Junk for Code

indulgences or a postmodern text?

Just by chance I caught a celebratory program on Joni Mitchell on SBS television last night. I watched with interest as I've decided to build a CS collection of classic albums of popular music. Whatching the program I was reminded of Blue, which I once owned and thought highly of.

I tried to access Joni Mitchell's website to look at her paintings, but no luck. The site was down. (It still is. This and thisis the best I can do.)

Then I spend some time in the small hours of the morning exploring the Beach Boys Smile sessions that happened just after Pet Sounds album in from the mid 1960s.

There is more on the Smile album here. It's a musically humerous jigsaw puzzle with half of the pieces missing.

What is widely known is that the aborted Smile album includes Good Vibrations, Heroes and Villains, Cabin Essence, Wind Chimes & Surfs Up.

I had purchased the Pet Sounds CD early in the day. It is a lush, textured album, melancholy and introspective, and full of insecurity, joy and love. All of this is polyphonically tied together by the innovative use of alternately sighing/thundering dynamics and multi-layered instrumental and vocal tracks. The songs appear to have been built up musical fragment by fragment. It is a record that makes you think in terms of lyrics, harmony, melody, the layers of sound, the time or moment when the song is produced and the historical cultural time. A landmark album that was a commercial failure.

Brian Wilson has recently been performing Pet Sounds live.

It is the brilliance of Pet Sounds that arouses my interest in the Smile album, even if it is described as a teenage symphony to God. That's a long way from teenagers having fun fun fun till Daddy takes the T-Bird away. It's more about musical meditation on the Californian Dream. Surf's Up now means the dream is over. This was art not commerce, and so it opens up way to talk about aesthetics and popular music beyond the rock musician as a romantic genius.

Since Smile is an unfinished album people have lots of fun putting the jigsaw together. Bootlegs of the master tapes of Smile now exist. The music lacks cohesiveness. Hence the jigsaw puzzle.

Novels have been constructed around the idea of finished uncompleted albums. The 1967 Smile album that never was actually opens up possiblities for people to construct their own Smile.

This news looks promising. Brian Wilson is going to perform Smile live in February 2004 in London. Clearly he still has the masterplan or blueprint in his backpocket amost 40 years on. Going back to that pivotal period is such a contrast to the cheap, cash-in nostalgia outfit the latter Beach Boys became.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at October 25, 2003 10:31 PM | TrackBack