It was early 1967 and Beach Boys frontman Brian Wilson was driving his car under the influence of barbiturates while listening to the radio. The Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever,” recently released, came on, and he pulled over to listen. The song was good. Wilson was devastated. Then-assistant Michael Vosse, who was sitting in the passenger seat, recalls Wilson saying: “They did it already—what I wanted to do with Smile. Maybe it’s too late.” Then he burst out laughing. “But the moment he said it,” Vosse says in the Showtime documentary Beautiful Dreamer, “he sounded very serious.”
Notwithstanding the laughter, Wilson was right to worry. He was hurtling toward a critical juncture in the history of popular music, after which his band would enter a terminal decline. The Beatles’ latest album was the airtight August 1966 release Revolver, inspired by the Beach Boys’ perfect Pet Sounds, which was itself inspired by the Beatles’ Rubber Soul. At the time, Wilson was working on Smile, a self-consciously American album meant to fend off the British Invasion. But Smile was too advanced for the era’s technical limitations, and Wilson too drug-addled to complete it. It was never released. The Beatles followed “Strawberry Fields” with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Beach Boys released Smiley Smile, a lo-fi album with stripped-down versions of the tracks recorded for Smile, and the notion that the two bands were ever in competition to reach the pinnacle of popular music began to look like a joke.
It wasn’t. A critical reappraisal of the Beach Boys’ output between the mid-1960s and the early 1970s has rightly restored their reputation as one of the greatest, most innovative, and versatile musical acts of the 20th century. The eventual 2011 release of what was left of Smile proved that the Beatles’ place in history at the top of popular music was a product of contingency, not destiny. And if it’s too late to rewrite that history, it’s nonetheless appropriate to recognize the greatness of what the Beach Boys did release.
If you associate the Beach Boys only with their juvenile-but-catchy early releases, you’re a victim of selection bias — specifically, the selection of your local oldies-station DJ. When the band started in 1961, Wilson’s abusive father, Murry, was their manager, and Brian, brothers Carl and Dennis, cousin Mike Love, and friend Al Jardine adopted surf rock as a strategic way to get on the radio. Songs such as “Surfer Girl” and “In My Room” suggested artistic ambitions, but the band’s music never developed. Then the moody Wilson, sick of touring and of the band’s one-note image, started staying home, smoking marijuana, and writing more complicated music.
The result of Wilson’s introspection was The Beach Boys Today!, released in 1965. After an A-side filled with upbeat rockers comes a B-side featuring six love songs. Wilson wrote dense, Phil Spector–inspired arrangements, hired session musicians — including an organist, three saxophonists, a twelve-string guitarist, and someone playing a timpani on “Please Let Me Wonder” — to play them, and coaxed sweet harmonies from his bandmates. The band followed that release up with singles such as “California Girls,” whose opening riff was the product of one of Wilson’s LSD trips, and “The Little Girl I Once Knew,” a favorite of John Lennon that used silence as a pre-chorus. Then came Pet Sounds (1966), often considered one of the greatest albums in the history of popular music. Suffice it to say its reputation is earned.
Smile was next. Whatever Wilson was doing when he pulled over to listen to “Strawberry Fields,” we can assume the album was on his mind. He had told a magazine in 1966 that it was to be as much an improvement on Pet Sounds as that album was on Summer Days (and Summer Nights!) — the commercially minded follow-up to Today! — and releases of the recording sessions from that era confirm the beauty and technical complexity of the music.
But the idea of the album was distinctive, too. Wilson’s co-writer, Van Dyke Parks, said recently: “Everyone was hung up and obsessed with everything totally British. So we decided to take a gauche route that we took, which was to explore American slang, and that’s what we got.”
Parks, a countercultural figure, musical luminary, and outspoken liberal, has since disclaimed the self-conscious Americanness of the album. But to listen to what was salvaged from the Smile sessions is to hear music that is defiant in its affirmation of American culture, history, and geography at a time when the counterculture was vilifying the U.S. as a force for evil and critics were interested in bands from overseas. Smile was no political statement, and it contained its fair share of subversion and irony — consider the title of operatic masterpiece “Surf’s Up,” a bit of wordplay meant to suggest the band was leaving its fun-in-the-sun subject matter behind. But the band retold the displacement of American Indians in “Do You Like Worms?”, discussed the innocence of early America and the romantic nature of conflict among settlers in “Heroes and Villains,” and penned an impressionistic portrait of railroad workers, cornfields, and the American West in “Cabinessence.”
The collapse of the album — owing to bandmate Mike Love’s distaste for the new music, Wilson’s drug use and teetering mental health, and the technical complexity of Wilson’s “modular” recording style — has been recounted at length, but no history of the band is complete without a discussion of the great, if uneven, music that came afterwards. Carl Wilson called Smiley Smile “a bunt instead of a grand slam,” but the album pioneered lo-fi music and features one of the band’s most beautiful harmonies toward the end of “Wind Chimes.” 1967’s soulful Wild Honey may have been only 23 minutes long, but, as Robert Christgau said, every song “ends before you wish it would.” 1968’s Friends gave undue attention to the crank practice of Transcendental Meditation, but every song is an earworm. Sunflower, a sun-drenched rocker from 1971, underperformed on the charts but was the band’s first true performance as a collective unit and one of the best albums of the decade. Surf’s Up, also from 1971, featured a terrible attempt by Mike Love to ingratiate himself with campus Communists (“Student Demonstration Time”), but the album’s final three songs are some of the most moving music Brian Wilson ever wrote. The band may fell off after that, except for 1977’s Moog-laced Love You, one of the first New Wave albums and an alternately gorgeous, embarrassing, and heart-rending masterpiece.
And what of Wilson and his legacy? Happily, the critical reappraisal of his work happened while he’s still alive, although it was too late for brothers Dennis and Carl. Unhappily, decades of hard-drug use and abuse from his psychologist have left him mentally shot. And even if his star has risen since the band’s collapse, mentioning the Beach Boys alongside the great acts in music history can earn you a cocked eyebrow. So maybe Wilson was right to be worried when he heard “Strawberry Fields Forever,” but he sold himself short. Nobody can touch the band’s best music, nobody’s output was as versatile, and nobody has as weird or as compelling a story as the Beach Boys, America’s greatest rock band.
Theodore Kupfer is the managing editor of National Review Online.
