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The Beach Boys: Smiley Smile/Wild Honey; Beach Boys Concert/Live In London

Barney Hoskyns, Record Hunter, December 1990

WHEN I FIRST BOUGHT Smiley Smile (1967) as a spotty 15-year-old in the mid-'70s, I was pretty astounded by how radically wacko it was. I'd read Nick Kent on the legendary unreleased Smile album, so I knew this was where the acid had really started to take effect on the Beach Boys' California dream. But nothing could truly have prepared me for the full, unadulterated strangeness of everything bar the famous singles 'Good Vibrations' and 'Heroes And Villains' on what this CD's very authoritative sleeve annotator David Leaf calls an album of Smile bits and pieces, remnants and remakes.

Total word count of piece: 588

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