Nice little interview/article about Brian Wilson in Friday's Guardian, including some juicy info on Smile. I wonder if they ever do release a new official version of Smile if people will buy it. Or is it just a curiosity by now since many (most?) of the songs have been included on other collections? Anyway, it's worth following the link for the whole article, but I pasted some of it that talked about the Smile sessions below for those in a hurry

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/frida...128599,00.html

"Teenage symphonies to God," Brian called it. The Beach Boys, when they got back, called it "freaked out" and "fucked up". Mike Love, Wilson's cousin and most vocal critic in the band, scoffed that it was "a whole album of Brian's madness".

Already reeling from a distressing battle with the group's record company, Wilson was overwhelmed. And when Parks was forced out by the band, there was no one to fight his corner. He was "brain-fried", as he put it, and suffering spiralling paranoia - believing that Spector was monitoring his brain and that a track on Smile had caused an outbreak of serious fires in Los Angeles.

The final straw was the sudden appearance at the top of the charts by another far-reaching concept album: Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, by arch-rivals the Beatles. Wilson put the Smile tapes on the shelf, went home, got into bed and closed the door.

And for decades, while some of his Smile songs were rejigged for subsequent Beach Boys albums or slipped out on bootlegs or the internet, he refused even to mention the project. Until last October, when he went back to the album and finished it.

He was aided by the now-sexagenarian Parks and - half his age - Wondermints keyboardist Darian Sahanaja. Sahanaja located what was left of the tapes in the Capitol records vaults and "loaded all the complete to nearly complete pieces of music on to my laptop and played through them with Brian".

Wilson was nervous at first. So was Sahanaja, "because it was well known that this was the music that began Brian's withdrawal and subsequent spiral. It had to be done in small steps. Fortunately, we had already been performing some of the cornerstone pieces such as Heroes and Villains, Surf's Up and Good Vibrations, all serving as a good points to rally around." Then Wilson "started getting into it. He was genuinely turned on by the sounds he was hearing and asking me how we would pull certain things off live."

It was Melinda's idea for him to play the album in its entirety, on stage and worry about details like releasing a recording later. It was, she believed, the only way he could top 2002's Pet Sounds tour. The British reaction to earlier shows convinced him to bring Smile over here.