Brian Wilson all ‘Smile’ in News-Sun interview

So filled with hope: The Beach Boys in a snapshot taken at Lakewood Beach, north of Springfield, in July 1964. Five months after playing the Champaign County resort, Brian Wilson (seated) would have his nervous breakdown.

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By Andrew McGinn, Staff Writer Updated 4:07 PM Thursday, October 13, 2011

Editor’s note: This story was originally published in the Springfield News-Sun on Sept. 30, 2004.

Next month, Capitol/EMI will release “The Smile Sessions,” a box set collecting the Beach Boys’ original music for their legendary aborted album.

Whoever thought up “Smile” for the title of what was supposed to be the most daring Beach Boys album ever must have been on drugs.

Uh.

Never mind.

“We were on drugs. Mostly LSD and amphetamines,” Brian Wilson confessed last week during a phone interview. “We had head problems.”

Between summer 1966 and spring 1967, one of the nation’s most beloved bands nearly fell apart, Brian built a sandbox in his living room — now, a honkin’ replica of Devils Tower we could have understood — and “Smile” was abandoned, an unfinished heap of psychedelic goo.

There wasn’t much to smile about.

“It was too avant-garde and too advanced for people to understand it,” said Wilson, no longer a Beach Boy at 62, but still a genius man-child.

Wilson has mustered up enough of that genius to finally finish “Smile,” ditching the old Beach Boys session recordings in favor of all-new performances, right down to the album’s meticulous backing tracks.

The most famous unreleased album in pop history was released Tuesday by Nonesuch Records.

“We knew people were ready for it and ready to graciously accept it,” Wilson explained. “I wanted it to be a Beach Boys album, but it became a Brian Wilson album.

“It remains a teenage symphony to God.”

Recorded with the Wondermints, the young power pop band that has blessed Wilson’s fragile soul with new spirit in recent years, the completed “Smile” is something to behold, a towering onslaught of dense Phil Spector pop, warped cartoon melodies and that heavenly glee club harmonizing.

“It’s more than I ever imagined we could accomplish,” Wilson said.

While it doesn’t cut to the heart like “Pet Sounds,” the gorgeous 1966 Beach Boys album that “Smile” was intended to leave in the dust, you nevertheless have to appreciate what Wilson has pulled off.

“Smile” shouldn’t have been finished — let alone sound this good.

“I was just as horrified as he was it’d show up again,” explained 61-year-old Van Dyke Parks, Wilson’s “Smile” lyricist. “But it was refreshing because it sounds like it belongs in the present.”

Regardless of what Parks or Wilson would have preferred, the album, finished or not, was never going away.

“There’s a tremendous subcult,” Parks said. “Many have their own idea how it should sound.”

Books have been written and websites have been launched to explore the myth of “Smile.”

Cable network Showtime at 9 p.m. Tuesday will debut “Beautiful Dreamer: Brian Wilson and the Story of Smile,” an original documentary on the making of what was rumored to be pop’s greatest album — and how the thing fell off a wall and was put back together again.

Wilson himself only fueled the legend by scattering finished segments of “Smile” over Beach Boys albums throughout the late ’60s and early ’70s.

Brilliant songs like “Cabin Essence,” “Surf’s Up” and the mega-selling 1966 single “Good Vibrations,” each intended to close the three movements of “Smile,” drove fans bonkers with one question:

What if?

“We’d had enough of it and we were ready to shelve it,” Wilson said.

The four other Beach Boys — particularly singer Mike Love and Wilson’s drummer-brother, Dennis — seemingly were ready to shelve the abstract “Smile,” originally titled “Dumb Angel,” from day one.

“Mike and Dennis couldn’t understand what I was doing,” Wilson recalled. “I knew we were onto something really cool.”

“We” being Brian and Van Dyke.

“If you’re building a Trojan horse, you better have enough soldiers to push it around,” Parks said. “He had no support.”

For starters, the album was envisioned as the ultimate response to the Beatles and the British Invasion — an ode to the American frontier, from Plymouth Rock to Hawaii.

“It was an American tapestry at a time when American music was not what people were thinking about,” Parks said. “Celebrating America at the time was very odd.”

To tell you the truth, the other Beach Boys found the surreal lyrics by Parks, a Los Angeles singer-songwriter who first befriended Wilson on producer Terry Melcher’s front lawn, to be oddest of all.

Indeed, lyrics like, “Over and over, the crow cries uncover the cornfield,” remain, well, a tad curious nearly four decades after the fact.

Love, who’d served as Wilson’s lyricist for some of the Beach Boys’ biggest sun and fun hits, was particularly harsh on Parks in public.

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