kirkland reporter

• Hendrix fetish art objects are, by definition, creepy. Here’s one that’s even creepier than most. It’s a sculpture of the musician shaking hands with former local DJ (and current rehab-center spokesman) Pat O’Day. It’s being auctioned off, having been seized from O’Day’s son to help settle a lawsuit involving the son’s onetime Kirkland jewelry store. That store closed suddenly in ’03. Several customers then claimed they’d consigned jewelry to Jerry O’Day that was neither returned nor paid for.
• The Kalakala’s current would-be rescuer says the drive to restore the streamlined ferry has busted him and rendered him homeless.
• The Husky men’s basketball squad’s predestined appointment w/destiny was done in by the First Brother-in-Law.
• One pundit’s prediction for the ’12 Mariners? Not as dreadful as last year.
• Facebook: Bringing people together. Including one local man’s two (simultaneous, unknowing) wives.
• One fifth of the Port of Seattle’s container traffic is moving to Tacoma.
• George Monbiot describes Ayn Rand’s worldview (i.e., what the Ron Paulies and even many Tea Partiers aspire toward) as “the philosophy of the psychopath, a misanthropic fantasy of cruelty, revenge and greed.” Speaking of which….
• Yes, there really is a Republican war against birth control. And yes, there really is no floor of utter sleaze beneath which today’s Republicans will not descend. (They’d advocate the return of slavery and poll taxes if they thought it would “test well among the base.”)
• Could one of America’s worst housing markets really be roaring back to life?
• The battle over e-book pricing heads (potentially) to the courts, as the Feds prepare to sue Apple and five of the Big Six U.S. publishers. The allegation: by letting publishers set retail e-book prices, Apple and the publishers conspired to keep said prices up.
• A Facebook zillionaire named Chris Hughes has bought The New Republic. Result: the usual inaccurate media descriptions of the opinion magazine as a “liberal bastion” and “influential in progressive circles.” TNR ceased to be liberal before Hughes was born. In recent decades it has (heart)ed Joe Leiberman, the Iraq War, and just about everything Reagan and the Bushes ever did. Hughes, who’s worked on Obama’s ’08 campaign, just might bring TNR back to what people who’ve never read it think it still is.
• For Intl. Women’s Day, the Guardian profiled a new addition to Forbes‘ list of world billionaires—a woman who’d earned her fortune (she didn’t just inherit it). She’s the inventor of Spanx undies.
• Said billionaires’ list includes eight (male) Washingtonians. You already know about Gates, Allen, Ballmer, Schultz, Bezos, and McCaw. The other two are the founders of Oakley sunglasses (who moved to the San Juans from Calif.) and video-game maker Valve Corp. In total, Forbes counts 1,226 billionaires, up from 140 in ’87. The 1% just keep getting 1%-er.

stranger cover, 8/30/95, art direction by dale yarger, illo by neilwaukee

I haven’t gotten all the details yet, but it appears Dale Yarger, a mammoth force in Seattle publication design, passed away over the weekend.

He’d been living in California for at least the past four years. But his local work is still a huge influence around here.

Yarger was one of the Rocket’s several rotating art directors in the 1980s. He created many memorable covers there and also made an early iteration of the Sub Pop logo, back when that was the title of Bruce Pavitt’s indie-music review column.

During that time he also co-founded a gay paper called Lights, art-directed The Oregon Horse magazine, and collaborated with artist Carl Smool on a memorable anti-Reagan bus sign.

Yarger became one of Fantagraphics Books’ first Seattle hires after the comix publisher came here from L.A. He redesigned the company’s Comics Journal magazine (where I first knew him), and essentially did every visual thing on its comics and books that wasn’t done by the artists themselves. He instilled the appreciation for top-notch design, typography, and production that now marks the company’s admired graphic novels and comic-strip collections.

By 1995 he transferred over to that other hip bastion, The Stranger. In his three-year stint there, Yarger took the alt-weekly from the look of “a zine on steroids” into the slick product it’s been ever since.

He also had a hand in the visuals of Seattle Weekly, the University Book Store, and Dana Countryman’s Cool and Strange Music magazine.

I will always remember him as a cool head even when surrounded by hot heads, a perfectionist who still understood schedules and budgets, a man with a knack for making even the most mundane assignment sparkle.

