Reading Smile
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Reading Smile

History, Myth and American Identity in Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks' Long-Lost Album

Dale Carter

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eBook - ePub

Reading Smile

History, Myth and American Identity in Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks' Long-Lost Album

Dale Carter

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About This Book

First conceived in 1966 but only completed in 2004, Brian Wilson Presents Smile has been called "the best-known unreleased album in pop music history" and "an American Sergeant Pepper. " Reading Smile offers a close analysis of the recording in its social, cultural and historical contexts.

It focuses in particular on the finished work's subject matter as embodied in Van Dyke Parks' contentious yet little understood lyrics, with their low-resolution, highly allusive portrayals of western expansion's archetypes, from Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts to Diamond Head, Hawaii. Documenting their multiple references and connotations, it argues that their invocations of national self-definition are part of a carefully crafted vision of American identity, society and culture both in tune and at odds with the times. Critical of the republic's past practices but convinced that its ideals, values and myths still provided resources to redeem it, the recording is interpreted as a creative musical milestone, an enduring product of its volatile, radical, countercultural times, and an American pop art classic.

Of particular relevance to American Studies and popular culture scholars, Reading Smile will also appeal to those interested in 1960s popular music, not least to fans of Brian Wilson, Van Dyke Parks and the Beach Boys.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2021
ISBN
9781000395518

1 Into the mystic? The undergrounding of Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks, 1964–1967

DOI: 10.4324/9781003108726-2
During the 1960s, Anglo-American popular music and the culture with which it was near synonymous were transformed in many regards. Enabled in part by rising prosperity and in part by social, demographic and technological change, the commercial record business burgeoned, both as an industry and as a cultural force. Between 1965 and 1967 in particular, a wave of ambitious artists created innovative, commercially successful work. With the music of The Beatles and Bob Dylan catalyzing many of these transformations, the middle of the decade saw popular music modulate into what would soon be identified as rock, distinguished from its predecessor by its variety, structural innovation, textual depth and diversity of influence – and by the credibility it was now able to command beyond its own aesthetic and demographic circuits (Gendron 170–205).
No homegrown American group experienced or advanced these transformations more than The Beach Boys. Following the group’s formation in 1961, its early years had seen chief songwriter Brian Wilson, working alone and in association with various lyricists, addressing a limited set of concerns centred on Southern California’s surfing subculture or conventional pop themes such as romance and cars. Even during this period, Wilson’s melodic gift, arranging skills and growing command of the recording studio were starting to shift some of the foundations upon which popular music in the United States had for many years stood. But from late 1964 onward, the thematic focus of his songs also began to change and diversify: on the one hand, deepening their introspective, emotional concerns (a move that in 1966 would culminate in the completion of Pet Sounds); on the other, following a wider trajectory to encompass major historical, social and cultural matters (a move that in 1967 would hinder the completion of Smile). In the space of only two to three years, Wilson – with his fellow group members holding on in varying states of anxiety to his seemingly runaway creative train – helped to transform the nature, ambition and standing of popular music. In the process, he also moved well beyond the world in which he had founded The Beach Boys just a few years earlier. Whether such departures saw Brian Wilson (to extend the railroad metaphor) going off the rails or opening up new territories; whether (to invoke surfing associations) they dragged him into deeper waters or bore him to greater heights, this chapter pursues the trip, providing in the process some social, cultural and historical contexts for the subsequent analyses of Smile’s lyrical concerns.

