Holy Bee returns with latest crackpot theory: SMiLE almost done in Nov 66

[The_Holy_Bee]

Okay, so I was just back reading the boards for the first time in months this evening, which led me to start reading through the TSS sessionography again – and C-man, just to reiterate what I’m sure everyone else has said already, it’s just an exceptional piece of work and by far the unquestionable highlight of the book (though I do think Diane’s recollections are quite revealing and sweet) – and then led to me lying in bed for two hours obsessively going through dates and recollections until it was clear I had no choice but to sit up till 3.30 writing 3,000 words on how I interpreted that data.

Which of course I did. You have been warned.

SMILE:  ALMOST DONE IN NOVEMBER, DOA IN JANUARY
Or, THIS NEEDS A CATCHY AND CONTROVERSIAL TITLE IF I HAVE ANY HOPE OF IT GETTING READ BY ANYONE


First: I’m not sure exactly when Brian and Van Dyke started writing together in earnest, but as far as we can gather VDP does not seem to have contributed lyrics to some of the earliest songs recorded for Dumb Angel/SMiLE.

I say this because the first two tracks (and possibly the original “Heroes”, contents unknown) Brian recorded during and after completion of “Good Vibrations”, “Look” and “Wind Chimes” (early August), were originally credited solely to Brian, and Frank Holmes never seems to have received lyrics from VDP for these. (More on this later.)

So VDP makes a sudden – but impactful - appearance on the Wilson studio scene on 25 August, when “Wonderful” and (probably) “He Gives Speeches” are recorded on the same day. “Holidays” follows in September – and it’s appearing increasingly likely the lyrics we got in ’04 are vintage, or at least a significant number of them (I can spot Ukulele Lady Lily, a lazy Mr Moon, a way for a Milky Way, a bottle –of port, or of rum for Carib scum? – as anchor is weighed, and most wittily, a man juxtaposed with a mystery in Frank Holmes’ (c)96 illustration for the song, which he told AGD were originals given to him by Van Dyke).

Then not much until October, presumably because Brian and Van are working up the songs in that magical sandpit.

But October kicks off in earnest, and a period of incredible productivity gets underway.  Where almost every other song worked by the pair gets either a re-recording or a place on the famous “Capitol Memo”, “He Gives Speeches”, “Look” and “Holidays” seem to vanish after their initial tracking – perhaps, on the basis of their lyrical affinity (on Holiday’s part) and musical resemblance (on Look’s) to “Do You Like Worms” and “Child is Father of the Man” (for which Van says he supplied no lyrics) respectively, we could speculate that they were essentially replaced by those October songs. All the other numbers get rough assemblies, demos, guide vocals or (in some cases) full band vocals over the next twelve weeks.

Which brings us to Heroes, which begins, I think we can safely say, as a very different, less unified song than the one it eventually – and torturously – arrived as. The May 11 session produced a 2:45 master take that apparently included “You Are My Sunshine” – not necessarily in a minor key and past tense.

 Vosse recalls in “Fusion” the origin of “Barnyard” as a direct continuation of the work Brian had done on YAM’s fade (perhaps confirming some of AGD’s opinions on the historical accuracy of this interview, but not I think too damagingly for this essay), so we might assume that when Brian and VDP decide to rework this early version, one developed – and was replaced by – the other.

 For whatever reason, Brian does nothing more with the song then until 20 October, when he goes back into the studio and records what seems very likely to be a good chunk of the backing track, in two parts, of his and Van Dyke’s new conception of the song – the “three minute musical comedy” of bootleggers’ dreams.

Recorded this day were the verse and “Barnyard”. Three days earlier, a vocal session for “I’m in Great Shape” had occurred with all six Beach Boys, though we’re not sure what this is (it may be the “Vega-tables” demo, but see below), and a week later, he tried again on a piece with this title as an instrumental backing track. All three pieces, incidentally, are logged as H&V sessions.

At which point, as with most of the songs we’ve already discussed, Brian seems to be satisfied with the backings and work stops on the number, awaiting vocals – certainly a week later again he’s audibly delighted to run through all three parts in sequence for Humble Harv, even describing the first transistion between sections with a particularly charming mouth-flutterhorn. At this point, H&V seems to be a very concrete entity – verse/IIGS/Barnyard, perhaps with intro and link between the latter sections.

And so we reach November and it’s here, I’d argue, that the sessionography reveals the first signs of the chaos to come, though for now it may just as well be Brian making a breathless dash for the finishing line.

Only four completely new pieces of music are recorded in November, and only one is a stand-alone song in the conventional sense – the soon-to-be contentious “Surf’s Up”. The others range from the arguably throwaway – “Workshop” – to exciting-but-unlikely-to-stand-alone, “The Elements: Fire”.

Then there’s “The Old Master Painter/You Were My Sunshine”, rescued from oblivion and resurrected as a three-part medley. Whether or not part 2 – the “Barnshine” fade – or the “Master Painter” quotation were part of the May H&V we may never know, but certainly this is how Brian intended the track to go in November, as he edited the two together. In fact, during the tracking of part two, he refers to it as “the [grand] finale”.

What’s more interesting for the moment is that is our first mention of “The Elements”, at least on session logs. An October-ish version of Vega-Tables – presumably Cornucopia, as no other version of the track gets taped until four months later - is associated with ‘The Elements’ by Frank Holmes in his artwork  for the booklet, and though this has long been contentious, looked at in this context I’m inclined to believe it was meant to be at some stage. (Can anyone confirm when in ‘66 the illustrations were done?)

But sticking with elemental forces: Van Dyke has said he never worked on “The Elements”, and indeed most of the lyrics (“cornucopia” couplet obviously excepted) on both the released version and the demo of Veggies sound more like Brian’s work than Van Dyke’s. Specifically, they sound closest in tone – evocative but in a simple way, whimsical rather than witty - to those of Wind Chimes, originally copyrighted solely to Brian, and one of the first songs tracked for the project.

While not disputing in any way that VDP contributed to these songs, if we lend any weight either to the assertion of the man himself that he didn’t work on “The Elements”, or to the fact their lyrical approach is so far removed from any of the other songs with words we know of, we can make one of two assumptions.

One, that “Vega-Tables” and “Wind Chimes” were never part of The Elements, but after years in that camp I’m beginning to think the weight of evidence is, at least for the former, in the opposite direction. The other possible conclusion is that this suite of shortish and thematically-linked tunes was very much Brian’s idea, started early in the project, and not particularly in Van Dyke’s purview.

As a piece of circumstantial evidence, it can be noted that in Frank Holmes’ illustrated plates (unless there are others I haven’t seen or I’m missing a particularly obscure visual reference), which Holmes has said he based exclusively on VDP’s lyric sheets, there is no reference to Wind Chimes whatsoever, and the only other link to The Elements is a literal depiction of Mrs O’Leary’s Cow’s title done in 1996.

