In my mind, I will always link American Idiot with Brian Wilson's SMiLE, because I bought them on the same day with a Best Buy gift certificate. The BB checkout person asked if I was buying Green Day for my kid or Brian Wilson for my dad, and was astounded when I said they were both for me. Apparently suburban big box retailers weren't accustomed to buyers with to cross-generational (and genre-ational) taste.
The story of the Beach Boys' Smile is well known. Because of pressures from the group and label, Brian Wilson abandoned the project in early 1967, and it remained unreleased and unfinished for 37 years. The album was widely available on bootlegs as a handful of completed songs (mostly released on 1967's Smiley Smile) and assorted fragments of other songs.
In the late 1990s, Brian started touring again, backed by members of L.A.'s Wondermints, and started performing some of the Smile tracks along with more well known hits. After a tour where they performed Pet Sounds with an orchestra, they decided to perform another show with Smile, and had to fit the unfinished parts into something cohesive.
The new Smile was designed to be performed onstage, and the album was just a recording of the performance with a few overdubs. Some parts are identifiable from the bootlegs, and other parts were written by Brian and Van Dyke Parks in 2004 to tie up the unfinished album. I was skeptical of that approach until I heard the album, then I was completely floored. Along with nearly every other long time Beach Boys fan.
Here's the first part of Smile, "Our Prayer/Gee" into "Heroes and Villains", taken from the live DVD. The live Smile I saw at the Greek Theater in Berkeley was one of the best concerts I've ever attended.
1 comment:
It's hard to overstate the impact of hearing the "finished" Smile live for the first time. I went to the performance at Davies Symphony Hall in SF. After years of listening to bootlegs and reading articles and books, the power of the music was one thing, but the sense of catharsis was equally powerful. That it had been finished -- that some kind of demon had been purged -- and the music finally allowed to exist in public was really a very powerful experience.
Post a Comment