Smile: The Beach Boys’ Lost Great Album Soren Eversoll
The Beach Boys’ Smile is perhaps the most legendary album never made. Meant to be the grand slam to follow Pet Sounds, which elevated the band from twee California surf rock into baroque pop glory, Smile was never released and marked the beginning of the end for the band—The Beach Boys would release eighteen more albums, though none would reach the level of artistry they’d achieved in the sixties. Exacerbated by inter-band tensions, fame, drugs, and the pressure facing frontman Brian Wilson to follow up on what had already been declared a perfect album, the Beach Boys never fully escaped the album’s specter. It would not be until 2004 that demands from fans prompted Wilson to re-record the album with original collaborator Van Dyke Parks and release Brian Wilson Presents Smile; archived sessions from the original studio recordings would be released in 2011. Never before has an unreleased pop album become the subject of two retrospective albums, of rabid obsession, of such total rock fetishism. Why? Much of The Beach Boys’ action in the early to mid-sixties was inexorably linked to the orbit of The Beatles. The band ushered the new British Invasion into America that paved the way for The Who and The Rolling Stones and, with the release of Rubber Soul in 1965, transformed the studio album from what was meant to be a faithful reproduction of the live act into an art form all its own. Music journalist Steve Turner described it as starting “the pop equivalent of an arms race’. Upon hearing Rubber Soul Wilson became determined for his group to release their own work that relied less upon the success of singles than the strength of the album as a cohesive whole, telling his wife Marilyn that he was going to make “the greatest rock album ever made’. Beatles or not, Wilson’s desire to musically transcend the surf rock cliches The Beach Boys had ridden to popularity on were, by 1965, long-stewing. It had soon become apparent that Brian, brother to Beach Boys Dennis and Carl Wilson, cousin Mike Love, and childhood friend David Marks, had a special attunement to music that his bandmates lacked. As a child, Wilson demonstrated an exceptional talent for learning by ear, able to recite verses as a baby that his father had sung for the first time only moments before. Wilson also had perfect pitch and a voracious appetite for learning new instruments, even though he was completely deaf in his right ear due to a childhood blow to the ear from a lead pipe held by a neighborhood boy.
Art: Aviva Sachs Recording sessions for Pet Sounds began on July 12, 1965, and ended on April 13, 1966. During this time Wilson took full creative control of the studio, often demanding endless takes from the studio musicians to achieve the sound he wanted, relegating his bandmates to the backseat. No sonic possibility was off limits—at one point, Wilson asked the producer if it would be possible to bring a horse into Sunset Boulevard’s Western Studio to record the coda to “I Know There’s An Answer’. HarpsiNF011 | 4