A preliminary note: footnotes have been added only where necessary; if the source is clearly identifiable from the surrounding text, no footnote has been inserted.
To know the truth of history is to realize its ultimate myth and its inevitable ambiguity.
Roy P. Basler
History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.
E.L. Doctorow
A look back into history: once upon a time, deep in the SMiLE dark ages, we subsisted on meager rations. I had the SMiLE snippets that had made it out onto official releases, and the few bootlegs that found their way to me. One of those was a cassette version, and everything about it – from the photocopied insert to the recording itself – was sad and murky. But such was life, in those days.
One of my friends was aware of my interest in the album, and he asked to borrow that bootleg. He wasn’t a Beach Boys fan, and when it came to SMiLE, he knew only what I had told him. But I was happy to lend it to him…after warning him about the sound quality in general, and about “George Fell into His French Horn,” in particular. Included on the tape was the song we knew, at that time, as "Do You Like Worms."
A week or so later, I asked my friend what he thought of the SMiLE music. "Very interesting," he said. "I especially liked the 'Play Myth Rock' song."
“Plymouth Rock” misheard as "Play Myth Rock": as misconstrued lyrics go, this borders on the miraculous. For SMiLE blurs, dazzlingly, the distinction between history and myth. On the evening of September 7, 1996, Van Dyke Parks, performing at the Ash Grove, reflected on the blurring of that distinction. He was introducing “The All Golden”: a song recorded and released mere months after the original SMiLE album was shelved:
[W]hat the details are – they’re shrouded in mystery, and if I started to explain it, it would be like finding the line between myth and history – and I really don’t know that anymore….
Here is Robert Penn Warren, muddying the same waters:
Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake. 1
This quotation would have been incomprehensible to generations of distinguished thinkers for whom history was nothing more than the unalterable record of events that took place in past times. Bacon was one such thinker. "That which is past and gone is irrevocable," he wrote, with the assurance of one who speaks a truth that is beyond controversy; "Wise men have enough to do with the present and things to come." 2 We, on the other hand, have no difficulty with Penn Warren's statement. That is not because we are wiser than Bacon; it is because we have learned to accept, at least provisionally, the modernist notion that all history is contemporaneous. William Faulkner: "The past is never dead; it's not even past." 3 Or, more colorfully, Bob Dylan: "When did Abraham break his father's idols? I think it was last Tuesday." 4
Time was of the essence, for Bacon, because past time was "irrevocable" and inaccessible, except by way of scholarly interpretation. Time is of the essence, for us, because past and present are one: the past is not even past.
These are slippery concepts. We might as well acknowledge, here and now, that human language deals imperfectly with such matters. We use metaphors to talk about time ("time on my hands"); we describe it in terms normally used to describe space ("point in time"). We even invent specialized tenses for specific time applications (we’ll return to this point in a moment). But none of these is a truly satisfactory solution. Even our most articulate writers can do only so much with the resources at their disposal:
[T]he historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence…. [It is] a sense of the timeless as well as the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together. 5
This is Eliot, and it is very serious writing; arch an eyebrow over it, however, and it begins to sound like a deadpan joke. It is perfectly lucid; at the same time, it veers perilously close to the cadenced nonsense of Lewis Carroll. Readers familiar with Van Dyke Parks's pun-laden lyrics will have no difficulty hearing, in Eliot's use of the word "presence," a sly, knowing, erudite pun: past/presence/present.
Slippery concepts, yes: concepts that lie close to the living heart and soul of SMiLE. This is Darian Sahanaja, Brian’s musical secretary, recording his firsthand impressions of the creative collaboration between Wilson and Parks:
It was as if they never stopped…. They were just a couple of free-thinking young Americans back in 1966, and they were no different in 2003. Van Dyke would be very conscious of thematic unity, while Brian would continue humming melodies over existing chord patterns. Van Dyke would come in the next morning with some lyrics that to this day I'm not certain if they had just recently been written or if they were always there in his head. And that was what I found to be so magical, the seamlessness of it all, as if the ideas were being drawn from the exact same place at the exact same time, which ironically in this case, makes it almost timeless. 6
Two quotations, some eighty years apart: one from a brilliant poet and essayist who never heard a note of SMiLE, and one from a working musician and arranger who was a partner in (and witness to) its resurrection. Eliot is speaking in generalities, describing the relationship of the artist to the living artistic tradition; Sahanaja is recounting specifics, describing the dynamic of a particular collaboration. And both men are responding to the same fundamental duality: the timeless and the temporal together.
