My Last (?) Crack at the SMiLE Jigsaw

[Julia]

Just using this same thread to comment on the new leaks that every other BB-related community is talking about.

Unless I'm missing something (only just got a copy of the whole thing) it seems the only "new*" info for SMiLE here is the Wind Chimes version with the "vocal false start" between the verses and chorus. I was shadowing the other forum on this topic and apparently that false start was double-tracked implying it was an intentional inclusion rather than a mistake or rehearsal left in the mix that would've been edited out eventually. This is so wild to me, because it helps prove my thesis that SMiLE was always meant to have these "off-beat humor/seeming-mistakes left in" moments (that we associate with Smiley) from the very beginning. It's a lot easier to defend the "veggie fight mixed into the song proper" and "George Fell leading into or out of SU proper" and the rest of the seemingly heretical Psychedelic Sounds inclusions if Brian had something as goofy as this in a test edit of WC. It's yet another point in favor of Smiley and SMiLE not representing as hard of a break as many once assumed. What separates the two isn't the sudden *addition* of goofy humor asides, it's the gradual *subtraction* of Wrecking Crew orchestration (and, I'd argue, VDP's American history kick) which was increasingly incompatible with Brian's goal of a humorous album.

So on the one hand, I like this "new" WC because it's further proof of my thesis. But I also think it "objectively" ruins the song. Kills the flow, doesn't belong with the beautiful heavenly arrangement, doesn't work as well as, say, Something/Anything? by Todd Rundgren (who also bookended tracks with studio chatter and false starts). I prefer SMiLE-era WC without this goofy "humorous" inclusion. And maybe this is more evidence of what I suspect the problem was: Brian wanted to do a comedy thing but that didn't fit with the music he was making. The August through December (arguably February) backing tracks were just too pristine, too melancholy and angsty. Plus, the lyrics were too "real," too steeped in racial injustice and descriptive of human suffering. They just weren't gelling with the goofy, spoken word humor asides Brian always wanted to include. So the seemingly radical shift to the Smiley aesthetic, with it's "homegrown" feel and simpler arrangements, with less serious lyrical subject matter...that was Brian adapting the music to suit the paramount, key theme on his mind--humor.

This theory gets stronger the more evidence we get--Brian killed SMiLE because it was too somber and not actually "smiley" enough. It's just hard to accept because most people, myself included believe it or not, would have preferred a straightforward Pet Sounds 2 of just the most intricate "neo-baroque" arrangements possible without the juvenile (and mostly unfunny) humor segments getting in the way. It's crazy to believe Brian could have songs like SU, CE and CIFOTM in his pocket only to scrap them for the likes of Smiley. But for better or worse, the man followed his genuine muse to the bitter end. I think we just have to accept that, even as fans, we are not always going to agree with Brian's final decisions. Anyway, maybe there's a middle ground between SMiLE and Smiley that respects his goal of laughter while preserving those gorgeous original tracks (certainly this is my MO as a fan-mixer) and the pursuit of that nigh-impossible ideal is the true mythical "teenage symphony to God."

*I've seen people say this version of WC isn't new, and maybe I've heard it on a boot or something too, but I can't remember. Either way it's been brought back into the public eye and recontextualized.

Additional Observations...

I don't recall noticing anything "revelatory" in the other SMiLE songs that've popped up in "the great leak" except that the 70s "mix" or whatever of OMP left out the maracas in the opening. This was surprising, since they honestly complete that part of the song in my opinion. Like especially if there really weren't meant to be vocals from OMP, it just fills out the harmony very nicely but if that was the final word on that piece until BWPS, I guess Brian thought differently. Also, to my ears/memory it sounds like the Worms version heard in this leak, or at least one of them, had the "scary string part" of the bridge (the part with the Hawaiian chanting) mixed up, which I liked.

[zaval80]

Paul Jay Robbins was the husband of Trina Robbins (she is on Wiki). I am not sure if you found this link on your search

https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/166/oa_edited_volume/chapter/3773442

which is a chapter of a book on SMiLE available online. The author says he interviewed the man you're after about his involvement with SMiLE, so at least that's something. I can add that PJR through his wife knew Jim Morrison, so it's possible he just did not have it in him, to be the "star chronicler", and pursued other avenues in his life.

Also, he is mentioned as interviewed re: SMiLE in this book:

https://api.pageplace.de/preview/DT0400.9781000395471_A41613291/preview-9781000395471_A41613291.pdf

[Julia]

Paul Jay Robbins was the husband of Trina Robbins (she is on Wiki). I am not sure if you found this link on your search

https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/166/oa_edited_volume/chapter/3773442

which is a chapter of a book on SMiLE available online. The author says he interviewed the man you're after about his involvement with SMiLE, so at least that's something. I can add that PJR through his wife knew Jim Morrison, so it's possible he just did not have it in him, to be the "star chronicler", and pursued other avenues in his life.

Also, he is mentioned as interviewed re: SMiLE in this book:

https://api.pageplace.de/preview/DT0400.9781000395471_A41613291/preview-9781000395471_A41613291.pdf

Thanks for the contribution. I did see that particular essay and mentioned it on page 6 of this thread. But by bringing it up, you've got me thinking of two things:

1) I either overlooked or forgot that this *piece of writing* by Dale Carter is apparently featured in two books, one of which is Good Vibrations: Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys in Critical Perspective as one piece of a wider, pan-authorial anthology of SMiLE essays and Reading Smile : History, Myth and American identity in Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks' Long-Lost Album by Dale Carter alone. Both of which, you've linked to.

For the record, I've read the former, but not the latter (to the best of my recollection, it isn't mentioned specifically in my notes). I found at least one source that may allow inspection if someone has membership and asks nicely (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/370013839_Reading_Smile_History_Myth_and_American_Identity_in_Brian_Wilson_and_Van_Dyke_Parks'_Long-Lost_Album_By_Dale_Carter_London_Routledge_2021_166_pp_ISBN_978-0-367-62286-2) There's also at least one copy in a college library near me, and I'm sure I'll find a way to it eventually, but considering this is yet another secondary source I'm assuming he's looking at the same info I am--IE, likely no new details. So this is less urgent to me than the potential of a lost primary source as was the hope with the other lead. Which leads me to point 2...

2) I probably should've tempered my expectations for a lost PJR article about SMiLE. I say this because if Paul Jay Robbins was interviewed by a thorough researcher, there's no way he didn't mention something like this...right? Almost certainly, but I guess it couldn't hurt to confirm with the author if I manage to ever get a hold of him. There is a potentiality, however remote, that PJR DID mention such an article...but didn't have a physical copy of his original draft or the specific issue anymore...and Mr. Carter didn't think that loose end tangent was worth mentioning. Very unlikely, but possible, and therefore worth the effort to try to clear up. (I'm not expecting the guy to confirm my suspicion, but the promise of a "lost witness" contemporary account from "the quiet disciple" is too enticing to leave as a dangling thread forever...)

[zaval80]

Point 2 is good, an article with a very valuable tangent may well exist, but this tangent may be forgotten by the author and not mentioned, and I know such examples, though not from the BB lore.

Do you know this site? https://annas-archive.org/  It's the largest library of "liberated" knowledge in the world. May require the use of VPN, and the exact site I've mentioned may not work, but they have mirrors like .li - these can be Googled. It's not like it could be expected they may have the LA Free Press archive, but they may have really invaluable things.

As for LAFP, I don't know, could such things be archived on "microfiche" and obtained via library exchange?

[Don Malcolm]

Julia, I think Robbins is almost certainly peripheral to the SMiLE story & while you are to commended for the desire and sense of responsibility to leave no I undotted and no T uncrossed, the blazing edge of your work will rise or fall on creating 2-4 credible scenarios for an April 1967 release of the LP, each flowing from the best possible reconstruction of the time frame.

