The Beach Boys at 50

The Beach Boys will soon celebrate their 50th Anniversary by going on tour, playing material from their newly-released album That's Why God Made The Radio.  In the Spring issue of the Claremont Review, Michael Anton writes on The Beach Boys and Smile, their infamous album that was never released.  As Anton argues, Smile was "the pinnacle artistic achievement of a lost civilization, the middle-class, baby-boom, sun-soaked, clean-cut, work-hard-play-hard, bungalow-and-car culture of post-war Southern California."  To fully appreciate what The Beach Boys were trying to accomplish with Smile, the listener must come to understand what California was like in the early twentieth century, the time that Murry Wilson, the father of Carl, Dennis, and Brian, first moved there:

[The Wilson family] came for the jobs but soon learned to appreciate the region's many other charms. [The journalist Carey] McWilliams, who migrated west the same year as [Murry] Wilson, was struck immediately by the landscape, "above all by the extraordinary greenness of the lawns and hillsides. It was the kind of green that seemed as though it might rub off on your hands; a theatrical green, a green that was not quite real." Of course, it wasn't quite real. At least, it wasn't natural. That green was the product of William Mulholland's "rape of the Owens Valley," the massive project to irrigate the bone-dry Los Angeles Basin later immortalized in Robert Towne's screenplay for Chinatown. L.A. in its natural state, as God intended, is the color of straw eleven months of the year.

And then there was the weather: mild, dry, predictable, and clear 329 days a year. Angelinos worshiped the sun with a fervor not seen since the Temple of Ra. Novelist Eugene Burdick—yet another member of L.A.'s class of '22—described that beneficent god thusly: "This is not the almost tropical sun of Hawaii or the alternately thin and blistering sun of Arkansas or the moderate bourgeois sun of France. This is a kind sun, a boon of nature, a sun designed for Utopia."

Now fast forward some decades to the Smile sessions:

Instead of a series of discreet songs of more or less the same length, the longer tracks on Smile are interspersed with snippets, instrumental bridges, and goofy, near-throwaway vocals—techniques the Beatles would not utilize (and even then not fully) until three years later with their last album, Abbey Road. Brian was also experimenting technologically with tricks well ahead of their time and that contemporary audio equipment could scarcely handle. He borrowed from the movies the technique of cutting and splicing tape, something hardly ever done in music before "Good Vibrations" and usually only to cover up mistakes. Brian elevated "modular recording" to an art form, allowing the music to turn on a dime in ways impossible to achieve if the songs had to be played straight through in one take. Sgt. Pepper—with its array of jump cuts, sound effects and multi-track overlays that could only be accomplished in a studio—has gone down in rock history as the first album to blast away the boundaries of traditional stage pop in ways that made it absolutely unperformable in a live act. Smile, which was written and recorded earlier, was even more sonically inventive. Had it been released on schedule, undoubtedly Wilson's masterpiece would have earned that honor.

Anton on the often-times strange lyrics of Van Dyke Parks:

As to the lyrics, that's where the trouble really hit. Parks's idiosyncratic and whimsical words fit the overall tone perfectly even if they don't always—or often—make sense. The overarching theme is America, a deliberate reaction or response to pop music's then-reigning British Invasion. The lyrics cover the nation geographically from Plymouth Rock to Hawaii, and historically from the Pilgrims through the Chicago fire, the Wild West, the railroads, and the Gilded Age. Snippets of standards from the Great American Songbook are woven in throughout, as are various pop culture jingles and theme songs. The words don't so much tell a story as set a mood, one that is often just plain silly. "I'm gonna be 'round my vegetables / I'm gonna chow down my vegetables" isn't exactly "Fall in love—you won't regret it / That's the best work of all—if you can get it."Yet despite their incomprehensibility, the lyrics for Smile remain fresh because of the music's optimism and exuberant innocence. That beneficent Southern California sun shines through in every word. Though penned in the mid '60s, there is scarcely a trace of the America-bashing then sweeping the intellectual and artistic classes. The Boys—and especially Brian—certainly succumbed to the carnal temptations of the time. But they never bought into the dystopic New Left vision of "AmeriKKKa."

In 2004 Brian Wilson finally got back together with lyricist Van Dyke Parks and put together an album that approximated something like what Smile would have sounded like were it released in 1967.  In 2011, the Smile Sessions were finally released and listeners got to experience all the work that was put into the making the album, which still to this day was never finished.

Below are some of the songs discussed by Anton, the first of which is "Our Prayer":

 

"Heroes and Villians":

"Vega-tables":

It's interesting to think what would have been if Smile was completed and released in 1967, before the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper was released.