It’s nothing, it's just fragments.
Mike Love
I have no excuse, sir.
Van Dyke Parks
When you sit down to read a piece of artistic criticism, I think it’s fair to start out with a few expectations. Surely it’s not demanding too much of the author to ask the piece to offer something in the way of analysis or interpretation; to add useful context or biographical information; or to draw some clear conclusions. In other words, to go somewhere and accomplish something.
Reasonable expectations, each and every one. But I’m afraid this little essay – if you can dignify it with that name – is destined not to fulfill them. A better way to approach it, maybe, is with a 1960s mindset: think of it as a more-or-less directionless meditation. A bit of messy musing, in short, about a messy subject.
Perhaps a brief quotation from Van Dyke Parks – the writer of the words under discussion – will be helpful here. He’s talking about the themes that run through the SMiLE lyrics:
It˙s all about the images. I think it's good to remind everyone that these words and images were created to simply uphold a sense of fantasy. The Greeks invented a word called phantasma; it had to do with the talent and the ability to make mental images. That's as high as the bar was raised for my endeavor….
Phantasma: a vision: a dream: and sometimes a phantom or ghost. Ultimately, it may be that that’s what we’re chasing: nothing more than the phantom or ghost of meaning. But let’s give it a try anyway.
The song (or song fragment) we know as “He Gives Speeches” belongs to a class of what you might call SMiLE-adjacent elements: bits and pieces whose place and position in the final work – if any – were and are uncertain. (“You’re Welcome,” released as the B-side of “Heroes and Villains,” is another.) It runs just under a minute, and these are the complete lyrics:
He gives speeches, but they put him
Back in bed where he wrote his satire
He gives speeches, always reaches
Out a lot, led him to discover
Silken hair, more silken hair
Fell on his face and no wind was blowin'
Stepped across the golden fields
And saw that she was soon trailing after
She was nice and didn't fight
He fell into her friendly persuasion
Late that night while by a streetlight
Little hands shadowed on the ceiling
In 2003, when Brian and Van Dyke got down to the business of finishing SMiLE, the song remained a stepchild. When Darian Sahanaja brought up “He Gives Speeches” as a candidate for inclusion, Brian (emulating a Roger Christian drag racer) shut him down:
"There's a piece called 'He Gives Speeches', another SMiLE-era out-take, but Brian didn't want to do that," says Darian….
Maybe that's not terribly surprising. It’s pretty obviously a tossed-off snippet, a sort of rough draft, and it would have needed an awful lot of development to become a standalone song – or even a worthwhile “modular” piece of a bigger one. It’s very difficult, maybe impossible, to figure out what’s going on in the lyrics.
Which doesn’t mean that they’re nonsensical, exactly. They’re not nonsense in the style of some of Dylan’s Basement Tapes lyrics, where you can tell that he’s just slurring some random syllables along until he can get to the chorus (thinking here of “Santa Fe” or the 1967 “On a Rainy Afternoon”). And not in the style of songs like “Andmoreagain” (Love) or “Hole in My Shoe” (Traffic); the 60s were indulgently tolerant of such stuff. (And just to be clear, I’m not denigrating any of those songs, or 60s nonsense lyrics in general.) No, “He Gives Speeches” is a different, stubborn sort of nonsense, and it does its best to resist any attempt to wring meaning or feeling out of it. Taking the lines in order, and giving a little extra attention to the first couplets, by virtue of their position in the song:
He gives speeches
You feel like you’ve been tossed into the middle of it, but still, it seems that there’s going to be some kind of story here. There’s even a quasi-protagonist: the unnamed “he.” The present-tense verb tells us that speechmaking is an ongoing activity for him, whoever he may be – something repeated or habitual (as in a phrase like "he drives a truck," or "he plays baseball"). The word “speeches” carries some interesting connotations. It has a whiff of ego about it; speeches are a particular kind of rehearsed, public speaking, very different from ordinary conversation. Everybody talks; but only important people, people like politicians and ambassadors, give speeches. We have no idea, at this point, who “he” is; but we begin to get a dim, vague sense of his character.
