(I wrote this piece on Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys for my music fanzine Dynamite Hemorrhage #10 in 2022. Now that that’s sold out and gone, I figured it’d be okay to reprint it here, and therefore gave myself permission to do so).

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Funny thing that happened to me this year. I finally “got” the Beach Boys. Don’t get me wrong – I mean, I got the Beach Boys years ago. They were my first favorite band as a child, with the Endless Summer greatest hits 2xLP serving as my personal soundtrack during the years 1974 and 1975, something I truly wore the grooves off in Sacramento, CA as a seven-year-old. First favorite rock band! This was soon followed by another, lesser greatest hits double album of 60s album cuts called Spirit of America, and I loved that one, too.

None of these four sides contained a single note of music from the year 1966 (save for “Good Vibrations”, of course), which was the year that the Beach Boys worked to shed the vestiges of being a 45rpm singles band; of being as a partnership of equals; and at least temporarily, being a group – and who then became, for all intents and purposes, “The Brian Wilson Band”. I knew all this stuff, but since I’d totally marinated in albums that didn’t contain any of Pet Sounds nor the lost Smile album – not even the “Heroes and Villains” single that did come out in ‘66 – I had to find out about all of that music long after I became an adult. By then I was too much of a sub-underground punk snob to care much about it, despite knowing and understanding how groundbreaking tracks like “God Only Knows” and “Good Vibrations” itself were. It just wasn’t my bag; it was someone else’s. 

It turned out that all the buzzy activity by folks like Domenic Priore that I’d mildly been aware of, like when his Smile ephemera print compendium Look! Listen! Vibrate! Smile! came out in the 90s, pointed to a community of fanatical Beach Boys “heads” who totally studied, archived and discussed this band with the diligence of Torah scholars. I had for years wrongly assumed that “Beach Boys studies” would have been a less-than-robust discipline. It had appeared from a distance that the band’s place in the popular canon has generally been restricted to a reputation made on the back of generally lightweight songs like “Surfin’ USA”, “I Get Around”, “California Girls” and yes, the majestic “Good Vibrations”. Yet there’s been an extensive scholarly community of Beach Boys navel-gazers hiding in plain site for decades, and while they may have loads to say about the sun/sand/girls eras of the band, they’re even more wound up by Pet Sounds and the Homeric saga of the 1966-67 aborted, lost-to-time album Smile. As well they should be. 

So this is where I come in, many years after everyone else did. By 2021 I’d listened to Pet Sounds multiple times online, and had come to recognize it as a great album, albeit one that I didn’t myself own. My exposure to anything from Smile – which, as I said, had never actually been released – had come from listening to Claw Hammer bass player Rob Walther playing me his bootleg tapes of Smile sessions in the early 90s, to which I said “no thanks, this is awful” at the time. I really liked the idea of a lost album, and somehow I vaguely knew that some of these Beach Boys heads were trading tapes and assembling their own versions of it. Last year, with my newfound Pet Sounds enthusiasm as wind at my back, I figured it was time to give what had come out as Smile a proper listen.

This set off a several months-long intense obsession with these two albums, and with everything related to Brian Wilson and his quest to make a “teenage symphony to God” in 1966. It got a little out of hand. First, not only did the mastery and the engineered perfection of these strange pop songs totally bowl me over, the songs themselves lodged themselves in my brain and absolutely did not leave. There was a week in which even my dreams contained “Heroes and Villains” as the backing music, and snippets from that song in particular, or sometimes from “Surf’s Up” or “Do You Like Worms?”, were my constant mental companions. Eventually it took me totally boycotting any and all Beach Boys for a couple of months to remove them, yet this was a decision reached only after nearly two months of listening to either Pet Sounds or Smile every single day, sometimes multiple times a day.

I read the books I needed to. I started with Jules Siegel’s contemporaneous long piece Goodbye Surfing, Hello God that he wrote for Cheetah magazine back then, and which is now available as a “Kindle single”. It’s a terrific piece, as he follows Wilson around and into various studios daily as Brian attempts to get the music playing in his head out of it, and onto tapes and ultimately into an album that will rival what the Beatles did with Rubber Soul. (A stated, competitive reason for turning the Beach Boys from a singles band to an album band). And Siegel pulls few punches in describing the presence of the methamphetamines that perhaps led to Brian’s crack-up and inability to finish Smile; one also conjectures these drugs potentially (and positively) contributed to the candy-coated rainbow of sound, the odd time signatures and the obsessive attention to detail and perfection that marks the Smile tapes. Among those who study the matter, I have found that there are, shall we say, differences of opinion vis-a-vis the drugs.

