“The album became a legend. Songs and beautiful musical fragments would emerge over the years, but Smile was to have been a whole musical direction, and the individual songs, taken from their natural surroundings, were deprived of what could have been a stunning collective emotional effort. The work had started with “Good Vibrations” and it had expanded with the help of a friend (Van Dyke Parks) Brian met on Cielo Drive. Now, a year later (1967), Smile was still a dream. Too much pressure. Too many drugs. Too much anticipation. Too little support. It was the end of an era.” - Byron Preiss (“The Beach Boys”/1979)

Smile was a bunt instead of a grand-slam” - Carl Wilson

One concise paragraph and a brilliant single-sentence analogy pretty much tell you what the upshot was of pop's holiest of holy grails, The Beach Boys unreleased and unfinished 1966/7 masterpiece, Smile. For decades, it lay - not forgotten - but memorialized, analyzed and eulogized. The history of the album, in fact, has become a cottage industry, spawning countless articles, books, websites (including a 'build-your-own-Smile' site) and film/video episodes in anything having to do with the band or it's primary “conjurer”, as songwriting partner Van Dyke Parks likes to call him, Brian Wilson. It has also been said that by “killing' the album, Brian saved himself. While that may not be quite true, it was pretty close to the end of the line for the Beach Boys as a revolutionary, creative entity who rivaled The Beatles during pop's most adventurous era.

With that said, who would have even dreamed that nearly four decades later the music from the project would not be 'completed', but performed live in all of it's dazzling brilliance by it's creator and a crack ten-piece band, augmented by strings and horns? On top of that, the trilogy of material seamlessly stitched together for the concerts would also be recorded in the studio…and is slated to be released in the very near future - tentatively by years' end. This year, by the way.

All of the current activity is explained and explored by vocalist/vibes/keyboardist Darian Sahanaja in an interview to follow. One of Los Angeles' own Wondermints, who serve as the core of Wilson's live ensemble, and who are, on their own, perhaps the finest exponents of pop in the last 30 years, as their four albums' on Japan's Sony/Neosite label (among others, world wide) will easily attest. Sahanaja humbly calls himself Brian's 'musical secretary' for this project, and also served similar duties on Wilson's brilliant Pet Sounds tours. You'll soon read (and hopefully also hear) that Darian's self-appointed job description goes much, much deeper.

But before we get to the interview, Senór Fremer, your doting editor and site host, has given me my brief: to provide you with a thumbnail ( well, maybe a little more than just a 'thumbnail') of what the original Smile project was…and perhaps more importantly, wasn't.

Smile away…

“Dove nested towers, the hour was strike the street, quicksilver moon…”

It's early 1966 in Los Angeles, at the dawn of the age of Aquarius. For almost a year, The Byrds were America's very own Beatles, having defined the folk-rock genre and now in the middle of pioneering psychedelic 'raga-rock', an all-purpose moniker that they hung their newly drone-filled, harmony laced inventions on; defined by “Eight Miles High”. For a brief moment, too, their slightly less complicated yet unmistakable and equally progressive harmony clusters had even eclipsed the Beach Boys themselves. The Mamas & The Papas, Love, The Turtles and Buffalo Springfield among others were defining the new, hip musical sensibility. Yet in the middle of all of this, Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys stood the tallest. They were in the midst of their classic phase, completing Pet Sounds and almost always mentioned in the same breath as the Beatles and the Stones.

Regularly at the top of best-of pop/rock albums (usually alternating with Sgt. Peppers…), this record, a masterpiece of melancholy, quietly spoke to a generation of young people whose heads were being turned a little too quickly by the hip ethos of the day, and of course, by young romance. It was art, it was personal to Brian Wilson, but the groups' label, Capitol, didn't quite get it…not to mention some of the Beach Boys. Mike Love called it “Brian's ego music” and warned him “not to fuck with the formula.” This was a problem, and would only get worse… especially because where Brian was headed, there was no “formula”. It also didn't quite burn up the charts as fast as previous Beach Boys records, and it's top-10 showing was somehow disappointing to Capitol, so much so that they released a 'Greatest Hits' collection within a couple of months to cover their backs. This was the beginning of the lack of support.