My Last (?) Crack at the SMiLE Jigsaw

[Julia]

Revisiting the Goodbye Surfing, Hello God article.

1. If he isn't conflating separate instances, then Jules came onto the scene in early October. We can infer this when he says he'd been following Brian for two months at the Fire session.

2. Terry Sachen was Brian's limo driver. I was trying to find this info earlier when looking for names to fill out a deck of cards and couldn't find it anywhere. So Im glad somebody preserved this bit of trivia.

3. Brian told his guests about SMiLE being a teenage symphony to God in October. The cutlery symphony is also implied to have been the same day, and Siegel mentions there were plates set up for 10 people when this happened. (Brian, Marilyn, Siegel, his girlfriend, the Anderles, Vosse...Diane Rovell? Barbara Rovell Gaddy and her husband? Can anyone think of a more plausible group of 10? Maybe Danny Hutton or Paul Jay Robbins and their girlfriends?)

^Almost all the coolest, most endearing, tantalizing behind the scenes anecdotes of SMiLE occur in October. That was the height of the SMiLE era, when Brian's enthusiasm, plus his coterie's hype was at peak levels. I think the recording of the first two Psychedelic Sounds sessions(: Lifeboat in 10-25 and PS itself on 11-4,) represent a turning point in the same way as Fire and the shift to the singles in January, as well as VDP leaving and recording in Bellagio. These are the chapters we can divide the story into:

1) "pre-SMiLE" or the Dumb Angel period, May - July '66
2) "early SMiLE" or the Optimistic period, August - Oct '66 
3) "mid SMiLE" or the BB's Return & Discord, Nov - Dec '66 
4) "late SMiLE" or the Single-Focus & Distraction, Jan - Feb '67
5) "post-SMiLE" or the Interrim period, March - May '67   
6) "Smiley Smile" or the Bellagio Sessions, June - July '67

4. VDP is said to have been hired in the summer. It's not clarified when but with context clues I think very late summer can be inferred here. If it was closer to May like Badman suggests, it just raises the questions of what the hell they were doing all summer and why so much remained undone, why Brian waited so long to record their music, etc. August simplifies the timeline so well and is attested to by other reliable sources, like Vosse and Will.

5. The "dinner-plate concerto" is said to have been the "first hip social event" that Brian hosted, and that's when he divided out tasks to those present, which really set SMiLE in motion. Not just the album itself, but it's larger purpose of reinventing the BBs as a hip entity with their own record label and movie division. I think Brian meant for this exercise to impress his guests by demonstrating his skills at spontaneous harmonic arrangement, even with unconventional tools at his disposal. I don't think it was intended to be on the album at all, not even that night, but rather to show his future-disciples that their leader could make great music out of anything on a whim, no studio editing required. Obviously it was successful. 

^This coincides with Vosse's account, who made it sound like everything (hearing SMiLE, getting hired, even the I Ching warning) all happened in one night--his wording is slightly ambiguous if it was all at once or if the I Ching part happened a week later, but either way it all went very fast. Anyway, the suggestion when harmonizing both sources is that it was all in one magical early October night, just before GV came out, when Brian was on top of the world and the only thing that could stop him was himself.

^This is my biggest beef with the various biopics about the group--this feeling of magic is never captured in them. Reading about scenes like this always makes me wish I could've been there, that I too were invited to participate in the coolest project ever. That's the hook this story needs to make the audience care about SMiLE and weep when it comes undone. I keep using Gatsby as a comparison because it's the same story arc, where the hero fails but we love him for trying, we love his style and the scenes he creates with his awesome house and salon of "hip people." If you don't have the audience saying "man I wish I could've hung out with '66 Brian" when they watch a BB reenactment, you failed to make the story land.

6. Vosse said he was hired before Anderle, who wouldn't get the BRI job until about a month later--Siegel mostly confirms that when he says it was "within six weeks" of that first fateful night, where Brian conducted the chinaware. This is a tight, reasonably harmonized window of events.   

7. Heroes is said to have been basically done going into 1967, which coincides with Anderle's testimony that it was selected as the single solely because it was "the closest to being finished." The 1967 sessions are dismissed by Siegel as excessive tinkering--unfortunately almost all of the pre-67 material for the song is lost, so we'll never know the version that everyone thought was great except Brian himself.

8. VDP left, then came back and left again. (We know this by now, but it's worth pointing out another corroborating source on important points like this.)

9. The Seconds anecdote is relayed in full (except Anderle isn't mentioned being there, but the quotes are the same except Brian's swipe at Jews is missing--I'm wondering if it even happened) and Brian mentions "the Beatles album" in this version of the story. The way this anecdote is relayed after Siegel talks about Brian's increasingly erratic behavior in the new year suggests Brian saw the film closer to the end of its run, in January (or at least December) and this is further implied with the beginning of the next scene, where he writes: "as the year drew deeper into winter" (rather than "as winter approached" or something). So perhaps we can date this incident to late Dec - early Jan as opposed to Nov when the film was released on the west coast, and that only makes it even more likely Brian was referring to Revolver instead of Rubber Soul, which would've been out 3+ months by then. (There's NO WAY any important music industry people weren't flocking to hear the new Beatles release ASAP, especially Brian as both a big fan and seeing them as his chief competition. No chance he hadn't heard it in all that time.)   

11. The construction of the sandbox is implied to be in 1967, but that contradicts Brian's insistence he wrote the first four SMiLE songs in it. The heated sauna in the bathroom is mentioned here as well as a detail I don't recall from any other source--the windows were grayed out. I personally think Siegel is using "creative editing" here to make his point, mentioning one of Brian's weirder anecdotes later in time to emphasize his unraveling. (I said I'd be willing to do the same if I ever made a movie about the SMiLE sessions--it's what adaptations do--but Siegel is supposed to be a journalist, so I scoff at this if that's his intent here.) 

12. Siegel describes the situation of being barred in the third person but the emotion is palpable. He thought he'd gotten close with Brian and was hurt to learn it wasn't reciprocated. It must've stung to think everything's cool and then Brian didn't even have the guts to tell him in person. This is another of Brian's genuinely shitty moments, like expecting his friends to drive to the studio/LAX on a whim in the middle of the night, making VDP sing or act like a clown on command in front of others, not sharing his vision with the Boys, not letting Al listen to the new Beatles song when Paul came to visit, choosing Daro/drugs over Marilyn... We have to accept that as much as we love the guy and his music, Brian could be kind of an asshole sometimes. I certainly wouldn't want to put up with a lot of this behavior. 

^While Siegel clearly wasn't popular with the others, I don't think he meant any harm. Without knowing him personally I can only deduce he had annoying personality quirks but clearly wasn't a mean person and still wrote a very laudatory piece here despite the personal grievance and watching this guy screw up a good thing for no visible reason. Many lesser men would've thought "f*** that jerk, I'm gonna follow my boss' directive and write about how much he dropped the ball." Jules didn't do that, and refused to edit his story into a hit-piece, which cost him a publishing credit in the prestigious Saturday Evening Post rather than defame Brian. That's true friendship. Siegel was a well-meaning guy who deserves respect and should've been given the opportunity to speak his piece on the TSS liner notes--even if he did sound like an annoying dweeb on the Lifeboat tape.

13. It's said that Vosse couldn't even hide his satisfaction at kicking Siegel out, sporting a big grin when he delivered the bad news. Vosse is said to have been fired "a couple of months" later. So I'm guessing Siegel was out by late December or January at the latest. I'm leaning towards January since he knew about the Heroes tinkering. This version of events doesn't contradict anything offhand, I can buy this timeline.

There's a lot more to this article that would be groundbreaking news to a SMiLE-initiate but at this stage in my all-encompassing fandom, these are the anecdotes which stood out to me now. Besides the obsession with "hipness" and some overly show-y prose at times, it's a great article and full of what seems to be accurate info based on my preponderance of the evidence. The only potential falsehoods are the sandbox mentioned out of date plus the fire incident but that's been repeated even by Brian so I don't know if we can blame Jules for starting what is now seen as a questionable detail.

[Julia]

I think you have all the materials at hand now to assemble a book, Julia. It is now just a question of how to organize for the reader.

Im extremely flattered you think this would make a good book. I was just gonna cross-post to my blog I'm open to suggestions but I thought of it as a journal, writing about my interpretation of SMiLE as I went. It started with me revisiting the topic after Brian's passing--browsing the Wiki article to see how it's changed, rereading Carlin...and then I realized I didn't know when Brian and Van actually teamed up so I googled it and found the Internet Archive copy of the Badman book, which was how this started. Then I wanted to read other books/articles where the most interesting tidbits from the wiki were sourced from and after a certain point it became "I guess Im gonna weigh ALL the evidence and try to be as well-read on the subject as possible."

The person who might have more concrete timeline details than what is extant elsewhere is Durrie Parks, who has some tantalizing quotes in David Leaf's SMiLE book. (Did you notice the fact that the Parkses actually moved into the spare bedroom at Laurel Way for an unspecified period of time? The question that arises is when did they depart? It seems that too much familiarity and proximity resulted in some escalating friction...)

Yes, I did! That might be the single most shocking revelation of the new book! It literally changes everything and because of it, I'm willing to believe theories that otherwise would've seemed absurd to me--like juggler's speculation that CIFOTM was a Brian-Dennis collab. It makes no sense an entire song would be left unfinished when they had infinite access to each other. It's so insane no other source mentions it--you'd think Vosse would have a throwaway line about it or something. Anderle, when he speaks of the relationship fracturing, you'd imagine would bring it up. Just goes to show there's so much we don't know and cannot know.

That said, the key point amidst the riches of your latest synthesis from Vosse's piece (and I agree that it is by far the best snapshot of the period that's available to us) is that a path to a 1967 SMiLE was possible had certain things been avoided.
The multiple versions that could constitute a released version should (IMO) be what a book leads toward, where they are discussed as potential real-life decision points for the different track listings. Some of the early intentions might have dropped out as the project moved toward completion (assuming Brian masters the HV situation). For me the best solution he had was to create a single and an album suite where HV connected with various parts of the Americana material. I think that's kind of where he got to in March, but at that time he was burned out--the same heebie-jeebies that plagued him with GV had kicked in. SMiLE only happens if he gets past that--which I think would have been possible if MOLC hadn't thrown things sideways, leading to the December contretemps.

I'd like that. From the first, it's always been my goal to challenge what I perceived then (and confirmed now) to be widespread inaccurate assumptions about the album. I had the gut feeling in 2013 after playing around with mixes and landing on my preferred Americana/Innocence structure that this was the true SMiLE. While I'm less dogmatic on that now, I still think Priore's Americana/Elements model is not only a flawed presentation but (now confirmed) completely unproven. Even in his own books, he doesn't justify it in the slightest, his conclusions don't come from an examination of the evidence (be it testimony, context clues, chords/instrument analysis, lyrical themes, etc) they're just pulled from thin air and rationalized with lies--like that ridiculous secret conversation in the 80s. A conversation which, I now have on good authority, ended with Brian yelling words to the effect of "get this guy out of my fucking house!"

I did not enter into this deep dive with the goal of decrying Priore--in fact I wanted to learn the truth whatever it was, and if there were good reasons his ideas had taken hold I was ready to acknowledge the facts and relegate my SMiLE sequence to the "I prefer this, even if it's inaccurate" category. However, the more I learned the clearer it became Priore has no business being held up as an authority on the subject. He's a blatant liar and has been given a wildly outsized role in the fandom. It's high time some other framework for organizing the music took precedence, and I've suggested several alternatives in these many posts. It need not be a SMiLE of two themes, but of flats/sharps or whatever else.

What you suggest is very reasonable--it does seem like there was a distinction between "this could be/was a Hero fragment" and "everything else" when looking at key signatures. There is, I now admit, a good case that Wonderful and even CIFOTM were perhaps the narrator of Heroes reflecting on his child(ren)'s upbringings rather than a generic Innocence suite. I'm not sure if I personally prefer the new sequences that could emerge from this over my old theories but there's enough evidence to justify it and it's worth trying.

If that hurdle is cleared and Brian sets The Elements aside, then track order variants will also hinge on Capitol's desire for GV to be on the record. I think you have plenty of room in a book (possibly a chapter called "So Just Would a 1967 SMiLE Have Looked Like?") to cover all the variants, including those w/o GV...though you do need to consider how to rank the likelihood for each as part of the assessment. (There is still room for personal preference/advocacy, however--that writing flavor is part of what will sweep the reader along and make this into what will be the eternally freshest take on "what might have been."

I can dig this. I do think there's SOMETHING to the master #s for example. It shouldn't be considered the end all be all of evidence but I think changes in the master for Heroes for example may signal changes in its structure--from a series of OMP variations to Barnyard-Heroes to Cantina-Heroes etc. We'll never know for sure but there had to be different "Eras" of each song.

BTW, Cam's comment does not make sense to me at all. (I couldn't find it there, so there might be more context to it, but remember that Cam was the originator of the notion that the master #s were the key to everything.) The escalating pushback from the band in December and the disastrous-in-retrospect edict from Anderle that they needed a single clearly made things more fraught for Brian, but the amount of studio wizardry expended on HV in early 67 puts the lie to the idea that Brian had totally soured on elaborate production. HV gobbled up so much time that he had little left over to revisit/resolve other tracks that were in various states of completion--it sure looks like March is that point in time...which dovetails with the departure of Vosse and Anderle. And that is when the transition to Smiley really begins...

I agree. The first quote was here (https://endlessharmony.boards.net/thread/880/tale-leavings-cabinessence-incident?page=6&scrollTo=100231) which paints a very different picture than what he followed up with here (https://endlessharmony.boards.net/thread/880/tale-leavings-cabinessence-incident?page=6&scrollTo=100243). The first post implied Brian didn't think the music was good anymore upon listening to it sober for the first time (since he'd been high nonstop for 4 months apparently) the latter clarifies that he was scared of the Fire tape and the negative vibes it represented--that drugs had strung him out too much and were no longer aiding the creative process. That's a significant difference and admittedly it goes to show how editiorialized quotes and reactions can give different impressions than what was originally said. (Another reason I encourage everyone to read the original sources too--this thread is just me trying to suss out what's important in each one and use that data to construct an overriding picture of what happened and what SMiLE was/would've been. I'm not trying to render the sources obsolete I'm trying to weigh the various accounts to get a "big picture.")

I dont think Brian soured on big production (or Wrecking Crew production anyway) until March '67. That's when suddenly a bunch of songs are just Brian on piano, maybe with Carl on another instrument. I think Smiley represents Brian's attempt to preserve the basic themes, tone, humor, sound effects and psychedelia of SMiLE without the Wrecking Crew productions, modular editing, recording hours of tape just to tediously hunt for highlights after, excising the band from the creative process and grand "symphony to God" aspirations. SMiLE is somewhere between the Pet Sounds lush orchestral and Smiley stoned party aesthetics--it's up to the listener/mixer where they place it along that spectrum.

[Julia]

Why not? Guess I ought to revisit the Anderle/Williams Crawdaddy interviews too. There's nothing left. I remember finding these really boring ten years ago but back then I was looking for info on SMiLE's sequence, what would be included, what Brian's plans were. Now, I'm still interested in that, but I'm also looking for interpersonal info and pinning down timeline events.

1. I share the two's disappointment to WH. I've never understood the enthusiasm for this very-short, very lo-fi (and not in a cool Smiley-esque experimental way) very screechy album. Especially because SOME of the biggest fans of it I've seen, at least among the forums, are also the biggest jerks, the ones who'd make fun of me for talking about SMiLE. So in my mind there's a permanent association of "this is the square BB music for boomers" even more than the hits, which are eternal. But WH I feel is very dated and out of step with its own genre--Carl may be an R&B fan but his voice wasn't suited for these songs, he sounds way too whiny to me on the title track. Mike's voice, or y'know, a deep-voiced dreamy black guy akin to Marvin Gaye and Barry White, should be belting out these tunes. Just had to get that out of my system.

2. Very first thing they talk about, after briefly expressing disappointment with SS and WH, is the Beach Boys limiting Brian, holding back his experimentation. It's literally only two-inches down the page in the first of three columns on the first page of the article (Im reading the LLVS reproduction). It's so clear that this is the fundamental issue of why SMiLE died--and I went into this research seeking to downplay this angle, but we can't deny how frequently it comes up, how emphasized it is. It's always the main reason cited for the collapse, whether we like it or not. I see our friend mike (the poster not the BB) taking flak for this on EH and all I can say is that element of the fandom would rather bully anyone off the internet than acknowledge their precious Mike (the BB now, not the poster) ever did anything wrong. They want to believe in a fairytale where the group always got along and any problems were because of those evil outsiders...they did drugs! (gasp)...so clearly they were acting against Brian's best interests.

3. Anderle mentions how they (including himself and Brian, others aren't specifically mentioned but I imagine this is the Vosse Posse) used to lay around the house doing "Hawaiian chants and all kinds of chanting, and all kinds of animal noises." This isn't a direct reference to the Nov 4 stuff but it implies that kind of thing was going on all the time--Brian would use whoever was available to try out vocalization experiments. This has always been my theory and I still don't understand why it's considered controversial. It's not like Anderle says this was just stoned goofing off, he even mentions Brian would be scared to try it out when the guys got back--implying these were serious demos he wanted them to refine with their perfect blend upon return. It's literally right there in black and white he used the Posse as his guinea pigs--we should be thanking the Gods we have a few preserved rough demos of this kind with the Nov 4 tapes, instead of dismissing them (because drugs? because you don't like how they sound? because it ruins your WC=Air theory?) and castigating anyone who brings them up. Sorry to be a pedantic asshole about it but the people who refuse to acknowledge these recordings really piss me off--it's insane to prioritize a very narrow, cherry picked interpretation of a quote from over a decade later to something Brian thought was important enough to devote an hour of tape to at a time when he could've recorded anything he wanted. And somehow Im the one "hobby horsing..."

4. As much as I love Brian, Anderle and the dream of BRI ("the first real nonuptight, positive, youth company"), I think the corporation as described here would've failed. Just like Radiant Radish and the Beatles' various non-music related businesses. These young creative types didn't know the value of a dollar, had no business sense, were too lax for their own good. It's a beautiful sentiment but realistically this would've just been a bunch of pampered rich youngins throwing money around until they went bankrupt--or they'd have to compromise on these principles. There'd have to be a boss, or a money guy yelling they needed a more commercial hit under the umbrella to keep the rest afloat, which would gradually morph into a regular company. That's how these things go. Ideally maybe Brian and Anderle could've been like Walt & Roy Disney--the creative pushing for art for art's sake and the business savvy advisor supporting that dream but tempering it where necessary so the overall operation remains viable. But these types of partnerships are always tenuous and fleeting--as soon as someone changes or moves on it always goes downhill.

5. It's sort of night and day listening to Tony Asher (or other Brian detractors) make fun of the "dopey" books he'd read compared to Anderle just gushing about the man, his ability to pour over any subject (subud, astrology, numerology, the occult then the I ching in that order) and saying "the most perceptive man I ever met is Brian Wilson." I think Vosse and especially Siegel really appreciated Brian too, as a person beyond his genius, but Anderle I think loved him as much as anyone can platonically love another man.

6. Despite emphasizing twice in separate parts of the early interview how the band pushed back against Brian's growth as an artist, Anderle does emphasize there was no ringleader of the opposition. He singles out Mike as the "most antagonistic" but goes to lengths to emphasize "they're very close, there's a great deal of love..." I think we need to be nuanced when we discuss Mike's pushback on SMiLE--it didn't come from a place of maliciousness or personal animosity. It was a strongly felt and vocally expressed creative disagreement, but not a personal feud. He didn't know or intend for Brian's creative spirit to be crushed (which arguably wasn't until post-Friends or even post-71) and he still wanted Brian to be the creative leader overall. I think that's how this aspect of the story ought to be framed going forward--don't deny that Mike criticized Brian's new sound (because that contradicts EVERY SOURCE) but let it be known he wasn't trying to hurt Brian's feelings. And for my part, I don't even blame Mike for anything related to SMiLE--my problems with him have to do with how he behaved afterward, and never rising to the occasion creatively after the fact.

