The end of Smile- Some big questions, any takers??

[Mark H.]

I've always found the Hollywood freeway to be inspiring, too.

Seriously.  I know I'm in a minority, but I always loved driving on LA's freeways.  This glorious secular communion...

I find a weird sense of oneness when driving on LA Freeways.  See I don't live there so when I'm there I rarely have time constraints....so I just dig the scenery.

[Alex]

How is San Fransisco compared to L.A.? Just curious...I'm intrigued by the West Coast.

[Jon Stebbins]

How is San Fransisco compared to L.A.? Just curious...I'm intrigued by the West Coast.

I grew up in the S.F. Bay Area, left when I was 19 and then lived in L.A. for ten years...now I live on the Central Coast half way between the two(near Morro Bay)...I live in a beautiful traffic and smog free environment right on the ocean, but i travel to S.F. and L.A. a lot for business...and in my opinion the S.F Bay area traffic is much worse, harder to negotiate, less predictable, worse drivers, again... my opinion. L.A. is always about the same, its kind of slinky like a Doors album...don't drive between 5 and 6:30 p.m. or your gonna get stuck, stay off the 405 if you can, and use the canyons and the coast highway to get around it all. Driving in L.A. can be an okay experience if you know how to deal with it, personally I'm okay with it. Smog can be bad, but if you stay on the west side or near the coast its rarely a problem. But you gotta know there are certain areas you just can't drive without experiencing gridlock, Santa Monica Blvd. from the 405 to Bev. Hills, parts of Orange County near Newport, parts of Sunset and Hollywood late in the evening, and like i said the 405 is a bad scene if you wanna move...but L.A. is a big sprawling place with lots of options for routes. And it smells much better than NYC.

[brianc]

Of course, staying on the westside of Los Angeles excludes one from the Silver Lake/Echo Park area, which is pretty much the best place in L.A. for art, literature and indie sounds. It's gotten more commercialized these past five years, but between Silver Lake and Downtown L.A., so much is happening outside of the westside.

In fact, besides Venice and some leftover cool in Santa Monica, I can't see why you want to spend any time on the westside. Maybe go to the beach. But there's nada happening on the Sunset Strip, unless you like pay-to-play hard rock bands, or want to be in the Paris Hilton scene.

[KokoMoses]

I've always found the Hollywood freeway to be inspiring, too.

Seriously.  I know I'm in a minority, but I always loved driving on LA's freeways.  This glorious secular communion...

I find a weird sense of oneness when driving on LA Freeways.  See I don't live there so when I'm there I rarely have time constraints....so I just dig the scenery.

Wow, you guys are awesome!

I'm a lifelong LA resident who despises the freeways, but since this thread, I've been looking at them from a different point of view. Going south on the 405 can be an amazing experience when you pass the airport at dusk and exit on El Segundo Blvd or Rosecrans and drive toward the ocean.

[Julia]

Of course, just to muddy the waters, one has to consider the alleged meeting in December 1966 at which the rest of the band shot down Brian's '3-movement' plan for Smile, as reported by Peter Reum here and on other forums. I don't believe for a moment that Peter would fabricate anything like this, but in the light of reported and inferred evidence, it seems somewhat unlikely. It's also been said that in 1982, when he told Peter of the meeting, Brian was not in the best functioning state.  FWIW, I asked Bruce and he said he'd never heard of any such meeting. But in the Wacky World of Wilson, who knows...

Nah, Im gonna call bullshit on this. I don't care how much of a respected insider Mr. Reum is and I mean no offense to him as a person but no fucking way that happened. If Im wrong Im wrong and I'll give a self-effacing apology of the century, but I want to see proof not some "he said she said" 5-degrees of separation, decades removed from the events in question type of rumor. Mr. Reum was only involved with Brian many years after this happened, yes? I don't know the exact timeline but at least 10 odd years after, right? So how come he knows about this super important meeting that NO ONE ELSE who would've been involved EVER talks about? (Again, if they have, show me the quote, tell me what book it's in, etc.) I would expect one of the BBs or Vosse Posse or Brian or VDP would have known if Brian was seriously thinking of a 3-movement structure for SMiLE in 1966 and said SOMETHING in sixty freaking years. I cannot believe that NOBODY ever heard Brian float this idea in the leadup to that mystical meeting, and they'd NEVER blown the whistle about it. Nonsense.

