20 Years Ago Tonight

Six great nights (out of seven). Mind-blowingly superb. Thanks to a whole load of Strings & Horns, Wondermints and other talented souls, but special thanks to Van Dyke Parks, and the big man who made it all possible: Briaaaaaaaaaan Wilson!

An incredible experience of a lifetime: the concert that was - somehow, incredibly - better than we could have expected after decades of speculation, the fact that Brian (and his amazing band) had pulled off the impossible (I half expected him to run off the stage when "Fire" kicked off) and the lovefest in the Royal Festival Hall among strangers from around the world who felt immediately bonded by their love of Brian. Getting my ticket autographed by VDP after the show and later by BW at a meet and greet. Not to mention the joyful gatherings and singalongs at the Travel Inn, where we were often treated to visits by band members. It was also my wife's first trip to London, so to walk off a transatlantic flight and step into this scene a few hours later was a trip! We were still buzzing wide awake in our hotel room at 4 a.m. even though we hadn't slept in 2 days.

I remember meeting AGD and John Manning and perhaps others on this board whose names I don't remember.

It's a nice memory to reflect upon when there's been so much sad news in the Brian camp lately. Thank you, Brian and Van Dyke, and the amazing band. And RIP Melinda, Nicky Wonder, and Jeff Foskett, all of whom played crucial roles. May you live in the eternal music.

Well written, Andrew. About once a year I put on my home-brewed dvd of the BBC cut of 'Beautiful Dreamer' and pinch myself that I was there .. I had to be there .. if you know you know. It's just incredible that it happened and I too cried a bucketful at the end of that first performance. 20 years. Wow! Gone too darn fast.

Got to see Brian perform the album live in Atlanta. Probably not as epic as the debut performance though. Would love to see a vinyl reprint of the album. It *is* the 20th anniversary this year...

From my friend Steve Webb, Writer and Arts and Entertainment Editor, who used to post on the old Cabinessence/Shut Down Message Board as "Textus":

A lot of BB/BW friends are commemorating the SMiLE premiere anniversary this week, partly because of our sad loss over the last year of Jeff Foskett and Melinda Wilson. I wasn't in London for the premiere, actually saw the show in our nation's capital instead with the delightful author and conversationalist Don Cunningham. If anyone's interested, this is the main article of three I wrote for clients about the tour:

"The long journey to ‘SMiLE”. Why Brian Wilson could complete his 1966 epic in 2004 after not doing so in 1968, 1971, 1975, 1980 and 1988"

By Steve Webb, Sarasota (Fla.) Herald-Tribune; Oct. 17, 2004

The Sixties can end now. When Brian Wilson finally released his long-lost album “SMiLE” with its three movements of interlocking pop songs last month, the last of the decade's prodigals finally surfaced. Bob Dylan released his 1966-67 “Basement Tapes” in 1975. The Rolling Stones' 1968 “Rock and Roll Circus” made it to stores in 1999, and just last year The Beatles' raw "Get Back" album was finally released as “Let It Be ... Naked.”

The album’s legend - it was to follow The Beach Boys' critically successful “Pet Sounds” and would be anchored by the No. 1 hit single "Good Vibrations" - eclipses any of the others above. Wilson abandoned finishing the thing in early 1967 amid disagreements with the other Beach Boys, and subsequent efforts in 1968, 1972, 1975, 1980 and 1988 by the other Beach Boys or their record companies to get him to finish it came up empty.

Hearing it in 2004 is a lot like if George Gershwin fans suddenly discovered that he had actually written his score for "The Lights of Lany," a second folk opera he planned to adapt from a play by Lynn Riggs before he died in 1937.

Or it would be like the discovery of a whole set of alternate episodes for a potentially classic TV series that instead "jumped the shark," such as a "Chicago Hope" in which Alan Birch wasn't knocked off and Aaron Shutt didn't get all goofy, or a "Dallas" in which Bobby didn't die in the first place (or for that matter J.R. did).

