The release last fall, after 44 years, of the Beach Boys’ abandoned masterpiece Smile is a milestone of American popular culture. Rolling Stone has called it “the most famous unfinished album in rock & roll history.” But Smile is also something much bigger. It is the pinnacle artistic achievement of a lost civilization, the middle-class, baby-boom, sun-soaked, clean-cut, work-hard-play-hard, bungalow-and-car culture of post-war Southern California. It was a paradise for the common man, one that produced legions of loyal and productive citizens, developed the modern aerospace industry, helped the West win the Cold War, and exported an attractive and fundamentally decent (if often vapid) vision of American life to every corner of the globe.
Western Migration
To understand Smile, you have to start by understanding the Wilsons, which requires understanding Hawthorne, California, circa 1961. In 1922, Murry Wilson arrived in Los Angeles at age five from Hutchinson, Kansas. His family was part of what journalist Carey McWilliams described in his classic 1946 study Southern California: An Island on the Land, as one of Los Angeles’s frequent “quantum leaps, great surges of migration”—in this case the 1920s oil boom that flooded L.A. County with white low-church Protestant burghers and strivers (mostly the latter) from the Plains and the Midwest.
They came for the jobs but soon learned to appreciate the region’s many other charms. McWilliams, who migrated west the same year as Wilson, was struck immediately by the landscape, “above all by the extraordinary greenness of the lawns and hillsides. It was the kind of green that seemed as though it might rub off on your hands; a theatrical green, a green that was not quite real.” Of course, it wasn’t quite real. At least, it wasn’t natural. That green was the product of William Mulholland’s “rape of the Owens Valley,” the massive project to irrigate the bone-dry Los Angeles Basin later immortalized in Robert Towne’s screenplay for Chinatown. L.A. in its natural state, as God intended, is the color of straw eleven months of the year.
And then there was the weather: mild, dry, predictable, and clear 329 days a year. Angelinos worshiped the sun with a fervor not seen since the Temple of Ra. Novelist Eugene Burdick—yet another member of L.A.’s class of ’22—described that beneficent god thusly: “This is not the almost tropical sun of Hawaii or the alternately thin and blistering sun of Arkansas or the moderate bourgeois sun of France. This is a kind sun, a boon of nature, a sun designed for Utopia.”
In a classic essay penned to explain to mystified (and horrified) eastern academics the election of Ronald Reagan as governor of California in 1966, political scientist James Q. Wilson contrasted the manufacturing middle-class standard of living for New Yorkers versus Southern Californians. The former lived mostly
in a walk-up flat in, say, the Yorkville section of Manhattan or not far off Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. Given their income in 1930, life would have been crowded, noisy, cold, threatening—in short, urban. In Long Beach or Inglewood or Huntington Park or Bellflower [or Hawthorne!], by contrast, life was carried on in a detached house with a lawn in front and a car in the garage, part of a quiet neighborhood, with no crime (except kids racing noisy cars), no cold, no smells, no congestion.
He adds, just to rub it in, “[t]he monthly payments on that bungalow…would have been no more than the rent on the walk-up flat in Brooklyn or Yorkville.”
Beach Themes
What was true in 1930 was exponentially truer in 1960. Indeed, historian Kevin Starr subtitled the seventh volume of his epic history of the state, which covers the postwar period, California in an Age of Abundance.
Plenty of jobs, plenty of space, plenty of sun, plenty of everything—that was the environment in which the Wilson brothers grew up. Three boys sharing one bedroom might not sound like abundance in the age of the McMansion but that was also an era in which a machinist without a college education, moonlighting as a musician, could comfortably if not lavishly raise a family on one income. It sounds idyllic, and for those who lived it, it was. Tom Wolfe made his career on noticing what was going on in Southern California before anyone else: “Suddenly classes of people whose styles of life had been practically invisible had the money to build monuments to their own styles. Among teen-agers, this took the form of custom cars, the Twist, the Jerk, the Monkey, the Shake, rock music generally, stretch pants, decal eyes….”
And the Beach Boys. Murry Wilson always wanted to be a songwriter. He scored a few minor successes on the side but never hit big. Success would come vicariously. The three sons whom he taught to play piano and guitar began by singing doo-wop songs (with a first cousin and a classmate) in impromptu sessions at Hawthorne High School and moved on to concerts at high schools and teen hangouts throughout the L.A. Basin. They were popular enough that in 1961 Murry was able to get the boys an audition in front of some music publishers, who unfortunately weren’t interested in another cover band. Show us some original stuff, they said, and…maybe.
Middle brother Dennis was getting into the growing nascent SoCal surfing craze and was pushing big brother Brian, leader of the group, to incorporate beach themes into their music. Brian had been working on just such a tune but it was far from finished. That didn’t stop Dennis from offering it up anyway. Now they were on the spot. One weekend, the parents took off for Mexico City and left the boys enough money to feed themselves. They took the cash, rented a bunch of instruments and equipment, and practiced for three solid days. They had a tape of an original song ready when mom and dad returned. “Surfin’”—a crude but catchy doo-wop with a bluesy bassline number—blanketed the Los Angeles airwaves and cracked the national top 100.
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