The point of all this? I think in November there was very nearly a finished album, and Brian had developed, if not concrete ideas for, at least some of the sequencing (more after the jump to back this up). And what we’re left with now are two of SMiLE’s most fundamental mysteries:  “Great Shape” and “The Elements”.

Conjecture time, so if this is the kind of stuff that causes some of you to flip out and behave rudely, please do me some small courtesy for the time I spent writing and cross-checking the rest of this and skip the next part:

At this stage, “Great Shape” as we think of it from the memo doesn’t exist. It’s sections two and three of a one-part “Heroes”.  It might be around this time Brian and Van Dyke recognise that the song as they’ve planned it – at least for the projected single – just doesn’t hang together enough for their purpose. It’s great fun and incredibly inventive, but there’s no repeating sections, let alone a chorus, and no steady beat for the discotheque kids of ’66. So they chop it roughly in half and start working on the more cohesive “Cantina” version recorded in January.

“The Elements”, meanwhile, may well have been where Brian started this mad dream, and it looks to me like in November, as the instrumental tracks for his and Van Dyke’s work was largely done, he was trying to finish it. Wind Chimes had been re-recorded and expanded the month before, Vega-Tables was clearly planned by December to stand alone in some fashion (hard to imagine with the demo, even in its pristine TSS version), and if one adds “I Wanna Be Around/Workshop” to the end of “Fire” after its destructive drumbeats, you’ve got a three minute tune there, fella.

Following this logic, the BWPS idea of a “suite” – full songs linked thematically – might well have been more likely for the The Elements than a single unbanded collection of instrumental fragments. (Contradicting this, in fairness, is Brian’s own quotation about the “Air element” in his “autobiography”. I’m not going to hide behind criticisms of the book’s veracity – as I said, this essay itself is just informed conjecture – so I will accept this as a black mark against my argument.)

For “Water”, you’ve got two options, both something of a stretch, but let’s persist. “Dada”, first tracked in late December, is the usual favourite. Frank Holmes has hinted at something in his Veggies illustration – “there’s more than one element” in it – and usually this has been guessed to be a “Holidays” postcard with a black lake in it. Well, it looks more like a stamp to me, and there’s no lake mentioned in the lyrics for “Holidays” (which it seems increasingly possible did exist and in Holmes’ possession in ’66, as discussed above), even if that crinkly black object is meant to be a lake at all.

What there is, unquestionably, is a wall of Surf. Which is Up.

And while my poor pigeons are unconscionably savaged by the neighbour’s cats, back to the sessionography and realm of facts and figures:

So! End of November, and we have rough edits/demos/acetates - ie. pretty clear indications of finalised structures - of the following songs later mentioned on the Famous Memo (and, more critically, thousands of printed cover slicks):
Heroes and Villains
Child is Father of the Man
Wind Chimes
Wonderful
Vega-Tables
Surf’s Up
Good Vibrations (natch)
Cabin Essence
The Old Master Painter
Do You Like Worms

All of them a) recorded or re-recorded since September (except GV, equally natch, and Wonderful) and – this is important - b) discrete modular compositions with very few shared musical themes (by my tally, if you’re not in the “SU always had the CIFOTM coda” camp, precisely none).

Add to these the other instrumental recordings – “Fire” and “Workshop” – done in November and you have – give or take thirty or forty seconds – a 32-minute pop album, exactly as was the norm in 1966, recorded in around two months, of 11 3-4 minute songs.

I would defy anyone to go through their Smile Sessions sessionography, old bootlegs, box set or period press clippings and provide me with evidence of linking tracks, shared themes or even a great deal of messing round with the structures of individual songs – in terms of the studio at least. I certainly couldn’t find such when I tried. In fact, I’d argue that it’s much easier to use all surviving contemporary data to argue strongly the opposite.

Look, I’m aware Brian didn’t, or couldn’t, finish SMiLE. I’ve also read the quotes from David Anderle, Mike Vosse, Carl Wilson et al about the endless permutations of sections. I’ve no doubt there was a lot of spitballing and throwing ideas about (and in Carl’s case, he was mainly there for the admittedly and increasingly chaotic vocal sessions after returning from the UK) – I wasn’t there, of course, so I don’t know.

But it’s fact that there is not one surviving example from before December of 1966 in which a single piece of music appears in more than one rough edit or demo of a song. Each one features only unique verses, choruses and bridges that do not appear in any other of those eleven tracks. The only possible exception is “YAMS” in the May “Heroes”, but that was a full five months before being split off into an entirely different track, so must be considered a special case.

Just about the only specific example given by one of the players on this subject is Vosse’s anecdote – said in ’68, mind – that Cabin Essence was once just the “Home on the Range” part – with the Appalachian feel – and “Iron Horse” was a separate track entirely. They almost certainly were, either as feels or when Van Dyke started working on the lyrics – but what must be more important is that all three pieces that make up the song were recorded on the same day, very quickly edited together (though not initially in the finished sequence), and not one of those three pieces ever turned up on a surviving acetate or tape as part of another song.

I did my conjecture piece above, so I’m going to avoid spelling out my conclusions on this, and finish up talking about the recorded chronology before things get sticky.

After this last rush of effort, it’s mainly vocals done over December. It can be safely noted without over-egging the pudding, I hope, that by now the Boys are back in LA in earnest, and there are some difficulties over the tracks, the lyrics and possibly Brian’s methods (cf. Mike and Al’s comments about recording on their backs, in pools and grunting like pigs). We do at least know one of the “Wonderful” backing sessions “went very badly” (but see more later) and afterwards Brian recorded “Surf’s Up” – missing tapes accepted, still likely the least completed of the major songs composed for SMiLE - for CBS alone.

And then there’s the December memo, which still makes a certain amount of sense in the context of the tracks I listed above, without any major re-recording needed for anything but Heroes. (Split “Great Shape/Barnyard” off to its own track and you need something to replace it in H&V.)

Oh, and Surf’s Up... which the boys don’t seem to touch at all after Brian’s plaintive reading for CBS (and there’s only one vocal session, missing but recorded, that seems to have happened at all – the day before. Perhaps that’s what Siegel remembers when he says a Surf’s Up session went badly on the day the boys recorded Wonderful... he’s not misremembering the song, he’s misremembering the day.)

Again, draw your own conclusions.

And, as we all know, for whatever reason the New Year kicks off with an H&V frenzy, the rest of the album apparently unimportant for the moment.

