Brian Wilson: Farewell, Dumb Angel

Brian Wilson (1942-2025) would have been 83 today. As promised when he passed a couple of weeks ago, here is further tribute. It’s still a bunt. There’s scads more to be said. I found much to salvage from the 1996 essay I mentioned earlier, but I’ll have to hire some kid to type it up! But meantime, there’s this.

The title of this post is not intended as a dis — DumbAngel was the original title of Wilson’s projected masterpiece, and I did want to pay greater homage to it here than I have heretofore done, because it has meant so much to me. Wilson’s vaunted follow up to Pet Sounds took forever to finish. That’s not just hyperbole, it’s literally true. It was never definitively completed. He and his bandmates and session musicians recorded an ocean of material in 1966 and 1967, and Wilson basically cracked up when it came to assembling it. First there was mission creep. It was originally to have been Dumb Angel, his “teenage symphony to God”, a kind of spiritual thing,. Elements of that primary impulse remained throughout the process. But he also shifted gears along the way and it became Smile, an album with elements of comedy and Americana with lyrics by Van Dyke Parks, and that was quite something else. I love both concepts, by the way. If he’d made one or the other or both, I’d have loved whatever he came up with. I can see clearly how to merge them. After all Americana and Spiritualism have a huge middle ground of overlap, with music directly at the center. Somehow he never found THAT place, though. Rather than the projected masterwork he left just fragments. Some of the songs have elements of both themes.

The most complete product of this phase of Wilson’s activity was the well-known #1 single “Good Vibrations”, considered the band’s critical and commercial peak. As with The Beatles’ “Penny Lane/ Strawberry Fields” double-sided single, it was basically a lead single from a batch of sessions that preceded the album. (The Beatles did not include these two songs on Sgt. Pepper in the end, but they were originally intended for it, and to be frank, as an album, it suffers a little from those missing pieces). By contrast, The Beach Boys always intended for “Good Vibrations” to be on their next LP. And for the LP itself, Wilson was employing the same methodology he used for “Good Vibrations”. He’d record an endless number of pieces and sections, with the intent of assembling them together into finished pieces in the studio. While he did finally finish the version of “Good Vibrations” that became the hit single, there are countless OTHER versions of it to be heard, and when you listen to the many out-takes and alternative tracks now available you quickly see how the process could make a guy crazy. The choices to be made are ENDLESS. And he was going to assemble a whole album like this, with recurring motifs, and reprises and callbacks and themes. It was to be a great work of modernist art, both lyrically and musically. Even in its present fragmentary state it is that.

Mind you, this is just the headache of editing, which is on TOP of the musical process itself: writing, then arranging, then rehearsing, then recording, and getting the perfect take. Which would be difficult in ordinary times, with ordinary ingredients, but Wilson was bringing in exotic instrumentation, funny sound effects, duck calls, clown whistles, circus organs, and such like. He was recording live non-musical sounds (e.g. playing with his fork and a water glass at dinner) and humorous conversations. This on top of the classic orchestra, the standard rock and jazz instruments, etc. He was bringing every form into it: barbershop quartet! Symphonic movements! More tuba! Less Sousaphone! Bring up the Theramin! At certain points he made the musicians wear funny costumes and play with toys (see above)! He set up a sandbox in his living room so he could get the vibe of the beach between his toes!

Okay, LSD was involved. LSD helps you expand your mind, but it doesn’t help you fold your laundry and put it back in the suitcase. Wilson was also freaking out because everyone was on his case to finish the album, and for God’s sake it had better be coherent and sell lots of copies. And the topper seems to have been the moment when the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper, which he found very intimidating, and he saw what a success Monterey Pop was (after the Beach Boys had declined an invitation to perform). The pressure was unbearable and he blew a gasket.

