©Mark London.

Although several noted musical figures have been quoted as coining the phrase, the fact remains that "talking about music is analogous to dancing about architecture." In other words, it can often be an exercise in futility. However, for the last 37 years, talk is just about all that pop music fans have been able to do about a long-lost Brian Wilson album called SMiLE. In fact, for many of us, unraveling the mythology behind SMiLE had become nothing short of an obsession. We were like the JFK assassination theorists of rock 'n' roll.

From a personal perspective, SMiLE had become the holiest of grails to my tight-knit circle of tape- and CD-trading compatriots — many of whom I go back with some two decades. We each concocted our own hypothesis as to what SMiLE could, would, and should have been. I vividly recall heated late night debates that dragged into the dawn concerning how Brian had clearly surpassed The Beatles' Sgt. Peppers' Lonely Hearts Club Band in terms of making a cohesive "concept album."

I am admittedly the poster child for the premise that teenage geeks without dates do have a lot of spare time. My friends and I exchanged surreptitiously obtained tapes containing luminous, yet conspicuously incomplete musical fragments and ideas from Wilson's aborted masterpiece. We knew that SMiLE had been given the catalogue number T-2580 by Capitol Records and that Van Dyke Parks' friend Frank Holmes had been commissioned to create artwork for both the outer LP jacket, as well as a 12-page booklet, which had never been done before (the new art is by Mark London, who has been working with Brian since he began performing live again in 1999). For years, as we tried to make some sort of sense out of the seemingly disparate pieces of information and rumor, more questions surfaced than answers. Did any of the hundreds of thousand of SMiLE LP jackets and booklets manufactured by Capitol Records survive? What was the real running order of the tracks? Did Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks music really make buildings burn down in Los Angeles? Was it true that the pair wrote the whole album within the isolation of an Arabian-style tent and sandbox in his Bel Air mansion?

Was it SMiLE that drove Brian to completely abandon the Beach Boys incessantly touring road show — which he did in 1965. Our collective ego-driven youth demanded we find answers. One fact that we all could agree on is that at some point in 1967, Brian inexplicably abandoned the SMiLE project and shortly thereafter began a highly publicized personal and professional descent — from which be only began to re-emerge in late 1995.