But something else happens in January that doesn’t seem to get the appropriate import: On the 27th, Brian commits the first piece of cannibalism on the pre-December SMiLE tracks – the first time ever that we know of that any piece of music, once recorded, was switched between songs, as opposed to simply being removed into its own number as in “Great Shape” or “YAMS”, and they started off together anyway – he  reworks “Bicycle Rider/Ribbon of Concrete” as a chorus for Heroes.
A little later “Great Shape’s” not entirely successful “tape explosion” gets deployed at the end of the “three score and five” verse.
On the tenth of February the second half of “Old Master Painter” is pillaged as a fade for the “Cantina version”.

This kind of stuff happens mainly with Heroes, but to a certain extent with Veggies (which absorbs “Do a Lot” and – kinda – the “Child is Father of the Man” refrain, at least for a day) and Wonderful.

And – to labour the point as fairly as possible – if there’s an album which is actually guilty of taking bits of the SMiLE songs, re-recording them in simpler versions and then trying a “throw the dart and see what sticks” approach to song structure... Well, it’s got “Smile” in the name, but it ain’t “SMiLE”.

Just to finish, I want to make it very clear that I know whatever conclusions I may have drawn or suggested in this enormous essay are my own, and are not facts – simply my own conjecture. This is why for the most part I’ve tried to base them very closely and firmly on actual data and accepted chronology, and avoiding the usual “Mike’s fault” or “Brian’s drugs’ fault” stuff. Those really aren’t arguments I’m trying to have with you guys.

But I do think that you put it all together like I have above and the idea of a completed SMiLE in late ’66-early ’67 isn’t quite as impossible as it now seems is fashionable to think.

That’s my reading, anyway.  I look forward to your refutation, questions, opinions or agreement of that notion (if anyone bothered to read the whole thing) – and to being corrected on my probably innumerable factual c*ck-ups! - but I’d really appreciate it if it was on the basis of data and reasonable supposition.  Of course, this is the ‘net after all, so we’ll see.

To sum up: SMiLE was one and a half backing tracks, several vocals, sweetening and sequencing away from completion in November 1966.

It began its quick decline into illness in mid-December and was functionally dead by 27 January.

Have at it! 

[Summertime Blooz]

   Thanks a lot for this, Holy Bee. That's a really entertaining read. Maybe you would be kind enough to elaborate on your statement "To sum up: SMiLE was one and a half backing tracks, several vocals, sweetening and sequencing away from completion in November 1966." I know you must have been getting tired by the end of writing your essay, but a detailed description of exactly what you postulate was needed to be done to finish a December Smile album would go a long way toward supporting your underlying theme.
   I'd also be interested in seeing what you reckon a 32 minute Smile would look like as far as running times for each song. In this regard I noticed you excluded I'm In Great Shape from the track list so I'm confused about that.
   Again, I appreciate your thoughtful analysis of the facts and sharing your opinions.

[guitarfool2002]

To sum up: SMiLE was one and a half backing tracks, several vocals, sweetening and sequencing away from completion in November 1966.

It began its quick decline into illness in mid-December and was functionally dead by 27 January.

I'd put the word "sequencing" in bold capital letters, because from a musical and functional perspective, that was a major issue dragging the project down. Looking at it, reading into it now for 20+ years, weighing all the possibilities, Brian seemed energized by the way Good Vibrations came together. After months of sitting on the shelf, after numerous attempts to find the right mix and the right edits to make the song explode, Brian can recall the moment he knew he had it right, when the editing, sequencing, and mixing came together and the single we know and love was playing through the speakers the way he wanted it.

It can be forgotten how much effort went into getting there, and it was done for a single lasting around 3 and a half minutes. Literally months went into that one single, now try to repeat that working method for an album with deadlines to meet.

The technology wasn't there, either. To edit that way is commonplace in 2012 with digital, a kid can do it in a bedroom with Garage Band and have more flexibility and control over edits than Brian did in the better studios in LA in 1966. The technology simply wasn't there. No one's fault, but being an innovator can only go so far if the tools haven't been invented to make your vision a reality.

I think Brian got so caught up in the creative bursts of recording incredible fragments that he "kicked the can down the road" as it were when it came to realizing what would be needed to glue it all together. You have short bursts of incredible, groundbreaking music that existed as fragments: You play them for people who are blown away, who have never heard music like this, and it's a massive ego boost. So you keep doing it, and recording more while the muse is there.

If the notion of finally putting all this together would have crept in as a reality check during some of these creative bursts in Fall 1966, I think it would have affected that creativity. Whereas leaving the functionality and reality of the editing tasks ahead for the future allowed more recording, but there may have been the dark cloud hanging over the entire time of "How will all of this actually work?".

I'd say that notion doomed Heroes as the follow-up to GV, because the individual parts of Heroes may have been equal if not better than the whole finished product. And Good Vibrations after months of tinkering was the opposite...the finished product was stunning, the parts not as much when removed from the sequence.

Sequencing - Technology, I'd say those are the key elements from the musical side.

[SMiLE Brian]

Brian's genius really wasn't made for his time.

[Chocolate Shake Man]

Good analysis.

I have to say I'm still not on board with Vegetables and Wind Chimes as being part of The Elements. For one, I don't quite agree with your assessment that Vegetables sound like Brian's lyrics. They don't quite have the, shall we say, majesty of some of Van Dyke's other lyrics, but they do have the wordplay and it certainly makes its appearance at a time when a lot of the rich Wilson/Parks songs are coming out. Wind Chimes, on the other hand, could be Brian's but that doesn't seem to me to make it part of The Elements. I think the more likely possibility is that the reason Van Dyke says he didn't work on The Elements is because either a: they were supposed to be all instrumental pieces; or, b: Brian himself never worked on them, perhaps, beyond Fire.

Also, I'm not sure Brian and co. entirely threw the baby out with the bathwater when it came to Heroes in January. I'm referring here to your suggestion that they broke apart Heroes in pretty much two and then began to focus on one part (leaving, say, I'm in Great Shape and Barnyard as their own tracks or something along those lines). If you listen to those January tracks, you'll notice that Brian is still referring to the recorded sections as "Parts" and that a lot of the parts he was recording in January fell under Part 2 or Part 3 (and even, to a lesser extent, Part 4!!). It is possible, then, that the Heroes/Shape/Barnyard set up that was recorded in October still existed for a while as Part 1. Cantina, How I Love My Girl, etc. were part of Part 2, and so on. OR: at this point, just the original Heroes backing was Part 1 - which is indeed a possibility. Listening to those January Heroes tracks in order makes Brian seem really lost, but at the same time, he is working with at the very least, some pretense to an organized structure. I realize, of course, that the placement of "I'm in Great Shape" as its own track on that memo also troubles this somewhat.