For me, it all hinges on Brian figuring out how to distribute Heroes & Villains across the landscape of his tracks. That could have stemmed from what he was doing in the studio in Jan-Feb, but didn't, so he went back to materials that had been taking shape (often inchoately) around "the Elements." That's when his commitment to the rest of the VDP Americana material hits the skids.

But I think a March-April release of SMiLE has to include all of that material, and MOLC would have remained in the can (or, in my mischievous scenario, is the mind-blowing B Side to the single version of H&V!! ). But lighter variants of H&V from the work in Jan-Feb could be what stitches things together across the two sides of the LP. A musical comedy/overture snippet could provide the transition into the innocence section culminating in Surf's Up.

I think one or two of your track orders get close to this approach. I think the book should suggest the likeliest ones for a March-April release, but the parallel tracks of the book should encompass the best detailed timeline (using the session data) while incorporating/embodying the fan-mix tradition/sensibility. I think all that can work in tandem when we acknowledge that to get a SMiLE in that time frame, some stuff has to be left out--otherwise, its Everyman making his/her own BWPS...

I've thought about giving it some kind of shot myself, but I'd much rather read a book like this written by you!!

[zaval80]

22. Modular Recording Wasn't Worth the Trouble

In hindsight, the indecisiveness of Brian towards GV is pretty wild to read about too. I think he was just as terminally perfectionist with that track as he was with the rest of SMiLE, it just gets swept under the rug or treated as a legitimate process because the record came out and was successful. But in the Badman book it sounds like Brian wasn't really satisfied with it, he just settled on it as "the best he could do." Obviously GV is a masterpiece but I really wonder if all the endless retakes, going to different studios and driving everyone crazy was worth it. Perhaps it's blasphemy but I think there's a version of the song that's just as good, made for less than the $50k figure quoted, in half the time. It just shows that Brian's downfall started even before '67 and that, in all honesty, without someone who could benevolently reign him in a tad, the album was doomed before it even began due to his own self-doubt and obsessive drive for perfection. The modular recording technique did more harm than good and that was the principle the whole project was built on.

I wrote in a discussion of GV development on the other board that, while most of 9 track GV sessions (from which recordings are available) reflect Brian's work on polishing/tightening the separate fragments consituting the song toward a hit single, Sessions 7 and 8 pretty much stand out, for the (great) music recorded during these is simply incongruent with his vision of GV as a single, and IMO may reflect Brian's design for something like a "GV album version", or "GV Part 2" if for a single. He was so much more into the same mode of working later, having recorded so many H&V sections, much more than a single would need, but he pursued this approach first with GV, and so the exact timings when he showed his predilection for straying from the path can be pinpointed. So yes, his indecision - too many ideas for which lesser lights would kill for to use in their songs, too much recorded sections, too much of everything. But I don't think the modular method should take the blame - rather his indecision regarding his own designs. There is nothing wrong with the method, and GV is the great example confirming its validity.

[zaval80]

31. The "Real" Reason SMiLE Died

I wanted to mention before, after reading Badman's book (or the parts relevant to SMiLE anyway) I came away with the distinct impression that the drama with Capitol Records was actually one of the biggest reasons the album failed. Absolutely. I know this aspect of the troubles has been discussed, but I think it's been downplayed by the somewhat overstated boogeymen of Mike's disagreements and drug-exacerbated mental illness. Those were big factors but a recurring theme of the very late '66 through '67 sessions is Brian discovered Capitol was screwing the band out of royalties, wanted to break from the label, and went out of his way to screw them over as a result.

I think Brian started wondering "why am I making this masterpiece million-seller for a company I hate?" Switching to Veggies as the single out of spite and spinning the wheels on half a dozen Jasper Dailey sessions after discovering the stolen royalties seems to corroborate this. I could see him getting off on the thought Capitol wasted a bunch of money on sleeves that are irrelevant come the Smiley remake just as he did when Heroes got replaced with Veggies. For at least half of the '67 sessions he was goofing off, screwing Capitol out of money every way he knew how. (Perhaps it wasn't "bad vibes" that led to session cancellations either, but another opportunity to make Capitol eat it.) At the very least, the idea that his productivity would lead to passive income for the people that hurt him took a lot of motivation out of his own success.

Brian was a producer, and producers are people conscious of the budget. Moreover, he with his brothers was also the artist under contract. He ought to have known full well that any calcellations of recording sessions mean paying the studio for the unused time, the hire of specific instruments, the hire of session musicians (the latter especially costly in his case) - and these money are paid by the artist from the advance the recording company provides; it's not something paid by the company. So I very much doubt his cancellations were done in spite. Most likely, he had his own reasons to cancel the sessions; I'd think in terms of having doubts about how his latest "feels" would go, the change of concepts in his mind; not feeling inspiration, whatever.

[BJL]

Julia, I think Robbins is almost certainly peripheral to the SMiLE story & while you are to commended for the desire and sense of responsibility to leave no I undotted and no T uncrossed, the blazing edge of your work will rise or fall on creating 2-4 credible scenarios for an April 1967 release of the LP, each flowing from the best possible reconstruction of the time frame.

For me, it all hinges on Brian figuring out how to distribute Heroes & Villains across the landscape of his tracks. That could have stemmed from what he was doing in the studio in Jan-Feb, but didn't, so he went back to materials that had been taking shape (often inchoately) around "the Elements." That's when his commitment to the rest of the VDP Americana material hits the skids.

But I think a March-April release of SMiLE has to include all of that material, and MOLC would have remained in the can (or, in my mischievous scenario, is the mind-blowing B Side to the single version of H&V!! ). But lighter variants of H&V from the work in Jan-Feb could be what stitches things together across the two sides of the LP. A musical comedy/overture snippet could provide the transition into the innocence section culminating in Surf's Up.

I think one or two of your track orders get close to this approach. I think the book should suggest the likeliest ones for a March-April release, but the parallel tracks of the book should encompass the best detailed timeline (using the session data) while incorporating/embodying the fan-mix tradition/sensibility. I think all that can work in tandem when we acknowledge that to get a SMiLE in that time frame, some stuff has to be left out--otherwise, its Everyman making his/her own BWPS...

I've thought about giving it some kind of shot myself, but I'd much rather read a book like this written by you!!

I know I'm a broken record with my own idiosyncratic opinions, but I continue to believe that the evidence taken together strongly suggests a coherent, totally complete-able album being recorded through December, followed by a long Heroes and Villains tangent that was intended to create either a single three minute single a la Good Vibrations or a double-sided single, of which one side was a Good Vibrations style modular hit and the second was possibly going to be a little looser - followed by the abandonment of both projects at once. I completely agree with Julia that within and between songs and between sections within songs there would *certainly* have been snippets of comedy, both musical and spoken, and quite possibly many such moments. But (speaking for myself and in a spirit of good humor and exchange of ideas!) I don't think the January-March Heroes material was ever intended to be distributed across the album as you suggest. I feel strongly that Brian was working towards a single, and that any scenario where the album comes out in the spring has that single as one track on an album that uses the track list already printed on the jackets.

[Don Malcolm]

Julia, I think Robbins is almost certainly peripheral to the SMiLE story & while you are to commended for the desire and sense of responsibility to leave no I undotted and no T uncrossed, the blazing edge of your work will rise or fall on creating 2-4 credible scenarios for an April 1967 release of the LP, each flowing from the best possible reconstruction of the time frame.

For me, it all hinges on Brian figuring out how to distribute Heroes & Villains across the landscape of his tracks. That could have stemmed from what he was doing in the studio in Jan-Feb, but didn't, so he went back to materials that had been taking shape (often inchoately) around "the Elements." That's when his commitment to the rest of the VDP Americana material hits the skids.

