Review

A Lost Pop Symphony
By Scott Staton
Smile
an album by Brian Wilson
Nonesuch, $19.98

1.
The Beach Boys are arguably America's quintessential pop group, but
their importance has been unfairly diminished by the cultural fads with which
they are associated: surfing and hot rods. Consisting of three brothers, a
cousin, and a friend, the young group emerged from the working-class
Los Angeles suburb of Hawthorne in 1961 with "Surfin'," an unpolished paean
to the local surfing craze. Relying on the prodigious musical talents of
the eldest brother, Brian Wilson, they combined harmonies inspired by
innocuous vocal groups of the Fifties with rock music's adolescent exuberance,
capturing the hedonism of postwar American affluence.

Their exultant tributes to surf and auto culture resulted in several
top ten hits over the next three years, including "Surfin' USA," "Surfin'
Safari," "Little Deuce Coupe," and "I Get Around." Wilson's talent for writing
hits was such that even when he gave away his song "Surf City" for his
friends Jan Berry and Dean Torrence to record, it resulted in a number-one
single. Wilson sang harmony on the Jan and Dean recording of "Surf City," and
his rapturous falsetto palpably evoked teenage male Californian bliss in
the refrain, which sang of a paradise where there are "two girls for every
boy." Casual listeners are today as likely to think "Surf City" is by the
Beach Boys as by Jan and Dean.

Brian Wilson was minutely attentive to the possibilities of mixing
sound and the other resources of the recording studio, and his elaborate musical
arrangements rapidly approached in quality those of his most direct
influence, the producer Phil Spector. While adolescents continued to
enjoy the group's fun-in-the-sun tunes, Wilson included on his albums ballads
such as "Don't Worry Baby" and "In My Room" that revealed both extraordinary
skill in composition and emotional vulnerability. The coupling of
commercial success with a growing musical sophistication thrust the Beach Boys
into the vanguard of popular music. They were for a time America's only match
for the Beatles, with whom they shared a record label and an intense musical
rivalry.

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The mid-Sixties were highly competitive years in the development of
popular music. Musicians began to regard themselves as recording artists rather
than pop stars, and their work reflected this ambition. Albums became
occasions for artists to improve on their previous releases and distance
themselves from the pack. Wilson felt the demands of the era acutely. After
releasing the brilliant Pet Sounds in 1966, a personal meditation on love and
growing up that bore no trace of either surfing or hot rods, the
twenty-three-year-old Wilson conceived of Smile, the highly anticipated
follow-up (originally titled Dumb Angel), as his "teenage symphony to
God."

He envisioned the album as an affectionate critique of America's mythic
past, a cartoonish representation of Manifest Destiny from Plymouth
Rock to Hawaii. Like the American composer Charles Ives, whose unconventionally
impressionistic work sometimes seemed to attempt to include and
interpret all of American culture, Wilson made wide reference to American history
and music, from the folk songs of Woody Guthrie and the familiar "You Are
My Sunshine" to pop standards like "I Wanna Be Around." A work unified by
recurring musical motifs, Smile was imagined as a collection of three
suites composed of discrete musical segments that would evoke themes of
frontier Americana and childhood, as well as the four natural elements—the
movement of air could be heard, for example, in the song "Wind Chimes." Wilson
intended the album to be the preeminent psychedelic pop-art statement.

The psychedelic era produced rock music's most recklessly innovative
work. The use of the drug epithet "psychedelic" suggested the recording and
arranging of songs in ways that would approximate aspects of an altered
state of awareness. The result was music whose bizarre conventions
demanded (and often rewarded) close attention from the listener. For Wilson,
this psychedelic element had a spiritual quality. As he related in a 1966
interview,

About a year ago I had what I consider a very religious experience. I
took LSD, a full dose of LSD, and later, another time, I took a smaller
dose.... I can't teach you, or tell you, what I learned from taking it. But I
consider it a very religious experience.
Wilson hoped the release of Smile would set off the commercial eruption
of psychedelic music that he and others (such as the Beatles) anticipated.
"Psychedelic music will cover the face of the world and color the whole
popular music scene," he declared. "Anybody happening is psychedelic."