7. In support of the "CIFOTM was Dennis' collab w/ Brian" theory, Anderle says Dennis was working on his own things while Anderle was around and they were "beautiful." Could this be IDK alone? Maybe but to me IDK always sounded really generic and nothing special--that's why I almost never acknowledge it and didn't even notice some of its tapes were missing until very recently.

8. I think the reason why there isn't a second CE incident that we hear about is because that's not how the guys expressed their frustrations. The BB/Mike apologists over at EH are always using that "gotcha" comeback to "prove" the band wasn't antagonistic. ("All Mike did was ask about some lyrics--which he had every right to do--and then sang them anyway!") But what Anderle and Vosse describe is more of constant grumbling in the studio, whining when given their new parts, complaining between takes, little incessant needling remarks that weren't a big deal in a vacuum but piled up. It wasn't a big dramatic shouting match so much as the constant dread of a sensitive person like Brian knowing he was going to face negativity in the studio each day, and it wore him down over time. (Like Marilyn describes in the IJWMFTT documentary and elsewhere.) Then when you point this out to the pro-BB/Mike faction, they downplay it ("oh, so just a few stray barbs is a crime now?") and it's a disingenuous talking point. Constant denigration definitely takes its toll on a person, especially a highly sensitive guy on the verge on a mental breakdown. It doesn't make the group monsters, just inconsiderate.

9. "Brian, a long time ago, was incredibly interested in humor, pure, beautiful, positive humor [...] Well, Brian was into that a long time ago; he wanted to put out the first pop humor album, and we spent days and nights running around the city tape recording different sounds and different things and getting into the most incredibly humorous things."

^And to think, I was told if I read this article it'd prove to me my theory on the importance of Psychedelic Sounds was unfounded. Seriously guy, get this quote tattooed on your forehead and call it a day. Of course the excuse to discount quotes like this include "oh uhh that was a separate humor album," but I've always been skeptical of that. If this supposed separate project had a name, a tracklist, vintage Brian quotes, more in-depth discussion from the principals maybe. But my theory is that this and SMiLE were always one and the same, the doubters (from then and now) just find the idea of a pop humor LP so ridiculous and unmelodic they refuse to believe what the evidence tells us. I'd have to look back through my notes again but I don't think any of the primary sources even delineate between SMiLE and separate spoken comedy / sound effects albums. Even if they were separate there was clearly CLEARLY a lot of crossover between them.

^If we suppose for the sake of argument the Nov 4 session was for a separate project it still has prominent element-themed harmonic vocalizations. If we supposed the Veggie Fight and George Fell were also non-SMiLE, they were recorded during actual SMiLE sessions and based on themes from SMiLE tracks. I think a separate humor album is a misunderstanding and red herring. The fact that Smiley Smile has stoned laughing and humor tracks like SGB is proof--as are the vintage quotes about talking and laughing between cuts. People just want SMiLE to be Pet Sound 2 and refuse to accept it would've been radically different. "Mistakes" and seemingly discordant elements would've been left in. The humor tracks Brian had included on BB albums from the beginning would've been more fully integrated into the music and themes.

^There's literally a mountain of evidence pre, post and during the SMiLE sessions that spoken word humor would be there, from Brian's quotes to Vosse/Anderle (and others) plus 4 different tapes rubbing elbows with the CE/SU backing tracks in the vault. The only argument against is "but I dont think that'd sound good / but that ruins my personal pet theory that I've decided is unquestionable!" This is what I mean when I insist we have to start throwing out the Priore misconceptions and let the evidence take us where it may. For the record, I don't personally think the humor skits improve SMiLE either, at least not necessarily, but that doesn't mean we can just pretend the entire MO of the album wasn't real.

10. Going off that, I think we need to take heed of another thing Anderle says (and other sources like Vosse and Hutton attest to) that a lot of Brian's ideas sounded insane at first, but then you'd do it and realize he was onto something. He was so ahead of the curve that he seemed to be pitching nonsense until the fully realized version was experienced and then it all made sense. So while others and even I myself might think interspersed comedic asides or wheezy breaths in a song might not sound all that great, might in fact ruin some of these beautiful compositions, we ought to at least consider the possibility that if we could hear the final edit of the thing, what Brian was hearing in his head, we might just be blown away by how well it all fit together. (This is what I suspect--and I think my version of Veggie Fight during the fade is an example of it, same as the Talking Horns wailing sound over the SU coda. And Brian's versions Im sure would've been even better.)

11. "This is how he got into, for instance, the chanting: one night we were at the studio, and Brian didn't feel like putting down a track. We were just laying around, and he said,"Come out here, everyone." So we all went out there, not one of us a professional, and he had us making animal noises, incredible noises, directing us from the control room: "Louder." "Softer." "More expansive." "Get in closer." The whole thing. We started off very conscious of what we were doing, looking at each other and very embarrassed, and then he just drove us into it, totally. We went into the studio and listened to it; he put it with music, we listen-ed to it again and walked out knowing that once again Brian had done it."

^Could this be the Undersea Chant? Usually when we hear "animals" we think terrestrial but technically fish are animals too. If not that then it must've been an early Barnyard, testing the farm animal vocalizations before having the BBs do it for real. Could this be the lost Barnyard vocal track from December? Either way, UC or not, it's absolutely the same kind of idea. Anderle doesn't describe this as "hur hur, stoned Brian doing goofy things wasting time, wasn't he wacky?" as the PS/comedy naysayers would have us believe. Anderle seems to treat moments like this, Brian directing whoever was around in impromptu harmonies, as awe-inspiring examples of his genius rather than drug-addled procrastination. The cutlery symphony is independently attested to here as well, except now it's "about fifteen" people involved and Brian would sing/chant over it. It's implied by how Anderle tells the story this wasn't a one-off instance either, but a semi-regular occurrence. And, rather than dismiss these are the dumb misadventures of goofball Brian, David regrets not being more enthusiastic about them back in the day--he realized then but even more now how brilliant it was. To the poo-pooers from 2015--tell me again how this article is supposed to disprove my pro-PsychSounds theories? Seriously, it's like they didn't even read the article themselves...

PART TWO

12. Brian used the guys as instruments, they'd come into sessions not knowing what they'd record and Brian would, on the spot, teach them only their fragmented tasks of several disparate pieces of songs. So they'd have no idea what was going on, which obviously added to their confusion and subsequent resentment.

13. In the same tangent, Anderle says Brian starts off his albums with a general concept and goes from there. Im sure with Pet Sounds it was "express my teen angst" and "an album of all good stuff" while with SMiLE it was probably "teenage symphony to God" and "a humor album that makes people spiritually enlightened through laughter." (For some reason, VDP didn't get this memo or forgot or pretends not to have been told, because when describing the concept of SMiLE he always diverts to "Americans talking about America" or "the innocence America had lost" and themes to that effect. I'm curious why practically every other primary source describes SMiLE a certain way BUT the co-writer.)

14. In a throwaway line, Anderle mentions that the elusive Paul Jay Robbins was brought in around the same time he and Vosse were. Paul must really have been a wall-flower the way nobody mentions him except here. Like, Siegel mentions both Anderle and Vosse in his piece, Vosse mentions the other two, Anderle returns the favor...but Paul's totally forgotten except the very rare mention like this. Anyway, I'm wondering if he wasn't one of the dinner guests the night of the cutlery symphony if he was brought in around the same time as the others--if we take Siegel's 10 and Anderle's 15 figures as our low and high end estimates, he'd fill out the number rather nicely with those I mentioned before. Him and a girlfriend would make 12, just in between the two.

15. I think everyone knows the "they blew each others minds" quotes Anderle lays out if they know anything about this article. I have little to add except that Anderle makes the parting sound mutual rather than VDP hurting Brian by unilaterally departing as may be implied from other sources. I think quotes like this really point to there being some kind personality clash, a mutual creative difference, rather than a sudden break solely due to outside forces. Just my impression, I could easily be reading into things.

16. February is listed as the month VDP left for good, which I think we can chalk up to hazy memories--it's not that far off from March.

17. "Smile was going to be the culmination of all of Brian 's intellectual occupations; and he was really into the elements. He ran up to Big Sur for a week, just 'cause he wanted to get into that, up to the mountains, into the snow, down to the beach, out to the pool, out at night, running around, to water fountains, to a lot of water, the sky, the whole thing was this fantastic amount of awareness of his surroundings. So the obvious thing was to do something that would cover the physical surroundings. We were aware, he made us aware, of what fire was going to be, and what water was going to be ; we had some idea of air. That was where it stopped."

^The first part of this quote is partially why I justify things like grouping tracks according to balanced numerological values, using the "Vega-Tables" spelling of the track, or interpreting SU as heralding in the Age of Aquarius (which Brian must surely have been aware of as an astrologist--and it was a common rallying cry in the Sixties). Even if they didn't have songs specifically, unambiguously associated with them, I think these topics would've found their way onto SMiLE, if even in as limited a capacity as the zodiac on the back cover paired with 12 tracks (implying a superficial if not definitive correlation). It does sound like the trip to Big Sur in the summer is what inspired him to do an Elements track if he didn't necessarily have all the music composed in his head going into the sessions with VDP. But still, this really perplexes me, if he had the idea all ready from the beginning why were the other 2 pieces not among the recorded bits in '66? Why wouldn't Van talk about this in all his interviews, instead of ignoring the topic as much as possible and focusing almost entirely on the Americana angle? (Van does mention "innocence" but in relation to "the innocence America had lost" and he does admit Brian had yet to get all the "when I grow up to be a man" out of his system--but no word on the Elements except when pressed, and even then it's "I worked on Veggies but nothing else.")

^It's also really weird how Van and Frank Holmes take it as a given Veggies was an element, so their two would be Fire and Veggies, while here Anderle says Water and Fire. For this reason, I'm willing to concede Dada may well have been water just because it's the only possible fragment floating around from the same time this was all going on. And certainly--absolutely--there was some kind of Watery chant even from the very beginning, which morphed from Undersea Chant to Cool Cool Water to the Water Chant (as part of a larger CCW). I think, if we insist on trying to pin down all the elements, these three are very plausible candidates and the best answer we're gonna get. It's air that's the big question, and since WC' tag has been definitively ruled out as far as I'm concerned, I think that leaves the Breathing skit as a potential clue as well as (in order of plausibility) "Air Dada," IIGS and Country Air assuming it's anything we've heard at all or even anything recorded in the first place.

^I recall AGD mentioning he was told Elements would've been two variations of two melodies/compositions and in this context I think a Fire/IWBA-FN or Fire/Fall Breaks paired with Dada (as water and air) might suffice. I think to stray from these theories would require a very compelling argument, and persisting with the "WC (tag) is air" nonsense is just pure stubbornness at this point. On top of all the other evidence against it I've chronicled here, there's NO WAY Brian wouldn't have mentioned air was a finished song in the can to Anderle if they were discussing what air was going to be. Someone has to explain this massive discrepency. Why would air be a mystery Brian couldn't make Anderle aware of if it's just a piece of music WE KNOW HE DEMOED TO ANDERLE AND OTHERS A HUNDRED TIMES? (Vosse, recall, mentions how they begged him to play that acetate over and over and says they must've heard it a hundred times. C'mon guys, there's no way to reconcile WC as air with the evidence.)

18. Anderle independently corroborates the "lot of fires broke out" talking point--this is roughly contemporary with Siegel's article and Anderle openly disdained Siegel so I doubt he'd repeat this mantra if he didn't have independent reason to believe it. He even repeats the "Brian destroyed the tape" lie. So, if this talking point is actually BS and there weren't an inordinate number of fires that year, fair enough, but it's completely unfair to pin that solely on Siegel as I've seen people do in the EH forum. It seems everybody in Brian's camp believed this narrative, for whatever reason. (Maybe they over-emphasized fires on the news that year, it was a slow time for local news and they over-covered a single blaze to fill airtime and this gave everyone the wrong impression?)

^Either way, Anderle says this is when the Elements died...but he wasn't around when Brian dug out Dada, so I don't think we can 100% rule out that Dada wasn't an old Element fragment dug out of mothballs either. (I have no stake in Dada being an element or not--frankly I think quibbling over which melody was what element is a fool's errand and largely a waste of time. I just think the Nov 4 chants are demos or pieces of elements or at the very least Brian searching for inspiration--that's the only hill I'm willing to die on with regard to this sub-topic.)

19. The Elements breaking down is described as the first signs of trouble for SMiLE as a whole. This is pretty well accepted but I think it's worth mentioning Anderle corroborates it. But he also says at the same time Brian started getting pushback at the studios for touching the console and booking time when he wanted it. "Then there was a hassle between Van and Brian and Van wasn't around." I really think quotes like this hint at personal squabbles between Brian and VDP, clashes of personality, that have never been fully revealed due to neither man speaking on the record until years later, where they forgot or it was too petty to dredge up. Later Anderle circles back to this and says "the central thing" (with regards to the collapse) was VDP's severing of that relationship.

^Maybe now that Brian's gone and Van has nothing to lose we might get some juicy nuggets of personal drama in his autobiography. Not to sound rude but he has to know SMiLE is the reason half the people who get the book are even interested. (Then again, Grace Slick's terrible autobiography only devotes two-pages each to Monterey, Woodstock and Altamont so who fucking knows. Maybe he'll troll us and not even mention it purely out of spite.)

20. Brian is said to have stopped recording for awhile. I notice a two-week period of studio inactivity from March 15 to March 28, with a more significant retreat from April 14 until those infamous 3 Dada sessions on May 16-18. Anderle states Brian was looking for excuses not to work on it, that he shifted focus to talking about films, to suddenly taking an interest in BRI, he doesn't mention the Jasper Dailey tracks but I think they're borne out of the same issue.

21. There's an anecdote about Brian and Mike clashing over who'd sing lead on a certain song--which he doesn't name--and they wasted a week of studio time before Brian did it. I'm wondering if this isn't H&V and that accounts for the weird version on the boxset where Mike and Brian sing lead of different parts. It lines up on AGD's site with the band's return from Europe.

22. At this time, Anderle mentions how scary it must've been for the guys with all these new people around "saying things." He specifically mentions himself, Vosse, Jules, Van and "Paul Robbins somewhat." Like he even subtly implies there that Robbins was a lesser entity which I think is interesting.

23. He claims there are "3 albums worth of tracks" recorded for SMiLE in the vaults. That's a blatant exaggeration, even if you include every throwaway fragment. I'm among the biggest SMiLE fanatics of all time and I'd say at most there's an album and a half of material (~60 minutes), and a significant chunk of that (let's say ~15 minutes) is either snippets that make no sense by themselves and drag their song down (Heroes outtakes) or are just mediocre by SMiLE standards. (Holidays, Barnyard, He Gives Speeches, Tones, IDK.)  

24. Anderle mentions Brian having to get involved with lawyers and business stuff as a factor in the collapse. At first he says "Brian was told he had to have a single" before finally admitting he was the bearer of bad news. According to David, the lawsuit stuff killed the positive vibes--suddenly he (Anderle) couldn't hang out with Brian all night as it had been, since he'd have to do business in the daylight hours. Suddenly instead of getting high and doing fun things, David had to relay the minutes of meetings he and Nick Grillo had with Capitol. This led to Brian getting stressed, worried, uptight, thinking about unfun legalistic wranglings rather than creativity. I guess the people who downplay this aspect of SMiLE's collapse, like Vosse in his Fusion article or VDP in all his interviews, just weren't close enough to that aspect of the goings-on to see how it affected Brian. And really, the whole thing was a perfect storm where one less stressor is probably the difference between SMiLE coming out or not.

25. It's reiterated Heroes was chosen as the single because it was closest to completion--apparently Brian even told Paul Williams this in December, so it was known even then. But there was some discussion of other songs as possibilities too, there was a back and forth.

26. I'll admit the way Anderle talks about Smiley as "preserving as much of SMiLE as he could while directly going into the humor album" implies SMiLE and "the humor album" were separate things. I'd be remiss if I didn't acknowledge he says something that potentially challenges one of my theories. That said, I think he's wrong. So there.  

27. With regard to Derek Taylor, Anderle credits him with the successful English tour BUT he confirms my longheld theory that Taylor and Brian didn't like each other. Their relationship "nosedived" and they mutually agreed to sever ties. Like VDP, he's described as leaving, coming back then leaving again. "Brian always felt the BBs were number two with Derek and the Beatles were number one." Brian was right to feel that way, considering how Taylor's book focuses exclusively on his time with the Beatles and the quotes he supplied to that dumbass Sgt Pepper book I reviewed in this thread were wholly negative.

28. The Barroom Brawl is mentioned here for the first time.

29. Anderle goes on at length about how a bad event, like a fight with Murry (or presumably the Boys) could put Brian in such a dour mood he wouldn't be productive for days, weeks sometimes. This furthers the idea that a few low-stakes incidents (like the CE incident) that make us think "that was no big deal, just get on with it" could've really hurt him. BUT even more than that, Anderle calls attention to a factor that many of us seem to forget, myself included, that Murry was constantly clipping Brian's wings in the background. He was crapping on even GV (which shut any dissent within the BB the hell up, at least somewhat) so we can expect he probably didn't mince words on his thoughts for CIFOTM. He was there at least in one session, which implies he could've been at other SMiLE sessions too, no doubt making rude remarks all the time. I think constant browbeating from Murry finally took its toll around the SMiLE sessions--Brian might've brushed it off like he had in the past, but with everything else going on it was one stressor too many.

^This does make the several gaps in the sessionography start to make sense to me. Before I'd assumed either Brian couldn't get studio time booked or was taking some time to perfect arrangements anytime there was a gap of more than a few days in the calendar but now I wonder if these incidents aren't Brian nursing his wounds after a blowup with his dad or perhaps the other Beach Boys. "There is so much emotion, and drama, in that family, much more than I've ever seen in any other family, and everything directly affects Brian. Brian is always conscious of those boys, continually conscious of them, as brothers and as human beings. Very seldom as an act. Again, that's why, a great reason why Smile wasn't finished, the way Brian wanted it, because of their resistance in the studio."

30. I think Anderle's assessment of Mike Love is worth quoting in its entirety: "Mike Love? Businessman. Continually being accused by Brian of being mercenary, soulless-very untrue, Mike is a very soulful person. He's the only one really who is aware of business, for the group. At the same time Michael is the one who has opposed experimentation stronger than anyone else. He's the one more divorced of the family relationship in the group. Brian's opposite number, you know, he's the one who is continually fighting Brian, the hardest one for Brian to control, the hardest one for Brian to deal with and I've seen Mike send Brian right out of sessions, because Brian will get so frustrated in terms of trying to relate to Mike, and not being able to. Brian will just stomp right out, and there 's some more lost time, more lost creative time."

^In the SMiLE Era, Brian was getting fed up with Mike--saying he made too much money and was uncreative. Had Mike not been family, if it were Al being described here or Bruce, I really wonder if he wouldn't have been jettisoned. I think those who downplay the rift between Brian and Mike have taken things too far in the anti-Leaf direction. Quotes like this clearly show there were a lot of hurt feelings despite their familial love. Just because we don't have specific CE incident stories of dramatic blowups to point to doesn't mean there wasn't constant low-key fighting that "wore [Brian] down" as Marilyn has said too. It's ridiculous overkill to throw out the overwhelming consensus of sources, especially these the most contemporaneous and truthful, saying Mike made the sessions a lot more stressful than they needed to be.

31. I think, towards the end of the second part, what Anderle hypothesizes is going on in the BB world post-SS and WH underperforming is dead-on. That's the great tragedy of Brian and the Beach Boys I say, that the group tried to restrain Brian's creative instincts in order to be more financially successful and in the process killed both their critical and commercial appeal. There's more to it than that I know, but it's so clear talking to anyone outside the BBs (who have an incentive to downplay this) that Brian's dream was to be an independent producer and the fact that they shut it down is pretty awful. It's not how they acted during SMiLE, it's how they acted during Redwood and the SU album etc that makes me side towards David Leaf's perspective on the band. Although I think Leaf took things too far by not giving the group more of an opportunity to defend themselves.