But I think a March-April release of SMiLE has to include all of that material, and MOLC would have remained in the can (or, in my mischievous scenario, is the mind-blowing B Side to the single version of H&V!! ). But lighter variants of H&V from the work in Jan-Feb could be what stitches things together across the two sides of the LP. A musical comedy/overture snippet could provide the transition into the innocence section culminating in Surf's Up.

I think one or two of your track orders get close to this approach. I think the book should suggest the likeliest ones for a March-April release, but the parallel tracks of the book should encompass the best detailed timeline (using the session data) while incorporating/embodying the fan-mix tradition/sensibility. I think all that can work in tandem when we acknowledge that to get a SMiLE in that time frame, some stuff has to be left out--otherwise, its Everyman making his/her own BWPS...

I've thought about giving it some kind of shot myself, but I'd much rather read a book like this written by you!!

I know I'm a broken record with my own idiosyncratic opinions, but I continue to believe that the evidence taken together strongly suggests a coherent, totally complete-able album being recorded through December, followed by a long Heroes and Villains tangent that was intended to create either a single three minute single a la Good Vibrations or a double-sided single, of which one side was a Good Vibrations style modular hit and the second was possibly going to be a little looser - followed by the abandonment of both projects at once. I completely agree with Julia that within and between songs and between sections within songs there would *certainly* have been snippets of comedy, both musical and spoken, and quite possibly many such moments. But (speaking for myself and in a spirit of good humor and exchange of ideas!) I don't think the January-March Heroes material was ever intended to be distributed across the album as you suggest. I feel strongly that Brian was working towards a single, and that any scenario where the album comes out in the spring has that single as one track on an album that uses the track list already printed on the jackets.

I think there are several credible variations of what would have constituted a spring 1967 SMiLE, and a book that explored them should leave room for those potential outcomes. For example, the H&V "part 1/part2" construction could have appeared in separate places on the record, with part 2 following Cabinessence as a light-hearted coda to the Americana side.

It is all conjecture, of course, and any alternate scenario that produces a spring '67 SMiLE has to change some of the events that doomed the project. I would concur that H&V would've had to be the single, but I'm not ready to rule out musical reprises and variations, which takes the modular concept a step further and (speaking personally!) is much more credible than 95% of the comedy material.

I think none of us knows enough to unilaterally discard any of the possible configurations that might have coalesced once Brian had successfully synthesized his efforts on H&V. Which is why I think a book exploring what that spring '67 SMiLE has to accommodate a number of disparate variations. (And ideally the book would also include a CD set that presented each variation--let's keep it relatively tame and limit the number of those to, sap, four--in their respective track orders for comparison. Given the vagaries of copyright law, however, all of that might need to appear at YouTube...)

Of course the question that emerges from this is whether or not the number of variations can actually be limited to four...!    I will defer that decision to Julia... 

[BJL]

Julia, I think Robbins is almost certainly peripheral to the SMiLE story & while you are to commended for the desire and sense of responsibility to leave no I undotted and no T uncrossed, the blazing edge of your work will rise or fall on creating 2-4 credible scenarios for an April 1967 release of the LP, each flowing from the best possible reconstruction of the time frame.

For me, it all hinges on Brian figuring out how to distribute Heroes & Villains across the landscape of his tracks. That could have stemmed from what he was doing in the studio in Jan-Feb, but didn't, so he went back to materials that had been taking shape (often inchoately) around "the Elements." That's when his commitment to the rest of the VDP Americana material hits the skids.

But I think a March-April release of SMiLE has to include all of that material, and MOLC would have remained in the can (or, in my mischievous scenario, is the mind-blowing B Side to the single version of H&V!! ). But lighter variants of H&V from the work in Jan-Feb could be what stitches things together across the two sides of the LP. A musical comedy/overture snippet could provide the transition into the innocence section culminating in Surf's Up.

I think one or two of your track orders get close to this approach. I think the book should suggest the likeliest ones for a March-April release, but the parallel tracks of the book should encompass the best detailed timeline (using the session data) while incorporating/embodying the fan-mix tradition/sensibility. I think all that can work in tandem when we acknowledge that to get a SMiLE in that time frame, some stuff has to be left out--otherwise, its Everyman making his/her own BWPS...

I've thought about giving it some kind of shot myself, but I'd much rather read a book like this written by you!!

I know I'm a broken record with my own idiosyncratic opinions, but I continue to believe that the evidence taken together strongly suggests a coherent, totally complete-able album being recorded through December, followed by a long Heroes and Villains tangent that was intended to create either a single three minute single a la Good Vibrations or a double-sided single, of which one side was a Good Vibrations style modular hit and the second was possibly going to be a little looser - followed by the abandonment of both projects at once. I completely agree with Julia that within and between songs and between sections within songs there would *certainly* have been snippets of comedy, both musical and spoken, and quite possibly many such moments. But (speaking for myself and in a spirit of good humor and exchange of ideas!) I don't think the January-March Heroes material was ever intended to be distributed across the album as you suggest. I feel strongly that Brian was working towards a single, and that any scenario where the album comes out in the spring has that single as one track on an album that uses the track list already printed on the jackets.

I think there are several credible variations of what would have constituted a spring 1967 SMiLE, and a book that explored them should leave room for those potential outcomes. For example, the H&V "part 1/part2" construction could have appeared in separate places on the record, with part 2 following Cabinessence as a light-hearted coda to the Americana side.

It is all conjecture, of course, and any alternate scenario that produces a spring '67 SMiLE has to change some of the events that doomed the project. I would concur that H&V would've had to be the single, but I'm not ready to rule out musical reprises and variations, which takes the modular concept a step further and (speaking personally!) is much more credible than 95% of the comedy material.

I think none of us knows enough to unilaterally discard any of the possible configurations that might have coalesced once Brian had successfully synthesized his efforts on H&V. Which is why I think a book exploring what that spring '67 SMiLE has to accommodate a number of disparate variations. (And ideally the book would also include a CD set that presented each variation--let's keep it relatively tame and limit the number of those to, sap, four--in their respective track orders for comparison. Given the vagaries of copyright law, however, all of that might need to appear at YouTube...)

Of course the question that emerges from this is whether or not the number of variations can actually be limited to four...!    I will defer that decision to Julia... 

I don't disagree with any of this! I think you're right not to rule out musical reprises and variations, and I may have made my case too strongly.

I think that in the abstract, the variations of a hypothetical "spring Smile" are infinite, virtually limitless. Brian, of course, would not have been limited to the material we have, he would have had the material we have plus whatever work he did to finish whatever vision ended up coalescing! But that fact in itself, on some level, puts fan-mixers in a position fundamentally at odds with "historians," or writers interested primarily in what happened and what compelling counter-factuals we might imagine rooted in those facts. The fan-mixer needs to organize the pieces we have into something that can be listened to. The historian, on the other hand, needs to weigh all the evidence, consider cause and effect, and imagine what Smile was and might have been without limiting themself to the material that works on a fan mix.

A big part of what I took away from Julia's argument about comedy - and I'm not sure if this is exactly what she said, but it is what she convinced me of, whether it is what she was trying to say or not - is that the comedy skits we have tell us important things about the project, even if Brian did not intend to use them as recorded. Anything likely to be done in the late stages of the project, including comedy, interstitial material, reprises, all things that were likely to come together at the stage of assembling songs and finalizing the track order, can't be judged on the basis of how well they work using the pieces we have, because Brian wouldn't have been limited to what we have at all!

[Don Malcolm]

I think it will be difficult if not impossible to reconstruct a "spring SMiLE" with specific comedy snippets, but there are some fan mixes that do so, and one intriguing tangent in a book devoted to such speculative reconstruction might be to include a survey of how fan mixes have tried to incorporate that material into their re-creations.