To those who would accuse me of discounting this ""evidence"" just because it contradicts my own theories, I say not so. First of all, I myself think SMiLE works best with what are commonly called "the elements tracks" grouped together as well--just with Fire and Veggies on side 1 with Americana while WC and Dada are on side 2 with the Cycle of Life. So, my own "hobby horse" and this story would still be compatible. But it's not about whether my theory is supported or disproven by Reum's claims, it's that some guy who wasn't around during the original project coming in 15 years after the fact with this revelatory insight that no one else corroborates doesn't pass the smell test. And if he specifically means Brian wanted "3 movements" as in a double album (but uhh ignore that pesky fourth side of vinyl I guess cause that makes sense) then I have even more trouble believing it, because they never made a dual album before or since and why would they do so here and now, just to arbitrarily group some pseudo-elements together? It doesn't make any sense, it's not the way Brian made albums and I think if he told Capitol "I want 3 sides of like 4 songs each, leaving tons of empty space and, oh yeah, an entire side blank" they'd be like "Brian, we already paid $50k for Good Vibes, don't complain when you cancel sessions at the last minute, we included a booklet with the album which is virtually unheard of at this time, we let you turn in work months late, you don't take our calls and speak to us through tape recorders at meetings, and you're freaking suing us now. Our patience with this sh*t is long past over, kid. Give us twelve tracks and put it on two sides like a normal person." C'mon, does anyone ACTUALLY believe this?

And why would the Beach Boys shoot down such a suggestion? Why would they care how many "movements" it's in, so long as it's good and sounds commercial? This just sounds like more bullshit about "the big bad evil beach boys stomped on Brian's vision!" when their problem was the songs didn't sound like hits, not any kind of quibbling over the presentation or whatever. If anybody would veto this deal it'd be Capitol and honestly I'd say with good reason. The only thing I could think of is if Brian said "I want three movements which means I'm going to need time to write 50% more material for the album" and they said "Brian, just focus on the twelve tracks you sent Capitol. With how slow you're working we don't need to waste another 6 months on 6 more songs! Dual albums are barely a thing now, in 1966, and we're just trying to burn off our last obligation to Capitol anyhow! Whatever additional material you have should go towards BRI's first album!" And you know what? They'd be right. If--IF--this scenario played out, it'd have me 100% on the Beach Boys' side against Brian, not only because their concerns make perfect business sense but because SMiLE was already so conceptually bloated as to risk becoming an incoherent mess as it is. In this writer's opinion, that's exactly the problem with the BWPS/TSS presentation, something about that third movement, the second dramatic changeover from SU to IWBA, it just leaves me thinking "oh god, there's more?!" even though I adore all the songs individually.

I'm not accusing Peter Reum of lying, at least not necessarily (I dont know the guy's character personally) but he's certainly passing along information as true without doing due diligence and I don't like that. Even if Brian really said that to him, to confirm if it's true with any other source or include in his recounting a disclaimer that it can't be corroborated is, I think, the minimum of journalistic integrity. Brian is a notoriously untrustworthy source of info, especially in and after the Landy years, so to take his word on something as would-be earth-shattering as this without further proof is foolishness or wishful thinking, and I'm leaning toward the latter. One of my big pet peeves with certain aspects of SMiLE fans is this need to myth-build and/or (at least in the case of Priore), outright fabricate evidence to justify their preconceived notions of what it should've been. Then this gets filtered through to the fans, some well meaning but misled, others as deliberately stubborn and undeservedly authoritative as the myth-makers, who shut out reasonable suspicion and (in my opinion, more logical) alt theories because it doesn't align with "the evidence." I'm really sick of it--if your precious three-movement and/or "Elements suite" theory was as "obvious" as they say it is, they wouldn't need to pull out these convenient, unrecorded "revelatory" secret conversations with Brian from twenty years later to justify them--there'd be vintage evidence and/or the music would undeniably flow better that way.

