Before we get to the essays themselves, I thought it might be a good idea to explain, briefly, how they came to be written.
The dawn of the twenty-first century was a very good time to be a SMiLE fan. There was The SMiLE Shop, a vibrant online SMiLE-centric community; intelligent and knowledgeable people were talking about the album, asking questions, proposing theories, exchanging ideas. (That’s the archived SMiLE Shop splash page up at the top.) Brian Wilson was incorporating SMiLE songs into his shows. Five years earlier the idea of hearing “Cabin Essence” performed live would have seemed ludicrous; now we were listening rapturously as the “iron horse” thundered through the concert halls.
The online activity – unsurprisingly – grew even more intense after Brian announced the planned world premiere of the completed work. And of course, after that premiere (and the release of the studio album that followed), we had lots and lots of new things to talk about.
I was active in the forum conversations, and my posts, for some reason, caught the attention of a gentleman who was a semi-regular visitor, and one of the true luminaries of the Beach Boys world: an “insider” who knew the principals and who was credited on the back covers of actual Beach Boys albums. I’m not going to share his name, because I haven’t been able to reach him to ask his permission, but I’ll ask you to take on faith my assurance that you would recognize it. He told me that he was putting together a book of essays about SMiLE. Some would be historical/biographical in nature. Others, he hoped, would be exercises in serious criticism. And he asked me if I might be willing to write and contribute a piece or two. It goes without saying that I was dumbfounded and honored, and I didn’t waste any time before saying yes.
The specific choice of subject matter? That was generously left up to me. My background is in literary criticism, broadly defined, so that was the perspective I took. I got started right away, and after a few months I had managed to produce reasonably complete drafts of a handful of essays.
It was all tremendously exciting. We thought that the arrival of the completed SMiLE would be treated as a major event: perhaps not quite at the level of the discovery of a manuscript of Love’s Labors Won (sticking with the theme of lost works), but significant nonetheless. We were convinced, absolutely convinced, that SMiLE was an important work of art. We imagined that it would be taken up and performed by later generations of artists – as Rhapsody in Blue was – in years to come. We let ourselves think, with a certain amount of innocent hubris, that our book would be an early entrant in what was sure to become a growing body of serious criticism.
Well, those things didn’t happen. It was strange: we had a complete SMiLE now, and you might have expected the flow of critical discussion to increase and accelerate. Instead, it slowed to a trickle.
Or maybe that’s not so strange after all. SMiLE went from dream to product, with a UPC and an amazon listing. And when something turns from romantic myth into accessible reality, the allure of mystery is inevitably lost. Some of the online commenters began to cavil with it. Some opined that it was too bright and happy (an odd complaint, given the name SMiLE). Some faulted the use of a particular digital instrument rather than the genuine analog article…intently focusing on a single sapling while ignoring the splendor of the forest (“forest” representing, here, the brilliance of the work and the fundamental miracle of its completion, after nearly forty years of neglect). I found myself wondering: if Orson Welles had sourced the funding to complete The Magnificent Ambersons in the 1970s – as he hoped to do – would people have objected to his choice of lenses and film stock?
In that changed and chilled climate, the planned SMiLE book project was set aside. My recollection is that shelving the book wasn’t so much a voiced decision as it was a natural failing of initiative. I don’t know that a final "master" was ever compiled. In hindsight, I have to shake my head over the irony: our little project came to emulate, in miniature, the album that inspired it. Substantial work was done, but it was never completed; and the entire enterprise wound up being suspended, with no real prospect of reviving it. (At least we didn’t tell anybody we had burned the manuscript.)
It’s now twenty years since the premiere of the finished SMiLE. No, other musicians have not incorporated it, in whole or in part, into their repertoires. And no, there hasn’t been much in the way of serious analysis or criticism. But in this anniversary year, it occurred to me to revisit the pieces I wrote for the book, to see if there was anything useful or interesting in them. I’m not sure of the answer, but I know that it didn’t feel right to let them languish on a hard drive, unseen and unread.
I reread everything with a critical eye. I identified places where my enthusiasm for the album led me into excesses or lapses of judgment, and I excised those passages. I tightened up the language generally. I discovered that some of the essays were overly ambitious, and some weren’t ambitious enough; I jettisoned those altogether. The most frustrating job was getting to grips with all the references. As best I can reconstruct my working method, I think I was waiting until we got to the polished manuscript stage before putting all the citations in proper format. That was a poor decision, because some of the references came from books or periodicals that I no longer possess, and it turns out that they are unavailable online. There were also lots of dead links, and the Wayback Machine, bless it, was only so much help there. So I spent a fair amount of time tracking down what I could and, where possible, finding substitute references for defunct ones. In some cases – a bare few – I was forced to retain the quotations and acknowledge, shamefacedly, that I was unable to locate the sources. I apologize for my shoddy scholarship.
I ended up with a modest collection of edited essays that I thought might be worth sharing. They're complete in and of themselves, but they represent fragments of the book as originally envisioned; the finished volume would have been deeper and richer, more entertaining and enlightening; and my contribution would have constituted only a part of the whole. Still, I hope there’s something worthwhile here, in this assortment of outtakes.
A couple of preliminary notes. Citations are not in proper academic format; my sole objective was to provide enough information to enable a curious reader to track down the original source. For example: specific poems are identified by author and title, without any attribution to specific editions. And one more thing: I don’t – as a matter of purely personal preference – use the “BWPS” acronym to refer to the completed SMiLE. There’s nothing wrong with it, I suppose, if one views it simply as a convenient shorthand. But in the years following the work’s live premiere and album release, it came to represent a way of distancing that work from the what some see as the “real” SMiLE. Since I don’t subscribe to that view, I don’t have any need for that usage.
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