BRIAN WILSON
SMiLE
(Nonesuch Records)
****

“GOOD VIBRATIONS” was one of the most revolutionary musical achievements of the psychedelic '60s. It was the first recording made after the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds album, whose stylistic shift away from beach babes and cars, and toward lush orchestral arrangements, alienated many listeners. But serious fans and music critics loved Pet Sounds for its sophistication and melodic bliss. The post-Pet Sounds follow-up Beach Boys album that would include “Good Vibrations” was called SMiLE, and promised to be more an even more ambitious album than its predecessor.

Capitol Records printed album covers and placed ads with a release date in early 1967, but it became pop music's most legendary unreleased album. Some SMiLE songs surfaced on later Beach Boys albums like the conceptually unrelated 1967 Smiley Smile, but band conflicts and Wilson's depression prevented SMiLE from being finished in its intended form. Wilson has finally completed SMiLE, first as a series of live performances in Europe earlier this year, and now as an all-new studio recording using the musicians from those shows.

“Good Vibrations” more deeply explored the way Wilson was beginning to create pop songs in Pet Sounds, refining a process that was new not only for him, but for pop music in general. Today, big-budget album production involves recording multiple takes and digitally splicing together the best pieces to make weak performers appear inhumanly perfect.

With “Good Vibrations,” Wilson's new creative process was closer to the making of a movie than a traditional pop song, collecting musical raw footage that he would dice up into various “shots and scenes.” “Good Vibrations” and the follow-up single, “Heroes and Villains” showcased the unreleased SMiLE album's intended signature style, cutting between edits of hours of recording sessions of varied vocal styles, instrumentation approaches, melody lines and tempos.

SMiLE was essentially a collaboration between Wilson and Van Dyke Parks, who contributed trippy lyrics to Wilson's musical vision of the “American experience.” Hearing these recordings, one can imagine Wilson addressing the Beach Boys in the 1966 studio with statements like, “This song is called ‘Do You Like Worms,' and it traces the American westward expansion from Plymouth Rock to Hawaii using abstract lyrics and fragments of cut-up studio session tapes.” And one can then imagine the band's likely response of dismay: “I don't know what the hell you just said, but I dig girls and hot rods! Can we sing about them instead?” No wonder the project was so tumultuous for the involved parties.

For years, obsessive fans and bootleggers have attempted to reconstruct the lost album from unreleased session tapes, later album cuts and CD bonus tracks. Most remarkable about the newly re-recorded SMiLE is the revelation of how the original, baffling puzzle pieces actually fit together as a cohesive conceptual “symphonic” whole. Incorporating Wilson's modular creative process, recurring lyrical and musical phrases are interleaved throughout the album, weaving complex interrelationships between the songs and themes. It's daring and effective. And despite its bizarre, lofty, avant-garde nature, the lush harmonies and melodies of the components make it quite easy to listen to.

Of course, this new project can't be exactly the same record that was supposed to come out 37 years ago, and some parts have inevitably evolved over time, as indicated by some minor details like the retitling of “Do You Like Worms” as “Roll Plymouth Rock.” But a legacy of vintage Beach Boys remnants combine with a new stand-alone recording to testify to Wilson's ingenious method that may have previously only seemed to be random madness.

(Originally published in The Cleveland Free Times, October 6, 2004)