Recorded 1966. (from) The Smile Sessions. 2011.
There’s something in the harmony. It falls like the raindrops, slowly. Dripping. The rain is a break in the sunshine, it gives you an opportunity to stop and wonder at the complexity of the arrangement. It is barely more than two minutes long. What Brian called his teenage symphony to god manifests itself entirely within the confines of this song. Man, its genius and stunning beauty were torn
from the souls of Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks, two young men testing the parameters of pop, re-shaping the future that we know, love and live in today. You have to marvel at where they had decided to take popular song – like, this was only five years after schmaltz like “Venus In Blue Jeans” was the big thing.
Think about that, five years. It’s now the batting of my eyelid but in that golden age of teenage angst, it’s more than a quarter of your life. And life and the world had changed considerably since Jimmy Clanton ruled supreme. Brian and VDP
were in their early twenties when they took the accepted norm of popular music and really did leave it somewhere else. The lyrical content, Carl Wilson’s vocal performance, yes, that bloody arrangement. There’s a school of thought suggests that had SMiLE been released in February 1967, the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper would
have been knocked into a cocked hat.
bernie@happening-things.com 