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A number of obstacles prevented Wilson from completing Smile, which was
only recently released by Wilson in 2004 as a solo project. Chief among
those difficulties was his inability to contend with the dissatisfaction of
the other Beach Boys, who feared that the album's musical adventurousness
would prevent its commercial success. Efforts to establish the group's own
label, Brother Records (almost two years before the Beatles attempted a
similar venture with Apple Records), and a lawsuit with Capitol Records over
royalties also distracted Wilson. He was further demoralized by the
approaching release in 1967 of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts
Club Band, itself inspired by Pet Sounds and instantly heralded as the type
of psychedelic masterwork that Smile was meant to be.

After repeatedly postponing the album's release date, the group finally
ceased recording it in mid-1967 and instead released a modest
substitute album, Smiley Smile, cobbling together home-recorded versions of some
Smile songs with other miniature compositions. The Beach Boys' obvious
failure to complete Smile, coincident with their timorous pullout from the
momentous Monterey Pop Festival that summer (a consequence of their having no
groundbreaking material to perform live), alienated critics and fans
whose developing tastes were fast outpacing the group's sunny anachronisms.

Despite occasional flashes of brilliance and sporadic musical
contributions from Wilson, the group suffered precipitously diminishing sales over
the next several years. Wilson, the Beach Boys' least dispensable member,
receded into mental illness, becoming over the next decade a bedridden,
drug-addled eccentric weighing some 320 pounds.[1] Smile, meanwhile,
became the archetype of the unfinished pop masterpiece: the Great Lost Album.

Smile haunted the music of the Beach Boys into the Seventies; melodic
fragments and entire tracks from it would appear on their later
releases, often in new incarnations. A contract signed with Warner Brothers in
1970 following the group's departure from Capitol even included a clause
that promised a finished Smile by 1973. When it failed to appear, the group
was fined $50,000. Wilson had by then renounced the work as "inappropriate
music" and derailed any attempt to revive it. The Beach Boys returned
to the top of the charts only after repackaging their early hits on the 1974
album Endless Summer. The compilation's retrospective appeal renewed their
fortunes, but it also eclipsed with nostalgia their legacy as one-time
innovators.

In the mid-Eighties, a recovered Wilson broke with the Beach Boys—who
over the years have suffered the deaths of Wilson's two brothers, Dennis and
Carl, internecine lawsuits, and a descent into woeful self-parody— and
began his solo career. Although he still hears voices and suffers from
occasional bouts of depression, in recent years he has been performing with
accompaniment and writing music with greater frequency. In early 2004,
nearly forty years after the aborted sessions, Wilson introduced a
newly completed version of Smile at the Royal Festival Hall in London to
great acclaim and almost equally great surprise. The album was rerecorded and
released by Nonesuch Records in September 2004 on the eve of a
well-received tour that was extended through the summer of 2005, delivering an
improbable denouement to one of rock music's most enduring myths.[2]

2.
To understand Smile and its enigmatic place in the history of pop
music, it is necessary to look back at Brian Wilson's mid-Sixties career with the
Beach Boys. The arrival of the Beatles inspired Wilson to move beyond
surf rock. "When I hear really fabulous material by other groups, I feel as
small as the dot over the i in 'nit,'" he explained in 1964, when the Beatles
first toured America.

That's probably my most compelling motive for writing new songs—the
urge to overcome an inferiority feeling.... I do my best work when I am trying
to top other songwriters and music makers.
Whereas the Beatles featured the talents of John Lennon, Paul
McCartney, and their producer, George Martin, Brian Wilson was essentially alone. The
Beach Boys' bass guitarist and most versatile vocalist, capable of sing- ing
all the parts himself if necessary, Wilson also wrote, arranged, and
produced their songs. "I go to the piano and play 'feels,'" he once said of his
songwriting.

"Feels" are specific rhythm patterns, fragments or ideas. Once they're
out of my head and into the open air, I can see them and touch them firmly.
Then the song starts to blossom and become a real thing.
Straining to prepare and record new material while also touring in
support of the group's unceasing release schedule—four albums in 1964 alone —he
suffered his first nervous breakdown late that year. Wilson insisted to
the other members—Dennis and Carl Wilson, his cousin Mike Love, and family
friend Al Jardine—that he stop touring to concentrate entirely on
composing and producing. "I wanted to move ahead in sounds and melodies and
moods," he commented shortly afterward. "A song can, for instance, have movements,
in the same way as a classical concerto, only capsulized."