Underground formations: steps toward a countercultural Los Angeles

Viewed retroactively, and with an eye on the currents that Wilson would follow in mid-decade, The Beach Boys were launched on fairly calm waters, musical and otherwise. Though hardly flat, the American popular music scene in the early 1960s was one in which the impetus provided by mid- to late-1950s rock ‘n’ roll had slowed; yet to register were the galvanizing effects of The Beatles-led “British invasion,” Motown’s soul-pop fusions and the folk revival and folk-rock forms associated with Bob Dylan and The Byrds. Among the white population, at least, economic growth and low inflation underwrote widespread satisfaction with and faith in the American way of life. In the White House, the Kennedy administration was combining rhetoric, symbolism and Cold War nationalism to sustain allegiance in foreign policy and contain grassroots dissent (most obviously in relation to race relations) at home. Vietnam remained low on the public agenda. Outside the realms of government and party politics, meanwhile, the New Left had scarcely articulated itself; Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was yet to advance environmentalism beyond the margins of popular attention; juvenile delinquency (source of an earlier media panic) had been successfully restaged as West Side Story; and the Beat revolt readily commodified into so many beatnik styles. Such patterns were also evident in The Beach Boys’ home environment. Its growth fuelled by large-scale investments in aerospace, real estate and private automobiles, early 1960s Los Angeles embodied (not least in its own self-representations) the nation’s prosperous, secure, accommodating and benevolent future. Though well past its 1940s studio heyday, Hollywood was busy reconfiguring itself as a burgeoning television-based entertainment industry – with popular music its underdeveloped though promising revenue stream (Starr 3–28, 217–32, 245–66; Sanjek 345–50).
Yet even as The Beach Boys took their first steps into the latter, the countercultural tide upon which Brian Wilson would later ride was rising. Ironically, given its embodiment of the more hedonistic, consumerist aspects of the American way of life, the surfing craze that afforded Wilson’s group its early profile was not solely, to use Herbert Marcuse’s term, affirmative; if, like other subcultures, it helped sustain the dominant order, it also described, even pushed, some of its limits (Marcuse, Dimensional 59, Negations 95). It was not so much that surfers had initially received a mixed press, courtesy of associations with risk-taking, juvenile delinquency and rock ‘n’ roll (May 96–8). Within their preoccupations with fun, escapism and youth, as reported by Tom Wolfe in The Pump House Ganxg (1968), there also lay a cult of sensual pleasure, of rejuvenation through immersion in the Pacific’s waves, which, as Wolfe showed in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), might lead into deeper waters of human experience (White 139–41; Phoenix 109; Wolfe, Pump House Gang 27–46, Acid Test 320–3). Even at the decade’s outset, intersections between the bohemian dimensions of Southern Californian surf and West Coast Beat lifestyles were emblematic of the latter propensity (Chidester and Priore 48–9; Priore, Riot 35). Though North Beach in San Francisco quickly became synonymous with Beat literature and culture, Venice had its own Beat community, the subject of Lawrence Lipton’s The Holy Barbarians (1959); and just as aspects of the North Beach ethos would help inspire Haight-Ashbury by mid-decade, so would Venice constitute a precursor to the alternative culture building around Sunset Strip during the same period (Lipton; Maynard; Puterbaugh 357–63; Chidester and Priore 229–37). Links between the Los Angeles surf and Beat scenes and the nascent counterculture would be exemplified by graphic artists and painters such as Rick Griffin and John Van Hamersveld, whose work lent all three a profile. Frank Holmes, later to provide the original cover art for The Beach Boys’ Smile, first met the album’s lyricist Van Dyke Parks when working at the Insomniac coffeehouse, a Beat hangout just south of Venice in Hermosa Beach (Chidester and Priore 48–9, 68–9). While there were differences between these realms, other musicians embodying the connection between Venice and the city’s growing counterculture included David Crosby of The Byrds and Jim Morrison of The Doors, both of whom lived for a time in the coastal enclave (Walker xv–xvi).
One distinctive feature of the Beat scene in Venice – its radical politics – was emblematic of another subcurrent within the rising countercultural tide in Los Angeles. Official state-level investigations had deepened Cold War antiradicalism across California as a whole, and by the early 1960s the postwar red scare was not over. Yet the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings at San Francisco City Hall in early 1960 had triggered mass protests, and public fear of both communism and the anticommunist lobby was diminishing (Heale 17–29; McBride 116; Goodman 428–34). If the late 1950s saw a political New Left emerging across the country from (and beyond) the ashes of the Communist Party-associated Old Left, the conflation in Venice of political, social and cultural radicalism – with the latter providing a good deal of the local impetus – provided a template for similar activity elsewhere in Los Angeles. This was in part because, even as long-established ideological leanings and the intensity of the red scare had kept the political Left relatively weak in the city, its status as a mass-media and mass-entertainment centre ensured, as David McBride has noted, that the cultural sphere (and thus cultural radicalism) would be a “fundamental concern” (111, 116). The fact that Venice had a sizable black population (which the later countercultural scene around Sunset Strip would lack) no doubt underwrote the inclusion of civil rights on the local radical agenda.
