Jesse Jarnow

They will almost certainly also inhabit “Opus,” Breathed’s latest venture, a Sunday strip set to launch Nov. 23 in 160 newspapers nationwide. In an indication of the reader appeal Breathed is still believed to command, he has demanded (and received) guarantees that each newspaper running the strip will give him half a page in the comics section, something no cartoonist has received since Bill Watterson retired “Calvin and Hobbes.”

Opus first appears on Page 30 of the “Bloom County Babylon” anthology, as the neurosis-addled Michael Binkley announces to his father that he has adopted a “manly dog.”

“Great Scott,” his father exclaims. “That’s a penguin.”

“Is it?” Binkley responds, whirling to examine the bow-tied blob that has waddled into the frame. “Oh dear.”

The next day, watching “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” Opus has his first speaking role. “Can you say ‘tuba player’?” the television host asks his audience.

“Tuphlem grdlphump,” Opus responds proudly.

“Good!” chirps Mister Rogers, from inside the box.

A few strips later, Opus had learned to speak. In the coming years Opus would develop with striking versatility, first as a foil to Binkley and friends, and later as a uniquely vulnerable low-status flightless waterfowl who among other things ran for vice president (his running mate: a dead cat named Bill), played sousaphone in a heavy metal band called Deathtongue, and ventured periodically to Antarctica in quest of his mother. His nose developed, too, from an angular beak to a truly whimsical schnoz.

What made the strips remarkable was the way Breathed effortlessly intertwined graphic ideas, concepts and gags. He regularly broke the fourth wall (or, in this case, the fifth panel), as when his characters threatened to strike if their space on the page was shrunk again. “Bloom County’s” absurdity meant that it seemed to melt the boundaries between the comics and the rest of the paper, broaching issues not traditionally associated with even the most experimental or political strips.

Since retiring “Outland,” the reclusive Breathed has devoted his time to fatherhood, work on his children’s books, and various other projects. In the past several years, Breathed has only granted sporadic e-mail interviews, including an uproarious exchange with the Onion in the summer of 2001 in which he compared comics to “the buggy whips of this millennium: quaint and eclipsed,” admitting only a “nostalgic twinge” for the medium.

As he prepared “Opus” for its maiden voyage, he agreed to communicate electronically with Salon from the Southern California home he shares with his wife and two children.

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From: Berkeley Breathed
Date: Fri, Oct 10, 2003, 1:51 AM
Subject: Fwd: salon interview

> Last we heard from you, via the Onion interview a few years back,
> the odds of you ever doing a strip again seemed pretty slim
> (to put it mildly). What changed?

The world went and got silly again. I left in 1995 with things properly, safely dull, and couldn’t imagine why anyone would feel it necessary again to start behaving ridiculously. It would have been at least courteous of the Republicans to warn a few of us inclined to retire our ink-swords that they had King George waiting in his zoom-zoom jetsuit aching to start the Crusades again.

> What are the advantages of a Sunday-only strip?

In my case, having a life. Ever see a seven-day-a-week cartoonist?

They all look like Keith Richards at 5 a.m. I’ve said that cartooning, like education and sex, is wasted on the young … but I understand why it’s that way. It’s wearing, corrosive, killing work. Consider Charles Schulz. Look where he is today.

> Again, in the Onion interview, you claimed that it was no longer possible to
> satirize American politics. In the past two years, the (visible) political landscape
> has changed considerably. Do you still believe it’s impossible to satirize?

I think there’s both a saturation point and a failure point in events being beyond satire. I started stripping in 1981, the same month that MTV started. Daily satirical comment was either “Doonesbury” or “The Tonight Show.” The horizon was clear. We had the whole playing field. You young punks just try to imagine that there wasn’t even a World Wide Web. Michael Jackson jokes passed as edgy comedy in “Bloom County.”

Now. Lord, now. The din of public snarkiness is stupefying. We’re awash in a vomitous sea of caustic humorous comment. I hope to occasionally wade near the black hole of pop references only obliquely without getting sucked in with everyone else. Full disclosure: I’ll admit that I had a momentary lapse and recently inked a strip where Opus’ mom sees a picture of Michael Jackson in 1983, proclaims Jacko’s old nose irresistible and voices an urgent wish to nibble it off down to the nub.

It took every thoughtful middle-aged fiber in my being for the courage to toss the finished strip. I did, but I wept.

Now the flip side of this is when events get untouchable. It becomes like the occasional lampoons of supermarket tabloids: unfunny because they’re mocking something that’s funnier than the satire. You can’t effectively satirize Bill Clinton getting waxed by an office vixen in the office of Abraham Lincoln. It’s done. Over. Go home. Know when you’re beat. It almost was physically painful to watch the great Garry Trudeau have to try to get a handle on it.

> What was your comic reading experience like as a child?

None. I’m sorry, I don’t know how else to put this. I watched “Wild Wild West” and collected snakes.

> Would you let your daughter anywhere near a modern comics page?

Not without those magnifying glasses you buy at the counter of Thrifty-Mart.

Your question brought me briefly back to the old days. There was a time in that hazy, sunny morning time in a bygone innocent America when a slightly off-color “Bloom County” or “Doonesbury” would hit the comic pages and the nation’s ministers would proclaim the funnies as ground zero on the cultural battleground for the morals of our youth.

Now it’s the sale rack of thongs for preschoolers at J.C. Penney. Even with “Boondocks,” the comics don’t even cause a ripple on the moral Zeitgeist anymore. This speaks poorly of where the comic page is today, by the way … which speaks volumes about why we’re bringing Opus back and why we’re demanding a half-page. Things have simply gotten far too bleak.

> Opus has existed in several mediums now — two comic strips, as well as
> children’s books, and an animated cartoon. Did transferring him to other
> mediums require you to reimagine the character at all?