From reading Julia's work as it has continued to evolve over the past months, I am confident that she could produce a section surveying and evaluating those efforts with an eye toward some generalizations as to how it could have been incorporated into the LP. (A comparison to Frank Zappa's approach to this would be part of this as well.)

That said, we see little or no such utilization of between-song chatter on Smiley Smile (the false start on "Little Pad," which is one of the tracks on the LP that has no point of prior connection to the SMiLE sessions).

While the possibilities are virtually infinite, I'm of the opinion that it will be necessary in a book covering the subject to cull things down to four, maybe five scenarios and track order concepts. These will also have to collide with another key decision point: Good Vibrations...in or out?

[zaval80]

Why would GV be out, if it was the part of "da tracklist"? also, very important for the commercial standing of the album.

[zaval80]

...

[Don Malcolm]

Why would GV be out, if it was the part of "da tracklist"? also, very important for the commercial standing of the album.

The question remains open with respect to a "spring SMiLE," even though the evidence you cite strongly points toward its inclusion.
Working with the "four variant" notion, I could see a version where it is left off, and three others with it (but each in different locations relative to the other tracks).

[BJL]

Why would GV be out, if it was the part of "da tracklist"? also, very important for the commercial standing of the album.

The question remains open with respect to a "spring SMiLE," even though the evidence you cite strongly points toward its inclusion.
Working with the "four variant" notion, I could see a version where it is left off, and three others with it (but each in different locations relative to the other tracks).

Yea, once you get away from what could hypothetically have happened early in the year, the different possibilities get wider and wider the more time you give the scenario to unfold!

[zaval80]

The question remains open with respect to a "spring SMiLE," even though the evidence you cite strongly points toward its inclusion.
Working with the "four variant" notion, I could see a version where it is left off, and three others with it (but each in different locations relative to the other tracks).

IMO the only presentable line-up of SMiLE where GV is NOT included could have been with it NOT in the tracklist in the first place. That would have been a bold conceptual idea, to present the new album without the tried-and-true hit song. And if it was, as we know, to have a GV-less SMiLE would be to diminish the album. I agree it's not an important cog from the viewpoint of concepts intended for SMiLE, but realistically, it has to be there.

[Julia]

Thanks for the lively conversation y'all, especially considering how slow things are around here overall. I'll be replying to you all individually one at a time.

Point 2 is good, an article with a very valuable tangent may well exist, but this tangent may be forgotten by the author and not mentioned, and I know such examples, though not from the BB lore.

Do you know this site? https://annas-archive.org/  It's the largest library of "liberated" knowledge in the world. May require the use of VPN, and the exact site I've mentioned may not work, but they have mirrors like .li - these can be Googled. It's not like it could be expected they may have the LA Free Press archive, but they may have really invaluable things.

As for LAFP, I don't know, could such things be archived on "microfiche" and obtained via library exchange?

I didn't but thanks for the link. I checked it out searching for PJR, the LAFP and SMiLE in general but sorry to say didn't see anything come up with regard to this particular tangent. Still, later on I might use it to see if those last 10 books come up...

As to your second suggestions, absolutely possible but nothing came up in a fairly thorough search engine crawl. It's not like Google has access to everything as I've come to learn just as a fan of obscure media in general, but it is pretty hard to imagine where I'd find someone with archives of a long-dormant underground newspaper from 60 years ago. Not giving up, just not sure where to go from here. That one college's newly acquired collection was my best lead--and to be fair they did say they're still categorizing everything they recently inherited. So it's possible if I checked back in a year maybe something will have turned up.

22. Modular Recording Wasn't Worth the Trouble

In hindsight, the indecisiveness of Brian towards GV is pretty wild to read about too. I think he was just as terminally perfectionist with that track as he was with the rest of SMiLE, it just gets swept under the rug or treated as a legitimate process because the record came out and was successful. But in the Badman book it sounds like Brian wasn't really satisfied with it, he just settled on it as "the best he could do." Obviously GV is a masterpiece but I really wonder if all the endless retakes, going to different studios and driving everyone crazy was worth it. Perhaps it's blasphemy but I think there's a version of the song that's just as good, made for less than the $50k figure quoted, in half the time. It just shows that Brian's downfall started even before '67 and that, in all honesty, without someone who could benevolently reign him in a tad, the album was doomed before it even began due to his own self-doubt and obsessive drive for perfection. The modular recording technique did more harm than good and that was the principle the whole project was built on.

[/i]

I wrote in a discussion of GV development on the other board that, while most of 9 track GV sessions (from which recordings are available) reflect Brian's work on polishing/tightening the separate fragments consituting the song toward a hit single, Sessions 7 and 8 pretty much stand out, for the (great) music recorded during these is simply incongruent with his vision of GV as a single, and IMO may reflect Brian's design for something like a "GV album version", or "GV Part 2" if for a single. He was so much more into the same mode of working later, having recorded so many H&V sections, much more than a single would need, but he pursued this approach first with GV, and so the exact timings when he showed his predilection for straying from the path can be pinpointed. So yes, his indecision - too many ideas for which lesser lights would kill for to use in their songs, too much recorded sections, too much of everything. But I don't think the modular method should take the blame - rather his indecision regarding his own designs. There is nothing wrong with the method, and GV is the great example confirming its validity.

Yeah, I am not as well versed on the minutia of GV as the rest of SMiLE (great song but it just doesn't speak to me in the same way PS and WC-through-Dada era SMiLE does) but I think I know what you mean. There are a few sections of music recorded for it that didn't make the 3:36 cut. The "hum be dum" vocals restored for TSS of course, and some others.* Brian did make alternate cuts of the same song for single and album releases, so even if we accept that SMiLE would've been 12 banded tracks rather than BWPS-esque freeflowing symphonic "movements," it's not outside the realm of possibility he'd make an alternate GV cut that's longer and designed to transition more smoothly into the rest of the side.

In that vein, I notice on the TSS boxset, at least the official YouTube upload of it, that there's a 9/1/66 take logged as "Persuasion" which is the same name officially given to what we popularly call "He Gives Speeches." AGD's site has that Wonderful/Persuasion a few days earlier but it still makes me wonder if perhaps GV into Wonderful--with HGS as a bridge or "part 2" to Wonderful--wasn't the plan at some point. GV is the guy's pov of a relationship, Won is the girl's, HGS is the guy again and/or a baby. (Those lyrics could be either and seem to imply each possibility in turn.) Obviously this didn't last long if it was even the plan at all. Fitting GV in with the "Van-influenced" material has always been one of my biggest hurdles as a fanmixer, but aside from Won the best candidate to follow it up is WC in my opinion.

I posted a soft "challenge" to anyone more talented than I to make an alternate cut of GV with some of the different takes and see what it sounds like. Now that we have pretty much seamless AI isolation tools, one could even splice the BB vocals on it. Maybe someday I'll take a crack at this but it's not a high priority.

*the tracks on Disc 5 labeled "Western 6/16/66 (Part 2 & Verse)" and "(Part 2 Continued)" have alternate instrumentation where the theremin is used outside of the chorus as one example.

31. The "Real" Reason SMiLE Died

I wanted to mention before, after reading Badman's book (or the parts relevant to SMiLE anyway) I came away with the distinct impression that the drama with Capitol Records was actually one of the biggest reasons the album failed. Absolutely. I know this aspect of the troubles has been discussed, but I think it's been downplayed by the somewhat overstated boogeymen of Mike's disagreements and drug-exacerbated mental illness. Those were big factors but a recurring theme of the very late '66 through '67 sessions is Brian discovered Capitol was screwing the band out of royalties, wanted to break from the label, and went out of his way to screw them over as a result.

