“There’s more to it”: The album Brian Wilson wanted to be remembered for
Every single rock and roll star is usually concerned with the legacy they leave behind. No one wants to be remembered for only screaming into a microphone for their entire career, and when looking at the greatest artists of yesteryear, they seemed genuinely interested in bringing a sense of peace into the world rather than encouraging kids to riot in the streets. Even by the standards of rock and roll, though, Brian Wilson was one of the few with many great songs to choose from as his finest work.
Looking through all of those Beach Boys hits, Wilson was the rock and roll equivalent to Mozart in many ways. Not many people from the early days of rock and roll were making musical leaps like he was when it came to harmony, but on every one of the band’s singles, he was creating mini symphonies in the same way Phil Spector did, only this time with the power of the human voice.
So when he got The Wrecking Crew to work on Pet Sounds, everything felt like it was falling into place. Songs like ‘She Knows Me Too Well’ took all of the makings of what those surf songs were supposed to be and channelled them into teenage melodrama, but this was the kind of watermark that no one would forget. The Beatles had already dared to dream bigger than the disposable pop single, but Wilson was taking all of that creative ingenuity and putting it into the three-minute format on ‘God Only Knows’.
But if The Beatles inspired Wilson to make Pet Sounds with Rubber Soul, the Fab Four weren’t about to stop influencing his craft. They were progressing even further on records like Revolver, so now that the psychedelic movement was about to enter its peak with the Summer of Love, Wilson had the road mapped out for him for his next classic when releasing ‘Good Vibrations’.
Sgt Pepper may have eventually taken the Beatles to even greater heights, but Wilson’s vision on Smile took years before finally coming to pass. His experimentation with LSD had drastically started to affect his creative process, but by the time he began work on the album years down the road, he felt that he had finally perfected the kind of sounds that he was hearing in his head.
When talking about the record, Wilson felt that everything he did to create SMiLE blew his acknowledged masterpiece out of the water, saying, “Pet Sounds everybody liked, of couse, but if you had to put it on a scale out to ten, I’d give Pet Sounds a four and I’d give SMiLE a ten. That how much I rate it. There’s more to it. There’s more exploration. More adventurous. More rock opera-ish. It was an unfinished work of art. ‘We junked it’ was the whole thing. [then] we finished all the songs, and it was sequenced all together which was a plus for us.”
And listening to the final version of what Wilson released in 2004, it’s easier to see what he was going for back in the 1960s. A lot of these songs had been heard countless times by Beach Boys fans who were curious about the unfinished puzzle, but whereas a lot of them were standalone pieces on albums like Smiley Smile, this version felt like taking all of the potential that Wilson had the first time around and turning it into a new work of art.
Wilson may have had to wait a long time before he finally heard the sounds that he was hearing in his head, but the new-and-improved version of SMiLE that exists today is about more than a collection of songs. This was about discovering an album that had been unearthed for years and finally given the time to breathe.
