I'd never heard the SMiLE bootlegs when Brian finally got around to releasing his version of the album. Just happened to see it at the store and picked it up because Holy Holy Cow he'd finally recorded SMiLE.
It was after midnight before I got home and I laid in bed with my headphones on thinking I was going to go to listen to a bit and then go to sleep. No sleep for me that night. I felt a rollercoaster of emotions and, by the time I got to the "Hum-ee-dah" Hawaiian section that was added to Good Vibrations, I had tears in my eyes. I stayed up all night listening to it over and over again.
By the end of the night I was typing up a weird document of my first reactions to the album and it reads like a fever dream on paper, talking about how SMiLE was like the Kill Bill of 60s pop, rising from the grave to take out Sgt Pepper. It sounds like lunacy, but it's one of the times I've been most emotionally affected by an album.
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