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Recording with temporarily hired session musicians while the others
were away on tour, Wilson's heightened concentration in the studio allowed
him to satisfy Capitol's demands for more music by producing songs of greater
structural and melodic complexity. Two albums in 1965, The Beach Boys
Today! and Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!), featured attempts to blend the
classical composition of George Gershwin, whose Rhapsody in Blue Wilson
held as his "general life theme," with the group's resplendent vocals into
songs that amounted to miniature pop symphonies. The hit single "California
Girls," with its orchestral introduction and cascading harmonies, is a
prime example. In part because Wilson was almost completely deaf in his right
ear, a defect he has attributed to his father's physical abuse, he produced
his recordings in mono. His grasp of musical arrangement and skill at the
mixing console brought clarity and spaciousness to Phil Spector's similarly
monophonic Wall of Sound style, in which a great number of instruments
and vocals are layered symphonically to come together in a rich mass of
sound.

But the influences of Gershwin and Spector didn't compare with Wilson's
preoccupation with the Beatles. Following the release in late 1965 of
the Beach Boys' Party! album, a live-in-the-studio collection that
contained no fewer than three versions of Beatles songs, Wilson listened to the
Beatles' newly released Rubber Soul while high on marijuana. Rubber Soul's
allusive lyrics and reflective tone suggested to Wilson that artistic
achievement in pop music would be measured by full-length statements of songs linked
thematically and stylistically to form an integrated whole. He decided
that his next album, Pet Sounds, would better it.

Wilson assembled for Pet Sounds most of Phil Spector's stable of
musicians, the "Wrecking Crew," with whom he painstakingly worked out individual
parts and fashioned combinations over months of recording. The Wrecking Crew
bassist Carol Kaye recalls that Brian always brought written out charts for most of the musicians....
He wrote the charts himself, you could tell from the illegibility of them
sometimes.... He didn't hire a professional copyist like the rest of
the arrangers did. The crystalline arrangements gracefully combined organs, saxophones,
strings, flutes, vibraphones, bicycle bells, timpani, and even barking
dogs into stunning instrumental textures. The instrumental tracks of the
album were already finished when the other Beach Boys returned from their
current tour to record the vocals. To realize the harmonies he had meticulously
devised in their absence, Wilson coached them through long hours of
vocal takes in an almost peremptory fashion.

[3] They were surprised and irritated by this exacting approach, and felt alienated from what Mike Love indignantly called Wilson's "ego music."

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Seeking to move away from the group's puerile lyrical preoccupations,
Wilson enlisted a young advertising copywriter named Tony Asher as a lyricist.
With Asher's help, he explored the anxieties of his early twenties on Pet
Sounds. The result was a bittersweet set of songs about a young man's search
for love and certainty suffused with the apprehension of their
impermanence. An extended reflection on romantic hope and the loss of innocence, Pet
Sounds was an expression of Wilson's distinctive emotional and musical
sensibility. The album's orchestral rock music was a striking contrast to the
juvenile euphoria of the group's previous work, exhibiting in its musical
composition and arrangement a new depth of feeling. As he said of the album years
later,For the first time in my life, I did something that I wanted to do from
my heart—what my real music is.... Pet Sounds was something that was
absolutely different. Something I personally felt.
While recording Pet Sounds Wilson began work on an inchoate composition
entitled "Good Vibrations." Wanting to devote more time and attention
to the song, he set it aside, later recording it over six months at four
different studios and a cost of more than $50,000. Rather than record the
instrumental track as an unbroken ensemble performance, as he had done for the songs
on Pet Sounds, Wilson isolated his musical arrangement into sections and
recorded them separately. He made prominent use of the theremin, an
instrument whose eerie electronic wail had been mainly confined to
horror movies, in an uncommon combination that included jagged cello triplets,
sleigh bells, harpsichord, clarinet, fuzz bass, and a Jew's harp.

A "pocket symphony" composed of vocal and instrumental segments
interwoven over little more than three minutes, "Good Vibrations" was released as
a single following the disappointing American sales of Pet Sounds. It
sold nearly 400,000 copies in its first four days of release in October 1966
and reached number one in both America and Britain. Its original,
apparently seamless mixture of different performances on a single record helped
redefine the pop idiom.

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When the Beach Boys toured the UK shortly after the release of "Good
Vibrations" in 1966, the British New Musical Express readers' poll
voted them the most popular group in the world, displacing the Beatles.
Wilson was meanwhile collaborating on Smile with a clever twenty-three-year-old
studio musician named Van Dyke Parks. Wilson considered the bookish Parks, who
had a penchant for puns and abstract imagery, the ideal lyrical foil for an
album that would consummate his "spiritual sound" and apply the
collage-like production methods of "Good Vibrations" to a full-length record.