[Chocolate Shake Man]

I should say, too, that that October recording of Heroes/Shape/Barnyard is really interesting because, there, he basically does the same thing as he did with Cabinessence and Do You Like Worms. With those, he recorded three sections that eventually came together to form a whole complete song. It seems like that is what he's doing with Heroes on that day and yet it still confounds everyone (perhaps including Brian) how it would turn into a whole song like Cabin or Worms.

Does this make sense?

EDIT: Actually at work right now so I couldn't consult the Smile liners but did check Andrew's site to see that, in fact, Great Shape was tracked on another day? In that case, maybe forget this. But I'll leave it up as food for thought.

[adamghost]

I just want to say that the main thesis, and GuitarFool's qualification of same, both ring very true for me.

[The_Holy_Bee]

Hey guys, thanks for the responses! I was going slightly mad by the end of it (which turned out to be more like 4.30am than 3.30am - good thing I'm "between gigs" at the moment!). Re-reading it there are a few gaps, but I think it holds up okay.

@Guitarfool - funnily enough, as I was writing the last few paragraphs  I thought about "bolding" sequencing, but decided in the end not to for the following reasons - which may not be valid if I've misunderstood the technology of the time. (And I do remember Alan Boyd's comments in the TSS liner notes about how difficult it would have been in 1966/1972 for Brian and Carl to do what he and Mark did - so brilliantly IMHO - in 2011.)

Actually, if you don't mind - and hoping to avoid another 4am finish  ! - I'll go through your post "verse by verse":

"... Brian seemed energized by the way Good Vibrations came together. After months of sitting on the shelf, after numerous attempts to find the right mix and the right edits to make the song explode, Brian can recall the moment he knew he had it right, when the editing, sequencing, and mixing came together and the single we know and love was playing through the speakers the way he wanted it."

I've never been quite sure how useful the "SMiLE as an album-length GV" framing was for looking at the process and creation of SMiLE. I'll grant you he certainly had the opposite creative experience on "SMiLE" - a shrug rather than "Eureka" at the end of that initial phase - but I'm not sure how he could have had that moment of completion with major pieces of the whole (ie. Surf's Up) untracked and many vocals missing.

"It can be forgotten how much effort went into getting there, and it was done for a single lasting around 3 and a half minutes. Literally months went into that one single, now try to repeat that working method for an album with deadlines to meet."

In terms of the ambition of the piece, and its comprisal of many short musical sections, there is a definite similarity between SMiLE and GV, but it's a conceptual similarity, not a meaningfully practical one.

The SMiLE tracks - as assembled or demoed in 1966, as completed and released in 2004 and 2011 - are individually quite simply structured (with the important exception of H&V, as you note). Even DYLW, probably the most eclectic of the bunch, only variates from its formula for one section, going A-B-C-A-B-C-D-B-C. The experimentation is in the music, the lyrical themes, the instrumentation, not in the structure of the songs - whereas Good Vibrations, even in its released 3.5 minute form, is far less predictable in its construction.

What's more, we know not one SMiLE track - again, prior to December - had more than two or three tracking sessions (and one-plus-a-remake is the norm), and whatever held up the vocals seems likely to be as much the vocalists as their arranger/conductor (let's remember Brian just went ahead and wiped vocals as he liked on Pet Sounds, so something larger was at work). The backing sections tended to be assembled by Brian and Chuck into something very like a final sequence very soon after recording. How many months and test edits did it take him to even decide what bits to include in GV, let alone their sequence? We're talking two different animals here.

So we come back to the idea of SMiLE as a 40-minute version of Good Vibrations. It's very possible that organizing those 11 songs I outlined as being ready for dubbing in December into a satisfying two-sides of vinyl was more difficult than Brian had anticipated, but let's remember that when we say "sequencing" all the hard evidence suggests that is all we mean.  There's no sign of repeated sections or swapping bits around until the Heroes madness of January-February. These are all, at heart and in practice, songs, and Brian left us rough assemblies and guides to most of them at the time (next essay: "SMiLE - Farther Down the Path (Not Such) a Mystery?). Whatever Carl might have said later about "just pieces", everything we have from 1966 suggests Brian knew exactly where they would go within their individual songs. Frank Holmes was given lyric sheets for songs, even if some of them weren't used or went unrecorded. He wasn't given 30 scraps of paper with orphaned choruses and repeating refrains written on them.

Finally: in 1966, pop and rock albums - even the great ones - were sequenced after the songs were finished, so the order with most satisfying variation and dynamics could be tried out and identified. Almost no one in the mid-sixties - not the Beatles, not Brian with Pet Sounds, not the Stones - knew concretely where one track would sit in relation to every other until they could actually sit and listen to the completed tracks in different sequences, just as we do with our fanmixes. Brian was ahead of his time, yes, but again I've yet to see one real indication that this wasn't likely to be his approach with SMiLE, just as it had been with all his most successful records in the past. What is a fact is that,  if recording and mixing aren't ever completed and at least one major song's tracking abandoned (see my comments in the original post on "Surf's Up") just a session or two from completion, it wouldn't even be possible to start sequencing in the usual - and most plausible - sixties/seventies manner.


"The technology wasn't there, either. To edit that way is commonplace in 2012 with digital, a kid can do it in a bedroom with Garage Band and have more flexibility and control over edits than Brian did in the better studios in LA in 1966. The technology simply wasn't there. No one's fault, but being an innovator can only go so far if the tools haven't been invented to make your vision a reality."

See, and this is where my musical ignorance might be setting me up for a fall (breaks and back to message board obscurity), but surely many songs in the sixties were recorded in two sections (I can think of several singles with intros, for instance, recorded seperately from the main song and spliced together later)? The difference between this and three sections - almost always taped on the same day - is only one of degree, and a pretty small one. What's more, we actually have rough mixes and dubbed acetates made by Brian at the time in which the pieces are spliced together into a pretty complete (if unpolished) form.

I think part of the problem with Alan's statement I paraphrased above, and this general line of thought, is it's a bit like the Christian analogy meant to disprove evolution - that putting the pieces of a watch in a jar and shaking it won't give you a watch, just as taking all the pieces of an eye and throwing them together without a grand design won't give you an eye. Which, sure, is true - but it also has both things essentially backwards.

If what Alan's is saying is that putting SMiLE 2011 together in 1966 would have been impossible without today's technology (as he suggests, to get the tracks together required "a piece from one real, then onto that acetate, then backing vocals from tape #45006, etc"), then I'm sure he's right.

But that's because they were working to a template created by Brian and Darian using digital technologies; because master tapes have been lost or stolen; because some vocals only survive on acetates. We know Brian could put individual songs together from those sections in 1966, because he did it. And what I'm trying to argue is that what all the evidence tells us this record would have been is 11 or 12 amazing songs, but individual songs none-the-less. And we know very well that given his druthers, Brian Wilson could do that - in as few ("Surfer Girl") or as many ("Good Vibrations") sections as he liked.

