Brian Wilson will perform the Smile album tonight in London. In the fall, Wilson will release the album. The Los Angeles Times provided sketchy details in an article today.
I've always had a soft spot for the greatest Beach Boys album that never was. The sequel to Pet Sounds, the response to Revolver never even neared a final form.
And the possibilities, possibly, struck me at the right time. Because back a decade or so, back before the big box and digital days, back when I played a boom-box with a tape deck, I had a birthday.
I don't remember too much about the birthday or what kind of party went on. But far pre-drinking and even a good ways pre-driving, some losing effort of the double-A ball Frederick Keys was probably involved. Whatever the tween year or circumstances, for that birthday I got a $15 gift certificate to Sam Goody. My good friend Jeff may have given me the present; most of the day's details clearly fled.
But gift certificate in hand, memories stayed a bit better. The nearest Sam Goody at the time squatted on the outer edge of Bethesda in a mini-mall that wasn't so much introverted as it was deeply troubled. Set back from the street, built clay red and metallic, the mall had a dug-in retail moat in front and parking only in back. The lot had plenty of spaces, but few ever found them. The last time I drove by, only a Honeybaked Ham outlet and a Middle Eastern bookstore had survived in the mall. Sam Goody itself would eventually move to another location before failing again and departing the area.
When the doors still swung open, walking around the music store was an enjoyably unencumbered experience. You could move up and down the walls of tapes without manuevering around a soul or fending off a clerk — God bless the world's interpersonal agoraphobia. What was left for me was a seemingly endless selection of the unheard. The thrill and the challenge were the same: plastic cases filled with strings and boom-box substance until then neither noted or known, all available for a price-gunned portion of my $15 gift certificate.
Music appreciation at this point in my life extended only to the city's oldies station and my older cousin Tim's M.C. Hammer tape. Unsurprisingly, Tim had refused to simply give me the tape at my asking (despite a previous Orel Hershiser-Alex Trevino baseball card trade in his favor, to say nothing of the light-hitting Trevino's). With my push toward rap and parachute pants denied, eventually along the Sam Goody walls I ended up at "B" for Beach Boys.
I knew the band enough from the old 104.1 FM to narrow my choices to their long line of tapes in the rack. I took my time deciding but ended up choosing the most songs for my money. The Made in the U.S.A. greatest hits compilation had 25 tracks for about $18. Using the gift certificate and paying the difference, I had myself a tape.
The cassette got a lot of play in the months and years immediately following, and the band's pop of the Pet Sounds era stayed with me even when their early surf rock waned some. The pop at their zenith was so tightly locked that it felt like you needed a thousand keys to unlock "God Only Knows" or the torturous break of "Caroline, No." Brian Wilson had nailed perfection down to punctuation.
But in the liner notes, an essay by Beach Boy biographer David Leaf, I found what seemed at first to be an easier lock to pick. The key was not harmonized but physical:
Throughout the Fall of 1966 and into 1967, The Beach Boys worked on a album that was to be called "Smile." Never completed, never released, it's become the most famous and enigmatic "missing link" in pop music.
"Never completed, never released…" was enough for me. The perpetually unfinished had to stick together. If that thought was only subconscious then, it didn't hurt either that the one song to escape the sessions alive was "Good Vibrations." Gypsy sand there poured out of an oscillating Electro-Theremin box and kicked across three minutes like Doheny. Who knew what else was possible?
Shortly afterward, I saw a magazine article that said Smile might finally be on its way. Brian Wilson was at work, the writer said. I scoured the tape stores for months. My mom even called a store in the days before Christmas that year, just to see if the clerks knew if or when the album might arrive.
I had no luck then and wouldn't have had luck any Christmas since if I had kept looking. The magazine was apparently wrong. After about a year of kid-level hunting, I figured word would be loud enough to hear if the album ever saw the sun. Or caught a wave.
Today when the news came, the glee felt halfway ferromagnetic. The new article wasn't wrong. Wilson had grown up and still managed to back and conclude his "Teenage Symphony to God."
Wilson had gone from untroubled to troubled, then decades later found himself with the time signature and peace to return. At least for himself, or so I hoped, he had proven true one of the supposed Smile lyrics, originally Wordsworth: "The child is the father of the man." I was happy for him for finshing and happy for my tween ears and the assurance of hearing a day–
So slowly spooling and all, it could let me wonder.
