Print

Mail

wiki links

A 'teenage symphony to God' revealed

AFP, London
Thursday, Feb 26, 2004, Page 16

"This night has confirmed for you what we fans have known all along: that `Smile' was and is the quintessential pop masterpiece of all time."

Jerry Boyd

Its wayward creator Brian Wilson tantalizingly called it a "teenage symphony to God," and in the 38 years since he abandoned the Beach Boys' album Smile the work has become pop music's equivalent of the Holy Grail -- until now.

Over recent days in London, the secrets of a record hailed for decades as a lost masterpiece have been revealed for the very first time.

Backed by an 18-strong group, Wilson -- now 61, frail and graying -- has taken to the stage of the capital's Royal Festival Hall for a week of shows, playing for the very first time an album billed as the Beach Boys' equivalent of Sergeant Pepper by transatlantic rivals The Beatles.

The performances have left many critics transfixed -- "it might be said straight away that it was an evening that validated claims made on behalf of Wilson's genius," gushed The Observer newspaper -- and fans ecstatic.

The story of Smile is an all-too familiar one in popular music, that of the eccentric musical misfit derailed by powerful drugs.

Although the Beach Boys remain best known for their sugary early 1960s hits about surfing, cars and girls, exemplified by Surfin' USA and the like, Wilson soon moved on to more ambitious things.

The songwriter and dominant musical force in a group which included his brothers Carl and Dennis among others, in the mid-1960s Wilson retreated from a heavy touring schedule to the safety of the recording studio.

There, aged 24, he almost single-handedly created 1966's Pet Sounds, a vastly ambitious work of lush orchestration and soaring harmonies which regularly tops critics' polls of the greatest rock albums ever made.

However Wilson's sudden move away from his highly successful brand of summer-tinged pop confused the public and alienated the rest of the band, with Pet Sounds selling poorly.

Undaunted, he took to the studio again to make an album intended to both answer his critics and provide a full outlet for an imagination fueled by increasing amounts of cannabis and the psychedelic drug LSD.

It was a dangerous mix. Already vulnerable, due in part to his abusive father, the Smile recording sessions saw Wilson fall ever further into self-indulgence and paranoia.

Most famously, after recording one song called Fire, Wilson became convinced a subsequent spate of local blazes had been caused by his work, and Smile was soon abandoned.

Wilson fell into decades of often drug-addled lethargy, a near-forgotten mythical figure of pop history, while Smile saw the light of day only in fragments such as the hit single Good Vibrations.

However two years ago, a now largely recovered Wilson toured the Pet Sounds album to great acclaim before working again with his much younger backing group to piece together Smile.

The result, first revealed at the opening concert last Friday, is a lush, dense and often intensely beautiful 45-minute suite of songs, using, alongside the usual guitars and drums, a string and horn section and more exotic instruments ranging from a ukulele to a swanee whistle.

At last Sunday's show the sell-out audience -- many of a similar age to Wilson -- greeted the performance with tearful reverence and repeated standing ovations.

Fans who watched a still-vulnerable Wilson sitting behind the protection of a piano he never played, his voice at times cracked, were fulsome.

"A true genius and it was simply an awesome privilege to be there," wrote one fan, Paul Knox, on Wilson's Internet site.

"This night has confirmed for you what we fans have known all along: that Smile was and is the quintessential pop masterpiece of all time," gushed Jerry Boyd after the first night.

However the critics remain split on whether the work measures up to its near four-decade billing as a masterwork, some noting that sections -- farmyard noises in one song, another about Wilson's favorite vegetables -- lapse into cloying whimsy.

"Of course, the reason why Smile has been so mythologized is precisely because it never did exist," The Guardian newspaper noted in its review.
This story has been viewed 1940 times.