Brian Wilson Bears "Smile"

Thirty-seven years after he abandoned it, Brian Wilson will revive Smile onstage. He and his backing band the Wondermints will perform the Beach Boys' legendary lost album -- or, rather, Wilson's 2004 interpretation of what the uncompleted 1967 album eventually would have become -- at London's Royal Festival Hall, February 20-24th.

Smile was to be the follow-up to critical darling but commercial failure Pet Sounds. The then-twenty-four-year-old Wilson wrote the album with lyricist and arranger Van Dyke Parks, and described the elaborate work-in-progress as a "teenage symphony to God."

The rest of the Beach Boys, who were on tour singing the band's more standard surfing songs during much of Smile's creation, were less than enamored with Wilson and Van Dyke's symphony. Wilson, shaken by real pressures to produce hits and less rational factors such as believing that his song "Fire" was actually causing fires in his Los Angeles neighborhood, abandoned the project, though Smile tracks like "Heroes and Villians," "Cabinessence" and "Surf's Up" and "Wind Chimes" would be re-recorded for subsequent Beach Boys records.

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Song Stories

“Is It True”

Brenda Lee | 1964

As the British Invasion reached its peak in 1964, Brenda Lee went from Nashville to London to record one of her hardest-rocking hits, her perky vocal backed by a stuttering, squalling guitar. That guitar was played by session musician Jimmy Page, yet to skyrocket to fame with first the Yardbirds and then Led Zeppelin. "She said to me, 'I've come here to make a record with the British sound,'" remembered producer Mickie Most. "She felt she wouldn't get the same sound in Nashville because they're only just catching up on the British beat group sound of about six months ago."

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