Yes, regrettably. His personality often served at the mercy of the joke or story that needed telling. This makes for funny gags sometimes … but not good writing. After 15 years, I honestly didn’t think I had a handle on my marquee character: He was a cipher. Suddenly I’ve found myself curious as to what really makes him tick. I plan to explore. Or at least after we’re done transforming him into “To Kill a Mockingbird” for some real money.

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The question is, does anybody care that an occasionally cranky “stripper” is going back to work?

If not, they should. As Willie Sutton robbed banks because that’s where the money was, it should never be forgotten that the comics page is where the readers are. For all of the astounding changes in the media, there are, according to an estimate by the Metro-Puck Comics Network, an advertising agency that represents about 200 national newspapers, still somewhere in the vicinity of 105 million people reading the comics pages on a given Sunday.

“The newspaper funny page [is] a great American story in itself,” Breathed remarked to Editor and Publisher upon “Outland’s” retirement in 1995, “shrunken in size and buffeted by new technology, still bravely resisting its own ending.” It has been a slow decline since the Golden Age of the early 20th century, when surreal masters like Winsor McKay (“Little Nemo in Slumberland”) and George Herriman (“Krazy Kat”) reigned over vast expanses of newsprint to a broad audience.

Since then, strips’ space on the page has been consistently decreased as newspaper readership has shrunk. With few notable exceptions, such as Aaron McGruder’s “Boondocks” and Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury (from which Breathed occasionally cribbed in his early years), most strips could have been written at any point in the past 50 years. This year, “Doonesbury” and Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman’s “Zits” caused industry stirs by using the words “masturbation” and “sucks,” respectively, in their strips — boundaries crossed years ago, to say the least, in most other popular mediums.

“Kids and adults and everybody see and hear candid words on cable and in magazines, on the Web,” says Dave Astor, the features columnist for Editor and Publisher. “I think papers are much too cautious. The reason they give is that kids read the comics.” Though the term “family-oriented” is frequently applied to the medium, according to the Metro-Puck figures the 105 million comics readers break down into 75 million adults, 17 million teens and 13 million children between the ages of six and 12.

Comics not only seem a flashback to an earlier morality, but an earlier sensibility. In a relentlessly self-reflective culture, comics remain resolutely straightforward: an end node with few links back to the outside world. The Sunday pages continue to be dominated by serialized adventures (“Annie,” “Prince Valiant”), simple family foibles (“Out of the Gene Pool,” “1 Big Happy”), and wryly talking pets (“Heathcliff,” “Get Fuzzy”). A “Gilligan’s Island” reference in “The Lockhorns” passes for intertextuality.

From production (hand-drawn and inked) to distribution (via massive centralized newspaper syndicates), the whole industry feels like it belongs to an earlier epoch. In a recent Editor and Publisher column, Astor profiled the traveling salesmen who still make the bread-and-butter sales for the comics syndicates. His descriptions of sample-laden satchels and hustled deals can only strike the modern reader as weirdly romantic.

But business is no place for nostalgia. When Breathed retired “Outland” in 1995, David Shearer of the Washington Post Writers Group — Breathed’s syndicate — expressed some remorse over the fate of the strips’ sizes. “I’d like to see comics displayed bigger. We all would. But that’s not the reality of it,” he said, pointing toward electronic media as a place for artists to experiment. Ironically, with Breathed’s return, the WPWG is using that missed experimentation as a selling point. “The one and the only place to see ‘Opus’ will be in newspapers,” Shearer says. “This is a tremendous opportunity to increase circulation.”

For his part, as mentioned above, Breathed is demanding half a page for his bird. “We heard a little bit of grumbling from some editors who thought it was too much space,” says Suzanne Whelton, Breathed’s editor at WPPG, “but once they saw the artwork, they were all easily convinced that it was deserving of that kind of space. He’s really honed his talents as a painter over the past years. It really has a more painterly look than ‘Outland’ or ‘Bloom County.’”

“I don’t think a half-page ‘Opus’ is going to have a big impact,” Astor says sadly. “In the early ’90s, Bill Watterson, who did ‘Calvin and Hobbes,’ had the clout to do a half-page on Sundays. It didn’t really change anything. It didn’t lead to other comics doing that. It didn’t lead to an expansion of the comics section. Sunday papers who wanted to get ‘Calvin and Hobbes’ knocked out one or two other strips.”

Or, typically, they shrunk them — both of which some editors have already announced they will do to make room for ‘Opus.’ In that sense, Breathed might be considered a mercy killer — the suicidal stripper come to slam his foot and force others back down the inkwell whence they oozed. Given Breathed’s occasionally adversarial tone, it’s hard not to read his actions as those of a vigilante guardian.

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From: Berkeley Breathed
Date: Fri, Oct 10, 2003, 7:08 PM
Subject: Re: salon interview

> Was having more space to play with a condition of your return?
> Do you think you deserve more space than other strips? Or is this
> an attempt to encourage other strippers to demand the same?

Strips are in the tiny size and proportion that you see now to allow editors flexibility to cut the boxes apart and rearrange in psychedelic patterns all over their kitchen ceilings if they want, I guess. Bill Watterson halted this graphic slide toward nothingness several years into his strip … and the editors screamed, but went along for the most part. They thought it was safely behind them until we offered them “Opus” in only one size.

Would I like to see other strips run similarly? Good God, yes … if anyone bothers to put the work into the drawings. My drawings are going to be fun to look at or I’m going to get bored. And if readers want to see what bored cartoonists produce, take a look at much of the page. Actually, some are so bored, they’re actually dead. That’s another issue.

> It’s upsetting editors, but has it caused any major setbacks? Are enough
> papers picking up the strip?

We’ll be in all the major markets. But the size issue will initially keep us out of the majority of the nation’s newspapers unless the readers make a fuss. Boy, I’d hate to see that happen. I’d hate to see readers force editors to eliminate the comic strips marketed by corporations, widows and distant relatives long after their deceased creators pass on. What would happen to all the hacks hired by Jim Davis to write and draw “Garfield” if we were to put it out of business? Remember what they did to Mel Gibson at the end of “Braveheart”? There’s an idea.