I think Brian started wondering "why am I making this masterpiece million-seller for a company I hate?" Switching to Veggies as the single out of spite and spinning the wheels on half a dozen Jasper Dailey sessions after discovering the stolen royalties seems to corroborate this. I could see him getting off on the thought Capitol wasted a bunch of money on sleeves that are irrelevant come the Smiley remake just as he did when Heroes got replaced with Veggies. For at least half of the '67 sessions he was goofing off, screwing Capitol out of money every way he knew how. (Perhaps it wasn't "bad vibes" that led to session cancellations either, but another opportunity to make Capitol eat it.) At the very least, the idea that his productivity would lead to passive income for the people that hurt him took a lot of motivation out of his own success.

Brian was a producer, and producers are people conscious of the budget. Moreover, he with his brothers was also the artist under contract. He ought to have known full well that any calcellations of recording sessions mean paying the studio for the unused time, the hire of specific instruments, the hire of session musicians (the latter especially costly in his case) - and these money are paid by the artist from the advance the recording company provides; it's not something paid by the company. So I very much doubt his cancellations were done in spite. Most likely, he had his own reasons to cancel the sessions; I'd think in terms of having doubts about how his latest "feels" would go, the change of concepts in his mind; not feeling inspiration, whatever.

I absolutely agree with you that a producer's job includes securing funding and keeping the budget under control. However, Brian especially at this time, I don't think was very considerate of how much of Capitol's money he burned in search of perfection. I don't necessarily doubt you that he'd ultimately be expected to pay Capitol back for any unacceptable increases in expenses because that would just make intuitive sense...however, to the best of my recollection no source actually mentions that. Maybe they assume it goes without saying but the impression given a lot of the time is that Capitol knew what a good thing they had with Brian that they were willing to keep throwing money at the "one man hit machine" as long as it meant a GV came out of it in the end. I'm not gonna die on the hill that this was definitely the dynamic at play, it's just the impression I got from the sources.

That said, while I threw the possibility of spite out there, I agree it's probably more likely Brian was just an unraveling mess with executive dysfunction problems around this time. (Not saying this in an unkind way, just being blunt.) It's the clear picture every source paints, one way or another, so it tracks. It's possible he'd made the appointments when an idea came to him at 3 AM but by the time they could actually get in the studio however many days later, he'd already realized that wouldn't work or a "better" idea occurred to him and there was nothing he could use that particular group of musicians for, so might as well cancel. This concurs with another common impression given by the sources, that SMiLE was being made up on the fly.

IMO the only presentable line-up of SMiLE where GV is NOT included could have been with it NOT in the tracklist in the first place. That would have been a bold conceptual idea, to present the new album without the tried-and-true hit song. And if it was, as we know, to have a GV-less SMiLE would be to diminish the album. I agree it's not an important cog from the viewpoint of concepts intended for SMiLE, but realistically, it has to be there.

To the best of my recollection offhand, there are at least one or two sources that imply or outright state that Brian didn't even want GV on SMiLE proper let alone SS. But regardless, I think even if that's true and even if he'd pressed his luck fighting that battle, this is one issue Capitol wouldn't budge on. Probably the Boys would've fought him over it too. And they'd be right to do so, at least from a commercial perspective.

I don't think GV fits cleanly with the rest of SMiLE lyrically, conceptually or musically. Not because it's inferior--it's actually the "best" song in the collection--but because its sonic identity doesn't cleanly fit any of the "movements"/themes/tangents that Brian and VDP worked on together. It's too modern and "other-worldly" for the American history throwback or farm-life "side" and too upbeat, lacking that "crying horn" leitmotif of the Cycle of Life "side." Despite the desperate justifications I hear some throw out ("it's the fifth element--Aether!"/"it represents Americana in the modern age!") there's just no corroboration that that's what Brian intended and I don't think those ideas have merit. BUT, my personal misgivings aside, it was listed on the back AND FRONT of the cover art. There's absolutely no way Brian wasn't aware of that list, despite what some want to think. And not only did Brian himself care deeply about sales, he wasn't above recycling old songs (like Rhonda on Today and Summer Days). In this regard, the BBs weren't like the Beatles where they'd leave off their prime material on principle.

All that said, it's not 1966 anymore and sales aren't a concern so there's really no reason one has to include it in their personal mix. I go back and forth between leaving it off or not. Anytime I do include it, it's out of respect for "historical plausibility" and always sticks out like a sore thumb amidst the more cohesive "two movement cantata" Brian and Van conceptualized that fateful autumn. Despite my theory the two men weren't on the same page, despite the 3~4 different topics being juggled, despite the fact they didn't have a fully outlined, track-by-track plan, there's still a connection (even if accidental) between the "feels" recorded from late August through March in my opinion.

[Julia]

Sorry for not responding to the rest of you sooner but this stupid site was down for like 12 hours last night. (This place is on its last legs, I say again back up everything you care about, I'm screencapping this page as we go and invite anyone reading to keep my blog in mind if you want to stay in touch or see the "finished version" of my SMiLE deep dive when I get around to posting it there: thecarbonfreeze.com)

I know I'm a broken record with my own idiosyncratic opinions, but I continue to believe that the evidence taken together strongly suggests a coherent, totally complete-able album being recorded through December, followed by a long Heroes and Villains tangent that was intended to create either a single three minute single a la Good Vibrations or a double-sided single, of which one side was a Good Vibrations style modular hit and the second was possibly going to be a little looser - followed by the abandonment of both projects at once. I completely agree with Julia that within and between songs and between sections within songs there would *certainly* have been snippets of comedy, both musical and spoken, and quite possibly many such moments. But (speaking for myself and in a spirit of good humor and exchange of ideas!) I don't think the January-March Heroes material was ever intended to be distributed across the album as you suggest. I feel strongly that Brian was working towards a single, and that any scenario where the album comes out in the spring has that single as one track on an album that uses the track list already printed on the jackets.

I personally agree with your assessment artistically. I think the material recorded during the sessions presents a very strong, interconnected body of work that would be recognized as a masterpiece then and now. People would KILL to have that music under their belt for a release. Despite how many themes are juggled, how much ideas changed, how disjointed I propose the collaboration was...accidentally or through sheer force of Brian's talent, the foundation of a great album was laid down. BUT I don't think Brian himself felt the same way unfortunately, he being his own harshest critic and worst enemy. Where most people would probably think "hey, this may not be the funny album I originally envisioned but it's still fucking awesome and there's nothing stopping me from making a silly humor album the next time. I'll just release this as-is and then do comedy afterward." But Brian wasn't most people.

Of course there's no way to know 100% this is how things played out but it's the overwhelming consensus I'm getting from the sources, especially if reading between the lines. I think the focus on the single at Anderle's urging just exacerbated things further. Suddenly Van's thinking "why am I hanging around to tinker with a song we already finished instead of doing new material" and Brian's questioning Van's contributions since Oppenheim/Bernstein didn't get them, the BBs didn't either and Van can't defend them to even relatively mild criticism or pushback. Then Van leaves, Brian moves to a new space and the moment just passed. Longwinded way of saying, the material they made together is a beautiful interrelated tapestry almost in spite of itself and the actual partnership was more fractious than the music itself would imply.

I don't disagree with any of this! I think you're right not to rule out musical reprises and variations, and I may have made my case too strongly.

I think that in the abstract, the variations of a hypothetical "spring Smile" are infinite, virtually limitless. Brian, of course, would not have been limited to the material we have, he would have had the material we have plus whatever work he did to finish whatever vision ended up coalescing! But that fact in itself, on some level, puts fan-mixers in a position fundamentally at odds with "historians," or writers interested primarily in what happened and what compelling counter-factuals we might imagine rooted in those facts. The fan-mixer needs to organize the pieces we have into something that can be listened to. The historian, on the other hand, needs to weigh all the evidence, consider cause and effect, and imagine what Smile was and might have been without limiting themself to the material that works on a fan mix.