UPDATE: Now I’m told Yarger had stomach cancer, for which he’d had surgery some time last year.

I just watched (much of) the beginning-to-end Monkees marathon on Antenna TV (one of those digital broadcast sub-channels).

All 58 series episodes plus the feature-film epilogue Head were aired over 31 consecutive hours, in memory of the recently deceased co-star Davy Jones.

Things I discovered (or rather rediscovered) during this:

The series was both wholesome and subversive. It incoroprated both Three Stooges slapstick (shot on the same studio lot and occasionally using leftover Stooge props) and Bunuel surrealism. It’s no coincidence that the show’s makers went on to make some of the most groundbreaking feature films of the late ’60s-early ’70s.

If only the derogatory “prefab four” meme (the idea that, as primarily a comedy team playing scripted roles, they weren’t a “real” rock band) had not gotten around to denigrate both the show and the group, the show would have been seen at the time as what it was—a leap several steps beyond the standard Screen Gems sitcom, a bright and life-affirming piece of informed nonsense.

The four actor-singers had distinct comic personalities. No one of them was allowed to overshine the others. They played off of one another very well, especially when they weren’t in reactive mode against the guest characters.

They also had distinct singing voices, and they were all skilled musicians, even though the show’s shooting schedule (much more elaborate than that of your basic living-room sitcom) didn’t allow them to play on most of the backing tracks.

The Monkees series is a work of perfection. And thanks to the growing rancor between the stars, the producers, and the network, the show ended at its peak. It didn’t fall into a slow decline, like so many other series.

The group’s lightweight pop sound was already becoming rear guard by the time the show premiered. By the spring of 1968, when the show ended, that music was even more passe among the emerging rock snobs, and would soon fall under the damning label of “bubblegum.”

And the four co-stars were anxious to make more of their own music, which would inevitably lead them in different directions.

But the Monkees, and their producers Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, would not leave without a proper goodbye.

•

Some reviewers have called Head a destruction of the Monkees’ image. Actually, it expanded the series’ absurdist premise to its natural extreme.

In the series, the Monkees always saved the day because they were even crazier than the villains, and because they knew that as the heroes they could bend the show’s fictional “reality” to their will.

But in Head, they’re trapped in a world that’s more complicated, even more surreal. No matter how many times our heroes break the proverbial “fourth wall” to escape a scene, they’re herded back into another. The Monkees could no longer save the day, or even themselves; much as the youthful idealism of the Camelot early ’60s was descending into foreign and domestic turmoil.

•

I was nine when The Monkees series began its original network run.

It made perfect (non)sense to me then.

And it still does.

The show’s music epitomized commercial pop at its best.

And it still does.

As promised, here are the pix of my Sunday Amtrak-trek to the not so naughty border town of Bellingham.

The journey is beautiful. You should take it early and often. WiFi, a snack car, legroom, scenery galore, and all with no driving.

The trestle over Chuckanut Bay just might be one of the great rail experiences of this continent. It really looks like as if train is running straight across the water’s surface.

The Bellingham Amtrak/Greyhound station is just a brief stroll from Fairhaven, the famous town-within-a-town of stately old commercial buildings, and a few new buildings made to sort of look like the old ones.

My destination was in one of the pseudo-vintage buildings. It’s Village Books, a three-story repository of all things bookish.

Why I was there: to give a slide presentation about my book Walking Seattle.

Why people 80 miles away wanted to hear somebody talk about the street views down here? I did not ask. I simply gave ’em what they wanted.

Some two dozen Bellinghamsters braved the sunbreaks punctuated with snow showers to attend.

Afterwards, some kind audience members showed me some of B’ham’s best walking routes. Among these is the Taylor Dock, a historic pedestrian trestle along the waterfront.

Yes, there had been an Occupy Bellingham protest. Some of the protesters made and donated this statue on a rock near Taylor Dock.

Apparently there had been windy weather the previous day.

After that I took a shuttle bus downtown, where I was promptly greeted by a feed and seed store with this lovely signage.

The Horseshoe Cafe comes as close as any place I’ve been to my platonic ideal of a restaurant. Good honest grub at honest prices. Great signage. Great well-kept original interior decor.

