When Brian Wilson first announced plans to revisit the legendarily lost Beach Boys album Smile, it sounded like a terrible idea. Now 63, Wilson is no longer the giddy, spirited writer he was in his youthful prime. Classics like "Surfin' Safari" and "California Girls" still top lists of greatest Beach Boys hits, but Wilson's genius grew considerably once he moved beyond rock 'n' roll.
Beginning with 1966's Pet Sounds, Wilson tapped into new possibilities for symphonic grandeur in pop music. By that point, he'd left the Beach Boys' touring lineup to work exclusively in the studio, where he crafted vocal harmonies and orchestral suites that wowed Leonard Bernstein, who celebrated Wilson in a high-profile television special that wondered if, perhaps, pop music wasn't all garbage.
When Wilson started on Smile, handlers were touting him to a '60s counterculture less than thrilled to celebrate a guy associated with songs about hotrods and high school. The Beach Boys were far from hip. But as word spread about Smile's grand experiment, the legend grew. Tales of tripped-out hijinks—including a studio session played in fireman's hats and songs written in an in-house sandbox—primed the market for an album unlike any heard before.
Then it went unheard, partly because the rest of The Beach Boys hated it, and partly because Wilson simply couldn't finish. As the pressure to deliver grew, he had a debilitating nervous breakdown that still haunts him. The ghosts occasionally show up on the version of Smile that Wilson finished and released in 2004, but Wilson was very much the victor. After the recent release of a Smile DVD—anchored by the feature-length documentary Beautiful Dreamer: Brian Wilson And The Story Of "Smile"—Wilson met with The A.V. Club to discuss the album, drugs, and Phil Spector.
The A.V. Club: Now that you've finished Smile and performed it several times, how do you feel about the whole process?
Brian Wilson: It is such a relief to have finished up the album. I think my band is far superior to The Beach Boys, so we are miles ahead of The Beach Boys, miles ahead, for this album.
AVC: In the film, there's a lot of talk about Smile being a form of therapy. Did you find it therapeutic?
BW: Yeah, in a sense. When we decided to do it in 2004, we went back to the time when we took a lot of drugs, so that was the bad memory, the drugs that I took. We took some street drugs that screwed up our heads, you know? But then when we were starting from scratch, we would listen to the tapes from 1967. Then we went and did it from scratch. And we created a third movement for it, which is all about "blue Hawaii" and paradise. So there's a three-part rock opera.
AVC: When you decided to go back and listen, did you think of it as revisiting that time in your life?
BW: No, no. We wanted to take it from that point on, from 2004. We didn't go back to the kind of thing we were into. We just kept going from 2004 until we had it completed.
AVC: How about for you personally? Were you able to think of it as a new project, or was it difficult to forget what had happened the first time?
BW: No, it wasn't difficult at all.
AVC: There's a lot of mythology about the role drugs played in the holdup of Smile. Were drugs a significant part of it?
BW: Well, the drugs got us into it, let's put it that way. The drugs got us into it, but we got into it so deeply, the drugs, that we had to stop them, because we were way, way ahead of our time for that album. That album was like 30, 40 years ahead of its time. We could have put it out, but again, it was very, very ahead of its time. And the drugs took us very deeply into it, so we had to pull out of the drugs, out of the project for 38 years, and then come back and think back 38 years later and put it all together.
AVC: Do you think the drugs helped in any way?
BW: Yes, they helped to spur it along and create an inspiration to continue. A little inspiration here, a little inspiration there. Inspiring-wise, it means a hell of a lot to me.
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