This is absolutely right and I'm not sure if I've ever touched on this particular detail, so I'm glad you brought it up. It's where I think fans sometimes talk past each other. There's those who want SMiLE to be complete as-is, no pieces missing (or if they are they weren't important), every anecdote in the sources must be paired to something in the vault however tenuous. This is the philosophy of Priore, Reum and some users on here. I understand the appeal: it'd certainly make things simpler if everything could be wrapped up in a neat bow and it'd put my mind at ease to think the lost reels/acetates weren't any different than what we have access to. But real life is messier than that, and even what we have on tape as-is hints at missing pieces that change everything (the clarinet in Look, new Worms melody, rough chant ideas in PsychSounds).

None of the fan mixes I've made have ever satisfied me for too long, because there's always a compromise. I'd give anything to have the Look vocals, to have Dada played with water sounds and the Durrie-IIGS instrumentation with a better version of Brian singing those vocals (the Humble Harv demo vocals SUCK). It speaks to Brian's immense talent that even a cobbled together reconstruction sounds as great as it does, and I see this as proof positive the album would've been a highlight of pop music, but I hate it when people seize on the few unfinished weak points to say "see! SMiLE wouldn't have been that great anyway! #Pepper4Ever!" Like, I don't fully love any of the Elements reconstructions I've done but they're a proof of concept more than anything else. Brian absolutely would've recorded cleaner versions of the Undersea Chant and put something on top of Breathing--if he even used those pieces at all.

A big part of what I took away from Julia's argument about comedy - and I'm not sure if this is exactly what she said, but it is what she convinced me of, whether it is what she was trying to say or not - is that the comedy skits we have tell us important things about the project, even if Brian did not intend to use them as recorded. Anything likely to be done in the late stages of the project, including comedy, interstitial material, reprises, all things that were likely to come together at the stage of assembling songs and finalizing the track order, can't be judged on the basis of how well they work using the pieces we have, because Brian wouldn't have been limited to what we have at all!

Exactly. Thank you!

[Julia]

Julia, I think Robbins is almost certainly peripheral to the SMiLE story & while you are to commended for the desire and sense of responsibility to leave no I undotted and no T uncrossed, the blazing edge of your work will rise or fall on creating 2-4 credible scenarios for an April 1967 release of the LP, each flowing from the best possible reconstruction of the time frame.

Thank you. I almost certainly agree but it's just too enticing a possibility to pass up. It's not like I'm spending hours a day driving around to every library and riddling through the dump for 60 year old newspapers, but I think it's worth putting the idea in other people's heads that there could conceivably be a fourth non-BB, contemporaneous primary source, which would be absolutely invaluable. The fact that Robbins wasn't involved in the project or as interested in Brian (considering he didn't hang around and do interviews through the years, like the others) means his account--if it even exists--would be less biased by hero worship. It'd also be more focused on a specific moment in time rather than trying to cram in as many half-contradictory anecdotes about a sprawling 6-month period as possible. Again, big "if" but there's no harm in trying to contact Dale Carter.

In fact, as of today, I've done just that. I'll post a follow-up if/when I hear from him. Hopefully he can confirm if this is a worthy rabbit hole or waste of time.

For me, it all hinges on Brian figuring out how to distribute Heroes & Villains across the landscape of his tracks. That could have stemmed from what he was doing in the studio in Jan-Feb, but didn't, so he went back to materials that had been taking shape (often inchoately) around "the Elements." That's when his commitment to the rest of the VDP Americana material hits the skids.

Very interesting and plausible theory! Personally I lean more towards BJL's perspective that what we got in the Jan/Feb Heroes sessions was for Heroes the single alone, not really anything that'd be distributed through the rest of the album. Any pieces shared between this version of Heroes and the rest of SMiLE represents, I think, how the album was being cannibalized rather than seeds germinating in the Heroes pot to be planted in the SMiLE garden. Even with all the research I've done, this was such a frustrating and obviously misguided endeavor on its face (and even more so with hindsight) which is why I think fans like us just can't be satisfied with the explanation and let it go. Why pick Heroes for the single? (Anderle says because it was "the most finished.") Then why remake it virtually from scratch and change so much? (Because Brian is a perfectionist.) Why did it have to come so soon after GV hit #1 in December--shouldn't that in itself have brought them some breathing room? (Because the BRI launch required new product to bargain with!) Why couldn't the BRI launch have waited? (Because nobody thought it had to until it was too late.) Why couldn't Brian have just kept at it after these distractions subsided in March/April? (Because the moment passed and the man followed his muse despite the consequences beyond the music itself.)

It all makes perfect sense but it's so unfulfilling that we demand a more dramatic explanation--I suspect that's where the "Mike killed it" angle comes from. Also, in years hence, I think the sense of betrayal from the Boys for not trusting his intuition is what really stuck out the most for Brian about the whole thing. As the beef with them compounded over the years, with the Redwood incident, using SU against his wishes, bad reaction to Mt Vernon and Til I Die, hiring Landy, canning Adult/Child, etc... I think the SMiLE blowback probably crystallized for Brian as the beginning and most dramatic of the bullying he felt from the band. Possibly if the group hadn't put him through some of the rest of that trauma, he would have remembered SMiLE very differently and been more apt to just shrug it off as "the pieces didn't align" as opposed to "my creative heart was broken." (In fact, if you talked to him on a good day, Brian more or less said exactly that even in our timeline, like in the 90s video interview.) Weasels such as Priore, who needed a scapegoat, were also whispering in Brian's ear and poisoning the well.

But I think a March-April release of SMiLE has to include all of that material, and MOLC would have remained in the can (or, in my mischievous scenario, is the mind-blowing B Side to the single version of H&V!! ). But lighter variants of H&V from the work in Jan-Feb could be what stitches things together across the two sides of the LP. A musical comedy/overture snippet could provide the transition into the innocence section culminating in Surf's Up.

"Realistically" I personally believe the album was already dead by March, just looking at the sessionography as well as the timeline of Van and Vosse's leaving. I either forget or don't know if Anderle's passing has ever been pinned to an exact month (much less date) but it had to have been around that time or April at the latest. Besides Marilyn et all saying "with the new house/surroundings, his muse shifted," I also think being deprived of his three "cheerleaders" must've sucked the wind out of Brian's sails. This is where he starts working at a different studio pretty much exclusively, one that he never used before (at least during the SMiLE Era) and there aren't as many credited musicians per session. I think this period through May is mostly just him spinning the wheels, looking for a new creative spark which would eventually come (or be settled on) with the Smiley aesthetic.

But for the sake of fun, assuming Brian's still fully committed and considered the project salvageable, I think you're right that humor interludes are a given as well as canning MOLC. If the elements are still even a thing at this point, we'd get some intermediate form of Dada/CCW as water, an intermediate form of Fire/Fall Breaks as fire, some kind of IIGS/Country Air thing as air and Veggies as earth. We'd probably get something like Smiley, essentially, with the more complex Wrecking Crew pieces left out or relegated to a single side. I think we might get a stripped down SU like the '67 solo. But even then, it's such a standout song amidst the far less serious Smiley/humor bits it's hard to think of how it'd all fit together. (Which is probably why it didn't.)

