Schwarz
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"The story of the original Smile is a fascinating catastrophe. It's best detailed in Domenic Priore's book Look! Listen! Vibrate! Smile!, a collection of magazine articles, interviews, sheet music and other primary documents from the period when Smile originally almost came to fruition. The essence of it is that in mid-1966, Wilson was at the top of the American pop world. His group the Beach Boys (who were, at that point, under his creative control) had been making increasingly beautiful, complicated records, built around exquisite harmonies and Wilson's inventive way with tone color; the Beach Boys' album Pet Sounds had set them up as the band to beat, and they'd followed it with the song "Good Vibrations," which had raised expectations for Wilson's work even higher. (Contemporary readers may need to work a bit to imagine "Good Vibrations" as a revolutionary piece of music rather than as an orange soda commercial, but that's what it was.)"