Having a finished “SMiLE” is that big a deal. It came about because after for years associating it with his own unraveling, or with the quick disintegration of Southern California’s pop utopia during the ‘60s that occurred after he wrote most of the music, Wilson became to accept that many of his most ardent fans seriously loved the bits that had made it to the public over the years, and then to confront finishing what had become through its legend both the jewel and the largest blemish on his legacy as an American musician.

Why 2004 is different from all those other failed attempts to get Brian to finish “SMiLE?” The answer has a who, a couple of whats and whys and to some extent a where. It matters that Wilson’s first “miracle cure” at the hands of psychologist Eugene Landy didn’t take. In 1979, saxophonist Walter Parazeider from the rock band Chicago had a solo project in mind that he thought about seeking Brian out to produce, Within a year, he dismissed the idea. “Brian isn’t well enough to do it,” he said in a 1981 interview.

In 1988, when a combination of his debut solo album and the quirk success of The Beach Boys single “Kokomo” prompted renewed interest in the project, he had completed his second cure hinged on his belief that his best music appeared on the more conventional albums “Beach Boys Today,” “Summer Days (and Summer Nights!!)” and “Pet Sounds.” Even as early as 1968, brother Carl Wilson’s completion of the songs “Prayer” and “Cabinessence” for inclusion on the “20/20” album backfired when Carl gave the song a more foreboding sound than Brian intended by grouping them with a song brother Dennis Wilson had co-written with an aspiring lyricist, Charles Manson.

At heart, though, the answer involves a “when.” In 1971, there was a deliberate push to have a “SMiLE” in 1972. When the Capitol hits package “Endless Summer” became a No. 1 album in 1974 and The Beach Boys had at most four releasable songs for a 1975 album, there was the same push to have a “SMiLE” in 1975. After the 1979 Beach Boys’ “L.A. Light Album,” there was another one to have a “SMiLE” suite serve as the centerpiece for the 1980 album that became “Keepin’ the Summer Alive.”

The efforts Brian’s circle made to bring about a completed “SMiLE” did not involve such deadlines. The efforts began as many as 13 years ago, but certainly no fewer than six years ago. In 1991, a court order severing Brian’s business and patient ties with Landy led to his affairs being handled by his second wife, Melinda, whom he married in 1995.

The next year, “SMiLE” lyricist Van Dyke Parks delivered to Warner Brothers Records his quadrennial solo album, “Radio Free America,” and it got rejected. Label president Lenny Waronker, a longtime friend dating back to the mid-‘60s, suggested to Parks that the songs had more commercial potential than did Parks’ quirky singing voice, and suggested in particular that one of them be re-recorded with Brian singing.

“This happened to be a period in which I wanted my records to actually sell,” Parks recalled in 1996, after re-crafting its songs with lyrics in the same kind of Cole Porter cum Walt Whiteman made of the “SMiLE” songs and recording them with Wilson as “Orange Crate Art.” The album was politely received, and one of several steps following the 1993 release of a dozen “SMiLE” fragments on the “Good Vibrations: Thirty Years of the Beach Boys” boxed set intended to let Brian know that the public didn’t only love his 1963-65 top 40 hits.

In 1996 when Capitol prepared for release a four-CD boxed set of the “Pet Sounds” sessions, onetime Wilson biographer and eventual confidant David Leaf floated the idea of a similar “SMiLE” sessions box. It is possible a finished “SMiLE” wasn’t yet considered a possibility, because when asked about the box, Leaf said, “Having a finished ‘SMiLE’ will never happen. That moment’s lost. What the box would do is collect and finally distribute all the wonderful music from those sessions.” The “Pet Sounds” box didn’t sell enough to pursue the idea further, although a new stereo mix of the 1966 album done for the box would eventually sell 2 million copies after its 1998 release.

That is a key year in the quiet “SMiLE” conspiracy. The release of Brian’s solo album “Imagination” included him revisiting a song he had abandoned in 1965 and 1976, “Sherry She Needs Me,” and successfully completing it as “She Says That She Needs Me” with new lyrics by Carol Bayer Sager. A series of concerts promoted the album, at a small enough scale to allow Wilson to deal with his legendary aversion to touring.

