When did Smile become legendary? Was it a marketing ploy for the Surf's Up LP?

[MikestheGreatest!!]

Oh, I also want to say that I think the record market was mostly single oriented up until the release of Pepper's and even for a good period after that, the LP was not totally dominant yet.  I don't think Williams Crawdaddy articles and the Bernstein special had that much significance to the general record buying public at that point in time, if Add Some was that far ahead of the curve, then he/she is truly to be congratulated, but I still don't think the non-release of Smile had that much to do with their demise, I don't even think they were yet regarded as that big of an album group in the public mind, I don't remember anyone in junior high or high school anticipating an upcoming BBs album release, in my experience at least, you just walked into a store and these records just showed up, and you bought them or you didn't.  I kind of think it was just their time to fade, they got older, the demographic had changed and whereas southern California and surf culture was still pretty popular nationally, that was starting to fade out also around "66, you stopped hearing so much about it and the Frankie and Annette moves and Jan and Dean had died out, etc.   There was not much of a rock press per se, at least in my neck of the woods and I suspect the Midwest in general and perhaps large swaths of the country.  NYC, Boston and LA and SF I am sure heard much more of the inside record dope than we did though, but the teen demographic really wasn't that focused on insider music news IMHO....I really don't even remember kids talking that much about the next Beatles album, when would it come out, etc, it was just assumed another one would at some point in time and when it did everyone would buy it.

The hits led the charge for most groups at that point in time.  Beach Boys albums sold in droves because they were hit packed.  However when the hits dried up, so did their popularity and let's not kid ourselves....Smile was never going to be that popular.  It was too outré to have made it in a big way.  I also don't think Brian could have stylistically followed it up with anything that would have been very commercial or popular.  I think his general style of music had become passé, the Spector model using the group and the studio.

He could have only done what he wound up doing....refining the group"s sound, but not really coming up with anything ground-breaking.  I think his wad was basically shot with the Smile recordings, though he did some good stuff after that also.  But I just don't think Smile or that other good stuff was ever destined to be as popular as their pre-Pet Sounds material.  Their time had simply pretty much passed, at least in commercial terms.  And that's ok, I enjoyed being the only BBs fan in town or in the dorm, even in 1972 during the supposed comeback....and concert tickets were easy to get and cheap and they came around all the time.  Early seventies were a great time to be a fan.

A fave memory was standing beside Al Jardine in the Allen Fieldhouse in Lawrence KS as he gave a mini-lecture to another person about the qualities of various Birkenstock sandals and Mike Love inviting the concert audience to a particular street address after the show where a bunch of meditators were meeting.  Never made the latter, but the group did seem awfully accessible back then....an accessible "super-group", how about that?

[Julia]

Old thread, but I don't care.

The legend was there from the beginning. That's what I got out of researching the album--Anderle and Derek Taylor wanted there to be a lot of buzz so they invited a coterie of "hip" intelligentsia and reporters almost from the beginning to follow Brian around and report on how cool this new album was going to be. The "Brian is a genius" campaign was about elevating him to the level of the Beatles and Bob Dylan, hyping up SMiLE as the masterpiece of a modern Mozart rather than "just another pop album by the flash-in-the-pan teen heartthrob band." There was tons of industry buzz--even if Pet Sounds was a sales disappointment (and that talking point is vastly overstated anyway) everyone who knew anything about music composition and arrangement was blown away by it. Industry bigwigs were raving about it, especially in England, so there was a lot of natural anticipation for what Brian would do next even outside the "manufactured" word of mouth from their press agent. Tapes were stolen or peeked at from very early on--not that VDP "Beatles stole our ideas" conspiracy theory, but there is legit evidence that Gary Usher and some others with access to the various studio vaults heard the sounds and spread the word (or possibly stole acetates and even tapes--GV was missing for days, remember). Between these illicit "sneak previews" as well as Brian playing acetates for these industry kingmakers hanging around his house for most of October and November, there was a lot of talk among the movers and shakers of the music world.

Articles were released, some during the sessions (Teen Set, most of what's in LLVS) others afterward (Anderle in Crawdaddy, Vosse in Fusion, Siegal in Cheetah, Tom Nolan in Rolling Stone) that brought the legend to the average Joe, first in anticipation of what was to come and later to cement that we'd missed out on something truly extraordinary. The Oppenheim footage premiered on TV at a time when there was only three channels and the group was still the biggest in America--you couldn't ask for a better marketing build-up than that. We can quibble about "well how many people actually read those magazines" and "well did anyone really take it seriously" but the word was out and people talk. Clearly there was enough perceived demand for the group to keep promising an imminent release from just after Smiley all the way through 1972. Clearly there was enough buzz that they felt the need to satiate fans with small tastes from 20/20 through the big one with SU '71. And as each piece came out, and was the best part of their respective albums, the hype was justified so the legend grew. Every time Brian talked about music so powerful he had to burn the tapes to save the world (lie though it was) the curiosity factor was increased. People want what they can't have, people love the forbidden fruit, people are fascinated by scandal and controversy.

The SMiLE myth was not the product of a SU '71 marketing campaign, it was the product of the SMiLE '66-'67 marketing campaign, and even as the album folded and the group tried to move on, it was so successful in hyping up everyone who cared about music that the BBs couldn't put a lid on it. They wouldn't have bothered to dig up a 5 year old track and make it the centerpiece of a new album, with several Dennis tracks waiting in the wings, if there wasn't a strong desire to see it released by the music industry and longtime fans. The story of SMiLE was just too interesting and the music just too great to be silenced. That's how the myth got started and self-perpetuated. And everytime things might've cooled down, like the '80s, some additional bootleg or LLVS would come out to revive interest. Then the GV boxset, Smile Shop forum and Surfer Moon essays on Angelfire carried it through the 90s, BWPS through the 00s, TSS and the new high-quality fanmixes through the '10s, and by now it's an established piece of rock lore that can never be forgotten, no less than the Beatles will ever fade into obscurity so long as pop music still exists.