Dan Hutt 12/12/07 Brian Wilson, Van Dyke Parks, and the Beach Boys
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Dan Hutt 12/12/07 Brian Wilson, Van Dyke Parks, and the Beach Boys' Smile: Cubist Aesthetics, Modular Democracy, and the Writerliness of the Unreleased Masterpiece First of all, like millions of other fans, I wish the original Beach Boys' Smile album had actually been completed and officially released. I wish Brian Wilson, with the artistic and moral support of his bandmates, record label, family, and co-lyricist Van Dyke Parks , had shown up to that final mixdown session booked in May of 1967 at Western Recorders studio in Hollywood, CA. Or that Capitol Records had written him the blank check for the additional year (at least) of studio time he knew deep down he'd need to be able to dibble and dabble, add and subtract, to craft the album precisely as he knew it should be. Had he been given that deserved opportunity, god only knows what manner of cultural icon the world would have today. "Smile makes Pet Sounds stink," said Beach Boy brother Dennis Wilson at the time (Carlin 114). Not that the Brian Wilson solo version of Smile, featuring his Jeffrey Foskett and Darian Sahanaja/Wondermints-led backing band isn't stunningly brilliant, it just doesn't have that "Beach Boys [vocal] blend" that Wilson used to finesse so (seemingly) effortlessly, as well as the "in the pocket" backing tracks of L.A.'s premier session players of the 60s era, the "Wrecking Crew." Luckily, in any case, many of us collectors have at least ended up with some advanced- stage-of-completion version of Smile from the many "bootleg" strains in circulation presently. Hutt 2 As Jeremy Glogan notes, . since the time that Smile was abandoned in May 1967 it has been re-materialising in myriad forms. The eighty-eight recording sessions that took place between 9 April 1966 and 18 May 1967 have given rise to an abundance of high quality bootlegs which coexist alongside the occasional appearance of Smile tracks on subsequent official Beach Boys releases. This, fuelled by spiralling conjecture over the ensuing decades, has resulted in Smile's potential ruins being rebuilt over and over. Many of the constituent parts are on offer, yet there is no precise blueprint, which means each version is different (69). To even the most critical listener, most of the songs sound ready for the cutting lathe, but then of course, no one, including Wilson, knows what more could have been done given more time and support. As Larry Starr explains, "When Smile died, a kind of fairy tale grew up around it and its creator Brian Wilson, a tale eventually assuming mythic proportions. Smile became rock's lost masterpiece . ." (39). In the absence of the glories of an actualized Smile, this essay argues that due to 1) Smile's cubist aesthetic and Brian Wilson's modular recording technique, and 2) the intrinsic writerliness of bootleg records such as the Beach Boys' unreleased Smile, those in possession of the unreleased Smile recordings enjoy multiple, active freedoms with the artwork, many of which would not exist had the album been officially released as originally intended. In effect, we have become agents not only of Smile's continued mythology, but its literal (if technically illegal) production. Hutt 3 While I don't suggest that Wilson consciously engaged a cubist approach in the Smile project, the residual effect of the many disjointed, unsequenced song sections we have left from the sessions is certainly cubist in nature, closely resembling Marshall McLuhan's explanation of the art form: "In other words, cubism, by giving the inside and outside, the top, bottom, back, and front and the rest, in two dimensions, drops the illusion of perspective in favor of instant sensory awareness of the whole. Cubism, by seizing on instant total awareness, suddenly announced that the medium is the message" (111). Certainly not exclusive to painting, Roland Barthes quotes playwrite Bertold Brecht in explaining what is a cubist aesthetic in puppetry of Bunraku theatre: " . Bunraku attacks the writing of the spectacle. With us, such writing involves an illusion of totality. 'We find nothing more difficult,' says Brecht, 'than to break with the habit of considering an artistic production as a whole'" (174). Likewise, others such as former Beach Boys business manager and Brother Records label head David Anderle, who is also a successful painter in his own right, have observed the cubist element in Smile and made connections between Wilson's work and the visual arts in general. As Anderle states, "He thought on a very large canvas, and it didn't have any rules and it didn't have any specific dimensions. It was very much a universe, the way he would think about things--he would just go" (Beautiful Dreamer). Anderle further invokes the visual arts when characterizing Wilson's mid-sixties compositions in the language of painting: "If Pet Sounds was his "Blue" period, then Smile