Last week Capitol Records (EMI) released The Smile Sessions, tentatively closing the book on one of the most storied and idolized of records in rock and roll history, The Beach Boys’ ill-fated and unrealized Smile. It is available in two flavors of obsession, depending on your level of membership in what has become a veritable cult around the album: a two-disc/LP version which includes the “full” album reconstructed from these tapes plus some previously-unreleased stereo mixes and excerpts from the recording sessions, or the Full Monty, a box set which includes five discs of studio sessions, the double LP, and two 7” singles (“Heroes and Villains,” “Surf’s Up”/“Vega-Tables”), as well as a 60-page hard-bound book and some pretty pictures, including original album artwork and photos by Guy Webster. The latter is to date the most comprehensive collection of material from the Boys’ studio work on the album, recorded between 1966 and 1967.

Much of the album proper had already been made available, in some form or another over, beginning with rerecorded tracks from the scrapped project that wound up making the bulk of 1967’s Smiley Smile, the consolation prize for Brian Wilson as well as for the fans who eagerly awaited the album’s initial release. Eventually there were bootlegs and Beach Boys-sanctioned releases that included material from those immortalized sessions, and in 2004 Brian Wilson’s solo recording of the album in its relative entirety. It was the best manifestation of Smile to date, but for all its merit it was only a mockup—it gave us Wilson’s vision, but that was only half the equation. It was not the album, crystallized in its nebulous and fragmented form, that lurked somewhere in Capitol’s vaults.

The Smile Sessions comes as close as possible, but here is where it’s unfalteringly awesome: not until now has anything approaching the sheer volume of material from those hours in the studio ever been unearthed and collected into a package like this, for all intents and purposes in its purest form. The production team, which included Brian Wilson, took a rather hands-off approach to editing and mixing, so short of getting one’s hands on the actual master tapes, the complete box set represents the most comprehensive and unadulterated experience possible of those fabled ‘66-‘67 sessions. Nearing seven hours of original session tapes, the full box set is the effective holy grail of anyone who has followed the legacy of this ill-fated and yet, to many, defining Beach Boys album. If anything, time is the biggest deterrent here, and not cost, as might be expected (the full box set runs at a moderate $149).

The period during which these sessions were recorded mark the height of Brian Wilson’s compositional genius, and one of the real values of this release comes in its unfiltered delivery of his visionary recording process in action, documented in hours of piecemeal cuts and recuts, overdubs, splices and inserts. It is also for this reason that Smile has forever been shorthand for the unrealized potential of the Beach Boys to reach the stratosphere, and for Wilson’s failure to lead them there—though not from lack of trying, as is apparent within minutes of listening to the material included in the five-disc set. Many of the outtakes offer a new look into the frustration by all parties throughout the process, and the tension between the Boys’ audible fatigue and Wilson’s perfectionism. His presence on these tapes is largely un-Draconian, however, and the bulk of the sessions reveal a group mostly together, and goofing off intermittently between takes (see “Brian Falls Into a Piano” or, alternately, “Brian Falls Into a Microphone”). It sheds a revealing, if occasionally stark, light on a band at the threshold of a major defining event, and it hints at a calm before the proverbial storm, offering some fresh insight into reasons Smile was, and perhaps remains, the greatest pop record never made.

5 / 5 bars

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