Rock's most famous walking casualty says he's feeling better these days, even if he says it cryptically, via e-mail. Brian Wilson, the reclusive and mentally fragile former leader of the Beach Boys, is doing extensive interviews to support the release of the CD Brian Wilson Presents Smile (Nonesuch). In the mid-'60s, Smile was the heavily buzzed project pegged to follow up the masterpiece Pet Sounds. Wilson's goal at the time was simple: he wanted to redefine rock music. But in 1967, after months and months of highly experimental recording sessions, he scrapped the endeavor, his mind in shambles. So Smile sat, decade after decade, the most renowned unfinished album of all time.
He returned to Smile last year, faced down his demons and finished it. Once a near-mystical artifact, Smile has kicked its way into the baby-boomer zeitgeist.
So here's Brian Wilson, not a loquacious fellow in the first place, promoting a tour and his first-ever solo CD that's legitimately hot. It can't be easy for him, but he's jumped (or been pushed) into the media fray.
I ask him via e-mail:
You have spoken of finishing Smile as confronting some of your biggest fears. You thought about quitting the [current] project, but never did. You pushed through the fears. Now that you have some hindsight, what therapeutic benefit did you get from finally finishing it?
And Brian Wilson answers: "I felt like a musician who had made his dream come true. It was a weight off my shoulders."
Do you think it has benefited your overall health?
"Yes it has, I got in a frame of mind to exercise again."
Are you happier from finishing it?
"Yes, very much."
Smile is getting the Big Push. Tour, promotion, advertising, gobs of mostly adoring press, a Showtime film documenting the odyssey, Beautiful Dreamer: Brian Wilson and the Story of Smile. While no masterpiece (see review, page 29), the disc is an admirable achievement, and the hype looks to be paying off. The disc recently entered the Billboard album chart at No. 13, the highest ranking for any of his four solo albums. The Smile tour is doing brisk business.
You're a guy who's made a lot of hit records, although not lately. What commercial expectations do you have for Smile?
"I feel it is appropriate for this year and people will really pick up on it."
In late 1965, dissatisfied with the sun 'n' surf formula of the Beach Boys, Brian Wilson wrote and recorded a passel of new songs while the rest of the band went on tour. Using a stable of ace L.A. session musicians, he meticulously orchestrated the parts and conducted the ensemble through a series of lush, symphonic instrumental tracks. When the other Beach Boys returned, he directed them through their vocals. The resulting Pet Sounds is one of the most revered albums in rock annals, a damn near perfect record that includes such polished gems as "Wouldn't It Be Nice," "Caroline, No" and "You Still Believe in Me." In England, the Beatles heard its clarion call and took it as a challenge. The Beach Boys — no, Brian Wilson — had raised the bar.
For his next endeavor, the 24-year-old Beach Boys auteur envisioned creating "a teenage symphony to God."
"One day I will write songs that people will pray to," Wilson allegedly said.
He enlisted a young wordsmith named Van Dyke Parks and together they cobbled a lofty, oblique concept: an American travelogue, flying from Plymouth Rock to Diamond Head in Hawaii.
Instead of making his new music song by song, Wilson took a modular approach, writing and recording snippets to be assembled later. The music conveyed a sweeping sense of Americana with a grandeur that recalled Gershwin and Copland. "If Pet Sounds was his 'blue' period, Smile was his cubist period," says friend David Anderle in the Showtime documentary.
Despite his ambitious artistry, Wilson's emotional state was beginning to fray. For the cacophonous interlude titled "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow," meant to evoke fire, he had musicians wear firemen's hats in the studio. After a spate of blazes broke out in the surrounding areas over the next few days, Wilson panicked, thinking they were his fault.
Making matters worse, the other Beach Boys, back from the road, didn't understand the music; Mike Love, the group's effervescent frontman, despised it. He refused to sing Parks' lyrics — elliptical at best, arguably nonsensical ("Columnated ruins domino!") — unless he was given explanations. The wordsmith refused.
One night, Wilson was driving his car, buzzed on Secanol, when the Beatles' "Strawberry Fields" came on the radio. Overwhelmed, he pulled to the side of the road and thought, "They did it already. Maybe it's too late."
The Fab Four's subsequent release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in the summer of '67 only made Wilson more dispirited.
In Beautiful Dreamer, he lays out his reasons for abandoning Smile: Love didn't like it; it was too experimental; the "Fire" tape was too scary; "People wouldn't understand where my head was at."
Wilson adds, "I felt personally beaten up by it. I did have a breakdown; I had a nervous breakdown."
