Brian’s SMiLE

Grown men were crying. Rock’s royalty, intelligentsia, and essayists were standing in the aisles. Sir Paul McCartney gave high fives for Brian was back.

Finally after nearly 4 decades, they all came to America from their seating in London’s Royal Philharmonic Hall. After a 5 minute standing ovation, Brian Wilson’s 45 minute salute to Mark Twain’s Americana and a symphony to God entitled, SMiLE celebrated the Iron horse (railroad) of industrialism to the orange crate art of the American farm. The elements of existence and the stages of humankind were also given a salute. This is Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys winter of content. Brian’s “new” album is a hit.

Years ago, Wilson’s initial work on the album slowed with a genetic mental illness that interfered with his work. Further, the band withered with divisions about the merits of the album and finally Brian gave up.

The first time that he heard SGT. PEPPER’S LONELY HEART BAND was the beginning of the end of SMiLE. Pepper was not only a concept album, but a commercially attractive vinyl.

The cover was excellent, the songs about all the lonely people like Mr. Kite, Lovely Rita Meter Maid, and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds who joined the club to urge each other on relative to life’s travails ended with a sad bloke who blew his brains out in the midst of a London traffic jam.

Brian felt that SMiLE was too subtle and not commercial enough to compare with PEPPER. The decision to drop the album was also the time, Yanks dumped the band. They fell into a five year funk in America, although they still played to capacity crowds in the rest of the world. Thus, Brian was even more depressed. The year was 1967.

He hid in his bedroom. An undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenia, he spent days in his bed listening to “Be My Baby” by the Ronnettes hundreds of times a day. For hours, he also talked to his dead father on his right and an illusionary friend named Danny on his left. Although he bathed, he never used the shower because he thought raw red blood came from the shower nozzle.

His breakfast was a T-bone steak, a milk shake, and a sizable stash of heroin. Outside his bedroom, he played in a tent in a sandbox in the living room and headed to the recording studio hidden behind the library and its secret entry. He loved the swimming pool when it was empty so he could sing in it, and spent day after day vegetating in his mansion, ballooning to over 300 pounds.

SMILEY SMILE was released in the place of SMiLE. SMILEY meant a grin induced with drugs and the album was what NEW MUSICAL EXPRESS called “daring” and “experimental”.  It contained a song about shimmering wind chimes, a barking ghost inviting one into the woods, and a bald headed lady chasing after her pill box. It was outrageous, entertaining, and exhausting to listen to. It was a top ten hit all over the world save for the States.

For years, fans would innocently ask when he was going to finish this original album collecting dust in the vaults of EMI-Capitol Music. Well it finally happened.

Brian played 16 dates in the UK, France, Belgium, and Germany. In the mean time,

The Beach Boys have won every award under the sun, still play over 150 gigs a year, and have sold roughly 100 million records. That put’s them up there with the Beatles and the Stones. They had a top 20 hit here in the states last summer that went platinum.

In January, GOOD VIBRATIONS  a musical utilizing 30 Beach Boys songs will premiere. After all these years, BRIAN WILSON’S SMILE, a new recording of the original songs is now in all retail outlets all across America.

At any rate, some times there is a happy ending. The saga continues.