It’s too bad because it’s quite clear from all the surviving evidence that if he’d managed to finish and release the record in 1966 or 1967, I find it impossible to conceive an outcome that would have been worse than how it did play out, with the Beach Boys becoming marginalized until their 1976 comeback, which of course was all about nostalgia. Smile might not have sold as well as their earlier LPs or even Pet Sounds (though I doubt it), and it may or may not have divided critics. But given the experimental spirit of the ’60s and the overall musical and lyrical excellence to be heard on the tracks, there is no way in hell it would have registered as some sort of shameful bomb. Certainly there are some critics who would have praised it to the skies even then. Instead what happened was that the Beach Boys were judged irrelevant, and their next six LPs, despite being cherished and rationalized by a handful of die-hard fans, are pretty much unknown to most pop music lovers, even ones who love the music of the late ’60s and early ’70s (perhaps especially them).

If Smile went unreleased, how do I know it so well? Versions trickled out. In 1967, the band released Smiley Smile, a much simplified and truncated thumbnail of what the project actually was, which satisfied no one, and convinced a good many the whole thing was hype. Then several of the other songs were revived and included and messed with and inserted into subsequent LPs of their lame-duck period. Then in 1993, that glorious moment when the boxed set: Good Vibrations: Thirty Years of the Beach Boys was released containing a good many of the actual tracks. And THAT was the revelation. That one blew my mind. I listened to those tracks over and over and over again. A decade later, Wilson finally got his head together and released an “official, completed version” Brian Wilson Presents Smile, which nonetheless I can’t bring myself to consider definitive. There are a couple of tracks that I really love on it that which I have heard nowhere else, and those I really love, but he also made some decisions I like less well than what I heard on the tapes that were released in 1993. And finally, there was the supposedly official Beach Boys version The Smile Sessions, which was released in 2011, along with endless bonus tracks. This is the one that’s currently on my iphone, though it definitely lacks some great things I really like from all the previous releases.

The one thing everyone agrees on is that the gorgeous a capella track “Our Prayer” is the first cut on the album. More than any other, it establishes the quasi-religious tone Wilson originally intended. “Good Vibrations”, while a love song, also retains this same cosmic feeling. Seasons and nature themes abound. Some tracks, like “With Me Tonight”, “Wonderful” and “You’re Welcome” mingle in aspects of romantic or sexual love. “Fall Breaks and Back to Winter (W. Woodpecker Symphony)” is without lyrics but conjures the woodlands. At one point Wilson was going to do a suite consisting of the four elements. He only definitively finished “Fire” (see hat above), but I swear a couple of the other tracks could have been made to serve the purpose to finish out the four part suite. For example he later converted his repeated fragment “I Love to Say Da Da” as “Cool, Cool Water” on a 1970 album. Well there, you go: “Fire” and “Water”. One of the better known tracks from the sessions, “Wind Chimes” certainly conjures “Air”. That’s three-quarters there! But I’m not on drugs. A couple of other songs I might loop in to this group of songs. “Child is Father to the Man” references Wordsworth, another God-loving nature poet. And there’s “Look (a.k.a. Song for Children)” and “Whistle In” which summon a child-like, simple spirit.

Other than “Good Vibrations” the other lead track on the record, and the one that seems most wedded to the comedy/Americana theme is “Heroes and Villains”, a melodrama parody that evokes silent movies, saloons in westerns and so forth. It was released as a single and included on Smiley Smile, but as with “Good Vibrations” there are countless other and better versions in the can. The rustic, frontier thematic element played out in several other Smile tracks with titles like “Cabin Essence”, “Barnyard”, “Do You Like Worms? (a.k.a. Roll Plymouth Rock)”, and “Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow” (a repurposed version of “Fire”). “He Gives Speeches” paints a hilarious portrait of a blowhard politician; the lyrics were changed and it then became “She’s Goin’ Bald”, an insensitive but even funnier song that has moments that evoke old time radio. A couple of the songs play into the Americana theme by conjuring the national mania for physical culture (“I’m in Great Shape” and “Vegetables”). And some of the songs that dovetail with the Americana theme are actually covers, such as the doo-wop classic “Gee”, a truly sickening medley of “The Old Master Painter” and “You Are My Sunshine”, and an intentionally hokey version of the lounge standard “I Wanna Be Around”, heavy on the vibraphone, and eventually disintegrating into a cacophony of workbench tools (hammers, saws, drills). Americana is evoked through the album with instruments like banjos, harmonicas, slide whistles, and detuned pianos.