"If the notion of finally putting all this together would have crept in as a reality check during some of these creative bursts in Fall 1966, I think it would have affected that creativity. Whereas leaving the functionality and reality of the editing tasks ahead for the future allowed more recording, but there may have been the dark cloud hanging over the entire time of "How will all of this actually work?"."

See my earlier comments on this, but yes, some doubt about the overall effect of these songs grouped together probably did creep in at this time. We can leave speculation on the causes of this for other threads!

"I'd say that notion doomed Heroes as the follow-up to GV, because the individual parts of Heroes may have been equal if not better than the whole finished product. And Good Vibrations after months of tinkering was the opposite...the finished product was stunning, the parts not as much when removed from the sequence."

Here, I'm happy to say, we thoroughly agree. We do have a pretty concrete structure established for pre-December Heroes, and though each part as I said is fun and funny, I've put that version together - and though obviously incomplete, even with elaborate dubbing and added transistions it's hard to see it having much luck on dance floors. Brian was and is a consummate artist - he was also, we know, commercially competitive. I think that the decision to split "Great Shape" to its own track on the Capitol memo is probably more important to SMiLE's collapse than we've imagined.

Thanks again guitar_fool for your very interesting post - hope I haven't missed too many of your points. I'm a little tired this morning! 

Rockandroll and krabklaw, will answer your posts in a while. It might be nap time shortly.

[Iron Horse-Apples]

Good to see you back HB

[The_Holy_Bee]

Thanks IHA! I'd love to hear your thoughts - positive or negative - on my massive screed when you have the time!

Naptime didn't work, so let's get back to it.

@Krabklaw -

You're right there, I could have been clearer about what I meant by "an 11-track album", and the use of December was a bit of an unintentional misdirect because of the Capitol memo with 12 songs. I can't be 100% accurate on the track times because we don't have a rough cut for "Heroes" at that stage and "Surf's Up" was never completed, but here's what was extant at the time (using Brian rough edits where indicated) and their respective lengths, in no particular order:

Do You Like Worms (approx 3.30-3.55 depending on the edit)*
Heroes and Villians (3.00-3.10)
Fire/Workshop (3.15-3.30, depending on how much of "Workshop" one uses)
Wonderful (1.58)*
Wind Chimes (2.31)*
Child is Father of the Man (2.55)*
Cabin Essence (3.31)*
Prayer (unlisted) (1.05)*
Vega-Tables (demo) (1.30)*
Surf's Up (3.55)
Good Vibrations (3.35)*
The Old Master Painter (1.55)

Which, if my sometimes erratic maths haven't failed me, and taking the longer estimates when tracks are in doubt, is an almost perfect 33.30 (I've added Prayer to my original calculations, hence the extra minute or so). The reason for no "Great Shape" is that in my thesis - and this has really been clarified in my conversation with Guitarfool - the breaking up of Heroes (which included it up until the memo, and it's a pretty safe assumption - though still an assumption - to speculate that it was by then those sections had been removed from the song) is kind of the point for me at which the story of SMiLE turns.

I've actually put together something very close to this - although cheating by including Dada and with some Jan sections to flesh out "Heroes" and "Great Shape" as separate tracks ("two part Heroes and Villains"?) - and it can really work as an exception pop album. Though, of course, that's just IMHO.

Rockandroll, you're next!

[The_Holy_Bee]

Hey Rockandroll -

When discussing "The Elements", the importance of the discoveries of the last ten years, and the sudden legitimacy of SMiLE as exemplified by BWPS and TSS, can't be overstated. Neither can the idea of "received wisdom".

When I first met the great love of my life (this album, of course) in the mid-nineties, we didn't have IIGS tracking takes. We didn't have "Cornucopia". Some of us still thought "Barnshine" was "Barnyard". The Prokopy notes, for which I have nothing but love and respect, ruled supreme. Priore's theories, as to a certain extent they still do, also dominated the discourse. And part of that approach was to USE AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE.

This is one of the reasons I tried at the beginning of my essay to cogently and objectively rule out "Holidays" and "Look" from the likely late '66 listing. They're simply beautiful pieces of work, but for various real reasons - not least the very finite limitations of vinyl - it's unlikely they could or would have been included. Indeed, see the post above to see how a comparatively spare SMiLE to the one we know today already approaches the limits of the conventional length for a sixties pop LP.

"The Elements" was, for a long time, kind of a clearing house for these kinds of pieces, so to an extent it was useful to think of it as a collection of instrumental pieces. You can have "Holidays" as Air, or Water. Or "Look" as Air. Or "Da Da" as Water - or, wait, what about those "bird noises" on Part 3? Maybe it's Air! Not much of this is based on actual evidence, but depending on personal preference, the incompleteness of "The Elements" has been a crucial tool in allowing us to get as many of our favourite pieces of unfinished music onto the tracklisting.

As a result, I think, of wanting to believe SMiLE was as close to finished in '67 as we could (it's better for the myth; or at least it was until a wonderful 50-minute SMiLE using almost everything except "He Gives Speeches" arrived in 2004 and mindsets had to be quickly changed) we may have ironically ended up thinking of it as further away. The point of my essay was to establish that it's quite possible that in the space of two months, an entire album's worth of songs were tracked by Brian, and it simply awaited vocals before sequencing could begin. What can be intuited from that, in terms of the reasons for its sudden collapse, I leave to the reader.

Of course, it would have had to be a very different beast from TSS or BWPS - but is that really such a problem? In fact, simply on the basis that it was only 2 sides, a '66-'67 incarnation would have to diverge by roughly a third, and the "three suites" idea would have to be inelegantly split in the middle. So for all the "what we've got is pretty much what they were striving for then" rhetoric of the last seven years, which I understand for political reasons, I'm not sure it makes much sense in context of the physical evidence.

But back to The Elements:

As I said, I was unconvinced for ages myself about lumping in Veggies or Chimes with that suite, because a lot of that received wisdom - and my own personal preference for using as much as possible in my mixes - urged against it. So, as I've been trying to do throughout, let's look at the facts.

The earliest references to "The Elements" I can source are in the booklet and the Fire session logs. (Though I'm sure I can remember seeing a contemporary press quote at some stage about it - can anyone remember or date this?)

In the booklet, the caption 'Vega-Tables' - which at this stage is almost certainly "Cornucopia", as this was probably recorded in October and there were no further VT sessions until April - is in quotation marks, and alongside it is a punctuatively unadorned The Elements, implying a larger framing entity as opposed to song title.

