Look, Listen, Vibrate, Smile

by Domenic Priore, Becky Ebenkamp (Editor)

Book by Priore, Domenic

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Essays

299 pages, Paperback

First published November 13, 1990

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

From Rockipedia :

The Smile album is a sacred object figuring in literature and certain rock traditions and said to possess miraculous powers. The quest for the Smile album makes up an important segment of the Saga of Brian Wilson, appearing first in works by Domenic Priore.

The Smile album legend development has been traced in detail by cultural historians: it first came together in the form of written articles in the later 1960s, and then vinyl bootleg recordings. The early Smile folk tales centred on Van Dyke Parks, acid, mental illness and Mike Love. Wilson and Smile were woven into the more general counter-cultural myths - Monterey pop Festival, Beatles-as-avatars, Haight-Ashbury and smoked bananas.


So - it's finally here. And it's worth a listen. Even (especially) if you know Brian's own 2004 version. One of the enduring ideas about Smile was that IF ONLY it had been completed and released just ahead of Sgt Pepper it would have fundamentally changed the orbits of the major planets, and that Charles manson would have heard it and become a real nice guy, and there would have been no heavy metal, ever.

This is all a bit dubious. I think Smile was so utterly in its own bubble of psychedelic nostalgia (Ray Bradbury on mushrooms) that the rest of the Western world would have blinked, goggled and moved carefully around it.



**

All Brian fans are waiting with big eyes and lolling tongues like old surf dogs near the door and listening with doglike ears for any slight sounds of the postman who any day now may be bringing them the deluxe box set of Smile released only a mere 76 years after Brian collapsed in the midst of it all back in the days when when you were seriously mentally ill everyone just thought you were high or being a wacky pop genius.

It matters not that the Brian fans have already got most - if not all - of this stuff already on the Sea of Tunes bootlegs which came out years ago.

Or that a goodly chunk of Smile has already been officially released in dribs and drabs.

It matters also not that in 2004 Brian himself finished and recorded Smile & so we have Smile in all its summery rictus and have been listening to it for seven years and know it backwards.

What does matter is that the original Smile stuff will be officially released.

Brian's version is stunningly beautiful, but he was 62 years of age when he finished it and his voice is wizened. Also, the lovely 2004 version is recorded in high definition blu ray ultrabrite 4D trilby hat 5 trigabytes-per-bagel sensurroundsound, and back in 1967 they just had tape recorders, but they were all 23 years old so they sounded like boy angels on drugs.

I intend to sneak in a review of this Smile box when it arrives.

I mean to say

Over and over the crow cries uncover the cornfield

[Samuel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is the kind of thing that just isn't published anymore (it would be a blog, or a Facebook group, or something similar now), a triumph of fan club culture. It's a bewildering collection of publicity from the mid-'60s about the legendary Smile album, plus a whole bunch of articles and interviews from the years following the record's nonrelease. It includes not just the articles themselves -- sometimes typed, sometimes simply photocopied from their original source -- but advertisements, posters, and other ephemera.

Look! Listen! Vibrate! Smile! predates Brian Wilson Presents Smile by a decade, and The Smile Sessions by more than that, so it's missing the definitive(?) answers that those releases provided to many of the questions about what was supposed to be on Smile and the state of those recordings. Since it's mostly a collection of primary sources, it's also noticeable that many of the details surrounding the recording and the eventual abandonment of the album change depending on who's telling the story. It's up to the reader to try and make sense of the contradictions and the gaps in the tale.

It's imperfect in the way a lot of these fan-made things from the time are imperfect -- the quality of the analysis and prose varies wildly; the photocopied photographs uniformly look awful; and some of the photocopied type is so small that it was everything I could do to avoid busting out a magnifying glass. But it also overflows with love and respect for Brian Wilson, one of the towering figures of 20th-century American popular music, and for Smile itself. As someone who loves the music involved, I found the journey fascinating, even if the eventual release of BWPS and TSS has removed some of the mystery.

You have to really, *really* care about the Beach Boys, Smile, '60s rock, or all of the above to want to wade through this ultra-dense hodgepodge. But if you are, it remains historically invaluable.

