Blessed wonder
Charles Spencer
Ifinally got my hands on a record I had been waiting to hear for 37 years last week. I first read about the Beach Boys' Smile project in the New Musical Express when I was 12. The band had recently released Per Sounds, which now regularly tops those ubiquitous lists of all-time great albums, but the buzz was that Smile was going to be even better. When the miraculous 'Good Vibrations', one of its centrepieces, was released as a single, it became clear that something very special indeed was likely to be on offer, a record to rival, and possibly eclipse, the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper.
But the album was never finished, never released. Brian Wilson, the presiding spirit of the Beach Boys, who had moved from those exuberant surfing safaris to gloriously sophisticated symphonic pop, had crossed the dangerously fine line that separates inquiring genius from debilitating mental illness. As so often in the Sixties, drugs, particularly LSD, helped push him into the land of the lost. In Britain, Fleetwood Mac's great guitarist Peter Green, and Pink Floyd's Syd Barrett, took the same disastrous route at about the same time.
Over the years that followed, Wilson spent much of his time in bed — a beach boy who never actually cared for surfing, who became a beached behemoth, weighing in at 25 stone and tormented by mental illness. He's still not well. In a moving interview in the Times's Saturday magazine last week, the journalist Alan Franks encountered a frail man of 62 who only seemed to be partly there and who confided, 'Most of the time I am depressed.'
The cruel irony of this, of course, is that at its best, there is no pop music more uplifting than the songs Brian Wilson wrote for the Beach Boys. Those glorious vocal harmonies hymning Wilson's vision of a sunlit life spent driving a Little Deuce Coupe with a beautiful Californian Girl in the passenger seat remain as shimmeringly potent today as they were in the early Sixties.
Wilson, fragile but plucky, has been touring again in recent years, with a fine band led by Darian Sahanaja of the Wondermints, and at rapturously received gigs at London's Festival Hall last February they gave the long-delayed world premiere of Smile. The night job meant that I couldn't attend these ecstatically received concerts, which apparently reduced strong men to tears, and I have been kicking myself ever since. Happily, however, Wilson and his collaborators went into the studio afterwards and finally got Smile down on disc. One is always chary of glib superlatives, but I can only describe the record as 47 minutes of blessed wonder.
Wilson has described Smile as a 'teenage symphony to God' and both its ambition and its achievement are breath-catching. The work is divided into three movements, each dominated by one of Brian Wilson's all-time classics — 'Heroes and Villains', Surfs Up', and 'Good Vibrations', with a cluster of other songs and potent fragments gathered round them. The album often sounds like a bumper compendium of popular American music, ranging from vaudeville and doo-wop to pure pop and hard rock, and its melodic invention is stunning. Joy keeps bustin' out all over in lavish, sometimes downright loony tunes, whose subject matter ranges from the innocence of childhood to a little home on the range via a hymn to the delights of vegetables. The album covers vast geographical distances too, from Plymouth Rock to Hawaii.
Frankly, the lyrics by Van Dyke Parks are the work of a man who has been seriously overdoing the waccy-baccy, and apparently the rest of the Beach Boys thought the album was drifting off into pretentious la-la land during the original sessions. If you can make sense of lines such as 'A diamond necklace played the pawn./Hand in hand some drummed along/To a handsome mannered baton Columnated ruins domino!' you are a better man than either me or indeed Van Dyke Parks, who recently wryly admitted that many of his lyrics here are 'indefensible'.
Luckily, you can't hear them most of the time, so lush are most of the arrangements, but the odd phrase lingers evocatively in the mind, amid the great washes of beautiful close harmony singing, the startling time signatures, the sudden changes of mood and key. This is seriously inventive music that somehow contrives to be as benevolent as it is ingenious.
A few sourpusses have complained that they would rather have heard the original tapes than this painstaking reconstruction. I'm not sure I agree. This is a young man's optimistic music sung by a frail, elderly man whose seasoned voice bears witness to his suffering. Though Smile does indeed make you smile, with its imagination, its generosity of spirit and its wit, the music's mixture of hippy-dippy innocence and hard-won experience is deeply poignant, too. So dive right in. The surf's up and the water's lovely.
Charles Spencer is theatre critic of the Daily Telegraph.
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