Smile is here ... finally (PsychSound by Steve Bergstein)

You may not know this, but the Beach Boys were not all about surfing, girls and cars. By 1966, the Beach Boys were a different band, as Brian Wilson stopped touring and worked full time in the recording studio with the best studio musicians in Los Angeles. This led to the much-loved Pet Sounds album, a record with none of the fun fun fun of the earlier albums and consisting instead of contemplative mood music that the Beatles easily could have created.

Brian was ambitious. After Pet Sounds, he began work on a follow up that would take him to the top of the mountain. He came close. The album was called Smile, and it was scheduled for release in 1967. This album could have changed the public's view of the Beach Boys for good. The Beatles were able to shed their moptop image, and the Beach Boys could have taken their image to the next level, too. But thanks to drugs, mental illness and resistance from the other Beach Boys over Brian's new direction, Brian had a breakdown and Smile was unfinished and remained unreleased. Somehow, most of it was bootlegged and those unauthorized releases became the Holy Grail of rock and roll bootlegs. The Beach Boys, meanwhile, released a few interesting albums to round out the late 1960s, but those albums were mostly ignored. As the 1970s got under way, the Beach Boys turned into an oldies act, and Brian further deteriorated mentally.

Out of the blue in 2004, Brian released a solo album of all the Smile songs with a new band and he even finished writing some of the songs were abandoned in 1967. The song were re-recorded from scratch. The Beach Boys had nothing to do with this. Brian Wilson Presents Smile is one of the best-reviewed albums of all time. This was great. Brian's voice was not quite how it sounded in the 1960s, but it was good enough, and for the first time, we could hear the album as it was intended. But we all waited for Capitol Records to finally release the original Smile. That day has arrived. The Smile Sessions came out on November 1, 2011. It's as good as we all thought it would be, even for those of us who have listened to the bootlegs for years.

Over the years, stories leaked out about what happened to the Smile tapes. Brian told the press that he destroyed the tapes, threw them in the fire. During one television documentary, he said the music was "inappropriate," whatever that meant. No one wanted to hear this. We wanted to hear the music. Smile became the most famous unreleased album of all time.

Now we get to hear it. For many Beach Boys fans, Smile is old hat. We've all heard the bootlegs, and over the years, the bootlegs got better; the sound quality improved and better versions of the sounds were leaked out. But nothing could ever sound like an official record company release. We have it now.

Smile sounds like the Beatles without John Lennon. It's all about the melody. Brian was a master songsmith, and the album incorporates 1960s psychedelia with American West imagery and far-out lyrics that make I Am the Walrus sound like Love Me Do. The vocal harmonies are sophisticated and gorgeous. Imagine psychedelic music with angelic harmonies. Brian handled the vocal arrangements. The tragedy is that not all the lyrics were written, so some of the cuts on Smile are instrumentals. But even the instrumentals are interesting, as Brian's creativity was growing by leaps and bounds, and he had the best studio musicians around to work with.

The release of Smile is a major event in the history of rock music. What makes the story all the more significant is that the music is great, and it shows that the Beatles were not the only creative geniuses in the 1960s. Throw away the surfboards. Smile is here!

Here's a few of the songs:

Heroes and Villains