Brian Wilson waits in the entrance of his Mediterranean house in Beverly Hills, dressed in brown cord, and rocks on the tips of the toe.
“Let’s go!” He says, jumping into the car. “Drive down here, make a U -turn, I give you the directions.”
Its silvery-brown hair is uncertained, it is unshaven and looks relaxed, like on a Sunday afternoon. His face is tanned, his smile is gentle and friendly. Wilson looks good. “We don’t have to imagine, we already know each other,” he says. “How are you doing?”
“Fine, and you?”
“I’m fine,” he replies. “I’m great. I have a lot to do. This is a great relief – Phew! – because I have had some difficult times behind me, but I fought myself through.”
Brian Wilson about “Smile” and his solo career
Wilson has been more active than ever before since the Beach Boys were most popular in the mid -1960s. He tours tirelessly with his excellent volume, published a solo album with the title “Gettin ‘in Over My Head” this summer, on which Elton John and Paul McCartney are guests, and is currently preparing the publication of his perhaps greatest masterpiece: a completely new recording of the legendary, unfinished album “Smile”, which was rejected in 1967 and became the famous unpublished unpublished album in rock history is.
“Smile” had this meaning
As the successor to the classic “Pet Sounds” by the Beach Boys and in response to the masterful albums “Rubber Soul” and “Revolver” of the Beatles, “Smile” should become the greatest and most complex rock ‘n’ roll production of all time: a loose thematic concept album about the “Americana” from coast, from Plymouth Rock to “Blue Hawaii”, it could From modular, cut out and re -merged fragments of pop melodies, orchestral instrumentation, recurring singing topics and even the noise of cracking vegetables and farm animals. The then twenty-four-year-old Wilson described his epic musical painting as a “teenage symphony for God”.
However, Wilson’s ambitions were undermined by a worsening, untreated mental illness as well as drug use (ua hashish and amphetamines) and the pressure of the other Beach Boys and their label capitol to finally stop playing around and produce hits. Beach Boy Mike Love was the hardest critic and supposedly described “Smile” as “an entire album by Brian’s madness”.
Wilson’s behavior became unpredictable and paranoid
His smile employee, the copywriter van Dyke Parks, remembers that he was fully dressed for a business meeting in Wilson’s swimming pool because Wilson feared that his house was being cared for by his control-addicted father Murry. One night, during the recordings for a section of his “elements” suite on fire entitled “Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow”, Wilson distributed plastic fire brigade helmets to the orchestra and lit a small fire in the studio so that they could smell smoke.
Wilson later learned that a building had burned down near the studio and that there were several other fires in Southern California. Wilson believed that his music had caused the fires, immediately stopped working on the song and closed the ligaments in a safe.
In May 1967, after more than 80 recording sessions, Wilson’s masterpiece, and with him he was also. “Smile” was abandoned. The best pieces – “Heroes and Villains”, “Wonderful”, “Surf’s Up” – appeared on later albums by Beach Boys like “Smiley Smile”; Bootlegger tried to see the rest together.
The failure with “smile”
Some say that Wilson has never recovered from the monumental disappointment about the failure of “Smile”. “He was a man who was so lonely and misused and slandered,” says Parks. “It was outrageous what he had to suffer.”
Today he doesn’t talk much about this time, except that Smile was “too far ahead of his time, so I rejected it”.
A new opportunity for the project
Until recently, he did not seem to be interested in dealing with this work again (“bad music, bad memories,” he told me in 2001). But a year and a half ago, when he was looking for a new live project, Wilson’s wife Melinda suggested trying to try “smile”. His band leader Darian Sahanaja began to organize the project. “It required courage,” says Wilson at Steaks and Heineken in the Mullholland Grill near his house. “We worked on it week after week until we finally found the right thing.”
“You hear that Brian has a spark of hope,” says Parks, who worked with Wilson on the new album “Smile” (in the typography of the original “Smile”). “I find it so wonderful on this project … Brian dives in a real light of redemption. It shows that he is very generous and very talented and that he uses his talent to comfort a powerfully way.”
Start working
The work on the new “smile” began in autumn 2003. One morning Sahanaja appeared on his iBook with all fragments of “Smile” with all fragments of “Smile” (both from bootlegs and from the archives of Capitol). “I knew that” smile “was not Brian’s favorite topic,” says Sahanaja. “And he looked as if he was looking over the edge of the Empire State Building without a stop.”
At first Wilson hardly reacted. “He was quiet for a long time,” says Sahanaja. “Then I played him ‘Do You Like Worms?’ before and thought he would freak out. And then it started, we grouped various sections and songs. “
Brian Wilson began to remember Harmonia and arrangements for “smile” that had never been taken up. Once they worked on part of “Do You Like Worms?” (Now renamed “Roll Plymouth Rock”), and Wilson could not read Parks’ 38 year old text. “We just didn’t get behind it,” says Sahanaja.
“Do you know the song, do you like Worms? ‘”
“Brian said: ‘Van Dyke knows that.’ So he grabbed the phone – Van Dyke has not called for years – and said: ‘Van Dyke is Brian. How does this line work? ‘”The next morning van Dyke Parks appeared at Wilson to start working for five days.
Parks says his main goal was to get “smile” out of the past for Brian Wilson and to make it a work of a man who looks back on his recent days instead of just creating a 37 -year -old material. “It was important that this does not seem irrelevant and brainless,” he says. Parks usually only made subtle changes. At the beginning of “In Blue Hawaii”, for example, he added the line “Is it damn hot here? Or on me? / It’s really a mystery.”
“These words show Brian in the present,” says Parks, “how he thinks about this situation that happened to him here.”
The new Smile was first performed by Wilson in February on a tour in Great Britain, where it received enthusiastic reviews, and then included in the Sunset Sound and Your Place or Mine Studios in Los Angeles. It was not always easy.
Work was not without criticism
“Darian is a perfectionist – he criticizes me a lot,” says Wilson. “It’s hard work, but it’s worth it.” Sahanaja adds: “Sometimes Brian was a bit impatient. He asked: ‘What do we have to do next? When will I get my steak?’ Sometimes I think he would have preferred to stay at home, and technically he wouldn’t have had to be there most of the time.
But he came, and man, that made a huge difference. Simply his silly art. We played a really nice version of “Surf’s Up”. We came to the last chord, all of our headphones had up and heard him scream: ‘Exactly like this, damn it!’ This is so inspiring for us musicians. “
Tonight it is difficult to say how enthusiastic Brian Wilson is of “Smile”, but he is definitely looking forward to dinner. “The salads here are excellent, they should try them,” he advises, calls for the waitress and orders two iceberg salads with blue cheese and two rib eye steaks, medium rare.
Wilson looks relaxed-at least as relaxed as I have experienced it in recent years-while he drinks beer and told about his places on the edge of the field at the playoff games of the Lakers and his four-month-old adoptive son Dylan. (Brian has to laugh aloud when it comes to expressing Dylan’s name alone.) “Life is better than in the past 20 years,” he says.
Angstattacken employ him
Nevertheless, he admits that he works hard to keep his depression in check. “I have an anxiety attack every day,” he says. “I can’t explain why. It just comes like that.” He takes medication for anxiety and depression and goes to a therapist three times a week. “I am psychologically in a bad shape, so I need it,” he says.
A routine from work and sport also helps. Every morning before he does something else, he spends an hour on the piano. He says he wrote three new songs last week. “The creative process overwhelms me,” he says. “It’s an amazing journey. Amazing. Just amazing. I am older, wiser and know more than before, so I can concentrate pretty quickly.”
He smiles, stares at him for a while, drink a sip from his Heineken and then looks at me with his light green-blue eyes. “I will tell you something that I have learned,” he says. “It is hard work to be happy.”