Through the years, scraps of Smile have appeared on compilations and boxed sets. In fact, the album released in its place in September of '67, titled Smiley Smile, included pieces of the deserted project, re-recorded in simpler fashion.Brian Wilson never fully recovered. The ensuing years intensified his drug use and food and alcohol intake. For more than two years in the early '70s, he retired to his four-poster bed, hanging out in a bathrobe, eating gargantuan meals, which ballooned his weight, and smoking five packs of cigarettes a day.
In 1976, he came under the care of Dr. Eugene Landy, a controversial shrink to the stars, who took over virtually ever facet of Wilson's life. Landy put his patient on a strict diet, and helped him shed booze and drugs. It worked for a while, but Landy's intrusion into the artistic process and band business — and his Svengali-like control over his frail client — probably ended up doing more harm than good. Their relationship lasted off and on until 1992, when Landy, slapped with a restraining order to stay out of Wilson's life, moved to Hawaii.
Over the years, Wilson's mystique grew. A generation of modern rockers revered him as some distant deity. It became hip to drop his name as an influence, or hero. Wilson's career carried on in fits and starts, beset by legal troubles, creative roadblocks and, probably worst of all, a general disinterest from the record-buying public. Two solo albums, 1988's Brian Wilson and '98's Imagination, sold poorly. Both discs, while they had their moments, were reminders to fans that Brian Wilson had not fully emerged from his basket-case status, and was not likely to. They were stiff, mechanical and missing the spirit that made Beach Boys music such a treasure.
All the while, Smile music spooked Wilson. It represented his biggest dream, his most devastating failure and his ultimate descent into darkness. So he avoided it.
When the millennium turned, things started looking a little brighter for the fractured genius. He put together a large ensemble, the core of which included a band of Wilson-worshippers called The Wondermints, who could perform his music flawlessly. He launched a Pet Sounds tour, where he sat woodenly behind a center-stage keyboard and sang the songs as if from the astral plane. The band soared behind him.One night, during a holiday party at the home of a band member, Wilson sat at the piano and, out of the blue, performed "Heroes and Villains," one of the centerpieces of Smile.
Acknowledging his breakthrough at the party, I ask Brian Wilson via e-mail: But what sparked YOU, inside, to revisit the music that you had so long avoided?
And Brian Wilson responds, "My wife, managers and publicity agents told me the world was ready for Smile, and I agreed."
But that's not really the point. The world had long been ready for Smile, but was Brian Wilson ready to undertake it? For decades, it had been his monster in the closet.
In the movie, Wilson says he was at first reluctant to tackle the project, but his wife, Melinda, whom he married in '95, convinced him he had the strength to do it. The creative team took some of the pressure off by deciding to bring Smile to the stage rather than complete it in the studio. Band keyboardist Darian Sahanaja gave his boss some sage advice: Don't think of it as finishing Smile, think of it as playing Smile.
Nevertheless, the Rubik's Cube of music, long shrouded in the vaults, had to be organized and sequenced. Sahanaja dumped the tracks into his computer, enabling him and Wilson to move pieces around at will. Parks was called in to write additional lyrics and, almost painlessly, Smile was readied for the stage. Now in three movements, it amounted to something of a rock opera.
Rehearsals for the show, slated for debut on Feb. 20 of this year at the Royal Festival Hall in London, were another matter. During vocal run-throughs at his house, Wilson was detached, fidgety. "I was scared of Smile, yeah," he says in the film. "I thought it was gonna bring back feelings."
Wilson even went so far as to check into the emergency room due to "inner turmoil," but his wife snapped him out of it by merely asking if he wanted to go to dinner.
By the time full-on rehearsals started, Wilson was in a much better frame of mind; he and the band buffed the piece into a shiny suite.
He was ready. Or was he? Backstage at Royal Festival Hall, Wilson was so nonplussed he contemplated canceling the show. Paul McCartney stopped by to offer best wishes. Wilson summoned up the courage to take the stage by meditating through the fear. He emerged, rigid and stone-faced, to adoring applause.
So I ask Brian Wilson via e-mail: On stage, how long did it take for you to get over the terror and really start to enjoy yourself?
And Brian Wilson responds. "Five minutes into the show."
The concert was a triumph. Parks, watching from the audience, broke into tears.
After the brief tour, Wilson headed to the studio to record the finished piece. He reworked some of the arrangements and took the same modular approach to recording. This time, though, the flow of the music had been established. He cut the master tracks with everyone performing live in a relatively small studio. For vocal sessions, Wilson and company used an original tube console identical to the one he employed for Beach Boys records in the '60s. Recording Smile in 2004 took three weeks.
I ask Brian Wilson: What new discoveries are you making with the material? Now that it's no longer a source of fear, how do you look at Smile?
And Brian Wilson answers: "A happy, jovial symphony to God."
This article appears in Oct 20-26, 2004.