PART THREE

32. The cynic in me might chide David for only realizing WH was cool when it became clear that the back to basic movement was getting picked up by Dylan and the Beatles too...but I get it. Some movies/music I like right away and never let go of, some it takes awhile to sink in. I'll admit I didn't like Smiley or Solar System or even Vertigo all that much at first, until it had time to sink in. And really, this is a microcosm of Brian's problem--he was always so far ahead that he didn't get credit as the pioneer he was until later and even then usually by an elect few (comparatively). Like, even in this forum, people would talk about how revolutionary Sgt Pepper was, but there's nothing on that album that Pet Sounds didn't pave the way for (and do better, I say) and if I'm missing anything, nobody could fill me in. I asked many times to those who scoffed at my uninformed youngster opinion "ok, enlighten me: what's there that I'm not hearing, what context would make this album's special genius resonate?" And I'd just get more dismissive condescension or "you had to be there" or "dude, it's THE BEATLES!" And here again, Brian paved the way for the back to basics movement but he was doing it in late 1967 when others took until mid-1968 (and some not until 1969). The problem is, and to his credit Jules Siegel got this if no one else did, Brian wasn't "hip" and so none of the record buying public saw him as a trend-setter. When he was ahead of the curve it was perceived as "look how out of step they are" where when Dylan or Lennon tried something different it was seen as "a bold new visionary direction!" Without hip cred, the Beach Boys would and did never get their due.

33. I think Anderle gives a good point on the second page of the article, that sometimes we expect too much of musicians and modern creatives where we always want them to keep growing and changing (and then people complain that their new era isn't as good as the past). Some artists, like he mentions Rembrandt, had a niche and did it well. Hitchcock was the suspense guy, Tarantino is the quirky action and snappy dialogue guy, Christopher Nolan is the weird-structure/non-chronological guy... Just let artists do their thing and tell the stories they want to in the way that makes sense to them. Not everyone is going to have as dramatic a shift as the blue period to the Cubist.

34. Also, same page, he mentions how the Vosse Posse hanging around, telling Brian he was a genius, the industry leader, bigger than the Beatles probably did more harm than good. The overwhelming image of Brian I get from all these sources, and Anderle in particular, is that Brian was a very simple-minded guy when it came to general life skills (like managing or relating to people, handling adult responsibilities, navigating the world) but he made up for it by being on an impossibly higher level creatively. It's like he was operating on a higher frequency than us, one ear tuned to the music of the spheres as one writer put it, with only one foot on planet earth. Anderle even says when discussing the new business, Brian's ideas were so childlike as to focus on anatomy pictures on the walls, meetings in the pool, making everyone eat healthy...instead of the revenue streams, tax havens, liability risks that a normal businessman might be more concerned with. I could definitely see the new pressures, the perceived new roles (you're not just making music now, you're setting the standard for the whole industry) really weighing on him where others might relish in it. It was too much real world consideration to handle.

35. The third part is by far the least interesting in terms of revelatory info on Brian and SMiLE. I thought so in 2015 and think so now. It does end on perhaps the biggest (and in some way most disappointing) reason SMiLE didn't get done--if Brian couldn't get something done immediately he'd lose interest. And that's what happened here, in some way there is no big, satisfying, universally understandable reason it didn't get done. No grand conspiracy from Mike to stage an argument before the cameras, nor hijack Taylor's press releases. No singular dramatic argument or bad acid trip we can pinpoint as the definitive moment it was all over. Brian just got bored, pure and simple. He probably had SMiLE the proto-WOIIFTM/USA album in his head somewhere and that was enough for him. The idea of getting bogged down for another 3-12 months (I don't necessarily believe him but he has said it would've taken a year in some interviews) fighting with the Boys' bad attitudes, tinkering with hours of tape to splice together the best comedic asides or hunting for specific notes to put together in a frankensteined water-recordings song, working with an increasingly uncool Wrecking Crew...all while the record company was yelling for product NOW and Murry was yelling to pull the plug NOW...it was too daunting to put himself through. We may not like it, and in hindsight it was the wrong call for the band's reputation (not to mention pop music as an artform) but it is what it is.

[MyDrKnowsItKeepsMeCalm]

Great stuff Julia, fascinating as always.

I've seen you mention a few times that the rest of the guys never fully understood what they were recording for Smile as it was recorded so piecemeal, and that that was a non-zero factor in their attitudes towards the material and process. I really agree with that.

A really interesting point of comparison are those Love You demos from 1976, where Brian is playing new-to-them Love You material like I'll Bet He's Nice for the guys. You can hear he starts off real nervous -- and then you hear in real time as he builds confidence and the guys start whooping and hollering as they get caught up in excitement. You have to feel like Brian leaves *that* meeting feeling better about the material than when he started, and feeling good that the BBs team was on board. I imagine there were few-if-any moments quite like that during the Smile process.

[Julia]

My copies of the Byron Preiss and Jon Stebbins books arrived a week earlier than posted! So, in the next couple of days, I'll commentate on them too! Then, I'm going to make a list of the big SMiLE mysteries or in-dispute points of fact (stuff like "when did Van join the project" or "what's the elements") and re-read my notes, putting in every source's answer to these questions or at least parsing out the overwhelming consensus. This way, it'll take all the info gleamed from this deep dive and present it in another, possibly simpler manner. (Or it may reveal how little I've learned and therefore how obscure SMiLE shall always remain!) Then I'll rank every source, as best I can ascertain, in terms of its accuracy and where possible, determine its specific journalistic flaw(s). (For instance, off the top of my head, I remember the Gaines book had a tendency to simplify multiple anecdotes into one or two incidents, presumably to make the narrative more concise and compelling. To his credit he does this well--the Gaines account is among my favorite versions of the story, I love the way he bookends it with Brian's two houses and includes lesser known stories like the chiropractor assault.)

And, to reiterate once again, I'll keep an eye out for a way to read those relevant ESQ issues (https://esquarterly.com/product-category/all-issues/smile/) without paying an arm and a leg, or if someone wants to go halvsies or something and we buy them together and shared pdf scans of each others...I'm willing to parse through that last (to my knowledge) significant source of potentially untapped info when I find a way.

Beyond that, if I've missed anything, any book/magazine/interview/podcast with important info that someone thinks ought to be weighed in on, let me know what it is and I'll do my best to track down a copy.

If anyone knows the legalese with regards to my sharing the Preiss book, Stebbins book and (most importantly) the BWPS concert booklet/tour program online somewhere, let me know what Im allowed to do or who I have to contact and I'll try to share them online, preferably on the Internet Archive's library. I want to make sure these sources are preserved, especially the last one because it's not a real book with a publishing house or explicit copyright info. It's a one-off piece of memorabilia from a 20-year-old tour that will NEVER happen again and will almost certainly never be republished...I don't think I'm depriving the estate of Brian Wilson or BRI any real revenue by sharing pictures of each page but I don't want to get in trouble either. Insiders used to post here, people who know insiders still do...anyone in a position to tell me how to handle preserving this document, let me know here or in PMs. I don't think it's fair I had to buy a copy just to see if there was any relevant info inside and I don't wish the experience on others, especially since my copy is the only one I could find at the time not going for hundreds of dollars.

[JK]

Hi Julia. I just discovered one of Lambert's books online. Maybe it's of some use to you.

Good Vibrations: Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys in Critical Perspective

https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/43888/9780472902385.pdf

[Julia]

This is my reaction to the info in the relevant sections of the Byron Preiss book.

Also, I caved and bought a single issue of ESQ to see if the rest might be worth the purchase someday. I went with issue #68 because it seems the most interesting of those not sold out that isn't over 30$ an issue. (It'd be nice if I could buy #67 without the CD of a song I already own and don't want, to shave down the $40 price tag but I digress). So that'll be a thing I end up looking at too, in the near future. I still think it'd be cool if anyone else were willing to buy at least one of the other issues in their SMiLE catalogue and summarize the info, if not for me than for the rest of us. Not trying to sound like a cheapskate here but I've already spent something like ~$100 in service of this project and these are uncertain economic times, with new SMiLE, Paley and "Brian's Back" sets on the horizon to get.   

1. Notes on the Byron Preiss Book

As I understand it, this is the second ever major book on the band after Leaf's original 1978 California Myth. I believe I have the good version with illustrations, and they are definitely a highlight. I also like the unique use of quotes separated from the main body of the text but peppered throughout the narrative. I only wish they were cited more frequently--sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't and it's inconsistent what gets the honor and what doesn't. Anything from GSHG is cited but Preiss doesn't even mention the writing of that article anywhere in his SMiLE narrative, so a newcomer would have no idea why these quotes are so significant; meanwhile the Crawdaddy and Fusion articles are not cited despite being as good or arguably better sources of info overall. I can recognize most of the major ones from my reading list already and I assume most of those I don't remember are new to the book--like the infamous "piano piece" quote that is, by far, the most frequently referenced passage from this text on the forums.

I confined myself to the "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times" chapter for now--I'll probably read the rest eventually but I hope y'all can understand why I kept things direct for now. (I'm getting sick of reading about the same story over and over as it is.) If there's some earth-shattering insight into SMiLE beyond the 1966-67 chapter of the book, I'm sure someone will let me know.

I originally wrote these notes in order of page # but then later went back and grouped them by subject because it seemed to make more sense.

2. Pet Sounds Stuff

Mike gushes about Pet Sounds, there's more quotes of him singing its praises than any other BB and I don't know if that's because the others weren't as available to Preiss or Mike's covering his ass (maybe compensating after Leaf's depiction of him) or if it's totally genuine. Maybe it's a cynical move allying himself with what must've been understood by 1979 to be their best work or he sincerely came around or his '66 grumblings were actually overstated all along. Either way, it's worth taking note of. It's possible Mike really did love PS and even SMiLE the whole time but just has a certain personality others find abrasive, or he's 90% jazzed about something but can't help voicing his concerns about the last 10% and it rubs others the wrong way. (To be fair, this is often my experience with people--I like to share my thoughts on things passionately and in-depth; it seems to piss a lot of people off, though that's never been my intent and I don't know how else to express myself without losing my intended meaning. Maybe that's Mike's issue too?)

Tony Asher says it was "a great joy making music with him" but otherwise being around Brian was "a chore." I sometimes wonder what it'd be like if Asher were asked to write for SMiLE instead--would the project have collapsed faster or maybe he'd have been better at setting boundaries so the work actually gets done? I can't see Tony letting Brian pressure him into singing or doing improv skits--would that have killed the vibe or forced Brian to get serious and quit goofing off?

We get another source saying Let's Go Away For Awhile" was meant to have lyrics but they were cut. I used to think this was a baseless talking point, whose "source" was just a cycle of other internet factoids referencing each other but I was 100% wrong on that. I wish we could see/hear the rejected lyrics--I don't think they would've improved the piece but I'm curious.

3. More Brian Idiosyncrasies

When describing Brian's weird interests, especially the fitness kick, not only is there the usual "eat veggies" and "gym mats in the house," "meetings in the pool" and "play sports" but Preiss mentions "scheduled vitamin intake" which is the first I've seen of this specific detail ANYWHERE. I'm inclined to believe this was a bit of artistic license, the author getting carried away, filling out the anecdote with an extra detail without a second thought. (Like, he hears "Brian was really into health" and absent-mindedly fills in the blanks of what he perceives that to mean, not knowing or caring that 50 years later an obsessed nerd would be agonizing over these details. Because to most people this is just half-interesting bit of fluff to fill out the story, a little piece of trivia to share with friends over coffee, not a sort of quasi-religion where each specific is a point of pseudo-doctrine.) Anyway, these things happen, information sharing is always a game of telephone, it's my self-appointed hobby at the moment to try to suss it out.

Similarly, Daro apparently suggested a clothing store that only sells robes, which enamored Brian at least for a hot minute. This anecdote feels vaguely familiar, maybe there was a line in the Badman book or something, but it's definitely a particularly obscure factoid about the SMiLE era either way. If it's true, it's another instance of Daro getting in the way and filling Brian's head with a lot of unhelpful ideas. Makes me wonder if it didn't influence Brian's other weird passing business venture ideas, like the all night telescope and ping pong stores, what ultimately became the Radiant Radish.

Brian supposedly designed the Arabian tent himself but didn't like it and went in "maybe two times" according to Vosse. 

4. The Infamous Air Quote (& Why It Isn't Wind Chimes)

The well-worn quote about Air as an unfinished piano instrumental cut is not expanded upon but I think we can infer a lot with context clues (which my rhetorical/debate opponents always conveniently leave out when using it to "prove" their WC=Air theory). Immediately after this line, which is a "disembodied quote" separate from the main text, Preiss describes the other 3 elements by name in the body paragraphs. He specifically mentions Mrs O'Leary's Cow, Veggies and later on Dada unambiguously. I repeat: by name, with no room for doubt, he says "X was Earth/Fire/Water." You know what song he doesn't mention at all? AT ALL? That's right--Wind Chimes. Why would he do that, it's such a massive omission in this case, and it's not like WC was some obscure fragment (ala He Gives Speeches, I Dont Know, IWBA, All Day, or even the Nov 4 demos everyone's predisposed to ignore). WC was a major song, on the Dec tracklist, with 3 versions including a contemporary official release on SS, and arguably the first SMiLE song. It's a known entity, something that would've been on both men's radar in this conversation, yet the connection is never made. Hmmm...

I submit that if Brian was talking about WC tag, this would've been sorted out in the interview process, and how could it not be? Even if Brian refused to elaborate beyond the vague quote, if Preiss had reason to believe he was referring to the WC tag, I'll wager any amount of money he would've said as much--either by pressing Brian ("you mean WC?") or openly speculating in the text ("this may be referring to WC but Brian couldn't/wouldn't elaborate"). How could a SMiLE author leave that last tantalizing element unaccounted for unless there really was no definitive answer, or the piano cut in question had no name? It's the equivalent of Brian sharing a clue about SU part 2 and not asking a follow-up--journalistic malpractice. Brian didn't give any more info because there was no more to give--it was a nameless piano melody (that may not have even been recorded for all we know, or is on one of the lost tape reels) unrelated to the more recognizable tracks he would've name-dropped if he could. It may not be an elegant answer that wraps everything up in a neat little bow with no hanging tangents...but such is SMiLE. Hell, such is LIFE.

To go through all the trouble of publishing a book, devoting YEARS of time and effort, wanting your book to be an important best-seller with revelations people will pay for, to not press for more info (if there was any) or make a seemingly obvious connection...it just strains credibility. Under different circumstances, I might be willing to tolerate some forced argument that "Brian/Preiss forgot to connect the dots" or "they thought it was so obvious they didn't need to spell it out" IF there wasn't a mountain of evidence against this stupid forced theory by now. (Even then, it'd be a huge stretch.) But since this is just the latest in a long line of strong, altogether undeniable evidence this isn't the case, yeah I say again WC wasn't air. Like, I'm sorry to spoil the fun of parroting the least interesting theory of what air was for the millionth time, to quash the endlessly recurring dialogue of "Preiss said piano piece"/"hey, WC tag is a piano piece!" before it can enter its umpteenth iteration, but really, not every theory needs to continue indefinitely.

To just finish this off once and for all, I ask any final stragglers--where's your proof to the contrary? All I can see in favor of your theory is: "Wind" in the title (coincidental--that's like saying CIFOTM is water because the baby's crying, or CE is fire because trains use combustion), this quote (which was hardly proof of anything to begin with and in context actually discounts the idea), Priore/bootlegs using it as such (they were desperate to fill a well-publicized conceptual hole and using the only thing they had access to that sorta kinda fit if you squint hard enough) and its use on BWPS (ditto--and there are unambiguous quotes of Brian/Darian admitting as much). It's a weak case propped up by tradition alone, championed by people who often argue in bad faith, using books like this and LLVS which they probably never even read solely to gatekeep dissent. It only ever had support due to peer pressure and convenience, not a thorough unbiased investigation of ALL the facts/testimony. It's such a ridiculous, unimaginative theory that even the author of Glimpses threw in a line making fun of it. This is a very intuitive reading of the situation, if I say so myself, and I don't see how the matter could be any more settled. Again, at this point, any holdouts are just being deliberately obtuse, bad faith debaters I say.

Again, I know I'm coming off as a petty, pedantic asshole about it, especially to those who weren't privy to some of the browbeating I endured on this issue years ago. But, I really hate how this stupid quote was always used as a "gotcha!" in element discussions, when it was always weak evidence even outside the context. Now that I've seen how Preiss goes out of his way NOT to include WC as part of this conversation, how he deliberately avoids connecting those dots, I can't help but feel a combination of vindication with frustration. This is why I wanted to embark on this deep dive in the first place, beyond my autistic obsession--I think the conversation of what SMiLE was has been hamstrung by these half-remembered, poorly-understood, out-of-context quotes cherry-picked and thrown around in bad faith. It's WAY passed time we looked at things more comprehensively, without nostalgic bias, willing to accept unexciting or ambiguous answers, crafting theories from the bottom-up based on the evidence, keeping a public record of which sources say what and weighing them by accuracy or, where that cannot be determined, against the consensus. That's what I'm trying to accomplish here.

(I'm not comfortable nor do I have the time to scan this entire book for internet reference but if anyone doubts me on this particular point, I'll take pictures of the relevant passages and embed them here, so eager am I to kill this theory once and for all.)

5. The Infamous Air Quote (& Other Candidates + Element Theories)

As for what I think Preiss/Brian were talking about here... obviously it wasn't WC or that connection would've been made. I think all exploring this topic in good faith can agree by this point. By the same logic, if we take that quote seriously AND literally, it would appear IIGS is out because they don't connect that to the quote either, plus it isn't an instrumental. Also, Dada is explicitly connected with water in this source. So, what's left...Country Air? Sure, CA isn't an instrumental either but maybe those lyrics were a new addition. (They are very sparse and simple, almost like a last minute add-on.) And in terms of its lyrics, CA is very similar to IIGS in my opinion: with the rooster crowing (farm animals, morning--like when you'd eat eggs and grits), the country/agriculture setting, the joy of breathing fresh air... I say CA is a reworked IIGS in the same vein as CCW and CWTL. Brian was clearly playing around with unused SMiLE odds and ends during the Wild Honey era (solo SU, reworked Dada into CCW, reworked WC into CWTL) so it isn't a stretch to think that a then-unrecorded piano melody he had in mind for air, and/or a lost section of IIGS might've finally got its due.

Country Air chords transposed from D to Ab: A D F#m E C#7 C#
IIGS chords in Ab:  Ab Db Ab7 Db7 Ebm7
Country Air chords in D: D G Bm A F#7 F#
IIGS chords transposed from Ab to D: Eb Ab Eb7 Ab7 Bbm7
(Source: chordify)

^Doesn't look like the same chords though, so maybe that's just in terms of subject matter. Either way, it's possible then that CA's melody was a secret unrecorded (or taped on a lost reel) piano piece for air...or maybe a proto-lyricless-IIGS (like what we hear on TSS:Disc 2) might've been air and its subject matter if not melody carried over into CA. Or maybe IIGS with lyrics was an idea for air and the Preiss quote is at least slightly inaccurate. Either way, I used to be very resistant to the idea of either song as Air or related, for what it's worth, but I'm slowly coming around to it.

If anyone were to say "hey, Brian doesn't connect the dots to say it was CA or IIGS either, so you're being inconsistent" I submit the following counters:

1) First, I still don't know if I even trust this quote's accuracy at all but I'm accepting it for the sake of argument. (Brian says a lot of stuff he doesn't mean to make people happy or end the conversation, especially where SMiLE is concerned. Practically every song he ever wrote starts as a piano piece, and so any song that wasn't finished is by definition "an unfinished piano piece.")

