Look, Listen, Vibrate, Smile by Domenic Priore
This book is the kind of thing that just isn't published anymore (it would be a blog, or a Facebook group, or something similar now), a triumph of fan club culture. It's a bewildering collection of publicity from the mid-'60s about the legendary Smile album, plus a whole bunch of articles and interviews from the years following the record's nonrelease. It includes not just the articles themselves -- sometimes typed, sometimes simply photocopied from their original source -- but advertisements, posters, and other ephemera.

Look! Listen! Vibrate! Smile! predates Brian Wilson Presents Smile by a decade, and The Smile Sessions by more than that, so it's missing the definitive(?) answers that those releases provided to many of the questions about what was supposed to be on Smile and the state of those recordings. Since it's mostly a collection of primary sources, it's also noticeable that many of the details surrounding the recording and the eventual abandonment of the album change depending on who's telling the story. It's up to the reader to try and make sense of the contradictions and the gaps in the tale.

It's imperfect in the way a lot of these fan-made things from the time are imperfect -- the quality of the analysis and prose varies wildly; the photocopied photographs uniformly look awful; and some of the photocopied type is so small that it was everything I could do to avoid busting out a magnifying glass. But it also overflows with love and respect for Brian Wilson, one of the towering figures of 20th-century American popular music, and for Smile itself. As someone who loves the music involved, I found the journey fascinating, even if the eventual release of BWPS and TSS has removed some of the mystery.

You have to really, *really* care about the Beach Boys, Smile, '60s rock, or all of the above to want to wade through this ultra-dense hodgepodge. But if you are, it remains historically invaluable.
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Last Gasp 1995
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0867194170
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0867194173
Item weight ‏ : ‎ 1.11 kg
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 20.96 x 2.54 x 27.94 cm
Out of print

Carefully packaged and shipped expedited small parcel with a tracking number.