The timeless and the temporal: SMiLE begins with bows to both. "Our Prayer" is a timeless spiritual invocation, as wordless as the imagined chant of a prehistoric cave painter. “Gee,” on the other hand, is not only a manifestation of the temporal: it is a small, fully-functional time machine. The SMiLE version of the 1953 doo-wop hit begins with an effect intended to simulate a scratchy vinyl record or an old AM radio (or both); The sound and the history rhyme, and we are reminded that this musical quotation is an artifact redeemed from another era. Midway through, startlingly, the sound becomes clear and “present.” All this in two minutes and nine seconds: a touch of eternity ("Our Prayer"); an acknowledgment of the past (the "vinyl" effect); and a cinematic "dissolve" into the present, as the original "Gee" lyrics give way to the "Heroes and Villains" lyrics, foreshadowing the song to follow.
And there is, remarkably, even more to this opening gesture. The song "Gee" languished on the Los Angeles AM-radio charts, in late 1953, until a local disk jockey – trying to win back his sweetheart – decided to play the single continuously, over and over, for one entire night. (History does not record whether she relented.) One imagines a young Brian Wilson hearing the song that night – a vinyl record played on an old AM radio – and reflecting, perhaps, on the unexpected power of simple words, repeated endlessly. It may not be too great a stretch to imagine him falling asleep to the sound of that nightlong marathon; perhaps the "dissolve" effect replicates the passage, in mid-phrase, from the low-fidelity reality of a bedside radio to the vivid immediacy of a dream.
"Heroes And Villains,” continuing to manipulate time, begins with a breakneck rush of words…words that put us at an immediate temporal distance:
I been in this town so long that back in the city I been
taken for lost and gone and unknown for a long, long time
"So long" and "long, long time": occurring, as they do, within the first three lines of the song, these phrases establish its "pastness" beyond question. The "cantina" section deftly sketches an Old-West saloon:
In the cantina, Margarita keeps the spirits high.
There I watched her. She spun around and wound in
the warmth. Her body fanned the flame of the dance
The very title "Roll Plymouth Rock" is a complicated gesture compressed into three words. "Plymouth Rock," of course, is an iconic name that resonates at the very foundations of American history. The prefixed "roll" negates the stability and permanence of "Plymouth Rock," suggesting the overthrow of the social structure. And the conjunction of "roll" and "rock" undercuts the gravity of Puritan history with a wink at the rebellious exuberance of rock-and-roll.
The lyrics of the song concentrate temporal energies into highly charged couplets:
Once upon the Sandwich Isles,
the social structure steamed upon Hawaii
The obsolete colonial name for the Hawaiian Islands ends the first line, and the current name for the islands ends the second. And the current name is also the indigenous name that existed before Lord Sandwich imposed his own. (The past is not even past.)
"Roll Plymouth Rock" is a grand, serious song. But there are historical glimpses elsewhere as well: in these lines from "Barnyard," for example:
Out in the barnyard,
the cook is choppin’ lumber
Little words: almost, one feels, a throwaway lyric. And yet this verbal miniature contrives to paint a tiny picture of the past. For the only cooks who need to chop wood are the ones working on wood-burning kitchen stoves; and such stoves belong to an earlier time.
The title "Cabin Essence" promises a distillation of frontier experience, and the song fulfills that promise:
Light the lamp and fire mellow cabin essence;
timely hello welcomes the time for a change.
Lost and found, you still remain there.
You’ll find a meadow filled with rain there.
I’ll give you a home on the range.
Who ran the iron horse?
Who ran the iron horse?
I want to watch you, windblown, facing waves of wheat
for your embracing. Folks sing a song of the grange.
Nestle in a kiss below there, the constellations ebb
and flow there and witness our home on the range
The "iron horse" races headlong through the chorus; at the same time, barely audible in the layered cacophony, obeying a different rhythm, a modern-day truck drives through a modern-day tollbooth:
Truck driving man do what you can
High-tail your load off the road….
With a buck and a booth
Catchin' on to the truth
In the vast past, the last gasp….
"Time for a change" indeed: from the "vast past" to the "last gasp" in a single line. (Not only the pastness of the past, but its presence.)
In "Surf's Up," the opulent details gather into a picture of a gaslit concert hall:
A diamond necklace played the pawn.
Hand in hand, some drummed along
to a handsome mannered baton.
A blind class aristocracy.
Back through the op’ra glass you see
the pit and the pendulum drawn.
Columnated ruins domino!
Canvas the town and brush the back-drop.
Are you sleeping?
Hung velvet over taking me.
Dim chandelier awaken me.
To a song dissolved in the dawn.