> That said, would it be your wish to cause ripples?

As an end, controversy is a dead end. It’s why TV shows tried to throw in nudity some years ago. I notice now that the ripples de jour are lesbian kisses. It’s a sign of desperation, not good writing. Not to say that if I could figure out a way to throw in some hot lesbian action into “Opus,” I wouldn’t.

> Do you have a sense of mission with your return? Do you feel you have
> something to prove or accomplish?

There ain’t no going home again. That truth burns with a vengeance on the comic page as in does in other popular entertainment. “Bloom County” had its perfect, temporary moment during the ’80s … the only moment it would have ever flourished. My goal now is to simply have some fun — and I never really did before, oddly. If I can encourage other artists to have some fun too … then that’s about as big a mission as I’d want to claim. Actually being alive and aboveground is also an asset I’d like to encourage in more of today’s strip cartoonists.

> You haven’t read the daily comics page in a while, but I was curious if you
> followed those comics that attempt to bridge the gap between the daily paper
> and the Op-Ed section (and usually end up running in alt-weeklies), such as
> Tom Tomorrow’s “This Modern World,” David Rees’ “Get Your War On,” etc.?

I’d hate to see the funnies become a de facto editorial page, frankly. But you see more raw energy and passion in the strips that you mentioned than you would in the next 200 years of “Garfield” strips, which — by the way — have already been written by Jim Davis’ staff.

> Is it possible for the comics page to ever regain the sweeping popularity it
> enjoyed at its peak?

Well, we won’t know it if the page is forever filled with “Peanuts” reruns from 1957 and those undying vixens from “Apartment 3G,” will we? Housecleaning time, girls!

> What do you hope to achieve with a strip? A laugh? Or something more?

Something much more. A laugh from me.

> A lot of old syndicated comics used teams of artists, writers and inkers to
> produce their work. Are your strips a one-man show, or do you have help?

If you need all that help, well, you’re — Jim Davis, actually. Rich and slothful. The comic strip works best as deeply personal art and writing produced by near-insane, passionate creators. Like music and filmmaking, actually. The more hands-off it becomes, inevitably, the more boring it becomes, if not actually killable (a unique aspect to our business).

> With “Outland,” you took a whole lot of chances visually, which didn’t
> always go over too well with readers. Now, eight years later, do you
> have any game plan to balance experimentation with accessibility?

Balancing creative growth and experimentation with accessibility is the issue of the day for any artist. All I can say is that there’s nothing more populist than a comic strip. The comic page is not the place for the whacked-out Jackson Pollocks out there to ram their nutso visions down the readers’ throats … not that I haven’t tried that myself. The counterpoint to overexperimentation is being offered “Blondie” 73 years after it started. But we also have to stay interested ourselves. There’s the balance. And balance is the operative word.

> You’ve spent the better part of the last decade working on children’s
> books, where you have an extremely fine control over color and detail.
> Is it safe to assume that this is one of the reasons why that medium
> has been so attractive? If this is the case, having worked in that form, have you
> gained a different perspective on how to use the cruder boundaries of newsprint?

Painting picture books necessitated me actually learning something about art. And like a baby armed with a new box of colorful crayons and a newly painted living room wall … I’m anxious to wreak some havoc.

> What kinds of things keep you visually interested in a strip?

Emotion. Raw visible emotion. It’s virtually absent from most comics today. It flared warmly with “Calvin and Hobbes” and has mostly disappeared again. That and nudity.

> How frequently does an idea for a strip begin with a gag or punch line,
> vs. beginning with a visual idea, or even a conceptual/structural idea
> (a different arrangement of the frames, for example)?

The reality of a cartoon strip or character is vapor-thin. I doggedly decline to test that gossamer construction by discussing the characteristics of the smoke it is made of. I will go to my grave in a state of abject endless fascination that we all have the capacity to become emotionally involved with a personality that doesn’t exist.

Especially a smudgy one a half-inch high on newsprint. The power we find in our hands if we’re one of the lucky few that find that we have invented such a thing fills me with the awe that I normally reserve for watching my children sleep or contemplating the age of starlight or watching George Bush Jr. try to actually pronounce the word “to” without leaving the “o” off.

> Can a strip be socially relevant without resorting to pop-culture references?

Ya know, just reading those words “socially relevant” made me physically wince just now. Our job is to make people smile. If my cartoons stray into — I’m sorry, I can’t type them again … those words you used above — it’s an accidental byproduct in the effort to make ME smile.

> What is it you most love about the medium of the comic strip?

If the “Opus” comic strip were instead a movie, for instance, I’d have to send a memo to Bob Weinstein (when I knew he was having a good morning and enjoying his eggs) and ask if he wouldn’t mind me drawing a panel where his ass falls off while flossing too vigorously. Opus’ ass, not Bob’s. Later, I’d have to follow up with a budget adjustment requesting the funds for drawing the ass falling off. Later we’d have to cut the scene after two 14-year-old boys in Dubuque wearing pants well below their own ass wrote on their test-screening response card that the butt scene sucked.

I love comic strips because I can skip the above.

But then, coincidentally, I actually am making “Opus” into a movie right now. And I should add here that I hope Bob Weinstein understands that I’m just having a little fun and that I honestly think of him like a father.

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It may be that satire is truly impossible now. Recent so-called parodies in the Onion almost read as straight news. But in a way, “Bloom County” can be read as a forerunner to the type of self-aware flotsam that washes over the media at the turn of the century. Likewise, Breathed’s 1987 Pulitzer Prize seems an acknowledgment that the traditional boundaries of “news” had begun to blur. In 2003, that lands Breathed in Newsweek alongside other “newsmakers” such as Hollywood couple Antonio Banderas and Melanie Griffith.