(Of course, I had to take advantage of sitting in a cafe in Bellingham to trot out the ol’ iPod and play the Young Fresh Fellows’ “Searchin’ USA.”)

Used the remaining daylight to wander the downtown of the ex-mill town. (Its local economy is now heavily reliant on Western Washington U., another victim of year after year of state higher-ed cuts.)

But I stopped at one place that was so perfect, inside and out. It proudly shouted its all-American American-ness.

Alas, 20th Century Bowling/Cafe/Pub will not last long into the 21st century.

twenty-flight-rock.co.uk

Remember, we’ve got a free Vanishing Seattle presentation at 2 p.m. Saturday in the Klondike Gold Rush National Historic Park, 319 2nd Ave. S. in Pioneer Square.

• MISCmedia is dedicated today to the memory of Davy Jones, one Tiger Beat heartthrob who aged gracefully and remained true to the spirit of life-affirming pop music. Until today, the Monkees were among the few ’60s bands whose original members were all still alive. And despite their reputation as a prefab creation of little depth and less staying power, their music and comedy have remained vibrant. A goodly number of the tracks they churned out between filming TV episodes, over tracks laid down by the L.A. “Wrecking Crew” session musicians, are acknowledged classics.
• Sadly, we must also say goodbye to Daniel “Eric” Slocum, a familiar news face/voice on KOMO-TV and radio for some 16 years, and a sometime amateur poet. In recent years, he’d come out as both gay and a chronic depressive. He apparently died by his own hand.
• Bill Lyne, a member of a college teachers’ union, speaks out on behalf of K-12 teachers’ unions. Lyne calls out corporate-sponsored “school reform” measures as union busting drives, part of a larger strategy to put K-12 firmly under corporate control.
• Seattle rides transit more than Portland.
• We previously mentioned Amazon has guidelines for erotic ebooks, including a few verboten fetish topics. Now, independent e-book distributors are refusing to handle a wider range of sex books. The censorious force putting on the pressure to silence these voices? PayPal.
• The first African American director to win a feature-film Oscar is a Seattleite. His parents were in the punk band Bam Bam.
• The Thunderbird Motel, once one of Aurora Avenue’s many affordable hostelries before it became one of Aurora’s most notorious drug and crime zones, is being demolished this week, to be replaced by a Catholic low-income housing project.
• This one’s several months old but still haunting—Seattle Met’s story about the last Aurora Bridge jumper.
• Three Republican staff members in the state legislature claim they were fired for not working on GOP campaigns and fundraisers. There are no allegations that the staffers were asked to do campaign work on state time.
• NPR now says it will urge news reporters and producers to seek out “the truth” on any given topic, rather than merely repeating two sides of a dispute as having equal merit. Or something like that.
• Wanna help fund the next Jim Woodring graphic novel?
• The next incarnation of clueless marketers trying to be cyber-hip: QR codes where they shouldn’t be.
• Rediscovered (though still out of print): It’s highbrow Brit novelist Martin Amis’s 1982 user guide to early arcade video games!

filmfanatic.org

• Forget the movie and the two bios, all full of fiction. In reality, Frances Farmer was not lobotomized. Her story’s still mighty tragic, though.
• Architect Matt Roewe suggests a new, novel public transportation solution—a passenger gondola from the waterfront to Capitol Hill, ending atop a 16- to 40-story tower above Broadway.
• Even some longtime Seattle citizens don’t realize the Army has held on to pieces of Fort Lawton, now surrounded by former fort land that’s now Discovery Park. That ends Saturday.
• The last iPhone-incompatible cell service operator, Bellevue-based T-Mobile, won’t be such anymore. They’re not going to sell the iPhone any time soon, but their data plans will at least work on it once the upgrades are done.
• Yep, looks like another stupid all-cuts budget in the Legislature, kicking the can of our regressive revenue system down the road again. However, at least Basic Health (or what’s left of it) is preserved in one of the competing budget proposals.
• The memorial totem pole to slain carver John T. Williams will be unveiled this weekend at Seattle Center.
• The Seattle Times wants to sell its now ex-headquarters buildings for $80 million, twice their appraised value. That would help the company to meet its pension obligations, and perhaps even help subsidize the paper.
• Artists’ rights outrage of the week: “…A Florida judge ruled last month that iconic funk king George Clinton doesn’t own the rights to any music he created from 1976 to 1983.” That pretty much includes anything you remember from the P-Funk heyday.
• Sponsor tie-ins and product placement, those savior/banes of modern bigtime movies, just get more ridiculous every year. Now The Lorax, that story-sermon against runaway consumerism and “stuff”-ism, is being used to sell SUVs.
• Google’s latest potential new hardware product is something out of a modern dystopian novel. It’s “augmented reality” eyeglasses that display informative texts, social media updates, and, yes, ads.

