There are a handful of great stories in rock 'n' roll -- Syd Barrett's wild ride into madness, whatever exactly happened to former Rolling Stone Brian Jones, Sid and Nancy -- and, strange and sad as most of them are, they don't tend to turn out well.

But there's none more notorious (or more bewildering) than the rise and fall of Brian Wilson, leader of the immortal Beach Boys. In the mid-1960s, he helmed the greatest band in the country and almost single-handedly changed the sound of pop music. But in 1967, he started work on Smile, an album that would consume his thoughts for the rest of his life. His work on Smile was never fulfilled, and Wilson slipped slowly into madness, forever consumed by his unfinished business.

But now, almost 40 years after he began work on it, Smile is complete

To talk about Smile, we must first talk about Pet Sounds, The Beach Boys' 1966 psychedelic pop epic that kicked off Wilson's long journey to finishing his masterwork. Upon its release, Pet Sounds was lauded as a huge step forward for rock 'n' roll, and Wilson, vindicated by the new attention to his unique genius, began plotting his next move.

Though much of it is dense and dated, Pet Sounds revolutionized the way records are produced, established the Beach Boys as major artists, and remains full to overflowing with some of the most remarkable songs and melodies ever written (there's no sentiment in pop music as lovely as "God Only Knows," with the possible exception of "Rump Shaker"). But no matter how you feel about Pet Sounds, the circumstances surrounding Smile have haunted the Beach Boys legend ever since its inception.

Driven practically mad by jealousy that The Beatles were making better music than he was, Wilson began taking copious amounts of psychedelics, sitting around in the sandbox in his living room, and associating with semi-savory characters like lyricist Van Dyke Parks (not to mention Parks' old friend Charles Manson). With Parks, he started writing and recording songs that would become Smile, a record he expected to become the greatest achievement in pop music. It would prove to be Wilson's breaking point.

Unable to complete the work to his satisfaction, Wilson entered a depression from which he would never really recover. The Beach Boys went on to make other records, but the failure of Smile forever haunted Wilson and the band would never again come close to the genius Wilson aspired to. But remarkably, 37 years after Smile was to be released, Wilson went back into the studio to realize his shattered masterpiece.

Brian Wilson's Smile is surprisingly close to how one imagines the original to have turned out.

It sounds exactly like a new Beach Boys record would have circa 1967 and Wilson's voice is as oddly beautiful as it ever was.

In a post-Soft Bulletin world, it's certainly not a revolution of sound; Wilson's influence is so great that, to any fan of anything vaguely psychedelic since the late '60s, the new Smile will sound perfectly natural. But had it been released as it was intended almost 40 years ago, it's not hard to imagine it blowing the lid off of pop music for years to come.

Wilson's melodies are really like no others; each and every song is a lyrical and compositional triumph, and this Smile only further proves that the great abstract thing that obsessed Brian for so many years was, perhaps, worth all the pain.

It's hard to say whether this new Smile will help Wilson exorcise some of his demons (although he was clearly pleased enough with it to put it out), and perhaps even harder to tell if people will take Smile for the classic it might've been way back when. It's no matter, however, since listening to Brian Wilson's Smile should satisfy anyone with a love of rock 'n' roll (Wilson, hopefully, included). Even in its strange new form, Smile is truly one of the most amazing things rock music has ever produced, and has now become the perfect ending to its own strange story.