March 07, 2004
Smile: live
By all accounts Brian Wilson has pulled the mythic lost song cycle off.
The tangled, glorious symphony of celebration and sadness with its Americana and ecological themes performed by "a psychedelic barbershop quartet" is a long way from the fantasy of Southern California life as an endless summer of perfect waves, hot rods and blond beauties.
Producing Smile involved similar production techniques to those used on Pet Sounds. Wilson used the studio as an instrument to work with unconventional arrangements that combined modern rock instrumentation with orchestral touches as well as nonmusical objects including water jugs, Coke bottles, hammers, saws, and bicycle bells. Each song written for SMiLE was recorded in pieces, in various studios, during different sessions, and edited later into completed mixes. Recording in this way was a long and painstaking process.
Hence the complexity of putting it all together and the histories.
Apparently the album will be released this year. Times of London critic Stephen Dalton wrote on hearing the Smile concert that it was a:
"...40-minute crazy-paving collage of song fragments and Looney Tunes jingles, all bookended by the lush glory of 'Heroes and Villains' and the rapturous warble of 'Good Vibrations' ... It was clearly adventurous for its era but it is not difficult to see why Wilson's label and fellow Beach Boys balked at releasing it."
Today the question is: can this reworked three-movement pop suite with each section having its own self-contained thematic suite be considered art rather than entertainment?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at March 7, 2004 08:54 AM | TrackBack