[Julia]

**I don't think Mike had very much to do with SMiLE not being finished, regardless of what Brian says in the documentary.**

Why oh why do we take some things Brian says about his own life, music and experiences as utter gospel, and others, we dismiss with whimsy?

Because Brian contradicts himself all the time and anyone who's watched even a handful of his interviews, especially from the 90s on, can see it. That's why we, or at least I, try to prioritize what can be independently corroborated, what things he steadfastly repeats multiple times through the years, and which interviews he seems particularly forthcoming and lucid. It's an imperfect science admittedly but if you try to take him as gospel all the time, you'll have like 5 different answers to the same question.

This is a guy who, out of nowhere, will tell you that VDP told him about modular recording/editing when he was already doing it almost from the start with GV. This is a person who will sing Mike's praises one day, tell you Mike's the one who made GV a hit, then another day say Mike's lyrics are inferior to Asher's and ruined the song. There's 90s interviews where he admits he remembers NOTHING about SMiLE ("I don't know where I was, what I was doing or who I was working with") then, a decade later, suddenly he's spilling the beans (or, cynics would argue, reading a script) in Beautiful Dreamer. Brian's a great guy, an amazing musician and one of my biggest heroes but he's also about as accurate as Jim Kramer predicting the stock market.

[Julia]

What exactly happened in Apr, May and June 1967? There are some key questions that remain. 1) When was the fate of Smile discussed? If you look at the tour schedule, you see that the group was on tour from April 13 until May 20 1967.  So at the Vegetables sessions the handwriting was on the wall-Smile was not going to be finished and couldn't be till June. Do you think there were heavy conversations with Brian about this at the sessions in April? Or was this just left unspoken? 

Nobody knows, we have to make educated guesses. Im glad other people like Cam who seem to know their sh*t have confirmed what, to me, are the most interesting revelations of the Badman book (which I wasn't sure if I could believe previously considering its spotty reputation). That being, the Boys did interviews in their spring-summer European tour where they apparently expected SMiLE to be out by the time they hit the mainland and were surprised it wasn't. This would mean they recorded more vocals than we thought (there are a fair number of missing sessions and tapes) and assumed Brian would fill in any blanks like he did for PS. That implies canning SMiLE was Brian's decision and he did it behind their backs. I tend to believe this is accurate--I don't buy for one moment that Mike hijacked Derek Taylor, which I consider a libelous fallacy from Priore, whom I now consider beyond a doubt to be a bald faced liar for that and several other egregious claims.

No, Brian canned SMiLE and he did it of his own accord. Probably a combination of factors, including losing faith in the material after a falling out with VDP and taking Mike's criticisms to heart. That and not wanting to edit all that tape, but this aspect of it only makes sense if "editing tape" means more than "stitching some verses, choruses, fades and the occasional bridge together" and instead implies loftier ambitions for SMiLE. I'm personally of the opinion that, at the height of his speed and thc fueled creativity, Brian imagined a song made from spliced audio verite water recordings, but the reality of cutting out every note from however many hours of raw footage and splicing it into a melody caught up with him. I'm further of the opinion that more of SMiLE would have music concrete and/or comedy interludes "between cuts" as he said in contemporary interviews, but this too would mean wading through hours of tape (even what we have on the bootlegs is like 2 hours, who knows what else there was or would've been) for a few seconds of usable material and then painstakingly cutting it out and then into the album. It's not impossible (well, except maybe the water song idea) just extremely tedious and you have to know exactly what you're doing before you start, which he didn't.

I think he just got bored of the whole thing, doubtful the effort would be worth it, and decided to start the project over without the modular technique (which was becoming a huge hassle) or session musicians (which was becoming uncool and a source of hurt feelings in the band).

