Brian Wilson and the legendary “lost” album of the beach boys

Following the sad news of the disappearance, at the age of 82, of Brian Wilson, We pay homage to the Californian musician retracing the operation that in 2004 saw him complete, together with Van Dyke Parks and Darian Sahanja, the legendary “lost” album of the Beach Boys, “Smile”. Here, following, the review that we published over twenty years ago.

Well …
Obviously this review touches me, for personal reasons – I am the only one, in Rockol, that “he could have” listened to “smile” if the disc had been released in 1967. But for this reason I am also the only one who can reasonably ask him what effect he would have made him heard this album in 1967. The answer, of course, is one: “And what do I know?”.
If anything, there is a question, to ask yourself: what is the use of this album now (which at the time did not go out for reasons that would be too long here to summarize – there are sites entirely dedicated to the topic: for example, http://www.rockument.com/smiolesessions.html) putting together a “likely” tracklist (in short, as if Brian Wilson is reminiscent of it, It was not in its most lucid season, from the point of view of neuronal synapses) and resonating and re -entitled the songs “as well as” would have been played and sung then – a virtual facsimile known for note? And, moreover, not with the beach boys, but with different musicians?
In short, this “smile” is not the “smile” one. It is a sinopia, as the restorers say when they reconstruct missing pieces of a fresco or a picture. So, I refer the question: what is the use of?

The real and sincere fans of the Beach Boys already have what was needed, of the “smile” one: bootlegs and outttakes and fragments and recovered recordings, pieces of dated and original creativity of the time. This “smile” is a picture that the author had not completed, which had in a certain way denied or to which he had somehow given up; Thirty -seven years later, the same author gives up that painting, but the hand cannot be the same, the grain of the canvas is different because it is modern (what effect would this disk listened to the poor vinyl on which the discs were printed then, and on the flies of the sixties, and divided into two facades?), Colors and brushes are those of today and not those of yesterday, and my eyes – are not the same. So, I can’t tell you what I thought of “smile” if the album had come out in 1967, because the story (also that of music) is not done with “if”. And I don’t think it makes sense to tell you what I think now: because this is a job that claims – “demands” also in the sense of English “to pretend”: it pretends – that the thirty -seven years have not passed that instead have passed.

I like this record? Yes, I like it. Not everything, as is obvious, but I like it. But I have to be honest, and to warn that probably what I am pleased is nostalgia, rather than critical objectivity. I love Brian Wilson, the second second of the twentieth century pop after McCartney (or eternal first in front of McCartney, depends on the schools of thought). I have a small long -standing passion, of which I blame/I thank Riccardo Bertoncelli, for that Mattocchio by Van Dyke Parks, who wrote (and today he rewritten, or written for the second time) the texts of the songs. And I have always been nice the beach boys, how not. But, in short, this is not a disc, it is an attack on the tear glands. And as such it cannot be judged lucidly.
I find Mark Paytress’s position courageous, who on “Mojo” with confidence that “smile” is superior to “Sgt. Peper’s …” and “Ok Computer”. I don’t think I share it, but not even to disagree. I try to ask myself how it would play me, today, “Sgt. Pepper’s …” if I listened to him in full form for the first time – and I reply that, at the same time, I should ask myself how I would play “Ok Computers” if I had listened to him for the first time in 1967. So, I get in the Ucronie and “What IF”. And I give up. I listen to this “smile” with a smile, but I invoke the clemency of the court and I abstain from the judgment.

(Franco Zanetti)