The process of scrapping SMiLE

[Micha]

I posted this on another thread already, but there were lots of themes being discussed, so it went unnoticed. 2nd try:

I've been wondering... the January version of H&V from the GV box set does not feature the BR theme. The BR theme isn't part of the earlier "Humble Harv demo" either. Could it be that when Brian turned the BR theme into the H&V chorus he had already scrapped DYLW?

Or was Brian in fact aiming at having a theme run through the album? What do you think?

When was the backing track for the H&V chorus recorded?

[Chris Brown]

Someone more knowledgeable than I can certainly correct me, but I don't think the "Heroes" chorus was recorded until the summer of '67, by which point "Worms" was long since dead and buried.   I never thought of it as a theme running through the album so much as trying to make use of Smile's remains to get the single done and released.

[Roger Ryan]

Well, the "Bicycle Rider" theme, or progression, does show up quite often throughout SMiLE, but in ways where you don't recognize it right off the bat (such as in "Fade To Vegetables"). I don't think Brian originally intended to use that close of a repeat of the theme as appears on "Heroes..." and "Roll Plymouth Rock" on BWPS; as already mentioned, I think he decided to structure the "Heroes..." single in a more conventional manner and determined the (abandoned) "Worms" chorus would do the trick.

[Bill Tobelman]

Micha, I've also thought that it could be the case that Brian was going to junk SMiLE, so he may as well throw the "Bicycle Rider" music into the single.

But more recently the thought occurs that this music, each individual part, was meant to produce an effect, and the album was meant to produce a cumulative effect. Since the individual pieces were separately infused & empowered their placement was not necessarily as significant as one would typically imagine.

Guess a good analogy might be gun powder. If each piece of the whole had gun powder, then no matter how you put it together it's going to produce a big bang. If you don't want it to go off you don't put those pieces together.

[Boiled Egg]

I've often wondered if the two parts of H&V (and, by extension, the two sides of the 45) would have been divided along the lines (1) verse/cantina/etc (2) all the BR rounds, culminating in 'so long to the city' and the existing chorus.

I'm sure someone's got chapter and verse on this, but the backing track for the chorus is surely '66?  Tack piano, two basses, all that chugging percussion - that's a very Wrecking Crew sound.  The vocals and that ruinous organ drone sound like '67 additions to these ears.  Who's got the skinny?

[hypehat]

That's about right - the organ overdubs on the were done at the house in April '67. Apparently some of the single's vocals were recorded in Brian's pool, or bathroom, depending on who's talking.

[Micha]

Tack piano, two basses, all that chugging percussion - that's a very Wrecking Crew sound. I'm sure someone's got chapter and verse on this, but the backing track for the chorus is surely '66?

That is THE interesting question. Should it have been recorded after the mixdown of the cantina version, it could mean that DYLW was junked around the time of this recording. If it was recorded in 1966, it would rather point at the BR theme to be used in both songs. But then why was it left off the cantina version?

That's about right - the organ overdubs on the were done at the house in April '67. Apparently some of the single's vocals were recorded in Brian's pool, or bathroom, depending on who's talking.

April is unlikely, I think, for the home overdub, as they didn't start recording at the house before June. I guess that's what you meant?

[Micha]

Micha, I've also thought that it could be the case that Brian was going to junk SMiLE, so he may as well throw the "Bicycle Rider" music into the single.

But more recently the thought occurs that this music, each individual part, was meant to produce an effect, and the album was meant to produce a cumulative effect. Since the individual pieces were separately infused & empowered their placement was not necessarily as significant as one would typically imagine.

Guess a good analogy might be gun powder. If each piece of the whole had gun powder, then no matter how you put it together it's going to produce a big bang. If you don't want it to go off you don't put those pieces together.

I'm not sure I get what you mean Bill... You mean, it doesn't matter anyway in what order the pieces would have been assembled?

