It would be a shame, during Albums That Got Screwed Week, not to mention Brian Wilson's Smile. Smile is best known as the album that Wilson lost his marbles trying to make, while his fellow Beach Boys and Capitol Records waited impatiently for the genius to come up with something. Wilson recorded the album in bizarre fragments and spent months trying to make them fit together, a puzzle his LSD-addled mind couldn't quite make sense of.
So, then, Smile was screwed by its own troubled creator, not by a record company. But I've always wondered why some helpful person- a bandmate, a concerned record exec- didn't check the clearly schizophrenic Wilson into a mental hospital. The man actually thought Phil Spector was bugging his room to steal ideas. And we all know it's crazy to think Phil Spector could ever do anything illegal.
Wilson and lyricist Van Dyke Parks did finally finish Smile in 2004. The results were wondrous, but, frustratingly, not as fascinating as the fragments of the original Smile that have trickled out over the years. Many have been bootlegs, although the Beach Boys did officially release a few of the album's tracks in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They are beautiful, strange, and feature Wilson at the peak of his vocal talents. For all the poignancy his ragged voice now carries, it no longer achieves the choirboy perfection it used to. I guess dealing with record companies and Mike Love for forty-five years will do that to anyone.
TODAY'S RECOMMENDATION: "Heroes and Villains" by the Beach Boys (original version)
AVAILABLE ON: Sounds of Summer: The Very Best of the Beach Boys; iTunes
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