So that was the first bookend event, the one that started me on my SMiLE journey. By the end of the decade I was buying up used copies of the Beach Boys post-Pet Sounds Capitol records – believe it or not, they were out of print at that point – and listening intently to the scavenged bits and pieces of SMiLE that appeared on them, wondering what the real album would have sounded like. There was no Internet, of course, and I wasn’t aware of any SMiLE-related print resources; like so many other SMiLE believers of the day, I was out there on my own, trying to understand, to imagine, to piece together my own version of the album. At one point, hungry for information, I wrote to the music publisher to get the lyrics to “Cabinessence,” and they sent me the sheet music. (The lyrics were full of misheard phrases and typos, by the way.)
There was something profoundly tragic and moving about the fragments, the ruins, the magnificent failure. I was a student of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound; that kind of thing had a powerful appeal for me.
I bought the current Beach Boys records too. When Surf’s Up was released, I was ridiculously excited to have a major SMiLE song in my hands. When my high school English teacher asked us to share a favorite poem, I brought in the album and made my classmates sit and listen to the title song, played through one of those primitive gray hammertone school record players. I think I passed around the lyric sheet as well. I wonder, now, what my fellow students thought about the whole thing.
When bootlegs became a thing, I lashed out and bought whatever pseudo-SMiLE albums I could find, some on cassette and some on vinyl. They didn’t help very much, but I was happy to have them. (I know now that there were better bootlegs out there, but those never came my way.)
Somewhere around 1973 I went to see the Beach Boys at the big local colosseum-type venue. It was a good 70s-style show. But it had nothing to do with my enduring interest in SMiLE; that lived in a different compartment of my imagination.
The years passed, and I sort of lost touch with the Beach Boys. I got interested in other varieties of music: prog rock, classical chamber music, and, later on, new wave. I was happily surprised when Brian emerged as a solo artist, and happily astonished when he began touring.
In 2002, my brother and I went to see Brian in concert, and I remembering being floored by the “Wonderful”/“Cabin Essence” medley. It was beautifully played and sung, with great power and conviction; the “iron horse” section shook the walls of the venue. I remember thinking that was as much of SMiLE as we were likely to get…and reconciling myself to that idea. I don’t recall talking to him about what it was like to hear those songs live, or to know that Brian had, on some level, reconnected with them. I wish I had done that.
The second seminal event came just a year later, on an ordinary workday morning. I was working at Mattel (the toy company) back then, and my usual routine, after starting the coffee machine and checking my emails, was to look in on a few different music and photography websites – just for a moment or two, while my brain spun up to working speed. I clicked on Brian’s site, and stared at the animated graphic element: a sun image with the SMiLE logo across the front. Was I seeing things? I had pretty much given up hope for an official release of the SMiLE fragments; the notion of a completed SMiLE wasn’t even a daydream.
There it was: the positive counterweight to that long-ago afternoon when my brother tossed away that magazine. SMiLE, it turned out, hadn’t been canceled after all. It had been shelved, delayed, crated up and put away. But now, thirty-odd years later, it was going to see the light of day.
By rights, I should have called my brother and shared my excitement. I don’t think I did, and I don’t know why.
I thought, briefly, about going to London for the premiere. I wasn’t put off by the inconvenience or the distance. I knew the city, as well as anybody ever “knows” a place like that; I had done a year’s study there when I was in college. But the financial considerations were another matter. I probably could have stretched the budget to fit in the airfare and the concert tickets, but it would have taken some doing. I put that idea aside, figuring that there would be a U.S. premiere as well – and, with any luck, an entire SMiLE tour.
By this time I was a member of an online Beach Boys community, and my SMiLE hobby was no longer a solitary pursuit. We were already trading theories and interpretations when the concerts were announced, and – as you might imagine – the activity accelerated from there. The night of the premiere we were all online, some of us still on dialup, hitting refresh every few seconds, trying to process the news as it came in (“‘ribbon of concrete’ at eight minutes!”). Wherever we happened to be, whichever time zone, whichever continent, we were all connected in real time. It felt like the kind of night the Internet was built for.
One kind member shared an audience recording of the premiere, so I had some idea of what to expect when I finally made it to a SMiLE concert in 2004. I’m not going to search for adjectives or comparisons. Let’s just say it was an amazing experience, and leave it at that. I bought my copy of the studio SMiLE the day it was released. I bought a copy for my brother, too.
He was right, all those years ago, to be so deeply disappointed. He knew, maybe in a way he himself couldn’t have explained, that there was something magical going on, and that the world would be a poorer place for missing out on it.
The music all is lost for now
In retrospect, that line from “Surf’s Up” should have given us comfort during the long age we waited – without very much hope – to hear SMiLE complete. Lost, yes, for now: for a time. But not forever.
Two decades on, I have reason to know that the magic wasn’t gone; it just took a while to reach us. During those years I’ve turned to SMiLE over and over, in good times and in hard times, and I’ve always found something redemptive and uplifting in it. It has moved me to tears, and it has moved me to laughter. I’m happy, in the end, to have traded in the fragments and the failures, the theories and the guesses and the questions, for this wonderful work of art, this triumph of the creative spirit.
And – there’s that questionable advantage of age again – I know something my younger self couldn’t have imagined. I know how rare it is, in this compromised world, for surrender and loss to be transmuted into victory and wonder. I’m profoundly grateful to have been a minuscule, subatomic part of a story that turned out, against all odds and expectations, to have such a gloriously happy ending.
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