The Haunting Story of The Beach Boys' "Smile" Well Told in 2004 Documentary

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Right now I’m listening to one of the conjectural reconstructions I did of the Beach Boys’ legendary lost album Smile, this time following the track list printed in the album covers from 1966 while Capitol awaited the album – which was in vain because Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys’ leader, principal songwriter and record producer, literally went crazy during the sessions and ultimately abandoned the album. I got inspired to pull out my Beach Boys’ CD’s because last night after the Balboa Park organ concert my husband Charles and I screened a 2004 BBC documentary from their Manchester studios called The Beach Boys: Wouldn’t It Be Nice which was occasioned by the arrival in Britain of the tour Brian Wilson did to support Smile in the version he finally released as a solo album in 2003 with his original collaborator, lyricist and producer Van Dyke Parks. The Beach Boys have been stuck with the image of their early hits and the stereotype that surrounds them to this day of the group that sang about surfing, cars, girls (not women!) and little else for so long that a lot of modern listeners are shocked to find that they were the one group in the 1960’s the Beatles considered their artistic rivals. The Wouldn’t It Be Nice documentary takes us through the early years of the Beach Boys’ story: how they were the three sons of a pretty normal suburban couple in the Los Angeles suburb of Hawthorne, California – only their dad, Murry Wilson, was a frustrated songwriter who had had a minor hit with “Two Step, Side Step,” recorded by Lawrence Welk. The relationship between Murry and Brian Wilson reminds me a lot of that between Leopold and Wolfgang Mozart: a mediocre musician who sires a genius and then doesn’t know what to do with him.

The original Beach Boys were Brian Wilson, his brothers Dennis and Carl, their cousin Mike Love and a family friend, Al Jardine (though he was replaced briefly during the early years by another family friend, David Marks), and they developed their trademark vocal harmonies from Brian’s careful study of the vocal group the Four Freshmen. In fact, Brian Wilson once said of the Beach Boys’ sound, “You take some Chuck Berry licks, add some Four Freshmen vocal harmonies on top of them, and you’ve got the Beach Boys.” From their initial single release, “Surfin’” (a song inspired by Dennis Wilson, the only Beach Boy who actually surfed), on a tiny L.A.-based label called Candix (recorded in a garage converted into a recording studio by local couple Hite and Dorinda Morgan and released in just one take with everything “studio-live,” i.e. recorded all at once with no overdubs), to a major-label contract with Capitol (probably not coincidentally, also the Four Freshmen’s label), they had a string of hits and became one of the two top rock ‘n’ roll groups in the U.S. The other was the Four Seasons, and I once joked that lf you lived or wanted to live on the East Coast, you thought the Four Seasons were the future of rock ‘n’ roll; if you lived, or wanted to live, on the West Coast you thought the Beach Boys were the future of rock ‘n’ roll.

Little did we Americans know that the real future of rock ‘n’ roll was over in England – and not even in London,but in freaking Liverpool, where a band called The Beatles was about to break out of the underground club scene (literally, since most of the Liverpool rock clubs were in basements) and become international superstars. The Beatles toppled the Beach Boys and other American groups from their perch on top of the U.S. charts – during one week ini 1964 all five of the top positions on the Billboard charts were held by Beatles records – and the Beach Boys responded with a shimmering new record called “California Girls.” On the surface it was another song about sun, fun and girls, but musically it was a huge advance over everything the Beach Boys had recorded before, with unusual combinations of instruments (like the guitar-and-piano blend Brian worked out for the instrumental introduction) and more complex chords and harmonies. Brian said that he wrote it after taking LSD for the first time and he wanted to reproduce the shimmering effect of the drug musically. Unfortunately, Brian’s increasing drug consumption led into his plunge into mental illness. It had begun in late 1964, when on a flight into Houston for a gig with the band he had a sudden panic attack and decided then and there that he would no longer tour with the band. Instead he would stay in L.A., write songs for upcoming Beach Boys albums, produce the backing tracks with the fabled “Wrecking Crew” (the cadre of studio musicians – one of whom, drummer Hal Blaine, is actually interviewed here – associated with Phil Spector and his fabled “wall of sound” productions, which Brian studied incessantly the way he had once studied the harmonies of the Four Freshmen), and then all the other Beach Boys would have to do was add the vocals on top of Brian’s backing tracks. Just how skillfully Brian used the Wrecking Crew became apparent with the release of Stack O’Tracks, a collection of Beach Boys songs with the vocals removed and only the instrumental backings included (essentially a karaoke album well before karaoke existed).