Recognition of Wilson's genius and his evident musical advances was
widespread at this time, partly because of his effort to remake the
Beach Boys' image into that of serious pop musicians. The group hired a
former Beatles publicist to mount a press campaign, and Wilson immersed
himself in Los Angeles's counterculture, where close admirers in the underground
music press doted on him.[4] Separated from the touring Beach Boys, Wilson
mixed with a fawning coterie of intellectual groupies who stimulated him with
ideas and substances uncommon to his suburban upbringing, such as
cybernetics, Eastern mysticism, hashish, and amphetamine.

Smile's release was delayed as months of recording passed; in the
meantime, cover art for the album was designed and reports from the press raised
expectations of an exceptional work. Wilson was also featured in an
April 1967 CBS television special, "Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution,"
concluding the program with a solo rendition (filmed in November 1966) of one of
Smile's highlights, the ironically titled "Surf's Up." The show's host,
Leonard Bernstein, introduced Wilson as "one of today's most important
pop musicians," describing the song as "poetic, beautiful even in its
obscurity."

But as ideas and hours of tape accumulated in the studio, Wilson's
behavior grew increasingly erratic. He planted his piano in a large sandbox in
the den of his house, installed a tree house in the doorway, erected a
giant tent in the living room, and moved furniture around to make space for
gym mats and exercise equipment that were never used. He became paranoid,
suspecting Phil Spector of putting him under surveillance and his
father (whom he had fired as the group's manager in 1965) of bugging his
house, and he held business meetings in the pool at odd hours. At a notorious
recording session for the Fire segment of the "Elements" suite, entitled "Mrs.
O'Leary's Cow," he lit a small fire and insisted that everyone in the
studio wear red fire helmets. He later learned that a nearby building had
burned down that night, and believed the screeching, howling inferno he had
recorded was somehow responsible. "That would have been a really bad
vibration to let out on the world, that Chicago fire," he said, and
locked away the tapes.

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Wilson completed much of Smile's instrumental recording by December
1966. When the other Beach Boys returned from their triumphant tour of
Britain to record the vocals, they were perplexed by his fragmented music and
aghast at the number of interlopers that surrounded him. According to David
Anderle, a confidant of Wilson's whose interviews with the rock journalist Paul
Williams offered some of the earliest insights into Smile, "Not only
were they hearing things they'd never heard from Brian," but because the
Beatles hadn't yet released Sgt. Pepper, with its own ambitious mixture of
disparate musical elements and surreal lyrics, "there was no way to relate to
what Brian was putting down."

Mike Love was especially exasperated by the inscrutable lyrics, such as
the phrase "columnated ruins domino": he aggressively questioned Van Dyke
Parks about their meaning, precipitating Parks's departure. The unraveling of
Wilson's support group and his dwindling confidence that he could
realize his musical vision exacerbated his increasing fragility; after some
months of diffuse effort he had another nervous breakdown. It was announced in
May 1967 that Smile had been scrapped.

A profusion of unauthorized recordings of the original Smile sessions
circulate widely among Beach Boys enthusiasts. They collect songs in
various states of construction and varying grades of fidelity, as well as
innumerable melodic fragments, amorphous variations of musical themes,
and experimental oddities—such as "George Fell into His French Horn," in
which Wilson directs a band of horn players to talk through their horns.
These recordings remain fascinating for the glimpses they provide into
Wilson's process of composition, especially when they are combined on certain
audio mixes to give a tantalizing impression of being complete. They also
give the listener an idea of the unwieldy amount of material Wilson found so
difficult to organize into the masterpiece he intended to produce.

3.
It was not until thirty-six years later, in 2003, that Wilson was able
to revisit these recordings. He did so with Darian Sahanaja of the
Wondermints, a retro-pop group that has found its calling as Wilson's musical
backing. They helped to prepare his successful Pet Sounds tour of 1998, and
Wilson was receptive afterward to the idea of similarly resurrecting Smile for
live performance. Sahanaja loaded the extant Smile material onto his
computer in order to review it with Wilson, making it easier than it had been in
1966 to sort and recombine the many segments. Van Dyke Parks (whose own
eclectic career had produced two minor masterpieces of idiosyncratic Americana,
Song Cycle and Discover America) soon joined the effort, providing some new
lyrics.As one of the many who have tried to edit fragments and incomplete
mixes of Smile songs into an approximation of what the album might have been, I
greatly admire how the material is interpreted on the Nonesuch
recording. The treatment by Wilson and his collaborators of the original
recordings as a musical score (albeit in pieces) affirms the flexible method of
studio production he realized on "Good Vibrations" and sought to apply on
Smile.