I think come March the path of least resistance, the most plausible way of retaining some of the original material while excising what wasn't working, is more or less where we actually ended up with Smiley. (At least as Brian saw things--I'd have recommended he cut the humor and save the Wrecking Crew, but then it wouldn't be SMiLE as he envisioned it.) I think the real tangent where things might have changed dramatically is December or February, if the Heroes noodling the next two months had borne fruit that impressed him. We probably also need to know why he stopped wanting to use the Wrecking Crew in the first place. Was it solely due to difficulties booking time in the studio and not being allowed to touch the console? If so, does anyone know why he couldn't just invite Hal Blaine and the gang to his house once Bellagio was set up? Would it have been a union thing, or recreating the same booking problems since these guys were so in-demand? Or did he really ditch them because not playing on your own album was considered uncool plus issues taking the sound on tour? I wonder if, had Brian owned a private studio in these crucial months, we might be looking at a very different outcome or if abandoning the Wall of Sound was already inevitable thanks to the Monkees backlash. (So, what I'm saying is, we need to use a time machine to go back and prevent the Monkees show from happening if we want to save SMiLE!)

I think one or two of your track orders get close to this approach. I think the book should suggest the likeliest ones for a March-April release, but the parallel tracks of the book should encompass the best detailed timeline (using the session data) while incorporating/embodying the fan-mix tradition/sensibility. I think all that can work in tandem when we acknowledge that to get a SMiLE in that time frame, some stuff has to be left out--otherwise, its Everyman making his/her own BWPS...

I've thought about giving it some kind of shot myself, but I'd much rather read a book like this written by you!!

Thanks so much for that last comment! I really appreciate it! And I hope I haven't been too pedantic with my response to you so far--I do see what you're getting at. I think it's a matter of getting as close to Brian's internal vision circa Nov-Dec with the material we have when trying to save as much of the "Pet Sounds-like" SMiLE aesthetic as possible. After that, of course, SMiLE get closer and closer to Smiley through means outside anyone's direct control and I don't think that can be stopped. In this regard, it's about getting Brian to maybe ease off on some of the wackier comedy ideas (false start WC chorus for one) and lesser / jankier songs (Barnyard Suite, Elements, maybe OMP and probably HGS, likely Holidays...) to get a more manageable LP out of what he already had. This is already my primary MO as a fanmixer--how can we get as close to what we've been told his plans were circa December with what's in the can, using things like '67 Veggies/Heroes and '68 CE to cheat.

I used to be more of a hardliner with thematically-linked sides (Americana/Cycle of Life) but admittedly I've been leaning towards a looser mix and match approach lately. Wonderful linked with Heroes and/or Worms for example, or Surf's Up as gilded age America (Carnegie famously built an opera house...after exploiting labor for years). I'd probably make at least one "pure" sides-oriented mix again and then one-to-three "whole album" oriented mixes at this point.

I think there are several credible variations of what would have constituted a spring 1967 SMiLE, and a book that explored them should leave room for those potential outcomes. For example, the H&V "part 1/part2" construction could have appeared in separate places on the record, with part 2 following Cabinessence as a light-hearted coda to the Americana side.

It is all conjecture, of course, and any alternate scenario that produces a spring '67 SMiLE has to change some of the events that doomed the project. I would concur that H&V would've had to be the single, but I'm not ready to rule out musical reprises and variations, which takes the modular concept a step further and (speaking personally!) is much more credible than 95% of the comedy material.

I think none of us knows enough to unilaterally discard any of the possible configurations that might have coalesced once Brian had successfully synthesized his efforts on H&V. Which is why I think a book exploring what that spring '67 SMiLE has to accommodate a number of disparate variations. (And ideally the book would also include a CD set that presented each variation--let's keep it relatively tame and limit the number of those to, sap, four--in their respective track orders for comparison. Given the vagaries of copyright law, however, all of that might need to appear at YouTube...)

Of course the question that emerges from this is whether or not the number of variations can actually be limited to four...!    I will defer that decision to Julia... 

I of course, also speaking personally, think the comedy material is more plausible for all the reasons stated ad nauseum but will reiterate I'd actually prefer it your way artistically. While I may sometimes sound like I'm denigrating Van Dyke for not "getting" Brian (either from the jump or not following Brian's shifting plans) I actually think his influence was better than what Brian would've done left to his own devices. I find the Americana stuff, CIFOTM turn-of-phrase and Won/SU lyrics in particular to be a lot more enticing than a humorous mish-mash of random occult references plus veggies. I'd have preferred a "Pet Sounds 2--with Americana as the theme instead of teen angst" instead of Smiley Smile. If Heroes/Veggies/Barnyard is more Brian and CE/SU/Worms is more Van, as I suspect, then I'd take Van's version of the album anyday. But really, what these two men did together in '66 trumps anything they ever did separately (Pet Sounds excluded, in Brian's case) and I think Brian should've trusted the natural evolution of the project instead of abandoning it for a misguided underwhelming comedy album the way he did. That's how art works sometimes, where the project finds itself in the process and turns out much different than you'd planned. Put succinctly, I advocate for the comedy inclusions not out of personal preference but historical accuracy, despite the impression I suspect many have of me.

I also agree, it's not limited to 4 possibilities.  I think a month by month or even session by session "here's what Brian may've been thinking at this point/here's how this may've fit in with the material recorded previously" SMiLE-timeline would be really cool. Like how that GV "Persuasion" session in September I mentioned may've been a connection to the song Persuasion (which we call HGS) recorded a week previously, though that idea certainly didn't last long. Or how Prayer was definitely "intro to the album" when Brian recorded it, but we can make a strong assumption it was replace by YW as intro and became the outro by December sometime, per Vosse's testimony (as well as the shared chords with SU...though that may've been intended as a bookend).

I think it will be difficult if not impossible to reconstruct a "spring SMiLE" with specific comedy snippets, but there are some fan mixes that do so, and one intriguing tangent in a book devoted to such speculative reconstruction might be to include a survey of how fan mixes have tried to incorporate that material into their re-creations.

From reading Julia's work as it has continued to evolve over the past months, I am confident that she could produce a section surveying and evaluating those efforts with an eye toward some generalizations as to how it could have been incorporated into the LP. (A comparison to Frank Zappa's approach to this would be part of this as well.)

That said, we see little or no such utilization of between-song chatter on Smiley Smile (the false start on "Little Pad," which is one of the tracks on the LP that has no point of prior connection to the SMiLE sessions).

While the possibilities are virtually infinite, I'm of the opinion that it will be necessary in a book covering the subject to cull things down to four, maybe five scenarios and track order concepts. These will also have to collide with another key decision point: Good Vibrations...in or out?

You're right there's no between-song chatter or "surfing the radio" sound effects or "one song flows into the next" on Smiley the way Zappa, Joseph Byrd, Todd Rundgren or the Beatles did it. It's still a banded 12-track album just with humor (outright laughter or funny chipmunk voices etc) and weird sound effects (popped cork, water pouring etc) thrown in for flavor where "appropriate." This is how I think SMiLE was meant to be, just more extreme about it--notice how much more dramatic "Moaning Laughter" is compared to Little Pad's giggling or the possibility of an entire song out of spliced water sounds compared to the pouring sound in Veggies. Even Undersea Chant, while perhaps not as beautiful (though I blame the non-BB vocals) is certainly more creative and complex than the Water Chant. It's like Brian realized these ideas he had for SMiLE, while amazing in a vacuum, made for a very disjointed whole that felt like less than the sum of its parts. I suspect the way he scaled back fire from an inferno to a candle, such was his MO with the rest of Smiley. 