2) When the group returned from Europe at the end of May-do you think that they had already decided to take more control of their career or was this all Brian's decisions?

I think Carl and Dennis were already trying their hands at producing with Tones and IDK. I think Brian felt he owed Mike a bone, hence the duet credit for Gettin Hungry. I think Brian recognized the other guys needed and deserved to feel like a greater part of the creative process, hence the collaborative Smiley sessions where they recorded together as a band. But I don't think they wanted Brian to stop writing music or slow down with his workload--if anything I think with the home studio they expected results. 

3) Do you think there was an emotional meeting where the decision was made to say Produced by the Beach Boys on Smiley Smile or did Brian suggest it without a heavy discussion? 

No, I think that was him throwing them a bone (no longer "Brian's puppets") and taking the pressure off himself ("hey it's not my fault SS sounds rough around the edges, blame the rest of the guys!"). There was an emotional meeting where they told Brian "no more drugs" around this time if you believe his word thirty years later. In this case, I do. In Mike's autobio he implies Brian was ashamed of the album, hence taking his name off.

4) Did the Beach Boys put up any fight when Brian said he didn't want to use the Smile recordings and instead wanted to make mostly new tracks for Smiley Smile?-it cost them a lot of money 

Yes Ive heard this happened and I believe it, it makes sense. As 1967 wore on and especially post-Pepper I think they realized Brian was right and psychedelia was the way to go. The irony is they pushed back both ways, so Brian probably felt he couldn't win and Im sure that must've been hurtful and frustrating ("what do you people want from me??")

5) Do you think that there were arguments about not playing Monterey or did everyone passively accept this?- in retrospective interviews they always blame Brian  6) Considering the desire in the late 60s for any Brian Wilson compositions they could lay their hands on- did the group just passively allow Can't Wait Too Long-clearly brilliant-to sit in the vault? Its very odd that they didn't grab it for 20/20-they didn't seem to care about Brian's wishes when it came to other songs he preferred not be released

Not at the time but afterward Im sure they realized they missed out and regretted it. Kinda like SMiLE, nobody knew how important it would be until the moment had passed.

I dont understand the CWTL thing either. I guess it's a case of "Brian still got what he wanted, even if it meant sitting on brilliance" but he wasn't happy about releasing CE and Prayer was he, and they did those? So Im not sure. Nobody ever asked or spilled the beans.

[Don Malcolm]

Julia,

Totally on track with all of the general and most of the specific points that you make in your three most recent posts in this thread.

I, too, think that Reum's three movement thing is a red herring. David Leaf's latest book pretty much pinpoints that MOLC is the tipping point of SMiLE wrt the BW/VDP collaboration, and The Elements got fragmented/shelved as a result of the  fracas that broke loose in December, returning only as a kind of afterthought in May. I think there are several variations of a January/February SMiLE to be strung together as possible releases, with the fragments that existed at the time placed in differing configurations based on how much repetition of musical motifs made Brian's final cut. It's certainly possible that the band was even more offput by MOLC than VDP, and that alone is enough to suggest a rebellion against a "third movement" (which in the 12-song list that went to Capitol is just "The Elements"--which, IIRC, was the most unfinished part of the LP at that time). But it seems likely that Reum extrapolated this from the more general accounts of strife that BW was recalling in 1982 (at one of his lowest ebbs...). And it appears to have insinuated its way into Priore's "theories" and then perigrinated itself into BWPS.

Regarding Derek Taylor--I do think that it is more than possible that he went rogue in May, with the possible intent of reaching the band and getting them to buck up Brian to finish the LP (which at that point he was ready to scrap). I can't imagine Taylor taking orders from Mike: this was a man with a big ego via his Beatles cachet...

My theory remains that Brian agreed to set aside the more elaborate material with the idea that he could return to it later once the band was operating more independently from him. Of course no one else was really ready to write up-to-snuff songs in May 1967. So in late May we have now tended to surmise that there was a group meeting to clear the decks and get an LP out ASAP. The result: Smiley. The re-reworked H&V became the single, released ahead of the album (which languished a bit longer than normal once it was delivered). It hit #12 about a week before the release of Smiley--at which point it, followed by the LP, sank like a boulder.

