Wilson's `Smile' is exquisite, scattered
Nowhere is the line between genius and madness finer than on "Smile," Brian Wilson's long-delayed and long-presumed masterwork, which will be released on Tuesday by Nonesuch. Wilson pulled the plug on the album on the eve of its planned 1967 release, due to negative reaction from the rest of the Beach Boys, resistance from the record label, and his own growing concerns about how his highly experimental follow-up to "Pet Sounds" would be received. Speculation surrounding the album has grown to mythic proportions during the nearly four-decade wait, and, as it turns out, Wilson's doubts and his fans' great expectations were equally founded. Rerecorded this year in its entirety by Wilson with his original collaborator Van Dyke Parks and his touring band, the collection of 17 songs -- grouped into three suites -- is brilliantly complex and startlingly childlike. At 24, Wilson was at the edge of mental illness and deep into drugs, and it seems likely that his state of mind both fueled his imagination and clouded his vision. Stretches of pure bliss spill into moments of whimsy remarkable more for their impenetrability than their depth (see "Vege-Tables").
Parks, an eccentric lyricist who would go on to be an A-list studio sideman, was clearly Wilson's kindred spirit. His words defy interpretation, and paired with Wilson's odd timings, mood swings, and classically influenced melodies, they urge a song like "Surf's Up" (which, like "
Still, "Smile" is too scattered and inscrutable to be the literate meditation on Americana that Wilson and Parks set out to create. Suite three opens with two-minute triptych -- "I'm in Great Shape/I Wanna Be Around/Workshop" -- that begins promisingly with a waltz-time ode to a Midwestern morning, downshifts into a fleeting jazz interlude about picking up the pieces of a broken heart, and then dissolves in a wash of power tools. The musical point of such an endeavor, let alone its meaning in the context of a social history, remains elusive.
Wilson's arrangements are intricate and novel throughout; he used everything from mandolins and banjos to cellos and crunching carrots to approximate the vast expanse of songscape conjured in his head. Most glorious of all, as ever, is Wilson's way with the human voice. "Smile" opens with "Our Prayer/Gee," a wordless, windswept chorale that morphs into vintage beach babble and singlehandedly fulfills Wilson's desire to compose a teenage symphony to God. The middle suite is exquisite: harpsichord and trumpet, tuba and flute, and a male choir moving in buoyant, complicated counterpoint power the winsome "Wonderful"; the wide-eyed "Song for Children"; a shape-shifting reflection on genealogy called "Child Is the Father of the Man"; and "Surf's Up." There are other gems, among them "Cabin Essence," a psychedelic extract of folk and surf, and lovely "Wind Chimes," which could be a companion piece to Wilson's seminal "In My Room."
"Smile" brims with the master tunesmith's inimitable melodies, youthful melancholy, ardent reach, and -- 37 years later -- nostalgia. If "Smile" had come out in 1967 the album might well have been annointed a symphonic pop masterpiece. It's still a thrill to hear it today. But Wilson's grand ambitions and dreamy ideas are now refracted through nearly four decades of a genre that's been pushed to countless wondrous edges, and "Smile" feels like a beautifully surreal snapshot of Wilson's '60s moment -- a sun-splashed spiraling down into imagination and delirium.
Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com 
