The Beach Boys Smile

Fantasized in several configurations, Smile will perhaps never have the status of a canonical and immutable masterpiece. Existing for a long time only in pieces detached, subject to various manipulations by its applicants (record company, Brian Wilson, the other Beach Boys), over the decades, Smile or Smiley Smile or Smile Sessions or Brian Wilson Presents Smile remains an open work, unfinished, lost to the pantheon. This book tries to offer a reading as fragmented as its subject, from the chronology of the sessions in studio.