Of the remaining fragments, there’s “Gettin’ Hungry”, cowritten with Mike Love and included on Smiley Smile, but a song that would have fit into Smile’s overall all themes (the verses sound like the singer works on some kind of chain gang, road crew, or farm job). Then there are three songs that play with nautical images, pirates, the Hawaiian islands: “Little Pad”, “On a Holiday”, and “In Blue Hawaii”, which is another song based on the “I Love to Say Da Da” theme. In a way, these come closest to what one might expect from the Beach Boys.

Finally, my favorite song of all, the one infuriatingly titled “Surf’s Up”, so that when you describe it to anyone who doesn’t know it, they’ll just assume it’s an ordinary Beach Boys number from their early period. It’s about as far from “Surfin’ Safari” as it’s possible to get — although the image of a catastrophic tidal wave is the one I always hold in my head. There are several heavily produced versions, but my favorite is a demo that is just Brian singing to his own piano accompaniment. To my mind the apocalyptic vision at the heart of this song would have anchored it, and ought to have been the last or next-to-last song, much as “A Day in the Life” does on Sgt. Pepper. The lyrics are Parks’, but I love them, and quoting them demonstrates that this ain’t “Help Me, Rhonda”:

A diamond necklace played the pawn Hand in hand some drummed along To a handsome mannered baton. A blind class aristocracy Back through the opera glass you see The pit and the pendulum drawn. Columnated ruins domino. Canvas the town and brush the backdrop Are you sleeping?

Hung velvet overtaken me, Dim chandelier awaken me, To a song dissolved in the dawn. The music hall, a costly bow, The music, all is lost for now To a muted trumpeter swan.

Columnated ruins domino Canvas the town and brush the backdrop Are you sleeping, Brother John?

Dove-nested towers, the hour will Strike the street quicksilver moon. Carriage across the fog Two-Step to lamp lights cellar tune.

The laughs come hard in Auld Lang Syne The glass was raised, the fired rose The fullness of the wine, the dim last toasting While at port, adieu or die A choke of grief hard hardened, I Beyond belief, a broken man too tough to cry

Surf’s up, mm-mm, mm-mm, mm-mm Aboard a tidal wave Come about hard and join The young and often spring you gave I heard the word Wonderful thing A children’s song…

Anyway, a tree fell in the forest and no one heard it! The Beach Boys’ next few albums are actually quite enjoyable, but they were like those salmon who accidentally jump out of the stream and beach themselves. People were moving on to wildly different sounds in the late ’60s.

I do want to note a little cul de sac that seems related to the Smile sessions though. As we mentioned here, the Beach Boys’ old friends Jan and Dean recorded a couple of comedy themed albums in 1966 called Jan and Dean Meet Batman, and Filet of Soul. Another L.A. based band The Turtles released a 1968 offering called The Turtles Present the Battle of the Bands, which is full of parodies of musical styles, including two nods to the Beach Boys: “Surfer Dan” and the Hawaiian themed “I’m Chief Kamanawanalea (We’re the Royal Macadamia Nuts)”. And perhaps most importantly of all, that same year there was the Beatles’ White Album, which was also chock full of musical parodies including not only “Back in the U.S.S.R”, but the very Smile-esque “Rocky Raccoon”. The Beatles had hung out with Mike Love while they were India, but McCartney had actually engaged much more with his compeer Wilson (and had actually been recorded chewing celery for the song “Vegetables”!)

At any rate, Brian’s electrons are tumbling around the universe now. And if they have harps out there, you know he’s exploring what’s all about.

For more show biz obsession please see my booksNo Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, and  Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube.