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| From | Dave Seaman <seamand@upmc.edu> |
| Subject | So how good is Smile? |
| Date | Wed, 25 Feb 2004 14:49:14 -0800 |
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So, if Brian Wilson's newly finished Smile piece is as great as the articles
say, will he get the recognition deserved? For instance, will he win a
Grammy for it? Of course, the Grammies are usually a waste of time and
money, but every once in a blue moon they get it right. I for one would
love to see BW get his due for an album started 40 years ago!
Here's hoping he brings Smile to the states, and to the CD player...
(articles below snipped from the BW web site)
___________________________
Guardian Unlimited
So how good, finally, is Smile, the great lost song cycle that Brian Wilson
kept the world waiting 37 years to hear? The only possible answer, after
Friday night's world premiere in London, is that it is better than anyone
dared hope. Multiple spontaneous ovations were the reward for the former
Beach Boy and his musicians, whose pristine performance breathed life into a
45-minute work previously known only through various shattered and dispersed
fragments.
Everything about the evening was remarkable, from the moment a small,
grey-haired man in a bowtie and a sleeveless cardigan received a standing
ovation merely for taking his seat in the stalls. That was Van Dyke Parks,
whose oblique, allusive lyrics for Smile provoked the internecine warfare
that led to the abandonment of the project.
The concert began with a wonderfully unexpected gesture, the musicians
clustering round Wilson to re-create the mood of the Beach Boys' Party album
in lovely versions of In My Room, Please Let Me Wonder and Good Timin',
accompanied by acoustic guitars and bongos. The more elaborate treatments of
California Girls, Dance Dance Dance, Don't Worry Baby, Wouldn't It Be Nice,
God Only Knows and many others completed the first half.
Smile occupied the whole of the second half, in a version reconstructed by
Darian Sahanaja, with the assistance of Wilson and Parks. A member of the
Wondermints, a Los Angeles band who provide the nucleus of Wilson's current
18-strong ensemble, Sahanaja approached the task with a thoroughness and
sensitivity that ensured all its many themes were slotted together with a
seamless perfection. Even the familiar sections - including Heroes and
Villains, Surf's Up and Cabin Essence - sounded utterly refreshed.
________________
Sunday Mail
SIXTIES pop legend Brian Wilson received a five minute standing ovation as
he performed his lost masterpiece Smile for the first time.
_______________________
Evening Standard
As a concept album, Smile is certainly more coherent than Sgt. Pepper,
weaving its twin themes of Americana and the elements extensively through
lengthy suites of dizzyingly ambitious music. Eighteen musicians, the core
formed by LA group The Wondermints, dashed around the stationary Wilson,
frequently changing instruments mid-song and playing everything from
Polynesian ukulele to a power-drill. There was spiritual beauty, as on a
cappella opener Our Prayer and the softly swooning Wind Chimes, and silly
humour, including the animal noises of Barnyard and wholesome ode to carrots
Vege-Tables. For Mrs O'Leary's Cow, the roaring "fire" part of side two's
elements suite, the string and brass section donned toy red fire helmets,
just as they had at Smile's most famous recording session. Songs already
familiar from their appearance in half-finished forms on later Beach Boys
albums, such as Surf 's Up and Heroes and Villains, took on a powerful new
resonance as they appeared complete in their intended surroundings. As a
whole, it was, as they probably would have said in the Sixties,
mind-blowing. When Smile's lyricist, Van Dyke Parks, appeared on stage for a
joyous encore of more established classics, he and Wilson received a
rapturous standing ovation. It went a small way towards meeting the acclaim
that the pair's vaulting imaginations should have received almost 40 years
ago.
----------------------------
Daily Telegraph
.... Nothing, though, could prepare us for the second half. From the opening
of Heroes and Villains, Wilson was a transformed man. Though still reading
his lyrics, he sat taller, sang louder and waved his arms about to conduct
the band. The atmosphere was truly electric, and the music echoed everything
from Philip Glass to Kurt Weill to Chuck Berry. It's nigh impossible to pick
out songs, as it was all a glorious, tangled symphony of celebration and
sadness - though the comical Vegetables and a transcendent Good Vibrations
were incredible. All right, Wilson did seem a man apart from the stage
around him, but the glory of late Beach Boys was always the contrast between
the fragility of his voice and his songs and arrangements. Last night we
witnessed that and so, so much more. Leonard Bernstein said Brian Wilson was
one of the greatest composers of the 20th century: he was not wrong.
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