A principal innovation of Wilson's was his extensive use of the studio
as a compositional element, layering vocals and instruments in unusual
combinations, coloring them with echo and reverberation, and piecing
different tape sources together into individual songs, a technique he
called "modular" recording. Wilson and the Wondermints replicate Smile's
whimsical fragments with uncanny precision, but they map them out in a dramatic
and thematically coherent sequence. The result is a display of vividly
imaginative music by one of pop music's best composers.

In the album's introduction, the hymn-like a capella harmonies of the
wordless "Our Prayer" are slowed one measure from the original. They
segue into the exhilarating "Heroes and Villains," which had been released in
an abridged form in 1967, with a line ("How I love my girl!") borrowed
from the song "Gee" by the Fifties doo-wop group the Crows. Dizzying vocal
harmonies accompany the lyrical narration of a romantic adventure with a mestizo
girl in the "Spanish and Indian home" of the Old West:

Once at night, cotillion squared, the fight
and she was right in the rain of the bulletsthat eventually brought
her down
But she's still dancing in the night
unafraid of what a dude'll do in a town full of heroes and villains.

Like much of Smile, the song is more a sustained flow of whimsical
imagery and music than it is a typical pop song.

A synopsis of the album's Americana theme, "Roll Plymouth Rock"
(originally titled "Do You Like Worms?") begins with an ominous sound of timpani
and the lines "Waving from the ocean liners/beaded cheering Indians behind
them/Rock, rock, roll, Plymouth Rock roll over." The latter line links
together references to early rock-and-roll stars Bill Haley ("Rock
Around the Clock") and Chuck Berry ("Roll Over Beethoven") with the site of
the Pilgrims' landing as part of the album's pop exploration of American
mythology.

A tinkling, music-box version of the "Heroes and Villains" theme then
precedes guttural, faux-Indian chants, which underlie the lines "Ribbon
of concrete, just see what you've done/ done to the church of the American
Indian." A play on the "ribbon of highway" lyric of Woody Guthrie's
"This Land Is Your Land," the phrase "ribbon of concrete" alternates on the
second refrain with the words "Bicycle Rider," a possible reference to Bicycle
"Rider Back" playing cards, first manufactured in 1885. In the album's
cartoonish way, both images suggest the inexorable westward expansion
of American settlers. Hawaiian chants usher in the end of the song ("the
social structure steamed upon Hawaii"), looking toward the Bicycle Rider's
final destination.

Another song, "Cabin Essence," successfully completes an arrangement
that had been left unfinished in 1966. Brian Wilson said long ago that the
song was about railroads,

and I wondered what the perspective was of the spike. Those Chinese
laborers working on the railroads, like they'd be hitting the thing...but
looking away too, and noticing, say, a crow flying overhead...the Oriental mind
going off on a different track.
Between folky illustrations of pastoral life on the frontier ("I want
to watch you, windblown, facing/waves of wheat for your embracing") are
interspersed forceful clangs and chants ("Who ran the iron horse?"),
conveying the impact of the railroad on the developing West. The lyrics
allude variously to "Home on the Range," "America the Beautiful," and
Guthrie's "Grand Coulee Dam," the latter punned with the derogatory
word for a Chinese laborer, "coolie" ("have you seen the Grand Coulee workin' on
the railroad?"). The closing line, "Over and over, the crow cries uncover
the corn field," has the ring of a Chinese proverb adapted to the American
landscape.

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Smile's centerpiece, "Surf's Up" ("aboard a tidal wave"), remains the
album's grandest song, the acme of the collaboration between Wilson and
Parks. It comes at the end of the "Childhood" suite, contrasting the
shortcomings of adult civilization with the innocence of youth. Over
resonant piano chords, elliptical lyrics depict impending catastrophe
amid myopic cultural ostentation:

Hung velvet over taking me.
Dim chandelier awaken me.
To a song dissolved in the dawn.
The music hall—A costly bow.
The music all is lost for now,
to a muted trumpeter swan.
Columnated ruins domino!
The worldly images seem vaguely apocalyptic:

The glass was raised, the fired-roast.
The fullness of the wine.
A dim last toasting.
While at Port, adieu or die.
The song's stirring coda, "Child is father of the man," is a melodious
chant whose words are borrowed from Wordsworth's poem "My Heart Leaps Up When
I Behold." Wilson explained in 1966 that the end of "Surf's Up" reveals
"the joy of enlightenment, of seeing God. And what is it? A children's song!
And then there is the song itself; the song of children; the song of the
universe rising and falling in wave after wave."

