girl, in short, gets knocked up. A boy – in the face of this, choosing not to face it - retreats into facts, figures, rhetoric. It ends badly; it all turns out okay. God’s there too – “music is God’s voice”, after all – in a song Nilsson and/or Newman could’ve written, but didn’t; and which - sans Harry’s sentiment and Randy’s cynicism – is all the richer for it. At the end of the day, there’s a child – and then because, as the man once said, Child is Father of the Man – there isn’t. A crying horn, piano keys rising and falling in sorrow and elation, a dozen overdubbed voices booming out their existential growing pain; this is the most incomplete song of them all, not even period lyrics remaining to us, just a verse, a chorus and a bridge. And yet it’s hard to imagine, even complete, that something about it wouldn’t remain a mystery. Isn’t that what growing up is, a mystery, no matter the intellectual framework we place around it, whatever words we use to tell the story? We’re a child one day, and then we look back and forward and down on another, and we’re not. But the past still beckons – is all there is - a children’s song. “You were my sunshine, my only sunshine. You made me happy when skies were grey.” Maybe it’s our Western Hero, so long to the city, that’s remembering happier days. Or one of his own children, fit with the stuff, no longer riding in the rough, who sings a song of the grange. Or the artist himself, looking out a Bellagio window, thinking of childhood and seeing God in the faraway hills: The Old Master Painter, doing a mural for the rainy days. The music fades, drags itself out to nothing - and then returns, full of vim and vinegar. There will be more children and more men to come, after all. Vamp to fade.

Good Vibrations. Then terrifying ones – vibes so violent and voracious they could consume a city block, and may well have tried. The Elements: Fire is a statement of paradoxical simplicity and sophistication, a two-minute instrumental which constitutes almost its own unique musical philosophy. Drums pound with each slab of wall or ceiling that hits the ground. The bass and cellos conjure a wall of flame. Violins create the screaming sirens of relief workers racing to the scene; as the track ends, you can’t imagine they made it in time. Some have suggested “Mrs O’Leary’s Cow” prefigures heavy metal. They’re wrong. It prefigures the apocalypse. A strange inclusion for an album partly designed as a paean to the spiritual power of laughter, you might think (and you’d be right) – but there is, as always, madness to the method. One of the oddest numbers ever intended for a major pop record, Vega-Tables, comes next – an alternately articulate and incoherent advertising jingle for healthy living. Hysterical laughter burbles under a bouncing organ and lyrics that combine the ridiculous and the, well, alliterative; made all the more amusing by following an inferno. Later attempts to turn the tune into a hit single add some fine songcraft but lose the earthy charms of the original; this ninety second cameo is the real deal. As is the solo (?) Wilson composition Wind Chimes, which channels the laidback melodicism of The Competition’s own “marijuana album”, Rubber Soul, into an exercise in vocal arrangement and quiet/LOUD/quiet dynamics. Lying in bed, inhaling deeply, feeling the air on his face and the smoke shooting down his trachea, the singer tries to concentrate on matters of import but finds his attention inexorably drawn back to the wind chimes tingling above the headboard. Eventually, he drifts into sleep: and what he dreams is the story of the first half of the twentieth century, as well as the story of a particular band in a particular period of that century. Surf’s Up was heralded as a masterpiece, a magnum opus, long before anyone ever heard it; remarkably, it remains so long after they did. A deconstruction not only of the career of the Beach Boys but of a world in the throes of yet another sociological makeover, it is also a lyrically clinical study of a species’ life (song-)cycle in acceleration. Since 1914, the world had experienced an unprecedented series of trips to and returns from the brink; economic, ideological, nuclear. Rise/collapse/remount: life/death/rebirth. Treading water perhaps, but not drowning. The sound of jewellery. A choke of grief. All the while, incessantly: columnated ruins domino. The usual line tells us that you need to know history in order not to repeat it. With SMiLE, Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks say something different: that repetition is inevitable; that the circle will continue, unbroken, despite the doubts and bombs and railways. Brian’s voice, solo above his keyboard at the end of the song, strains and soars with all the sadness in the world; a long, unbroken moan. But the sound he makes is not fatalistic or pitying: not an elegy, but a Prayer. Much later, long after the collapse and rebuild, we will still have what we had before, and will be heard again: a children’s song.

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