joe mabel, via wikimedia commons

• How comprehensive can a list of the “10 Greatest Homes in Seattle History” be if it leaves out the Montlake spite house?
• Something I never thought I’d see: young adults joining Elks lodges. Back in the middle of the last century, Elks clubs were huge. The one in Everett, where my father attended, had that town’s best bar, gym, and private pool, and its only live music lounge. But the national Elks were among the last American social institutions to confront their own racist/sexist policies, and hence got branded as reactionary fuddie duddies. The new Elks are promoting themselves with that so-courant “social” mantra, and cheap drinks.
• Linda Thomas would like to remind you that Microsoft XBoxes and Amazon Kindles are also made at the same notorious Chinese factories used by Apple.
• Thomas also performs the ever popular local-angle-on-big-story shtick, with “Local duo penned popular Whitney Houston hits.”
• Not so fast, arena-hopers: Efforts are indeed being made to keep the NBA’s Sacramento Kings and the NHL’s Phoenix Coyotes right where they are. At worst, this would give the arena developers more time to acquire the rest of the land they’d need and to design the thing.
• Meanwhile, Goldy dumps righteous scorn on the hippie sports-haters.
• Mayor McGinn’s “State of the City” address mentioned the usual things (Amazon, arena, jobs, education, crime, etc.). But he also mentioned race discrimination in housing (still going on) and attempts to pull up African American school graduation rates. Unlike some ’60s-generation white people around here, McGinn actually knows there have been actual black people here other than Hendrix.
• Knute Berger sees developers and Seattle’s civic establishment as preparing for a post-recession boom.
• The state budget deal: done with mirrors.
• Who’s not making money from the Facebook IPO? The $1-an-hour foreign laborers who censor your pictures on the site.
• Meanwhile, Jeff Jarvis thinks journalistic institutions should become more like Facebook. Whatever that means. Let me explain briefly why this is hokum: Professional journalism (no matter what contrived “social” or “search” elements are tacked onto it) is someone relaying/interpreting information, telling factual stories for collective audiences. It’s nothing even vaguely similar to the huge censored chat room that is Facebook.
• Amanda Marcotte says the Girl Scouts, current topic of a trumped-up right wing smear campaign, really were progressive at the start, just by having girls do the same “scouting” things boys were doing.
• D.L. MacKenzie boils down the whole Libertarian thang into a simple mantra, in which Business is supposed to be Always Good and Government is supposed to be Always Bad. (As you might expect from this summary, MacKenzie interprets this mantra as a gross oversimplification, at odds with the complications of the real world.)
• Where not to go to get away from drugs: small towns.
• My fave recent American author David Foster Wallace would have been 50 this week. He never even got to live to see The Year of the Trial Size Dove Bar (a shtick in his most famous work Infinite Jest).

• Not really a Seattle Times Shrinkage Watch update, but related: The Times website has posted the entire 152-page commemorative special section originally published at the Seattle World’s Fair’s opening weekend, 50 years ago this April. (And remember, newspaper pages were a lot wider back then.) All those puff-piece articles. All those now ‘retro’ photos and art. And all those ads! From supermarket chains down to commercial construction firms that didn’t need mass-market ads. Everyone wanted to advertise in newspapers then.
• No, Amazon is not some giant ogre out to stomp on all things truly bookish, say a few truly bookish folks.
• Rap n’ Opera, together at last. At least in this story.
• Last week’s #1 TV show in the Seattle area: the Grammys. #2: Downton Abbey. Really.
• Are we two years away from no longer being able to see films distributed on, you know, film?

