There are two excellent books about The Beach Boys’ “lost”
masterpiece SMiLE, both very
different and both by Domenic Priore. Look!
Listen! Vibrate! Smile! is a scrapbook of period articles and more recent
essays chronicling the anticipation leading up to a release that never happened
and the cultish (though deserved) fan obsession that followed. SMiLE: The Story of Brian Wilson’s Lost
Masterpiece is a more straight forward biographical look at the record that
takes us up to Wilson’s solo recreation of it from 2004. Since the SMiLE story didn’t end there—The Beach
Boys have since did the once unimaginable by sanctioning the release of a
wealth of the original sessions in a deluxe box set—a third book on this
particular record is not necessarily unnecessary. The SMiLE Sessions opens the story further by providing a more
thorough portrait of the music and its making than most people previously heard
and finally providing some closure to this uniquely open-ended story. However,
Luis Sanchez doesn’t get into that in his installment of the 33 1/3 series. In
fact, his Smile doesn’t really deal
with SMiLE much at all, at least not
for the first 88 pages of his 118-page book. Those pages are spent with each
Beach Boys record leading up to SMiLE.
They are discussed with light criticism and basic history most fans will
already know. When Sanchez finally gets around to the ostensible subject of his
book, he gives SMiLE a bit more
attention than Surfin’ USA or The Beach Boys Christmas Album but not
nearly enough to satisfy. I applaud the writer for not falling into the worst
traps that 33 1/3 writers sometimes tumble into. His book is not preciously
personal. It is not inaccessibly academic for a book on pop music. It does not eschew
The Beach Boys for tangential discussions on agrarian economics or Vampire
Weekend. However, this simply is not a book about a single album, which is
supposed to be the purpose of the 33 1/3 series. It’s a brief history of The
Beach Boys on record from 1961 through 1966 finished off with a decent but
general essay on SMiLE that touches a
little on the album’s troubled history, a little on Van Dyke Parks’s
consequential contributions, a little on its themes and sounds, and a little on
its more recent rebirth. While it is not satisfying as a 33 1/3 book, Smile certainly isn’t bad as an
early-Beach Boys primer. I don’t think Domenic Priore is going to lose any
sleep over this one though.
