Smile? In 1966, the legendary abandoned Beach Boys' album and "teenage symphony to God" left its visionary, Brian Wilson, with the devil to pay. Disc One of this double DVD set offers David Leaf's glorious documentary "Beautiful Dreamer", interviewing all those involved with the project's development (save, bizarrely, any of the surviving Beach Boys, least of all Smile's most trenchant naysayer Mike Love) and charting Brian Wilson's ascendancy to the cusp of creative immortality and subsequent crash-and-burn to a bedridden, burnt-out recluse. In the South Pole-style... "production race" with The Beatles for popular music's brave new frontier (a contest more self-justificatingly important to Wilson than to Lennon/McCartney) it was to be The Beatles who planted the flag and Wilson who perished in the snow; Smile was to be Brian Wilson's nemesis. The albums' eventual completion and re-recording (hats off to Brian Wilson's musical sidekicks The Wondermints) in 2003 was the happiest and unlikeliest conclusion to pop music's most fascinating and infuriating chapter. The entire live performance of Smile in Los Angeles - beautifully filmed on Disc 2 - is a fitting happy ending. The work - especially the waxing and waning chorales of the "Child Is Father Of The Man" section - is a marvel; beautiful, bold, coherent and deft enough to leave the myth - the great "what if?" of 20th Century music history - intact. --Kevin Maidment [show more]
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