Luis Sanchez: The Beach Boys' Smile

The Beach Boys’ story can be told as just one chapter in the history of popular music, a way to connect the birth of rock ’n’ roll to the rock revolution that presumably ensued, but this kind of narrative never seems like enough. What makes The Beach Boys’ story so compelling are those moments when it is at odds with the progression of rock history. They weren’t the only surf group to come from a particular time and place, but with more ambition and success than most of them, The Beach Boys brought their version of surf, and finally their version of America, to life. As a unit held together with the intimacy of family, they embodied all the suburban ordinariness, seething dysfunction, and optimism of an American dream where mastery of cultural inheritance and the chance to pursue one’s hopes is available to anybody, even if everybody can’t achieve it. What separates The Beach Boys—what makes them extraordinary—is that they not only lived this American dream, they transcended it, making music that fused the tangibility of their suburban background with Southern California topography, attitude, and aspiration. Then they invited their audience to find some version of themselves inside the fantasy. Which I guess, in the end, is all that audience could hope for.

It has often been said that Smile is a great lost album. The presumption is that for all the staunch forward march of the rock revolution, it was only a matter of time before the glint of The Beach Boys’ aesthetic should have been overtaken by the babel of hippie mindset. Yet the story of Smile’s rise and fall is so ingrained as myth that it has lost its power to lure and convince. For decades, writers and cultists kept the story alive by rehashing hyperbole and rumor that could only take the story so far. Writing about Elvis Presley in the early ’70s at the moment when the singer’s steady, public deterioration of self revealed that it was possible for even the greatest of rock ’n’ roll myths to lose its vitality, Greil Marcus bristled at the King’s lack of commitment to his music and showing his audience why it mattered in the first place. “Elvis has dissolved into a presentation of his myth, and so has his music,” he wrote. As a critic with an acute perception of the dimensions and value of myth in popular culture, Marcus shows us why myth alone is not enough. Without a personality to inhabit it—to recognize it, celebrate it, test it, revise it—what you end up with is music drained of life.

In a way, this is what has happened with Smile. The seeds of the myth were sown so close to the events that took place that the myth itself overtook and nearly consumed the artist and the music it was about.