A scene from the 2008 Japanese film Love Exposure (dir. Sion Sono).

walla walla union-bulletin, via bygone walla walla

• As we prepare to mark a half century since the Century 21 Exposition, another local institution also marks the big five-O. Let’s raise a Coca-Cola Freestyle and some Mexi-Fries to the fiftieth birthday of Taco Time. (The Washington Taco Time, that is; not the same-named but separate Oregon chain.)
• Cold cases may make for popular TV dramas, but the folks who actually pursue them are facing layoffs.
• The Legislative session’s more than halfway done. Still nothing even on the horizon that would address our state’s crippling, unjust revenue system.
• Stanley Siegel at Psychology Today says your tastes in porn can reveal your personality—even the person you wish you were. If true, then it means I long to live in a never-really-was vision of 1970s Europe, surrounded by dirndl-clad Alpine lasses, slinky Indonesian photographers, and clean-cut German coeds. (And cool cars and cooler music.)
• Memo to the pop music world: Dude, you’re not gettin’ Adele.
• Friday’s BP refinery fire could have been covered as an environmental disaster barely averted, or a sign that this company still can’t be trusted. Instead, the Seattle Times‘ lead proclaimed the event’s most important aspect was that it “might boost gas prices.”
• Paul Krugman explains, at length, what the Wall St. crooks did. As for righting their wrongs, he says “It’s not that simple.” (Link contains NSFW banner ads.)
• Sarah Jaffe proclaims that America is becoming “less, not more, conservative.”
• Layla Farah at Huffington Post lists 11 living both-black-and-gay icons. They are two writers, one professor, one news anchor, three film directors, one comedian, two magazine editors, and one former athlete. No singers, musicians, actors, elected officials, businesspeople, scientists, or current athletes. And, in a major act of omission, no DJ Riz.

• King Street Station isn’t just getting “restored.” It’s getting architecturally-appropriate new stuff added to it.
• The basketball/hockey arena proposal announced Thursday is exactly as I, and many others, had predicted. All the money will come from private sources, and from city/county bonds to be paid back by arena revenues. Now comes the long wait, on three fronts. The city and county councils have to sign on. The project has to be designed. And it won’t get built until an NBA or NHL team (preferably both) actually come here.
• On a related note, Aaron Levine at KCPQ says it’s still OK to hate NBA boss David Stern.
• A lonely expanse of lawn on Beacon Hill is slated to become a neighbor-run park dedicated to edible plants. Welcome to the “food forest.”
• Lisa Rochon at the Toronto Globe and Mail makes “The Business Case for Beautiful Libraries.” Yes, she mentions Seattle’s.
• KIRO-TV.com headline: “Marysville teachers protest for statewide budget cuts.” Uh, they’re actually protesting against the cuts. This must be the same sort of sentence construction as the oft-heard talk about folks staging “a fundraiser for muscular dystrophy.”
• Now we know why Michael Nesmith wasn’t on last year’s Monkees reunion tour, and hadn’t performed many solo gigs lately either. He’d been slowly going blind. But he’s cured now. (It was undiagnosed cataracts.)
• Today’s Republicans aren’t even trying to get the votes of non-dittoheads anymore.
• In the 1990s it was e. coli in Odwalla apple juice. Now it’s arsenic in “organic brown rice syrup,” whatever that is.
• Mars Inc. will impose maximum calorie counts on its candy bars. Think of it as a way to reduce product sizes, keep the prices the same, and call it a “health” move.

