Why was The Beach Boys album ‘Smile’ never finished?
Fresh off the back of the band’s celestial 1966 LP Pet Sounds, which had achieved only modest commercial returns but widespread critical acclaim, The Beach Boys‘ in-house genius Brian Wilson set to work again. This time, he was looking to create his magnum opus. Pet Sounds was all well and good, but he could do even better.
In fact, Wilson wasn’t just aiming to produce his own masterwork, but America’s. He wanted his next project to be a sweeping history of the United States, spanning from the moment the Mayflower arrived at Plymouth Rock, through the age of expansion out west and the country becoming the world’s workshop, to the moment surf culture hit California.
The musical basis for this historical review would be a whistle-stop tour of the country’s musical heritage. Wilson enlisted avant-garde songwriter Van Dyke Parks, who he later described in a 2011 interview with Analog Planet as “the greatest lyricist I’ve ever heard”, to write the words for his melodies and thematic ideas. The project would develop into an album entitled Smile, reflecting Wilson’s vision for the work as a satirical presentation of American history and music embellished with humour.
Recording for Smile began with an instrumental track for one of its thematic centrepieces ‘Heroes and Villains’ in May 1966, just weeks after the release of Pet Sounds. Wilson was experiencing a creative surge like no other throughout his career.
Was it sabotage?
Unfortunately, Wilson was also developing a very serious mental illness, with the helping hand of amphetamine abuse and frequent LSD use. He began to experience severe bouts of psychotic paranoia, believing that his hero and rival producer Phil Spector was out to get him and hearing voices in his head.
Meanwhile, the rest of The Beach Boys were increasingly unhappy with the experimental aspects of the recording process, as well as Van Dyke Parks’ obscure lyricism. At one point, the band’s lead singer, Mike Love, had Parks summoned to the studio to explain what the line “over and over, the crow cries uncover the cornfield” meant in the song ‘Cabin Essence’.
To make matters worse, with Wilson out of control in the studio the band was missing deadline after deadline for submitting newly recorded material to their record company Capitol. It didn’t help that they were suing the label for unpaid royalties at the time.
Soon afterwards, Parks lost patience with Wilson’s increasingly domineering studio persona and left the project. Wilson claimed in his 2011 interview that it was the mutual decision of him and his lyricist to shelve the album. “Van Dyke and I decided that we were too far into it and we didn’t write anything but snippets,” he explained. Except for ‘Heroes And Villains’, we didn’t write whole songs. They were incomplete songs. That’s why we junked it.”
He then retreated to a home studio at his new house in Bel Air and supposedly became convinced that one of his entourage was trying to control him with telepathy. He allegedly believed people working with The Beach Boys were leaking recordings from the prospective album, too, including to members of The Beatles.
The final nail in Smile‘s coffin was arguably the release of The Beatles album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in June 1967. It came during a break in the recording of Wilson’s project and appeared to demoralise him beyond consolation.
According to fellow Beach Boy Bruce Johnston, Wilson was in the process of “disintegrating” anyway due to a toxic combination of drugs, his ego in relation to the band’s infighting, and the commercial failure of Pet Sounds. Add to that a debilitating mental illness, and it’s not hard to see why he was in no fit state to complete his most ambitious musical project.
In lieu of Smile, the relatively lightweight LP Smiley Smile came out in September 1967 to satisfy the band’s contractual obligations. It featured at least four of the songs which had been pencilled into the unfinished album’s tracklist albeit in a different form. These songs included ‘Heroes and Villains’, along with the song that people consider The Beach Boys’ single greatest achievement, ‘Good Vibrations’.
In the coming years, other unfinished Smile tracks were reworked and released on subsequent albums. As Wilson has stated, “The songs were strong enough”. It was finishing them that proved too much for him at the time.
In 2004, he recorded and released a solo version of the project with a new set of musicians. Finally, in 2011, The Smile Sessions box set was released, and the unfinished recordings were remastered in all their glory. Just a glimpse of what might have been, but still something to smile about.
