SMiLE & the spirit of '66, and BW's healing

From The Smile Shop

SMiLE & the spirit of '66, and BW's healing, by George Barba Yiorgi

Reading Peter Reum's wonderful description in the missing tapes thread, which clarifies so much about the BW/SMiLE saga, I'm led to put forward a feeling that I've had for the last few weeks listening to the new concerts, about what this music could mean to us in 2004.

It is like a love letter from a mythical spiritual place, the 1966 of unlimited possibilities of human understanding.

1966 was a special year for music and maybe also for the consciousness that for a few years would be called the "counter-culture". So much of that counter-culture would turn out to be shallow or a dead-end or commercialized beyond recognition; but certain aspects of the "feeling" of '66 were very very real, and resonate to this day, though usually imperceptably.

I have been obsessed for years with the thrills I felt listening to the radio that year as each month brought a new message of hope and fearlessness from the young musicians who were pushing all the envelopes of popular music's potential, with little regard for what even then was considered "the tyranny of the marketplace".

Each Fab Four single would be answered in turn by one of their compatriots in the emerging fraternity of hispter-popstars: a Paperback Writer would beget an Eight Miles High, a Good Vibrations would be "answered" in a few weeks by a Strawberry Fields Forever-- it was as if the teen world had sent out teams of Lewis-And-Clark explorers into some other dimension, and every few weeks they were sending back successively weirder and more wonderous reports from the Outer Limits.

But really, in '66 "Good Vibrations" was the ultimate. What a record!-- a pocket symphony-- not just one hook, but a dozen hooks, crammed into one amazing trip, with a science-fiction forward-momentum that seemed to be saying "we are departing now for worlds unknown-- and we're bringing everything you like about the new pop music with us!" The melodicism, the church-gospel soul, the ooo--bop-bop doowop camaraderie, the sighing teen angst moment of that initial "Aahh-" fronting the vaguely Goth minor key roller-rink organ stabs- the grasping mock-Baroque swingle-singers classicism merging spiritual traditions of the New and Old worlds- and finally that Forbidden Planet thingie woo-wooo-wooo-- it was a new universe of sound, and when I was 13 I wanted to live in that universe.

GV was one peak moment, and there were many other world-changing sounds in that amazing 3-year period 65-67. But over the ensuing decades something got lost. Something about the spirit of casually optimistic fusion-of-cultures, with universally- melodic instant-hummability, that so characterized the early folk-rock-psychedelic hit singles, got sidetracked... and later attempts to reconnect always foundered in mere details of imitating technical approaches or guitar styles or some other aspects that missed the point entirely.

When I heard the finished live SMiLE, a continuous, cohesive work, the most amazing thing happened. It came back: The spirit of melodic sumptuousness, the feeling of unlimited possibility, that moment of child-like joy you would feel when you would hear a new Beatles or Stones or Kinks or (briefly...)...Beach Boys single for the first time and it would be as though you had ALWAYS known that tune, it would instantly become a three-minute world that would always be there for you. Only this three-minute world was ... 45 minutes-- it was the promise that Brian had made back in that halcyon Fall of '66, the excitement and mystery of Good Vibrations stretched out for a full album's length of music... a 45-minute Good Vibration.

Now we learn that this process of reviving and reconnecting to a lost emotional moment may have been part of a long and tortuous healing process for the creator of this mysterious music.

And here we are in 2004, at a time when it might seem as though the threads that connect us to the shining possibilities of the alternative culture that spawned the 1966 SMiLE were cut long ago.

We live in a world where cultural leaders don't exist-- they are dead, or discredited or just drowned in vats of their own cynicism-- while what pass for political leaders don't even bother to blather "There Is No Alternative" any more, as they build, with our grudging assent, dismal empires of fear and greed and mediocrity and endless wars, both real and virtual.

This gift of Brian's healing SMiLE is manna for a world starving for the real Alternative: hope and spiritual enlightenment- in the form of a 45 minute pop rhapsody that sounds like the ultimate too-much-fun 1966 3-minute pop single of all of our dreams.

-George Barba Yiorgi