candy wrapper archive via aol/lemondrop.com

aol radio blog

• Overhyped meme of the day: Following last night’s Grammys, teens and young adults by the dozen are supposedly Tweeting® “Who Is Paul McCartney?” As if the entire world hadn’t been force-fed the Sixties Generation® and its incessant proclamations of itself as the apex of humanity from which all before and since is a mere subspecies. As if Sixties Generation® superstars, even those famous for singing about dogs and butter pies, haven’t been repurposed everywhere from Simpsons cameos to Guitar Hero® games. Have at least a few dozen young Americans actually found a way to mentally shut out the tactics of Nostalgia, Inc.? Could they actually be more interested in creating their own culture, their own world?
• Adultery. Sex scandals. Obsessions with sales-hustling, upscale material goods, and “branding.” Shady business practices. Welcome to the all-American materialistic world of yoga.
• Just in time for v-day, gays will be able to get married, in just a few months. As long as the out-of-state bigot megabucks campaign, just starting, doesn’t reverse it.
• The Belltown Community Center is finally set to open in June, at the former Zum upscale gym at Fifth and Bell. The building of Bell Street’s “park boulevard” makeover (specially wide sidewalks and special street lighting) starts later this year; piggybacking, as it had always been planned to, on street work City Light was going to do on Bell anyway.
• Is Rick Santorum really an extremely bigoted ass, or simply cynically pretenting to be an extremely bigoted ass?
• Going everywhere by car: it’s just sooo less popular these days.
• The drive for NBA and NHL teams in Seattle now has a “fan lobby.” It’s called Arena Solution. Its board and advisory committee includes everybody from ex-Seahawks coach Tom Mara and Sonics legend Shawn Kemp to Capitol Hill bar owner Marcus Lalario and “Seattle’s Biggest Sports Fan” Lorin Sandretzky. This group seems willing to have a new arena in either Sodo or Bellevue, as long as we get the teams to play in it.
• Working moms are often perceived as giving less than 1000-percent undivided fealty to their employers. They are role models to us all.

fdin.org.uk

• Did you know Heinz had a soup factory in Kent? Emphasis on the “had.”
• Just when you thought you’d seen everything, something unexpected comes. Today’s edition: A poet who’s actually got people listening to him. Meet the Tacoma guy behind the viral video “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus.”
• A Facebook ad said an Issaquah heavy-metal guitarist with the stage name Steve Thunderbolt was looking for bandmates, but insisted on “no blacks”. Not ’cause he was a racist or anything; it was just “a drug issue and a safety issue.”
• It’s not just Ron Paul. The national Republican Party as a whole seems to just luuuuuv them some white supremacists.
• The UW president, the state’s highest paid employee, claims finding answers to education funding in Wash. state is “above my pay grade.”
• Soul divas aren’t supposed to die this young.
• Let’s hear it for last week’s #1 selling musical star on Amazon’s CD and download charts: Leonard Cohen! (Really.)
• Let’s close, just for the heckuvit, with Mike Wallace in a shortening commercial.

gasoline alley antiques

• Last time, we discussed what any potential Seattle NHL hockey team should be called. “Go 2 Guy” sports commentator Jim Moore has a simple answer—the Totems. That was the name for Seattle’s teams in the old Western Hockey League. (That league disbanded shortly after Vancouver, its marquee franchise, joined the NHL.)
• Mayor McGinn has promised that city tax money won’t go toward building a new basketball/hockey arena. This does not mean it will be an all private-enterprise endeavor, or that it would be cost-free to Seattle taxpayers.  The city will have to vacate at least one long block of Occidental Avenue South, essentially giving that land to the arena developers. It might also have to move in on any holdout landowners at the site, essentially forcing them to sell. The project might involve city-backed bond sales and/or tax breaks on construction and ticket sales. And certainly a new arena will compete with the city-owned KeyArena for the Storm, Seattle U basketball, the Rat City Rollergirls, concerts, corporate meetings, evangelical crusades, etc.
• David Meinert, meanwhile, believes McGinn might actually get a second term in ’13.
• The unionization drive at the new Longview grain terminal finally succeeded.
• The truckers’ strike at the Port of Seattle is having effects.
• The state legislature might approve textile-based traction devices, invented in Europe. Get ready for “tire socks.”
• A Vancouver USA attorney wants to overthrow the state’s Congressional redistricting scheme. He alleges the new districts are too incumbent-friendly.
• The one, way insufficient, state tax reform scheme in the current Legislative session is getting bogged down in the specifics.
• The pseudo-“religious” anti-gay bigots may not show up at the Powell children’s funeral after all. (The tragedy that led to this is, as we all sadly know, the work of a criminally insane straight guy.)
• Anthony B. Robinson ponders why Wash. state’s Democrats can accomplish gay marriage and other “social agenda” things, while the state government’s revenue system sends it, and us, ever closer to civic oblivion.
• Charles B. Pierce at Esquire is succinct: “Dear Ronald Reagan: Thanks for Destroying America.”
• Health insurance rates keep rising, as the insurance giants pocket more and more of that increased cash inflow.
• What happens to pizza-parlor robot rock bands after they die? Avid collectors, including some in Seattle, try to reanimate them.

west seattle blog

This Sunday’s Grammy Awards telecast will feature the three living original Beach Boys, reunited on stage for the first time in a couple of decades.

