‘Rio Grande’: the moment Brian Wilson revisited ‘Smile’
Music is full of comeback kings, and Brian Wilson has certainly earned his place among them. At the beginning of the 1980s, the career of the eldest Beach Boys brother was on the rocks, plagued by substance abuse and becoming increasingly estranged from the rest of the group. It seemed unlikely that he would ever return to his glory days until, miraculously, the tides began to turn, and he found his old music maestro groove again.
But what song could hold the power to turn around a fate so grim? It was ‘Rio Grande’, a warbling experimental masterpiece that saw Wilson return to the roots of what made his musicianship so golden in the first place.
The Beach Boys were synonymous with the modular movements technique employed in the likes of smash hits, including ‘Good Vibrations’, so much so that it became somewhat of Wilson’s musical calling card. He had mastered the use of modulation so intensely that it was the subject of the entire band album, Smile, from the late 1960s – but much to his initial disappointment, it never saw the light of day.
That was until echoes of the Smile era inevitably crept their way into ‘Rio Grande’, a passion project for Wilson encouraged by producers Andy Paley and Lenny Waronker as a means to rehabilitate the star back into his music-making greatness. The crux of the song was inspired by the 1950 western romance movie of the same name, and in that spirit, Wilson embarked on a sonic journey to encapsulate the tone of the American wild west in what can only be described as a musical collage.
The technical term for this is ‘musique concrète’, the process in which various sounds are recorded and overlayed as raw material, much like a collage. It creates an expansive and eclectic mix, favoured in Wilson’s penchant for experimentation previously in Smile and which lent itself perfectly to the notion of a journey across an American frontier that ‘Rio Grande’ explored.
An eight-minute odyssey of traversing landscapes and conditions, ‘Rio Grande’ is the longest piece of work in Wilson’s back catalogue and is deeply rooted thematically in the notion of survival. Producer Paley commented that Wilson was “really into […] the idea of the little man against the big men and making it on your own,” intentionally or otherwise uncannily reflecting the stark circumstances he had recently found himself in up to that point. Through this lens, ‘Rio Grande’ is not only a journey of survival but one of personal redemption and catharsis.
From there, Wilson’s career was largely set back on the up. His 1987 return to form allowed him to see he was still capable of creating the experimental nectar of his Beach Boys’ golden era, and it even led him back towards his original unfinished magnum opus. On September 28th, 2004, he released Brian Wilson Presents Smile, an album which unearthed the initial recordings from the group’s failed record – and it gained him universal critical acclaim. It just goes to show the power of Wilson getting himself back on track; the good old days got back in grasp, and it all started with ‘Rio Grande’ as the catalyst.
