The Beach Boys' "Smile": Let It Be... Mythical
Feb 25 '04
The Bottom Line The Beach Boys' "Smile" is a beautiful idea, one of the most important beautiful ideas in the history rock and roll. It doesn't need to be an album.
I’ve always found it interesting how we humans fetishize the material aspects of the things we hold sacred. I’ve always wondered at what drove so many people to search for the Holy Grail, and really, what’s up with Holy Relics? What purpose does it serve to enshrine the bones (or the fragments of bones) of saints? Why is it that so many scientists seem so intent on discovering the archaeological and geological proof of events recounted in the Bible? Would finding such hard evidence really reinforce our faith? Or does our search for hard evidence actually reinforce our lack thereof. If we never find the actual blueprints for the Tower of Babel, does that make the story somehow less meaningful, less true?
Of course, these fetishes often extend beyond our religious faiths, into the realm of pop culture. In the winter of 1997, Green Bay Packer-backers were buying one-foot-square chunks of turf taken from Lambeau Field. Planet Hollywood and the Hard Rock Café built businesses around the notion that a hamburger eaten in the presence of relic of even the most trivial star (Tommy Tutone’s tie, anyone?) is a special hamburger. In “The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert”, the drag queen Felicia Jollygoodfellow carries around “an ABBA turd” as a good luck charm.
Perhaps it’s because I’m such a music obsessive myself, but I tend to think that we record collectors are perhaps the most guilty of fetishizing the thing we hold dear. Maybe it’s because music is so ephemeral and intangible. You can’t put your favorite songs into a shadowbox like a treasured collection of Hummel figurines. So we collect the objects that we associate with the music. The records. The CDs. We alphabetize them in shelves made specifically to hold them. We make lists and databases to catalog them. We spend just as much time listening to them as we do just looking at them. After awhile, a CD collection isn’t so much about the music itself, but about the “music story” we build for ourselves – our personal mythologies of music. These are the stories of how we experience the music we love, the stories of how we came to love songs, the first time we heard them, the times and places and emotions and events and tastes and smells we associate with them.
When I think of ABBA’s “Super Trouper”, I think of those wonderful weekends when I was little when my half-sisters would come and stay with us for the weekend, and how those weekends were somehow different, special, charged and exciting. “Super Trouper”, then, for me at least, becomes less about ABBA’s songs, and more about “special weekends” when everything feels new and good and different. For that reason, I hold the album sacred. Would that feeling of excitement be any less real or less valid if I didn’t own a copy of “Super Trouper”? Absolutely not. But having the album is like having an instantaneous connection to those feelings and that time of my life always at my fingertips.
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Not all musical mythologies are strictly personal, though. There are mythologies we share. And one of the most enduring and potent mythological archetypes is that of the Artist-as-Messiah, the Artist who seeks to create that one Divine Masterwork that defies all the prevailing orthodoxies of its time, the Artist who is ultimately crucified, either by the record company, those people close to the Artist, or by the Artist’s audience – or by any combination of the above. In some instances, the Artist’s work is resurrected, and reigns triumphant (Wilco’s “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot”). And sometimes the work is resurrected and fizzles away, shattering the myths we’d constructed around it (Prince’s “Black Album”).
And then there are others for which the story is a little more complicated, where there is no real resurrection and we’re simply left to believe in “what might have been”. What might the Beatles’ “Let It Be” have really been, had Phil Spector not been recruited to “finish” it. For more than three decades, Beatles fans were left to contemplate just that, and the “real” version of “Let It Be” had come to be mythologized; and in a sense, many people came to believe the Holy Grail was actually out there somewhere, waiting for an musical Indiana Jones to go out and find it.
Until last fall, when Apple Records released “Let It Be… Naked”, billed, somewhat deceptively as that Holy Grail: This is what the album was meant to be.
But it isn’t. “Let it Be… Naked”, like so many of the bootlegs circulated among traders for three decades, is simply one person’s (Paul McCartney’s) interpretation of what “Let it Be” might have been. Should it matter that that one person was one of the artists involved in the original work? Perhaps the fact that McCartney was there at the time of the album’s recording gives “Naked” an aura of legitimacy, however fragile.
