Here error is all in the not done,
all in the diffidence that faltered....
Ezra Pound, Canto LXXXI
An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.
J.D. Salinger
Well, the cupboard is finally bare. All of the essays written twenty years ago – for a book that didn’t happen, about an album that very nearly didn’t happen – are present and accounted for. And I’ve tossed in a couple of “bonus” pieces as well, pieces that were written (in draft form at least) around the same time, but weren’t intended for the book.
But before saying “adieu or die” (or “aloha nui,” if you prefer), I thought I’d take a couple of minutes to talk about my (admittedly) personal take on SMiLE. Not interpretation. Not analysis. It’s much simpler than that. I don’t want to talk about SMiLE’s value…I want to talk about SMiLE’s validity. I grant you, that’s an odd word choice, and I wince a little typing it. But let me explain what I mean.
It boils down, really, to two sentences. I don’t think either of them is controversial, but I know that view is not universally shared.
1. With respect to any work of art in general (and with respect to SMiLE in particular), I cede absolute control and authority to the creators of the work.
2. The work captured on the album released by Brian Wilson in 2004 is SMiLE.
Let’s take them in order.
Surely we ought to be able to agree on the first one, shouldn’t we? If you respect art and the creative process, you really should defer to the composer, or author, or old master painter…you get the point. When the painter sets down the palette and the brush, and declares his painting to be finished, that gesture represents, for me, the last word on the subject.
A corollary of that principle: if the artist decides to pick up the palette again and return to the canvas – whether that happens thirty-seven minutes later or thirty-seven years later – that decision rests with the artist alone. As long as he’s alive and functioning, he owns the absolute and exclusive right to revise and remake that painting. If the interregnum has been a long one, he may return to the painting as a changed person, and he may make creative choices that are different from those he might have made before; but so it goes.
All well and good, in the abstract. Let’s see how well these fine-sounding ideas hold up when we try to apply them to a specific work of art. Not SMiLE; let’s talk about a different work, in an entirely different (or is it?) genre. Let’s talk about Wagner’s Ring cycle.
I’m going to quote from my friend and sometime collaborator MacAndrew at this point. I can’t hope to improve on his words.
The…thing that makes SMiLE and the Ring works of art "of the same kind", much more than, say, SMiLE and Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro, is their immense, pivotal importance, for bad and for good, in the life and art of their respective authors. They have literally spanned their lives, being conceived in youth and completed many, many years later: Wagner's first draft of the Ring dates from 1848 and he completed it in 1874 – Brian beats him by 12 years more in this! Both works suffered a long interruption when they were near completion…and would not probably have been finished, had it not been for the help and encouragement of a group of loyal friends.
I don’t propose to get into the themes or techniques shared by these two works, beyond acknowledging that those shared elements do, in fact, exist. I want to focus on the decades-long span between their beginnings and their triumphant endings. Wagner conceived what would become the Ring when he was a young man; he could not have imagined the life journey, the changes of vision, that would ultimately lead him to its completion.
To my mind, that matters not at all. When Wagner finally declared the Ring to be finished, the Ring was finished; and it makes no difference that it took him twenty-six years to get there. Along the way, there may have been dozens of proto-versions of the cycle; the earliest drafts, we know, imagined a completely different ending, one which the older Wagner would disown, to the horror of some of his closest friends (Nietzsche was one of them). Those versions may have been brilliant. They may have included passages of heartbreaking beauty. But they are not, finally, the one authoritative, true, final work. Only one person – the composer – has the right to award that status.
I see SMiLE in precisely the same way. I concede that the finished work is different from the work envisioned in 1966 (more about that in a moment). I acknowledge that there was great beauty in the early “drafts”; but I happily defer to Brian and Van Dyke in the matter of the work’s finality. No-one – no-one – has the right to question their judgment.
Let me be absolutely clear on a related point. Just as no-one has the right to question the artist in this connection – to my way of thinking, anyway – no-one has the right to prevent people from preferring the draft over the final work. If you think that the early version of The Waste Land, pre-Pound edits – the version with the bears and the icebergs and the police done in different voices – is more enjoyable than the version Eliot blessed as the final poem, well, there’s not a thing wrong with that. On the other hand, if you want to say that the early version is the real one, and the official version a pretender…that’s a different story. That’s just wrong.
