Gadfly: How did you come to put the book together in the first place?
Domenic Priore: Well, what happened was that a girlfriend of mine had this cool little notebook, you know those school notebooks, the three-ring binders? It had...these vintage 60s things on it, and it had her name on it in a flowered,
psychedelic way inside. Right at the time, I was finding all these articles from the 60s, primarily four articles, by different writers, that were extensive about Smile. One of them was Jules Siegels’ “Goodbye Surfing, Hello God.” Another one was the Crawdaddy piece done by Paul Williams, and there was another piece that was in Teen Set magazine, and it had a lot of pictures, and these pieces are actually in the Smile book, and---oh, yes, there’s another one from I Magazine, I believe, and all four of those pieces, and I just got plastic binding papers and put them inside of this little folder, booklet, and I just
used it to read about “Smile,” because it was such a compelling subject...I got hold of those articles that people told me about, put ‘em in this one little book, and I said, you know, everybody should be able to read all four of these
in a row like I’m reading them in this little loose leaf binder. Before you know it, people kept on telling me about other articles, about “Smile,” and...I said, Man, this getting to be like a whole huge literary collection of long
pieces just on an unreleased album, and I just happen to be putting them into a loose leaf binder, and as time went on, I decided, hell, what else is out there, and people just kept on handing me things... So, every time I heard a little
piece of tape, it was like I got goose bumps, you know, it was almost scary, they were so good, you know? Like the first time I heard “Wonderful” or “Child is Father To the Man,” that’s really neat, and I was getting these articles, and
that’s when I thought that this was becoming...very, very interesting. That was the roots of the project, really.
Gadfly: Have you heard all the music that was intended for “Smile”?
DP: Yeah. I heard a lot of the things that were sort of completed tracks, before the book came out, in 1988. And since that time, maybe by design, I sort of made the book so that Beatles people would maybe kind of wake up a little bit and take a look at this stuff. Beatles people tend to be the biggest bootleggers, you know, and the eventual thing ended up happening. In other words, I had nothing to do with any of the bootlegs, other than the fact that maybe some of these sleeping bootleggers who were primarily into the Beatles or Dylan woke up and said, “Wait a minute. Brian Wilson was really onto something.” And that caused other people who had more illegitimate means of releasing music....The myth has mushroomed, but I would like to say that it is really not a myth, because that music was actually created, and that’s the
reason why people have been drawn to it and been inspired by it.
Gadfly: Speaking of myths, this is certainly a project where many myths have come and gone through the years. What are some of the biggest myths and misconceptions surrounding “Smile?”
DP: The biggest myths and misconceptions about the album are things that Brian Wilson himself has put out there. Like, “I burned the ‘Fire’ tapes,” which we all know isn’t true, because we’ve heard them, so....that guy definitely had very serious emotional, artistic, creative problems at the time, just after he made all that music. He met with a lot of resistance, and it was a very hurtful thing for him, and it was something that he kept guarded for many years. Some of the guarding has been him putting out certain myths like that. Unfortunately, we all want to listen to what Brian Wilson says about this, but to be honest, that is the reason I compiled this book. Before those artistic walls were put up around him he spoke quite openly about “Smile” music, and it appears in all those magazine articles. He was interviewed by people like Derek Taylor, a great journalist, and Derek got--not only Derek, but people like Jules Siegel and some of these other people--really got Brian to come out and talk openly about the new music he was making at the time he was making it. Unlike these bullshit myths that came out years later when he put up these walls around himself, you could read right there, in that book, his original ‘60s feelingsabout that music. That’s why I think that book is powerful, because it’s Brian talking about “Smile” before he had any problems with it.
Gadfly: Is Brian Wilson the primary reason why there still hasn’t been an official release?

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