Smile has become one of the most unavoidable legends of rock'n'roll folklore, and in this searching examination Domenic Priore presents the true story behind the album's 40-year conception. Work on Smile began hot on the heels of the ground-breaking Pet Sounds, when Brian Wilson collaborated with Van Dyke Parks to create a 'musical story of America'. However, production would famously collapse under a tide of internal fighting, record business chicanery and Brian's own health problems. In this unique account, Domenic Priore interviews all the main players and documents every aspect of the Smile experience, from its troubled inception to Wilson's brave attempt to finish what he started in 2005. The book includes detailed accounts of studio work, the triumphant live shows in Europe and the US, and a host of exclusive photos from photographer Guy Webster.

"Every art form has its holy grail, those elusive creations around which legends grow. For rock 'n' roll, The Beach Boys' album Smile heads that list. Work on the album began on the heels of the group's seminal Pet Sounds, when Brian Wilson teamed with Van Dyke Parks to make a 'musical story of America'. But the writing and recording process soon devolved into chaos, capsized by internal fighting and record business chicanery. Tantalizing bits of Smile - most notably 'Good Vibrations' - hit the airwaves, but the album, reviled by Beach Boys singer Mike Love as a document of 'Brian's madness', was shelved." "In Domenic Priore's new book, he interviews all the main players and documents every aspect of the Smile experience, from its inception in the 1960s to last year's release of Brian Wilson Presents Smile, his remarkable and brave attempt to finish what he started 40 years earlier. Featuring detailed accounts of studio work and the triumphant live shows in Europe and the US, exclusive photos from Smile-era photographer Guy Webster and forewords by Wilson and Van Dyke Parks, Priore's book is the last word on perhaps the finest album ever recorded."--BOOK JACKET.

Brian Wilson was on top of the creative world, laying down music that surpassed anything before, during or since this cultural zenith in our history.

Now the subject of the movie Love & Mercy, starring John Cusack! Brian, Carl, and Dennis Wilson, along with Mike Love and Al Jardine--better known as the Beach Boys--rocketed out of a working-class Los Angeles suburb in the early sixties, and their sun-and-surf sound captured the imagination of kids across the world. In a few short years, they rode the wave all the way to the top, standing with the Beatles as one of the world's biggest bands. Despite their utopian visions, infectious hooks, and stunning harmonies, the Beach Boys were beset by drug abuse, jealousy, and terrifying mental illness. In Catch a Wave, Peter Ames Carlin pulls back the curtain on Brian Wilson, one of popular music's most revered luminaries, as well as its biggest mystery. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and never-before heard studio recordings, Carlin follows the Beach Boys from their earliest days through Brian's deepening emotional problems to his triumphant re-emergence with the release of Smile, the legendarily unreleased album he had originally shelved.

From original beachcomber personalities like the Waikiki Beachboys to the rise of Venice Beach as a creative center for music, art, and film, Pop Surf Culture traces the roots of the surf boom and explores its connection to the Beat Generation and 1960s pop culture. Through accounts of key figures both obscure and popular, the book illustrates why surf culture is a vital art movement of the 20th century. Pop Surf Culture includes essays about the popular "beach” movies of the fifties and sixties, which featured such stars as Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon and the music of Dick Dale & His Del-Tones, Brian Wilson, the Pyramids, Gary Usher, James Brown, and Little Stevie Wonder. Sixties art figures Michael Dormer and Rick Griffin--as well as the surf magazines which promoted their art--are featured alongside the progenitors of "surf music,” from the little known (the Centurians) to the wildly popular (the Beach Boys). Duke Kahanamoku, the Gas House, Gidget, surfing on television, the bohemian surf aesthetic, surf music hot spots, Mickey "Da Cat” Dora . . . the entire spectrum of pop surf culture is covered within these colorfully illustrated pages.

They say there are no second acts in American lives, and third acts are almost unheard of. That's part of what makes Brian Wilson's story so astonishing. As a cofounding member of the Beach Boys in the 1960s, Wilson created some of the most groundbreaking and timeless popular music ever recorded. With intricate harmonies, symphonic structures, and wide-eyed lyrics that explored life's most transcendent joys and deepest sorrows, songs like "In My Room," "God Only Knows," and "Good Vibrations" forever expanded the possibilities of pop songwriting. Derailed in the 1970s by mental illness, drug use, and the shifting fortunes of the band, Wilson came back again and again over the next few decades, surviving and-finally-thriving. Now, for the first time, he weighs in on the sources of his creative inspiration and on his struggles, the exhilarating highs and the debilitating lows. I Am Brian Wilson reveals as never before the man who fought his way back to stability and creative relevance, who became a mesmerizing live artist, who forced himself to reckon with his own complex legacy, and who finally completed Smile, the legendary unfinished Beach Boys record that had become synonymous with both his genius and its destabilization. Today Brian Wilson is older, calmer, and filled with perspective and forgiveness. Whether he's talking about his childhood, his bandmates, or his own inner demons, Wilson's story, told in his own voice and in his own way, unforgettably illuminates the man behind the music, working through the turbulence and discord to achieve, at last, a new harmony.

Smile is not merely a great unfinished album, but a living work of art that is all at once expansive, indeterminate, and resolutely pop. In the early 1960s, The Beach Boys rose from the suburbs of Hawthorne, California to become emissaries of a post-war American dream that fused middle-class aspiration and mobility with images of youth. Led by dream master Brian Wilson, their music gave voice to a Southern California mythos and compelled an audience across the nation and beyond to live out their own versions of the fantasy. By 1966, the encroaching counterculture added new dimensions of creative possibility to popular music. Looking to revise and expand, Brian Wilson sought collaboration with a brilliant musician named Van Dyke Parks. Together they began work on Smile, an ambitious album of music that refracted The Beach Boys' naïveté into a visionary exploration of American consciousness. Smile edged so close to greatness it seemed destined to become one of the most significant musical advances of its time. But the story didn't end quite like this. In this book of evocative essays, Sanchez traces the musical journey that transformed The Beach Boys from West Coast surf heroes into America's pop luminaries, and ultimately why Smile represents a tumultuous turning point in the history of popular music.