The performance kicks off a short tour promoting the group’s 50th anniversary and its recent Smile Sessions box set.

Probably the last major release by Capitol Records before Sony devours its parent EMI, the box set presents, in as complete form as possible, the most legendary unreleased album in pop history.

•

The story of Smile is long and convoluted. Whole books have been written about it.

To make this long story short:

In 1966, the pop music scene was changing. LPs and “album rock” FM radio were becoming more important than singles and top-40 AM. Pop combos like the Beach Boys were threatened with irrelevance.

Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys’ composer-producer, had already quit touring with the band to be in the studio full time. With the Pet Sounds LP, he’d turned away from the Boys’ early songs about surfing and cars, toward more complex subjects and arrangements.

Then with the single “Good Vibrations,” Wilson experimented with “modular recording.” Using L.A.’s top session players for all the non-vocal parts, he recorded (and re-recorded) different sections of the tune in different studios, then mixed-and-matched them for the final hit.

Wilson decided to make an entire LP the same way.

What’s more, it wouldn’t be a set of self-contained songs, but a concept album (the term was just coming into use).

The concept: a “teenage symphony to God.” Themes and motifs would flow, blend, cut away, and recur.

As with “Good Vibrations,” Smile’s instrumental tracks were recorded in the form of dozens of fragments, some as short as five seconds. Some fragments were more or less intended to be merged into standard-length songs. Others were stand-alone musical miniatures.

Wilson had composed and arranged these bits without a running order in mind (for the individual bits or for the LP as a whole), planning to figure that out later.

Wilson’s chief compatriot in the project was Van Dyke Parks, a young L.A. scenemaker. Parks wrote conceptual, sometimes surreal lyrics to Wilson’s melodies, and sat in with Wilson at the instrumental sessions.

These tracks were ready when the Beach Boys returned to L.A. from a long tour. At first, the Boys didn’t “get” Brian’s pop-symphony ambitions. Lead singer Mike Love especially felt Parks’ abstract, allegedly drug-inspired lyrics were too removed from the Beach Boys’ format (what would now be called their “brand”).

Vocal recordings were about three-quarters completed, then suspended.

Parks singed a singer-songwriter deal with Warner Bros. Records and quit the Smile project, with at least one song lyric unwritten.

A few months later, the Boys’ press agent issued a statement saying the album had been scrapped.

Some of its tracks were reused or re-recorded on later Beach Boys releases. Others made their way onto the tape-trading circuit, and eventually as CD bonus tracks.

Then in 2004, Wilson and his current solo band premiered a full reconstruction of Smile on stage, followed by an all newly-recorded CD.

Critics adored it. They called it a timeless work, beyond mere “oldies” status. It deftly mixed different pop sensibilities with modern classical and experimental “musique concrete” influences.

Now we have the “official” Beach Boys Smile CD, assembled in the order Wilson had used in 2004, supplemented with several discs of outtakes and alternate tracks.

•

Several factors contributed to Smile’s original scrapping, including Love’s opposition and the group’s ongoing beef with Capitol management.

The probable real reason, I believe: Wilson didn’t know how to assemble all the bits into a coherent whole. He was slowly but steadily “losing it” mentally, due to drugs and/or clinical depression. (I suspect the latter was the greater reason.)

Nobody else knew how to assemble all these bits either.

The following is how I conjecture it could have been completed (I’ve probably got some historical details wrong, but go along with me).

•

[alternate-history mode]

After Parks quit the Smile project, Capitol bosses examined the hours of recorded bits and pieces. They decided the project needed adult supervision, if the label stood a chance of making back its investment.

The label brought in a “record doctor.” We’ll call him “Mr. A.” He was familiar with both pop-rock and the outer reaches of modern jazz.

Mr. A’s nominal job was to replace Parks as Wilson’s uncredited co-producer.

His real job was to create a shippable product.