And we know that Brian's plans to write hits for the group, delegate songwriting, do outside productions, and (maybe) resurrect the "orchestral SMiLE" all got flattened in October when the rest of the band had a collective panic attack.

Then we get Wild Honey and Friends, with the former producing reasonably acceptable results with 45s but the latter underperforming--the LP alarmingly so--in the summer of 1968. Brian brings back CWTL and looks to move it up in weight class to be a followup single to Do It Again, but just like SMiLE, he couldn't find the thread for it. And it seems to have been an initiating incident in a significant downward spiral--depression, withdrawal, etc.--all of which jump-started the songwriting/production efforts of the rest of the band. The release of CE and Prayer on 20/20 pocket veto any remaining chance of a Brian-led reworked SMiLE, and he "puts it out of his mind" at this point.

[Julia]

Julia,

Totally on track with all of the general and most of the specific points that you make in your three most recent posts in this thread.

I, too, think that Reum's three movement thing is a red herring.

Thank you. I was wondering if maybe I was being too harsh for a second but then I made my way through more of that other thread he commented on and saw that Mr Reum is dismissive of acetate discovery/preservation. In my opinion, that's just such an indefensible position and anyone who'd say "we don't need those, we have the final word with BWPS" is pushing an agenda. There's no way you can argue in favor of, essentially book burning, information loss, forgetting the past, and be on the right side of history. Just on sheer principle, that's not the answer in any field.

David Leaf's latest book pretty much pinpoints that MOLC is the tipping point of SMiLE wrt the BW/VDP collaboration, and The Elements got fragmented/shelved as a result of the  fracas that broke loose in December, returning only as a kind of afterthought in May. I think there are several variations of a January/February SMiLE to be strung together as possible releases, with the fragments that existed at the time placed in differing configurations based on how much repetition of musical motifs made Brian's final cut. It's certainly possible that the band was even more offput by MOLC than VDP, and that alone is enough to suggest a rebellion against a "third movement" (which in the 12-song list that went to Capitol is just "The Elements"--which, IIRC, was the most unfinished part of the LP at that time). But it seems likely that Reum extrapolated this from the more general accounts of strife that BW was recalling in 1982 (at one of his lowest ebbs...). And it appears to have insinuated its way into Priore's "theories" and then perigrinated itself into BWPS.

I still havent gotten to that yet, Im saving it for last after LLVS, archiving some old SMiLE threads here and skimming through the Smile Shop essays. But that premise makes sense to me. Elements/Fire is so unlike anything else Brian or any other pop musician was doing at the time, or arguably anytime after, that I could see it freaking everyone out. How can you put this on an album, how can you put this on the radio, how are teens going to dance to this? It would absolutely have weirded people out--which is why I think it's a tragedy it didn't happen. It really could've shook up an entire generation and forced them to acknowledge the untapped potential of music and art. Alas...

I can fully believe there was a meeting in Dec where the guys told Brian some combo of "don't release Fire (or the other elements if they're gonna be weird pseudo audio verite or unmelodic music concrete collages)" and/or "stop playing around and focus on what's essential so we can get an album out" and/or this in combination with "Anderle needs a single for BRI" (with the implication that "at least ONE of these songs better sound like a hit pretty damn soon!"). What I can't believe is that Brian said "I want to have three movements" and they said anything beyond "umm...ok, as long as there's a hit in there somewhere and it fits on a vinyl LP." (Really, I don't believe in an Elements suite at all, but you get that by now). I'm willing to accept this coloring of events as plausible but I'd still really like it better if we heard someone who was there, even a member of the Vosse Posse, allude to such a would-be momentous event. Or just an offhand "yeah, Brian wanted the album to have (3) movements/suites," but they never do.

