Moving on to lyrical/musical allusions in SMiLE Movement III. For a general introduction to this essay, please see Post 4. For Movement I, please see Posts 4 & 5. For Movement II, please see Post 6. Please note that footnote numbering follows previous posts.
Movement III
If the song references in Movement I are mainly historical in nature, and if those in Movement II are mainly personal in nature, then it must be acknowledged that the song references in Movement III defy easy classification altogether. They range from 1960s standards to 19th-century ballads; from light opera to horse opera; from the King of Rock 'n' Roll to the Queen of Hawaii. It's probably fair to say that the diversity of these references mirrors the diversity (some might call it fragmentation) of Movement III itself.
• I Wanna Be Around
This song, performed by Tony Bennett, reached number 14 on the Billboard charts in 1963. It was written by Johnny Mercer (music) and Sadie Vimmerstedt (lyrics). Their collaboration had an interesting beginning: Ms. Vimmerstedt committed the lyrics to a note handwritten on two pages torn from a daily calendar. Not having a more complete address at hand, she sent the note to "Johnny Mercer – Songwriter – New York." The United States Post Office duly forwarded the envelope to the ASCAP offices, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Here are the lyrics, as sung by Bennett:
I wanna be around to pick up the pieces,
When somebody breaks your heart,
Some somebody twice as smart as I!
A somebody who,
Will swear to be true,
Like you used to do with me,
Who will leave you to learn,
That misery loves company,
Wait and see!
I wanna be around to see how he does it,
When he breaks your heart to bits,
Let’s see if the puzzle fits so fine!
And that’s when I’ll discover,
That revenge is sweet,
As I sit there applaudin’
From a front row seat,
When somebody breaks your heart,
Like you broke mine!
Like "Gee" and "You Are My Sunshine," this song is given a "period" treatment: in this case, the effect is a reverb-drenched, exaggerated "lounge" interpretation.
Wilson treats the first two lines with a playful literal-mindedness. As we listen, we hear (1) the so-called tape "explosion"; (2) the "I wanna be around" lyric; and (3) the "Workshop" sounds of rebuilding. The tired "broken heart" metaphor is reinvented as a musical/lyrical pun.
Just as interestingly, Wilson – as he does with "Gee" and "You Are My Sunshine" – deliberately manipulates the song to suit its new SMiLE context (this is an observation possible only upon hearing the complete SMiLE in 2004: the 1966 instrumental version of "I Wanna Be Around," obviously, is unenlightening in this connection). In the original performance, "I Wanna Be Around" is nothing more or less than a classic lover's-revenge song ("Who's Sorry Now" is another). But Brian stops "quoting" the song at the point where it turns spiteful. More than that: he actually changes the words, singing this instead of the "proper" lyrics:
I wanna be around
to pick up the pieces, when somebody
breaks your heart. When somebody
breaks your heart in two
And there it ends. Brian has simply dropped the mean-spiritedness out of the song altogether, giving it a new feeling of generosity and good humor. He has turned an exercise in swank cattiness into a song about healing. In so doing, he has made of "I Wanna Be Around" a sort of second cousin of his own "I'm Waiting For the Day," from Pet Sounds:
I came along when he broke your heart
That's when you needed someone
To help forget about him
I gave you love with a brand new start
That's what you needed the most
To set your broken heart free
I know you cried, and you felt blue
But when I could I gave strength to you
I'm waiting for the day when you can love again
When one considers that SMiLE is a work made of "bits," and that it has been likened many times to a "puzzle" (a view that appears to be reflected in the original Frank Holmes graphics as well as the 2004 Mark London graphics), the lyrics of the second “I Wanna Be Around” verse seem curiously appropriate.
• Yes! We Have No Bananas
Aaron Copland is reported to have said, recalling his early career, that “it was great to be twenty in the twenties.” It was great, too, to be twenty (or thereabouts) in the sixties – and for many of the same reasons. Certainly the decades shared a set of attributes that made them especially congenial to the young creative sensibility: a restless energy, a repudiation of tradition, a sense of infinite possibility.
In musical terms, the two eras shared another quality: a curious ability to mix the serious and the experimental with the unabashedly silly. And so we may detect, in “Vega-Tables,” an echo of this thoroughly ridiculous 1924 Eddie Cantor hit (the politically incorrect lyrics are by Frank Silver and Irving Cohn):
There's a fruit store on our street,
It's run by a Greek.
And he keeps good things to eat
But you should hear him speak.
When you ask him anything
He never answers "No."
He just "Yesses" you to death,
And as he takes your dough,
He tells you:
YES! We have no bananas,
We have no bananas today.
We've string beans and HON-ions,
Cab-BAH-ges and scallions
And all kinds of fruit, and say
We have an old fashioned to-MAH-to,
Long Island po-TAH-to,
But YES! We have no bananas.
We have no bananas today.