In 1965 the Beatles released their album Rubber Soul, and Bill Miller, the Capitol executive responsible for sequencing the Beatles’ albums for U.S. release, replaced four of the songs from the British version with two folkish songs from the second side of the British Beatles’ Help! LP. Miller’s intent was to reposition the Beatles as a “folk-rock” group, making it seem like they were following in the footsteps of Bob Dylan, The Byrds and other U.S. groups blending rock and folk music. Brian Wilson was hugely impressed by the American version of Rubber Soul and he decided to make the next Beach Boys album not only a coherent program instead of just a few hit singles and filler, but one which would tell a continuous story: the history of a love affair, from its beginning to its end. The result was Pet Sounds, which was a commercial disappointment, though not an outright flop: it reached #10 on the Billboard albums chart and it “broke” three hit singles, “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “God Only Knows” and a cover of the Kingston Trio’s hit “Sloop John B.” It also scared the hell out of the Beatles, Paul McCartney in particular; after Pet Sounds was released in Britain Paul called a band meeting and told them, “Brian Wilson has just made the greatest rock album ever made. We’re going to have to work our asses off to top it.” The Beatles did just that with their late-1966 release Revolver, and Brian determined to make an album of his own with the Beach Boys that would eclipse Revolver once and for all and establish the Beach Boys, not the Beatles, as the true creative leaders of rock.

The project, which was called Smile because Brian thought it was important that it include humor, began promisingly with an audacious new single, “Good Vibrations,” which Brian co-wrote with Mike Love (though there are different stories of just how much Love contributed to the lyrics), which became the biggest hit single the Beach Boys had had to that time. To write the songs for the rest of Smile, Brian hooked up with Van Dyke Parks, an unusual producer, songwriter and singer with a penchant for self-consciously poetic lyrics that literally made no sense. The makers of this documentary include clips from both Parks and Mike Love, who complained during the Smile sessions that he coudnlt sing the lyrics because he didn’t understand them, At one point Love asked Parks what a particular line meant, and Parks said, “To be honest, I don’t know what it means.” Love was furious – he said, “Even the guy who wrote this says he doesn’t know what it means, and we’re supposed to sing it?” – and this documentary includes clips from both Love and Parks, who not surprisingly had different recollections of the encounter. Parks said that he didn’t know what his lyrics meant literally, but he was writing images and they made sense poetically. Smile was recorded in bits and pieces and never definitively finished because even Van Dyke Parks got tired of Brian’s self-indulgence and walked out, but the final straw apparently came when Paul McCartney came to the U.S. and visited Brian. After asking Brian how his new album was coming along, Paul said, “And now I’d like to show you what we’re doing.”

Accounts differ as to what happened next: in his alleged autobiography, also called Wouldn’t It Be Nice (and I use the word “alleged” because, though Brian Wilson and Todd Gold were listed as co-authors, Brian has said in more recent interviews that he never even read the book, much less wrote it), Brian said he heard Paul play the song “She’s Leaving Home” from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Beach Boys biographer Steven Gaines, in his book Heroes and Villains, says that Paul played Brian a tape of the final song on Sgt. Pepper, “A Day in the Life,” and that’s the version I consider more likely. I suspect that once Brian heard “A Day in the Life,” he realized that even if he finished and released Smile, it wouldn’t be heard as the album that redefined rock music as an art form: rather, it would be dismissed as “The Beach Boys’ Sgt. Pepper.” The result was a long, slow descent into madness in which Brian realized that he wanted his grand piano installed in a sandbox so he could feel the sand between his toes as he composed (his then-wife Marilyn is interviewed in this documentary and she remembers thinking, “There goes our dining room”), and as he slowly withdrew from the world he ended up literally staying in bed for four years, 1972-1976, leavling only to get food and use the bathroom.