I think you nailed it, that 20 years later (!) Brian's memory was colored by his ruminations/regrets/second guesses and bitterness towards the group for other slights over the years. How accurate are your memories from 20 years ago, really? I was 13 and I can barely remember anything from back then accept that I was in middle school and some of my classes, my fave band was Jamiroquai, I was just getting into classic cinema... And if that's a bad analogy, even thinking back to when I was 24, I couldn't tell you anything specific about the novel I was writing that never got finished, or the last conversations I had with some of my college friends before they graduated and moved away. Memories from 5+ years on are pretty damn useless, honestly. That's why, I dont doubt Reum heard what he heard but I doubt strenuously that it's evidence of anything except how Brian felt about the project and the boys at that time. ("Yeah man, I was doing this great symphony with 3 overarching themes and then the Beach Boys sh*t all over it and that's why it didn't come out!") Personally, that's how I square the circle with Brian's focus on Mike's negativity despite there objectively being other, more plausible reasons things stalled. Mike didn't have the power to kill SMiLE and realistically, Anderle's bad advice and the legal shitstorm did more damage, but looking back years later that's the wound Brian remembers. It isn't "I focused on the wrong thing for too long and missed the moment" that sticks with a person, it's "I poured my heart out to someone I love and they called it 'disgusting'" that can be an epoch-defining hurt.  

Regarding Derek Taylor--I do think that it is more than possible that he went rogue in May, with the possible intent of reaching the band and getting them to buck up Brian to finish the LP (which at that point he was ready to scrap). I can't imagine Taylor taking orders from Mike: this was a man with a big ego via his Beatles cachet...

Yeah I'd believe that over Mike commandeering him. Taylor knew Mike was lame and that Brian was the Beach Boys. He wouldn't risk his job and getting involved in family drama if it wasn't either a unified statement or at least coming from the top dog. Even if he did, he would've blown the whistle on what happened by now. If your theory isn't accurate, I think the other most plausible explanation is Brian simply canceled the album through him and that's that. I don't know why people are so hesitant to accept that the simplest explanation is the truth. Otherwise, Taylor would've been fired and his name cursed thereafter if he'd done something Brian didn't want him to do.

My theory remains that Brian agreed to set aside the more elaborate material with the idea that he could return to it later once the band was operating more independently from him. Of course no one else was really ready to write up-to-snuff songs in May 1967. So in late May we have now tended to surmise that there was a group meeting to clear the decks and get an LP out ASAP. The result: Smiley. The re-reworked H&V became the single, released ahead of the album (which languished a bit longer than normal once it was delivered). It hit #12 about a week before the release of Smiley--at which point it, followed by the LP, sank like a boulder.

And we know that Brian's plans to write hits for the group, delegate songwriting, do outside productions, and (maybe) resurrect the "orchestral SMiLE" all got flattened in October when the rest of the band had a collective panic attack.

Then we get Wild Honey and Friends, with the former producing reasonably acceptable results with 45s but the latter underperforming--the LP alarmingly so--in the summer of 1968. Brian brings back CWTL and looks to move it up in weight class to be a followup single to Do It Again, but just like SMiLE, he couldn't find the thread for it. And it seems to have been an initiating incident in a significant downward spiral--depression, withdrawal, etc.--all of which jump-started the songwriting/production efforts of the rest of the band. The release of CE and Prayer on 20/20 pocket veto any remaining chance of a Brian-led reworked SMiLE, and he "puts it out of his mind" at this point.

I pretty much agree with all this. The other most plausible theory would be that Brian NEVER intended to go back to SMiLE but said as much so Capitol didn't get sore (or sue!) for the wasted sessions. I think, perhaps a bit of noodling on CCW and that beautiful SU solo performance in '67 aside, he was done with SMiLE as soon as Smiley debuted. Even CWTL (and Version 2 CCW) I think represents his "never let a good melody go to waste" attitude in action rather than "how can I preserve what's left, including melodies, without reusing the lyrics/songs from Smiley." But I dont feel strongly on the specifics of this point enough to argue either way. The point is he thought or made others think he'd come back to it and ultimately didn't...until 2003.