The unfinished album Jerry Garcia and Pete Townshend agreed was a masterpiece
When you find yourself in a discussion about the definitive masterpiece by The Beach Boys, a large majority of the time, the assumption can be made that Pet Sounds is the album in question.
It’s not that the rest of their work was bad by any stretch of the imagination, but their 1966 album is such a superlative piece of work that it doesn’t bear comparing any of their other albums to it. The genius composition, production and arrangements of Brian Wilson on this record have influenced the works of countless other contributions in the world of pop since then, whether they’re aware of it or not, and its revolutionary nature is exactly what makes it a special piece of work.
Some other knowledgeable sorts may bring up other Beach Boys albums in this conversation from time to time, with the likes of Surf’s Up, The Beach Boys Today and Sunflower also getting nods, but people have to seriously stake their claim in favour of them over Pet Sounds as being the finest and most complete example of their brilliance. You simply can’t beat Pet Sounds, and Wilson himself found that out the hard way.
The one album that always held the potential to dethrone it was its planned successor, Smile, but given Wilson’s perfectionism and deteriorating mental state as a result of him attempting to create something beyond perfection, it never came to fruition in the way that he’d envisioned it, and the album had to be shelved so the band could continue to pursue other projects.
What did come in the aftermath of Smile and its cancellation was Smiley Smile; a considerably watered down version of Wilson’s supposed vision, and a compromise on the fact that he couldn’t achieve exactly what he’d wanted with the scrapped sessions.
It’s often regarded as a letdown, and a record that saw Wilson come crashing down from a wondrous high to have to deal with the hard-to-swallow truth that he was fallible, but since the album’s lukewarm initial release, several staunch defenders of Smiley Smile have reared their heads as well.
For one, the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia regularly used to rave about the album and called it one of his favourites of all time, with him proclaiming that the visionary psychedelic feel was lightyears ahead of what anybody else was doing contemporaneously, and that the gorgeously woven harmonies that Wilson and the rest of the band delivered were still nothing short of perfection. To illustrate his love for the album, it’s reported that he used to give out copies of the record to all of his friends as a gift and would insist that they listen to it to understand its genius.
Without going to quite the same lengths as Garcia, The Who’s Pete Townshend also claimed it was one of his favourites of all time, with it having provided a major inspiration for the recording of The Who Sell Out. Given how the album also follows a similar conceptual theme that joins songs together in medleys and is punctuated by jingles, there are plenty of similarities between The Who’s third album and the abandoned Beach Boys record, and given that the recording process for Sell Out was also a lengthy one that had to be compromised in places, its final state bears some resemblance to the unfinished Smiley Smile.
It’s far from the intended masterpiece it was supposed to be, and even if there are many versions of it that have come to light in the years since, either re-recorded by Wilson or reworked from the ditched tapes, it’s hard to know whether either lives up to his intentions. However, the original is evidently enough for some, and while it may be rough around the edges, there are plenty of flashes of the ambition that was there in the first place, making it a special record in their catalogue nonetheless.