I then moved on – the same day, in fact – to Domenic Priore’s Smile: The Story of Brian Wilson’s Lost Masterpiece, which I proceeded to read in two rabid sittings. It’s a fantastic read, and I recommend it highly. Any bit of trivia or detail you’re missing about how this thing (didn’t) come together, you’ll find it here. Van Dyke Parks, whom Brian picked to write many of the abstract/obtuse lyrics before they parted company, plays a starring role, and seems to still have a clear enough head to set the record straight on a number of matters. Actually my favorite part of Priore’s book is the section in which Priore himself played a starring role: the internationally-distributed 1980s Brian Wilson case-crackers who swapped Smile recordings and anecdotes in the hopes of piecing together the mythos on their own. Stories of record fiends, tape traders and music obsessives always draw me in; I wouldn’t be doing this fanzine if they didn’t.

These dogged soldiers found their redemption in the early 2000s, when Wilson assembled a backing band to take Smile on the road, and finally gave the world a sense of the track selection and order that would have made up the album. There’s a great documentary on all this that I recommend watching for free on YouTube – it’s called Beautiful Dreamer: Brian Wilson and the Story of “Smile”. Let it be your shorthand for this story, perhaps, if you’re unschooled and interested.

I’m still not totally sure how close the album Wilson finally pronounced as “defined” in 2004 was to the same Smile album he sought to complete in 1966, but we’ll need to listen to him. He’s Brian Wilson, and it’s his record. He has said on the record that the new version that first came out in 2004 was “different, much different. Much more progressive, much happier, much more uplifting.” Here’s how Smile was finally unveiled, after years spent among the bootleggers, re-compilers and tape-traders:

** 2004: Brian Wilson, Van Dyke Parks and members of the LA band The Wondermints (and no other Beach Boys), after months of practice, premier Smile at the Royal Festival Hall in London on February 20, 2004. A 

** 2004: Later that year Brian Wilson Presents Smile is released with the same backing band; it featured the track order that’s now pretty much the defined order.

** 2011: The Smile Sessions – the abandoned Beach Boys album – finally comes out in multiple versions – double LP, single CD, double CD and 5-CD box set. It’s packed with outtakes, false starts and more, as well as the closest approximation of the LP that would have come out in 1967 as we’ll ever hear.

What’s just phenomenal about this music is that most of Smile was recorded in snippets and sections, predestined to be re-assembled later. One joyous piece of a given song often worms its way into another; I remember my jaw dropping when I first heard “Look (Song for Children)” and picked out a small portion of “Good Vibrations”, which is rather obvious now that I’ve heard it a million times. The more time you spend with it, the more you hear bits and pieces of “Heroes and Villains” in particular all over this record. “Pocket symphonies”, he called them. Lyrically, it’s best not to get too wound up into what he was trying to do here. At times it was supposed to have been an American travelog, a requiem for the American Indian, an exploration of laughter, a paean to “better living through healthy eating” and so on. 

When it comes to the ridiculous number of studio sessions captured on the 5xCD Smile Sessions – the false takes, the alternate versions, the ideas that briefly germinated in Brian’s brain in the moment and were then abandoned – I actually find myself a little stressed-out listening to them. Wilson is in the studio, conducting the Wrecking Crew to fulfill his vision, and he regularly cuts them off – politely, in most cases – and tells them what’s not working. His voice pops in abruptly “No, no, Carol, that’s not right – high E, that section that goes dah-dah-dah-dee needs to end in a high E” – and he makes them start over again. I mean, yeah – this is how it works, I get it. It’s why I’d have been an awful, thin-skinned session musician for hire, not that anyone was ever asking. I feel for these people, and even the mighty and omniscient voice of Brian Wilson (who knew best!) correcting them doesn’t keep me from cringing every time he steps in. So in all honesty, the four CDs’ worth of extra material are great to listen to in parts, for context, but the whole is probably for “true fans only”.

The final indignity that showed just how owned I was by this music was when I went and subscribed to Sail On: The Beach Boys Podcast, just so I could listen to their omnibus 9-episode series on Smile. The guys that host this are far younger than the music itself, even younger than I am (not too difficult!), and yet they are such absurd Beach Boys dweebs – in the best sense of the word – that you truly have to doff your cap. One of them self-admittedly discovered the band when he heard “Heroes and Villains” on The Fantastic Mr. Fox soundtrack (!). Anyway, I haven’t finished all 15 or so hours yet, but there is good reason to believe that I will. 

In the end, what I learned through this heroic journey was that there are the Beach Boys, and then there is Brian Wilson. Despite the Venn diagram overlap between both, each is a distinct “school” of study. This line of thinking goes that the other Beach Boys, as personified by the evil Republican Mike Love, sabotaged Smile and hung Wilson and his genius out to dry. Indeed, by the late 1980s the band were playing rallies for presidential candidate George Bush and singing, “I’m picking up Bush vibrations” (to say nothing of “Kokomo”), so they’re not easy to forgive for their less-than-enthusiastic embrace of Brian Wilson’s genius. I know that there are many reasons to reject this simplistic overview of the band, but there’s no question in my mind that the figure most worthy of both praise and further exploration in this saga is Brian Wilson, and anything ancillary – Dennis and Carl, Smiley Smile, Wild Honey and so on – are all interesting in their way, yet not quite worthy of rabbit-hole descent just yet. At least not for me. At least not today.