Business got so good with him
He wrote home to say:
"Send me Pete and Nick and Jim,
I need help right away."
When he got them in the store,
There was fun, you bet!
Someone asked for "Sparrow grass,"
And the whole quartet
All answered:
YES! We have no bananas,
We have no bananas today.
We've string beans and HON-ions,
Cab-BAH-ges and scallions
And all kinds of fruit, and say
We have an old fashioned to-MAH-to,
Long Island po-TAH-to,
But YES! We have no bananas.
We have no bananas today.
“Vega-Tables,” like the Cantor song, makes a sort of game out of naming kinds of produce:
If you brought a big brown bag
of them home, I’d jump up and down
and hope you’d toss me a carrot…
I tried to kick the ball, but my tennie
flew right off. I’m red as a beet
‘cause I’m so embarrassed.
It is interesting, too, that “Vega-Tables,” like “Yes! We Have No Bananas,” indulges in joking mispronunciations. Cantor rhymes “cabbages” with “barrages”; Wilson and Parks rhyme “vegetable” with “label.” But more important than these specific similarities, perhaps, are the similarities of tone between the two songs: they are both funny, clever, slightly frenetic…and deeply, unapologetically silly.
• Ukelele Lady
This song is referenced in "On a Holiday":
A pirate with a tune on a holiday.
Ol’ lazy mister moon want a getaway.
And isn’t that a moon for a milky way?
A ukulele lady – a roundalay. Rock, rock roll, Child!
Rock, rock roll, Plymouth Rock roll over.
For a holiday – with a roundalay
"Ukelele Lady" is a Gus Kahn song (copyright 1925). The reference does its job: to establish, by allusion, a dreamily exotic, pre-Pearl Harbor Hawaiian locale. Here are the words:
I saw the splendor of the moonlight
On Honolulu Bay
There's something tender in the moonlight
On Honolulu Bay
And all the beaches are filled with peaches
Who bring their ukes along
And in the glimmer of the moonlight
They love to sing this song
Verse 1:
If you like Ukelele Lady
Ukelele Lady like a'you
If you like to linger where it's shady
Ukelele Lady linger too
If you kiss Ukelele Lady
While you promise ever to be true
And she sees another Ukelele
Lady foolin' 'round with you
Verse 2:
Maybe she'll sigh (an awful lot)
Maybe she'll cry (and maybe not)
Maybe she'll find somebody else
By and by
To sing to when it's cool and shady
Where the tricky wicky wacky woo
If you like Ukelele Lady
Ukelele Lady like a'you
She used to sing to me by moonlight
On Honolulu Bay
Fond memories cling to me by moonlight
Although I'm far away
Some day I'm going, where eyes are glowing
And lips are made to kiss
To see somebody in the moonlight
And hear the song I miss
• The Pirates of Penzance
When one tries to identify specific "pirate" references, one is walking a narrow plank above dangerous seas. The vocabulary of pirate words and images is so familiar – after thousands of songs, films and stories – that it may be impossible, as a practical matter, to determine the origin of a particular "reference." Does every mention of pirate rum invoke Robert Louis Stevenson? Certainly not.
That said: the "pirate" of "On a Holiday" is clearly an important SMiLE character. By way of support for that statement, we have no less an authority than Van Dyke Parks himself, who has explained, in a 2004 interview, that the pirate was inspired, in part, by the bootleggers who have circulated dozens of unauthorized SMiLE releases over the years. "I introduced a character…the pirate. The pirate represented to me the most exploitive kind of figure you could think of in folklore," Parks said. "I thought it was OK to take a stab at and at the same time laugh about the pirating of SMiLE." 11
Long, long ago, another brilliant lyricist must have had a similar kind of mischief in mind. In 1878, William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan enjoyed unprecedented success with their light opera HMS Pinafore. It was performed to universal acclaim throughout the English-speaking world…including the United States of America. But a loophole in international copyright law permitted American producers to avoid paying royalties to the authors; they lost enormous revenues as a result of this international piracy. When Gilbert sat down to write the libretto for the team's next production, it is surely no coincidence that his imagination (like Parks's) turned to thoughts of…pirates.
Let’s pause here to acknowledge the obvious: Gilbert and Sullivan were not American artists. But I think we can stretch a point – grant them a sort of temporary creative visa, if you like. Their operas were enormously popular and pervasively influential, after all; and as it happens, that next production – The Pirates of Penzance – had its world premiere in New York rather than London, way back in 1879. A convincing case can be made, I think, for its influence on "On a Holiday."
The plot of Penzance is (to say the least) highly improbable. It involves a band of Cornwall pirates whose overly kind-hearted behavior is turning piracy into a money-losing proposition. (Believing themselves to be orphans, the pirates are committed to sparing all orphans; and they are fully prepared to believe that all would-be victims are orphans.) The opera also includes an Apprentice Pirate born on Leap-Year-Day ("on a holiday"?); his lovely sweetheart; her father, the "Very Model of a Modern Major-General" (a man with knowledge of "matters vegetable"); other assorted comely females; a life-changing mixup between the words "pilot" and "pirate"; and a slightly less serious confusion between the words "orphan" and "often." You will not be surprised to learn that everything works out splendidly in the end.
