#381 - The Beach Boys - The Smile Sessions (2011)
MUSIC HISTORY WRITTEN BY HEAD WRITER DJ MORTY COYLE:
While never officially released as an album this 2011 comprehensive compilation of the intended tracks, outtakes, and extras from these unfinished and aborted sessions recorded between 1966 and 1971 and produced by Brian Wilson were originally slated for a 1967 release on Capitol Records and would have been the 12th studio album by the American, Surf Rock, Art Pop, Psychedelic, Folk, Rock band.
They formed as a teenage, garage, band with distinctive, tight, harmony vocals in Hawthorne, California in 1961 by brothers Brian, Carl, and Dennis Wilson on bass, guitar, and drums respectively, their cousin Mike Love on co-lead vocals, and their friends Al Jardine and David Marks who replaced each other several times on guitar.
The Beach Boys soon had a string of hit singles that celebrated the youthful West Coast pastimes of surfing, driving, and endless summer loving.
Managed by the Wilson’s overbearing father, Murry and lead by Brian as their producer, arranger, and chief composer with his cousin Mike Love writing many of their lyrics, they quickly evolved from a popular Surf Rock band with Doo-Wop vocals singing about simple subject matter to a musically innovative group that could express the complexities and depth of adolescent feelings.
They were also one of the only American bands that remained just as popular when their label-mates The Beatles, and the “British Invasion” happened in 1964. In fact it was Brian’s evolving and challenging direction that not only impressed The Beatles but inspired them to progress as well.
Young studio wizard Brian soon emulated his hero, producer Phil Spector and decided that he would similarly employ many of the same pro studio musicians from Los Angeles’ famed Wrecking Crew to play on their records which mostly left The Beach Boys to only singing on their albums.
In late 1964 at about the same time that Brian was first introduced to marijuana he had a panic attack aboard a plane during a tour and abruptly quit performing live to concentrate full time on his studio work for the band.
He was replaced on tour first with Glen Campbell and then Bruce Johnson.
Off the road permanently by 1965 Brian mingled in hip, artistic, and savvy social scenes, experimented with LSD and other drugs, devoured books about religion, numerology, astrology, and the occult and entered what he later referred to as his “psychodelicate“ period.
Now collaborating with lyricist Tony Asher Brian soon employed an almost Classical, modular approach to music that constructed songs from short, interchangeable, movements or sections that, once recorded to tape, could be cut and spliced into almost any configuration.
In 1966, spurred on by the The Beatles’ 1965 album “Rubber Soul”, The Beach Boys released their masterpiece, “Pet Sounds.”
Soon The Beach Boys shared The Beatles’ press agent Derek Taylor who played up Brian’s genius and hyped the monumental importance of this upcoming album which made Brian feel even more in direct competition with The Beatles who by then were also permanently off the road, experimenting with drugs, locked in the studio, and moving Pop music into “High Art.”
That Fall Brian put out the wildly popular, cosmic, “pocket symphony”, single “Good Vibrations.”
Both exhilarated and paranoid Brian was convinced that whoever would get their album out first in 1967 would win.
Once again utilizing an expansive array of instrumentation and similar modular writing techniques, Brian began work on the next Beach Boys album which he considered “a teenage symphony to God" that he planned to call “Dumb Angel.”
With session musician, arranger, and songwriter Van Dyke Parks as his new lyricist Brian intended the new material to honor humor and laughter, growing and evolving, wfaith, the spirit of youth and childlike wonder, his spiritual connection and devotion to music, and classic Americana that would combat the Pop world’s obsession with everything British.
Brian and the studio musicians were constantly recording as he continuously wrote, revised, rewrote, and rearranged, including moving the modular sections of songs around to other songs.
When The Beach Boys returned from a European tour at the end of 1966 Brian presented them with several new songs.
Everyone agreed the music was interesting and often wonderful but the band and Mike Love in particular were concerned that Van Dykes Parks’ often inscrutable and indecipherable words might be a byproduct of the drugs he and Brian were taking and wouldn’t work for a Rock band.
But Brian had already sent Capitol Records a list of the song titles that were to be on the album and they excitedly had the album covers made in advance.
Here’s where things began going south.
By 1965 Brian was already having audio hallucinations of voices telling him he was a failure that were exacerbated by his unhealthy lifestyle and the methamphetamine psychosis from the drugs he was prescribed to combat his overeating.
His undiagnosed mental decline continued in paranoid episodes and eccentric behaviors.
By 1967 while “Good Vibrations” was losing luster and the sessions were dragging on the band sued an already impatient Capitol over unpaid royalties and prepared to transition to their own Brother Records label.
Then Brian heard The Beatles’ newest single, “Strawberry Fields Forever” and felt he’d been beaten to what he was trying to do.
By March the album really went off the rails after Van Dyke Parks got his own record deal and decided to put his energy towards that rather than continue in a subservient role under Brian.
By that point the over fifty hours of tape included instrumentals, new songs, song attempts, renditions of classic old songs, spoken word skits, the band making animal noises and acting out a giant collective orgasm, bizarre chants, sound effects, and damn near anything else Brian thought of trying.
Disappointed and disinterested Brian abandoned and transitioned “Smile” into a new Beach Boys record he would title “Smiley Smile” that was a quickly re-recorded, lo-fi, collection of some of these songs and more.
However in the interim of waiting for the “Smile” album and as the momentum from “Good Vibrations” was slowing down Capitol released two greatest hits collections. So during the progressive Summer of Love of 1967 the Beach Boys were not only missing the psychedelic era but were only reminding the world of their earlier and outdated surfing, car, and girl songs.
Released in September of 1967 and despite being a very trippy album “Smiley Smile” had their lowest chart placement in the U.S. and continued about a decade of waning popularity while concurrently and inadvertently building their cult credibility.
While their popularity continued in the U.K. in the U.S you had to really want to be a Beach Boys fan.
Despite other songs from the project ending up on subsequent albums the entire “Smile” experience along with Brian‘s mental health conditions scarred him.
Brian continued his decline for years before making enough progress to become productive enough to write and even perform live with the band again sporadically in between getting help for his mental conditions, substance abuse, and weight issues.
In 1988 The Beach Boys were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Meanwhile the folklore about this album grew into myth.
In 1993 after decades of bootlegs being passed around they released an official career-spanning boxed set included thirty minutes of unreleased “Smile” material.
In 1995 Brian and Van Dyke collaborated on a new record and a short while later Brian saw the Los Angeles-based band The Wondermints do a faithful re-creation of “Smile” song “Surf’s Up” and remarked, "If I'd had these guys back in '67, I could've taken “Smile” on the road."
A couple years later he invited The Wondermints to join his touring band and through some constant coaxing they got him to revisit the album and even to start playing some of the songs live. Soon Van Dyke Parks returned and with Wondermints keyboardist Darian Sahanaja they built on the original songs and constructed a well-received live performance version.
In 2004 “Brian Wilson Presents Smile”, the studio version of their embellished reconstruction was released and Brian won his first Grammy for “Best Rock Instrumental Performance.”
Then in 2013 this set finally won The Beach Boys their first Grammy for “Best Historical Album.”
While tragically Dennis and Carl passed away Brian and the band are still going strong as two separate entities that occasionally work together.
The Beach Boys have sold over 100 million records and remain one of the most successful and important Rock and Roll bands of all time.