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	BRIAN WILSON A SMILE FOR SMILE

Thanks to the miracle of modern recording, and to a personal victory or two on Brian Wilson’s part, the world can now say something it should have been saying in 1968: "Brian Wilson doing Smile? Big deal, saw it last year." The intended Beach Boys masterwork, an album Wilson finished last year with major help from Van Dyke Parks, was a media sensation. It was also Wilson’s first big commercial success in three decades. And now that the shock of Smile has worn off, it was possible to savor the music when Wilson performed it at Bank of America Pavilion a week ago Tuesday. Between the grand acid-Western sweeps of the first movement and the bittersweet life-cycle theme of the second, that wasn’t hard. The finale even got fresh emotional mileage out of "Good Vibrations" — no small feat for an orange-juice commercial.

Wilson seemed in fine shape — the distracting nervous tics of last fall’s Orpheum show were largely gone, and he sang the Smile material better than he does on the album. Long-time sideman Jeffrey Foskett, who sings the high parts when Wilson’s not up to it, had relatively little to do. Wilson started out playing older Beach Boys hits along with some surprises — the minor hits "Breakway" and "When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)" were new additions. The latter proved that throwaway lines written by a teenager —"Will I dig the same things that turned me on as a kid?/Will I look back and say that I wish I hadn’t done what I did?"— can sound poignant four decades later.