The next year, both Wilson and Parks received a jolt from the ABC miniseries, “The Beach Boys: An American Family.” Although in general a less sensational fictionalization of the group’s story than the 1990 ABC biopic “The Beach Boys: Summer Dreams,” it generally portrayed Wilson as a gifted naïf brought into focus only when working with his cousin Mike Love. And Parks was portrayed as a fast-talking huckster, sponging off Wilson rather than collaborating with him. As the most watched ABC program not hosted by Regis Philbin that year, this image would be the lasting one if nothing changed.

Parks started talking to friends about completing “SMiLE.” “I have no intention of ‘completing’ it after Brian is gone,” he is said to have retorted. “That’s ghoul’s work.” When a British journalist came to Los Angeles to interview him and mentioned liking the song “Cabinessence,” Parks saw to it that the journalist got to say the same thing to Wilson himself before heading back to the U.K. When Melinda Wilson talked Brian into doing a tour of the “Pet Sounds” album, Parks agreed to score an overture for the show.

In 2001, a tribute concert at Radio City Music Hall for Wilson pointedly included “Prayer” and “Surf’s Up,” the latter in a stunning version by Vince Gill, Jimmy Webb and David Crosby. “Phil Ramone told me that it was very important that the song be included,” Gill said in a 2001 interview. After hearing Gill sing the song, Wilson used it and several other “SMiLE” songs as an opening act for Paul Simon in 2001. After recording a complete album with his post-1998 solo band, work began in earnest to first finish the arrangements, then complete the lyrics, then premiere in February at London’s Royal Albert Hall, and then to record that last light from the ‘60s.

And maybe, because it was completed, the ‘60s can’t end now. If “SMiLE” matters as a piece of popular music literature, maybe the decade is now going to go on forever. What is ‘SMiLE’? A 60-something’s Cantata to the American Dream (This previously unpublished piece was written as a sidebar to “The Long Journey to ‘SMiLE.’”) A bunch of guys (and one girl) gather around a campfire, get comfortable singing some songs they all know and then launch into a complicated, 50-minute joke.

That image most captures what Brian Wilson and his musicians do in a concert intended to present the original Beach Boy’s “SMiLE” to the world. If there is one central thing those of us who spent up to 37 years speculating about what the thing would be missed, it is the level and nature of its humor. We imagined the California songwriter had done rock’n’roll’s “East of Eden,” when all along what he really wanted to do was its “Cannery Row.”

What is “SMiLE?” When Wilson began his 1966-67 collaboration with lyricist Van Dyke Parks, he said he wanted to do a “teenage symphony to God.” That never really fit. He was 24 when they started on the thing, for one thing, and he had to set it aside until 2003 to complete. So try this: “SMiLE” is a 60-something’s Cantata to the American Dream. Its lightness, and its almost serial structure of building mini-movements into songs and strings of songs into movements beg the more informal label among serious vocal works. And both the subject matter and the medium reflect the idea of America.

Wilson and Parks – a session keyboardist and strings arranger at the time whose sessions ranged from Disney animated soundtracks to Paul Revere and the Raiders – intermingled three ideas. One involved this country’s westward expansion created by the evolution of transportation. A second used childhood to reflect potential in a country that constantly reinvents itself. A third involved the role that the Virgin Land itself plays in the first two. And that sounds so heavy! It’s not, mostly because the two concocted it using various conventions of American song as a response to 1966 rock’s fascination with droning Asian modes.

Some songs are quoted directly, most obviously the country song “You Are My Sunshine” and a torchy version of Johnny Mercer’s “I Want to Be Around.” Some titles become word play, “Home on the Range,” “C C Rider” and “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” among others. Others inspire melodies, a riff from “Rhapsody in Blue” that Wilson built into a stanza that then reminded Parks of Marty Robbins’ “El Paso.” As a recording, “SMiLE” finally confirms that Wilson stands alongside America’s greatest songwriters. As a stage piece, though, it comes alive. Sight comedy abounds. When musicians aren’t playing, they join in a pantomime playing denizens at a cantina, a fitness club or a Keystone-like firehouse. All of which, among other things, turns the conflagration that “SMiLE” once seemed into that inviting campfire.

Steve Webb

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