Supporting evidence - "Cornucopia" is only a minute or so long, like Fire more likely to be a part of something else than just a standalone. Frank Holmes himself has said "there was more than one element" in his illustration, implicitly confirming that unless we're including faces, postage stamps or taps as elements, vegetables growing in the earth is likely to be one of them. (Other options - a sun as "Fire" and "Surf's Up" as water, and we know how popular the latter theory has proved.)

But here it's possible to have your beet and eat it too. If, as rumoured, a big band argument ("We almost broke up after [Surf's Up] for good" - BW) occurred in December, and this was the time at which the project began to definitively change (see my initial essay), then two things can be conjectured. First, that bearing in mind we have a good idea of one prominent Boy's feelings about H&V's commerciality and lyrics, and we can pretty securely assume from the memo that it was around then that the originally planned Heroes began to be chopped up into parts; the idea of a "Heroes" single, at least in that initial form, was falling out of favour. Whether or not it was Brian's favour, or Mike's, or Al, Carl, Diane Rovell or LBJ's frankly doesn't matter here.

Secondly, we can assume that since they didn't "break up for good", it was still bad enough for substantive changes to be made to the band's approach to SMiLE after it - something that we can see from the sessionography. We know they did go back to "Heroes", with a vengeance, in January, of course, but if there's one other song in that initial 11 with a) reasonably accessible lyrics from a conventional point of view and b) the boys actually sound like they enjoyed singing, it's the Vega-Tables "demo" ("Chug-a-lug" redux?). Maybe it was here, as the emergency tracklisting memo was drawn up for Capitol, that Vega-Tables was first considered as a replacement single, and Heroes was lined up for serious revision.

So, part of Elements 'till at least November, and then considered a separate track, potentially for single purposes if Heroes didn't work out (which was tried, as we know, the following April) - people know what vegetables are, right? Unlike "sunnydown snuff" or "dove-nested tours the hour" - after December. This seems to me to comfortably fit in with all the established data, and clarify a few mysteries into the bargain.

*******

So, some more specific responses to your comments, with all that said.


"For one, I don't quite agree with your assessment that Vegetables sound like Brian's lyrics... Wind Chimes, on the other hand, could be Brian's but that doesn't seem to me to make it part of The Elements."

On the former topic, you might be quite right. I think they definitely worked on them together, I'd just say there was more Brian in there than, say, "Wonderful" or "Cabin Essence". Fair call on "Wind Chimes", about which I'm just making a massive grab because...

"I think the more likely possibility is that the reason Van Dyke says he didn't work on The Elements is because either a: they were supposed to be all instrumental pieces; or, b: Brian himself never worked on them, perhaps, beyond Fire."

... I don't think "The Element" was all that concrete an entity - more a general thematic idea like "humour album", "teenage symphony" or "American gothic trip" - until Brian made a stab as I suggested at finishing up the tracking in November. In this context, "Wind Chimes" would fit as Air okay if, say "Veggies" was Earth and "Surf's Up" water. As I said above, in this sense we're looking at an "Elements" more much like what we got in 2004, though with different songs comprising it, than the instrumental suite postulated in fan circles for years (helped I'll admit by some comments, though often vague, made by Brian himself).

Less subjectively, I think there is real evidence (given above) that Vega-Tables was at some point a part of The Elements, which means it simply wasn't (at least entirely) an instrumental suite. It also means, if we identify Van's presence in the lyrics, he had some involvement in Elements at least. And if Frank Holmes was in fact hinting at "Surf's Up" as water, here we have a major VDP lyric as part of the overall Elements concept. Maybe he didn't know how Brian was thinking about this for some reason, or it simply didn't matter. But if a) there's more evidence for an "Elements" comprised of individual tracks, some with lyrics, than for a four or five minute instrumental suite (and I hope I have demonstrated just that) and b) Van Dyke genuinely didn't think he was working on it, but rather on individual and fully crafted songs, then we're left with the surprising conclusion that if any part of BWPS is actually the most revealing of the original concept, it might be the apparently patchwork "Elemental Movement" that concludes it.

******

One more thing before we move on to Heroes.

I am aware we're still left, regarding all of the above, with the Big Stumbling Block: The Capitol Memo, with "Vega-Tables" and "The Elements" individually listed. There's an easy out, frankly - you call MOLC "The Elements: Fire", along the lines it was logged at the time, and then follow with the rest of the tracks under their own titles, but identifiable to any halfway perceptive listener as representative as one of the other three elemental forces ("Vega-Tables", "Wind", "Surf").

But if that still rankles, there's an even more general argument, and again it's pretty much the one I'm increasingly realizing I'm making: that the Capitol Memo was an emergency measure caused by increasing pressure and tensions, of various kinds, to establish and delineate potential "hits", if not so much the album as a whole (Brian's "grand finale" of OMP/YAMS/Barnshine still gets its own listing, just), which can explain some of its awkwardness.

******

"Also, I'm not sure Brian and co. entirely threw the baby out with the bathwater when it came to Heroes in January. I'm referring here to your suggestion that they broke apart Heroes in pretty much two and then began to focus on one part (leaving, say, I'm in Great Shape and Barnyard as their own tracks or something along those lines). If you listen to those January tracks, you'll notice that Brian is still referring to the recorded sections as "Parts" and that a lot of the parts he was recording in January fell under Part 2 or Part 3 (and even, to a lesser extent, Part 4!!). It is possible, then, that the Heroes/Shape/Barnyard set up that was recorded in October still existed for a while as Part 1. Cantina, How I Love My Girl, etc. were part of Part 2, and so on. OR: at this point, just the original Heroes backing was Part 1 - which is indeed a possibility. Listening to those January Heroes tracks in order makes Brian seem really lost, but at the same time, he is working with at the very least, some pretense to an organized structure. I realize, of course, that the placement of "I'm in Great Shape" as its own track on that memo also troubles this somewhat."

As I said initially, it's only at the end of January that the cannibalism starts, so it's a matter of the other songs being pillaged from rather than the nomenclature that's important (once OMP loses half its length and big ending to give the "Cantina version" its fade, what's really left?). I agree with everything else you've said - my personal view is that the "Cantina" section is a direct replacement for "IIGS", and we know various fades were tried out before settling on the re-recorded "Barnshine".

But! and I'm thrilled you inspired me to look this up before I got snapped by somebody else, but I did blearily misread the sessionography last night, and the repurposed "Bicycle Rider" theme wasn't recorded until three weeks after the date I gave above - which means the inclusion of "Barnshine" in "Cantina" is now the first concrete piece of shuffling on record, on 10th February.

It also means I was out by two weeks, and it's early Feb instead of late Jan the album really collapsed inwards into the blackhole of H&V and the insatiable craving for "hits", but I'm still not going to change the title of the thread as without the controversy I wasn't really expecting anyone to slog through it!