2) Second, it could stand to reason that if IIGS was significantly reworked into CA that Brian wouldn't connect the two in his mind anymore by '79, or care enough to clarify. So if Preiss asked about IIGS specifically, Brian wouldn't be the type to chronicle its complete evolution from one song into something else. (Again, that's very Brian.)

3) Third, it could be that he forgot CA existed at the time they were speaking about SMiLE (it's a brief, relatively unimpressive song in his catalogue made at a time he wasn't mentally all-there, from an under-selling album that he barely ever talks about and probably doesn't remember well).

4) Fourth, being a WH track, it's possible Brian just doesn't mentally categorize CA as SMiLE-related anymore, similar to how he rejected using CCW in BWPS even though it's clearly the final evolution of Dada and much more explicitly water-related. (It came out on a different album so it's different, regardless of where the idea/melody originated. If you ask "why not the same mentality for CE/Prayer/SU?" I answer that Carl released those without Brian's involvement or consent. With CCW, CWTL, CA and Fall Breaks, it was Brian's choice that these be the final versions of those concepts.)

5) Fifth, Brian gives unilluminating one-sentence answers unless pressed--it's what he does. I strongly suspect that in order to "know" Veggies was Earth and Dada was water, Preiss had to ask him specifically "Brian, was X the Y element?" / "W was the Z element, right Brian?" I also think there's not a chance in hell, especially with the word "wind" in the name that Preiss didn't ask the same thing here "WC must've been air, wasn't it?" only for Brian to give the quote we see in the book. (Essentially "nah, it was this unfinished piano piece.") Since Preiss isn't an uber-nerd with access to all the material and years to suss out all the theories like us, it didn't occur to him to specifically ask "so was this other song from WH air, then?" He wasn't even considering that a WH song could be related, or stuff from the then-unknown spoken word recordings.

Anyway, as for the Nov 4 PsychSounds chants in this new context...I still think they're elements demos, but it's Brian trying to see if he couldn't fit vocalizations onto the song in some way. The "oooh" scat in Fire, maybe some kinda Veggie chanting or the fight over Workshop, something akin to Undersea Chant over perhaps Dada's melody played through water recordings, and labored breathing over IIGS or CA's melodies. (Or, these vocal pieces would bookend the otherwise discordant pieces of orchestration, smoothing the transitions of what would otherwise likely sound like a mess.) To anyone who'd say "but why didn't Brian/Preiss mention these demos in the book?" I counter that Preiss didn't know they existed in order to ask and Brian is not the type to offer specific info unless pressed. Had these pieces been booted in Preiss' time, I'm willing to bet they'd be mentioned in the narrative and we'd get a Brian quote explaining or dismissing them. But just because Preiss wasn't given unfettered access to the vaults and Brian's a bad interviewee doesn't mean these recordings didn't mean something in '66, if only for a day/week/month. Furthermore, if anyone's gonna dismiss this theory by saying "oh but that wouldn't even sound good!" ...you might be right. Remember this is an idea Brian abandoned, probably with reason. Obviously he couldn't get it all to work, or didn't think it was worth the effort after a certain point. That doesn't mean this isn't still a very (the most?) plausible theory of what happened, of what the elements would've been in '66. I challenge anyone to offer a more satisfying theory with the music and evidence we have, because I'd love to see a better Elements. 

^The final piece of the puzzle is IIGS' lost reel shared a master # with Cornucopia Veggies. Coincidence? I'm thinking maybe not. I'm starting to think Elements wasn't more explicitly Americana than we thought, with names like MOLC & In Blue Hawaii tying two of the sections to specific US locales while the other two (Veggies and IIGS/CA) were part of the rustic pastoral lifestyle vibe seen in Barnyard and CE. Rather than a separate "third movement," a weird discordant suite of four unrelated and tonally inconsistent songs, "Elements" was just another piece of the American history/nature puzzle that encompassed not 1/3 or even 1/2 but rather the entirety of SMiLE. At least, that may've been the plan at one point, then Brian decided Veggies was too "complete" on its own to be part of such a medley, and Elements should be purely instrumental (with only chanting or vocalizations, no lyrics). This, plus the Fire paranoia killed the plan. Then "candle Fire" Fall Breaks and standalone Veggies got released on Smiley while standalone Dada/CCW and newly-reworked CA were intended for WH. This...makes sense to me. I'm going to call the Elements mystery more or less solved unless anyone else presents a more compelling argument to the contrary.

6. Dada and Water

It takes awhile for Preiss to mention Dada when discussing the elements, so when first reading I was expecting he was unfamiliar with that particular piece since it isn't on the tracklist or discussed in the '66-contemporary interviews. I was increasingly convinced we'd had it wrong all along and Dada/All Day was intended to be air while the Undersea/Water Chants alone were water. I'm still somewhat convinced of this opinion even after Preiss brings Dada in as the water element a few paragraphs later--it's at least very plausible and certainly the second most compelling way to tie the pieces together after my earlier theory. (For reasons I'll bring up as they come, I don't particularly trust Preiss as a source.) One such instance of Preiss' questionable authority occurs as part of this anecdote, where he claims out of nowhere that SU was part of a "water suite" within the larger "elements suite." Again, I've NEVER heard this from anyone else (except a certain board member who wasn't even familiar with this Preiss quote) and it just doesn't click--there's nothing watery about SU except the coincidental name, same as with WC. I'm not saying Dada or whatever water was couldn't have come before SU on the album--in fact that may've been a clever musical pun, making the listener anticipate the next track would be the usual BB "fun in the sun" fair, but it's not an element. I think Preiss was letting his own speculation out of control in this instance. (Some may accuse me of the same, but no one could deny I back my theories up.)

Dada is specifically said to have voices and sound effects intended for its final mix. Again, I'm spotty on Preiss as a source by now but this does jive with my intuition and other accounts. Remember Brian says on "All Day" (which is either a proto-Dada or brief attempt to merge it into Heroes) he wanted a lot of talking in the pauses. Plus there's the Vosse water recordings, which are mentioned in this book in this context, and elsewhere. Brian's whole shtick at this point was purposefully selected arrangements to make the listener see the subject matter, and what better instrument to illustrate water than water itself? After all, Fire had actual fire crackling noises overdubbed in some takes, Veggies had actual veggie crunching for percussion--although not by Paul McCartney. (And, to absolutely drive the point home, another problem I have with the piano quote for air is...how is a piano airy? A truly bisociative composition for air ought to be like woodwinds or something air blows through to make the sound, right? Brass, an organ, a harmonica? Pianos, where the string is pounded, are among the least airy instruments I could think of next to a drum. It just totally goes against Brian's MO during this period, a compositional philosophy he followed so strongly that he rerecorded perfectly fine arrangements if they didn't evoke the image clearly enough.) 

However, Preiss claims Brian sent Vosse out to get them in June which is completely 100% bullshit. It can't be June '66 because by his own admission Vosse wasn't part of the scene until late September or early October, to say nothing of the fact that Elements couldn't have been written then. It can't be June '67 because Vosse was gone by March and so was SMiLE. (Also, by now I should mention, Vosse is continuously misspelled "Vossi" in the book.) Preiss clearly had access to the Fusion article because he quotes from it in places (uncited, unless I'm going crazy) so it's strange he ignores the man's own timeline of events for no discernible reason. And I personally put V-Fusion as the #1 single most reliable primary account so to contradict it requires a hell of a convincing body of evidence which Preiss just doesn't provide.

7. The Engineers Weigh In

Chuck Britz says on page 53 that Brian would record a song/section over again if anyone criticized it, even if they didn't know what they were talking about. ("People would say things they had no right to say...") If not for the more compelling theory of mine regarding the various versions of Wonderful, Wind Chimes, CIFOTM (where discarded takes weren't bisociative/pictorial enough, or the context for the song changed requiring a new arrangement to remain impressionistic) I'd suggest this may've been what happened with those. This is definitely the tendency of Brian's that helped stall progress and require endlessly reworking what was already perfect, it may've been what helped lead to the Heroes sessions. I wonder if perhaps members of the Posse weren't guilty of offering unsolicited and unhelpful advice like this? Perhaps that's part of why Brian ultimately cut them all out? In any case, it definitely adds fuel to the idea Brian was too sensitive for his own good, too much a people pleaser, too willing to silence his muse if it meant keeping everyone happy or chasing universal validation.

Jim Lockhart (misspelled Lackert?) says the band would sometimes want to try things a different way other than Brian's and they'd do that first, then come back around to his first suggestion. This also apparently wasted time.

8. Derek Taylor / Frank Holmes and Cover Art Stuff

Page 56, Derek Taylor says Brian admitted the band had neglected artwork and press jockeying for too long. This was a throwaway line in the disowned WIBN book, I'm glad to see it referenced in a better source. So, Brian was aware the BB covers were mostly sh*t and the SMiLE shop was his first time taking an interest in such things. Is it a coincidence then that the next 3 albums also have arguably the best looking sleeves in all the BB canon? SS/WH/Friends after Christmas/Today!/PS is night and day for me. The Beatles took more of an active interest in such things and it showed--from With the Beatles on, all their sleeves are iconic, gorgeous works of pop art in their own right. Sgt Pepper is arguably the single most beautifully crafted photograph of all time, regardless of how overrated the music is.

Apparently we got the 12 page booklet because the lawsuit granted Brian leverage to demand it. I never saw this detail before but I can believe it. I always thought it was weird Capitol would do such a thing otherwise, especially because this would've been the first of such extras in a rock album to the best of my knowledge. (And how much cooler is this than the dumb cardboard cutout mustaches from Sgt Pepper by the way?)

Frank Holmes is said to have "sent out" the cover in December, at least it's implied since his delivering of the art is discussed alongside the December tracklist and advertising blitz by Capitol around the same time. Since Preiss has gotten dates wildly wrong elsewhere, I'm inclined to go with October for the cover's completion, as other sources say. Unless I see otherwise, I'm convinced he was hired in August or perhaps very early September, then delivered his work sometime in October. Whether the arrival of that cheery smile shop image inspired the name change from Dumb Angel or not, I'm inclined to believe it convinced Brian to be more explicit with the humor than perhaps he'd first intended. Now instead of just silly titles and lyrical wordplay (or musical shenanigans, like the soft verse of WC into the loud chorus) he opted for some spoken word comedy and laughter.

9. Vosse Posse Stuff (The Most You'll Ever Hear of Paul Jay Robbins)

We get June 1966 as when Brian and VDP met and it's implied when they began working. Again, I'm sticking with the earlier consensus of late August, probably after the WC track was recorded. (I think this is only time where Van wrote words to a pre-recorded song, with the rest written together, but that's just my intuitive speculation.)

Siegel was sent by the Saturday Evening Post directly, who were independently eager to see what Brian was up to after PS & GV, similar to Oppenheim from CBS. So, Siegel was arguably the only person in the scene not brought in directly by VDP, Anderle or a family member. He wasn't in the friend group, hence everyone singling him out as someone who didn't fit in socially. It seems like Siegel himself wanted to be cool and accepted, he wanted this to be more than a work assignment, he thought he was Brian's friend. I think his obsession with hipness was projected onto Brian in the GSHG article. I feel bad for the guy and think he was done dirty by the others--nothing in his article seemed a major lie, certainly not big enough to warrant Anderle's accusations (unless he was planning to include something else we don't know and got shut down).

On page 58 we get a rare mention of Paul Jay Robbins, who apparently was brought into the scene by Anderle. (First direct mention I've seen of where he came from. Is it because he wasn't offered a job like Vosse and Anderle that he gets so overlooked? Was he not offered because he was inadequate or there wasn't anything else for him to do?)

This is the first I've seen of Brian sending Vosse and Anderle to represent the BB organization at an LA protest against the 11 pm curfew. Apparently Paul Jay Robbins got hit in the head--he isn't mentioned as being sent by Brian, so was he there independently? (Also, when mentioning this incident, Preiss takes the time to refer to him as "Van Dyke's friend.") A quick Google search reveals this protest, called a riot in some sources, occurred on November 12, then the next night "and on and off throughout November and December." I'm going to assume 11/12 was when PJR got hit because that seems the biggest night of activity. This raises SO MANY QUESTIONS and I'm legitimately shocked it's never mentioned in any other source, assuming it's true. You'd think Vosse or Anderle, one of them, would mention that Brian sent them to a protest where a member of the Posse got hurt. They usually mention PJR once if at all and always in passing, never anything notable he did. The poor mysterious guy, I thought, must've been a quiet wallflower type who did nothing of note in order to be so overlooked. But here he is (allegedly) taking a baton or fist to the skull in the fight for freedom and they never mention it. Assuming this is all accurate info, why in the hell is this brushed over? Also, couldn't the fact that there were riots going on in the city Brian lived in during the crucial Nov - Jan period have something to do with his increasing sense of "bad vibrations" and paranoia? So why isn't this potentially contributing factor to his negative headspace ever considered?

10. Brother Records Future Projects

We get specific mentions of a health food album and "musical movies" as the envisioned projects of BRI for the then-near future. Usually you hear about this so-called "humor album" (which I'm skeptical was ever truly a separate project from SMiLE) or rarely a "sound effects album" (ditto) but this is the first I recall of a "health food album." I've seen the musical movies idea before and it makes me want to cry imagining what Brian could've done if he hadn't completely broke down the way he did. The man could've made a new Fantasia in reverse--coming at it from a musical background as opposed to animation--and probably done it better than Disney himself. (Huge Walt Disney fan, love what Fantasia was going for, but I think the execution was sadly lacking. The idea is brilliant though and I think Brian teamed with a bold, psychedelic-inclined, indie director might've made it happen.) It need not be animated either--just imagine a short film of interrelated music videos with avant garde visual language, each standing on its own but adding up to a greater whole. They would've absolutely been pioneers, DECADES ahead of their time--MTV in the cinema, before Michael Jackson, a-ha or Peter Gabriel had a chance to make the music video an artform all its own in the 80s. What a tragic waste.

While it's too late for them to be the ones leading the pack on this, I still think an animated film about SMiLE could be a huge success with the right directors/studio and a non-BWPS/TSS presentation of the music. Imagine a thoughtfully composed two-suite mix like one of the 17 I've suggested in this thread, paired with surreal impressionist imagery. Like, Frank Holmes meets Yellow Submarine meets The Wall meets Spider-verse. There's minimal or even no story, just trippy imagery illustrating the songs in a metaphorical way, each track having its own art style but only moderately removed from what came before, so the pictures flow as well as the music. By the end, we've gone from one style to a radically removed one. Don't worry about character or even narrative continuity--like Wonderful could show pictures depicting a modern little girl on the playground, a traditionally animated Disney princess and her woodland friends, a personified Columbia met by the ruthless settlers, Pocahontas going to England...all simultaneously to reflect the infinite possibilities of VDP's oblique words. Mix 2D and 3D, let the colors depict feelings not necessarily realism, pay homage to the likes of Cubism, Pointilism, Futurism, watercolor and Renaissance frescoes. It could be a masterpiece in the right hands.

11. Barnyard Suite Info and Theory

On page 59 we are told the Barnyard Suite (which is, I suspect, IIGS on the Dec tracklist) would've been "4 songs, 4 short pieces" combined into one. So, it would've been a direct counterpoint to the Elements as that track was originally conceived. I think we can therefore assume that BYS and TE would've been split between the sides, although there's no direct proof. But it just kinda makes sense that way, doesn't it, like how PS' two instrumentals were split up? I imagine a BYS bookended by Heroes, Worms, OMP, CE and maybe Veggies (?) paired against a TE suite bookended by GV, WC, Wonderful (?), CIFOTM and SU. This might be the most plausible grouping for SMiLE there is, possibly switching Wonderful and Veggies. (So the former can come after Worms' similar sounding outro as a metaphor for the rape of Columbia/the Native American Princess (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_princess) and the latter can serve as the Earth element.)

My theory with regard to BYS' internal structure is as follows:

1) I think Vosse's description in Fusion is probably accurate to how it was somewhere along the way, but not at the very start. It seems like My Only Sunshine was part of the earliest Heroes, and Brian's goal with the entire project of SMiLE was to take old standards like that (and later Cece Rider, Gee, OMP, etc) to recontextualize them in medleys of his own music. This was Brian's way of celebrating Americana where Van was more overtly historical. Then Heroes got its own lyrics, of which I think Barnyard-proper and IIGS were included in that first brainstorm (or not far behind), but Brian could never settle on how exactly they'd fit in a song about cowboys in the southwest. Because really, there's no farms in the southwest deserts and ranches.

2) Then the Western motif took off to include all the parts that would become CE and Worms, but where for example HotR/IH/GCD naturally fit into a single track, BY & IIGS still didn't completely gel anywhere. As I've said, Brian made several pieces too many and these were the ones left standing in the game of musical chairs. So, the idea of a Barnyard suite became an elegant solution to use all these would-be leftovers in one medley. Where the other pieces became choruses, bridges, verses or fades, these two bits would be half of a four segment suite with no repeating sections. When Vosse heard it, that meant Barnyard, OMP's two sections (taken out of Heroes as that became its own song), then IIGS and/or the workshop noises. I'm guessing this was how BYS existed circa November sometime. 

3) I suspect eventually Brian decided OMP with a fade worked better as its own thing (hence the parentheses crossed out on the Dec tracklist--this was a last minute decision to make it a standalone rather than subtitle in a larger song). Meanwhile the rest of BYS was now officially titled IIGS because Brian just liked that name better--I guess it'd emphasize the fitness and feel good vibes he was going for on the album as a whole. And this would've comprised of some combo of IIGS, IWBA, FN(WS) and BY. That's what the mysterious IIGS listing on the Dec tracklist was, but Brian never got around to assembling these pieces in a final edit.

It's no coincidence the two bloated 4-part medleys were the least finished and seemingly the least enthusiastic parts of SMiLE. Ultimately, I think Brian (and listeners) realized the Element pieces worked better as fleshed out independent tracks and the Barnyard suite worked best on the cutting room floor. (It was included on BWPS/TSS Disc 1 because the bootlegs made it too iconic to cut, and even then it's a mess of speed-bump fragments that ruins the flow--if free from built-up audience expectations and guided by his best instincts, I say Brian would've eventually cut this song, both in '66 and '03.) SMiLE needs at least one major cut to come in at an acceptable album length for 1967, and personally I can think of no worthier candidate than IIGS/BYS with OMP coming in second. Nothing else is on that same level of comparative mediocrity (not the right word but you get it--compared to the likes of SU and CE, these pieces just aren't on the same level). If they were stronger ingredients they wouldn't've had to be mashed together in one awkward lump to begin with. 

12. Smiles and Frowns

On pages 59 and 60 we get the obligatory mention of Brian's interpretation of humor as a spiritual thing. This, though, is the first I've heard of laughter's supposed intent to disarm any accusations of pretentiousness. According to Preiss, Brian was worried people might think he was getting too serious, that this new direction might turn people off, unless he could show them it's just as fun as the old stuff. I've never heard it from this angle before but it makes sense.

On page 62, Diane says SMiLE was "not a real comfortable time." I wonder if she means all of it or just the "breakup period" from December onward. If she were asked this question on Nov 1, would she reflect the positivity that early period seems to embody or was there a darkness even then we didn't see? So many of these "new" (to me) disembodied quotes are frustratingly vague. Uncomfortable how? For whom, Brian or everyone? Was Brian having a ball (until he wasn't) but at everyone else's expense as I sometimes suspect? If this quote was new to Preiss, he got it out of Diane, how can you not ask like a half-dozen follow-ups? 