[Matt Bielewicz]

Great points, everyone. I've thought for years that it's *really* hard to tell, based just on the recorded pieces that have, er, come down to us over the years, whether Brian really was cleverly 'seeding' different parts of subtly altered SMiLE melodies throughout the tracks like a classical composer, or whether the repeating sections are actually down to Brian scuttling sections of music for whatever reason, but then thinking, 'well, there WAS a good idea in there somewhere... I'll re-use it in something else'.

If the latter is the case, although we've ended up with similar sections of music recurring in multiple recordings, that might NOT be because these similar sections were intended to be issued all together as part of one album, but because the later recording of the music in a different context was supposed to REPLACE the earlier recording. If so, and SMiLE had been finished in 1967, we might only have heard (say) the Bicycle Rider theme in one place - say in the chorus of H&V, not threaded cunningly throughout the album.

I think, on the evidence available to us, that it's absolutely impossible to tell one way or the other. And in a way, this is key to how people see SMiLE. If you believe that, for example, there would never have *been* a version of the album released that had the Bicycle Rider theme cropping up in the chorus of Do You Like Worms, again in the chorus of H&V, and maybe also on the 'Fade To Vega-Tables'; one album that had the intro of 'Do You Like Worms' musically quoted again at the start of 'In Blue Hawaii' (or 'I Love To Say Dada', if you prefer); an album that includes musically similar parts in the verse of Vege-Tables in a chant called 'With Me Tonight', and which requotes a melody from a track called 'Look' (or possibly 'Song For Children') in the smash single 'Good Vibrations'... if you don't think that was supposed to happen, and that instead these musical themes would have appeared just once, with the latest versions replacing all of the earlier iterations of those themes on a finished album, then I think you'd be much more well-disposed to believing that SMiLE would be a fairly standard mid 60s album of 12 discrete tracks, and much LESS understanding of a presentation of the album like Side 2 of Abbey Road, or indeed the SMiLE of 2004, crossfaded and arranged as long pieces with quasi-classical repetition of themes in slightly different arrangements and with link pieces that cross-quote from other pieces of the work. Now personally, I absolutely love that idea, and I think the 2004 album and live show were an absolute triumph in terms of executing that concept... but I have no idea whether that was an intention at any time in 1966-7. Not for sure.

It could have happened either way, given the bits we've got that were recorded. I've always thought that it's a dangerous game to assume that everything we know was recorded for SMiLE would have necessarily ended up on an album (for one thing, there's far too much of it for a single album, of course, as has been discussed to death over the years). SMiLE wasn't like Pet Sounds; with SMiLE, we have all these pieces of the jigsaw, but we don't know whether the bits we've got were ever supposed to be fitted together at one time, into one album. But most bootlegs and fan mixes (mine included...!) have usually attempted to wedge all of the pieces in there.

To develop this idea a bit (this is, as usual, all speculation): as Micha said: perhaps Do You Like Worms was completely scrapped, and H&V was, at one point, the only place where we would have heard the Bicycle Rider theme on a notional 'finished SMiLE', had the album been finished at that point. Perhaps that's how the intro piano melody from Do You Like Worms also ended up at the start of 'I Love To Say Dada' - because DYLW was gone, and was never going to be released, but (perhaps just for a couple of days around May 1967) 'I Love To Say Dada' WAS going to be released instead, and this is how he thought he might get that 'feel' released. Similarly, perhaps by March 1967, The Elements was gone, scrapped, and so Brian recycled Fire in a different form as 'H&V intro'. If you believe this idea, then you NEVER would have had an album with both H&V Intro and Fire, much less with them glued together, as on the 2004 SMiLE. Perhaps the album includes Good Vibrations, but Look is gone, because in Autumn 1966 that chorus melody has been re-used for a vocal section towards the end of GV which Brian thought worked much better there. That would mean that if a version of the album had been finished at that point, it wouldn't ever have had both Look and GV on it. And there are so many other instances that would fit with this idea: perhaps Child Is Father Of The Man was scrapped by May 1967, but Brian wanted to recycle the idea in 'I Love To Say Dada' and that's why some takes on the ILTSDD sessions show the band beginning a bridge that closely resembles 'Child'. And of course later, we know he did exactly this kind of recycling with the bass line from the SMiLE Wind Chimes, as the unrelated track 'Can't Wait Too Long', completely separate from SMiLE. And Cool Cool Water, which closely resembles 'All Day' from January 1967, and ILTSDD from the May of that year... and so on and so on. But these were *replacements*, not clever re-quotings of the themes for use in SMiLE, which was long gone by then.

