BRIAN WILSON'S SMILE
All photos by David Dalton


That Music Was Actually Created
An interview with "Smile" historian Domenic Priore
By Neal Alpert

The biggest myths and misconceptions about the album are things that Brian Wilson himself has put out there. Like, "I burned the 'Fire' tapes," which we all know isn't true, because we've heard them. That guy [Wilson] definitely had very serious emotional, artistic, creative problems at the time, just after he made all that music. He met with a lot of resistance, and it was a very hurtful thing for him, and it was something that he kept guarded for many years. Some of the guarding has been him putting out certain myths like that. More…



All But Done
By Barney Hoskyns

By the time "Good Vibrations" had hit No.1 at the end of 1966, Brian was firmly committed to extending pop's boundaries as far as he could. Gathering around him a coterie of brilliant, precocious scene-makers–Van Dyke Parks, Loren Schwartz, Danny Hutton, David Anderle, writers Jules Siegel and Paul Jay Robbins–he dug in deep and all but kissed goodbye to the Beach Boys of old. Most important among these men was Parks, the diminutive, bespectacled keyboard player whom he'd first met at Terry Melcher’s house on Cielo Drive in February 1966. More…




Epiphany at Zuma Beach Or Brian Wilson Hallucinates Me
By David Dalton

After Pet Sounds Brian Wilson became the mad genius of the Beach Boys, a prodigy who had miraculously emerged out of the surf and car culture of southern California. He was an American kind of prodigy, a tinkerer and visionary like Edison, someone who could spin magic out of thin, sweetened air. He was as self-effacing, childlike, and bemused as Huck Finn–and utterly devoid of the aggressive hipsterism of other late sixties idols. Brian actually had little interest in cars or surfing–these were Dennis's domain. When I once asked him about surfing he advised me to "Stay away from that stuff. It's dangerous." More…