You can’t go home again, though the modern comic strip might be as close as you can get. Trapped between the many streams of popular culture and the classical bounds of simple narrative, comics have essentially become contemporary dumb shows — which was always an unfortunate name for simple gestures that are so revealing.

“You know, when I was little, I didn’t know anything about politics. But I read those strips and I knew that Ronald Reagan was a bad man,” the clerk at the bookstore tells me, ringing up a used copy of an out-of-print “Bloom County” anthology, one of the many “a little mildewed from sitting at the base of all those toilets in all those bathrooms throughout America during the ’80s,” as Breathed described them to the Onion.

“They have a half-life of a flounder laying on the back porch,” he claimed. This hasn’t prevented “Bloom County” reruns from becoming among the best-selling strips on UClick.com, a subscription-based comic site. Breathed’s ’80s strips were rife with topical humor, and those references have certainly become dated. But unstable substances have a way of mutating, and — with all the historical context drained from them — “Bloom County” strips have transmogrified the ’80s, turning names like “Caspar Weinberger” into objectively bizarre monikers just as strange as any villain Little Nemo might face in Slumberland.

Separated from circumstance, one can truly begin to appreciate Breathed’s strategy of the absurd, in which human truths reveal themselves within his etched lines. Breathed doesn’t seem particularly inclined to discuss how his art works. At “Bloom County’s” peak, he would frequently cram a month’s worth of work into 90 hours, followed by a trip to the airport to put the strips — and sometimes himself, if he hadn’t yet finished them — on a plane to the syndicate in Washington. In that feverish state, “Bloom County” must have seemed like a dream, ready to slip away the next morning.

What was undoubtedly deeply personal for Breathed became instinctively so for his readers. By bridging the space between a child’s wonder and an adult’s confusion — the kinds of thoughts grown-ups contemplate after they have turned the light off, but before they have fallen asleep — Breathed did something wonderful: He individualized politics.

This is why the reappearance of a penguin on the funny pages is a profoundly good thing. If “Bloom County” and “Outland” were dream worlds, then they hit their readers early in the day, maybe over breakfast, when the pleasant haze of dreams still hung in their consciousness. And if they hit right, they might be able to pull that innocent state full into the daylight, if only for a second.

Even if Breathed resists the urge to go political with “Opus,” it’s hard to imagine him turning in anything remotely escapist. It would be ridiculous to think that Opus the penguin can change anything. But it gives one pause to think of 105 million readers simultaneously plunged into Breathed’s fantasyland for 10 or 15 seconds apiece. It might even make him smile.

Though once prolific, with seasonally surfacing B-sides and compilation tracks, Beck — the modern singer-songwriter most often compared, hopefully, to Dylan — has had little output since 2002′s morose “Sea Change.” In interviews, he has said his next album would be harder-edged, but also mysteriously hinted that it might just be more in the wispy pastel vein of “Sea Change.” Critics puzzled, fans stirred.

The project was linked to producers ranging from pop wunderkind Timbaland to conceptual hip-hopper Dan the Automator to Japanese avant-weirdo Cornelius. In the end, though, it was the Dust Brothers who got the nod, Beck’s collage-minded collaborators on 1996′s acclaimed “Odelay” (not to mention two of the strongest tracks from 1999′s “Midnite Vultures”).

And it sounds like … Beck.

But after the smirk-shattering cataclysm of “Sea Change,” you really can’t go home again — though you sure can try. Given Beck.com’s emphatic posting (also now removed) that the leaked album was unmastered, unmixed, unsequenced, it’s hard to know how much to read into these tracks. If forced, one could classify the 13 circulating songs into those that sound very much like Beck’s previous work, like the (perfectly fun) Spanglish hip-hop “Odelay” redux of “Que Onda Guero,” and a slightly larger handful that chart new territory between “Sea Change’s” melancholy and Beck the Younger’s exuberance.

Even without an obvious smash — or helpful iconic tag for “Guero’s” direction — the best half-dozen of the 13 tracks are healthy babes. On “E-Pro,” the first single, a devastatingly weird hand-clap breakdown erupts into an anthemic refrain. The unfortunately titled “Earthquake Weather” (a tentative “(maybe)” affixed to the initial labeling) snakes an octave-leaping chorus over a sultry tropical groove while Beck hones his powers of surreality: “The sky is purple,” he sings. “Days are changing/ with the weather/ like a riptide/ could rip us away.” “Girl” employs a tricked-out electronic false start before dropping into a sweet, up-tempo strummer.

Like Beck’s other so-called party albums, it’s a pastiche, though this time out the sources are almost invariably familiar. “Go It Alone,” “E-Pro,” “Nazarene” and “Black Tambourine” are all built around blues-heavy raps (often with harmonica interludes), direct descendents of “One Foot in the Grave,” (“Stereopathetic Soul Manure’s” tribute to Sonny Terry). “Brazilica” (now likely titled “Missing”) and “Earthquake Weather” both lean on nylon-stringed South American exotica for their mystique. Distorted lo-fi guitars dot nearly every song (especially the B-side destined “High 5″ remake, “Chain Reaction”).

A lot can change during mixing and sequencing, and — in this case — one hopes that it might be the disc’s lack of punch. Though that could be Beck himself. “Guero” nudges Beck back toward the dance floor, albeit frequently without the accompanying giddiness needed to invite listeners back, too. And if there’s little punch, there are fewer punch lines. Though Beck is back in a familiar lyrical landscape filled with strange decay — nooses that “hang from the sun,” “fax machine anthems” — brilliant throwaways like “Thursday night, I think I’m pregnant again” seem gone for good. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

As a work-in-progress, “Guero” is genuinely promising — though much rests on the work that remains before the disc’s official unveiling. Though some may be retitlings of earlier songs, a full tracklist posted by Beck.com features what appear to be five different songs, perhaps enough to swing the album to full strength. In its leaked state, however, it’s hard to imagine “Guero” receiving the royal ovation given to nearly all of Beck’s previous releases.

