Album: SMiLE
Artist: Brian Wilson
Born: Inglewood, California
Released: September 2004
Genre: Psychedelia
One regret that haunts me, when it comes to missing important gigs, was not buying tickets for Brian Wilson's performance of SMiLE at the Royal Festival Hall in early 2004. I'd seen Wilson play live (via a big screen in Hyde Park) for the Queen's Jubilee concert in 2002 and my reaction wasn't entirely positive. This led me to believe that he wouldn't be able to carry off the full performance of SMiLE a few years later, but how wrong I was. By this time, his stage fright was better under control and his vocal training had strengthened his voice, and Wilson also had the support of a 10-piece backing band and a 10-piece string section. My only consolation was seeing him play the Sunday afternoon slot at Glastonbury in 2005, when the clouds miraculously parted and, after several days of heavy rain, the sun shone down on all the mud-caked revellers. It was a very memorable set, though watching it back again it's clear the band were carrying his performance. Wilson has always been more at home in the studio, right from when he had his nervous breakdown in the mid-60s and decided to spend his time instead experimenting with weird techniques, like echo chambers. For the SMiLE sessions, Wilson rekindled his working relationship with lyricist Van Dyke Parks (who himself produced a stunning 60s pop gem, Song Cycle), and also brought in younger musician Darian Sahanaja of The Wondermints. This proved to be another fertile period of creativity for Wilson and, by his own admission, the finished version of SMiLE ended up very different from his original vision.
One regret that haunts me, when it comes to missing important gigs, was not buying tickets for Brian Wilson's performance of SMiLE at the Royal Festival Hall in early 2004. I'd seen Wilson play live (via a big screen in Hyde Park) for the Queen's Jubilee concert in 2002 and my reaction wasn't entirely positive. This led me to believe that he wouldn't be able to carry off the full performance of SMiLE a few years later, but how wrong I was. By this time, his stage fright was better under control and his vocal training had strengthened his voice, and Wilson also had the support of a 10-piece backing band and a 10-piece string section. My only consolation was seeing him play the Sunday afternoon slot at Glastonbury in 2005, when the clouds miraculously parted and, after several days of heavy rain, the sun shone down on all the mud-caked revellers. It was a very memorable set, though watching it back again it's clear the band were carrying his performance. Wilson has always been more at home in the studio, right from when he had his nervous breakdown in the mid-60s and decided to spend his time instead experimenting with weird techniques, like echo chambers. For the SMiLE sessions, Wilson rekindled his working relationship with lyricist Van Dyke Parks (who himself produced a stunning 60s pop gem, Song Cycle), and also brought in younger musician Darian Sahanaja of The Wondermints. This proved to be another fertile period of creativity for Wilson and, by his own admission, the finished version of SMiLE ended up very different from his original vision.
Much of pop music history can be seen as a conversation (or dialectic) between America and Britain, and the beauty of Pet Sounds was how it responded to the music of The Beatles and upped the stakes. SMiLE was envisaged to be the follow-up to Pet Sounds, and its deeply American outlook was intended as a counterpoint to Beatlemania, its vision stretching the breadth of the country from Plymouth Rock to Hawaii. Sadly, the project was rejected in 1967, partly the result of opposition from band members like Mike Love, who called it "a whole album of Brian's madness". Few music lovers have much time for Mike Love. SMiLE clearly wasn't some insane psychedelic flight of fancy; I see it as Americana before its time, before even Dylan got there with The Basement Tapes sessions and before The Beatles went back to their roots with The White Album. Wilson in some ways was the anti-Dylan, without even the slightest hint of cool, his influences being Phil Spector, doo-wop, prototype rock & roll, barbershop quartets, ragtime, mock-Polynesian Tiki music, cowboy movies and old American classics like You Are My Sunshine, which appears on track 5 of this record. As well as the obvious highlights like Good Vibrations, Heroes & Villains and Surf's Up (probably my favourite Beach Boys song, even above God Only Knows), there are so many other stunning songs, including Wonderful, instrumental Mrs O'Leary's Cow and Cabinessence. As with Roll Plymouth Rock, Cabinessence tells the story of America's pioneers in a uniquely Brian Wilson take on folk music. The record also has darker, psychedelic moments like Wind Chimes, which give an eerie insight into Wilson's fragile state of mind in the 60s. Overall, though, the effect is magical and uplifting. In fact, if this music doesn't make you smile, you might be a little dead inside.
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