Mike and Al have quotes distancing themselves from SMiLE, saying words to the effect of "I was at home" and "I wasn't involved conceptually in that time." Everyone knows Mike's role in the story, and dissent is often said to have come from the group as a whole but the exact positions of the other individual members aren't delineated. (Except Dennis who's unambiguously positive, sans a few bizarre quotes to the contrary from Brian from decades later.) Anyway, I think we can put Al in the "SMiLE-skeptic" crowd with quotes like these plus his relative absence in the non-vocal sessions. At best, he was ambivalent at a time when Brian needed unwavering support most of all. (If Al wasn't "on Mike's side" complaining about the album/process then I don't know who was, because Dennis has enough evidence to "exonerate him" and people get upset if I suggest Carl wasn't fully supportive--plus he's most frequently utilized among the Boys in non-vocal sessions.)

13. Random Info

Preiss specifically, independently singles out October as the height of the sessions too.

Another notable inaccuracy: Preiss lists CE separately from Iron Horse and "(Have You Seen) the Grand Coulee Dam." This isn't just listing IH, GCD and Home on the Range as separate, which I could understand. Plus this is the only time I've ever seen that subtitle in the parenthesis on GCD.

There's a Mike quote that claims the concept of Teeter Totter Love (if not all the lyrics) was Jasper Dailey's own idea. He thought using a teeter totter as a metaphor for the battle of the sexes would be a cool idea. It seems like Brian took Jasper's own pitch and surprised him by fleshing it out into an entire song for him to sing. If SMiLE had been finished this would've been an interesting, fun bit of trivia for us fans, a cool victory lap story of the master burning off excess steam. Instead it's a frustrating tangent we wish wouldn't have happened. Even if writing a song from the guy's own idea is kinda cute, doing two more tracks (wasting like ~4 sessions and God knows how much time composing) was absolutely ridiculous overkill. I have to imagine even Jasper must've thought "uhh Brian, is this really the best use of your time?" I'd love to be able to read the minds of him and the sessions musicians during these pointless excursions. 

On page 63, there's a throwaway line about Brian being approached to do car jingles, which he didn't appreciate. It just goes to show he was so in-demand that everyone wanted to use him on their musical projects, even if it was beneath him. (He could've given them the bouncy backing track to TTL for an extra chunk of change if he had the mental wherewithal and let someone else write the lyrics. Could've thrown Asher a bone if he wanted to, in that regard, but I wonder if Brian couldn't sense Tony's disdain hence washing his hands of him after.)

Spector's quote on page 64 is the nicest thing I've ever seen him say about Brian and it's dead-on accurate. Essentially, by making GV he was put in a position where he wasn't just making music anymore, he was leading an entire industry which meant all eyes were on him and as a shy sensitive person that's a lot of pressure. It was a trap he walked himself into.

14. Brian's Acid Intake

Carl says Brian took a lot of LSD in a short period and then stopped completely. How much is "a lot" how long is "a short period" and when was this exactly? We don't know. Honestly, even though it contradicts the consensus of ~3 trips over maybe 6 months to a year or so (mid '65 through mid '66), I could buy this. I don't believe the other "heterodox" takes on Brian's acid intake, like Taylor's dismissive quote or Leaf's 78 book claiming he took a lot in Spring '67 to soothe the pain. Those feel like anti-drug, scapegoat-seeking, "hurr hurr acid is funny" exaggerations. But taking too much acid in a short period of time (say once a week or every two weeks over a 2~3 month window perhaps) would actually explain the dramatic, sudden, permanent personality shift into a moody, erratic, avoidant person unable to take care of himself. Mike says Brian's personality completely changed suddenly and he was never the same after. That's what happened to Syd Barrett the other famous "acid casualty." And the people who actually crash out on acid, it's almost always 1) latent mental illness, 2) over-doing it especially in too tight a window or 3) both. While this throws an otherwise settled matter back into the throws of the unknown, I don't think we should dismiss Carl's quote out of hand. The question then becomes: when did this period of acid consumption take place--November '66 through May '67 or some smaller time-frame within that half-year or thereabouts? Maybe trying to find his muse again as the original conception of SMiLE slipped away, which eventually led to its refounding as Smiley? Maybe it was at the very beginning of the sessions actually, like August-October, which had him feeling great at the time but contributed to the perceived downfall starting in November? (By the way, poor Tobelman, because if true this further erodes his theory's already strained-at-best credibility.)

15. Inside Pop Info

There's NO MENTION of Mike staging a fight for the cameras, and the "went very badly" (which isn't mentioned explicitly but Preiss discusses a prior attempt to film the sessions before Brian's solo SU) is just that the BB vocal session was too fragmented to be palatable to general audiences. This makes perfect sense, first of all, since so much of TSS is short snippets that aren't particularly impressive on their own. (Imagine if they just aired 4 minutes of "Bridge to Indians" or "Wonderful Insert" or "Do a Lot" sessions for Inside Pop--ooh, that'd set America on fire, right?) And beyond that, if there was a fight I highly doubt Oppenheim wouldn't have mentioned it since his assessment of Brian in the Gaines book was brutally honest and unflattering. I doubt his crew wouldn't run away with that hot story sometime in all these decades. I doubt Brian, when in the mood to throw shade during the 80s and BWPS era wouldn't have mentioned it as a point of contention. I doubt Mike hater in chief, David Leaf, or literally any other source besides the discredited Priore, wouldn't have uncovered that juicy story and shouted it to the heavens by now--if it actually happened. (Which it didn't, Priore's a liar.)

On the second attempt, apparently Oppenheim tried to interview Brian about the state of the industry, music in general, the counterculture, but Brian was too shy to give him anything usable. Then they had trouble getting him relaxed enough to play, it took a lot of coaxing from the Posse. There were apparently many false starts before he finally did the whole song. All of this info is new to me (assuming true). Every other source gave the impression Brian was more or less at ease with Opp or at least not terribly nervous around him. At least until after the exuberant praise paradoxically made him doubt the music. This does make sense with his famous shyness and growing paranoia, so I'm not inclined to write it off but I think it's notable how other sources don't paint the same picture.

16. Preiss' SMiLE Mix

Preiss sort of gives his own hypothetical SMiLE assembly but it's presented as a throwaway, not the carefully crafted attempt at a definitive mix, ala Priore. (Worms, BYS, CE, OMP, [Iron Horse, Grand Coulee Dam], Bicycle Rider, Heroes // GV, Elements, Veggies, SU, CIFOTM). The brackets around two consecutive pieces of CE are my own addition and, again, that they're separated from a standalone CE makes me think Preiss doesn't really understand the material. Still, he mostly got the groupings down to what seems the most popular format, which is Americana Side 1, Elements/GV/SU(+ CIFOTM and/or Wonderful) Side 2. There's something natural about those groupings that just make sense to people, spoken as someone who likes to split up the Element pieces myself. It's intuitive in a way other, in my opinion better, structures aren't.

WC=Air conspiracy theorists may look at this and yell "see! it's not listed separately because Preiss includes it in the Elements track!" But, no. He doesn't acknowledge that song's existence until later--just before Smiley. He doesn't list IIGS here either, hasn't mentioned that track yet and won't until the next page (81). This sequence is just a half-hearted mess he throws out on a whim, not a serious attempt to put the pieces together. Note Wonderful is conspicuously absent as well, and Prayer too. Since they're never mentioned, I'm not sure he even realizes I Ran, Holidays, He Gives Speeches or You're Welcome even exist to play with. I don't know why this aside was even included in the book if he was going to make so many strange decisions and not justify them, but oh well.

17. The Holmes/SMiLE Animated Film (That Could've Changed Everything)

There's a corroboration of the 90 minute animated special that another source (Priore 2005, I believe) mentioned. This would've been the coolest thing ever, even if it was just a "special" (so, TV?) as opposed to a theatrical release. It couldn't be any worse than Magical Mystery Tour, which would surely have been its competition. And if it were really based on Holmes' illustrations (a detail not mentioned here) it would've been a beautiful trippy piece of experimental animation beating Yellow Submarine to the punch by 6 months at least. Along with shelving SMiLE and skipping Monterey, this must surely complete the trifecta of bad decisions that absolutely destroyed the band's longterm reputation. They literally had the opportunity to do some of the coolest things the Beatles and Stones ever did (minus the murder of a fan) on a silver platter and just absolutely blew it. This isn't me inventing a crazy fantasy scenario, this was all set to happen and Brian screwed it up for no reason but self-sabotage. I wonder if the other guys were aware of this and if any of them recognized the massive opportunity they were blowing by saying no. Were I in the band, I'd have mutinied.

This is the kind of thing that could've legitimized the BBs as a respected, cool band that people wanted to make films out of in the eyes of future generations. Even schoolkids I knew riding the middle school bus in the late 2000s were talking about how much they loved Yellow Submarine and how trippy it is. In college, I knew guys who were big into music getting stoned and doing viewing parties of it in their dorms with a dozen people over really getting into it. Films can often live on in a way that music alone can't, plus they're accessible and exist as ongoing shared experiences for groups. People get together and watch entire movies as a "centerpiece activity" while almost no one invites the gang over just to listen to albums (unless they're all musicians) or if they do it's usually background noise while people talk. (It's the same as in clubs--the music is background to the socializing, not the focus like a movie theater.) This defeatist attitude that SMiLE always would've flopped and only ever appealed to niche audiences is absurd as it is, but with a freaking psychedelic animated movie predating YS under its belt, it would've been a major culture touchstone then and long into the future. There's an alternate universe where the BBs are the generation-defining band of the 60s and all it would've taken was for Brian to make a few different decisions that fateful Spring of '67. I wonder why this isn't discussed as often as the Monterey tragedy.

18. The Death of SMiLE

Brian is said to have grown frustrated with Van's work. Van is said to have left in February (not March or April, the other most common months I've seen) and there's no mention of a prior leave in December. Around this time in the narrative, there's another "disembodied quote" where Brian says "we had a basic argument" but with the text surrounding it, this could refer to Van (my impression) or possibly Murry (who's also mentioned as a negative influence in the same passages).

Marilyn thinks the move to Bel-Air finished SMiLE off, as being in a new place made the old project and thoughts take a backseat. This tracks with what Van has said and makes a lot of sense to me. It seems to be how Brian's mind operated and honestly even more focused, well-adjusted people behave similarly. So again, that's March give or take. Timeline syncs up to where the project became unsalvageable in my estimation.

19. Preiss' Blurry Timeline & Significant Errors

On page 81, probably the biggest error of all, Brian is said to have played Johnny Carson a lot in the home studio. Is this a case where Preiss accidentally transposed a paragraph from ten years later into the wrong section of the book? Was he just full of sh*t? Or was JC somehow written WAY earlier than I thought? (I just double checked and no it wasn't.) This is a glaring error either in editing or research or what but it further calls into question Preiss' reliability as a source. There's actually a good bit of novel info here but I can't fully trust it because of things like this, not that some of it doesn't make intuitive sense on its own.

Aside from its use in the prospective tracklist earlier, OMP isn't discussed on its own until page 82, around when the author has moved onto the home studio era, further blurring the timeline. Then we skip from this song right to Cant Wait Too Long, which is erroneously and unambiguously referred to as a SMiLE track. And no, not in the sense that it borrows WC' melody (which Preiss doesn't mention). It's presented as though this were a song you might've seen rubbing elbows with CE and Wonderful on a finished SMiLE album, which clearly isn't true anymore than "She's Goin Bald" would've ever been on a finished original SMiLE just because it's a reworked HGS. In fact, further complicating matters, WC is only mentioned for the very first time after CWTL in the book. Just reading this, you'd think the song originated in the Smiley era and AFTER a song that we all should know comes from the WH sessions. Major, MAJOR errors here. The very first SMiLE song (not counting GV) is presented as though it were the very last.

Preiss blends together SMiLE and Smiley. There's no dramatic moment of change between the two eras, one flows into the next and as you've seen, he plays fast and loose with the songs and details. We get the same anecdotes of recording in the pool, now there's an added detail of singing in the shower with the water running. Beyond that, very little info on Smiley as is the tradition amongst every single source. There's no mention of a definitive break where SMiLE becomes Smiley, no mention of inter-band conflict or confusion about it, no "guys were blindsided in Europe" or "we almost broke up over whether to release SU." These details were never recorded for posterity and have now died with Brian. If Mike were going to spill the beans, he'd have done it in 2016. Bruce wasn't around for a lot of this. Al...no offense to the guy but I feel like he was the least aware member of the band when it comes to this kinda stuff.

20. How Long Was Heroes?

There's mention of Heroes versions that go up to 8 minutes, and the way this is worded it can be assumed no longer. I'm a strong believer that the supposed 12 minute cut was a Leaf exaggeration. Unless there's some novel odds and ends in the lost tape reels he somehow got to hear in '78, there just simply isn't 12 minutes of usable material unless Brian repeated multiple sections in the same song. (Color me skeptical--2+ recurring "choruses" in the same song is insane even for SMiLE.) Besides, 12 minutes wouldn't fit on a 45 in '67 unless I'm very much mistaken, so why would Brian even construct such a thing? This isn't the Disco Era with 12 minute Moulton mixes, or album-length singles to keep people dancing. It'd need to be a "Heroes part 1, part 2, plus BYS-but-we're-calling-it-Heroes-again-now-for-some-reason" as an album cut or EP. And at that point, it's not a 12 minute version of "Heroes the single," it's "SMiLE, Side 1 of the album," anyway. As I've said, I made a 10 minute cut of Heroes and it's a bloody mess--I couldn't imagine stretching it out a further two minutes.

On page 81 IIGS is finally mentioned (after Preiss' shoddy SMiLE sequence) as an afterthought and in context of Brian's fitness obsession, NOT in the context of Heroes or Americana. You'd never know IIGS was a Heroes fragment or part of BYS (and/or IWBA/FN) if you just read this book, which I think is a significant error.

CONCLUSION

This book, despite its inaccuracies was a great read. I hope anyone interested can pick up a copy, and I'd like to see it archived online like so many of the other seminal BB books. I'd be willing to donate my copy to any group like the Internet Archive who preserve texts online. The watercolor illustrations are gorgeous, honestly worthy of album covers themselves. The novel info about SMiLE, while I must take with a grain of salt due to the book's occasional falsehoods, still provides a fascinating new insight into things. It confirms some of my favorite less-spoken anecdotes from other sources that I was starting to doubt were real. (Specifically, the Holmes-inspired animated film that was planned.) It's by far the most info you'll ever get on Paul Jay Robbins in a single source--which really just shows how little there is to say about him more than anything. It's presented well and there are far more tantalizing quotes than the one everyone seems to throw around about Air as a piano cut. Similar to LLVS, I can now say the people using that as a cheap "gotcha!" to justify their WC=Air theory didn't even read (or at least retain) the book they were using to gatekeep people with other theories and they conveniently ignored the context of the quote which makes it clear neither Preiss nor Brian was talking about WC. For that peace of mind alone, I'm glad I made this purchase.

[mike s]

'Air' was referred to as a 'cut'.  A cut is a recorded piece.

[mike s]

Vegetables likely was not Earth - was at one point but was then made into its own song.  Possibly a skit replaced it..?

[Julia]

Hi Julia. I just discovered one of Lambert's books online. Maybe it's of some use to you.

Good Vibrations: Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys in Critical Perspective

https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/43888/9780472902385.pdf

Thanks, Old Sport. I have actually seen that source before and as I recall there wasn't any new info. I do appreciate the suggestion though!

Vegetables likely was not Earth - was at one point but was then made into its own song.  Possibly a skit replaced it..?

I used to think this, I was as against the concept of Veggies being Earth as I was (and remain) against WC as air. My reasons were primarily that it's a full-blown song with lyrics and not an instrumental, which I'd always been told Elements would've been, also it wasn't labelled "Elements Part X" on the tape, session sheets or studio chatter like Fire. However, there's SO MANY sources, predating BWPS even, that refer to it as Earth I think it's a "where there's smoke..." situation. Plus Van says in the BWPS concert booklet that the only part of Elements he worked on in 66 was Veggies, and that Frank Holmes illustration (based on lyric sheets sent by Van) subtitles Elements as Veggies, or the other way around I forget. There was clearly a connection, that's supported over a large body of evidence. I had to admit on this one I was wrong and Veggies definitely started as Earth, though it seems to have been spun off by December and certainly by March when it became a single. The Elements changed over time, like pretty much every single SMiLE song. I suspect there was an earlier "rustic pastoral" elements that was four songs with lyrics, including Veggies and possibly even IIGS as air, then it morphed into a collage of instrumentals and possibly chants or skits/monologues that was never finished.

'Air' was referred to as a 'cut'.  A cut is a recorded piece.

We may just have to agree to disagree. I think it's as likely as not Brian was just bullshitting or misremembering like he's done a hundred times, and Air was never recorded until CA if you believe my theory. OR if it was recorded contemporaneously, it's lost media on one of those missing tape reels. (Probably the lost IIGS session, that's my guess.) I think the WC tag has been thoroughly debunked, so I say if one is to hold fast that there's an Air among the material we have circa 1966, the onus is on the theorizer to make a case for what else that could be. It's possible All Day/Dada was air the whole time and the "Dada is water" understanding that's even repeated in this book has been a big red herring due to CCW developing out of its melody. I'm amiable to that theory but it's not a hill I'm going to die on either. Otherwise, what else is there? Some Heroes fragment? Part 1 tag?

[mike s]

Yeah V started as Earth but was then spun off.  As the booklets were printed I presume something related would have to go there - or else trash the booklets..?  Or just carry on..?

[Julia]

Yeah V started as Earth but was then spun off.  As the booklets were printed I presume something related would have to go there - or else trash the booklets..?  Or just carry on..?

I think it's a relatively minor thing they would've just overlooked. Brian certainly wasn't going to let some out of date packaging screw up his artistic muse. As far as he was concerned, if it didn't match the booklet or even back cover anymore that was Capitol's problem. And Capitol probably thought "we're already making booklets and inflating the cost to keep Brian happy, no way in hell we're redoing it just to fix a minor 'error' that no one's gonna care about anyway."

[Julia]

Now Im doing the Jon Stebbins book BB:FAQ. I'm just reading the SMiLE chapter, I checked and it looks like there isn't any substantial info on this era in the other sections of the book.

1. So, just starting out, I don't like being pedantic, but I think to some extent it's gotta be done. There were no tapestries in the tent according to anyone else's testimony, there are only 4 songs unequivocally said to be written in the sandbox, singing in an empty pool only occurred in Smiley, and while Brian was known to film things on a whim (ala the Paul Williams story of Christmas eve at Brian's) I've never heard that he wanted to "film everything" during the sessions.* Again, this is artistic license I get it, I just think it's important to point out because if they get this wrong it makes me less inclined to believe other novel info.

*Oh how I wish he had though...would make my current hobby so much easier and more fun.

2. I appreciate the way Stebbins immediately notes how Brian wanted comedy skits and nature/water sounds incorporated into his music. I don't think this is really in doubt anymore, but at least back in the day there were a lot of "SMiLE-Conservatives" arguing that anything not explicitly orchestrated belonged on a separate "comedy album," which I'm still not sure even existed as a separate concept. I think Brian probably mentioned doing "a humor album" while recording the goofier bits from the Psychedelic Sounds bootleg, and some of his friends were too "straightforward" to understand that he was talking about SMiLE itself. Like, nobody had ever mixed the two before except arguably Frank Zappa, and even that was very slight in Freak Out, so they couldn't conceptualize a symphony, much less one directed to/about God, that would have comedic interludes. Either way, whatever your opinion on the intention of the PS bits, SMiLE was intended to talking on it of some kind (see: contemporary interviews, All Day studio chatter, etc) and it's possible that after opening that door, Brian was inspired to take it further in the future sometime, and offhandedly said "hey we could do a whole album of just these comedy skits!" But this was just Brian thinking of how he could take each individual concept to the next level--same as a supposed "sound effects album" and I'm sure if SMiLE were to remain 12 banded tracks, the concept of "a whole album/side is one suite/medley" would've come up the next time because he was clearly at least stepping his toes in that water with SMiLE.

