THE BEACH BOYS

The SMiLE Sessions

[Capitol]

In a scene from the classic movie Citizen Kane, the character of Mr. Bernstein (played by Everett Sloane) rhapsodizes about a comely stranger he briefly spied from a distance some 45 years earlier. “I only saw her for one second,” he says. “She didn’t see me at all, but I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.” There is no beauty quite so radiant as that which slips from our grasp—but its reality could never live up to our imaginings. Such is the danger inherent in this first authorized release (outside a handful of tracks on 1995’s Good Vibrations box set) of material from the legendary sessions for the Beach Boys’ wildly ambitious, elaborately orchestrated and famously unreleased SMiLE.

Like Bernstein, group mastermind Brian Wilson has been haunted for 45 years by the one that got away. Faced with resistance from his record label and bandmates, not to mention the agonizing prospect of piecing the album’s practically innumerable musical elements into a cohesive whole, Wilson gave up on SMiLE. At long last, here we have at least a best-guess approximation of the masterwork he intended. Accompanied by a wealth of fascinating outtakes that illustrate Wilson’s painstaking recording process, SMiLE is indeed a beauty—albeit one with which bootleg listeners have been familiar for decades. So the major attraction here is the lustrous sound quality, which puts the bootlegs to shame and spurs one to wonder yet again at what might have been. –CN

comment closed

Copyright © 2011 M Music & Musicians Magazine ·