He gives speeches, but
The word “but” sets us up to expect – what? Some kind of opposition, presumably: something that undercuts the pomposity of “speeches.” Something like “he gives speeches, but nobody listens to them.” Instead, we get this:
He gives speeches, but they put him
Not exactly what we might have expected. Now we have a “they” to deal with, and they’re putting our orator somewhere; which suggests that they have some sort of authority or power over him. Off the stage? Out to pasture? Off the train (if we let ourselves imagine a whistle-stop speaking tour)?
He gives speeches, but they put him
Back in bed
Uh-oh. It’s damnably difficult to figure out what’s going on here. The word “back” implies that our nameless fellow got out of bed, in the first place, to make his speech; not an unreasonable notion, since most of us do wake up and get out of bed to start the day’s activity. (The SMiLE song “I’m in Great Shape” gives us another character, this time in the first person, tumbling out of bed to greet the morning.) But “back in bed”? Are “they” silencing the speechmaker, yanking him from the public stage and tucking him in? Or could this be a more benign act – is he ill, or worn out from speechifying, requiring a bit of bed rest?
He gives speeches, but they put him
Back in bed, where he wrote his satire
Now our speechmaker is a satirist as well. More than that, he’s doing his writing in bed. You want to read “satire” as denoting a genre, rather than a specific piece of writing (think “he writes drama” or “he writes fiction”), but the past-tense “wrote” suggests otherwise. Maybe this really is a reference to a single satirical piece, written some time in the past.
When it comes to the speechmaker/satirist’s identity, the writing-in-bed notion might give us a clue. Based on what little critical analysis exists, the odds-on favorite for this role seems to be Mark Twain. There’s support for that notion, in the form of a 1905 New York Times article containing an interview with the then-70-year-old Twain (if ever a literary figure deserved a SMiLE reference, it's ol' Sam Clemens). Jokingly (half-jokingly?), Twain explains that his favorite place to work is indeed his bed:
Whenever I've got some work to do I go to bed. I got into that habit some time ago when I had an attack of bronchitis. Suppose your bronchitis lasts six weeks. The first two you can't do much but attend to the barking and so on, but the last four I found I could work if I stayed in bed and when you can work you don't mind staying in bed.
I liked it so well that I kept it up after I got well. There are a lot of advantages about it. If you're sitting at a desk you get excited about what you are doing, and the first thing you know the steam heat or the furnace has raised the temperature until you've almost got a fever, or the fire in the grate goes out and you get a chill, or if somebody comes in to attend to the fire he interrupts you and gets you off the trail of that idea you are pursuing.
So I go to bed. I can keep an equable temperature there without trying and go on about my work without being bothered. Work in bed is a pretty good gospel – at least for a man who's come, like me, to the time of life when his blood is easily frosted.
Now, I figure Van Dyke Parks knows plenty about Twain; heaven knows he looks enough like him on the cover of the Clang of the Yankee Reaper album. And as for his qualifications as an orator: he was an in-demand public speaker, well known for his witty, acerbic speeches. Many of them have been lost to time, but a good number of them survive – including a piece titled “Plymouth Rock and the Pilgrims,” delivered at the first annual dinner of the New England Society on December 22, 1881: 261 years, to the day, after the historic landing.
In that speech, with tongue firmly in cheek (or is it?), Twain scolds the New Englanders for their obsessive need to celebrate and memorialize their Pilgrim forbears. Calling them a “mighty hard lot,” he humorously criticizes the Pilgrims for their mistreatment of various persons and groups (Native Americans included); and he concludes with the startling suggestion that their descendants would be well advised to put the famous rock up for sale – to roll it over, one might say, and slap a price tag on it:
Hear me, I beseech you; get up an auction and sell Plymouth Rock! The Pilgrims were a simple and ignorant race. They never had seen any good rocks before, or at least any that were not watched, and so they were excusable for hopping ashore in frantic delight and clapping an iron fence around this one. But you, gentlemen, are educated; you are enlightened; you know that in the rich land of your nativity, opulent New England, overflowing with rocks, this one isn’t worth, at the outside, more than thirty-five cents. Therefore, sell it, before it is injured by exposure, or at least throw it open to the patent-medicine advertisements, and let it earn its taxes.
