Smile (The Beach Boys Album) - Original Themes and Ideas

Original Themes and Ideas

We just kind of wanted to investigate…American images.…Everyone was hung up and obsessed with everything totally British. So we decided to take a gauche route that we took, which was to explore American slang, and that’s what we got.

“ ” Van Dyke Parks, 2005

The Act of Creation, by Arthur Koestler turned me on to some very special things.…it explains that people attach their egos to their sense of humor before anything else. After I read it, I saw that trait in many people…The book’s about the logic of laughter, and I noticed that people are very self-conscious about being funny. They sort of watch themselves as they’re being funny, and there’s even a competition—it’s “You’re funnier than me?!" I think a sense of humor is important to understanding what kind of person someone is. Studying metaphysics was also crucial, but Koestler’s book really was the big one for me.

“ ” Brian Wilson, 2005

Several key features of Smile are generally acknowledged: both musically and lyrically, Wilson and Parks intended Smile to be explicitly American in style and subject, a direct reaction to the overwhelming British dominance of popular music at the time. It was supposedly conceived as a musical journey across America from east to west, beginning at Plymouth Rock and ending in Hawaii, as well as traversing some of the great themes of modern American history and culture, including the impact of white settlement on native Americans, the influence of the Spanish, the Wild West, and the opening up of the country by railroad and highway.

It was around this period that Brian Wilson read Arthur Koestler's book, The Act of Creation. The book had a profound effect on him that carried onto the Smile project, specifically the human logistics of laughter. As a consequence, the Smile songs are replete with word play, puns and double entendres. One example is "Vega-Tables", which includes the lines "I'm gonna do well, my vegetables, cart off and sell my vegetables"; the phrase "...cart off and..." is a bilingual pun on the word Kartoffeln, which is German for potatoes. At one stage, Wilson apparently toyed with the idea of expanding Smile to include an additional "humor" record, and a number of the scrapped recordings were made in this vein. The idea would later be expounded on the Smiley Smile track "She's Goin' Bald", a reworking of an earlier Smile track known as "He Gives Speeches".

Smile also drew heavily on American popular music of the past; Wilson's original compositions were interwoven with snippets of significant songs of yesteryear, including "The Old Master Painter" (made famous by Peggy Lee), the perennial "You Are My Sunshine", Johnny Mercer's jazz standard "I Wanna Be Around" (recorded by Tony Bennett), the song "Gee" by noted 1950s doo-wop group The Crows, as well as quotations from other pop-culture reference points, such as the Woody Woodpecker theme and "Twelfth Street Rag".

Wilson's experiments with LSD were undoubtedly a significant influence on the texture and structure of the work, and one of the strongest intellectual influences on his thinking at this time was his friend Loren Schwartz, who is said to have introduced Brian to both marijuana and LSD. Writer Bill Tobelman suggests that Smile is filled with coded references to Brian's life and his recent LSD experiences (a presumed Lake Arrowhead, California "trip" being the most important). He also argues it was heavily influenced by Wilson's interest in Zen philosophy — notably the Zen technique of using absurd humor and paradoxical riddles (the koan) to liberate the mind from preconceptions — and that Smile as a whole can be interpreted as an extended Zen koan.