Smile (The Beach Boys Album) - Aftermath

Aftermath

After Wilson abandoned the Smile project, his brother and bandmate Carl would frequently revisit the session tapes, taking into mind the possibility of salvaging them for future releases. In early 1972, The Beach Boys announced that they would be finishing the Smile album to follow up on the success of their Surf's Up album. By the end of the year, the idea was either abandoned or forgotten, with Brian refusing to participate in any further Smile-related material. When asked about Smile in a 1976 interview, Brian said that he still felt an obligation to put out Smile, and that the album would be released "probably in a couple years."

By the beginning of the 1990s, Smile had earned its place as the most famous unreleased pop album, and was a focal point for bootleg recording makers and collectors. A 1988 proposed sequencing of the album by engineer Mark Linett eventually leaked to the public. In 1993, fans were treated to a goldmine of official archival Smile material that was included in the 5CD boxed set Good Vibrations: Thirty Years of The Beach Boys. The second disc of the set included almost thirty minutes of original recordings, including versions of "Our Prayer", "Wonderful", "Cabin Essence", "Wind Chimes", "Do You Like Worms", "Vega-Tables", "I Love to Say Da-Da", an alternate version of "Heroes and Villains" and numerous linking segments featuring the "Heroes and Villains" theme, plus Brian's fabled demo recording of "Surf's Up", which Elvis Costello compared to discovering an original recording of Mozart in performance.

These recordings, sequenced by David Leaf, made it clear that Smile had been much closer to completion than had previously been thought, and this prompted much excitement by fans over what additional songs might exist, and debate about how the songs fit into the Smile running order. There was hope that the box set would be followed by an official Smile release, but failed to materialize.

With the emerging popularity of the Internet in the mid 1990s, the bootlegged Smile recordings became more widely available through a series of websites and "tape trees". A few websites actually offered full downloads of the tracks, and fan edits and arrangements started to appear. Beginning in 1997, the bootleg label Sea of Tunes (named after The Beach Boys original publishing company) began releasing a series of CDs featuring high quality outtakes, session tracks and alternate recordings that ranged across the group's entire career; these reportedly drew on official session recordings that had been copied onto digital videotape fourteen years earlier, during the making of The Beach Boys: An American Band documentary in 1984. Among these was a 3-CD set featuring over three hours of sessions for "Good Vibrations", and several multi-CD sets containing a significant number of the tracking, overdubbing and mixing sessions for Smile.