But what both communities shared – a cultural dissidence that was also political and social – was scarcely restricted to these neighbourhoods. Nor was it previously unknown. During the height of the postwar red scare, what durability progressivism had shown in the region owed more than a little to what Michael Denning later dubbed the “cultural front.” Informal gatherings held by actor Will Geer and his wife, the actress Herta Ware, at their Topanga Canyon ranch, for example, provided an under-the-radar forum for the social networking of fellow radical theatre activists and other cultural and political progressives, many of whom had been blacklisted for their Popular Front-era activities and associations. From the late 1950s onward, their low-intensity but long-life pilot lights would ignite others (Cray 354–55; Rossinow 104–5; Bell 64–5).
Playing a notable part within these communities of cultural radicals was a group of folk music collectors, enthusiasts and artists whose activities constituted an additional indirect tributary of the Los Angeles counterculture. Active in the early postwar People’s Songs group and inspired by the example (and periodic presence) of the Geers’ friend Woody Guthrie, figures such as Mario “Boots” Casetta and Earl Robinson not only carried the torch through the anticommunist era, particularly for topical songs; their efforts and those of others also provided the basis on which the folk music revival in Los Angeles would later build (Cohen 47–9, 75–7, 118–20; Cohen and Samuelson 132–4; Lieberman 60, 69, 117; Dunaway and Beer 70–3). In 1957, former union activist Herb Cohen opened the city’s first folk music coffeehouse, the Unicorn, located on Sunset Strip. Over the next year, two more folk venues opened in West Hollywood, a few blocks south of the Strip. The Ash Grove featured old-time, blues and bluegrass artists and became a focal point for the traditionalist wing of the folk revival. Sharing much of the Old Left’s class-oriented outlook, club owner Ed Pearl supported a range of progressive causes emblematic of the long-standing association between folk music and radical politics, from labour unions via racial justice to nuclear disarmament (Lieberman 34–46; Sullivan; Nolan). The Troubadour, meanwhile, provided a gathering place for the revival’s modernizing wing; more attuned to the politics of the personal, owner Doug Weston promoted what would later become the contemporary singer-songwriter genre, with its sensitivity to emotional and spiritual concerns (Hoskyns, Waiting for the Sun 74–5). Complementary in their activities and emblematic of its varied aspects, both the Ash Grove and the Troubadour would serve as seedbeds for the city’s nascent underground as the 1960s progressed.
They did so in part by providing the physical venues for musicians – as well as other countercultural aficionados – to gather. The Troubadour in particular served as a forum wherein the inheritance of traditional music and topical songs sustained at the Ash Grove interacted with the inspirations provided by the folk revivalism of Bob Dylan and the pop song innovations of The Beatles. From as early as 1962, the migration of a number of folk revivalists from New York City and elsewhere led to the coalescence around Los Angeles of a group of musicians – many of them also inspired by the Beats and then The Beatles – keen to create music that eroded the gulf between the supposed depth of acoustic folksong and the assumed shallowness of amplified pop (Hoskyns, Hotel California 1–9, Waiting for the Sun 74–7). The Troubadour became one early fulcrum of these activities. A regular at the venue from 1963, for example, Van Dyke Parks played piano in jam sessions there with a number of influential musicians, including Danny Hutton (later of Three Dog Night), whom he got to know at a Monday-night hootenanny in 1964, and Jim (subsequently Roger) McGuinn, whose meeting with Gene Clark at the club that March led to the formation of The Byrds. Others crossing the same circle included David Crosby (soon to become The Byrds’ third recruit) and Steven Stills (later of Buffalo Springfield). Such figures would help provide bridges between the musical and cultural crucible of the folk and post-folk-revival club scene and the commercial pop world whose heights Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys had been successfully climbing over the preceding couple of years (Unterberger 75–80; Rogan 27–9, 35–6; Greenwald).
Crucial in this connection were the debut performances of The Byrds at the Ciro’s Le Disc club on Sunset Strip in March and April 1965. As Domenic Priore and others have shown, at precisely this time the area’s club scene was undergoing rapid transformation, with demographic and cultural changes prompting the displacement of an older, more bourgeois, movie-oriented clientele by a younger, predominantly teenaged crowd attuned to pop music (Priore, Riot 16–25, 41–5; Hoskyns, Waiting for the Sun 71–4, “The Strip” 34–7; Adler 116–31; Bernhard and Friedenberg 8–13). The Byrds’ shows were significant in part because they quickly attracted large numbers of teenagers, the group’s appeal confirmed and further boosted by the rise of their recording of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 in June 1965. These events also mattered because that success demonstrated the commercial potential of the folk hybrids then being crafted at the...

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