I suppose you could say that point number two above is really just a specific application of point number one. But I don’t think it’s fair to deal with it so superficially. There is a significant contingent among the Brian Wilson/Beach Boys fan community that takes issue with the idea that the 2004 album represents the definitive SMiLE; and the folks who espouse that viewpoint have gathered some compelling support for it. Let’s take a look at a few of their more popular arguments.
Claim: The 2003/4 SMiLE doesn’t live up to my expectations; it’s too happy, or too bright, or too something or other, and it doesn’t even end with “Surf’s Up,” as SMiLE was obviously meant to; and while we’re on the subject, the arrangement for the second part of “Surf’s Up” is too simple, Brian would never have done it that way…and so on, and so on.
Response: Umm…so what? I don’t mean to sound dismissive, but it seems to me that we don’t need to spend too much time on this claim, in any of its variations. Honestly, I think we all got too used to the idea, during the gap between concept and completion, that we were entitled to cobble together our own personal versions of SMiLE; and some of us got deeply invested in those versions. Maybe that – taken together with the availability of the many SMiLE bootlegs – was an unavoidable consequence of the long delay.
I recall one forum post, shortly after the album release, that took that attitude to a point of grand absurdity. The poster claimed that the 2003/4 SMiLE was really just another fan mix – Brian’s and Van Dyke’s, in this case – with no greater claim to authenticity than any random listener’s Frankenstein assemblage of parts and pieces. To bring the composers down to that level (or, alternatively, to elevate oneself to a point of parity): that denigrates the work and insults the artists. But I also recall, sadly, that there were several people who enthusiastically agreed with the assertion.
But here's some good news, for folks who want to go on reshuffling and recombining the old SMiLE fragments: you can keep right on doing that. But with SMiLE completed, there’s no longer any artistic warrant for trying to put together the “real” work; at this point you’re talking about a hobby, a fun way to re-sort and experience the music. It’s not terribly different from the phenomenon of the Beatles’ Love album; that album offers some fascinating and delightfully unexpected rearrangements of familiar material, but nobody would argue that it supersedes the definitive versions of the songs.
I should add here that there’s no necessary connection between liking an album or a book, on the one hand, and accepting its legitimacy as the final work, on the other. Bob Dylan dropped the brilliant “Abandoned Love” from the Desire album, replacing it with the thoroughly regrettable “Joey.” I find that a poor creative choice – one that seriously mars the album, in my judgment – and my own playlists omit “Joey” in favor of the superior song. But I acknowledge, of course, that the released Desire is the final album, and I concede that Dylan’s decision, as regards the content and sequence of that album, is his alone. You may or may not care for the 2003/4 SMiLE, but I submit that that fact has no bearing on its standing as the “official” work.
Claim: Brian himself acknowledged that the 2003 premiere and 2004 album weren’t SMiLE, because he positioned them as “Brian Wilson presents SMiLE”; the word “presents” undercuts any argument that the 2003/4 version is the “real” SMiLE.
Response: Ugh. Was a single inoffensive word ever freighted with so much unwarranted probative weight? At the risk of sounding a bit grumpy, does anybody really think, in their hearts, that Brian inserted the word “presents” as a signal, a warning, a disclaimer – so that nobody attending a concert or buying a CD would think they were getting the genuine article? Doesn’t that sound – I don’t know how else to say it – absurd on its face? “Now pay close attention to that word ‘presents’, folks, because that’s important, like the mouse type at the bottom of a TV commercial. If you think you’re getting SMiLE, you’re out of luck. You’re getting a presentation of SMiLE material, that’s all – like maybe we’ll just put up a PowerPoint, and play the Smiley ‘Heroes and Villains’ over and over. No refunds, sorry.”
According to this view, the “sort-of” SMiLE delivered in 2003/4 was similar, in principle, to the budget classical-music box sets that used to take up space in the family hi-fi console: sets of LPs containing selections from important works, excerpted into manageable lengths – so folks could absorb culture at their convenience, without having to sit through entire operas and symphonies.
But here’s the thing. If you look at the tour collateral from Brian’s 2002 Pet Sounds concerts – the immediately preceding tour, mind you – you’ll note that they read Brian Wilson Presents the Pet Sounds Tour. So the word “presents” has a pedigree stretching back before the SMiLE tour. When he announced the SMiLE premiere, Brian went with “performs” instead of “presents” (“Brian Wilson Performs SMiLE”); but the word is still doing the same job. Now once he decided to record a studio version, I’m guessing he thought “performs” didn’t really work; it really does seem to suggest a live concert. So “performs” was dropped, and “presents” was swapped in; the substitution probably took the graphic designer all of five minutes.
I submit that’s all that was going on. No expectation management, no weasel-words, no distancing of the 2003/4 work from the “real” one. But hey – if you’re so dead set on delegitimizing it, go ahead and prop your argument up on the slender support of that single innocuous verb.
Claim: The 2003/4 SMiLE isn’t the real one, because it’s not the album it would have been in 1967.
Response: The problem with this argument isn’t the assertion that the 2003/4 work isn’t identical to the work that would have, should have, hit the record store shelves in 1967. That’s true, no disagreement there; more than that, it’s so obvious that it really shouldn’t need saying.
The plain fact, of course, is that it would have been impossible for the 2003/4 SMiLE to be identical to that chimerical, unreleased 1967 album. There are probably a thousand reasons why that’s so, but we can content ourselves with listing just a few of them. The 1967 album would have been a Beach Boys album, not a Brian Wilson album. It would have been a work of art created by two men in their twenties, fueled by the hopes and dreams of the young, rather than a work completed by two older men, writing and composing from a place of lived experience. It would surely have included elements that didn’t make it into the 2003/4 work; and conversely, it would have been missing elements that were added to it.
When it comes to that last point, we don’t have to talk in generalities. We have the words of Van Dyke Parks himself, in the year 2004, explaining two of these additions:
I introduced a character: the pirate. The pirate represented to me the most exploitive kind of figure you could think of in folklore. I thought it was OK to take a stab at and at the same time laugh about the pirating of SMiLE.
and
That's where I decided to underscore Brian's present-tense predicament, when he says: 'Is it hot in here, or is it me?/It really is a mystery.' I was very keen on having Brian surface for a moment in his misery…with a confession to having had some severe problems. And that immediately resonated with him.
So there you are: absolutely authoritative proof (if you needed any) that there’s content in the 2003/4 work that wouldn’t have been present in the imagined 1967 version.
The problem isn’t with the truth of that premise. The problem is that what we have here, essentially, is a simple syllogism with one of its propositions hidden (I’ve restored it, in bold, below):
• The 2003/4 SMiLE isn’t identical to the album that would have been released in 1967.
• Only the planned 1967 SMiLE can be regarded as real.
• Therefore, the 2003/4 SMiLE isn’t real.
As straw men go, this is a beauty. The 1967 SMiLE is a mirage: an unattainable vision. When I first got interested in the SMiLE story, there were people out there claiming that the album was actually finished, and that the tapes or acetates were stored away somewhere, waiting to be rediscovered. That was a hopeful fantasy, but we know, now, that that’s all it was. We don’t have the 1967 album; we can’t have it. So when you slip that unspoken second proposition into your argument, you’re ensuring that no actual, available SMiLE can ever be legitimate. To borrow from Gary Usher, it’s pure “heads you win, tails I lose” reasoning.
Not to put too fine a point on it, let me add: insisting that only the putative 1967 album can be “real” is to ignore a great deal of SMiLE history. The album was a sort of protean shape-shifting creature all through 1966. The later-1966 “SMiLE,” for instance, was significantly different from the early “Dumb Angel” version. (It didn’t even hold still long enough for Brian to hammer out a final running order, as per the printed back cover.) So to put a pin in the mythical 1967 album, to fix it for all time as the only definitive version, ignores what came before as well as what came after.
Claim: The 2003/4 SMiLE isn’t the real SMiLE because it’s just a sequencing of SMiLE-related material for live performance – something the principals themselves acknowledged at the time; and the studio album is merely a document of that sequence.
Response: I want to take some time over this one, because it’s a more serious argument, supported by weightier evidence.
Let’s look at one major exhibit: a 2004 interview with Darian Sahanaja, Brian Wilson’s musical secretary – a gentleman who was present, and intimately involved, as the 2003/4 SMiLE came together:
So here we are doing Smile, and I'm wary, but I know we're going to have to do this. I know that we can do this; I know this band can pull it off. My reservations were more 'why should we be doing this? We're dealing with myth here – we're dealing with mystique, and legacy. It's larger than life.' But here I am, with this music, on my iBook, up in Brian's music room…with music that's reminding him of really uncomfortable times, politics, family, guilt, bad feelings, whatever. So what I did was this: I looked at him and said, 'Brian, we're not trying to “finish” Smile here. But we just gotta perform this music live, so we have to figure out a way to perform this music so that it flows. Present it so that it's a nice listening experience. 'Cause it's great music that deserves to be heard.' At that point, he said, “Okay, okay”. [emphasis added]
I mean, that should end the discussion right there, shouldn’t it? There’s Darian, one of the central figures in the story, conceding that “finishing” SMiLE wasn’t even on the table – that the (far less ambitious) goal was simply to put together “a nice listening experience.”
Well, not so fast. Let’s look at Darian’s comments in context. Here’s what comes next, in the transcript of that interview:
Q: I think that was a brilliant way to do it, Darian.
A: Yeah, and when we started playing it, it was more of Brian looking at it as just playing this music with this band, period. There was one point where we got to “Do You Like Worms”, and Brian got really excited and said, “Oh yeah! We're going to do that, and Paul Mertens can play this on that….” And from that perspective, he was really enjoying what he was hearing. But it took some time, and it was definitely 'baby steps'.
I think it’s fair to say that this puts Darian’s initial statements in a different light. When the interviewer congratulates him, saying “that was a brilliant way to do it,” he’s praising Darian’s strategy: his way of nudging Brian in the direction of re-engaging with the SMiLE music: of finishing the album.
It’s been established, time and again, that Brian Wilson can be an infuriatingly stubborn individual, and that he will invariably find a way to avoid doing that which he doesn’t want to do. His reaction may take the form of retreat or passivity rather than outright defiance, but more often than not, over the years, it seems to have achieved the intended end.
In a 2004 interview Peter Reum, one of Brian’s friends, has described his behavior this way:
Brian has always enjoyed the process of doing little stunts that allow him to "get away" with things when the authority figures in his life aren't looking. It probably goes back to his childhood with his dad. In this case, many of the tunes were born out of rebellion against…people crowding him at that point in time. Brian's rebellious behavior is very well documented in several books.
The nature of being rebellious is that you either have to like conflict or be incredibly covert. Brian tends toward the latter because he hates conflict.
That’s a view that Darian – after years of close collaboration with Brian – would surely endorse. When dealing with that kind of personality, you don’t just come out and say ‘Hey, Brian, you know that SMiLE album, the one with all those horribly negative associations, the one that brings up hundreds of dark memories…yeah, that one. Well, what we’re going to do is, we’re going to sit down this afternoon and finish it. Okay?’ Instead, you take a softer approach: ‘Oh no, we’re not trying to finish the album, we’re just trying to program an evening of pleasant music, that’s all.’ In Darian’s own words, you take “baby steps.”
So I’m not persuaded, sorry, by Darian’s disavowal of any ambition to “finish” SMiLE; but not only because of the question and answer that follow his comment. You also have to take into account a number of other facts that support a different viewpoint.
Consider: if the only objective was to assemble a “nice listening experience,” there was no need to bring Van Dyke Parks into the project; it would have been a simple matter to create “flow” without unearthing unused old lyrics or adding new ones. Would any SMiLE fan have objected to a live version of “Roll Plymouth Rock” as it stood, without restored lyrics? No: we would have been happy and grateful to be hearing it at all. That’s probably what we would have gotten, if the Beach Boys had gone through with their announced plan to include the song on their 1979 Light Album; it’s doubtful, I think, that any serious new work would have been done on it. So at that point, at least, the idea of releasing a mostly-instrumental version of the song wasn’t seen as a problem. (Aside: in a 1978 interview, Bruce Johnston referred to the song as “Rock Plymouth Rock/Roll” – establishing that the “Roll Plymouth Rock” title was not a pure 2003 neologism.)
