61. Smile/Beautiful Dreamer (2004) - Dir. David Leaf
I like Pink Floyd, David Bowie, T Rex, King Crimson, The Flaming Lips, Ween and many other bands. However, there is one man, from one band, who I believe to be the greatest musical genius since the turn of the 20th Century. The band is, The Beach Boys, and the man is, Brian Wilson. Brian Wilson is the man, and on February 4th, 2004 he gave the world the greatest present a music fan could ever hope for. He, along with his band, performed, for the very first time, the newly completed Smile album. A “teenage symphony to God,” Wilson once called it when he conceived of the album back in 1966. Conceived as a concept album about a flying bicyclist who travels from Plymouth Rock to Hawaii, while listening to the newly recorded finished version, one can close his eyes and envision every last detail.
And now we can do one better. With the release of the this concert film and documentary, we are witness to the creative process behind the music, and to the completed work. To see the legend unfold on screen during the documentary segment, Beautiful Dreamer, is to see the truth unfold from layers of myth, half-truths, and lies. Wilson’s journey from critical darling to musical genius, and from studio mastermind to crazed musical-lunatic, drugged out, and paranoid, is heart wrenching. To see him talk about it now with his droopy, questioning, barely able to smile face is even more so. And, to hear the completed music he and his new band recorded is the one of the most beautiful sounds ever captured - a musical journey that transforms the very air into emotion.
During the course of the documentary, we actually observe Brian Wilson lose a battle to his inner demons, but then triumphantly conquer them some thirty-odd years later. His is a story not often told. Usually, these stories end like Syd Berrett’s, or John Lennon’s - in tragedy. All too often, as lovers of art, music, and film, we hear about an unfinished masterpiece that never was, or lost footage of a film that was rumored to be great. However, this story ends with an abundance of happiness. It could not have ended any better, even if SMILE had been released in 1967. On the contrary, I think it would have ended worse had this happened.
There is no way the world was ready for Smile in 1967. Although the only single released from the album, Good Vibrations, was an instant hit, it was also the most, and only truly, accessible song on the record. Smile, we learn, was constructed in three movements, and each movement was recorded in a modular manner. Each module could then be positioned in different positions in the track. Wilson, who produced, composed and engineered the record, acted like a giant puzzle master, as he would listen to each movement with the various modules in different positions. While recording these pieces, he would often have between fifteen and thirty musicians in the studio, all playing the intricate parts he painstakingly wrote.
The various movements represent different themes, and each is connected by a melody, harmony, lyric, or phrase. The songs that make up the movements talk about everything from exercising, to eating vege-a-tables, to sad memories of a surfer’s lost dreams, to Americana, to barnyard animals, to a cow starting a fire, and back again. The songs, and the movements, are filled with whimsical passages, as well as deeply moving moments of breathtaking beauty. If the world thought The Beatles’ Sgt. Peppers album was a departure for pop rock in ’67, to hear Smile might have caused a global upheaval of pop-culture.
Beautiful Dreamer does a grandiose job of taking us through the entire process, with Wilson and lyricist/collaborator Van Dyke Parks. We get to see how they began the project after the B-Boys had finished Pet Sounds. We see Wilson in the studio, pouring over the mixing console. We see him and Parks, huddled over a piano, feverishly writing the catchy melodies and lyrics. We also get to see the meltdown, and the anger. We get to hear how hard it was for Wilson to deal with his abusive father, and the disappointment he felt when the other Beach Boys returned from a London tour only to hate the new music he had recorded.
But, like the name of the album says, we also get to experience smiles and happiness. After Wilson’s nervous breakdown, and almost total social-isolatio, we get to see an awakening. With some gentle prodding from his wife, and fellow band mates who helped him tour with Pet Sounds a few years before, Wilson begins to purge his soul and dive head-first right back in to where he left off so many years ago. It is almost as if the thirty-five years between those legendary failed Smile sessions and the new Smile sessions never even happened. It was as if Brian Wilson were asleep, waiting for that gentle sound of some cosmic alarm to wake him up and tell him the world to smile.
September 28th of 2005 was a very special day for me. This Sunday night was the night I got to see Brian Wilson perform Smile at the Paramount Theatre in Seattle. It was a night of pure magic, one of those nights that I don’t believe actually happened. It was so great, it just had to be a dream. I have seen some pretty dang good concerts: Pink Floyd, Flaming Lips, Ween, Bob Dylan, Bella Fleck, Richard Lloyd of Television, and others, but none of these filled me with the emotion of this night. The music soared and swirled around my head, and, as I looked around, I saw that almost every single face in the crowd was smiling. Brian Wilson once said that he could no longer smile on the outside, and so he writes music to smile on the inside. With his album, he made me smile, and I eternally grateful.