The music-hall – A costly bow
But troubling images lie beneath the gilded surface, implying the decadence and eventual collapse of Victorian solidities:
A blind class aristocracy.
Back through the op’ra glass you see
the pit and the pendulum drawn
Stark irony, this, to put an opera glass into the hands of the metaphorically "blind." Look back through the opera glass – look inward into the eyes of the concertgoers – and one glimpses the depravities of the Inquisition. Sound out "the music hall a costly bow," and one hears "holocaust." And the concert hall's transitory splendor is already (to quote the haunting backing vocals) “bygone”: a landscape of "ruins," ready to fall domino-fashion.
Outside – “at Port” suggests a waterfront scene – there's a "carriage across the fog" and the glow of "lamplight." A ship sailing, a parting, a farewell: "adieu or die" and "Auld Lang Syne." One rides the tidal wave, or else one is overwhelmed by it. (And "auld lang syne" – literally, "old long ago" – echoes the "long long time" of "Heroes And Villains" and the "long, long ago" of "On a Holiday.")
A ship sailing: "On a Holiday" evokes the pirate seas of the past with its nautical jargon, shouted through a megaphone (so ship communicated with ship, in days before radio):
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!
And "Port," here, rhymes with "Port" in "Surf's Up" (carefully capitalized in both places): a triple pun, encompassing the clubman's after-dinner drink; the place from which ships sail; and the left-hand side of a vessel. And the winds that filled pirate sails stir present-day wind chimes. (History is the present.)
The temporal and the timeless; history as myth; as witness the Native American notion of mythic time:
In Native American narratives, one can notice two kinds of time: A time before time, or outside time (mythic time), where things are not as they are here, and historical time, similar in most respects to contemporary life. In mythic time, no barriers exist between the spirit and physical worlds. Earth, animals, plants, and humans understand each others' languages. Spirit beings walk the earth openly and interact with human beings freely, sometimes helping, sometimes harming, sometimes mating with them…. Native American creation stories, migration accounts (stories of how a people found its way to the sacred homeland), and stories of culture heroes (those who gather the wisdom and rituals that hold a people together) are stories of mythic time….
Stories of mythic time often have the ability to bring the story's audience into that time – into the nonordinary time of the spirit world. Storytelling among Native Americans – when the story is of mythic time – dissolves boundaries. Reenacting such a story overlaps…worlds…. Much traditional ritual recreates myth, bringing the story's power into everyday life. 7
Boundaries dissolve; worlds overlap. Mythic time – obviously related to the "dreamtime" of the Australian aboriginal people – is the time within which legends and fairy-tales take place. It is the time within which demons, monsters and other supernatural beings ("Heroes and Villains”?) exist; and since "ritual recreates myth," SMiLE begins (and closes) with a prayer, a ritual intended to elevate the mind out of day-to-day reality and focus it on the timeless:
[T]here is a reaching towards a different kind of time, called 'mythic time': the perpetual present of ritual. When ritual is performed, the past event becomes present again. This kind of time is not linear like clock-time; it is recurrent, even cyclical.... 8
and:
During the prayer service, the goal is to use your mind to rise above the needs of the body, on a journey toward God. With feet on the ground, your mind is soaring toward the clouds, and beyond, into a higher spiritual realm. On such a spiritual plane, life seems to be timeless. 9
Mythic energies inform the images of SMiLE; they seem, also, to flow through its very words. The perfectly good adjective "wonderful" has been transformed into a noun, the better to suggest something ineffable and divine. Adjective, noun, verb: it's interesting to note that some ancient languages actually used a specific verb tense to describe mythic time:
One of the initially bewildering features…is [the] use of verbal tenses. This difficulty is rooted in the fact that the IndoIranian languages possessed a special verb form, the INJUNCTIVE, which is reserved for the expression of myth and timeless truths. Whereas one tends to regard all events, whether mythological or not, as taking place in a nonrecurring historical order, archaic man understood mythical events, which took place in MYTHOLOGICAL TIME, as being EVERPRESENT…. The problem is that we lack words to express adequately this subtlety of thought. If one translates the injunctive with the past tense, one relegates the action to history; if one uses the present, one excludes that aspect of the action that took place…in mythological time. (Emphasis in original.) 10
Absent such a specialized tense, how are we to speak intelligibly of such subtleties?