In Dylan parlance, perhaps “Sea Change” wasn’t Beck’s naked “Blood on the Tracks” confessional at all, but his “Nashville Skyline”: a clean break, a purging of the voice and vocabulary for which he’d become beloved. For Dylan, it was the beginning of a long trek into the wilderness. Only time will tell where it might bring Beck.

According to “Look! Listen! Vibrate! Smile!” — Dominic Priore’s exhaustive sourcebook of clippings and “Smile” arcana — Wilson began tracking “Prayer” several days after beginning the “Smile” sessions in earnest in October 1966. Most of that summer had been devoted to the 18 studio dates that yielded the Beach Boys’ classic “Good Vibrations,” Wilson’s triumphant so-called pocket symphony, which — in turn — had followed the “Pet Sounds” LP, the ethereally tender response to the Beatles’ “Rubber Soul” that he had crafted in early 1966.

All in all, 1966 was a busy year for Wilson. By the end of it, however, “Prayer” wasn’t finished. It wouldn’t be until November 1968, when it was completed for a different Beach Boys album, “20/20.” And though Wilson promised Capitol Records that “Smile” would be ready for release on Jan. 1, 1967 — cover art was prepared and the label began a promotional campaign — it wasn’t finished by the end of that year, either. Nor, for that matter, by the end of that decade, the three that followed, or even the century.

Eventually, the “Smile” reels leaked, and over the years a network of Beach Boys geeks have traded reconstructed versions of the LP like Deadheads exchanging live tapes. Those fan versions, along with the many promises of “Smile’s” true completion — it was a stipulation of the band’s contract with Reprise Records in the early ’70s, and tracks were unearthed for a possible touch-up in the late ’80s — make it difficult to know what tense to describe the album in. The past (“Smile” contained several ambitious song-suites co-written with lyricist Van Dyke Parks…) is too etched in stone for an album never finished; the present (“Smile” is rock’s first concept album, pre-dating “Sgt. Pepper”…) too inaccurate. It is a poetic irony of grammar, then, that the only appropriate voice is the future perfect.

But now, “Smile” is taking a big step toward the present tense. Last Friday, in London, Wilson performed the album for the first time in front of a live audience. He will repeat the performance in a tour through Europe over the next few months and, in the fall, the United States. Wilson and the 18-piece band that backed him received a five-minute standing ovation after their London performance, but they are playing against history. Wilson’s voice is no longer what it once was, and the brotherly harmonies literally do not exist anymore. His brothers are dead (Dennis, via a drunken drowning in 1983; Carl, from cancer, in 1998) and Wilson is estranged from the other two founding Beach Boys (cousin Mike Love amid a snarl of songwriting legalities, and former neighborhood friend Alan Jardine in a lawsuit over remarks made in Wilson’s ghostwritten 1991 autobiography — “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” — produced under the watch of Wilson’s then-Svengali psychiatrist Eugene Landy).

Then again, except for their vocals, the Beach Boys barely played on “Smile,” anyway. The later-named Wrecking Crew, a conglomeration of Hollywood’s best session musicians, including drummer Hal Blaine and bassist Carol Kaye, performed the music. Mike Love was especially opposed to the project, deriding Wilson’s “drug music” at every turn, urging Brian to stick with the successful girls ‘n’ cars formula. The wound of their leader’s seemingly abandoning them at their peak still festers — leaving the Beach Boys family in a deep decades-long feud of love, money, death and sex — and will make difficult any stand-alone release of the original sessions.

Internal band strife is only one explanation for why “Smile” never got made. Wilson’s struggles with addiction (to drugs, to food), the Beach Boys lawsuit against Capitol Records for back royalties, and their attempt to start to their own label and install a studio in Brian’s mansion also played a role. Somewhere, “Smile” got lost. That somewhere was probably inside the song “Heroes and Villains.”

“Heroes and Villains,” most likely, would have followed “Prayer.” Though it was eventually issued in shortened form as a follow-up single to “Good Vibrations,” the song began as something grander. Some versions of the story have it taking up 18 minutes and filling the projected LP’s entire first side. In every possible way, it was symbolic of the album’s successes and failures.

“Heroes and Villains” was one of several song umbrellas conceived by Wilson and Parks. Structurally, it was a surreal comic opera, with intertwining musical and lyrical themes that drew on American history and popular melody. Realistically, it was a collection of song fragments with repeating motifs, such as “Bicycle Rider,” whose “Bicycle rider see, see what you’ve done / To the church of the American Indian” chorus evoked Manifest Destiny and the blues number “C.C. Rider” in one trippy breath. As he did with “Good Vibrations,” Wilson wrote “Heroes and Villains” in sections, planning to assemble them later. He never did.

Lewis Shiner, in his novel “Glimpses,” about a time-traveling stereo repairman who can conjure the great lost rock albums by visiting their sessions, posits that Wilson had a moment of true inspiration with “Smile” and simply lingered too long in capturing it.

“Glimpses” is an exhilarating read, and absorbing oneself in books like Priore’s and Shiner’s is a good way to begin to understand what the album might have been. From there, a true “Smile” fanatic intent on unearthing the possibilities of the past might — in one obsessive burst — pour through the accumulated bootlegs, listen with Wilson and Parks’ concepts in mind, match melodies to ideas like an archaeologist reassembling a crumbled pediment, feed the remains into the computer, and chop and paste for hours, naming the different sections based on lyrics and scenes (“In the cantina…”) and jury-rigged classifications (“American pastoral”), until “Smile” eased its way back into existence.

“It was getting to me psychologically,” said Mark Spano, an audio engineer who put together his own “Smile.” “I started to feel very frustrated. And if I was getting down, I could only imagine what Brian must have felt.” Spano called on all his expertise to make his version of “Smile.” “Pitch correction, time compression, whatever it took, I had to do it, just to see if it could be done.”

