The Smiley Smile Message Board

Hey guys,

There's this article I remember a few years ago, which I can't seem to find anymore when searching for it now. I remember it had a journalist who was I think spending the day with Brian (and the BB?) and they went to the beach. The journalist brings up Smiley Smile, which had just been released, talking about how he loved how avant-garde it was, etc. The writer compared it to some European art movement I think asking Brian what he thought of it, but Brian kinda looked at him confused and said he didn't know anything about that. I might be confusing this with another article but I think at the end, the writer describes Brian looking like a Buddha there in the beach against the sun.

Does anyone know which article this is? I'm mostly interested in the bit about Smiley Smile and remembering exactly what he said about it. I tried the search here and some of these keywords using a search engine to no avail. Thanks

Sounds like David Dalton's piece, "Epiphany at Zuma Beach Or Brian Wilson hallucinates me"
http://www.gadflyonline.com/home/05-06-02/ftr-epiphany.html

Thanks for the link, juggler. I enjoyed reading  this slice of 60s SoCal music scene journalism. The movie that's mentioned is 'Seconds' not 'Sounds' if anyone wants to check it out.

My favorite quote from that article is "On a glass coffee table was a veritable pyramid of joints all rolled by the in-house joint roller. He'd been a flack in the publicity department of Capitol records and now he had this job: rolling doobies for the Beach Boys."

Speaking of the coffee table...  In the accompanying photo, sitting around the coffee table, it appears that we see, clockwise from left, Marilyn, Annie (with baby), Carl, Audree, Brian (holding Louie the dog).  So, who's the baby Annie is holding?  Certainly not Jonah. Justyn, Carnie or Wendy, none of whom had been born by July '67.  So who is it?  Matt Jardine?  One of Denny's or Mike's kids?

What do we make of this article, anyway? Lots of minor factual inaccuracies, but also lots of evidence this guy was actually there. Did Brian really think he was Phil Spector? Carnie wasn't born until 1968, so Phil Spector wouldn't be mailing a baby swing gift in July 1967...

Yes, there are multiple time-line problems with the piece, and it seems like the author may have been misremembering and conflating several different visits with BW.

But would BW have had a baby swing in his home without an actual baby in residence?  If it were almost anyone else, I'd say probably not.  But, well, wasn't he drinking chocolate milk out of a baby bottle during the "I Love to Say Da Da" period? So who know...

Did Brian really think that Spector was visiting in the form of David Dalton?  Or was that a massive put-on?  We're talking about the era of extreme THC-induced paranoia, so the former is probably a bit more likely than the latter.

The more I read about this time period, the more I can understand why SMiLE didn’t come out at the time

David Dalton helped found Rolling Stone and wrote a fun book on the Rolling Stones but he is a provocateur/writer not a reporter. This article is his recollections-written much later-not a contemporary account and I would not 100% trust it as a source of factual info about BW-though clearly he did meet him at the time....