^My opinion is that anything recorded during '66 (and possibly the Smog skit, which is a case where I must tentatively trust Badman's date of ~spring '67~ due to lack of additional evidence) was intended for SMiLE at the time it was gathered. Even if Brian changed his mind the very next hour, or his friends took down more tape than he could possibly use, these recordings were created for that purpose. I don't think Brian "morphed the two [separate concepts] when doing Smiley Smile" as Anderle claims, I think they had been one and the same since Nov 4 or possibly earlier. I think there was always more of Smiley in SMiLE than many of the "Pet Sounds 2" brand of theorists would admit (whom, by the way, I disagree with respectfully while understanding their aesthetic preference positively). That's why I was so excited at the thought of the name change from "Dumb Angel" (a "Pet Sounds 2" that begins with Prayer, has separate tracks, classical arrangements) to "SMiLE" (a "Proto-Smiley" that ends with Prayer, has some degree of linking cues/talking/laughing, bisociative arrangements) sometime in October, with Nov 4 representing the beginning of the new direction--Wilson meets Zappa! That would've tied things up perfectly...

3. The explanation of the title Dumb Angel on page 84 seems to be pulled from thin air: "an entity that tries its best to help others but constantly screws up everything it touches." I've never seen any insider claim that interpretation, and it's quite the reach from just the words "Dumb Angel" alone. I always thought that title was a reference to Brian himself, who's basically non-verbal (Anderle's words in Crawdaddy, plus he's evasive in interviews and frightfully shy) but mostly kind-hearted and trying to bring the message of God. Someone who's not going to be an eloquent philosophical preacher like Jesus, Buddha, Zarathustra, Mani, Lao Tsu, yet proclaims a similar declaration of divine love in the way he knows how. He can't explicitly verbalize the revelation from heaven so he expresses it in music instead. I don't think it needs to be any more than that. And I still think this is a better title than SMiLE, iconic as that name now is.

4. VDP left, came back, left again. Dates are not given.

5. Carl participated more than any other BB (which I've confirmed by tallying his appearances on the TSS sessionography).

6. I like the way this book describes BWPS: "once the dust cleared and the hype died down, many fans of SMiLE concluded that BWPS was only a facsimile, and a fair-to-good reproduction of the BB' SMiLE [...] the 2004 version is in no way the BB' lost SMiLE album. The concept is compromised, the context is wrong..." Harsh but accurate. However, I disagree with the wording in another quote in the same passage: "it was a surprisingly compact and efficient-sounding collection of songs." The purpose of this last statement is that BWPS proved SMiLE did in fact have a viable cohesive whole, it wasn't an unworkable mess, and I agree with the spirit of this statement if not the exact phrasing. I think the BWPS presentation is exhausting and drags due to pacing issues from the various 30-second roadbumps, fragmentary IIGS medley and three-part structure which makes it seem twice as long as it actually is. You walk away from BWPS feeling like you just sat through Gone With the Wind instead of Alice in Wonderland (the '51 Disney animated version). I love both of those movies, but the former I only break out on special occasions, maybe once a year or even every other year, the latter I could throw on at any time on a whim and never get sick of it. It's the difference between Electric Ladyland or The Wall versus Axis: Bold as Love or Piper at the Gates of Dawn. It's a great case study in how editing affects momentum, and therefore enjoyment.

^That's why I'm so hard on BWPS and adamant that SMiLE be officially released in an alternate structure: I think this presentation does the music a grave injustice and is why BWPS and TSS didn't make more of an impact among casuals.

7. I appreciate the way this book acknowledges Prayer could've opened or closed the album. I used to staunchly believe the former and now am equally convinced it was the latter.

8. I also like that Stebbins isn't afraid to admit how "evil-sounding" a lot of SMiLE is. Like psychedelics themselves, even if the trip is overall a 4-8 hour "discourse" on love and inspiration, in my experience there's always a significant underpinning of dread and sadness to the ordeal. (And they do feel like you've been through an ordeal after it's over.) I've had trips where I was laughing AND crying at the same time, where I literally wept with guilt over killing a fly earlier in the day and learned to love my worst enemies one minute, only to turn around and get caught in thought loops of my flaws and the people I've hurt in life. They're the most spiritual experiences I've ever had, but it always shows you heaven AND hell, so to speak. I love how SMiLE reflects this and isn't afraid to be spooky. I love how music as vaguely foreboding as Talking Horns or CE can come in a package adorned with an unassuming kiddie drawing. That's the insane dichotomy that makes SMiLE fascinating and it's what BWPS lacks with its one-dimensional, whimsical circus packaging with Brian forcing a smile every second of the concert footage. (Of all the eras of US history, SMiLE makes me think of colonial, Revolutionary, 1800s, the Psychedelic Sixties themselves and a hopeful future where we learn to live in peace with nature and stop the H&V-esque wars. The last period of history it makes me think of is that tacky early 1900s Barnum and Bailey aesthetic, but that's just me. It's just a little too generic, palatable and pretentious for my liking, can't say exactly why.)

9. Stebbins calls CIFOTM one of the most ambitious and beautiful sections of SMiLE, which is nice because it's an overlooked gem of a track that deserves its due.

That's it, that's the whole thing. He includes two verbatim press releases announcing the then-imminent TSS release. Overall this is a pretty slipshod depiction of the album, no offense to Mr. Stebbins personally. It's too lacking in detail to draw in a newbie OR serve as a useful reference to obsessives like me because the info is so basic when it isn't largely opinionated or outright incorrect. It's not really useful in filling in gaps or reframing what we thought we knew, it's just one guy giving a not particularly good summary. It's like "baby's first peek at SMiLE." In hindsight this is one I easily could've skipped, and while the rest of the book may be great and I'll check it out someday, I would recommend avoiding this if you're looking to learn about these particular sessions. I'm sure Mr. Stebbins is a great guy and I know he used to post here, but the truth is there's better sources to spend your time on.

Besides the incoming issue of ESQ I've got in the mail, that's it for me for the foreseeable future. If I continue to track down sources and commentate on them it'll be after a break of at least a few months. The next step in this project for the immediate future is to proofread what I've got so far and organize the info from each source into a series of answers to SMiLE's biggest questions, in conjunction with reposting to my blog.

For the record, these appear to be the BB books I haven't touched yet. If anyone wants to carry the torch, do me a huge favor, this could be your reading list--summarize the relevant info and point out differences to the consensus narrative. Or, if you have access to any of these texts already, let us know if they're worth the effort/price of tracking down. Thanks in advance.

The Beach Boys: A Biography in Words & Pictures by Ken Barnes
The Beach Boys by John Tobler
The Beach Boys Silver Anniversary by John Milward
The Beach Boys (Rock and Roll Hall of Famers) by Mark Holcomb
The Beach Boys: America's Band by Johnny Morgan
The Beach Boys by The Beach Boys
The Beach Boys: The Essential Interviews by John D. Luerssen
The Beach Boys Archives Vol. 1 by Torrence Berry
Surf's Up! The Beach Boys On Record 1961-1981 by Brad Elliott
In The Studio with Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys by Stephen J. McParland

^This webpage (http://beachboys.com/booksI.html) was my source to see what BB books I was missing. If you notice anything there that wasn't already "reviewed" in this thread or listed here in my "suggested future reading list," it's because a) I did read them but they didn't have any novel info worth commenting on, b) they have a narrower focus that doesn't include SMiLE, c) I have it on good authority they're not worth my time, money or effort--either very basic info or badly written and error-prone.

[Julia]

I heard back from David Leaf directly, whom I respectfully contacted about the prospect of releasing the 6-hour "director's cut" of Beautiful Dreamer. While he did seem enthusiastic about the prospect of showing more footage someday, he could give no more specifics than that. I'd made it clear in my message that I understand all the legal and practical reasons this may not be within his power to do. Just letting everyone know that avenue has been sought. At least it's a bug in his ear that there's some interest in such a thing. Fingers crossed.

By the way, he never talked to Paul Jay Robbins either.

Alt Elements Theory ahead...

Also, I'm looking further into the "Country Air = Im in Great Shape = Air?" theory. I notice looking at the CA and VT cornucopia/demo lyrics, they're three sets of verses with no chorus and two-repeated lines ("get a breath of that country air/breathe the beauty of it everywhere" & variations of "I like you most of all/like me the most of all" with "my favor-ripe vega-table"). Veggies has those weird out of step verses ("If you brought a big, brown bag of them home / I'd jump up and down and hope you'd toss me a carrot" & "I tried to kick the ball but my tennie flew right off / I'm red as a beet 'cause I got so flustered"). What if "Air" would've filled this hole with the IIGS and if necessary BY lyrics? What if the original elements, the one from October where Veggies demo was recorded and IIGS with the same master #, the one Frank Holmes was referencing, was also the Barnyard suite in a way? Maybe the earliest Elements wasn't necessarily the 4 Greco-Roman expressed in their purest form so much as "exposed to the elements" IE outside IE nature IE the pastoral joys of living on a farm growing healthy veggies to eat while working the land. What if the earliest "element suite" wasn't something like Veggies, CA-IIGS, Barnyard and All Day? The fact that IIGS and CA talk about the early morning, maybe "'66 Dada" wouldn't have been about the rest of the day on the fields?

If this were true, Nov 4's "fitness elements" demos of swimming/fish chants, veggie chants (or the fight recorded later), breathing (or smog recorded later) would be Brian deciding to take the concept more literally, of splitting the Element and Barnyard suites into separate medleys, one the agricultural lifestyle and the other a bisociative/pictoral 4-part instrumental (maybe w/ just vocalizations) that brings the 4 classic elements to mind unambiguously. Then the Fire incident kills this idea and the concept morphs into 4 separate tracks over the next few albums (FB&BtW, CCW, CA, Smiley Veggies). Could this be the evolution of the elements concept? I submit that it was, more or less.

[Julia]

The Paul Jay Robbins tangent has been eating away at me lately--who was this guy, what did he do, what did he witness, why is he barely mentioned in any source, was he there as a friend (ala Danny Hutton or Mark Volman) or a journalist (ala Siegel and Oppenheim)? It sounds like he was in the friend group with VDP, Anderle and Vosse but why wasn't he offered a job like those three? How often did he stay around if he wasn't getting paid or writing an article about Brian for the Los Angeles Free Press? Why didn't David Leaf or other SMiLE documentarians get him on the record? Was he really hit in the head at the LA riots in November and is that where he dropped out of the scene? (Perhaps he was recovering in the hospital and recuperating at home after that, while everyone else stayed another 1-3 months depending on the individual.) He's not in the LAX photos to my recollection (I dont see his face nor see him listed in the captions) nor is he listed in the liner notes of the Psychedelic Sounds bootleg as a participant. If he was at the cutlery symphony, which cannot be determined with the info we have, it was his only appearance at a well-known iconic SMiLE event.

My guess? Robbins was probably a quiet person whose vibe wasn't right or who had more pressing things to do in his own life. He probably wasn't hired because he still had a full-time job of his own and there weren't any other roles for him in the BB organization. He probably came around a few times, or maybe just once or twice in October when he had some free time. It'd make sense he'd be allowed in if he was friends with at least two of the main participants (VDP, Anderle) and during the SMiLE era, if he wanted to be with his buds that meant going to Brian's house. If he was still around in early November, that knock on the head probably finished off his involvement. He must be a private person and has little if anything to say or I feel he'd have been approached or unilaterally offered his stories by now, online if not in a book or interview.

I did my best to look him up anyway and here's what I was able to find...

First off, on discogs, PJR is credited as a member of the choir on VDP's Song Cycle. He's credited as a co-writer on Van Dyke's single "Number Nine" (which involved translating the German from Beethoven's ninth).

https://ionamiller.weebly.com/sunset-strip.html
https://www.lltjournal.ca/index.php/llt/article/view/5499/6363

^These sources include a brief account of and by PJR at that LA protest. Apparently he was struck by a baton and saw a kid get beaten mercilessly by cops. (Both links appear to be of the same article by different names but the writing, at least the section about PJR, is identical.) He also is said to have been a member of some political action committee which would explain why he was at the protest outside of Brian's orders.

https://epub2pdf.obar.info/download/epubtopdf

^This source states that VDP introduced Robbins to Brian and it's implied at the same time as Vosse was brought in. My hunch tells me PJR was at that cutlery symphony dinner. That seems like it was the big "assemble the Posse" event, where everyone who'd be a regular or semi-regular was there. Besides the LA curfew thing, he participated in a civil rights march. I'd read the two Part III chapters here before and didn't find new info--what I'm quoting now comes from Chapter 6, which I'd skipped before. It's written by Dale Carter who explicitly claims to have interviewed PJR for the book. I guess that's one time he gave his story.

https://research.uca.ac.uk/2819/1/9%20Warhol%20proofed.pdf

^This article only briefly quotes a PJR piece and gives this citation for it: Paul Jay Robbins, ‘Andy Warhol and the night on fire’, Los Angeles Free Press (13 May, 1966). So, that's something he wrote, anyway.

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Firesign/4ccGEQAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=Robbins

^I can't investigate further but from what little of this book's preview I can see, he's listed as a FILM CRITIC for the LA Free Press. Which is strange since the two articles he wrote that I keep hearing of are about the Byrds and Dylan.

https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_American_Counterculture/poKhEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=robbins

^This too, is only a limited preview but we get a citation to an article he wrote called "The Strip is a Bummer."

https://www.jstor.org/action/doBasicSearch?Query=%22Paul+Jay+Robbins%22&so=rel&efqs=eyJjdHkiOlsiWTI5dWRISnBZblYwWldSZmMyVnlhV0ZzY3c9PSJdfQ%3D%3D

^This has free access to a bunch of issues of the LA Free Press with PJR attached. I tried to search the docs themselves for his name but nothing comes up even though he's credited in the metadata. I quickly skimmed one or two but saw nothing. Someone else can take a deeper look if they want. I searched his name and Brian's as well as the BB simultaneously to see if he ever wrote an article about the SMiLE sessions but nothing came up. It doesn't appear as though JStor has the full directory of LAFP issues since we know from those earlier citations that PJR wrote articles dated 1966 but for some reason JStor only has issues from '65, '67 and like one from '68 (at least that have PJR as an attached name/author). So he may still have used the opportunity to give a contemporary account in his publication, and if so I think this may be yet another "Holy Grail" of SMiLE. Imagine a "Fourth Gospel," a contemporaneous account by a first-hand witness, that's gone unsung this entire time. Is it possible something like that could exist without anyone else ever mentioning it--I don't know and I want to find out. Even if PJR wasn't around for much, that may be a silver lining if he zeroes in on some session or details that others overlooked when trying to describe the grandeur of the entire saga in one article (and thereby recounting the same tired "greatest hits" package of Fire, Mike didn't like it, etc).

And if he didn't write an article...I don't know, somebody dropped the ball either him or the editor of LAFP who presumably wouldn't allow it, because...imagine being given the ultimate opportunity to watch the hottest man in pop music working on his would-be magnum opus AS A JOURNALIST IN AN UNDERGROUND COUNTERCULTURE PAPER and just not doing anything with it. Hell, even if he wasn't at Brian's very much, as friends with Anderle and VDP you'd think he'd be able to ask them about the most anticipated album of the year--wouldn't that be a major scoop for the LAFP. Like, what other article was he working on that could possibly top that?? Come to think of it, why wasn't it PJR breaking the stories that ended up appearing in Fusion, Cheetah and Crawdaddy up to two years later? Unless there's extenuating circumstances I don't know, it feels like he missed out on a career-defining scoop, honestly. Very interesting conundrum, this is...

https://www.jstor.org/action/doBasicSearch?Query=%22Brian+Wilson%22&scope=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&so=old

^For the sake of thoroughness, I checked the LAFP archives on JStor with just Brian's name, not PJR. Same thing, 1966 is skipped over for some reason.

https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/10-july-15-1966/bob-dylan-as-dylan/
https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/11-july-30-1966/bob-dylan-as-dylan/
https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/12-august-15-1966/bob-dylan-as-dylan/

^Probably the most well-known article PJR wrote, interviewing Bob Dylan.

https://musicianguide.com/biographies/1608001562/Byrds-The.html
^Of the Byrds, PJR is said to have written: "Their singular method is to unite, in a dynamic and irresistible adventure, the techniques and honesty of folk music, the joy and immediacy of r & r, and the virtuosity of jazz.... What the Byrds signify ... is a concept deeply applied to unification and empathy and a rich joy of life.... Dancing with the Byrds becomes a mystic loss of ego and tangibility; you become pure energy someplace between sound and motion and the involvement is total."

[BJL]

The Beach Boys: A Biography in Words & Pictures by Ken Barnes
The Beach Boys by John Tobler
The Beach Boys Silver Anniversary by John Milward
The Beach Boys (Rock and Roll Hall of Famers) by Mark Holcomb
The Beach Boys: America's Band by Johnny Morgan
The Beach Boys by The Beach Boys
The Beach Boys: The Essential Interviews by John D. Luerssen
The Beach Boys Archives Vol. 1 by Torrence Berry
Surf's Up! The Beach Boys On Record 1961-1981 by Brad Elliott
In The Studio with Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys by Stephen J. McParland

^This webpage (http://beachboys.com/booksI.html) was my source to see what BB books I was missing. If you notice anything there that wasn't already "reviewed" in this thread or listed here in my "suggested future reading list," it's because a) I did read them but they didn't have any novel info worth commenting on, b) they have a narrower focus that doesn't include SMiLE, c) I have it on good authority they're not worth my time, money or effort--either very basic info or badly written and error-prone.

Hi Julia,

I have The Beach Boys by the Beach Boys and just scanned through the Smile chapter. 99% sure there's no knew info there, but I'm sharing a folder with images of the chapter by direct message if you're interested. The one thing you might want to take a look at if you haven't already seen it somewhere else is the Derek Taylor articles "The Beach Boys: Maverick Millionaires" reproduced in full on pg. 231. It has the ring of genuine observation to me, and gives some insight into Brian and Mike's working relationship, suggesting that Mike was becoming more interested and involved in the business side of things in the mid-60s and noting the difficulty of making decisions by consensus without a manager. Also Mike's quotes on the facing page reiterate the point you made earlier in the thread (I can't remember which source) that Derek Taylor played a big role in making the England tour a success. Also an interesting quote from Carl saying he wishes Brian could have seen how well received their music was in England, suggesting that it might have helped him keep his confidence up.

[BJL]

The Beach Boys: A Biography in Words & Pictures by Ken Barnes
The Beach Boys by John Tobler
The Beach Boys Silver Anniversary by John Milward
The Beach Boys (Rock and Roll Hall of Famers) by Mark Holcomb
The Beach Boys: America's Band by Johnny Morgan
The Beach Boys by The Beach Boys
The Beach Boys: The Essential Interviews by John D. Luerssen
The Beach Boys Archives Vol. 1 by Torrence Berry
Surf's Up! The Beach Boys On Record 1961-1981 by Brad Elliott
In The Studio with Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys by Stephen J. McParland

^This webpage (http://beachboys.com/booksI.html) was my source to see what BB books I was missing. If you notice anything there that wasn't already "reviewed" in this thread or listed here in my "suggested future reading list," it's because a) I did read them but they didn't have any novel info worth commenting on, b) they have a narrower focus that doesn't include SMiLE, c) I have it on good authority they're not worth my time, money or effort--either very basic info or badly written and error-prone.

Okay, I don't know why I addressed that last post to you like an email, Julia  

Did you read the Smile chapter in Timothy White's The Nearest Faraway Place? (It's on archive.org). If you haven't, that's worth taking a look, I think. Nothing that's going to, like, shift the narrative, but White was really interested in Van Dyke Parks and writes about Parks place in the industry in the mid-60s and his connections to Warner Bros and maybe has a bit of a different angle on it.

[Julia]

Continuing on the hunt for a hypothetical PJR article about SMiLE in the Los Angeles Free Press...