Listening to the “Smile” sessions is a revelation. It’s startling to suddenly realize that one can actually hear Wilson at work in stunning stereo fidelity, the music warbling like a time machine in reentry as the reel-to-reel flutters on and off at the end of each segment. The sections flit by, melodic idea after melodic idea — cinematic fantasias, folk songs, barbershop vocal arrangements — Main Street USA rendering itself in vivid psychedelic color. “Smile” is the album you’d want with you while doing serious drugs at Disneyland. But who would want to do that? Nonetheless, “Smile” makes the prospect alluring.

Paul Williams, who — as a teenager — founded the pre-Rolling Stone rock magazine Crawdaddy and visited Wilson in Los Angeles over Christmas 1966, explains the genesis of the “Smile” myth, which he helped perpetuate in his magazine and his book “How Deep Is the Ocean?”: “I think that the basic enthusiasm of people like [writer] Richard Goldstein and me and others who heard parts of ‘Smile’ when it was being recorded [was over] the beauty of individual small pieces, movements, of music that Brian had executed in parts in the studio. [They were] breath-taking and inspiring.”

Williams, who went nearly 20 years between his initial encounter with “Smile” and his next hearing of the tapes, says he is “happy with … fragments that were not attempts to actually be an album sequence, though I totally empathize with and respect fans [who compile their own versions of the album]. It’s part of the game, like Mr. Potato Head: Here are the pieces, now make your own ‘Smile.’ It’s partly as though everybody’s given a few of the elements and then they’re told, ‘This was intended to be something great,’ and they naturally project what it could be based on their enthusiasm for what they’ve heard.”

They likely also project their notions of what a great album should be, fitting (and forcing) the “Smile” tracks over ideas of album flow that didn’t yet exist in 1966: what should be positioned where and how. If somebody thinks a great album should segue from track to track, with a quiet song at the end of Side 1, then — by golly — his “Smile” will segue from track to track with a quiet song at the end of Side 1 (probably “Wonderful”).

With file-trading protocols like BitTorrent making it easier to distribute new editions of “Smile” en masse, and technologies like Apple’s GarageBand making it easier to recombine them, one can easily imagine one’s own “Smile” being sent out into the world and finding its way back. It gives literal meaning to the fairly hokey quote Wilson added to the back cover of “Smiley Smile,” the half-assed album the Beach Boys put out instead of “Smile” in 1967 (“a bunt instead of a grand slam,” admitted Carl Wilson): “The Smile That You Send Out Returns to You.” “Smile,” then, is a reflection of what makes listeners happy, which is what Wilson intended to begin with.

But Wilson, who has in recent years been playing with the ’60s pop revivalists the Wondermints, has been reluctant to perform material from “Smile” himself. “He said it reminded him of a bad time and just didn’t want touch it,” says Wondermints multi-instrumentalist Probyn Gregory. “Finally, we started sneaking a few of the songs into the set, easing them in.”

Then, last fall, Gregory says, “Van Dyke Parks and Brian got together and finished up some of the fragments and added some things. They put some melodies to unfinished tracks, and words to some things that hadn’t had words put on them. And it all sounds like it’s a part of the piece, part of the period.”

Gregory is reserved about the prospects of making a definitive “Smile” record. “I was against the recording of ‘Pet Sounds Live!’ for the same reason,” he asserts. “No one will ever sound like the Beach Boys. We’re trying to be as faithful as possible, but please don’t compare us vocally to the Beach Boys, or to the Wrecking Crew, or to the sound of those microphones, or anything [Brian] did down at Western Recorders back in the old days.”

To the extent that battles can ever really rage between dorks lovingly obsessed with music recorded nearly 40 years ago, the battle over “Smile” does so. In addition to threads on discussion boards like the Smile Shop, Jeff Turrentine weighed in on Slate: “No band of touring musicians and singers, even one as talented as the group that backed up Wilson in 2000, will come close to capturing the magic that these kids from the ticky-tacky suburbs of Los Angeles were able to achieve in the studio [then]. To return to this now-mythic collection of songs is to gild the rarest, wildest lily in pop music. ‘Smile’ is dead; long live ‘Smile.’”

Paul Williams disagrees. “If you are not imprisoned by your own or other people’s expectations, [the old material] is just a jumping-off place for creative work,” he says. “Brian is, on the face of it, completely free of any of the pressure that could have been on him over the years regarding ‘Smile,’ because — just as for any other artist — when he’s doing something as a live show, he’s free to do with it whatever comes to him and whatever works for the show right now. Of course, in doing that, he also gets to discover what the music is for him right now, and that directs him towards the freedom to [possibly] make a record out of it.”

“Smile” and its story appeal to fans for many reasons. It is drama spread over nearly 40 years. The stakes are high: Somebody tried to achieve something momentous and didn’t. One fears “Smile” because he fears failing at his own life’s work. But that fear exists only for the same reason that “Smile” attracts him to begin with: Everything about it reeks of potential energy. One fantasizes of getting to the brink of achievement, but one is equally terrified of collapsing there, suddenly unable to do what had once been second nature. If people project notions of what a great album should be, then Brian Wilson becomes the avatar for it, one’s own fortunes lashed to his journey. It’s difficult not to root for him.

If “Smile” were to be released tomorrow, it would likely be a blip on the cultural radar. “Frankly,” Paul Williams says, “I’m not sure what impact ‘Sgt. Pepper’ would have if it were released today, just because contexts change. ‘Smile’ was a project that was sincerely and earnestly the next step in a body of work. It was specifically the next step in a sequence that we’d heard as ‘Pet Sounds’ and ‘Good Vibrations.’ I think that it’s inevitable that there will be a lot of good music in ‘Smile’ in whatever form it takes. Obviously, that doesn’t guarantee sales, but I think it’s just natural that it will be listened to respectfully by a lot of different people, most significantly musicians.”

Yo La Tengo‘s Ira Kaplan owns an edition on colored vinyl. “Man, it’s everything,” raves Will Cullen Hart, founding member of the Wilson-devotee collective the Elephant 6 Recording Company and current leader of the Circulatory System. “Conceptually, the musical stuff [is amazing], the idea of the sections, each of them being a colorful world within itself. [Wilson's] stuff could be so cinematic and then he could just drop down to a toy piano going plink, plink, plink and then, when you least expect it, it can just fly back into a million gorgeous vocals. Of course, you’ve got Van Dyke Parks’ lyrics…”

Williams observes, “It’s ironic that we’re talking about the [first] great album that never was at a time that the very form of the pop album is itself falling on hard times.” While this is certainly true, the return of the single has also brought the return of the producer, with musicians such as Timbaland and the Neptunes entering the spotlight. Wilson is a precursor to them just as much as to today’s indie rockers, working so successfully as he did (for a time) within the California scene’s studio system, employing every modern tool at his disposal.

Ultimately, “Smile” is a patriotic album. The Beach Boys were a patriotic band. But “Smile” oozes with a different kind of patriotism, calling on American nostalgia the same way the Beatles employed music hall on “Sgt. Pepper.” Despite celebrating an America that was great then and is, goshdarnit, great now, it points a ring-bejeweled finger toward a blissfully ethereal future with Uncle Sam as spirit guide. Profoundly uncynical, if “Smile” were to be released now with the attention it would have received in 1966, it might be deeply relevant as an album to rally behind for malcontent liberals accused of being America-haters for their beliefs.

Had it been completed in 1966 as planned, “Smile,” the Beach Boys’ legendary unreleased album, would have ended with a song titled “Surf’s Up.” It still might — preferably one that weds Brian’s 1966 transcendent solo vocal to backing tracks and an ending finished by Carl in 1971. The song crests gorgeously before swooping down to a lone Brian: “Surf’s up, mmmmhmmmhmmm, aboard a tidal wave…,” all the longing in the world — of an individual, of a member of a family, of an American — somehow evident in that middle “hmm.” And then the Beach Boys are singing, all of them, absorbing Brian’s lead in a levee-breaking swirl of harmony. If the opening to “Surfin’ USA” posited the United States as a coast-to-coast ocean, then the ending to “Surf’s Up” — and “Smile” — posits the wave that will make it so and pulls us out to sea with it.

I have an instant affection for Meloy and the Decemberists. And the reason for my instant affection, which is admittedly unfair to all parties, is that they uncannily resemble an entirely different band: Neutral Milk Hotel. And it’s not that the Decemberists merely remind me of Jeff Mangum’s now-defunct outfit — they sound like them right down to the smallest of mannerisms: the nasal faux-English accent, the ragtag marching rhythms, the fascination with the Old World, the songs about dead European girls. It’s forgivable, because it doesn’t sound exactly intentional. It also makes me open myself to their new album more than I would otherwise. Maybe too much.

On one hand, I could rationalize my attraction by saying that I am interested in the Decemberists for the same reasons I was initially interested in Neutral Milk Hotel. But, really, that’s not true. Jeff Mangum hasn’t made an album of new music since “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” in 1998. “Aeroplane” is as perfect and autonomous a record as ever has been made. One need not know anything about Neutral Milk Hotel’s previous history to understand it. (Though dealing with their later story frequently becomes a large part of one’s experience with it.)

There’s nothing overtly difficult about “Aeroplane.” In fact, the melodies and chord changes are almost instantly familiar: simple songs constructed out of the most obvious progressions. Parts are, that most hoary of clichés, Beatle-esque. Still, the album doesn’t quite sound like anything else ever recorded. The songs swim with surreal scenes. “Cocoa leaves along the border/ Sweetness sings from every corner/ Cars careening from the clouds/ The bridges burst and twist around,” Mangum sings in a typical verse.

From the lyrics spring the production and the arrangements: elegantly mournful horns bursting in bittersweet bouquets across a sky of crackling sheet noise, melodies streaking by from singing saws, accordions and zanzithophones. And Mangum’s voice, soaring warmly adrift in this completely bizarre world. The album is even mixed differently — the levels are cranked up just hotter than normal — which makes listening to it that much more immediate. The experience of “Aeroplane” is cathartic: noise breaking down one world while Mangum’s voice reinforces another.

Just as “Aeroplane” doesn’t sound like other records, listeners don’t relate to it like other records, either. A word that shows up time and time again in fans’ testimonials is “healing.” Instead of comparing it to other albums, listeners frequently cite deep-seated upheavals and realizations — broken love affairs, suicides, dying relatives. Which is perhaps why, five years after Neutral Milk Hotel last set foot on the modest club stages they made their home, people still care deeply about “Aeroplane.” The album continues to sell briskly. After all, it takes time for associations to build up. In its 10th anniversary issue, Magnet voted it the best album of the past decade, above Nirvana’s “In Utero” and Radiohead’s “OK Computer,” William Bowers calling it “indie rock’s ‘Amazing Grace.’” The Atlanta alt-weekly Creative Loafing recently devoted a cover feature to the album.

Naturally, one goes looking for more. Maybe that’s just the nature of living in an art world driven by commerce and progress — one always instinctively searches for the next step. There is no more, though. At least not yet. A year after “Aeroplane’s” release, as the story goes, Mangum got sick and, well, just sorta disappeared from public life. Right now, he’s off living in Halifax, Nova Scotia — or maybe in Brooklyn, N.Y. Not even his friends seem to know for sure. No matter where he is physically, he’s surely made his own world. And, for now, that means no music. Understanding this seems an inevitable, even beautiful, part of a listener’s relationship with “Aeroplane.”

