"There are myriad drug songs on the pop music market today.
I don't know which they are." - Brian Wilson, 1966.

One can find many summations of the SMiLE era online. They're fairly consistent with one another. This one's a little different. Much of what follows was initially inspired by Brian Wilson's 1991 biography Wouldn't It Be Nice. It was written at a time when Brian was entering back into the public eye. He had made his first solo album, revisited the SMiLE sessions, and was supposedly working on his autobiography. The parts of the biography that influenced what follows typically are not found in the SMiLE section of the book. For the most part, they precede that section. I tend to think that exposure to the SMiLE tapes likely brought back memories of events that led up to the creation of that music and that a few of these memories ended up in the biography.

Some will likely write off what follows as pure guesswork. To a large degree it is just that, but it's based on info that very well may have come from Brian Wilson. Much attention is paid to the mid 60s pre-Pepper placement of the events. And the assumptions made are, what I consider, fairly reasonable and well informed. What follows is an unusual take on SMiLE's genesis.

Brian Wilson dropped acid a total of three times. This was prior to the SMiLE era of creativity. Brian ended up viewing this experimentation as a very spiritual experience. In Brian's case, there was no separating the religious/spiritual experience from the LSD experience or vice versa. The two went hand in hand. They were one and the same.

Brian has long held the belief that some music contains the presence of God. During his spiritually enlightening third trip Wilson contemplated his future work on "Good Vibrations" envisioning a Spector-like production. This acid experience, involving God, music, and its creation, may have been the basis for, or at the very least reinforced, the idea that music is God's voice (If anyone locates an example of Brian Wilson claiming 'music is God's voice' or something similar to that prior to SMiLE please let us know).

SMiLE was inspired by Brian's spiritual/LSD experiences. He said as much in 1966. His ambition, in keeping with those heady times, was to create a major spiritual/psychedelic/LSD based work. As with Pet Sounds, the album would be another very personal project. It would be a bold, hip, move to document one's LSD experiences on a record album. Such an LP could transform the Beach Boys' outdated image.

To achieve such an ambition, Brian had a few obstacles to overcome. When "God" was included in the title of "God Only Knows" Brian had worried about possible radio bans. Similar concerns likely influenced his approach when figuring out how to do an LSD based album. Band-wise, his brothers, Carl and Dennis, would most likely go along with whatever project their older brother came up with. This, however, was not a given with the rest of the touring Beach Boys. Mike Love had not been happy with drug related lyrics on Pet Sounds, and this resulted with one song having to be rewritten. Newcomer Bruce Johnston had remarked, showing some reservations, that "Good Vibrations" might be a career ender. Al Jardine was considered to be a potential ally, but Brian was unsuccessful in getting Al to try LSD. Getting full support for SMiLE was not going to be an easy task.

How was Brian going to make a hip album based on his LSD experiences without letting some un-hip members of the general public and his band know what was being presented? The Beach Boys' clean-cut, surf and drag, all-American image needed to change with the times, but how could this be done in a way that didn't upset the apple cart?

After his first two LSD trips and prior to Pet Sounds Brian experienced a wild acid flashback in the Pickwick Bookshop. This surreal event presented him with a big riddle made up of mysteries that were full of meaning. He was determined to find the solution to this riddle.

Brian's search for inspiration led him to a book by Arthur Koestler titled The Act Of Creation. The work reveals the basic foundational structure in common to all realms of creative endeavor: from humor to science, or 'discovery,' and art. In-jokes, chance discoveries, and subtle metaphors are some examples of humor, science, and art accessible to some people, but not everyone. Intuitive creations can conceal deeper levels of meaning. Brian could use the album form of art to hide his LSD experiences and humor to prepare the listener for a great discovery.

Another book Brian was familiar with is The Joyous Cosmology. In this book several LSD trips are presented as one. Alan Watts documents his acid inspired thoughts, discovering hidden meanings in his surroundings.

Wilson's bookstore hallucination, Koestler's view of creativity, and Watts' LSD experiences all involve hidden meanings.

When the Beach Boys shot their Pet Sounds promo film, time away from home and the natural setting gave Brian an opportunity to take LSD again in favorable surroundings. There he could mentally revisit his bookshop flashback mystery/riddle along with his first two trip experiences for answers and inspiration. Brian's third, and final, LSD trip gave him the direction he needed to finish "Good Vibrations" and make SMiLE.

SMiLE would secretly present the consumer of the work with Brian's spiritual LSD experiences. Using the discovery process Brian, Van Dyke Parks, and artist Frank Holmes would create an album akin to Brian's bookshop flashback. By using, in Frank Holmes' words, "an equivalent alternate representation" to present the true nature of the project, SMiLE would remain a mystery. The little mysteries would be open-ended and subject to multiple interpretations. This would allow the artists to have a free reign in their creative process as well as numerous avenues to distract from, and conceal, SMiLE's raison d'être.

Still, this was to be a Beach Boys album, and in 1966 the Beach Boys were beginning to distance themselves from the surf and drag fads, but they couldn't help but be American (especially given the British Invasion). Their steadfast American image served as a useful metaphor for SMiLE giving the work's creators some direction, if needed, in their presentation of the little mysteries.

The album's mysterious open-ended nature makes it impossible to pin down, and gives it a timeless quality that's all its own.

One problem with presenting imaginative examples, LSD-like free association connections, to illustrate SMiLE's creative process is that they may lead some people to have serious doubts about the whole approach. People's normal way of thinking is relatively straight-forward and structured, rigid and consistent. Thus the more abstract the examples presented, the farther they stray from people's usual way of thinking. The more examples presented, the less believable it all seems.

Also, people don't generally tend to look for hidden meaning in things (as Brian Wilson did with David Anderle's SMiLE era portrait of him). Most folks take things at face value. This approach is totally understandable, especially for Beach Boys fans, given the lyrical straightforwardness of their career up to that point.

Readers are encouraged to consider the viability of the alternate history presented here. One may even begin to get a sense of why the LP was originally abandonned. Some might see why popular explanations of the era's events seem flawed and/or incomplete.

"A lot of the groups and singers in the mid 60s were taking acid and all those kind of drugs, and what it did was expand people's consciousness to the point where they didn't know how to handle it, you know?" - Brian Wilson.

In 2004 on Larry King's show Brian's wife Melinda revealed that Brian only had three LSD trips at 21:29. Start the clip around 21:05.
This jibes with the number of LSD trips mentionned in Brian Wilson's 1991 biography Wouldn't It Be Nice.

MELINDA WILSON: "The funny part about it is Brian's doctor now says that in terms of what most people were doing in the '60s, Brian didn't do much. I mean, when he talks about LSD, he went on -- he took three trips. In the '60s that wasn't a lot."

from Larry King Live, August 20th 2004

http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0408/20/lkl.00.html

One can see that we were talking about this stuff around the year 2000.
Bio Based SMiLE