Author, David Leaf has been a Beach Boys lifer. He penned the first truly exhaustive history of the band in the late 1970s and would later befriend Brian Wilson, who was responsible for composing and producing the sounds that defined the band and moved a generation west to the sun-kissed California shores. During that time, Leaf was privy to rumor and innuendo surrounding Wilson’s long-lost masterwork, Smile, the follow-up to the Beach Boys groundbreaking, Pet Sounds. The word through the mill was Wilson, who passed away shortly after this book’s release and while I was finishing it, originally abandoned the 1967 project due to drug abuse and his inability to endure his lifelong battle with mental illness, leading to breakdown and an abandonment of his dream to compete what he called “a teenager’s letter to God.”
With his new aural history, Smile, Leaf provides a comprehensive overview of the album’s initial demise and an essential deep dive of the process that brought a bunch of unknown musicians and a master songwriter together to complete the circle that brought to life this mythical work. Along the way provides alternative reasons for the shuttling of Smile, mostly due to the Beach Boys recalcitrance with the intricate music and quizzical lyrics by Van Dyke Parks (the concerns primarily from cousin, lead singer and usual lyricist, Mike Love) and blowback from a worried Capitol Records to what they deemed strange and unmarketable music.
But where Smile takes off is the slowly painful reimagining of the project that culminates in the famous London debut concerts of 2004 that forever changed the music world’s perception and wild acceptance of Wilson’s incredibly inventive music.
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