Let's leave that point aside for the moment. Would there have been any need – if the goal was simply to create a pleasant concert sequence – to swap out the iconic, universally-known "Good VIbrations" verse lyrics for a substitute set? Surely not.
And let’s be clear about this: there was plenty of material to fill out half a show, without fleshing out songs like “On a Holiday” or “Song for Children.” Toss in a few of what you might call SMiLE-adjacent songs – “You’re Welcome,” “With Me Tonight,” that kind of thing – to pad out the running time. No need to worry about transitions or thematic connections, either: start off with “Prayer,” end with “Surf’s Up” (as most people expected), and the audience goes home happy. In fact, in the weeks before the 2003 premiere, there was a certain amount of concern among the SMiLE fan community that we might wind up getting that sort of thing. At one point Brian released a teaser photo showing some of the sheet music that the band was presumably using in its rehearsals; and the post-SMiLE song “Time to Get Alone” was prominently displayed. Frankly, we were worried. Was Brian going to deliver a pseudo-SMiLE, an assemblage that included songs that had no SMiLE connections at all? Thankfully, our fears were unfounded.
And here’s something else. In 2002 (as Brian was beginning to incorporate SMiLE material into his live shows), he reached out to another friend, Bob Hanes, to ask him to find a copy of an out-of-print book: The Joyous Cosmology, by Alan Watts. Why is that significant? Because that book deals with the psychedelic experience – and because it was one of the books that led Brian, back in the day, to travel the creative path that led to SMiLE. Maybe Brian was just feeling a pang of nostalgia; but I don’t think so, and Hanes didn’t either. He saw Brian’s request as signaling a renewed openness to the ideas that inspired him in 1966:
That was my immediate thought while still on the phone.... Obviously Brian had overcome the idea that Pet Sounds hadn't reached the masses. He'd seen and heard the crowds, he'd been buoyed by the Capitol audit of the original Pet Sounds sales. He now knew he'd been lied to, or been lying to himself, and that his "greatest work" was indeed his greatest released work.
Now maybe it was time to find out if he had really "been crazy" to have started SMiLE. Maybe the rap on that was as ill informed and mean spirited as the people that had betrayed him in the "bad old days." Maybe it was good work?!
These were the things that passed through my head during the "book search."
So Brian’s willingness to reconnect with SMiLE didn’t come out of nowhere; a year before, he was beginning to dip back into the creative energies out of which it was born. You don’t need to do that if you’re just programming an evening of listenable music.
Finally, I want to turn back to Peter Reum, and his first-hand account of the process that brought Brian to that London stage in 2003. Please bear with me; I’m going to quote at some length here, because I think this is desperately important stuff.
Brian did not initially want to reenter the dark cave from his past called Smile. He had terrible memories from the period...feelings of being emotionally terrified, feelings of betrayal by his family and record company; feelings of spiritual evil and isolation that were real to him; feelings of failure and descent into emotional malaise and pain that only he truly knows….
[T]here's always that cave, that terrifying cave. Brian wants to heal, more than anything in the world. Brian wants to be a strong father, husband, and grandfather to his loved ones. His therapists tell him, to heal, he has to enter the cave, face his dark side, put his faith and trust in the force within himself, and triumph….
Brian says...."okay I'll enter the cave, but only the first 10 feet." Everyone says "Sure!!!! We're right here with you....we'll support you, you won't have a Dark Night of the Soul this time." Brian agrees to listen to the tapes...no anvil falls outta the sky and hits him on the head. Brian says "hey, this was pretty good work" and his friends say "it is GREAT work Brian." Brian says "okay I'll go in 25 more feet." Friends say "we're right with you Brian." He asks Darian Sahanaja, Smile's Musical Secretary, to bring the tapes to the house so they can review them together. Darian does this, records the tapes on his laptop. Brian wonders if they are possible to be done live. Darian affirms this. Melinda and David Leaf say they will support Brian if he wants to go further into the cave. Brian in a typical flash of Brian enthusiasm goes "yeah" without thinking of what that'll entail.
