vintage postcard via allposters.com (prints just $14.99)

• After the success of its Redbox DVD machines, Bellevue-based Coinstar’s Next Big Thing could be—(ready for it?)—coffee vending machines. But, supposedly, really good coffee vending machines.
• Queen Anne Books is for sale. Prospective buyers: Don’t think of this as your chance to stage a valiant crusade to save Book Culture. Think of it as a bona fide actual for-real business opportunity. One that, depending on your skills and dumb luck, stands a good chance of panning out.
• How fiscally desperate is the state? One legislator suggests selling off the state’s art collection.
• Community Transit in Snohomish County slashed service a couple years back, and is slashing it again this week. Like other transit agencies around here, it’s over-dependent on local sales tax revenue.
• Then there’s the story of an unemployed local tech writer, who’s now making at least some money picking lice out of schoolkids’ hair.
• Seattle’s would-be NBA owner, an admitted hedge fund manager, is also described as having been a small time bully at Blanchet High. (Seattle’s would-be NHL owner, as described here previously, is in a business almost as lowly regarded as hedge funds—tobacco.)
• City-owned KeyArena will do just fine even with a newer, bigger Sodo arena, or so the City insists.
• The scary mega-earthquake dystopian fantasy known around here as “The Big One:” Could still happen. Could be even more fearsome than previously feared.
• And we must say goodbye, after eight-plus years, to Inner Space, the private indoor skateboard park in Wallingford. But fret not: it might reopen under new management later this year.

• 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?

donald levin's holdings range from cancer sticks to hockey sticks.

The Toronto Globe and Mail has confirmed the rumors (mentioned here a few weeks back) that Donald R. Levin, owner of a minor league hockey team in Chicago, is interested in owning a new or moved National Hockey League team in Seattle.

Levin’s interest in the Seattle sports world has been known for a while. Last July, KIRO-TV reported Levin was looking into potential Bellevue sites for a new NHL arena. But the Globe and Mail story says Levin’s willing to be roomies with Chris Hansen, who wants to build an NBA arena in Sodo.

Besides the American Hockey League’s Chicago Wolves, Levin is the principal owner of the privately held D.R.L. Enterprises.

It’s a mini conglomerate built around Republic Tobacco. Levin built that from a single smoke shop in the Chicago suburbs. From there he moved into wholesaling, and eventually into manufacturing.

Republic’s properties include JOB rolling papers* (bought from the original French owners), Drum and Top “roll-your-own” tobacco (bought from R.J. Reynolds), and assorted other brands in assorted countries.

Levin has funneled some of his cancer-puff profits into businesses with brighter futures; principally industrial leasing (including aircraft, though I don’t know if that includes Boeing aircraft) and licensed sports gear and merchandise.

And, according to the Chicago Wolves’ website, Levin has “made nearly 20 motion pictures distributed in the U.S. and overseas.”

The Wolves’ site doesn’t identify them, but the Internet Movie Database lists 12 films produced or executive-produced by Levin from 1983 to 1995. They include:

• the Stephen King bomb Maximum Overdrive,
• the Jamie Lee Curtis soaper Love Letters (in partnership with Roger Corman),
• the camp-classic thriller Angel, and
• the late director Zalman King’s softcore classic Two Moon Junction (which launched the career of our idol Sherilyn Fenn).

In other words, he sounds just like our kind of guy.

* (PS: Yes, I am aware that rolling papers are sometimes filled with a substance other than tobacco. If you can find a relevance from that fact to this story, go ahead.)

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

tinyprints.com

• We may hear today (Thu 2/16) from the ex-Seattle financier who wants to build a new basketball/hockey arena and move an existing NBA team to it. No word from that other guy who allegedly wants to move an NHL team here.
• Dystopian novelist Gary Shteyngart went to Seattle for a travel mag. The resulting piece is super sad, in parts. But he also describes Seattle and Portland as…

…the last places in America where books are still a dominant part of the culture, consumed, discussed, pondered, and critiqued with gusto.

• Amazon reportedly still wants more Seattle office space.
• Liquor privatization starts phasing in on March 1, when restaurants and bars can buy booze direct from producers and out-of-state distributors.
• That $340 million state budget “windfall”? A lot of it’s due to past slashings of social service programs.
• The state Legislature still doesn’t have a plan to halt horrendous budget cuts. But it is working to bring back incentives for out-of-state film productions.
• It’s the end of the smelting line for the Fremont Fine Arts Foundry. The longtime site of statue-making, and home base of the first efforts to save the ferry Kalakala is going to become a restaurant, a bar, and a restaurant-bar supply house.
• Forget about radio, the printing press, penicillin, the wheel, or even gum with flavor crystals. The Internet is “the greatest thing that mankind has ever created.” Or so says the don of crazy cat captions.
• Is Microsoft helping fund a creepy right-wing campaign to force “climate change is just a theory” curricula in K-12 schools?
• In reality, as opposed to right-wing-media fantasyland, there is no war on religion in this country. And wrestling is fake too.
• Sean Hannity held a panel discussion about the birth control pseudo-controversy. The panel included men of several races and religions, and not even one woman. (Has even one woman spoken for the anti-birth-control side in any public forum, other than Sarah Palin?)
• Nancy Grace has become, if it can be imagined, even sleazier.
• Lest We Forget Dept.: It’s the 70th anniversary of the forced detention of Americans of Japanese descent.
• One anniversary not commemorated by many, except by Noam Chomsky: The 50th anniversary of the start of the Vietnam War. (Or rather, of U.S. involvement in same.)

That piece was all about me.

This time, I’m fantasizing/riffing about who I would like that potential girlfriend to be.