First, I combed the Internet Archive of what could be gleamed from searching his name, as well as the name of the LAFP itself in conjunction with "Beach Boys" or "Brian Wilson".

https://archive.org/details/los-angeles-free-press-1966-11-18/mode/2up?q=beach+boys

^I found this issue from Nov 18 1966, less than a week after the LA riots where their reporter was bludgeoned and the damn paper doesn't even mention the poor guy's name. (According to a search function for "Paul Jay Robbins.") What a load that is, you'd think they'd at least acknowledge their own employee's noble stand and hardship. Just for fun I searched for Brian and the BB names too, nothing.

https://archive.org/details/waitingforsunstr0000hosk/page/128/mode/1up?q=%22Paul+Jay+Robbins%22

^In the process, I found this other book about the greater LA music scene of the time with some info on SMiLE. Nothing earth-shattering as you might suspect, but it's there. One more potential source we can cross off the list. The most interesting angle this account brings to the table is the author's speculation Brian was spooked by the failure of Spector's latest single (River Deep Mountain High) and sabotaging his own album so he'd never have to see it fail. The author claims the final session was April 14 (a date for Veggies, according to AGD's site, the last session before Dada) which...honestly, while technically an "unorthodox" take I think has a lot of merit. It's actually a pretty prescient observation on the part of an otherwise surface level "recounting the usual bits" writer, who elsewhere says Brian "fried his brain on acid."

https://archive.org/details/los-angeles-free-press-1966-09-09/los-angeles-free-press-1966-09-09.pdf

^Here's a September 66 issue of the LAFP. It allows searching the text but the only mention of PJR is of a general staff credit. So we can rule out this issue having anything.

https://archive.org/details/popgeniusofandyw0000sche/page/477/mode/1up?q=%22Paul+Jay+Robbins%22

^A citation for his review of an Andy Warhol expo, May '66.

https://archive.org/details/venicewestbeatge00mayn/page/161/mode/1up?q=%22Paul+Jay+Robbins%22

^Reference to an article on Venice Beach he wrote called "Op, Pop and Slop" that apparently was so controversial the paper issued an apology.

https://archive.org/details/van-dyke-parks-song-cycle-richard-henderson_202011/page/101/mode/1up?q=%22Paul+Jay+Robbins%22

^He wrote liner notes for Song Cycle but this book doesn't mention singing on the album specifically.

Outside the Internet Archive, I found the following through browsing Google for a few hours, searching various combos of "Paul Jay Robbins" and "Los Angeles Free Press" separately or together, as well as LAFP Archive, etc.

https://libguides.csudh.edu/los-angeles-free-press-collection#s-lg-box-30861993

^This is the most promising archive I could find surfing google for a few hours. I contacted them and politely asked if they have any PJR authored articles in the vaults, specifically anything related to SMiLE/Brian Wilson.

http://www.afka.net/Mags/Los_Angeles_Free_Press.htm

^Another, lesser archive.

https://www.jstor.org/action/doBasicSearch?Query=%22Beach%2Bboys%22%2B%22smile%22&scope=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&so=old

^A link to the JStor archives of LAFP, searching keywords "Beach Boys" and "smile." I haven't found anything yet but it's a thing. The closest is the June 9 67 issue having an article (not by PJR) about Carl's draft issues.

https://www.adsausage.com/blog/los-angeles-free-press-archive

^And this. I didn't see anything, I left a comment asking if they had what I'm looking for.

Considering how hard it is to find anything in this vein, I'm thinking my hypothetical PJR article is just a pipe dream. I'll still keep a lookout but I think if it existed someone else would've dug it up by now. It seems like PJR was a lesser contributor to the publication, first of all, with only the Bob Dylan articles living on and popularly referenced. It's said he had to fight to get his Byrds concert reviews published, and while the paper is said to have included movie and music reviews from what few issues I've browsed I don't get the sense it was a big focus. The founder and editor of the LAFP (Art Kunkin) was apparently a socialist more concerned with community stuff, local culture and activism--at least that's what I've read and the impression I get. I could see the "lame" and decidedly not-counterculture-coded BBs coming off as too insignificant to write about.

Regardless of whether a PJR article on Brian exists, I wonder if the man had that intention when he was hanging around that scene or not. I'd assume so--like I've said it would've been a MAJOR scoop, his friends were part of it, why the f*** WOULDN'T you want to write about it--but maybe he was there unofficially as VDP's friend. It'd track with Danny Hutton and Mark Volman, who had no reason to be there but were friends with the participants. It really does just seem like a waste though--I'd love to be able to get him on the record more substantially than that one chapter of the GV book, which left a lot unsaid. He had a career-defining opportunity and did nothing with it, or was prevented from doing so by a potentially prejudiced editor. That's kind of a minor tragedy within the greater tragedy that is SMiLE.

[Julia]

Hi Julia,

I have The Beach Boys by the Beach Boys and just scanned through the Smile chapter. 99% sure there's no knew info there, but I'm sharing a folder with images of the chapter by direct message if you're interested. The one thing you might want to take a look at if you haven't already seen it somewhere else is the Derek Taylor articles "The Beach Boys: Maverick Millionaires" reproduced in full on pg. 231. It has the ring of genuine observation to me, and gives some insight into Brian and Mike's working relationship, suggesting that Mike was becoming more interested and involved in the business side of things in the mid-60s and noting the difficulty of making decisions by consensus without a manager. Also Mike's quotes on the facing page reiterate the point you made earlier in the thread (I can't remember which source) that Derek Taylor played a big role in making the England tour a success. Also an interesting quote from Carl saying he wishes Brian could have seen how well received their music was in England, suggesting that it might have helped him keep his confidence up.

Thanks for informing me about that source specifically--that's one I was more enthusiastic about from that list. It's interesting to think the issue that arguably led to the downfall of the Beatles also affected the BBs. In another life it might've been cool if Anderle managed them but he might've been too close to Brian (suggesting he go solo) for that to work.

Okay, I don't know why I addressed that last post to you like an email, Julia 

Did you read the Smile chapter in Timothy White's The Nearest Faraway Place? (It's on archive.org). If you haven't, that's worth taking a look, I think. Nothing that's going to, like, shift the narrative, but White was really interested in Van Dyke Parks and writes about Parks place in the industry in the mid-60s and his connections to Warner Bros and maybe has a bit of a different angle on it.

Hey it didnt read overly formal to me at all! Thank you very much for the PMs too.

I did. No offense to it as a source it just didn't say anything novel I found worth commenting on. You're right the VDP stuff is new and thorough though, I just wasn't as interested in that aspect of the story when I first read it. I looked it over again at your mention and one thing that's notable is, in his account, it sounds like the band unilaterally decided the music shouldn't be released, when the prevailing consensus narrative is the group was skeptical but willing (if begrudgingly) and Brian finally blindsided them again by canceling it himself.

[Julia]

Quick update...

https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8ff41bf#access-and-use

^This is a more easily searchable version of the California State University archive. The only potentially relevant article from PJR is titled "The Sound of Sunlight Rising," which is undated. Everything else deals with Bob Dylan and comes from 1965. I heard back from one of the archivists almost immediately and they said they could pull the material for me as early as Wednesday (today). I don't know if that means I'd have to go there in person or they're willing to share online (I asked in a follow-up, the wording seems to imply the former) but they seem very helpful and I asked if they could confirm if the article is about Brian/the BBs which I'm sure they ought to be able to do whether I have to go to California to read the entire thing or not. If it can only be accessed in person, I'll spread the word to every BB fan community I can find and hopefully someone nearby can read and summarize the damn thing. We'll see--this could be another "Al Capone's safe" or perhaps a major discovery in SMiLE archaeology. Definitely worth checking just in case. I tried googling the name of the article along with "robbins" and "los angeles free press" but nothing comes up on Google.

I also got a response from that lesser archive of the LAFP too--nothing. The guy who answered gave me Mark London's instagram as a "here's a person to ask BB questions" tip, but unless he also happens to be a major collector of vintage 60s underground papers I don't think the cover artist for BWPS can help me on this.

Random Thoughts on the Elements' Development & Album's Structure

It occurs to me now that my earlier Elements theory of a "country/outdoor living" medley (where we don't necessarily get the classic 4 unambiguously represented) morphing into 4 non-lyrical instrumentals and/or experimental vocalizations (or skits) would parallel the trend of other tracks if true, including Wonderful/WC/CIFOTM, which changed drastically in order to be more explicitly bisociative/pictorial. I take this as an additional assurance I'm on the right track, and that the overriding "problem" with each song was "how can this arrangement paint a clear, unambiguous image in the listener's mind" as much as "how do I order all the pieces together in sequence?" Writing a good melody came first, then getting it on tape and making sure it worked in and of itself, then tweaking instrumentation to be more impressionistic was the final step.

If I haven't pointed it out already: Heroes, Wonderful and SU are more explicitly narrative than the other tracks. They tell the stories of people's major milestones, recognizing a problem in society or coming to a life milestone and then ending on catharsis. Meanwhile: WC, VT, GV are "odes" to objects that the speaker has strong feelings about--there's no story, just enjoying a pleasant vibe. BYS/IIGS, OMP and Elements tell a story indirectly with repurposed lyrics or seemingly unconnectable, discordant melodies. (I suspect Fire was a metaphor for personal tragedy, anxiety or heartbreak while the others would build back to positivity afterward.) Worms, CE and possibly CIFOTM are seemingly pleasant events in the verse or chorus (which for the first two means a beautiful cabin to call one's own or exciting cross-country trip) intercut with a nagging conscience reminding the speaker of the past horrors which made it all possible.

Then Heroes, CE, Worms are explicitly historical--they clearly take place in specific eras and locations in US history. Wonderful, CIFOTM and SU are about parents' and kids' relationships with each other; they aren't explicitly removed from the Americana umbrella, but could easily exist outside of it too. BYS/IIGS, OMP and arguably VT or WC are celebrations of rustic pastoral living, where they could exist outside of US history too despite always being thought of as part of an Americana side/suite. (Like, people have lived on farms from Mount Vernon to the Dust Bowl and beyond--these songs can take place in any era.) Then Fire, Dada, arguably WC or VT (whichever you cede to "rustic country suite," keep the other here) could be thought of as elementals. This is a blueprint for a "four suite" SMiLE, more balanced than the "3 suite" BWPS/TSS/Reum model and these groupings are not a stretch either. I think history/agriculture and innocence/elements are naturally paired most often, while I myself have begun splitting traditionally-considered "element pieces" between sides recently. But I think there's a lot of sense in merging US history with the Elements: how Fire is a reference to a historical fire, WC and CE are similar celebrations to a nice new pad with quiet verses paired against loud choruses, plus Dada was a Heroes fragment. (The agriculture/innocence pairing that must follow is a bit more awkward though, in my opinion.) Really, I think the strongest "new" grouping among these 4 pieces would be a history/innocence side 1 and agriculture/elements side 2. The former would pair historical mistakes in "raising" the future with parental shortcomings--the need to forgive your ancestors and do better for the sake of future generations. Then the latter would basically mash what I consider "early elements" with "later elements," IE the natural world at its most empowering AND scary. One side is making peace with our past, familial and historical, despite its flaws--the other is about doing the same for nature, how it can make us healthy or ruin us if we abuse it. 

[Julia]

I still haven't heard back, but I understand Windows was down for a lot of people yesterday so, I'm just hanging tight. I'll share when I get a response.

I'm unsure of which way it could go. I was beginning to doubt, thinking maybe this not-Dylan article was the Byrds concert review, but I found another source citing that article, which called it "Byrds Live" and his Andy Warhol article (the other subject I know he touched) has a different name ("Andy Warhol and the Night on Fire") as well. So if this article isn't about the BBs, it'll at least reveal one more thing this guy wrote. I searched this article name on the Internet Archive too--with and without every permutation of PJR's name--and nothing came up there either. This collection is the only mention of it I can find.

Another development, I found out that PJR republished his Bob Dylan interview in another periodical called "Fifth Estate" but googling this shows a bibliography just as sparse as the rest of this man's career. All we have are those same Dylan interviews.

New Mix Ideas Based on Yesterday's 4-Suite Thing

I made some new SMiLE sequences for reference later. These are named after, or in the style of, some Valentinian Gnostic Aeons. The first is a further modification of the Sophia/Sandalphon structure, taking what I've come to like best from both the more I think of it.

The earlier prospective album cover art, again, included: a Luna Park gate and nighttime amusement park against a cityscape, of I Ran and CIFOTM / the virginal young woman of Wonderful and possibly Heroes / the piano on the shore, like the sandbox of Surfs Up / the Indian archer, who I intend to recast in a WH-esque stained glass window aesthetic, the "church of the American Indian"

New cover ideas for the next four might be: veggie drawings / giant WC as a prison to a guy/ two trains golden spike for CE / the Beach Boys holding a giant firehose in front of a fire truck, in reference to the Surfer Girl and Surfin Safari covers in a Fire context.

And each one can have its own trigram printed on the front cover, where the picture is holographic! It'll never get manufactured but that'd be cool. Seven colors of the rainbow and white vinyl for Soteria (the one I'm most enthusiastic to try!)

Dumb Angel, Soteria

[You're Welcome] Heroes and Villains
My Only Sunshine
Cabin Essence
Do You Dig Worms? [Snippet of Taxi Cabber over fade, ~19 seconds]
Mrs O'Leary's Cow [Snippet or rest of Taxi Cabber slowed down]
Barnyard Suite [IWBA/Workshop/Barnyard]
Vega-Tables

Second Day [Water Chant/Dada/Breathing]
Wind Chimes
Wonderful [including I Ran]
Child is Father of the Man
Surf's Up [including Prayer]
And Then We'll Have World Peace

Dumb Angel, Logos

[Veggie Fight] Vega-Tables
Heroes
CIFOTM
OMP
CE

(Prayer) WC
GV
Worms
SU
Elements

Dumb Angel, Synesis

Heroes/Worms/Wonderful/CE/Prayer-SU
CIFOTM/Dada/WC/Fire/IWBA-FN/VT

Dumb Angel, Zoe

Fight-Veggies/Heroes/Wonderful/SU-Prayer/GV
Worms/CIFOTM/Cow/OMP/BYS/CE

Dumb Angel, Tharros

Heroes/Worms/CE/SU/Wonderful/CIFOTM
VT/GV/WC/OMP/BYS/Elements

Dumb Angel, Agape

Heroes/Won/SU/BYS/OMP/Elements
VT/GV/WC/Worms/CIFOTM/CE

Dumb Angel, Aletheia

Heroes/Wonderful/Worms/CIFOTM/CE/SU
WC/OMP/Fire/Dada/BYS/VT

Dumb Angel, Charis 

Fire/Heroes/Dada/Worms/WC/CE
VT/BYS/Wonderful/OMP/CIFOTM/SU

[Julia]

Still nothing. I'll wait a a bit longer and put another bug in their ear, then if I still don't get a response a few more days after that, I'll spread the word to other BB communities that there's potentially a lost SMiLE article in the CSUDH vaults and hopefully someone can get through.

In the meantime, these are some mock ups I had Gemini make of a "Brian imprisoned by Wind Chimes" cover art. I know using AI generated art is frowned upon but Im not a visual artist. If anyone else wanted to take a crack at the concept with traditional means I'd love to see it. Think of these more like a proof of concept.

[BJL]

Still nothing. I'll wait a a bit longer and put another bug in their ear, then if I still don't get a response a few more days after that, I'll spread the word to other BB communities that there's potentially a lost SMiLE article in the CSUDH vaults and hopefully someone can get through.

Hopefully they will be willing to pull the article for you and at least confirm if it's about the Beach Boys! I'll be in LA in January and can check it out then if it's still not resolved, but hopefully you'll have an answer before then

[Julia]

Still nothing. I'll wait a a bit longer and put another bug in their ear, then if I still don't get a response a few more days after that, I'll spread the word to other BB communities that there's potentially a lost SMiLE article in the CSUDH vaults and hopefully someone can get through.

Hopefully they will be willing to pull the article for you and at least confirm if it's about the Beach Boys! I'll be in LA in January and can check it out then if it's still not resolved, but hopefully you'll have an answer before then

Thank you so much, it's awesome to know there are people like you who'd be willing to make the pilgrimage! Thankfully though, I did hear back late yesterday and unfortunately the article in question is about a different band called The Rising Son. The archivist did say for the record I wouldn't have had to go to CA to see it, but obviously it's of no use to me if it's not about SMiLE.

Apparently they don't have a complete collection of the LAFP, and are in the process of digitizing everything so their directory isn't completely thorough yet. They did say they "don't think they have every issue from 1966-67." So the dream of a PJR article about SMiLE is still alive but on life support. I'm increasingly skeptical but would love to be proven wrong. I'm thinking now that if such a thing existed we'd have probably seen it already, and it seems like PJR must not have been a particularly prolific contributor (or he has the misfortune of his articles tending to be only in missing issues, because the digitized issues of LAFP I've seen never include his writings). I hear anecdotes of how he had to fight the editor to get his Byrds concert review published and it makes me think he wasn't exactly writing the kind of stuff that was Art Kunkin's cup of tea, plus they don't even mention him in the issue about the LA curfew riots where he got hit in the head (unless the search function was broken, his name didn't come up). It's weird. The only articles he has that seem to have survived and are semi-widely reprinted are the Bob Dylan interviews.

I still think this is a tangent worth pursuing if for no other reason than thoroughness, but this is a guy who doesn't seem to have been particularly prolific, writing in a periodical that doesn't seem to have been too interested in music, whom everyone acknowledges was a "second tier" member of the Vosse Posse at best (he's only ever mentioned in passing or with a qualifier like "...and PJR to some extent") who doesn't seem to have stayed close in the way that Anderle/Williams and Vosse himself reunited to do interviews in the 90s and the BD doc as well as the TSS liner notes. I just get the distinct impression he wasn't really around much, influenced little, didn't have an official reason to stick around and the injury on 11/12 caused him to pull back if he was even still around by then at all. In any case, I can't do anything until or unless new issues of the LAFP turn up and are digitized.

I still can't help but wonder why, assuming there isn't an article out there, PJR didn't consider the SMiLE project worth writing about like he did for Dylan, the Byrds, Rising Son and Andy Warhol/the VU. Even if the music wasn't his style (what is he deaf?) it sounds like he was friends with Anderle/Vosse/VDP which should've convinced him there was something there, plus an easy scoop since they must have been willing to talk to a buddy! How could he just sit on a story like that--once it got canceled too, that should've been a great opportunity to interview his pals and get them on the record for such a massive "scandal." Or, if he did do any of this, I wonder why his writing is so much more obscure than any other contemporary article on the subject. Is it just because it wasn't on Priore's radar for LLVS? But the Vosse Fusion piece wasn't there either and that's still well-known and widely circulated among fans. If it exists and Priore didn't know about it, could that imply there are other SMiLE articles out there languishing in obscurity, waiting to be rediscovered in a similar manner to what I attempted to do? Probably. 

A person could go crazy thinking about it. Maybe I already have... (I just really love a good rabbit hole, especially lost media and unresolved mysteries--in that vein SMiLE is the gift that keeps on giving, even outside how great the music is or the personal connection I have with it, how it brought me back to spirituality.)

[Julia]

So I got my copy of ESQ issue #68, with the arm turning on an old-fashioned radio on the cover. I'll take this article by article (I'm gonna skip some of the more ancillary ones though)...

1. VDP Interviewed by David Beard

Van wanted to paint images in the listener's head, like the Greek concept of "Phantasm," which sounds similar to Brian's bisociative/pictorial thing I mention so often. He chose words that painted an image, not ones that necessarily made literal sense.