So much for Twain's case; and it's a pretty good one. That said, I think there’s at least one dark horse: a gentleman who fits the part better in one way, and less convincingly in another. Ambrose Bierce, author of The Devil’s Dictionary, is arguably the greatest pure satirist American literature ever produced; and while he doesn’t seem to have been much of a public speaker per se, he was a very, very public figure: a celebrated journalist who took polarizing positions on many of the issues of the day. (One example: he created a firestorm of negative publicity for his employer – one William Randolph Hearst – over a printed piece that seemed to call for the assassination of President McKinley. The controversy effectively scuttled Hearst’s own presidential ambitions; it’s noteworthy that he nevertheless retained Bierce’s services.)
When it comes to writing in bed, however, Bierce’s candidacy seems to falter a bit. He isn’t known to have taken to his bed for that purpose; but it’s true that he was often bedridden, suffering from the aftereffects of a Civil War injury that left him with significant brain damage.
Twain or Bierce (or some other less obvious figure): take your pick. (That's Twain up top, of course; but that's partly because I couldn't resist that beautiful autochrome image.)
“Satire” is an interesting word choice, by the way. Today we tend to bracket satire with parody; and it’s true that both genres make generous and effective use of ridicule. But true satire delivers less humor and more invective; it has its roots in a Roman form that was sometimes little more than a catalog of the failings of an opponent or enemy. Bierce himself defined it as a “kind of literary composition in which the vices and follies of the author's enemies were expounded….” (Twain’s Plymouth Rock speech can be viewed as a comedic take on the classical satire.)
Taking the term at face value, we might be better advised to imagine our speechmaker not as a humorist, but as a social critic.
He gives speeches, always reaches
Out a lot, led him to discover
The repetition of “he gives speeches” seems to hold out the hope of further elaboration of the speechmaking activity, but that doesn’t happen. As for “always reaches”: is the reaching literal (the gesture of a public speaker, or of a political candidate shaking supporters’ hands) or figurative – some sort of searching? In either event, the sloppy grammatical construction appears to imply that it is the reaching that leads him to discover…something. Subsequent lines take us on a journey and into the company of a woman: a voyage of personal "discovery"? A journey from the public world to some private realm?
You have to ask, at this juncture: does “He Gives Speeches,” to this point, feel like it belongs to SMiLE? Does it fit with its themes? Does it feel (for want of a better term) SMiLE-ish? I think we’d have to answer, tentatively, in the negative.
But that changes with the next lines. There’s no segue here, no easing of the transition. It’s like some kind of lyrical jump cut:
Silken hair, more silken hair
Fell on his face and no wind was blowing
This is truly fascinating. The "silken hair" couplet, of course, is the only one that survived more-or-less intact in "She's Goin' Bald," and it's interesting to see how its meaning has changed. In the Smiley Smile song, the "silken hair" belongs to the main character, and she's losing it...it's "falling" as in "falling out of her head." In the original, the "silken hair" doesn't belong to the main character at all; it belongs to his female companion (introduced in a pleasingly subtle way, her presence announced by her hair), and it's falling across his face, as it might during an embrace. The lyricist takes pains to inform us that there’s no wind, so her hair is falling across his face because of some movement of hers, or because she’s lying above him.
Now, it seems to me, we’ve got some possible links, some elements that could conceivably connect to the established SMiLE themes. There’s a “fall” in “Wonderful” as well, and it’s possible, at least, to imagine that the “silken hair” could belong to the female character of that song. Beyond that, could “silken” be a passing nod to the cornsilk in the “Cabin Essence” cornfield? (This point will come up again in the next essay.)
