Had SMiLE been released as planned in 1967, we can now say with certainty that it would have
re-established the Beach Boys as a top group, secured Brian Wilson's position as the world's most innovative songwriter and producer and changed the course of popular music.
The Rolling Stones, the Beatles and the Beach Boys each recorded conceptual albums that year. Their Satanic Majesties Request is considered by many to be the Stones' worst record; The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is regarded by most to be above reproach.
The Beach Boys' SMiLE
scuttled for a variety of reasons, was finally re-recorded by Beach Boys mastermind Brian Wilson this year and released Sept. 28. Not only does it decisively trump, as its cheerleaders contended for 37 years, anything released by the Beatles, Pink Floyd and even the Beach Boys' 1966 album Pet Sounds (considered by many the best pop record ever recorded), but it can be placed beside the greatest music of all time.
SMiLE's world is buoyant and fragrant, with pleasant surprises arriving each minute. Each thematic shift is fluid, each new scene warm and welcoming. The record mesmerizes the listener like nothing else, with no whiffs of negativity, pretense or ego emanating from its creative headwaters.
The singing voice of Brian Wilson is this recording's tragic weak point. Now in his 60's, Wilson's voice is unsteady, of limited range, and beset by odd slurring. And it is at its worst on the album's opener, Heroes & Villains and its closer, a re-recorded and rearranged version of 1966's #1 Good Vibrations.
Wilson's current band members create a respectable pastiche of the vintage Beach Boys, but without those most distinctive and emotive of harmonies, the potential of SMiLE is not realized on this recording, and sadly never will be. Perhaps any attempt to recreate the Beach Boys' vocals should have been abandoned in favor of anonymous women's and children's voices. After all, toddlers will enjoy this recording as much as those on acid trips.
The music of each century comes to be defined by a handful of composers, innovations and individual pieces of music. The
non-appearance of SMiLE in 1967 not only doomed the career of the Beach Boys and allowed the Beatles to become the overrated phenomenon they became and still are, but it robbed the 20th century of one of its most important, unique musical achievements. No pop songwriter today is as ambitious and daring as Brian Wilson was in the mid-1960s, and none have a vocal instrument as special as the Beach Boys at their disposal.
2004's SMiLE despite its vocal flaws and the computer technology that eased its recording challenges, is an incredible achievement -one which raises the potential of pop music and will influence musicians for hundreds of years. But more importantly it calls us all to confront our mortality and the low times of our lives with optimism, friendship and, of course, smiles.
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Jake Mecklenborg
