Unfinished Masterpiece Capitol Preparing A Beach Boys ‘Smile’ Release 28 Years After Original Album Failed To Appear

Lewis Shiner’s 1993 novel “Glimpses” contains what may be the ultimate rock ‘n’ roll wish-fulfillment fantasy: A troubled stereo repairman and ex-musician named Ray Shackleford is blown back through time to 1966, where he persuades Brian Wilson to complete the Beach Boys’ fabled album “Smile.”

Wilson succeeds in fiction where he could not in fact. “Smile” - an overwhelmingly ambitious work that Wilson referred to as “a teenage symphony to God” - turned out to be, in critic Paul Williams’ eloquent phrase, “the album … that flew too close to the sun.”

Set for release 28 years ago, the album never hit the streets; Beach Boys historian David Leaf justly calls it “one of the greatest ‘what ifs’ in pop culture history.”

However, Capitol is beginning work on a three-CD compilation, tentatively titled “The ‘Smile’ Era.” The set, targeted for an August release, will bring together significant portions of Wilson’s elusive unfinished masterpiece for fans who have pined for the album’s official release.

Capitol executive Wayne Watkins, who is serving as executive producer of the forthcoming set, says the package is styled to solve certain critical problems that have dogged “Smile” over three decades.

He asks, “How do you deal with arguably the greatest record never released in a way that, No. 1, satisfies the fan base; No. 2, does Brian and the Beach Boys some sort of justice; but, No. 3, doesn’t presuppose that we know everything about the process, that we should go in and actually try and make the record?”

To explain what “The ‘Smile’ Era” seeks to be, it is necessary to discuss what it is not - the completed “Smile” album - and to examine its checkered history.

In 1966 - following six months of sessions that resulted in the elaborate single “Good Vibrations,” a huge No. 1 hit for the Beach Boys - Brian Wilson began studio work on an album project first known as “Dumb Angel” and later as “Smile.” Wilson was serving as producer and composer; the lush, cryptic lyrics were supplied by Van Dyke Parks.

Wilson reportedly completed a two-part, sixminute version of the impressionistic single “Heroes and Villains.” An album cover printed for “Smile” in 1966 featured a song list supplied by Wilson that also included the titles “Do You Like Worms,” “Wind Chimes,” “Surf’s Up,” “Cabin Essence,” “Wonderful,” “I’m in Great Shape,” “Child Is Father to the Man,” “VegaTables,” “The Old Master Painter” and a suite known as “The Elements.”

Recording sessions, which were breathlessly covered by the nascent rock press, continued into the early part of 1967. Capitol promised “Smile” to retailers in trade ads.

And then … nothing. In May 1967, weeks before the release of the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” Beach Boys publicist Derek Taylor announced that the album was “scrapped.”

Why? Leaf, who is serving as compilation coproducer of “The ‘Smile’ Era” with Mark Linett and annotating the set, says, “There are as many reasons that ‘Smile’ didn’t come out as there are reasons why our federal deficit will never be balanced.”

Leaf cites among those reasons a March 1967 suit filed by the Beach Boys against Capitol for $225,000 in unpaid royalties; dissension within the group, which included Wilson’s brothers Carl and Dennis and cousin Mike Love, over Parks’ opaque lyrics; and Brian Wilson’s own insecurity.

Wilson, Leaf says, “was like a guy at the edge of a cliff, about to step off into the great creative unknown. Here’s Brian, who in three years has gone from surfing to ‘Heroes and Villains.’ Maybe it was too fast.”

Shards of the music were heard in succeeding years: A truncated version of “Heroes and Villains” became a No. 12 single for the Beach Boys in 1967, and cannibalized or rerecorded versions of “Smile” songs appeared on such subsequent albums as “Smiley Smile” (a poorly received, quickly recorded doppelganger released by Capitol in 1967), “20/20” and “Surf’s Up.”

In succeeding years, the album has attained legendary proportions. An entire book has been published about its making and unmaking: Domenic Priore’s 1988 work “Look! Listen! Vibrate! Smile!” - which is set for a new edition this year. Several extravagant bootleg albums drawn from the sessions have been issued.

Warner Bros. unsuccessfully tried to get the Beach Boys, then under contract to the label, to complete “Smile” in 1973. In 1988, Capitol’s plans to release a “Smile” package, reported in several national publications, also came to naught.

Watkins says Capitol’s decision to move forward on “The ‘Smile’ Era” was sparked by the positive response to a 1990 series of twofer Beach Boys releases and the 1993 gold-certified boxed set “Good Vibrations: 30 Years of the Beach Boys,” which contained some 30 minutes of mostly unreleased material recorded for “Smile.”

Leaf says, “The reason I think people react so strongly to (the box’s unissued “Smile” tracks is that) it’s like being in the studio with Picasso painting, and he’s interacting with the brushes and the canvas.”

Watkins says of the current project’s objective: “There isn’t a ‘Smile’ record. But there was a period of time when people were working on ‘Smile,’ and that creative process is what we’re trying to explore here.”

Engineer Linett, who worked deep in the Beach Boys’ tape vaults while serving as coproducer of the 1993 boxed set, says “The ‘Smile’ Era” will be culled from a considerable amount of period material.

“In front of me are about 11 songs,” Linett says of the tapes currently in hand. “If you figure it’s about 40 minutes a reel, that’s somewhere about 350, 400 minutes, not including (the tapes for) ‘Good Vibrations,’ which is another six or seven hours. It’s a tremendous amount of material.

“We hope to include every song that was possibly going to be part of ‘Smile,”’ Linett continues. “I have to emphasize (possibly), because I’m not sure that Brian at the time knew what was finally going to be included or what it was going to be called.”

Leaf says the “Smile” music has enduring value, even in its incomplete form: “It’s one of the most beautiful collections of pieces of music ever composed, period. And it comes from one of our most important composers. It’s like discovering unfinished symphonies by Mozart.”