"Brian Wilson - Smile"

Brian Wilson is a mythic figure in rock and roll history--the creative powerhouse behind the Beach Boys; the guy who lay in bed for a year, refusing to leave; the man who built a sandbox in his living room so he'd have the beach right there. Wilson's psyche was always a delicate thing, it seemed, but his creative genius was virtually unrivalled in popular music in the 1960s.

Smile was to be Wilson's magnum opus, the proposed follow-up to the Beach Boys' smash Pet Sounds LP and the culmination of Wilson's experiments with modular music (what exactly "modular music" is I'm still not sure, but I think I understand what he's talking about. More on that when we get there). Instead, it was shelved, becoming the phantom ship and albatross of Wilson's career.

So Smile became a legend, possibly the most longed-for unreleased album ever. Various bootlegs of what Wilson had already managed to record (which was considerable, it turns out) circulated among collectors and enthusiasts, but neither hide nor hair of the complete album were ever seen. Most suspected it would remain that way.

Flash forward to 2003, and Brian Wilson finally sits down and completes Smile. It seems to be on a whim. Maybe it was just an effort to exorcise a 37 year old demon. Whatever the impetus behind the album's completion, Wilson and his band took it out on the road, playing it for audiences, and a year later, got together in the studio and completely re-recorded the entire album for CD issue.

So, is Smile as good as everyone always hoped it would be? It's hard to say, really. People put so much faith in Wilson and his work on this project back in 1966 that he and it took on an aura of infallibility (much like the Beatles circa Sgt. Pepper's or, really, most any point in their career). Folks always assumed it was a perfect pop album, the epitome of psychadelia and Americana and contemporary music. Folks built up all these expectations for the album, and really created in their minds a completely different album, one that bore no resemblence to anything human beings could craft. You'd have thought that Wilson had somehow tapped into the celestial music of the spheres, listening to some of these rather rabid fans.

But I digress. Smile is, all things told, a phenomenal album by any realistic measuring stick, a series of song cycles that cause one to sit back and think, sit back and laugh, or simply sit back and enjoy. Regardless, it is an amazing piece of work, and one which was worth the wait.

Musically, Wilson created not a set of songs in the tradtional pop-rock sense, but a series of musical vignettes, a few dozen short musical interludes that weave together to create a bizarre and fulfilling picture of Wilson's vision of America circa 1966. Each "song" on the album is actually a collection of shorter, "modular" bits, a collection of seemingly unrelated but actually interconnected musical pastiches. It's as though each vignette is a short story in music form, but the sum total of the short stories is greater than each story by itself.

Wilson has a great ear for instrumentation. Instruments are chosen for the texture or feel they provide to a piece. Therefore, anything and everything go. You have any number of exotic or unusual instruments, but the predominant sound is that of the piano and various organ-like instruments the band uses. Various forms of percussion and bass, reed instruments and horns and glokenspiels and melotrones and God knows what else all come together to form a swirl of soothing, beauitful sound. You won't find anything traditionally rock and roll about this album--guitars appear rarely, and then only as part of the overall swirl of music. There are only a couple of tracks where guitars are even halfway prominent, and then it's only for the briefest of moments. You can see why the other Beach Boys were afraid to issue this record--it was unlike anything they'd ever done before, even Pet Sounds.

Vocals in Smile are pretty typical of the Beach Boys style, even if this isn't a Beach Boys album. There's lots of harmonizing and lots of beautiful melodies. Lyrically, Smile appears pretty shallow--there's a song about vegetables, for crying out loud--but the words of the lyrics are actually rather unimportant. What is important is the mood and the feeling the vocals evoke, and to that end, the singers are very effective. In Wilson's hands, the vocals are simply another instrument to add more texture to the songs.

Ultimately, Smile is a series of musical medlies about Wilson's America. It's a beautiful and ratehr moving--if more than a little odd--tribute to what he saw as the heart of this country. It's an impressive piece of work, especially if you consider the fact that this came from the same guy who wrote "Surfin' USA" and "Little Duece Coupe."

~chuck

Song of the Moment: Brian Wilson, "Good Vibrations"