But it’s also a fact that Paul McCartney is a different person now, in very different circumstances than he was in 1970. And so are the Beatles. No longer four guys just hitting their thirties in a turbulent time, consumed with interpersonal conflicts and showbiz politics. Two of them are dead. One has been knighted, and looking towards his retirement has suddenly become conscious of the possibility that his part of the Beatles’ legacy may now be diminished because of some silly publishing arrangement he’d made with his (now-dead) buddy when they were both youngsters. The other is touring the world with a menagerie of has-beens (excuse me, “all-stars”) playing Hooked on Oldies.
Are these people any closer to the “truth” about “Let It Be” than any of the Beatles fans who’ve loved and obsessed over the “what might have been” of it all this time? I think not.
The truth of “Let it Be” is that we can never know what it might have been. All we have for sure is “Let it Be”, as it was released in 1970. And “Let it Be… Naked”, which shares many of the 1970 version’s songs, but is neither “Let It Be (as it was intended)” nor even an actual Beatles album. It’s like an orphan, an album without an artist, born out of a collective desire among Beatles fans (and the remaining Beatles) to know, to have and to hold “what might have been.”
This fall, perhaps the biggest “what might have been” still left out there will get an official release. The Beach Boys’ (but more importantly Brian Wilson’s) aborted would-be masterwork “Smile.” For some this may be happy news, but the idea of it makes me a little queasy.
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In 1966, after dazzling record critics and music fans alike with a couple of brilliant, totally unexpected, and totally un-commercial albums (“Pet Sounds” and “Good Vibrations”), Brian Wilson, a man perpetually engaged in a sort of internal battle to prove himself worthy in the eyes of his allegedly abusive father, a man whose ambition had always been apparent, even when he was writing silly pop songs about cars and girls (think “Don’t Worry Baby”), a man struggling with various and sundry addictions and neuroses, retreated to his studio to build an impossible dream.
All around him, the natives were getting restless. The Beach Boys’ lead singer Mike Love wanted nothing to do with what he called “drug music” that strayed away from the formula that the group had built their brand on. The record company was setting deadlines for Wilson he couldn’t meet. But most importantly (and destructively), Wilson himself was setting his own bar way too high. “Smile” was to be the musical equivalent of the Great American Novel. It would be the work that, like the Tower of Babel, would rise up and touch the heavens, touch God himself.
In short, an album that was never really meant to be. An album that never was, and never will be.
It’s hard for us to accept that though. After all, “relics” of the sessions for “Smile” have been widely circulated for nearly 40 years. Some of the songs recorded for “Smile” have even turned up on other Beach Boys albums and singles, most notably the song “Surf’s Up”, and a three-and-a-half-minute edit of what probably would have been the album’s centerpiece, a side-long epic called “Heroes and Villains”. The Beach Boys even released a kind of underbaked collection in 1967 called “Smiley Smile.” But, for years, bootleggers have scoured recordings, as well as documents relating to the sessions in order to come up with the Holy Grail, the definitive “Smile (As It Was Meant to Be)”, but that album just isn’t out there. Only the idea of it.
But that’s what’s most important! To me, “Smile” isn’t about the specific songs that were supposed to be on the album; it isn’t about Brian Wilson’s specific vision. To me, the meaning of “Smile”, the “What ‘Smile’ Is” is the idea that Wilson had a vision - that any Artist could have a vision - and then devote himself to that vision completely, and follow it, against the warnings and dissent of others, to its logical ends, even if the vision never fully comes to fruition, and even at the expense of the Artist’s physical, emotional, financial well-being. That to me is the beauty and poetry of the Beach Boys’ “Smile.”
And I believe in that poetry even though I’ll never hear “Smile” the way it was intended to be released in 1966.
“Smile”, released in 2004, will not be that album. It can’t be, because that specific album does not exist. At the very most, 2004’s “Smile” will simply be – can only be - a very good record, based on the recording sessions for the 1966 album. That won’t stop me from buying the album when it comes out – I have “Let It Be… Naked” as well.
But I’ll always prefer the 1966 “Smile”, the mythological one, the one I’ll never actually hear.
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Member: Paul Lorentz
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