The problem of how to speak or write of the myths themselves presents itself. Do we discuss them in the past tense…, as though they have already occurred? This seems to work in most cases, yet…this isn't quite correct either…. So is the present tense more appropriate? …Could it not also be said that the myths are still unfolding as different people encounter the myths for the first time? As new insights and new inspirations are gleaned from them, are they not in the truest sense still "that which is becoming?" The present tense is the standard form of literary reference, and in this case it seems not without reason that it should be so…. By extension, if we can place the context of the myths continually in the present then they could also occur perpetually in the future tense, since all the stories are meshed however imprecisely with events which will result from them…. Or perhaps we ought to think of all three of these things occurring at different levels simultaneously. 11
Here again, in connection with "The Dreaming" of the Aboriginal peoples:
The term "The Dreaming" refers to this creative epoch in which Aboriginal men, women and all of nature came to be as they are – eternally interconnected with their totemic ancestors. But the concept is not confined to the mythical past, it carries forward into the present and future as a living reality. 12
Turning back to SMiLE, consider these lines from "Heroes and Villains":
Once at night, cotillion squared, the fight, and she was right
in the rain of the bullets that eventually brought her down –
But she’s still dancing in the night unafraid of what
a dude’ll do in a town full of Heroes and Villains
In the space of three lines we move from the past tense ("brought her down") to the present tense ("she's still dancing") to the future tense ("what a dude'll do"). Past (“fell in love years ago”), present ("you're under arrest") and future ("there shall be peace") are interwoven throughout the song…and throughout SMiLE.
"You Are My Sunshine" displays such a multi-level manipulation of tenses: in the original song, the verses speak of a woman who is already gone; but the chorus asks that same woman not to go. As performed in SMiLE, the song has undergone a further twist on this tense-confusion, with a change from "you are my sunshine" to "you were my sunshine," and "please don't take my sunshine away" to "how could you take my sunshine away."
"Cabin Essence" mixes present-tense verses (“the constellations ebb and flow there”) with a past-tense chorus ("who ran the iron horse") and a present-tense coda ("crow cries"). "Wonderful" mixes present ("she belongs there") with past ("God reached softly"; "the path was a mystery") and future ("she'll return"). "Surf's Up" is cast mainly in the past tense, with the present tense intruding at key moments ("are you sleeping"; "the children know the way"). And SMiLE ends triumphantly with the visceral immediacy of the present tense: “I’m pickin’ up good vibrations.” The past is not even past: there is a deep reality here for which our ordinary language struggles to find expression. These are slippery concepts.
And so one must pay attention even to the little words. “Once upon a time” – the traditional fairy-tale opening – is echoed in “Roll Plymouth Rock”:
Once upon the Sandwich Isles,
the social structure steamed upon Hawaii
"You Are My Sunshine" is nominally a plea addressed to a sweetheart; but it is (literally) a supplication addressed to a sun-figure (worlds overlap). "Old Master Painter" amounts to a pop-song creation myth:
That old master painter from the faraway hills
Painted the violets and the daffodils
He put the purple in the twilight haze
Then did a rainbow for the rainy days
Dreamed up the murals on the blue summer skies
Painted the devil in my darlin's eyes
Captured the dreamer with a thousand thrills
The old master painter from the faraway hills
Then came his masterpiece and when he was through
He smiled down from heaven and he gave me you
What a beautiful job on that wonderful day
That old master painter from the hills far away
Sun-like, the creator-figure "smiles" down from heaven. When "Song for Children" asks "Father of the Son. Where is the Father, Son," we hear the last word as both "son" and "sun." And other myths seem to lie just below the surface: the tidal wave of "Surf's Up" calls to mind a flood-myth, and the "water prayer" transition – from purgatorial flames to life-giving water – resonates deeply across many cultures.
"Cabin Essence" suggests an eternal figure – a mythical earth/vegetation goddess? – in these lines:
Lost and found, you still remain there.
You’ll find a meadow filled with rain there
and the final lines imply cyclical time ("over and over") even as they give a voice to the crow: a powerful Native American myth-figure:
Over and over, the crow cries uncover the cornfield
Cycles repeat. And SMiLE (through which a "bicycle rider" unceasingly travels) is a work about such cycles.
"Wonderful" seems to take place entirely in mythic time. Its mysticism and enigmatic spirituality call to mind traditional mythological narratives; in its tone and imagery, it resembles a fairy tale:
She belongs there left with her liberty.
Never known as a non-believer.
She laughs and stays in her one, one, wonderful.
She knew how to gather the forest when
God reached softly and moved her body.
One golden locket, quite young and
loving her mother and father-
Farther down the path was a mystery.
Through the recess, the chalk and numbers.
A boy bumped into her one, one, wonderful.
All fall down and lost in the mystery.
Lost it all to a non-believer, and all that’s left
is a girl who’s loved by her mother and father.