His friends step out on faith and announce the concerts and get backing for them and for other projects. Planning begins in earnest. Brian begins shuffling the fragments, remembering this is where Smile broke down last time. Darian is there, and Brian begins to step further into the cave, finding familiar landmarks, like unrecorded melodies, unsung lyrics, and ideas for Movement themes.
Darian facilitates, but they come to a point where to finish, they need another old friend who loves Brian unconditionally--Van Dyke Parks. Van has heard all this talk, wants to be called, and is thrilled when Brian gets with him. They do the work needed to finish the work...lyrics for songs recorded after Van left, final sequencing of tunes, and segues to make the whole work flow as it should.
Van Dyke is the other musical muscle that pushes the rock away from the Sanctum Sanctorum, the innermost part of the cave….
His friends gather 'round and support him, and he finally gathers up the courage to step into the Light…. Brian gets past his reservations, and plays Smile for the first time.
The rest is history, and old wounds have been healed, what was wrong has been made right, what was lost has been restored tenfold, and the world has a new beautiful piece of music, reflecting God's glory, as Brian intended it to so very long ago….
Q: I wonder if you'd care to comment on the context of Smile…. And what would you say to those who say that Smile…today, is not the Smile he wrote in 1966.
A: To those who contend that Smile should have come out in the 60s, and is not valid in 2004, I would say---in my opinion, you have totally missed the whole point of Smile…. Did Brian and Van Dyke succeed in their quest to create a Teenage Symphony to God? I would say yes, but not as a Teenage Symphony, but a Life Symphony….
Now, some of this, I grant, shades over into interpretation – a personal reading of certain events. But the basic facts are incontestable. Peter was there, a witness to the process. If you’re going to give significant weight to Darian’s comments above, then you must, as a matter of intellectual honesty, give similar (or greater) weight to Peter’s account.
I have to ask: does the creative journey Peter describes – the painful, difficult journey to triumph and redemption – align with the notion that Brian was simply stringing together a few songs to create an enjoyable evening of music? If the answer is no (and I don’t know what other answer might be defensible), then that, I think, successfully rebuts the claim that the 2003/4 SMiLE is nothing more than a sequence cobbled together for live performance.
I’m going to give the last word, on this point, to Brian himself. In 2004, talking about the runup to the SMiLE premiere, he said:
We wrote a bit of new music because we didn’t think it was complete. [emphasis added]
Brian Wilson, at least, seems to think that he was finishing SMiLE.
So, after all that: is the 2003/4 SMiLE…SMilLE? No equivocations, no caveats, no footnotes?
I think so. And I think that the arguments marshaled against that proposition, as sketched out here, are ultimately unpersuasive.
But it may be, finally, that the best answer to that question is an intensely personal (and a concededly subjective) one. It’s not a matter of tracking down sources, or citing interviews, or digging up obscure bits of history.
For me, it comes down to hearing it. Experiencing it. Does the work itself convince you?
Does it move you – emotionally, spiritually? Are you touched by its beauty, delighted by its humor, awed by its audacity? Those are the sort of reactions that tell us, beyond any interpretations or analyses, that we’re in the presence of a work of art that is true and real and whole.
And speaking of art: while I was putting this piece into final form, I happened on a quotation that struck me as having a powerful relevance to this discussion. It’s from a book about – of all things – the lost autochrome photographic process. And while it speaks in terms of visual art, its central tenet applies with equal justice to music, or sculpture, or anything else. The author describes the old autochrome images as having
the authority of art – that power to rivet our gaze and demand of our eyes that they return again and again, and the power to reward those returns with pleasure and insight.
I can’t improve on that phrase, so I’ll borrow it to ask, in a slightly different way, the question asked above. Does the 2003/4 SMiLE have the "authority of art"?
My own answer is an unhesitating yes. Starting with my first listen to an audience tape of the London premiere (courtesy of a kind pirate with a tune), and carrying through the two decades since, I have found it to be a coherent, sincere, magnificent work of art: timeless, ennobling, joyful and, yes, complete.
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