Brian Wilson Learns to Smile

This story was originally published in the October 14, 2004 issue of Rolling Stone.

Brian Wilson is waiting in the driveway of his Mediterranean-style Beverly Hills house, dressed entirely in brown corduroy, bouncing on his toes.

“Let’s go!” he says, jumping into the car. “Go down here, make a U-turn, I’ll give you directions.” His silvery brown hair is uncombed, and he’s unshaven, in a relaxed, Sunday-afternoon way. His face is tan; his smile is gentle, easy. Wilson looks good. “We don’t have to introduce each other, because we’ve met before,” he says. “So, how you been?”

“Good. How about you?”

“I’m good,” he says. “I’m great. Doing a lot of work. It’s a big relief — whew! — because, you know, I’ve been through some rough times in my head, but I’ve been fighting it off.”

Wilson is more active now than he’s been since the Beach Boys were America’s top group in the mid-Sixties. He tours relentlessly with his superb band; he released a solo album this summer, Gettin’ In Over My Head, with cameos from Elton John and Paul McCartney; and now he’s preparing to put out what may be his crowning achievement: an entirely new recording of the legendary, unfinished Smile, which was scrapped in 1967 and has become the most famous unheard album in rock history.

Launched as the follow-up to the Beach Boys‘ classic Pet Sounds— and in response to the Beatles’ masterful Rubber Soul and Revolver— Smile was intended to be the grandest, most complex rock & roll production ever: a loosely themed concept album about coast-to-coast “Americana,” from Plymouth Rock to “Blue Hawaii,” built from modular, cut-and-paste fragments of pop melody, orchestral instrumentation, recurring vocal themes and even the sounds of crunching vegetables and barnyard animals. Wilson, then twenty-four, described his epic musical tapestry as a “teenage symphony to God.”

Wilson’s ambition, however, was undercut by intensifying, untreated mental illness as well as by drug use (including hashish and amphetamines) and pressure from the other Beach Boys and the group’s label, Capitol, to stop messing around and start cranking out hits. Beach Boy Mike Love was the harshest critic, reportedly calling Smile “a whole album of Brian’s madness.”

Wilson’s behavior became erratic and paranoid. His Smile collaborator, the lyricist Van Dyke Parks, remembers going into Wilson’s swimming pool fully clothed for a business meeting, because Wilson was afraid his house was bugged by his controlling father, Murry. One night, while recording a section of his “Elements” suite about fire called “Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow,” Wilson distributed plastic fireman’s helmets to the orchestra and lit a small fire in the studio so they could smell smoke. Later, Wilson learned that a building near the studio burned down and that there had been several other fires across Southern California. Wilson believed his music caused the fires, and he immediately stopped work on the song and locked the tapes away in a vault.

BY May 1967, after more than eighty recording sessions, Wilson’s masterwork was unraveling, and so was he. Smile was abandoned. Its best tracks — “Heroes and Villains,” “Wonderful,” “Surf’s Up”— turned up on subsequent Beach Boys albums such as Smiley Smile; bootleggers tried to piece together the rest.

Some say Wilson never recovered from the monumental disappointment of Smile’s failure. “He was a man so lonely and so abused and maligned, ostracized,” says Parks. “It was an outrage what he suffered.”

Today he won’t say much about that time except that Smile “was too far ahead of its time, so I junked it.” Until recently, he didn’t seem interested in revisiting the work (“Bad music, bad memories,” he told me in 2001), but a year and a half ago, looking for a new live project, Wilson’s wife, Melinda, suggested trying Smile, and his bandleader, Darian Sahanaja, began to organize the project. “It took courage,” says Wilson over steaks and Heinekens at the Mullholland Grill, near his house. “We worked on it little by little, week by week, until finally we got it right.”

“You can hear that Brian has a glimmer,” says Parks, who worked with Wilson on the new SMiLE (differentiated in typography from the original Smile). “That is what I think is wonderful about this project… It bathes Brian in some real redemptive light. It shows that he is very generous and very talented, and that he uses his talent to console, in a powerful way.”

