A LONG-AWAITED SMILE

Several years ago, I read an excellent book about the Beatles and the process by which their music took shape. The book was The Beatles Recording Sessions by Mark Lewisohn, and what made the book so fascinating was that it was a chronology of what took place in every single Beatles recording session between 1962 and 1970.

Every session. Every single, every album.

What was especially intriguing to me at the time was that there was a lot of material that was never used, never released. You’d expect that, of course. Plenty of alternate takes, false starts... stuff that really is of no interest except to the most rabid fanatic or music historian.

But one thing stood out in my mind. Lewisohn provided a very detailed chronology of the creation of the song “Strawberry Fields Forever,” which he described as “known for being among the most complicated and difficult to record.” He later describes the single (“Strawberry Fields Forever” b/w “Penny Lane,” issued February 17, 1967) as “arguably the greatest pop single to be issued by anyone at anytime.” Strong praise, that, but I don’t take objection to it. These songs were so different from the Beatles’ earlier work, so different from anything else anybody had ever heard, that it put one in mind of an iceberg splitting off from a glacier and sailing off to an unknown sea. We would sit, listen, jaws slack in amazement. And we weren’t even stoned at the time!

But there was more to the story. As Lewisohn relates, the song that was eventually released was in fact cobbled together out of two completely different versions of the song: one, more-or-less the “original” lightly instrumented mix; and two, a “more intense” scored version. John Lennon liked both and suggested to George Martin, the producer, that the two takes be spliced together. This was not a simple process, as they were half a tone different in pitch and at two different tempos – but Martin, with the help of engineer Geoff Emerick, managed to do it. [The splice, if you care to listen for it, is at exactly 60 seconds into the final song.]

That “original” version, though...

The very first take of “Strawberry Fields Forever” was recorded on November 24, 1966. To quote Mark Lewisohn,

Any lingering doubt about whether the Beatles had changed would have crumbled into a thousand pieces had this version of the song been released. But it wasn’t. It remains in the vaults today, a reel of magnetic tape which captured a magic night.

This paragraph haunted me for years, until the release of the Beatles Anthology II CD set in March 1996. The vault that contained that “magic night” was finally thrown open…and the magic was still there. That early version – Take 1 - of “Strawberry Fields Forever” was absolutely magnificent. On its own, it would have been a landmark recording. Now, it was not only beautiful in its own right, it was a precious piece of history.

This is an amazingly long-winded way of saying that Brian Wilson has pulled off the same trick with the release of “Smile,” the long-lost musical project that disappeared into a black hole after the release of “Pet Sounds” in 1966.

“Pet Sounds” was, in a sense, the Beach Boys’ breakaway album, the one that sent a bold, clear message to the world that something fundamental had changed. This was no longer a stupid-ass surf music band. “Pet Sounds” was enough of an attention-getter that it directly influenced the Beatles as they began the process of creating “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” Oh, yes – and “Strawberry Fields Forever.”

But “Smile” would have taken the changes of “Pet Sounds” a step further. Much more than “Pet Sounds,” it was truly an album, not merely a collection of songs hung together. It was an organic whole, and as far from those old surfin’ safari days as the Beatles’ new music was soon to take them from their hand holding days of 1962.

It never happened. “Smile” never made its originally scheduled release date, and eventually bits and pieces of it started showing up on other recordings (most notably, “Smiley Smile,” released in 1967) in the form of weaker alternative versions. It was the great Beach Boys Album That Never Was.

And now, 37 years later, it is.

Brian Wilson has somehow managed to pull himself together enough to recreate (virtually perfectly!) the sound of the mid-1960’s Beach Boys at a watershed moment in their career. It’s a little like discovering “Sergeant Pepper” for the first time. In 2004. In a sense, it is “Sergeant Pepper” - American style. Or in Wilson’s words, a “teenage symphony to God.”

The vault has been thrown open, and the magic is there. After all these years, a long-awaited reason to smile.