Marilyn realized that desperate measures were called for – otherwise she feared that Brian would go the way of Elvis (who was still alive in 1976 but on his own drug-fueled downward spiral that would kill him a year later) – and so she called in a controversial therapist named Dr. Eugene Landy. Landy’s “therapy” method included being with the “patient” 24/7 and controlling virtually every aspect of his life – his first step was putting padlocks on the Wilsons’ refrigerator door so Brian couldn’t just keep stuffing himself with food – and he also aimed to get Brian back into the recording studio and even before a live audience. (I remember seeing the Beach Boys in concert at the San Diego Sports Arena in 1981 and watching Brian shamble his way to a piano, where he croaked out a version of “God Only Knows” that was alternately bad and heartbreaking given the gap between how he had once sung this song in 1966 and what it sounded like now.) The result was a promo campaign called “Brian Is Back!” that proved awfully premature, though it resulted in a quite good album called 15 Big Ones that was half Brian Wilson originals and half 1950’s rock and R&B covers.

It also produced an NBC-TV special produced by Lorne Michaels, the comedy genius behind Saturday Night Live, and he used some of the original SNL cast members in sketches, notably one in which Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi (yet another creative mega-talent whose brain was wrecked by drugs and met an early death!) play police officers who arrest Brian Wilson for posing as a surfer when he’s never actually been one. They take him to a beach and put his bloated body on a surfboard – which, as Marilyn pointed out, he’s holding backwards, with the tail fin actually pointing forward. Eventually Dr. Landy went too far – he co-produced an album with Brian Wilson and took co-writing credit on the songs – which resulted in him losing his psychiatrist’s license due to a conflict of interest. (The episode was covered in a magazine story under the inevitable title, “Bad Vibrations.”) Reportedly, Brian was so spooked by Dr. Landy’s treatment of him that while watching the filming of the movie about his life, Love and Mercy (ironically named after one of the songs Dr. Landy had claimed credit for as co-writer!), he went ballistic at the sight of Paul Giamatti, who was playing Dr. Landy in the film. And Dr. Landy wasn’t the only person from his past Brian had harsh words for in this documentary; he also said he couldn’t stand Mike Love any more because he found Love’s ego too hard to take. At least part of

Brian’s bitterness towards Love was that he had secured legal ownership of the name “The Beach Boys” – which made it something of a surprise that in 2012 Brian participated in a Beach Boys reunion that brought back together all the surviving members of the original group (though by then both Dennis and Carl Wilson had died, Dennis in a boatinig accident at 39 and Carl of cancer; contrary to the account in this film, it’s not Dennis Wilson – who had started a friendship with a truly sinister man named Charles Manson and had actually recorded one of his songs, “Never Learn Not to Love,” though Manson had called his version “Cease to Exist” and threatened to have Dennis’s kids kidnapped because Dennis had changed the words from “Cease to exist” to “Cease to Resist” – but Carl who kept the group going once Brian’s mental state incapacitated him). They produced a new CD on Capitol to celebrate the 50th anniversary, That’s Why God Made the Radio, and did a concert tour that produced a live album before the deep-seated rivalries once again broke them up. Wouldn’t It Be Nice is a sad story, especially given Brian Wilson’s admission that he still hears voices in his head telling him things like “We’re going to kill you” and “You don’t have much longer left to live.” But it’s also a hopeful story in that Brian was able to come back from the abyss and become a creative force in music again – unlike Syd Barrett, the original founder of Pink Floyd, who likewise burned himself out early on too many drugs but, though he lived until age 60, never returned to the world of music or even made it back to basic sanity.