Thanks again Rockandroll for your thought-provoking comments and clarifications.  

[Biggus Dikkus]

An excellent read, very informing and interesting. Out of curiosity, do you use your own custom mix based on a theory of what you think it would've looked like had it been released in 66/67?

[The_Holy_Bee]

Hi BD, thanks for the kind words. If you haven't read the rest of the thread, there's some more interesting stuff in there as the implications of the post are explored, largely thanks to the comments and clarifications of Guitarfool and others.

Short answer is no, not really. Like most SMiLE fans, I've made numerous mixes over the years, depending on my changing tastes and whatever new material/info came to light. Of course, the problem with putting together SMiLE - outside of the various gaps in info - is the battle between historical accuracy and listenability.

On my current mix, for instance, I've re-edited from TSS a full 3-minute CIFOTM from the TSS version, which may be historically accurate - ie. structured according to Brian's original rough edit - but also features the same wordless verse twice and four very similar choruses, so "listenability" lost out on that one. (That said, I could listen to CIFOTM on repeat all day, so it doesn't bother me.) Conversely, I've used a rejigged version of Alan Boyd's excellent TSS Vega-Tables (omitting the first "Sleep a Lot", which has always jarred to me used as a chorus) instead of the '66 version, just because, well, it sounds much nicer and more varied.

I'd qualify my current mix - finding replacement takes for which (to get rid of TSS crossfades etc) actually led me back to C-man's sessionography and provoked all this - as a fairly accurate Jan '67 version if Brian had been able to bring all of the songs listed in my original post to completion (with Veggies miraculously transported three months back in time!), using new Jan sections to fill out Heroes and Great Shape (so it's slightly amended to fit in with the printed cover slicks).

I'd like to avoid this thread becoming a comparison of mixes, if possible, but I'd be happy to PM you a breakdown/link if you'd like!

[Wirestone]

This feels right to me. I think I posted last year that something clearly changes in the sessions as 67 dawns. Brian stops making an album and starts fixating on individual tracks. And as he does that, the re-recording and shuffling problems become greater. And he begins to see that H&V and Veggies and Dada -- none of them are surefire follow ups to Good Vibes. At which point he's screwed, right? Because what did he spend the last six or seven months doing, then?

It's also clear that Brian had a real album in mind around November. We'll never know precisely how it would go together, but it would have little duplication and be discrete tracks, as you say. If the vocal sessions had gone more smoothly, or if he had felt more comfortable in the material, the album could well have been out by early '67.

[The_Holy_Bee]

Hey Wirestone, glad you agree. I didn't start writing last night to prove any thesis at all, really  - I just thought something quite distinct was emerging from the forty five-year gloom when I did a close reading of the session dates - but as a result I feel I've leapt bodily to some interesting conclusions, particularly regarding the nature of December's crisis and the reasons for/meaning of the Capitol memo. If "The Elements" has been sectioned off to establish "Veggies" as a separate entity for potential (re-recorded) single release, and the same thing with a more coherent H&V - hence breaking off "Great Shape" - this goes some way to explaining why these two tracks have been such a mystery for so long.

The most important thing I hope I've done is lend some credence to the conclusion suggested by the data - that, regardless of its quality or how close it would have been to what eventually emerged, there WAS enough discrete and structured material for an album up till November, which includes all of the major songs and isn't a world apart from the December memo.

And that it's this album (though as you say, there's no way of knowing what the exact sequence might have been) that Brian spent October particularly furiously, and with great artistic focus, recording.

EDIT: Sorry, Wirestone, one more thing. When you say "Because what did he spend the last six or seven months doing, then", that's another of the big SMiLE misdirects I think.

If, "Wonderful" aside, the SMiLE sessions proper started in October (Good Vibrations, released on the tenth of that month, was the one that occupied six or seven months, and that turned out okay) then actually he'd only been going for three months when January dawned, and over the course of six weeks of them he'd produced an entire record's worth of backing tracks. Still quite a long recording period by '66 standards, but not all that crazy, especially compared to GV.

And yet, weirdly, if we accept that at that stage he was essentially finished with the musicians, and had pretty much a record's worth of discrete songs tracked, then it's at the moment that it's time to record the vocals that things go mysteriously and (not quite permanently, but for long enough) awry.

I blame the drugs, frankly. The ones that apparently didn't arrive until mid-November.

EDIT AGAIN: Oh, I said I wasn't going to do this!

[Puggal]

Your essay is going to inspire numerous fan mixes of Smile. Cheers.

It's funny that if Brian decided that, for example, the messy late 1966 version of Wind Chimes was "finished", and "Holidays" wasn't fit for inclusion, we would have been treated to an album inferior to what he ultimately "finished" in 2004. It would have had a great amount of historic value, though.

[Puggal]

Your essay is going to inspire numerous fan mixes of Smile. Cheers.

It's funny that if Brian decided that, for example, the messy late 1966 version of Wind Chimes was "finished", and "Holidays" wasn't fit for inclusion, we would have been treated to an album inferior to what he ultimately "finished" in 2004. It would have had a great amount of historic value, though and would have probably prevented the boys from fizzling out so quickly in the late sixties.

[The_Holy_Bee]

Hey Grave Robber, really interesting thought!

I was just thinking that while putting my new mix together and listening to my scrupulously accurate (as much as it can be) '66 mix - I really like its charm and simplicity (that October version of Heroes really is nuts as a lead single - I have some sympathy for the Boys on that one), and it's often genuinely weird and experimental in ways that the more carefully developed TSS isn't really... But there's so much missing, in retrospect, that the longer version and the '67 material restores.

Still, who knows what he would have done with fully produced vocal tracks - Denny singing Cabin Essence, as was intended, a fully developed CIFOTM - and studio sweetening of that version of the album. We might have been a lot less bothered by Holiday's exclusion!

EDIT: Just for clarity, of course, it should be "*my approximation of* that October version of Heroes", of course.

Also, for all the "what would it had done to Brian if it tanked" - which is fair enough - looked at it from this perspective it was actually only a) two or three months of work if it had come out in January, half what it took for one single (GV) and b) look what happened in this timeline. If it wasn't for his joyous resurgence this century (I'm just listening to the TLOS "demoes" as I write this, which I love without reservation), it's hard to imagine a "darker timeline" than the one we got.

[Cam Mott]

I agree that a reading of the sessions has always shown Brian was way down the road on having the album done. Vosse felt the same.

I can't get on board with the sequencing or obsessive recording being a problem. Brian's method was to go to the studio already knowing what he wanted and what the sequencing was. He was not recording and searching/hoping for a sequence, he knew the sequence before he got to the studio and made notes and called out the sequences at the studio. The evidence for it is all over the docu and recordings. To my reading he was not futzing with the album cuts much, so they were not the hang up. He was futzing with the expected single as he had with GV but not in a confused and obsessive way but in a progressive and calculated improving/revising way like GV. To me, the problem was it took time and during that time he fell out of love with an album that was mostly done.