She’ll return in love with her liberty.
Just away from her non-believer, she’ll
sigh and thank God for one, one, wonderful
"Golden locket," a Parks pun on "Goldilocks," makes the fairy-tale connection explicit. If "all fall down" is a direct quotation from the nursery rhyme “Ring Around the Rosey," it is also a reference to the greatest "fall" of all. Forest echoes garden; innocence is lost; and the path that leads away from the forest loses itself in mystery.
The innocent girl of "Wonderful" appears elsewhere in SMiLE – in other guise, and by subtle implication:
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.
The "Liliuola Kalani" who appears in these lines from "On a Holiday" is Lili'uokalani, the last Queen of Hawaii, and a prolific songwriter. Among her best-known songs is "Pauahi 'O Kalani." Pauahi, the Queen’s niece, is portrayed in the seclusion of sacred “bowers”:
Our lady is there in the coolness of Mana
Admiring the beauty and the glories of the forest
She knows the fragrances of Puna's bowers
She has worn the maile from Pana'ewa
Her loving thoughts return to love her kin
To her home, her birthplace, she is returning
Live, Oh Highness, Pauahi, great royal one
'Til time shall [be] no more
Live, Oh Highness, Pauahi, great royal one
Live long, in truth, supreme in excellence
Like the young woman of "Wonderful," who will "return in love with her liberty," Pauahi "is returning" to "her home, her birthplace." And "Mana" is sometimes a branch, sometimes a fern, and – most interestingly – sometimes the miraculous, divine power of the Hawaiian chiefs. (Here, it is most likely all three.) It is also, we may reflect, a fair translation of the adjective-turned-noun "wonderful."
'Til time shall be no more: timelessness, time beyond time. (Attention, again, even to the little words):
A wah ha wah
Sonorous syllables, yes, but not necessarily nonsense syllables. In Hawaiian, the word “wah” (a variant spelling) is defined as a “period of time, epoch, era, time, occasion, season, age;” as a grammatical tense; as a “space, interval, as between objects or time…;” and as the “fret of an ukulele, guitar, or similar instrument.” The word “ha” (which can also have a musical meaning: a note of the scale) often means "four" or "fourth," although it can be used as a multiplier or intensifier (as in the English "fourfold"); it also refers to sacred breathing, and is therefore associated with the divine power of Mana, which is controlled through prayer, breathing and meditation. And the word "a" is usually translated as “to” or “until” (“a” is often used to indicate a period of time, and may also be used to convey protracted time or great distance).
“A wah ha wah”: to multiple times…with a suggestion of sacred ritual…and a musical connection as well? Perhaps; as we have seen, SMiLE – a ritual recreating myth – does indeed take us on a journey “to multiple times.” Not only the pastness of the past, but its presence; the timeless as well as the temporal, and the timeless and the temporal together. The past is not even past.
"The timeless and the temporal together": that is Eliot the essayist. This is Eliot the poet, some two decades later, displaying a deeper understanding of the same truth:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past….
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present….
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present. 13
and
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always. 14
But while the Four Quartets ponders an intersection that is "England and nowhere," SMiLE is informed by a uniquely American sensibility:
[T]o be an American…is precisely to imagine a destiny rather than to inherit one; since we have always been, insofar as we are Americans at all, inhabitants of myth rather than history. 15
So Leslie Fiedler describes the continuing drive to re-imagine the American story, to retell the American tale: to remake, by living it, the American myth. SMiLE is more than its history, more than the sum of what it has inherited. It is its own invention, written anew, existing in its own "timeless moment.” Play myth rock indeed.
Footnotes
1 https://www.robertpennwarren.com/Bro%20to%20Dragons-Foreward.htm
2 Francis Bacon, The Essays
3 William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun
4 Bob Dylan, Biograph
5 T.S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent"
6 This is highly embarrassing. This quotation has been sitting in my files for two decades; I have the sense that it is reasonably well known. But I have been unable to locate the original source. Still, it was too good, and too relevant, to omit.
7 https://web.archive.org/web/20050313160359/http://www.stormwind.com/common/namyth.html
8 https://goodnews.ie/jacobswellnov2015.shtml
9 https://aish.com/48942466/
10William W. Malandra, An Introduction to Ancient Iranian Religion
11Ibid.
12https://allaboutheaven.org/observations/bruce-chatwin-australian-aboriginal-the-first-morning-003082/221
13T.S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton" (Four Quartets)
14T.S. Eliot, "Little Gidding" (Four Quartets)
15Leslie Fielder, “Cross the Border, Close the Gap”
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