Here are the relevant SMiLE lyrics:
A pirate with a tune on a holiday.
Ol’ lazy mister moon want a getaway.
And isn’t that a moon for a milky way?
A ukulele lady – a roundalay. Rock, rock roll, Child!
Rock, rock roll, Plymouth Rock roll over.
For a holiday – with a roundalay.
Abaft and forth, a starboard course with
north abeam, sherry of course. The men
will share some sport ah – now me hearty!
Not the rum of Carib scum. It’s Port
tonight, drink up and come. Un-weigh
the anchor yank and we will party!
A shanty town – a chanty in Waikiki. And juxtapose
a man with a mystery. A blue Hawaiian – capture
his melody. And Liliuola Kalani will sing to me.
Rock, rock roll, Child! Rock rock roll, Plymouth Rock roll over
These lyrics read very much like a set of W.S. Gilbert lyrics. Gilbert's wit, his inordinate love of puns and wordplay, his assured ability to wed precision of statement to rollicking cadences, his penchant for multiple-syllable end rhymes…surely Van Dyke Parks is some sort of distant spiritual relation. Clearly the man who wrote:
Slipped on a cornucopia
Stripped the stalk green, and I hope ya
and
A shanty town – a chanty in Waikiki. And juxtapose
a man with a mystery
can claim kinship with the man who wrote:
About binomial theorem I'm teeming with a lot o' news,
With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse
and
I know our mythic history, King Arthur's and Sir Caradoc's;
I answer hard acrostics, I've a pretty taste for paradox.
This Parks pun ("roundalay"/"round a lei") –
A ukulele lady – a roundalay. Rock, rock roll, Child!
Rock, rock roll, Plymouth Rock roll over.
For a holiday – with a roundalay
Echoes these lines from Penzance:
And Nature, day by day,
Has sung in accents clear
This joyous roundelay
But the parallels go much deeper. Here is the "Opening Chorus" of Penzance:
Pour, O pour the pirate sherry
Pour, O pour the pirate sherry;
Fill, O fill the pirate glass;
And, to make us more than merry
Let the pirate bumper pass.
For today our pirate 'prentice
Rises from indentures freed;
Strong his arm, and keen his scent is
He's a pirate now indeed!
Here's good luck to Fred'ric's ventures!
Fred'ric's out of his indentures.
Two and twenty, now he's rising,
And alone he's fit to fly,
Which we're bent on signalizing
With unusual revelry.
Here's good luck to Fred'ric's ventures!
Fred'ric's out of his indentures.
Pour, O pour the pirate sherry;
Fill, O fill the pirate glass;
And, to make us more than merry
Let the pirate bumper pass.
The first two lines of the opera – one cannot imagine a more prominent position – refer to "pirate sherry": as far as I can tell, no rum whatsoever is consumed during the work. (A "bumper," by the way, is a large drinking vessel, often used for toasting.) Consider these lines in relation to the bridge of "On a Holiday":
Abaft and forth, a starboard course with
north abeam, sherry of course. The men
will share some sport ah – now me hearty!
Not the rum of Carib scum. It’s Port
tonight, drink up and come. Un-weigh
the anchor yank and we will party!
Two choruses; two invitations to pirate "revelry"; and in each case the same libation of choice: pirate sherry (of course). The SMiLE bridge – a curiously appropriate term for such a nautical middle-eight – seems to be a clear echo of the Penzance chorus.
Later in the opera, the Pirate King's solo "Oh, Better Far to Live and Die" (also known as "The Pirate King") begins as follows:
Oh, better far to live and die
Under the brave black flag I fly,
Than play a sanctimonious part
With a pirate head and a pirate heart.
Away to the cheating world go you,
Where pirates all are well-to-do;
But I'll be true to the song I sing,
And live and die a Pirate King.
"True to the song I sing": here, at least, is one "pirate with a tune." And he is, in a sense, "on a holiday": these inept, kind-hearted pirates are revealed, at the end of the opera, as "noblemen gone wrong," and their pirate careers come to an end as they assume, once again, their "duties." They have been play-acting as pirates; their "holiday" is over. It is striking – in light of Parks’s remarks about the pirate as an “exploitive” figure – that Penzance so blurs the distinction between aristocrat and pirate.
Interestingly, "On a Holiday" also sounds like the Penzance "Opening Chorus" and "The Pirate King." The tempi, the rollicking nautical rhythms, even certain details of the melodies: the SMiLE song musically echoes these Penzance songs.
Footnotes
11Van Dyke Parks, quoted in the Arizona Republic, 2004 (link no longer available)
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