She would be, more or less, as follows:

• Any adult age; though if you’re much younger, be aware that I don’t stay up ’til 2 as often as I used to.
• Any ethnicity, skin color, or hair color.
• Won’t try to convert me into becoming a Christian, a vegan, a stoner, or a Libertarian.
• Will let me keep my “room of one’s own;” will let me keep it messy.
• Will let me hold, more or less, to my odd (but never deliberately so) tastes in food, music, apparel, and entertainment. Will let me continue to own and use a television.
• Believes in gender equality, in BOTH directions.
• Allows my needed daily work-at-home time.
• More into soul-melding, intimate lovemaking than porn-style fucking.
• Progressive populist, not alt-culture elitist. (i.e., not a square-basher.)
• Not a female me, which couldn’t exist anyway. A complement rather than a clone.
• Notices things I don’t notice. Knows things I don’t know (which covers, I admit, a LOT of ground).
• Has an open and voracious mind.
• Cares about people and the future and stuff.
• Sees the heart and humanity in other people, no matter what their niche or lifestyle.
• Has eyes that light up the night, and lips to melt into.
• Equally at home in social and private situations.
• A “city mouse.” (I’m not moving to Bainbridge.)
• Preferably not currently married. Preferably.
• NS/LD.
• Preferably without preteen kids (but that’s not a requirement).
• Preferably without implants (but that’s not a requirement).
• Isn’t looking for a guy with money (goes w/o saying).
• Isn’t looking for an “enabler.”
• Doesn’t need to conform to others’ standards of “nonconformity” (ideology-wise or fashion-wise).
• Tells me what she wants; doesn’t just expect me to already know.
• Relatively free of psychotic episodes.
• Centered, self confident, and comfortable in her self.
• Believes love is more important than self righteousness.
• Believes in herself, in others, and in me.

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.

john mattos, via tor.com

• How to teach those kids an appreciation for classic art: via sci-fi inspired knockoffs.
• Sadly, one of the greatest collectors of art and info about VHS-era home video has passed away. His name was Fred Adelman. He published a zine, first in print then online, called Critical Condition, starting in 1982. His principal topic was horror/sci-fi cinema. But while the films themselves survived (though several of them have remained in, or returned to, obscurity), the medium through which Adelman initially reviewed them went away altogether. His site remains a major historical source about movies released on tape.
• I meet a lot of people who call themselves “Burners.” But I always had, and continue to have, only one favorite Burner. And here’s how you can help her.

filmschoolrejects.com

Alexander Wolcott at Vanity Fair ponders the not quite as rare as it used to be phenomenon of male nudity in U.S. movies, and sees farce and weakness and busted bravado. He goes on to describe these scenes as…

…caution flags, symbolic indicators of a national power drop that encompasses politics, economics, education—the works. Now that we’re no longer king of the world, American self-confidence is undergoing its own shrinkage; no one believes in the Top Gun jockstrap bravado anymore, and the joshing attitude and shrugging posture our movies have adopted reflect a country and a culture that have lost their spunk and don’t feel like keeping up the pretense of swagger anymore.

As my half-namesake Kenneth Clark might say, more lucidly than I, there are many ways to see a naked man.

The typical Hollywood way is best exemplified in the (phallus-free) Porky’s films: Female nudity is drama; male nudity is comedy. Every sex (or almost-sex) scene turns from enticing to ridiculous the instant the guys drop trou.

And thus you get the premise of Seth Rogan’s entire career.

Anna North at Jezebel.com doesn’t like that male parts only appear on screen to be laughed at:

This stereotype is a bummer for men, many of whom enjoy the chance to be admired. But it’s also sad for heterosexual women, reinforcing the notion that they don’t really desire men, that they’re only interested in guys’ fame or money or desire to get married, and not in, say, their butts.

As for the nation-in-decline part of Wolcott’s premise, there are historical examples to the contrary.

Imperial Greece had plenty of statues and paintings of nude men (or rather, of men with boy-size privates).

Victorian England had a mini-renaissance of nude studies (albeit carefully coded in mythological narrative, at least at first).

And stern-faced nude dudes were prominent in Nazi kitsch art.

Of course, nude paintings, statues, and even posed still photos tend to depict what Kenneth Clark called “the Ideal Form.”

Which isn’t something the makers of the Hangover movies care much about.

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.

The new-look CHT has now appeared.

It looks clean and modern.

And it looks like the new management is truly interested in providing space (if not much money) toward neighborhood news coverage.

And it’s got a locally based editor, Stephen Miller, who seems to really want intelligent discussion of the issues of the day.

That’s certainly what he says in his column for the Feb. 8 issue.

It’s about Seattle University’s Search for Meaning Book Festival, held the previous Saturday. Besides book sales and signings, the festival included speeches and panels by authors representing myriad flavors of religion in America.

Miller talks about the need for good questions instead of easy answers.

And he talks briefly about some search-for-meaning related trends in the news, as discussed by speakers at the festival. Among them:

The threat of Sharia law. A Mormon nearing the White House. Federal funds paying for abortions. A redefinition of marriage.

Except that trends 1 and 3 do not really exist.

Nobody’s trying to impose Sharia law in any part of the U.S.

There is no federal funding for abortions, and nobody’s proposing to start any.

These are merely right-wing scare campaigns.

They’re just as fake as the right-wing-only cable channel’s annual hype over a nonexistent “war on Christmas.”

If Miller did not want to address this complicating factor in his limited print space, he could have described these “trends” more accurately as allegations, promoted by some of the festival’s speakers.

Miller’s column asks us to pursue “intelligent discussion.”

A big part of that is distinguishing what’s really going on in the world from the spin and the bluster.

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

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.

[/alternate-history mode]

•

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.”