Rock lore rarely matches reality in its surrealism—but The Beach Boys' Smile comes close.
Conceived in the wake of Pet Sounds, Brian Wilson’s grand “teenage symphony to God” was poised to eclipse even the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper. Instead, it became a swirling myth: a studio sandpit, incense-wreathed sessions, songs about worms and fire, and a breakdown that wrecked its release. What followed was years of obsession, partial salvaging, and eventual resurrection. Smile remains a haunting testament to creativity pushed to the brink. Here’s the story of how one of pop’s most innovative works became its most enduring ghost.
The buildup: Pet Sounds and high hopes
By 1966, the Beach Boys were done with surf-pop. Pet Sounds was Brian Wilson’s audacious leap into sophisticated pop—a lush, haunting record that redefined the possibilities of studio production. It painted teenage longing with such emotional precision it drew respect from the Beatles and critics alike.
Flush with ambition, Wilson teamed up with songwriter and arranger Van Dyke Parks for Smile: a conceptual suite weaving Americana, spirituality, and fractured pop for a “teenage symphony to God”. The sessions were theatrical and surreal—Wilson composed surrounded by sand in his living room, built fire-themed environments for Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow, and immersed himself in creativity, LSD, and paranoia.
Paranoia, pressure, and resistance
Even as Smile progressed, Wilson's mental state deteriorated. He became convinced that a song about fire had triggered real spread-through fires in Los Angeles. Session chaos, self-doubt, drug excess, and creative exhaustion blurred reality. Studio days bled into days of isolation, and Wilson himself admitted that “Smile was killing me”.
Yet internal resistance was perhaps even more corrosive. Band members—especially Mike Love—found Van Dyke Parks’s dense, cryptic lyrics “indecipherable,” leading to his early exit from the project. Capitol Records awaited a pop answer, not an avant-garde suite.
In particular, the song 'Good Vibrations' kept stalling, as Wilson treated it less like a single song and more like a sprawling sound experiment. Instead of recording it straight through, he broke it into modular fragments—separate sections that could later be spliced together like a musical collage. That approach was visionary, but it also meant endless tinkering. Wilson kept delaying completion because he was always hearing new possibilities: another melody, a different harmony, an unusual instrument (like the electro-theremin).
When Sgt. Pepper dropped, Brian folded—feeling he’d lost a race he never intended to win. In May 1967, Smile was shelved. The Beach Boys scrambled to deliver something to Capitol Records - and the result was Smiley Smile, a strange and stripped-down shadow of the grand project Brian had once envisioned.
Instead of lush orchestrations and sprawling suites, Smiley Smile was recorded quickly and cheaply in Brian Wilson’s home studio in Bel Air. Its sound was claustrophobic, almost homemade — minimalist organ drones, odd vocal harmonies, and quirky, half-finished fragments stitched together with a stoned, detached humour.
To many fans, it felt like a jarring comedown after the technicolor ambition of Pet Sounds and 'Good Vibrations'. Brian himself later called it “a bunt instead of a grand slam.” Yet, in hindsight, Smiley Smile has its own surreal charm: an offbeat, lo-fi detour that hinted at both Brian’s fragility and his restless need to keep creating.
The aftermath: retreat and resurfacing
After the collapse of Smile, Brian Wilson retreated from the world he had once dominated. The pressure, paranoia, and sheer scale of the project had broken his confidence. Once the tireless visionary at the centre of the Beach Boys’ sound, Brian now became an inconsistent presence. He would occasionally drift into the studio, offering flashes of brilliance, but often seemed disengaged or distracted.
His bandmates carried on, but the loss was palpable: without Brian’s steady creative hand, their music became more uneven, and his once-dazzling genius was reduced to scattered moments rather than sustained innovation.
The Beach Boys drifted, their sound becoming diluted, their commercial mojo slipping away. Yet fragments of Smile—'Surf’s Up', 'Cabinessence', 'Heroes and Villains'—filtered into later albums and the bootleg underground, preserving Smile as a tantalizing ghost in musical lore.
Over years, fan fascination grew. Those scraps became sacred—snippets of a lost masterpiece that vanished too soon and cast its creator into shadow.
Resurrection
In 2004, after decades in obscurity, Brian revisited Smile—this time as Brian Wilson Presents Smile. He and Parks, plus musician Darian Sahanaja, reassembled fragments into a coherent album. It was earnest, elegant, and hailed as redemption—the closure of a creative wound.
But the most revealing release came in 2011 with The Smile Sessions, a sprawling box capturing original 1966–67 recordings. Part museum, part fever dream, it allowed fans to step into the actual fragmentary sessions, raw and radiant in their incomplete brilliance.
Smile today: myth and masterpiece
Today, Smile stands as both a ruin and a revelation. Its legacy is legendary: a ruin because Brian never delivered it in 1967; a revelation because what survived proved far ahead of its time. Critics acknowledge its fractured beauty—segments like Surf’s Up and Wind Chimes shimmer with jagged genius, unsettling and ethereal in equal measure.
Yet its commercial viability remains debated. Many commentators argue that Smile, even if it had been completed and released in 1967, might have been too strange, intricate, and avant-garde for mainstream audiences. Its modular song structures, surreal lyrics, and complex orchestrations were unlike anything pop listeners were used to, and some sections—like the famously odd 'Cabinessence' or 'The Old Master Painter'—bordered on the experimental.
In other words, it wasn’t just that the album was unfinished; its very ambition made it a commercial gamble. Paradoxically, this unfulfilled potential only amplified Smile’s legend. Over the decades, the album became a symbol of what might have been, a mythical “lost masterpiece” whose allure rests as much on its unfinished status and the stories surrounding Brian Wilson’s struggles as on the music itself. Its mystique owes more to imagination and myth-making than any actual chart performance.
A haunting legacy
Smile is a ghost story: a vision that imploded, then hovered in myth for decades before it could be summoned into form. In doing so, it transformed from a “lost album” into a symbol of creative ambition pushed to its edge—and then beyond. Brian Wilson’s later life and career were shaped by it: his breakdowns, his silences, and ultimately his redemption through revisiting the very thing that once broke him.
In pop and in myth, Smile endures as both masterpiece and cautionary tale—a reminder that genius is beautiful, fragile, and sometimes too much for the world to bear. And when lightning strikes like this, exactly at the breakdown, what’s left behind can outshine everything that came before.
