My Greatest 100 (or so) Albums...

Smile (Capitol, 1966 UNRELEASED) The Beach Boys and Smile (BriMel 2004) Brian Wilson. Creatively on fire after wrapping Pet Sounds, Brian Wilson went right to work on the single Good Vibrations, which was to be a cornerstone of his far more sophisticated and ambitious double album Smile. As you know, Brian sorta melted down due to the various pressures in his life and Smile was never released. For years he's call it "inappropriate music." Somewhat fortunately, bootleggers with suspiciously good connections to the Capitol records vaults got that music, incomplete as it was on a number of Bootlegs. Capitol itself released a bunch of it on their Good Vibrations box. All of that is worth tracking down on the Net or at the Music store.

In 2004 Brian and his new band, got back together with project lyricist Van Dyke Parks and put out a new edition of Smile, that was absolutely brilliant. Brian's new vocals couldn't match his `66 abilities, but at least we discovered what he had in mind all of those years, and it was just as awesome as it was supposed to be. Check it out!