Listening and relistening to "Smiley Smile"

My favorite Beach Boys records

Smiley Smile is my favorite Beach Boys album.

Aside from its mention in the Barenaked Ladies song “Brian Wilson,” Smiley Smile doesn’t seem to get a lot of love. At least not when you stack it up against the countless books, documentaries, and remastered reissue box sets attendant to Pet Sounds.

Pet Sounds is a great album, no doubt about it. My friend Seth Rogovoy, whose work I admire, shared a one-of-a-kind take on Pet Sounds in his Substack, and I hope you’ll read it.

Revisiting the Sad Genius of Brian Wilson

But back to Smiley Smile. It’s bonkers, and I love it.

Almost defiantly lo-fi in the wake of Beach Boys studio craft that came before, it became home to the “Good Vibrations” / “Heroes and Villains” single that was supposed to herald the Smile album and, with it, a new dawn in pop music.

The Smile story has been told, retold, and told again billions of times. I like it well enough, but I still go for its Smiley incarnation.

The album Brian built around that big hit single is a doozy. Check the track listing:

Side one: Heroes and Villains / Vegetables / Fall Breaks and Back to Winter / She’s Goin’ Bald / Little Pad.

Side two: Good Vibrations / With Me Tonight / Wind Chimes / Gettin’ Hungry / Wonderful / Whistle In.

By all accounts a big commercial and artistic let down upon its 1967 release, it didn’t sound at all like its familiar predecessors.

It’s barely 30 minutes long and it’s one of those albums I prefer to hear in one, non-shuffle-play dose. Paul McCartney guests, chewing carrots as percussion. A tribute to Woody Woodpecker. A hair tonic accident. And “Wonderful,” which regardless of where it sits (it was a part of the Smile experiment), is, indeed, wonderful.

I’m not being willfully contrarian here (“Oh, it’s popular? Then I don’t like it!”) when I say my other favorite Beach Boys album is The Beach Boys Love You.

Like Smiley Smile, this one is … um … skewed. And like Smiley Smile, The Beach Boys Love You is beautiful music Brian Wilson created from the rubble of his life at the time of their release. The former rose from the ashes of the aborted Smile; the latter among the first of countless “Brian’s Back” marketing ploys pulled by the business nabobs pushing the more fun fun fun side of the band. Love You was the follow-up to something called 15 Big Ones, a collection of oldies remakes that put the band back on the top 40 for the first time in a long time.

I’ll bet they wanted more of the same – just as some in the band reportedly balked at Pet Sounds and Smile for being not more of the same. I recall an article reporting Love You is the remnants of what was supposed to be Brian’s first solo album.

Whatever the case, Love You is anything but a Beach Boys rehash. I wasn’t a big fan of the band at the time but picked up the album not long after its release when I was surprised to see it on sale for $1.99 at Fay’s Drugs in Oneonta.

I’ll admit I was confused on my first few “what the hell is this” listens. With song titles like “Ding Dang” (written with Roger McGuinn!) and “Honkin’ Down the Highway” (“honkin’ down the gosh-darn highway!”) one should not expect Shakespeare. One need not spend a lot of time looking for hidden meanings.

Yet there’s a song called “Johnny Carson,” which is about Johnny Carson.

He sits behind his microphone / Johnny Carson

He speaks in such a manly tone / Johnny Carson

Ed McMahon comes on and says “Here’s Johnny” / Every night at 11:30 he’s so funny

Another called “Solar System,” which says this:

If Mars had life on it / I might find my wife on it

I read an interview in which Brian Wilson said he worked hard to get the lyrics right for this album. Song for song, they come off as a little simplistic. Taken as an overarching whole, though, they make the album sound like the Beach Boys, Brian in particular, indeed do love you. It’s a piece of quiet little genius overshadowed by the better-known parts of the band’s catalog. It’s one big old hug.

True to human nature, I’ll be playing these two records a few times over the next several days – them, along with my Sly and the Family Stone albums and the Smile redux Brian pulled from exile in 2004. Beautiful records all, and I’m glad we have them.