My own story with “Aeroplane” has several chapters: It was the music that cooed me to sleep, jobless and groundless, after graduating from college; the music that propelled a friend and me to Athens, Ga., on a vague search for Mangum and his compadres in the Elephant 6 Recording Company; the music that encouraged me to start futzing with my roommate’s four-track, recording wineglasses and the kitchen sink; the music that became the high-stakes mirror for a two-year nonrelationship (and inspiration for a creative collaboration).

It was the latter that seemed to come to a conclusion this summer, as I heard “Castaways and Cutouts,” the Decemberists’ 2002 debut, for the first time, and I got involved with somebody else. “My name is Leslie Ann Levine,” frontman Colin Meloy sang as the album opened. “My mother birthed me down a dry ravine.” It was the voice, Mangum’s voice, pinched and assured, and it was like suddenly remembering a dream. Instinctively, I searched for the same sort of cosmic tendrils that lashed me to “Aeroplane” and the girl. They seemed a necessary component of a meaningful relationship.

One confused morning after, I listened to “Aeroplane” on the subway ride home, and arrived at my apartment to find the Decemberists’ sophomore effort in my mailbox. Listening bleary-eyed, and feeling the need for emotional resolution, I was struck by a horrible sense of guilt. the Decemberists seemed less like a dream and more like reality, and I felt like I was cheating — not on somebody I was ever actually in a relationship with, mind you, but on a goddamn album. And that felt even more stupid and unhealthy than the initial feeling of guilt. So it goes.

It left “Aeroplane” pleasantly unsullied, but it gave pathetically short shift to the Decemberists (and, by extension, anybody new in my life). After all, it is plumb unreasonable to criticize the Decemberists for not being Neutral Milk Hotel, or to evaluate one person on the basis of another. To be fair, “Her Majesty, the Decemberists” sounds considerably less like “Aeroplane” than its predecessor. More important, it’s a really wonderful album, precisely on its own merits.

If Mangum seemed as if he was transmitting from the unconscious, like a surrealist engaging in automatic writing, then Meloy is a meticulous short-story writer. Both of these stances are consciously employed effects, to be sure, neither more nor less authentic than the other. There is a sense of haphazard inevitability to Mangum’s music and a sense of careful ordering to Meloy’s, and this subsequently affects the listener’s level of engagement. Like an author dressing a scene with finely described props, the Decemberists’ arrangements are pure suggestion. Where ambient theremins and “Aeroplane”-like crackles served “Castaways and Cutouts,” organ drones, whispered strings, and all manners of bells populate “Her Majesty.”

This in itself isn’t much of an achievement. It’s what is meant these days by the term “well-produced.” Except that the extras all adhere to a gently macabre, very original aesthetic, structurally sketched by Meloy’s lyrics and percussionist Rachel Blumberg’s resolutely pre-rock rhythms. The latter are subtly inventive, prodding the music along with quiet insistence (such as the muted march of “The Gymnast, High Above the Ground”). The former are decidedly surreal, with more than a hint of Mangum (“Seraphim in seaweed swim where stick-limbed Myla lies”), but seem more actively written than pulled whole from a subconscious, more functional in the real world than describing a dream state.

Indeed, there are places where Meloy oversteps in describing the world, emphasizing antiquated language for its own sake (“pantaloons” and “dungarees” make appearances in “The Soldering Life”), or delves into plain cutesiness, such as the show-tuney (though endearing) “Chimbley Sweep.” For this, Meloy and company might be dubbed “literate.” They are, though not because they make smarty-pants allusions to Russian revolutionaries (their band name) and haunting authors (“Song for Myla Goldberg”), but because they are so self-aware. “Here’s a plaintive melody/ A truncated symphony/ An ocean’s garbled vomit on the shore,” Meloy sets up, before delivering the punch line, shooting the listener unashamedly into glittering modernity: “Los Angeles, I’m yours.”

This awareness might be taken for mannered restraint, and that is both what makes the record enjoyable and what might prevent it from becoming a revered document, à la “Aeroplane.” “Her Majesty, the Decemberists” is not the key to a new and weirder life — but then, not much is. For that matter, it doesn’t try to be. “Aeroplane” is a high-stakes record. It works for some, and it could be considered one pretentious-ass slab o’ music by others. It’s hard to listen to without noticing its ambitions.

For those obsessed with (or possessed by) “Aeroplane” — that is, for me — “Her Majesty, the Decemberists” might well be a lesson in what to do afterward, the day-to-day life following an astonishing dream. Just as one might unconsciously attribute dream actions to real-life acquaintances, Colin Meloy and the Decemberists point backward to Jeff Mangum and Neutral Milk Hotel. It is not wrong to expect things out of bands or albums, but it is dangerous — falling in love with somebody who might be incapable of loving you back. But when they do, it’s wonderful. Especially albums. Such love is unconditional, and doesn’t go away.

Mangum’s absence has only made “Aeroplane” that much more untouchable. The night I received “Her Majesty,” I ventured back into Manhattan from Brooklyn, where I live. I took the long way back to the subway as I listened to it, detouring down St. Mark’s Place. There, sitting at an outdoor cafe, was Neutral Milk Hotel’s Julian Koster, smiling broadly and enjoying the late summer evening. I quickly pushed the headphones off my ears, stunned by the surreality of the moment and, again, with guilt. Of all the issues to be raised by pop music, guilt should not be one of them.

The simple moral is that not everything has to be high stakes. The oblique cleverness of “Los Angeles, I’m Yours” might be Meloy’s writerly lesson in a nutshell. One imagines him walking quixotically through the sprawl, places and people transforming into “a city by the sea/ A gently company.” “Its streets and boulevards/ Orphans and oligarchs,” he sings. And if oligarchs, then why not singing saw players?

The Decemberists don’t have to reshape my world, just as every girl I meet doesn’t have to reshape my future. But my present? Fine. It’s probably healthier to be transformative than transcendent, anyway. Real worlds are better than fantasies; real bands are nicer than nonexistent ones. The Decemberists will tour again soon.