Word: smilingly
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...while waiting in line for Smile merchandise during intermission, the response from concertgoers was immediate and enthusiastic. Someone whispered “teenage symphony to God”—once Wilson’s promise of what Smile would be—and someone else nodded back. The first person came to the front of the line, pointed to a poster of the young Wilson, and opened his wallet...
...face of the planet. I’ve chosen to narrow my focus to an album that never quite made it, and a man who was psychologically destroyed in the process, joining Mr. Barrett as poster boys for 60s burnouts. My choice is the Beach Boys’ Smile, Brian Wilson’s long-deferred masterpiece, intended to top the sublime Pet Sounds and to render the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper obsolete before it hit the shelves. This album’s failure to appear reflects almost too perfectly the abortive and tragically naïve vision...
BILL: Well, Chris, you’ve surely stumbled upon a fantastic tribute to drugs, a fully realized study and celebration of self-medication. Smile can’t respond to that sort of cohesive vision; for more than thirty years it existed only unfinished as fragments tucked away on obscure bootlegs. But in truth I like Smile not in spite of its failure, but rather because of it. The hype was justified, the music was that good, and yet it crashed and burned and it’s all very tragic and still wonderful. In Sept. 1966, Brian Wilson...
Deadlines passed; pressure mounted for marketable product; impatience festered within the band. Wilson abandoned and disowned the album, retreating to his bed for the better part of the next decade, where he became a mess of drug addiction and obesity. The Beach Boys stumbled out with Smiley Smile, a watered-down and vastly quieter echo of Smile’s original vision. The Beatles’ release of Sgt. Pepper became a landmark event, and their status atop the rock world was secure. The Beach Boys, lost without their creative force, slipped into artistic irrelevance and nostalgia tours...
...following decades saw most of the Smile sessions leaked from studio vaults to expensive bootleg collections. And the songs were fantastic: an organic sound, dense but airy, layered with intensely complicated but immediately ingratiating vocal arrangements and Parks’ beautiful, obscure lyrics. Some songs were finished; others were short, orphaned segments; some never made it past the demo stage. A small but growing core of diehard fans kept the flame burning. The advent of the internet meant easy propagation of the material. Finally Wilson himself, rehabilitated, married and finally receiving proper medical treatment, broke his decades of silence about...