[Garrett Cash · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a rare book I've wanted to read for a long time. It acts as a time capsule for the brief moment in 1966-67 when Brian Wilson created the most mythologized rock album ever recorded and not released, but it is also equally a capsule for pre-internet fandom culture. This book simply wouldn't exist in printed form like this today, but instead would be a website. It's a scrapbook of seemingly every major SMiLE related interview, advertisement, snatch of a newspaper clipping, etc you could possibly think of. There's everything from epic articles like the classic Goodbye Surfing, Hello God! to scanned prints of small teen magazine blurbs.

This is not for the SMiLE beginner. It's a dense hodgepodge of extremely arcane Beach Boys knowledge that seems to cover every angle known at the time and then some. There was also much that was unknown when this was published because Brian had not yet done his 2004 "finished" version, nor had they done the 2011 Smile Sessions box set.

But if SMiLE is one of your all time favorite non-albums like it is for me, this is all fascinating and worth flipping through this book if you can get your hands on a copy. I've decided there's a threshold that my Beach Boys nerdiness simply won't go beyond (making my own SMiLE mixes, laboriously poring over session tapes and trying to figure out who sang what), but this was fun to peruse.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Look, Listen, Vibrate, Smile
Domenic Priore
If you are interested in the Beach Boys' abandoned '66-'67 Smile project, this is a fascinating and, at times, irritating scrapbook of primary sources regarding the activities in and around the band and Brian Wilson during this period.
Author/compiler Priore presents 300 pages of articles, press releases, ads, studio documents, as well a few of his own interviews in roughly chronological order from the end of Pet Sounds recording through (in the Revised Edition) Wild Honey. It is a fascin... (show more)

If you are interested in the Beach Boys' abandoned '66-'67 Smile project, this is a fascinating and, at times, irritating scrapbook of primary sources regarding the activities in and around the band and Brian Wilson during this period.
Author/compiler Priore presents 300 pages of articles, press releases, ads, studio documents, as well a few of his own interviews in roughly chronological order from the end of Pet Sounds recording through (in the Revised Edition) Wild Honey. It is a fascinating collection and obviously a labor of love, but in an attempt tinclude all that he has discovered, Priore often includes redundant articles, and many of the sources lack documentation of any kind. As a way to get a sense of the Zeitgeist surrounding the recording of this period, however, this book is indispensible--especially if, like me, you were 5 or 6 years old (or younger) when all this was going on. Priore's personal commentaries are largely what you would expect from someone who would embark on this sort of endeavor: a bit too much fan-boy raving, but refreshingly enthusiastic.

[Nathan Phillips · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reread, two decades after I devoured it as a teenager. The definitive, intentionally disorganized portrait of how the Beach Boys’ Smile was recorded and abandoned, and the subsequent public fallout. For all my complaints about Smile, this is an astonishing gathering of material — all of the major clippings and articles pertaining to the buildup to a release that never happened, and the often lurid aftermath of its cancellation — that presents a genuinely persuasive portrait of an artist allowing his own convictions to waver, or following his better instincts, depending on your perspective. Some of the articles included are brilliant (Jules Siegel’s legendary “Goodbye Surfing, Hello God,” Paul Williams’ fascinating interview with David Anderle in which they both completely turn around on the merits of Wild Honey, and several illuminating, observant fanzine pieces) and reading the whole thing today, it’s such a thrill to be surrounded with the kind of enthusiastic fandom that was necessary to produce it… even if some of the then-prevalent theories about Smile have since proven to be bunk. And I must admit that after years of being unable to persuade myself to love this music, it’s still so interesting to read about it and try to get a handle on what Brian Wilson was really up to when he let the sophisticates get to him. Is it possible to long for a world in which Brian got to do what he actually wanted to do and still became celebrated as the mythical genius people search for in these pages?

[Chris Freeman · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a collection of newspaper clippings that relate to the elusive "Smile" album from the Beach Boys. It's funny to read it like a book because many of them repeat the same information. But it's worth it for fans of the band.

[Crispin Kott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Exhaustive scrapbook collecting everything available about the aborted SMiLE project. It's got something of an amateur feel, which is charming. By the end, the enthusiasm for the album shown in magazines during its recordings comes off as incredibly sad knowing what happened next.

[Ichiro Mito · Rating 5 out of 5]

Awesome!

[Marco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Crazy times, equally eccentric reader about the times '66-67.