This 'GV replaces Look, rather than co-existing with it' theory, which I guess you could call 'The Replacement Theory of SMiLE' if you were feeling all artsy about it, would make sense of a lot of things. Why were all those H&V chorus-style progressions recorded, the ones you hear strung together on the 'H&V (Sections)' track on the 93 box set? Under the Replacement theory, perhaps they were *never* all meant to be released edited together as one piece: Brian would, perhaps, have chosen just ONE for the final cut, and that one would have replaced all of the others on the version of SMiLE that came out. Or perhaps not. We just can't know, as the available evidence doesn't definitively point one way or the other. Domenic Priore claimed that you could hear Brian on the session tapes for those sections explaining how the bits were meant to be edited together to make H&V Part 2, but, well... put it this way, Brian doesn't audibly say that on any of the bootlegs of those sections that *I've* heard. And we all know that DP said a *lot* of stuff in LLVS that has been, uh, thrown into a different light, shall we say, by later discoveries.

Who knows, maybe Brian was planning to have *two* different choruses of H&V, but he recorded the four we hear on the sections track and the one eventually used as the chorus on the Smiley Smile version, and was trying to weigh up which two he wanted for his next edit of H&V. He never made his mind up, so we end up with recordings of all five versions and mistakenly assume they were ALL going to be used in SMiLE, or as some kind of gigantic, cleverly self-quoting 'Heroes & Villains Part 2'. This is also possible, although unsupported definitively by any evidence; so it's time to stop this line of theorising for the moment, as I am needlessly multiplying possibiltities now, and William of Ockham is turning in his grave!

As with all this stuff, though, it's food for thought...

MattB

[Matt Bielewicz]

...oh, and Micha, regarding the weird timeline of the H&V chorus with tack piano: I agree it sounds *very* 1966. But of course, the album in Brian's head might not have evolved in a linear fashion. Perhaps he had the Bicycle Rider theme in DYLW in 1966, then scraps 'Worms' by December 66, re-records the theme as an insert for a possible H&V chorus in January 1967... and then decides AGAINST it in February 1967 and does the Cantina mix. He might then have changed his mind yet AGAIN somewhere between February and June (possibly several times), and eventually gone with his second impulse. And so we get: no Do You Like Worms on Smiley Smile, and the Bicycle Rider Theme / H&V Chorus (now with added Smiley-friendly Baldwin) as, well... the H&V Chorus! Which is, of course, why we call it the H&V chorus...

What I'm saying is: just because something may well have been recorded with the idea of it being a chorus in Autumn 1966, the dating of that secton is not *necessarily* invalidated by the fact that it didn't appear in the Cantina mix in Feb 1967. According to various members of the Vosse Posse, Brian was forever changing his mind and switching things around, so it's entirely possible he went one way, changed his mind, went another, changed his mind again, and then went with an earlier idea after all. Double-back Brian!

In fact, he has verifiable form on that, although the only example I can think of is from Pet Sounds, not SMiLE... the version of the vocals used on the album version of the tag to God Only Knows were recorded and mixed... and then he had a change of heart and redid them, so that the vocals that now remain on the multitracks are different for that part (which is why the vocals going into the tag on the later stereo mixes sound different). But 'Double-back Brian' went with the now-erased original vocals for the final mono album version, presumably splicing them in from an earlier mono mixdown, dating from when the original vocals were still on the multitrack...

MattB

[Micha]

...oh, and Micha, regarding the weird timeline of the H&V chorus with tack piano: I agree it sounds *very* 1966.

I've always assumed it was 1967, though, as the recording dates for the HV sections presented in the GV box are all 1967. Where's Andrew when you need him? (On a successful job interview, I hope!)

Long but enjoyable read from you there, Matt, you made the point I aimed at.