The subsequent "Elements" suite presents a rush of impressionistic
music:
the sound of celery-munching on the earthy "Vega-Tables," slide
whistles and marimba touches on the alternately airy and bursting "Wind Chimes,"
vertiginous strings and crashing cymbals on the conflagration of "Mrs.
O'Leary's Cow." The suite concludes with "In Blue Hawaii," a piece that
brings the American drift westward to an end. The song contains what
was previously known as the "water chant," a wordless string of syllables
("wa-wa-ho-wa") that sound vaguely Hawaiian, and has new lyrics by
Parks that reflect Wilson's psychological torment in the years since Smile's
inception: "Is it hot as hell in here, or is it me?/It really is a
mystery/If I die before I wake/I pray the Lord my soul to take my
misery/I could really use a drop to drink."

Appended at the very end of the album is a new and inferior "Good
Vibrations" that restores Pet Sounds lyricist Tony Asher's unfamiliar
early verses, which weren't used in the original 1967 version. Despite the
song's important part in the album's conception, Wilson was always ambivalent
about its inclusion on Smile, and its place at the end of this release makes
sense as a crowd-pleasing encore.

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Despite the eclecticism of the album's instrumentation and its thematic
conceits, which can seem haphazardly ambitious when described, Smile is
impressively melodic and accessible. Now that he is sixty-three,
Wilson's voice no longer has the range it once had, but it retains an
earnestness that is expressive and often poignant. The colorful vocal harmonies
also lack the special quality of the Beach Boys' voices, but Smile expressed
such a personal vision and realizing it was such a trial for Wilson that it
is easy to understand why he has redone the album in his own way and
released it under his own name. He probably wouldn't have completed it, however,
if he didn't have help from Darian Sahanaja, Van Dyke Parks, and the
recording engineer Mark Linnett, who had prepared mixes of Smile songs for an
aborted release in the late Eighties.

The album's sequence is essentially a composite of the many
unauthorized versions conceived by various enthusiasts over the past several
decades, but the thread of motifs and graceful segues give the material a wholeness
it has never before enjoyed. The original Smile tapes of the 1960s, which
contain many unreleased and still completely unknown recordings, have
never been officially released because Wilson had previously refused to
revive the music and confront his memories of a troubled period. Some listeners
are unhappy that the original recordings have not yet appeared, but their
release is now probably inevitable.

Once thought drastically uncommercial, Smile has become the occasion of
Wilson's commercial rebirth. He received a Grammy for Best Rock
Instrumental Performance early this year, and the album has sold more copies than
any of his other solo releases. Members of the boomer generation and young
listeners have been equally enthusiastic about his world tour, which
has been highly popular. Smile, an album that became a pop music myth
largely because it was never released, is finally finished. Its completion
validates the album's complex history, and convincingly reaffirms Wilson's
originality and musical genius.

Notes
[1] Despite some embarrassing misspellings and a tendency toward the
sensational, Heroes and Villains: The True Story of the Beach Boys, by
Steven Gaines (Da Capo, 1986), provides a detailed account of the inner
turmoil of the group, with much about the Smile debacle and its
fallout.

[2] A new DVD set of Smile has also been released by Rhino Video,
packaging a revealing documentary by Beach Boys authority David Leaf (Beautiful
Dreamer: The Story of Smile) with a live performance of the entire
album.

[3] Released by Capitol Records in 1997, the Pet Sounds Sessions box
set presents selections from the session recordings over three discs. For
more on the recording of Pet Sounds, see Charles L. Granata, Wouldn't It Be
Nice: Brian Wilson and the Making of the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds (Chicago
Review, 2003).

[4] These writers and hangers-on had considerable access to Brian
Wilson's music during the making of Smile and are primarily responsible for the
myth-making that followed its abandonment. Domenic Priore has compiled
their articles and interviews in his formidably large scrapbook, Look!
Listen! Vibrate! Smile!, published by Last Gasp in 1997.