He was respected enough within the business to gain Brian Wilson’s trust, at least at first. The Beach Boys were more reluctant to accept him, but agreed under the condition that, once this quagmire was out of the way, the group would have their own (i.e., Mike Love’s) way on their next LP.

First, Mr. A scheduled two vocal sessions to wrap up Parks’ last unrecorded lyrics. Only the first session required the whole group at once, recording six group parts for four tracks.

The second session involved solos and duets, for three or four standard-length songs and three fragments. Love declined to sing any more of what he called Parks’ more “trippy” lyrics, so those parts were divvied up among the other group members.

While Brian conducted those sessions, a crew of assistants re-logged all the instrumental and vocal fragments, built “scratch track” vocal/instrumental mixes, then redubbed all these onto radio-station tape cartridges.

Mr. A sat Brian down in a mixing booth, where he used these “carts” to play the bits in different sequences. He started with the tracks that most closely resembled traditonal song structures (“Surf’s Up,” “Wonderful”).

Wilson signed off on each approved sequence, under daily and weekly deadlines imposed by the label. As this work dragged on, Wilson reportedly became less active in suggesting or rejecting different options.

Mr. A and Wilson eventually reached a track for which Parks hadn’t written a lyric. Pet Sounds lyricist Tony Asher was quickly brought in to supply words, under the new title “Hawaiian Islands.” Love agreed to sing on this one, because it updated the classic Beach Boys topic of wholesome recreation. Brian took advantage of this extra studio date to redo some already-recorded vocal bits, punching up some and smoothing out others. But the label steadfastly refused to budget any more studio time after that.

Next came the placing of the one-minute-or-less song bits. Mr. A labeled these “M&S” on log sheets, for “medleys and segues.” Higher-ups at the label, during interoffice chatter, unofficially reversed the initials.

Under Capitol’s dictates, the fragments were used more sparingly than Wilson wanted. This was particularly true of the all-instrumental bits. The label’s reasoning: This was a Beach Boys record, not a “Brian Wilson Orchestra” record.

What Wilson had vaguely planned as three sides running 49 minutes became two sides running 43 minutes.

During the tedious final mixing sessions, Wilson allegedly nodded off in the booth at least once. Later rumors claimed Mr. A forged Wilson’s initials signing off on some of the track mixes.

Upon hearing early versions of the mixes, Love allegedly felt surprised. This music wasn’t druggy; it was dense and cerebral. But that, he’s said to have said, still wasn’t Love’s idea of a proper Beach Boys record.

Smile was released in the fall of 1967, a year after the first instrumental sessions. The previously-printed LP covers got pasted over with sheets listing the final song titles in order, and including the small-type credit: “Mixed by Brian Wilson with Mr. A.”

Some critics called Smile a “flawed masterpiece.” Others called it a more intellectual, but less emotionally involving, work than the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper, released earlier in the year.

It undersold its predecessor Pet Sounds.

In later years, pop historians noted that many of the era’s “concept albums” supplied reassuring (even if loud) music to get stoned by. Smile failed miserably at this use, with all its abrupt changes of melody and mood.

The Beach Boys’ next LP was the back-to-basics Wild Honey. It was recorded without outside musicians, and mostly without Brian’s songwriting. It was the Boys’ last Capitol release.

In 1968, the group negotiated with Warner Bros. to distribute their own Brother Records. The Brother roster included Brian as a solo act. However, WB did the least it had to do in regard to funding (and, later, promoting) Brian’s solo debut.

That debut, You’re Welcome, didn’t come out until 1970, and included several leftover compositions from Smile (re-recorded, since Capitol claimed rights to the tapes).

Wilson, like Scott Walker (another top-40 balladeer who’d moved into loftier creations), would be viewed as a post-pop innovator whose releases steadily became more creative, less commercial, and much less frequent.

When CDs came along, Capitol reissued the LP version of Smile, in both the original mono and in a reconstructed stereo version. Several years later came a “director’s cut” version, with many tracks lengthened and restored.

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The later career and personal trajectories of the Beach Boys and of Brian Wilson would have probably been about the same as they wound up in real life.

The only difference was that Smile would have existed as a critics’ darling and as a curious artifact, not as a legendary unheard “ghost record.”