Smile, Maybe

May 18, 2007

A central question for Brian Wilson's Smile (2004) is the extent to which it reflects the album that should have been completed back in 1967. The official narrative, as told in the documentary Beautiful Dreamer, is this modern Smile is the completion of that old project. This is the album we have waited 37 years to hear!

There are reasons to doubt this congratulatory narrative. The Smile album that was released in 2004 is divided into three suites. It is hard to imagine these three suites being transferred to a double sided LP.. which would have been the requirement in 1967. Insofar as Smile depends on this triple format, it departs from any realistic guess as to what the original would have sounded like.

Beautiful Dreamer had the opportunity to showcase Brian Wilson as a renewed creative force.. but in fact Brian Wilson comes through as a rather passive force in the creation of Smile.

The steps as they appear in the documentary are as follows:

All the surviving tracks from the Smile sessions were loaded onto a computer and arranged. This ordering of tracks seems to have been a product of a collaboration between Darian Sahanaja and Wilson.

When we are shown video of the early practice sessions, we find Wilson sitting by himself and barely participating. Several of the band members profess to being nervous that Wilson would not engage with the material. So far as we can see from this documentary, the musical arrangements for Smile were completed with minimal input from Wilson.

Once the band starts rehearsing the material, Wilson is still detached. He sits at a keyboard with two monitors supplying him with the lyrics for every song. The band behind Wilson is excellent.. but there is little interaction between Wilson and the members of the band.

If you listen to old studio sessions from the Beach Boys during their creative height, you hear something strikingly different. Wilson is in command telling people what to play and when to come in. He is domineering even. That is the Wilson who composed some of the most beautiful American music of our time. Few traces of that person remain.

The music does remain. There were plenty of beautiful fragments from the original Smile sessions, and they were ripe for someone to pick them up and arrange them in a winning order. It is either the spirit of a marketer or a fan blind with nostalgia who believes the line that this modern Smile is what the 1967 album would have been like. Appreciation for the modern Smile means forgetting about all that.. it means recognizing that this is a modern stitching-together of old tracks.. a beautiful new album that happens to be named Smile.