Soon after Smiley Smile (1967) was released, the principal songwriter of the Beach Boys, Brian Wilson, was admitted into psychiatric care.
With his talent for composition, Wilson held almost sole responsibility for the Beach Boy’s success in the early ‘60s. In early 1965, Wilson withdrew from touring for reasons of mental health. As the band toured in Europe, their leader stayed home and experienced a creative breakthrough. His new songs achieved a new level of emotional expressiveness and musical complexity, while still retaining a pop sensibility. When the other members returned to the States and heard them, however, they weren’t optimistic about their commercial viability. Songs like “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times” and “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on my Shoulder)”, with their melancholic lyrics and surreal melodies were a far cry from the surf-rock ditties that brought the band to fame.
Unfortunately for Wilson, the pessimism of his bandmates was initially justified. Pet Sounds was well received in Europe but the reaction in America was colder than Wilson had hoped for. The record company was putting a good face on things, running publicity campaigns that proclaimed Wilson’s genius, all the while tensions were growing within the group. Wilson needed to produce a single that would demonstrate he could still make great pop music. Capitol Record gave him a carte blanche, and with it the band used over 90 hours of tape to produce a single song: “Good Vibrations”. The strategy paid off. The song was a huge success and extended the band and the label’s faith in Wilson’s creative abilities. He may be eccentric, and the “genius” label may have had a bad influence on his ego, but he could be counted on.
Wilson’s creative journey, encouraged by a huge budget, a great degree of freedom, and copious psychoactive drugs, was leading a direction that was far from contemporary pop music. Pet Sounds had been strange, but the music of his next project was out of this world. The recording sessions have become the stuff of legends. For the song ‘Fire’, Wilson lit a fire in the studio and everyone present where toy fire helmets. On ‘Vega-tables’, it was rumoured he had Paul McCartney munch on a carrot, and used the sound as percussion. For other tracks, he insisted that the Beach Boys sing while floating in his swimming pool. The recording process was as surreal as the music it produced.
The album was to have been called Smile but itt never came to be. Between the band’s infighting, Wilson’s deteriorating mental health and the sheer ambition of the project, it collapsed under its own weight. Losing patience with the expensive, meandering sessions, Capitol Records demanded that the Beach Boys fulfill their contract by providing an album, be it good or bad. Wilson was persuaded to shelve Smile and the estranged members reuinited to record what Wilson had written so far. The result was Smiley Smile: the biggest commercial failure at that point in their career.
Why was Smiley Smile such a failure? The main issue was Capitol marketing avant-garde music as if it were pop. Smilewas intended to be a concept album about childhood, with humour interspersed throughout. There were comic sketches, including one where Brian Wilson falls into a piano, getting stuck between the C and the C-sharp, until his bandmates manage to play him out. These were cut. The songs were made short to encourage radio play. These decisions lead to the album sounding rushed and shallow.
As the years passed, a cult of interest in the Smile project became noticeable. In 2011, Capitol responded to this demand by issuing The Smile Sessions, a box set comprising five discs. Instead of presenting radio friendly compressions of what the Beach Boys had recorded, the whole sprawling project was laid out in its incomplete form. The release was a commercial and critical success, despite being composed of outtakes and unfinished material.
But even this release can only give us a fractured picture of what Smile might have been. The possibility is slight of the album ever being reconstructed from the unfinished material. This is because of the production method Wilson developed while working on “Good Vibrations”. Nothing would be written down. Instead, Wilson would develop the song by exploring different musical ideas, and then ingeniously fit them together. “I had a lot of unfinished ideas, fragments of music I called ‘feels.’” Wilson explained, “Each feel represented a mood or an emotion I’d felt, and I planned to fit them together like a mosaic.”
The sessions weren’t attempts at nailing down a song that already existed. The recording process was itself Wilson’s mode of composition.
Together, these releases illustrate two distinct approaches to unfinished material. With the Smiley Smile approach, an unfinished project is presented as if it were a completed work. The aim is radio play and commercial success. Ideally, it should fit comfortably with the artist’s previous releases without arousing suspicion from uninformed fans.
You can see this approach in the posthumous albums of American rapper XXXTentacion. Since his death in June 2018, two albums have been released. On both, a small amount of material is stretched out with guest features from a slew of artists including Kanye West and Lil Wayne. The list of producers is even more copious. There is no indication on the front of these albums that there is anything unusual about them. This is intentional. The aim is to keep the listener in the dark about how much input the deceased artist actually had on the tracks.
This philosophy behind this approach is pure cynicism. It handles the deceased artist as if they were merely a cog in a machine to be replaced when they stop working. For artists like Michael Jackson, it’s truly amazing how many posthumous work is released under their name. They appear more productive in the grave than they were in life.
The alternative approach is exemplified by The Smile Sessions. Here, you emphasise the unfinished nature or the album. You can present different versions of a song, contrasting early takes with later ones; things you wouldn’t dream of putting on a release you hoped would be a chart-topper.
The benefits of this are evident on recent Beatles releases, such as the 2018 remaster of the White Album or the 2019 remaster of Abbey Road . On the second halves of these albums are session recordings where you hear the band joking around, and experimenting with different approaches to their songs.
Over the last century, audiences have become increasingly demanding. We feel a sense of entitlement towards the media we consume. Even when a project collapses, we stand patiently by the wreckage, waiting for any remnants to be presented to us. We’re insatiably predatory.
Record labels respond to public demand. The only problem is that the public doesn’t know what it wants. In fact, nobody does. Public taste can change in an instant. Still, the executives at Capitol, the publicists, the other members of the Beach Boys, and Wilson himself all had their own expectations about what would be a hit. Of course, a hit song is a notoriously difficult thing to achieve. Some bands only ever have one, and then waste the rest of their career trying to emulate that success. Others, like the Beatles, Phil Spector, and the early Beach Boys seemed to have had it down to an art. The fatal flaw of the Beach Boys was that they got too concerned about what the public wanted. They were so anxious about whether their new music would alienate their listeners that they ended up boring them instead.
Like all companies, record labels are amoral. They are guided by money alone. As long as we keep accepting dubiously moral posthumous releases, they’ll keep robbing graves to provide them. We live at a time when companies can be held morally accountable for their actions. Through social media, we can damage them where it hurts. These companies are trying to give us what we want. It’s time we take a look at what that is.
Originally published in print by TN2 Magazine in March 2020.
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