Sin of the Month • Abby Bardi
	Smile

 

The 2004 election is that at some point, it will be over. By the time you read this, unless we have to endure weeks of electronic chad-counting, Election Day will have come and gone. But even if the candidate you disliked least won, you may not feel ready to celebrate. If you voted for Kerry, your elation at his win may be tempered by ambivalence or apprehension. If you voted for Bush and he won, you probably know that his hubris is going to bring him down in the end. No matter how it turns out, this election has been tortuous—mean-spirited, even vicious, frustrating, and divisive. So why am I smiling?

Because although the world may be crumbling, last week I was fortunate enough to achieve the dream of a lifetime: I heard Brian Wilson perform his lost Smile album. The Smile saga is long and complicated, but the basic story is this: back in 1966, on the heels of the Beach Boys’ ground-breaking Pet Sounds album, Brian Wilson, in collaboration with Van Dyke Parks, began work on a concept album that was to be what he termed “a teenage symphony to God.” The other Beach Boys, including his brothers Carl and Dennis and first cousin Mike Love, were on tour when recording began, but when they came back and heard the tracks that Brian had been working on in the studio, they responded with bewilderment and even derision to the oddity of the music and Parks’ inscrutable lyrics. (Mike Love demanded to know what the phrase “columnated ruins domino” could possibly mean.) Smile contained a section in which earth, air, water, and fire were invoked, and apparently, during the fire session—at which the musicians wore firefighters’ hats—the music was so intense that some fires broke out in Los Angeles. Reportedly, this freaked Brian out, and he ceased work on the album, later claiming that he had destroyed all the tracks. (See the Showtime documentary Beautiful Dreamer for further details). It turns out, though, that as Smile devotees had known all along, the session tapes had never been destroyed but were in vaults somewhere, just waiting for Brian to resuscitate them. But this did not seem likely. For thirty years, Brian was a recluse, beset with psychological problems that had come to a head during the Smile sessions; he spent years, famously, refusing to emerge from his bed, and had for a time been under the control of an evil psychotherapist who was eventually successfully sued by the Wilson family and disbarred. But somehow, after the deaths of brothers Dennis and Carl, after years of litigation over the Beach Boys’ royalties and legacy (the name is now used by Mike Love), in 2000, Brian Wilson went back on the road, something he had hated even as a young Beach Boy, and performed all over the world to adoring fans who gave him standing ovations everywhere he went. I saw him four years ago in Baltimore, and I couldn’t believe my luck. He was stiff, reading lyrics from a teleprompter, and his voice was sometimes uncertain, but he was unmistakably the same Brian Wilson who had tried to move from songs about surfing and cars to something more profound and had been hassled into a breakdown instead. After this tour, at which Brian and a bunch of terrific musicians, younger and hipper than he, performed the entire Pet Sounds album, sometimes with an orchestra, I, and no doubt all the other rabid Brianites, got to thinking about the Smile album. If his new band could do justice to Pet Sounds, a production masterpiece that included all sorts of weird instruments like glockenspiel, theramin, bass harmonica, ukulele, and barking dog, why not Smile? Apparently, however, whenever anyone mentioned Smile to Brian, he would go strangely silent, or change the subject. Then one day, he said okay. nd the rest is rock history. My desire to hear Smile goes back to the autumn I spent in Manhattan three decades ago. I had come from a small college in Los Angeles, intending to stay back east. I had disapproved of L.A.—it had seemed artificial, with its plastic palm trees and perfect people, and, in a weird way, nonverbal. It felt to me like if one lived there long enough, the endless blue of the ocean would seep into one’s brain and render one incapable of speech. But there were things about L.A. I hadn’t known I would miss. New York was harsh, cold, and full of garbage (it was during the Beame administration’s fiscal crisis). People were brainy and articulate, but in a way that wouldn’t let up. I started listening incessantly to the Beach Boys—not to their early stuff, which like you, I was pretty sick of, but to post-Pet Sounds albums like Surf’s Up. A guy in my dorm heard my stereo through the floor, and one day he knocked on my door. He showed me his collection of Beach Boys albums and told me that somewhere between Pet Sounds and the inferior Smiley Smile, an album had been recorded that only a handful of Beach Boys purists knew about. It had been scrapped, but there were hints of it, songs like “Cabinessence,” “Wonderful,” and “Surf’s Up” that had made their way onto other albums. The lost Smile album was the great Platonic ideal of rock and roll, existing only in people’s imaginations, beyond the veil, complete only in dreams. That January, I went back to L.A., and my vision of it had completely changed. Far from being just a big strip mall, as it sometimes appeared to be, southern California in those days had a fragile beauty, an innocence that it no longer seems to possess—tropical colors that remained in your mind like a musical notes, mysterious fragrances as if groves of oranges still perfumed the air, golden light, buildings the color of sand, houses of all possible architectures that could only have been designed by crazy people, sunsets so brilliant and multi-hued that you saw them on the backs of your eyelids when you tried to sleep. These images are what I heard in the fragments of Smile that I was able to get my hands on over the years. I never expected that I would actually hear the whole thing in one piece. But that was exactly what happened last month at the Warner Theater, where a bunch of my fellow enthusiasts and I finally got to experience the teenage symphony to God we had always dreamed about. To say that the Smile experience was amazing is an understatement—it was amazing, though musically, it is strange and offbeat, and it’s hard to know how it would have been received in its day. It’s possible that this weird election year, 2004, is truly its moment, and that what looked like a tragic ruin, a thirty-seven year paralysis, was in fact just the way these things inexorably work themselves out. In any case, for me and for all the other Brianiacs, it was literally a dream come true, a vision come to musical life, and Brian was a living monument to the human spirit, having emerged from the darkness, reborn like a Fisher King restored. We spent most of the concert leaping to our feet, applauding Brian for his bravery in facing down his demons and sharing his vision with us. I tell you this not because I think you should run out and buy the new Smile album—though you should; it’s wonderful—but to remind you that even if the election didn’t turn out as we hoped, it’s still possible to reach the endless harmony we hear in our dreams, and we should never give up hoping for it.