[The_Holy_Bee]

Hi Cam, as regards falling out of love with SMiLE while revising "Heroes", what do you think of my notion that the return of the Boys meant some hard thinking, not just about Van's lyrics or the more esoteric backings, but specifically "hit potential" of various tracks - particularly "Heroes"?

As Rockandroll and I discussed above, that original(ish) Oct version of H&V, with the backing tapes and the demo as a guide, would really have been a bizarre first single. It's certainly true that the backing track for Heroes - which Brian had been so excited over on Nov 4 with Humble Harv, and was projected as the single - doesn't seem to have been subject to any vocal attempts at all, or indeed a rough assembly, unlike almost all the other key tracks.

I ask this because we know of various fall-outs with the group - over CE and SU at least, and possibly Wonderful - and we've heard the "scripted comments" of Mike Love about H&V. Is it possible the catalyst for the collapse was not Brian's inability to resolve and sequence, but conversely that the active intervention of the Boys (probably in early-mid December) led to breaking up H&V (and therefore the creation of "Great Shape") and plucking Vega-Tables from "The Elements" as a potential single, etc... and that led to the fragmenting of Brian's substantially developed plans for the record?

In which case, as I suggest above, it could mean that by all the "futzing about" in January trying to perfect a single, the conception of the overall record had already been fatally wounded by the band's (understandable) commercial considerations?

[Biggus Dikkus]

Hi BD, thanks for the kind words. If you haven't read the rest of the thread, there's some more interesting stuff in there as the implications of the post are explored, largely thanks to the comments and clarifications of Guitarfool and others.

Short answer is no, not really. Like most SMiLE fans, I've made numerous mixes over the years, depending on my changing tastes and whatever new material/info came to light. Of course, the problem with putting together SMiLE - outside of the various gaps in info - is the battle between historical accuracy and listenability.

On my current mix, for instance, I've re-edited from TSS a full 3-minute CIFOTM from the TSS version, which may be historically accurate - ie. structured according to Brian's original rough edit - but also features the same wordless verse twice and four very similar choruses, so "listenability" lost out on that one. (That said, I could listen to CIFOTM on repeat all day, so it doesn't bother me.) Conversely, I've used a rejigged version of Alan Boyd's excellent TSS Vega-Tables (omitting the first "Sleep a Lot", which has always jarred to me used as a chorus) instead of the '66 version, just because, well, it sounds much nicer and more varied.

I'd qualify my current mix - finding replacement takes for which (to get rid of TSS crossfades etc) actually led me back to C-man's sessionography and provoked all this - as a fairly accurate Jan '67 version if Brian had been able to bring all of the songs listed in my original post to completion (with Veggies miraculously transported three months back in time!), using new Jan sections to fill out Heroes and Great Shape (so it's slightly amended to fit in with the printed cover slicks).

I'd like to avoid this thread becoming a comparison of mixes, if possible, but I'd be happy to PM you a breakdown/link if you'd like!

Thank you for the kind reply. And if you do get the time I'd love a breakdown of sorts. I have already read a lot of theories about a 66/67 authentic mix and they're all very interesting.

[Cam Mott]

Hi Cam, as regards falling out of love with SMiLE while revising "Heroes", what do you think of my notion that the return of the Boys meant some hard thinking, not just about Van's lyrics or the more esoteric backings, but specifically "hit potential" of various tracks - particularly "Heroes"?

It could be. Brian was very commercial minded but I tend to think it is just coincidence in the timing with the Boys returning. I tend to think it was more about the concurrent rise of GV and the attention they were getting over GV and PS. Brian does not seem to be concerned about any issues the Boys may have had and they did everything that they supposedly had issues with so it's hard to see how it could have been a stumbling block.

I personally think it had little or nothing to do with mental illness or emotional issues either, those became stumbling blocks years  later. I tend to think SMiLE was all on Brian and it was just what Brian said it was back at the time: lyrics too arty for him, music too elaborate and old fashioned, not suiting vocals the way he wanted, all of HIS problems with the music and lyrics itself. Which was reflected in the issues between Brian and Van Dyke.

[Chocolate Shake Man]

Brian does not seem to be concerned about any issues the Boys may have had

"If there's not any more cooperation, I'm splitting after dinner. I mean it."

and they did everything that they supposedly had issues with so it's hard to see how it could have been a stumbling block.

Then why are were there missing vocals on songs that were ready for vocals, like Surf's Up, Cabinessence, Do You Like Worms, etc.

I personally think it had little or nothing to do with mental illness or emotional issues either, those became stumbling blocks years  later. I tend to think SMiLE was all on Brian and it was just what Brian said it was back at the time: lyrics too arty for him, music too elaborate and old fashioned, not suiting vocals the way he wanted, all of HIS problems with the music and lyrics itself. Which was reflected in the issues between Brian and Van Dyke.

You forgot to add, "And that's why the tapes have been destroyed."

[Roger Ryan]

Aren't some of the vocals missing simply because the backing tracks had not been finished and/or edited together? Weren't lead vocals among the last things that Brian would add to a track before final mixing?

I don't think anything being discussed on this thread is inconsistent with the idea that Brian got caught up in doing a very experimental album and then began to doubt that work's commercial appeal. Realizing time is slipping away, he turns his attention to making "Heroes..." a worthy follow-up single to "Good Vibrations". Now, when "Heroes..." was first being worked on, "Good Vibrations" wasn't yet the biggest smash the band had released. As the sales of GV got bigger, it's possible that Brian began thinking that the follow-up needed to be even more special than his original vision for it. All the while, he's wondering if anything he's doing with SMiLE will match GV in commerciality. Eventually, he falls out of love with the SMiLE sessions or, maybe in his mind at the time, he simply moves on and the Beach Boys continue.

[Chocolate Shake Man]

Aren't some of the vocals missing simply because the backing tracks had not been finished and/or edited together? Weren't lead vocals among the last things that Brian would add to a track before final mixing?

Well, leads were recorded for Wind Chimes and Wonderful by this time, so he was at least quite ready to be recording lead vocals as demonstrated by the fact that he had already done so.

I don't think anything being discussed on this thread is inconsistent with the idea that Brian got caught up in doing a very experimental album and then began to doubt that work's commercial appeal.

Well, then, in that case let me be the first to oppose that - or oppose that as the overriding reason why the album got scrapped. Of course, if we were to believe that that's the case, then it would therefore follow that he must have thought that Smiley Smile would have had much more of a "commercial appeal" by drawing on many of the same songs but making them weirder.