Released!
Brian Wilson's 'Smile' is the latest in a long line of magnificient obsessions abandoned by their creators -- and rescued by their followers
They are the masterpieces that never made it. The dusty manuscript discovered in a closet. Reels of celluloid dismissed by the bean-counting movie executives. Master tapes in a vault, heard only in low-quality, bootlegged snippets traded by obsessive fans. And then, usually long after the creators are gone, the artifact is dug up, packaged, and released. That's when the real test begins, when myth meets reality, when the Holy Grail becomes another product. It's a phenomenon that'll take place this week, when pop music's greatest missing album arrives in stores.
It is called "Smile," and in the 37 years since Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys abandoned it, the album has inspired books, movies, and a worldwide network of tape traders. What's special about "Smile" -- out Tuesday on Nonesuch -- is that it isn't an archival release culled from long forgotten sessions. Instead, Wilson and his current band recorded the pop symphony from scratch.
"A lot of people dreamed of `Smile,' " says David Leaf, Wilson's friend and the author of "The Beach Boys and the California Myth." "The fact that it now exists, and it's out in the world, is a miracle."
But it's not the only abandoned epic resurrected in recent years. Movie aficionados rejoiced when producer Rick Schmidlin added 99 minutes onto the famously sliced Erich von Stroheim film "Greed" for broadcast on Turner Classic Movies. Bibliophiles didn't mind when only a portion of the late author Ralph Ellison's attempt at a second novel arrived; they were just glad to see "Juneteenth." And audio geeks have feasted on a steady flow of reclamation projects, from croaky John Lennon demos turned into a posthumous Beatles reunion to the Billy Bragg-Wilco collaboration on "Mermaid Avenue," a series of Woody Guthrie songs that had never been set to music.
"Smile" has had a particularly complicated route to release. The original attempt to record it took place between 1966 and 1967. The sessions were led by Wilson, the most commercially powerful American musician of his time. In the previous two years, under his leadership, the Beach Boys had reeled off nine Top-10 albums. But with 1966's "Pet Sounds," Wilson left behind the surfboards, stick shifts, and girls on the beach. He had quit touring -- the other Beach Boys continued on the road -- so he could focus on producing his increasingly elaborate pop symphonies. Wilson wrote the music for "Smile." Van Dyke Parks, then a virtual unknown, wrote the words. If "Pet Sounds" had been a record of heartbreaking teenage elegies, "Smile" would be a surging, literate meditation on America.
At the first session, Wilson sat down at the piano and played the melody for the song that would become "
"When I heard a railroad train in Brian Wilson's music, imagery appears," says Parks. "The Greeks call that phantasm."
Though the original "Smile" would ultimately end in failure, Wilson's first release from the sessions, "Good Vibrations," was a No. 1 hit considered the most complex and expensive pop song of the era. Naturally, Capitol expected a new album that would compete with the Beatles. About 400,000 record sleeves for "Smile" were printed. They would remain in boxes as Wilson, growing increasingly manic, began to fold under the pressure.
He filled his living room with sand so he could feel it on his toes as he played the piano. He required that all discussions take place in the swimming pool. His home, he feared, had been bugged. This is the scene the Beach Boys encountered when they returned home from a tour. If they were put off by Wilson's increasingly aberrant behavior, they were confused by the complex music he was creating.
Overwhelmed and feeling incapable of finishing "Smile," Wilson shelved the album. When he did, he created something much bigger than a hit. He created a cult.
The legend grows Warren Zanes got his first "Smile" bootleg in the '80s. He was in a band, the Del Fuegos, when someone slipped him a tape with portions of the sessions. He was hooked. "There's something about the preciousness of the artifact," says Zanes, now vice president of education at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. "The gauze of mythology really changes the document."
The story usually ends there. The creator moves on to other projects. The legend of the lost work grows. Even if the artist is alive, he doesn't particularly want to revisit his failures. Parks says he was horrified to hear Wilson had taken up "Smile" again. He only came around when he heard the finished, 2004 version.
Classical composer Charles Ives had an uneasy relationship with his own unproduced work. His Second Symphony had been ignored when he wrote it in the early 1900s. But 50 years later, renowned conductor Leonard Bernstein brought it back for its debut with the New York Philharmonic. "It was a huge success," says Tufts University music historian Jan Swafford, who has written a book on Ives. "There was an absolute ovation at the end, and Mrs. Ives said to her friends, in disbelief, `they like it.' Ives himself heard it on a neighbor's radio, and his only comment was to get up, spit in the fireplace, and walk out of the room. Nobody was quite sure if that meant he was too moved to speak or didn't give a damn."
In the world of literature, such reclamations create a dilemma. Would F. Scott Fitzgerald want his unfinished novel, "The Last Tycoon," released only months after his death? Would Ernest Hemingway be pleased to discover that not one, but three posthumous books of fiction had been published in the 40 years after his suicide?
