After Brian Wilson's touring band helped him to finally realize his vision with a 2004 solo album called Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE, Priore covered the creation of Wilson's lost masterpiece in the more traditionally written The Story of Brian Wilson's Lost Masterpiece SMiLE.
Amazingly, the solo disc was not the end of the SMiLE story, because in 2011, a bit of technology and a whole lot of diligence helped bring the album Wilson was trying to make with The Beach Boys in 1966 into existence as part of a weighty yet worthwhile box set called The Smile Sessions.
On the twentieth anniversary of Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE, another dedicated Beach Boys chronicler revisited the complicated history of that gloriously complex album but in a different form than either of Priore's books. For his SMiLE: The Rise, Fall, & Resurrection of Brian Wilson, David Leaf presents an oral history of the most mythologized album in pop history. Leaf conducted new interviews, drew on old ones he did for his superb 2004 documentary Beautiful Dreamer, and drew on a mass of archival interviews conducted by others.
Although the interviewees should be the star of any oral history, Leaf still serves as a guiding presence throughout his book, sometimes quite humorously, as when he navigates the reader through a typically dense and winding quote from SMiLE lyricist Van Dyke Parks. The author also asks a lot of questions because SMiLE is such a puzzle waiting for solution. That puzzle can never be solved because, even if Brian hadn't died, the answers seem more locked up in a version of himself that ceased to exist after 1966 and because world's luckiest cousin and sometimes lyricist Mike Love has been so dishonest about the active role he played in the project's demise.
Leaf has come a long way in the four years since he played the bowing diplomat in his 2021 revision of his first Beach Boys book, God Only Knows: The Story of Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys and the California Myth. He clearly isn't having Mike Love's bullshit anymore, and his newest book is all the better and more cathartic for it.
He is also exceptionally insightful for an oral history tour guide. Leaf rightfully and righteously points out that while The Beatles enjoyed a creative license to kill, Brian Wilson suffered constant push back from both Mike Love and Capitol Records—ironically The Beatles' U.S. record label as well (Well, maybe not so ironic considering that Capitol was responsible for neutering the Fabs' first seven albums and surely would have continued to do so if the band hadn't dug their Cuban heels in when renegotiating their contract prior to Sgt. Pepper's).
Perhaps most revelatory, and ominous, of all is Van Dyke Parks's suggestion that he left the SMiLE project because he believed he could come to physical harm if he didn't leave the lyric-writing duties to another. We don't need Leaf's ample hints to understand just who that nasal, talent-deprived bully was.
The original SMiLE sessions are only the focus of the first third of this book. Next it moves on to Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE, mostly its genesis and live performances. Much of this material was covered in Beautiful Dreamer, but on the page we get more details and clarity, and quite a bit about the deep and very touching love between Brian and Paul McCartney.
The only aspect of the SMiLE story Leaf really skimps on is The SMiLE Sessions. While this box set was the ultimate triumph in this troubled story for many of us fans, being a long abandoned project resurrected with the musicians and voices that were originally supposed to present it, it's a relic of a period that did incalculable damage to Brian Wilson as far as David Leaf is concerned. This completes the oral history portion of The Rise, Fall, & Resurrection of Brian Wilson on a slightly bitter note, before the book finishes off with a series of light essays (the most substantial is, of course, Priore's). This is unfortunate, since Leaf's book is overwhelmingly "joyous and celebratory," in the author's own words.
While it's impossible for me to share in Leaf's lack of enthusiasm for The SMiLE Sessions, I can't really blame him. Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE was purely Brian's project; The SMiLE Sessions looped the other living Beach Boys back into it, and that includes Mike Love, a guy who sued his cousin following the release of Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE, partially because that solo album allegedly "exploited" the original SMiLE that was supposed to be completed by the band of which Love was a member. Never mind that he basically personally killed that album off in the sixties. That's Mike Love for you. As Mad Magazine would say, Blecccch.
But Leaf is correct that SMiLE: The Rise, Fall, & Resurrection of Brian Wilson is largely joyous and celebratory, and it's a rare pleasure to read a rock and roll history book that actually makes you feel happy. It's also a sincere love letter to Brian Wilson. No rock star is more deserving of one.