would've been his "cubist" period. I mean, it would've been that radical of a move from one art form to another and would've influenced, I think, music at that time as much as Picasso's cubist period influenced art" (Beautiful Dreamer). What might be the most representative of musical cubism was Wilson's simultaneous awareness of the individual parts that composed the whole of the project. Even though the music had been written with Hutt 4 lyricist Van Dyke Parks in a modular approach (which I will discuss shortly) and was recorded in the same sectionally isolated fashion, Wilson knew how the puzzle fit together. In all likelihood, he was the only one who did. The wonderfully illuminating and historically accurate film Beautiful Dreamer: Brian Wilson and the Story of Smile, by director and long-time Beach Boys scholar David Leaf, portrays the process in which Wilson would assemble the parts into a whole: At night, after the recording sessions, Brian and his friends would gather [in Wilson's Bellagio, Beverly Hills mansion] and he would play them the Smile music [dubbed onto acetate from each night's session], explaining how it could all fit together. Having written and recorded in a modular style, the verse or chorus of one song might become the bridge of another. The Wrecking Crew sessionists, led by drummer Hal Blaine, would record at session dates ranging from five minutes to all night with no sense of how their parts fit into the whole of a particular song, much less into the overall album concept. Longtime Beach Boys engineer Chuck Britz at Western Recorders studio couldn't always discern a road map of the sessions, although it was clear to all that Brian was firmly in control and as artistically determined as ever. All the Beach Boys themselves knew was that Brian, as always, would deal out the five or six vocal harmony parts to the group, but this time, the music was a lot weirder and the lyrics a lot more ethereal. Their well-documented inability to see the forest for the trees, particularly on the part of vocalist Mike Love, caused lots of stress in the Smile sessions, the departure of Parks from the project, and ultimately Brian's shelving of the album as a whole. The Beach Boys' objections are more understandable when one considers they had been happily acting within the spectacle, like everyone else under Brian's creative direction. When it occurred to Brian during Hutt 5 the Pet Sounds sessions and then especially during Smile that "the medium is the message," however, music as the Beach Boys and the pop world knew it was about to be turned on its head. A direct extension of the cubist aesthetic of Smile was the modular writing approach of the album, achieved with Parks' lyrical assistance, as well as the modular recording technique employed by Wilson, which took advantage of the latest in recording studio technology. The two artists may have written a verse, bridge, and chorus on a given day, with Wilson descending into the studio that night for their recording, though perhaps each of the three song sections in question might ultimately appear in different songs from one another altogether. Brian would manually splice the reel tape apart and rearrange it as he saw fit. Music professor Daniel Harrison quotes Wilson's description of how the process worked in the case of Smile's centerpiece, "Good Vibrations": "I had a lot of unfinished ideas, fragments of music I called 'feels.' Each feel represented a mood or an emotion I'd felt, and I planned to fit them together like a mosaic." As Harrison explains, "'Good Vibrations' was the first piece where this mosaic effect was felt most strongly, since six different--and mostly disparate--'feels' are assembled" (42). Additionally, composer and Beach Boys contemporary Jimmy Webb remembers, Brian Wilson was one of the first, if not the first guy around who recognized and then utilized the studio's potential as an interactive part of the band and the performers' making of the record . 'I have four tracks, I have 8 tracks, I can bounce things, I can layer things, I can stack things up,' and all of a sudden the studio becomes one of the instruments that you're playing (Beautiful Dreamer) Hutt 6 Such practice is standard in the music industry today (as well as in home recording), and made much easier by the usage of computers in recording. At the time, however, this modular technique, together with the recent advent of multi-track recording, was revolutionary. It is considered that the Beatles' Revolver and the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds albums were the first to employ these advances in technique and technology, although arguably it is Smile that most completely embraces and advances the new palette of artistic possibilities: Up until then, the use of tape recorders had been associated with authenticity: the band would create an (audio) original, this would be recorded on the tape deck, the same thing would later be played back on the turntable.