In 1967 the world was expecting to get two records that would change music but only The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released. 37 years later the impact of that album is still constantly felt: I could hear reverberations in the newest U2 single while people like Jeff Lynne and Todd Rundgren made whole careers off it.
The other was Smile from the Beach Boys but under the pressure of expectations, mental illness and drugs Brian Wilson fell apart before it could be completed. Looking back from today, Smile probably ranks with or even above The Rolling Stones’ Rock And Roll Circus as the greatest music event of the rock era that never was. Although since we live in an amazingly commercial age of course both were eventually brought to market.
Wilson’s troubles since these recording sessions are legend, the beginning of the end of the Beach Boys as a force in music, and so his return from the beach in 1995 and the resumption of his recording career was seen in some circles that a path from which we turned away might still be trod. After several records of new original music and a new version of Pet Sounds, Brian took the reaction to a performance of his hit Heroes and Villains as the launching point to finally conquer the one mountain that’d always stumped him.
Beautiful Dreamer is a feature length documentary that looks at both the original years and at the current effort and its currently running on Showtime. The generally chronological narrative is cut through with interviews about Wilson and this record, done with the people who were there then (Van Dyke Parks, who wrote the lyrics, Wilson friend and Three Dog Night leader Danny Hutton, and studio musicians like Hal Blaine) but neither of the still living members of the Beach Boys–I would have been interested to get Mike Love’s perspective though Brian and the narration seemed honest about their conflicts and such–and then jumps ahead to the beginning of the effort in 2003 to reclaim a lost masterpiece.
From all the buildup I was expecting the last segment to be the London concert this past February where the entire rock opera was premeiered. Sadly all we saw were the wordless but lovely acappella overture and the closing, revamped version of Good Vibrations. Guess no one wanted to dampen sales of the CD.
Still, this is music I’ve loved from early childhood and a sad life story with which I’m well familiar so definitely 105 minutes well-spent in watching. Director David Leaf truly made an honest telling of a troubling story but leaves us positive. Is Smile the “teenage symphony to God” that Brian Wilson set out to make in 1966, does it deserve a place on the fantasy Rock and Roll Hall of Fame shelf next to Sgt. Pepper’s? From what I heard, no. Terrific music that would have changed the music scene if released in 1967, yes. Surely that parts that did come out over the next few Beach Boys albums, especially Good Vibrations, the revolutionary way Wilson used a recording studio as an artistic tool were scene changers. After all this time I have one piece of advice: Sit back and enjoy; as much as anything Beautiful Dreamer demonstrates that life’s too short to do anything else.
BillSaysThis 