Sure enough, the next couplet seems to locate us squarely in that imagined landscape:
Stepped across the golden fields
And saw that she was soon trailing after
The “golden fields” surely call to mind not only the cornfield above which the crows circle, but also the wheatfield of the thresher and the “waves of wheat for your embracing.” We can detect (or imagine) a kinship between the “she” of “He Gives Speeches” and the female “you” of “Cabin Essence.” Do these lines, in retrospect, put the “reaching” and the “discovery” in a different context? If our speechmaker is making a journey, is it a westward one, ”stepping” across the continent with his female companion in tow? Discovery can be an equivocal thing, after all.
She was nice and didn’t fight
He fell into her friendly persuasion
"Friendly persuasion”: a common turn of phrase. As used here, it sounds as if our orator may be falling under the spell of the peaceful female presence. And consider: that barely-glimpsed female isn’t necessarily a dutiful wife following behind her husband. Her serenity amid the “golden fields” suggests, perhaps, an affinity with the female character of “Wonderful”: elemental spirit or goddess as much as flesh-and-blood woman?
Staying out in the fields for a little while longer, this could also be an allusion to the excellent 1956 William Wyler film of the same name, about a Quaker farming family caught up in the chaos of the Civil War. "[S]he didn't fight" could be a punning reference to Quaker non-violence, as well as a comment on her lack of resistance (note that we have yet another “fall” in the second line). Parks was no stranger to Hollywood; the film reference would have come naturally to him.
Late that night, while by a streetlight
Little hands shadowed on the ceiling
Another instantaneous, disorienting jump; and the phrase “late that night,” which simulates a normal narrative transition (something along the lines of “later that same night…”) doesn’t help matters any. That streetlight takes us clear out of the cornfield and back to an urban setting. Why so? Streetlights belong in cities. And this image is clearly intended to suggest a multi-story dwelling (like a brownstone), since the streetlight's illumination is entering the window from below and casting a shadow on the ceiling. As for the "little hands”: the woman's hands? A child's hands? The “little hands” of a clock? If the “golden fields” lines suggest a connection to “Cabin Essence,” perhaps this nighttime couplet, with its streetlight, nods to the turn-of-the-century-gaslight imagery of "Surf's Up." Without knowing what was to follow, there’s no way to know what to make of this "turn" in the lyrics.
And that’s the end: that’s all there is.
The conventional wisdom is that “He Gives Speeches” was abandoned early in the SMiLE proceedings, and I think the conventional wisdom, in this case, is probably right. This little sort-of song feels like an early effort, an uncertain grasping after meaning, the kind of thing you would write at a point when the overarching themes and images were just beginning to come into focus. It’s not quite there, but there are stirrings, hints, foreshadowings of what’s to come.
For my part, I think I’ve given “He Gives Speeches” too little attention, over the years, for a couple of reasons. One is obvious: we don’t know where – if at all – it would have fit into the complete SMiLE (another point that's going to come up again in the next essay). The second is less defensible: I have difficulty separating it from the silliness of the Smiley Smile song it gave rise to. (I can’t help it: I can’t help imagining Mike Love grinning as he rewrites Van Dyke Parks, substituting juvenile “Monster Mash”-level humor for Parks’s obscurities.) It may even be that the consensus name for the song (is there conclusive evidence that “He Gives Speeches” was its real name?) has colored our views. Maybe we would take it more seriously if it were known as "Golden Fields" or "Friendly Persuasion."
I certainly don’t want to stray too far in the opposite direction. This is, in the end, nothing more than a curiosity, a working sketch, and it would be folly to make overblown claims for its importance. That said, these are interesting (if frustrating) lyrics, and they do suggest affinities with some of the major SMiLE pieces. It seems to me that our speechifying satirist would fit most comfortably among the historical allusions of Movement I. As for the last eight lines, I think a case can be made for connections to both Movement I (by virtue of the “Cabin Essence” echoes) and Movement II (by virtue of the lamplit “Surf’s Up” setting and the presence of the mysterious woman). But this is pure guesswork. For a passing moment, at least, this strange little vignette presumably had a place in the SMiLE puzzle. It would be fascinating to know where that might have been.
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