Work on the new Smile began in the fall of 2003, Sahanaja showed up at Wilson’s house one morning with all the existing fragments of Smile he could find (both from bootlegs and the Capitol vaults) loaded onto his iBook. “I knew Smile is not Brian’s favorite topic,” says Sahanaja. “And he had a look, like he was looking over the edge of the Empire State Building with no support.”

At first, Wilson offered little reaction. “He was quiet for a long time,” says Sahanaja. “Then I played him ‘Do You Like Worms?’ and I thought he was going to freak out. But he went, ‘That’s pretty cool. We did that?’ And it just started going, grouping different sections and songs together.”

To Sahanaja’s amazement, Wilson began to remember harmonies and arrangements that were never recorded. At one point, they were working on a portion of “Do You Like Worms?” (now renamed “Roll Plymouth Rock”), and Wilson couldn’t read Parks’ thirty-eight-year-old lyric sheet. “We just couldn’t figure it out,” says Sahanaja. “Brian goes, ‘Van Dyke will know.’ So he picks up the phone — hasn’t called Van Dyke in years — goes, ‘Yeah, Van Dyke. It’s Brian. Do you know the song “Do You Like Worms?” What’s this line?’ ” The next morning, Van Dyke Parks showed up at Wilson’s house to begin five days of work.

Parks says his main goal was to bring Smile out of the past, to make it the work of a man looking back at his younger days, not to try and simply re-create material thirty-seven years old. “It was important that this not arrive irrelevant and brain-dead,” he says. Parks made mostly subtle changes. At the start of “In Blue Hawaii,” for example, Parks added the line “Is it hot as hell in here? Or is it me?/It really is a mystery.”

“These words reveal Brian in the present tense,” says Parks, “reflecting on this situation that happened to him all those years ago.”

The new SMiLE was first performed by Wilson on tour in the U.K. in February, to rave reviews, then recorded at Sunset Sound and Your Place Or Mine studios in Los Angeles. It wasn’t always easy. “Darian’s a perfectionist — he henpecks me,” Wilson says. “It’s hard work, but it’s worth it.”

Adds Sahanaja, “Sometimes Brian was a little impatient. He would say, What do we need to do next? When am I getting my steak?’ Sometimes I think he would have rather stayed at home, and, technically, he didn’t have to be there a lot of the time. But he showed up, and, man, it was such a difference. Just his goofy way. We’d do a really beautiful version of ‘Surf’s Up.’ We’d get to the last chord, and we’re all there with our headphones on and we’d hear him scream, ‘Right the fuck on!’ That’s so inspiring for us musicians.”

Tonight it’s hard to tell how excited Wilson is about SMiLE, but he’s definitely excited about dinner. “They have an excellent salad here; I think you should get it,” he advises, then calls the waitress over and orders two iceberg-and-blue-cheese salads and two rib-eye steaks, medium rare.

Wilson seems relaxed — or as relaxed as I’ve seen him in recent years — as he drinks beer and talks about his courtside seats to the Lakers playoff games and about his four-month-old adopted son, Dylan. (just saying Dylan’s name makes Brian burst out laughing.) “Life’s better than it’s been in the past twenty years,” he says.

Still, he admits that he works hard to keep depression at bay. “Every day I have an anxiety attack,” he says. “I can’t explain why. It just comes on.” He takes medication for anxiety and depression, and he sees a therapist three times a week. “I’m in bad mental shape, so I need it,” he says. A routine of work and exercise helps, too. Each morning before doing anything else, he spends an hour at the piano. He says he’s written three new songs in the past week. “The creative process blows me out,” he says. “It’s an amazing trip. Amazing. Just amazing. I’m older, wiser, more knowledgeable than I used to be, so I can get it together pretty quick.”

He smiles, stares off for a while, gulps his Heineken, then looks up at me with pale greenish-blue eyes. “I’ll tell you something I’ve learned,” he says. “It’s hard work to be happy.”