"Kafka said burn his stuff," says John Callahan, a professor at Lewis & Clark University and the executor of Ellison's estate. Ellison's wife asked Callahan to help compile what would have been the follow-up to her late husband's landmark 1952 book, "Invisible Man." When Ellison died of cancer in 1994, Callahan had been one of a handful of people at his side. Still, the second novel remained a subject he had barely broached with the author.
"Certain friendships cooled and grew distant because people would ask [about it]," says Callahan. "He would put them off. It was kind of a private matter that, to some extent, was eating at him. `Invisible Man' was his first novel. And how the hell do you follow that?"
Ellison's solution: He didn't. He left that to Callahan, who cut thousands of pages down to 350, chose the title, and faced the critics.
That's long been the norm for the recovery project. The artist usually isn't around. But their fans are. So decisions must be made that won't alienate them. Bragg and Wilco were warmly received for the 1998 "Mermaid Avenue," developed after Nora Guthrie asked them to look over some of the 2,500 songs her father, Woody, wrote but never recorded.
"The biggest help was that nobody had heard those songs," says Bragg. "We were very conscious that we weren't going back to recreate what Woody did. Our idea was to collaborate with him as if he was sending us the songs from somewhere."
Film producer Schmidlin had a different challenge when he took on von Stroheim's 1924 film, "Greed." Working off a 40-year-old copy of the script and with about 650 stills he found in a film library, Schmidlin had to figure out how to best replicate the director's original vision. These weren't unpublished lyrics carted around by a folk singer's daughter. This was a chunk of Hollywood history that had been debated at film conferences and in books. There were expectations. And even if the 99 minutes Schmidlin added on didn't encompass Von Stroheim's original vision -- the first rough cuts of the film were reportedly more than nine hours long -- it did make the version more complete. "It's not a restoration, it's a recreation of a lost story narrative," Schmidlin says. The producer knows of `Smile' and is intrigued to hear it, but adds, "We don't necessarily know what Brian intended [originally]."
Doing the unthinkable Actually, the Brian Wilson camp insists that we do know what was intended. Much of "Smile" had been recorded by the time Wilson abandoned the project. Several of the songs had trickled out on Beach Boys albums from the late '60s and early '70s. Wilson also released more "Smile" material on the Beach Boys' 1993 box set. Still, he refused to resurrect the total project.
"I just kept getting the same question over and over for 38 years," Wilson says during a phone interview. "I didn't know what to say." He told interviewers that the music was "inappropriate." That the sessions had collapsed in a drug cloud.
Strangely enough, he did show up in the early '90s for a book signing held for novelist Lewis Shiner's "Glimpses." The book featured a protagonist who time-traveled back to the '60s to help some of rock's great icons with their legendary unfinished projects. In "Glimpses," Wilson completes "Smile." At the book signing, Wilson hardly said a word, which led Shiner to ask his friend, Leaf, whether Wilson might read "Glimpses."
"I think he'll open the book, see the word `Smile,' and close the book again," Shiner remembers Leaf telling him.
Something strange happened a few years later. Wilson, remarried and better medicated, began to record again. He also decided to tour as a solo artist, which he had never done before. He hired a band, which included members of the Los Angeles-based Wondermints, and performed "Pet Sounds" in its entirety.
In 2000, at a Christmas party thrown by one of his band members, Wilson did the unthinkable.
"Somebody said, `Brian, it's Christmas, play "Heroes and Villains," ' " Leaf remembers. "And he said, `OK.' We were all pretty stunned and excited because up until that moment he was willing to address just about everything, but `Smile' was still not on the table of topics."
Pleased with the response, Wilson worked up "Smile" songs for his upcoming tour. This past summer, he and the group performed the music for the first time. "I was scared to death it wouldn't go over," Wilson says. "But after I played those concerts, and I knew people love it, we decided to record."
This time around, instead of commercial pressures and doubting band mates, Wilson got only encouragement. Darian Sahanaja, a member of the Wondermints -- and such a fanatic he once made himself a homemade "Smile" T-shirt -- loaded material from the original sessions into his laptop. Sahanaja played such a central role he was credited, with Wilson, for producing the mix. Parks came by Wilson's house and added lyrics and transitions. By the end of June, they were done recording. Earlier this month, clips of the new "Smile" began to show up on the Internet. Suddenly, the myth had become reality.
"This is still not going to be the definitive `Smile,' " says Zanes. " `Smile" was treated as kind of the apex of Brian Wilson's obsessive creativity, the individual sitting in his swirling mass of creativity. The new `Smile' is a group effort with Brian at the center. It is a project in celebration of Brian Wilson, this great American music figure. But I think you need to recognize it for what it is. It's very different from the original `Smile.' "
On www.thesmileshop.net, a website dedicated to the unreleased album, a more important issue has emerged.
"I gotta ask," one participant posted on the site's much-traveled message board, "the raison d'etre of the Smile Shop is to promote the memory of a `lost' album. After Sept. 28, 2004, the album will no longer be lost. What next?"
A few lines down, another poster answered.
"Surely," he wrote, "the possibility of a SMiLE sessions box set is enough to keep the board talking."
Geoff Edgers can be reached at gedgers@globe.com.