The way Van says "I thought it was important to capture the Western movement, the conquering of this continent and beyond--from Plymouth to Hawaii" feels significant to me. He could've said "we" but specifically says "I" and we know for the most part that Van picks his words carefully. Plus, a few noted instances aside ("tenny" in Veggies, "too tough to cry" in SU), Brian seems to have given him a good deal of lyrical freedom. I've speculated in the past that the "genocide of the Indians" / "manifest destiny" sub-theme was Van's idea and this quote would strengthen my hypothesis if true. It just seems to make sense, since Van is always into Americana and topical geopolitical commentary (Tokyo Rose) in his work while Brian is never so overtly serious or "white guilt" or "downer" as that. Brian, during and after SMiLE, is the fun eclectic interests guy, not the "race relations" guy. This would also serve as an elegant solution to the problem of why he and Van were butting heads as the project went on. (Mike sowing dissent and Brian bossing Van around certainly helped, but I think Anderle's quote of "Van wanted more sophistication/Brian wanted simplicity" and Van's insistence he left the arrangements to Brian are only compatible under this context; David misspoke, it was thematic not instrumental differences of opinion.) As Brian came to want a more explicitly fun, humorous, feel-good album, he realized Van's "we destroyed an entire culture" vibe just wasn't gonna work anymore. It makes perfect sense to me, anyway.

Heroes was the first song, reiterated yet again, and that established the "overton window" of the whole project (my words), the center of gravity from which all other pieces conceptually orbited. VDP explicitly says everything that came later "tried to connect to that scene." Bicycle Rider, rather than an actual guy riding a bike across America (a commonly parroted, misguided framing device people use to describe the album) was meant to evoke poker players using Bicycle brand cards at a seedy cantina. We know from other sources BR was actually in Heroes first, then Worms, then Heroes again, and it seems like putting it in Worms (a song about taking a boat ride to Hawaii) ruined the original intent of the piece. Worms, in this context, feels like a song that just never fully came together musically or conceptually. It's an example of how the original intentions of the music could get muddled with all this shuffling around. 

Sadly, VDP admits it's hard to remember exactly what they were trying to do all these years later, "so much nuance is lost."

Page 3 of the book, the point is driven home--VDP UNAMBIGUOUSLY ADMITS THE AMERICANA THEME WAS HIS IDEA. As clear and definitive proof we'll ever get that my long-held theory was correct! Van brought Western expansion and US historical references to SMiLE, and honestly that kinda explains everything if you ask me. When Brian went in the Smiley direction, what did he jettison? The manifest destiny stuff, as much as possible (Heroes was too far in the pipeline to just quit, Wonderful/Veggies work outside that context, WC I think conceptually predates Van's influence, the rest of the songs were reworked or new material). Anyway, according to Van, Brian was (initially) amiable because he'd gone as far as he could with boy/girl love songs. (I'd agree, after GV anything else in that category feels like an afterthought--Brian needed to expand as an artist and knew it...until he didn't.)

The way Van talks about Brian's sporadic, disconnected writing process at this time seems to imply Brian's quote in the TSS webisodes (where he credited Van with teaching him to work in a modular style) is wrong. Honestly, this was pretty obvious to me especially because GV was well on its way by the time the two started collaborating. That quote I always dismissed as "Brian being Brian."

Van says this "animated" style of work made him think of Chuck Jones Looney Toons, which ties in with his praise for the Holmes cover and how that influenced his vision for the album. VDP admits he had no idea where it was going but trusted in the creative process, he let the music take them where it would. He had no "grand plan," so the Western thing was more of a general idea, not a carefully planned "we start with this song, into that song/we should have songs about each region or era of the US" kind of thing. Fair enough, this all makes sense to me.

Van, like Brian in Earcandy '04, explicitly denies a Zen connection. The Tobelman theory, while charmingly eccentric and passionate, is officially dead. I still think the site is a cool bizarro work of Web 1.0 retro art, but he's similar to Priore in that he started off with a theory he liked then selectively chose/ignored evidence to make it work, and this shoddy investigation has had an outsized, undeserved influence on SMiLE discourse for too long. (It's even included as an external link on the wikipedia page, which is ridiculous.) We need a new paradigm of what the album is/was, and I hope my research may contribute to such a seismic shift in perspective.

Van reiterates he never asked Brian to change a note. Also, the music always came first, he calls it "the creative department" over the words, the words were always in reaction to the music. Again he says the words were impressionistic.

Van is aware of criticisms to his words (I recall it was "cool" for awhile to trash them on the forums, with the Kokomoists now governing the shadow-realm leading the charge there, perhaps to exonerate their patron saint). To this Van asks "what words would work better" rhetorically. Honestly, I'm on his side on this one. I can't imagine more perfect lyrics to CE, Wonderful, Heroes and Surf. Even outtakes like HGS have very interesting words. (I've tried writing lyrics to I Ran and CIFOTM in his style but I'm never satisfied my work matches his.) Van's lyrics are not too far removed from what Dylan was doing or the Beatles and Joseph Byrd would do the next two years. I always felt this was a bad faith criticism that says more about the complainers than it does Van's work. And I'm not even a huge VDP fan, I think he can be a bit pompous in interviews and his solo work largely isn't my cup of tea, but him and Brian balanced each other perfectly, like Jerry Seinfeld's corniness and Larry David's cynicism on Seinfeld.

Veggies was inspired by Curtis Springer, apparently a pirate radio late night host who advocated healthy eating.

VDP didn't like the name "Worms" and felt changing it to Roll Plymouth Rock was an appropriate decision. I disagree. Not sure who decided silliness on an album called SMiLE about HUMOR with a kiddie cartoon cover was somehow inappropriate. Hell, not sure who decided songs have to be named for their choruses either. One of the cooler things about SMiLE for me was how it threw out all the rules including naming conventions.

Van repeats the whole "asserting our Americanness" against the British invasion concept, reminding people it was ok to be an American despite the embarrassment of Vietnam and police brutality against civil rights marchers. He repeats the SU story more or less how it is in the 2005 Priore book, where the song was already written when Dennis heard it (minus the handful of syllables that included the title-drop), he asked "what's that called" and Brian asks Van what to call it, and Van says "Surf's Up!"

Van talks about SMiLE in terms of "cartoon consciousness" and says Holmes immediately "got it" when he drew in a cartoony style. This isn't new info but he repeats it here.

Van worked for Brian--he was hired by Brian, collaborated with Brian and followed his vision to the end (as opposed to the BBs). He left when he felt he wasn't being used productively anymore, asserts he made the right call, and clarifies he left "after Barnyard, I never made it to Fire." I notice there's a Barnyard session just before Liferaft (I suspect where the rift really began) as well as the Humble Harv demo on Nov 4 right before some scattered SU sessions, OMP and the Veggie Fight before Fire. This implies Van could've been gone or half checked out a lot earlier than has been supposed.

Asked when he left, Van discusses the same stuff as in the Priore 2005 book--the lawsuit distracted Brian, too many people were around so they didn't have that private space to work, he didn't know what the project was anymore or where it was going. Curiously, he doesn't mention Mike or drama within the BBs. Van says the music got too abstract for him--I suspect he's talking about stuff like Talking Horns which would fit the timeline of when he says he left. (It's been one of the biggest surprises for me, that Brian was the avant garde abstract one and Van was more inclined to do a traditional pop album, despite each man's reputation to the contrary.) I notice looking back through my notes there's no proof Van was at those Nov OMP sessions either. Could this mean Van was more or less gone even before the CE incident?

2. Michael Vosse Interview from our own, Cam Mott

(There's a Brian interview about CE that's as illuminating as you'd expect of the Big Guy. Nothing to comment on there EXCEPT Brian independently corroborates that the American history thing was Van's idea. Page 11. I think the point is made--without Van we wouldn't have the Americana stuff, for better and for worse.)

Vosse recounts the same meeting at Brian's he described in Fusion--Van invited him and Anderle over, they heard some demos of SMiLE and a dub of the not-yet-released GV. That was meeting #1, meeting #2 was for a TeenSet article about GV where they talked about the spiritual component of humor, then Brian called and offered him a job.

Vosse's first assignment was to record water sounds all over LA and he reported back "almost daily" for awhile. This implies that Brian's want for sound effects or even raw material for an entire song made of water goes back earlier than even I suspected--October, not November/December. Vosse also recorded sounds around Brian's house, like pebbles rolling down the incline of the driveway. The taxi cabber thing is mentioned, apparently it was an hour-long interview and Brian asked about the guy's experiences and opinions, not just directions around Chicago. So it would seem we only heard a small snippet of this on the PsychSounds bootleg. It's also stated Brian thought the guy was hilarious and wanted to capture the humor of the conversation. Then after that, Vosse tried to negotiate to get a BB movie made with the big studios. Nothing came of it and he doesn't mention the tantalizing animated "special" in this context.

Brian is said to have listened to anything new in RnR, further evidence he would've heard Revolver by the time Seconds came out. I think calling either that or RS "religious" is weird, but if either fits that description it's Revolver for sure.

Vosse helped arrange use of the fire station and truck for the GV video.

Very disappointingly, Cam asks directly about the comedy skits (he even mentions Hal Blaine veggies, trapped in a piano and liferaft ("a skit about getting lost in the dark at Columbia")) and Vosse gives a lame non-answer. "The Hal Blaine thing is in the Teen Set article. There was a lot of humor in the lives of Brian..." No new insight, no smoking gun "oh yeah, Brian was gonna use those to close out the sides!" but oh well. Cam even follows up to ask about Brian's intentions for them and Vosse brushes him off again. Cam asks about the Nov 4 chants and also doesn't get a very good answer. Vosse doesn't clarify what they were for, how serious Brian was about them, just that it's another example of Brian's idiosyncratic way for working, etc. When asked if there were other such recordings, Vosse says "plenty" but can't describe what the purpose was. I'm starting to think the Psychedelic Sounds bootleg is just scratching the surface, especially when Vosse mentions they played with paper clips and paper cups.

When asked specifically about the LA riots and unrest, Vosse mentions specific instances of police brutality but doesn't include PJR at all. (I'm telling ya, the guy was on the outskirts of that friend group at best.)

Cam even makes the Zappa connection and asks if the two interacted, but Vosse can't say. (Cam's really nailing it with these interview questions! It's a shame Vosse seems to have forgotten or grown less interested in the more off-beat aspects of the project since 1969. It's also a shame Cam himself seemed less interested when I came to the scene carrying the torch for these same subtopics...)

Vosse recalls live performance of the material was a topic of discussion amongst the group but doesn't really elaborate. When asked about the other guys he mentions only that Carl and his wife came over to Brian's house more often than any other. (It's significant Carl's wife and brother are in the LAX photo but no other BB spouse.) The vocal sessions are described as "arduous."

When asked about some of the SMiLE songs specifically, Vosse gives mainly surface level, one sentence answers. The most interesting insight comes from The Elements. Here, Vosse states that the Fire myth was mostly bullshit in his own opinion and also that his water recordings were connected to the song, in case there was any doubt. (You may be surprised--I've had posters argue passionately that SU was water because of the title and the Vosse recordings were for the "humor album" alone. Some people refuse to accept Occam's razor if their favorite theory is at stake but I digress.)

Vosse goes out of his way to say Van's lyrics were the equal to Brian's music and without "that creative parity" SMiLE wouldn't have been as amazing or even exist. (I agree--there's no guarantee we'd get a Pet Sounds 2 if Brian were left to his own devices and I think the anti-VDP naysayers don't appreciate that. Brian could've just stagnated earlier without a creative guy on his level to push him in an inspiring new direction. The industry is littered with people who struck gold with one album and followed it up with mediocre swill after.)

When asked about Brian's modular technique and whether this signals that he had lost control of the process, Vosse admits there was no grand plan but dismisses the notion that that's a bad thing or even unusual. I think to some extent he's right, he points to cases where great movie moments were found in actor's improv or the editing room which is very fair. To some extent, a lot of collaborative art is working around seeming problems (art through adversity) and letting things happen organically. But also, I think most filmmakers would say that it's a good idea to have some kinda plan going in--a finished script, storyboards, a general idea of what tone you want to impart. Then if you realize during the process that a particular actor is unexpectedly stealing the show, or a better idea comes to you, you can let things develop naturally from that foundation. But it's pretty rare for filmmakers to go in blind and it not resulting in a total mess. I'm less versed on music production but I imagine that can be more free-form since you don't have to worry about an overarching narrative that makes sense and there aren't hundreds of crewmen, extras and expensive cast who are getting paid every day the shoot drags on. Even then, I think there's a big difference between a band doing some jam sessions and fleshing out the highlights versus Brian's 30 sessions for Heroes, rerecording the same parts over and over again. I love the guy but I absolutely think he got carried away with pedantic perfectionism and many sources corroborate that.

Vosse is very dismissive of SS, saying "[it] sorta fit into the 'better than nothing' zone at the time." No mention of coming around to it, tying some of its concepts back into SMiLE's foundation, trying to justify Brian's thought process. No one ever wants to talk about this poor album.

^Cam Mott did fantastic here, he asked everything I would've and pushed for follow-ups when given a bad answer. (Not that this helped but he tried.) It just sucks Vosse wouldn't or couldn't elaborate on certain tangents but I guess after 40 years it's hard to remember something that happened for a few months that amounted to nothing. This just shows how important it was to get these guys on the record ASAP--the picture painted by 1969 Vosse versus 2004 Vosse is night and day.

3. Jon Hunt Article "The Many Faces of SMiLE"

Not much to say here, this is your typical summation of the sessions by a reverent uber-fan. To my delight he focuses on the humor skits but doesn't have any new info to offer except that apparently Bob Gordon was there on Nov 4. I'm not sure what his source is, maybe just "Bob Gordon's Real Trip" which I'm not sure if that was recorded at the same time or comes from the same reel. To my immense satisfaction, Jon Hunt says "there's a relation between the water chanting by Brian's friends during Psychedelic Sounds and the finished water chant of Love to Say Dada." So, if the co-founder of the Smile Shop forum's intuition means anything, there you go. Add that to the list of evidence--direct or circumstantial--that Undersea Chant and Water chant were related. I still maintain the connection is very obvious to anyone who's not insistent on arguing in bad faith to service their own fan theory.

Hunt claims Bob Gordon's Real Trip was recorded by BG himself and includes crunching leaves, water and veggies. Also, apparently, Brian wanted to make an entire movie about water. He claims Brian recorded Little Red Book on 2/14 when AGD has it in April '68. (I go with AGD especially on this one.) He also describes the "Untitled Instrumental" Spanish Guitar ditty that we now know was from Friends-Era. Hunt comes to similar conclusions as I have--the skits would likely have been used as fodder for "link segments" between tracks and the sound/water recordings were bound for the Elements primarily. I wonder if the leaves might've been for Air, like water sounds for Water, Veggie chants/crunching and Fire crackling effects. What sounds like a tea kettle whistling (and Badman says such a thing was recorded) might've been water OR air--perhaps the bridge from one to the other!

4. Jules Siegel Interview by David Beard

(There's an article about that Curtis Howe medicine man who inspired Brian's veggie kick. I don't have anything to say on this. There's mini articles on the Chicago Fire, Grand Coulee Dam, Hawaii's takeover, etc.)

It's nice to see Siegel get a chance to speak, I think he's one of the more unfairly maligned figures in the story and the fact that Priore got like 3 essays in TSS and like 2 in the BWPS concert booklet while Siegel, PJR, Guy Webster and Bob Gordon didn't get any still drives me nuts. (To be fair, maybe some of these guys couldn't be reached or declined but ALL of them, BOTH times? I doubt it.) 

Maybe the biggest revelation is that Anderle brought Siegel onto the scene as well. This discounts a small theory I was crafting that Siegel was sent by the Saturday Evening Post independently--IE he wasn't explicitly wanted by anyone but it was too good a press opportunity to pass up. That said, unlike the others (VDP, Vosse, Anderle, PJR) Siegel wasn't a friend, he and Anderle met at a convention and David pitched writing a story about Brian. Considering the animosity that would develop between these two years later, it's ironic.

Siegel is asked about the Lifeboat tape and could've shed some light on my theory that Brian delegated the tasking of setting up the game to him...but nope. He just says it was probably recorded at Brian's house to the best of his recollection and that he tried listening to it years later but shut it off as it was so embarrassing. I gotta say, I'm kind of annoyed by these guys giving dismissive replies to these questions that are obviously very important to the journalists asking them and us fans who paid good money to get the answers. This was my dream scenario--Siegel having a chance to tell all about the Lifeboat tape--that's how big of a SMiLE nerd I am--and he just brushes it off. Cam Mott at least asked followup questions to try to get more out of the subject but unfortunately Mr. Beard just moves on immediately.

I guess we'll never know if the Liferaft game was Brian's idea or Siegel interloping but I now assume the former. I don't think it makes sense for Brian to assemble all these people to do a skit and then just let Jules pitch a random game idea while the tape's rolling without trying to regain control or stopping the recording. Vosse also clearly knew what Brian wanted to get from the session since he can be heard explaining to some of the girls after the take has broken down beyond repair (Brian is frustratingly playing the piano so loud that it's impossible to hear what he's saying, except "that's what he's after") which leads me to believe he'd tell Jules to knock it off if he [Jules] were leading the group off-course with an unplanned distraction. But who knows--everyone seems to immediately dismiss Jules and suggest throwing him overboard, then Brian and Vosse say rude things to the others, clearly goading a fight, but not in the context of the game (such as "I vote X off the boat!" or "I say we draw straws!") instead it's just like "shut up, Y!" and "quit laughing, Z!" kind of general insulting language. That would imply they just wanted to start a fight (one of the two recurring comedy skit ideas, which could've been a barroom brawl, a Nov 4 "we've got to fight and then make up!" and culminated in the Hal Blaine Veggie argument) not necessarily a survival game. They seem to be ignoring Jules' setup or at least rendering it unnecessary.

^Possibly Jules knew Brian wanted to get everyone at each other's throats and suggested the game as a way to do it? Honestly, if so, it wasn't a bad idea on Jules' part. It'd be an interesting setup for a watery counterpart to the veggie fight, and was far more interesting of a concept than just Brian and Vosse telling everyone to shut up anytime they started to say anything that could've been interesting. This session went off the rails because of Brian, not Siegel--and is ironically a good example of Vosse's own moral of letting ideas develop organically rather than try to force a rigid structure on things.

Unfortunately, that's all we get. Siegel's final answer reiterates that he told Brian to release SU as a single right then after the Oppenheim performance but "Brian was in a phase of complicating things," which I think is dead-on. Ironically, he shares an anecdote where he [Siegel] said to Oppenheim "I think Brian is the new Bach" and was told "write that" but Siegel refused because he thought he'd be ridiculed, presumably lifting up a pop artist to the great Baroque composer. So he arguably made the same mistake, or let the same demons stifle him as Brian did. Beyond that, Siegel says that it's not about analyzing the "semiotics" of Brian's music, it's about how the music makes you feel. I agree that's the most important thing but I think that's what analysis is for--you know how a thing makes you feel and then want to dig deep "WHY does this make me feel that way/HOW does the artist accomplish that effect?" That's good criticism--bad criticism is getting too metatextual (IE the artist is problematic, or of such-and-such school/tradition, that is of no concern to the average audience member) or lambasting something that's effective just because it doesn't use as many arbitrary techniques or whatever. Side-note but a big problem I have with English class in grade school is the insipid focus on symbols, "vocab words" and foreshadowing rather than "which characters do you identify with and why? What message do you think the author was trying to convey?" That kind of media analysis misses the forest for the trees, and trains kids to see media literacy as dumb busywork rather than one of life's greatest pleasures. 

CONCLUSION

That's it. Honestly this was a great read and I'm really glad I purchased it. It's definitely on the shorter side and smaller than I anticipated (not 8.5 x 11" page size) but great journalism which I'm happy to support. The interviewers clearly knew their sh*t and asked the same questions I've been dying to see the principals asked (it's not their fault the guys can't remember much 35 years later). There was genuinely revelatory info in here as well as more validating confirmations of some of my theories. I think of all the SMiLE themed issues I made the right call getting #68--the others are great I'm sure but this one had the more tantalizing interviews. If I were to purchase another issue it'd be #67 if only I could buy one without the stupid "On a Holiday" CD that doubles the price. I'd recommend this magazine to any BB fan just based on this experience. I wish these interviews were more well-known among the community--I was treated like a lunatic for wanting answers on some of the stuff that's in these articles. Clearly a real publication thought they were important too.