Another reason I think the original SMiLE oddities didn't happen is because they were too grueling in service of what were then-untested ideas. Plus, they might have thrown off both the pacing as well as the heavenly vibe of those gorgeous Wrecking Crew arrangements, if the WC false start is any indication. Zappa managed to get it to work but his band was producing a more grunge-y rock n roll sound, not neo-Bach, plus he had an insane work ethic the likes of which Brian could only dream of. Zappa didn't even touch weed let alone acid--he was a machine who produced what like 100 albums in his lifetime? (It's at least more than 50 I know offhand.) Also, while I will always greatly respect the man, I have to admit that 10-years on, I'm not as in-love with WOIIFTM as I used to be. I still absolutely love pieces of it and respect the whole as a masterful work of art that pushed the medium forward, but it's not something I'd throw on unless I were really in the mood. I prefer the Wrecking Crew esque instrumentals of the 60s Italian film composers these days--more PS-style, less SMiLE/Smiley. So in that regard, maybe Brian was right not to pursue such an endeavor. (For the record, I don't like Lumpy Gravy either which is also a weird audio collage. My favorite Zappa album I've heard is his first. I think, post-college and definitely post-20s the whole "breaking rules and pushing boundaries for its own sake" thing loses its appeal.)

Joseph Byrd also did incredible things in this vein but he didn't include spoken word jokes, so he didn't have to worry about screwing up the momentum of The United States of America. He did do a lot sampled sounds and layered music which I think it works partly because of the otherworldly analog synth and electric violin sonic texture unique to that album. Something about those classic instruments Brian was using just don't seem to lend themselves to the kind of experiments these guys pulled off successfully, at least in my opinion. (Maybe I'm too simple and lacking in imagination when I say that, I don't know.)

[BJL]

Even with all the research I've done, this was such a frustrating and obviously misguided endeavor on its face (and even more so with hindsight) which is why I think fans like us just can't be satisfied with the explanation and let it go. Why pick Heroes for the single? (Anderle says because it was "the most finished.") Then why remake it virtually from scratch and change so much? (Because Brian is a perfectionist.) Why did it have to come so soon after GV hit #1 in December--shouldn't that in itself have brought them some breathing room? (Because the BRI launch required new product to bargain with!) Why couldn't the BRI launch have waited? (Because nobody thought it had to until it was too late.) Why couldn't Brian have just kept at it after these distractions subsided in March/April? (Because the moment passed and the man followed his muse despite the consequences beyond the music itself.)

I think this is well said. So many of the steps along the path to Smile's failure made sense in the moment. There are certainly moments, many captured on tape, when you just want to reach back in time and say "what are you thinking!" But so much of what derailed the project was just reasonable or at least to-be-expected reactions to events in the moment. And then eventually the band was too far down a path of no return.

I of course, also speaking personally, think the comedy material is more plausible for all the reasons stated ad nauseum but will reiterate I'd actually prefer it your way artistically. While I may sometimes sound like I'm denigrating Van Dyke for not "getting" Brian (either from the jump or not following Brian's shifting plans) I actually think his influence was better than what Brian would've done left to his own devices. I find the Americana stuff, CIFOTM turn-of-phrase and Won/SU lyrics in particular to be a lot more enticing than a humorous mish-mash of random occult references plus veggies. I'd have preferred a "Pet Sounds 2--with Americana as the theme instead of teen angst" instead of Smiley Smile. If Heroes/Veggies/Barnyard is more Brian and CE/SU/Worms is more Van, as I suspect, then I'd take Van's version of the album anyday. But really, what these two men did together in '66 trumps anything they ever did separately (Pet Sounds excluded, in Brian's case) and I think Brian should've trusted the natural evolution of the project instead of abandoning it for a misguided underwhelming comedy album the way he did. That's how art works sometimes, where the project finds itself in the process and turns out much different than you'd planned. Put succinctly, I advocate for the comedy inclusions not out of personal preference but historical accuracy, despite the impression I suspect many have of me.

This is perhaps neither here nor there, but I do think that the Cantina mix of heroes from Feb. shows that, from a creative and musical perspective, it was absolutely possible to integrate these two sides of the project seamlessly. Brian managed it at least one time, in one of really only a handful of "finished" mixes we have from the period. The Cantina mix is undeniably gorgeous and sophisticated music, with a very strong Van Dyke Parks influence, that fits well alongside the darker and more serious side of the project. But it's also full of Brian's musical humor, in almost every section: the slide whistle at the end of the verse, Mike's exaggerated doo-be-doos in the acapella section, the madcap laughing in the cantina section, the "your under arrest," rhyming "jive" with "survive," the dum dum dums that lead into the tape explosion. All of those moments seem, to me, to be clearly products of Brian's musical humor kick! Now, could he have pulled it off for a whole album? Honestly, yeah, I think he could have.

[zaval80]

I didn't but thanks for the link. I checked it out searching for PJR, the LAFP and SMiLE in general but sorry to say didn't see anything come up with regard to this particular tangent. Still, later on I might use it to see if those last 10 books come up...

Probably makes sense to look up for the general BB-related content there and to sift through it - they have an awful lot of sources (though not every worthy one), but the question is, how well they are referenced.

I have a nice collection of BB books including some wanted by you, will start looking them up at some later date.

As to your second suggestions, absolutely possible but nothing came up in a fairly thorough search engine crawl. It's not like Google has access to everything as I've come to learn just as a fan of obscure media in general, but it is pretty hard to imagine where I'd find someone with archives of a long-dormant underground newspaper from 60 years ago. Not giving up, just not sure where to go from here. That one college's newly acquired collection was my best lead--and to be fair they did say they're still categorizing everything they recently inherited. So it's possible if I checked back in a year maybe something will have turned up.

I've mentioned the "microfiche" stuff, that was the preferred method of archiving in the '80s and before, and who knows what may have been preserved by this method. I know that some underground stuff was definitely microfiched, awful to look at from today's possibilities viewpoint, but at least preserving texts to read.

Yeah, I am not as well versed on the minutia of GV as the rest of SMiLE (great song but it just doesn't speak to me in the same way PS and WC-through-Dada era SMiLE does) but I think I know what you mean. There are a few sections of music recorded for it that didn't make the 3:36 cut. The "hum be dum" vocals restored for TSS of course, and some others.* Brian did make alternate cuts of the same song for single and album releases, so even if we accept that SMiLE would've been 12 banded tracks rather than BWPS-esque freeflowing symphonic "movements," it's not outside the realm of possibility he'd make an alternate GV cut that's longer and designed to transition more smoothly into the rest of the side.

When I've started my SMiLE research, GV was the first track I've assembled into the complete session sequence - it felt good to start from the hardest one and to be awarded with a good glimpse into its intricacies but, though some GV sessions like the ones I've mentioned (7-8 out of 9 known for the track) did not seem to me like the single material and strongly suggested the later possibility for an album, I would not agree with "Brian did make alternate cuts of the same song for single and album releases", just because GV mix is the same everywhere, and any alternate versions seem to have been prepared for the purpose of the single. But yes, with the amount of material at hand, he could have prepared no less amazing versions, if he wanted to.

I absolutely agree with you that a producer's job includes securing funding and keeping the budget under control. However, Brian especially at this time, I don't think was very considerate of how much of Capitol's money he burned in search of perfection. I don't necessarily doubt you that he'd ultimately be expected to pay Capitol back for any unacceptable increases in expenses because that would just make intuitive sense...however, to the best of my recollection no source actually mentions that. Maybe they assume it goes without saying but the impression given a lot of the time is that Capitol knew what a good thing they had with Brian that they were willing to keep throwing money at the "one man hit machine" as long as it meant a GV came out of it in the end. I'm not gonna die on the hill that this was definitely the dynamic at play, it's just the impression I got from the sources.

That said, while I threw the possibility of spite out there, I agree it's probably more likely Brian was just an unraveling mess with executive dysfunction problems around this time. (Not saying this in an unkind way, just being blunt.) It's the clear picture every source paints, one way or another, so it tracks. It's possible he'd made the appointments when an idea came to him at 3 AM but by the time they could actually get in the studio however many days later, he'd already realized that wouldn't work or a "better" idea occurred to him and there was nothing he could use that particular group of musicians for, so might as well cancel. This concurs with another common impression given by the sources, that SMiLE was being made up on the fly.

I think that Brian had full artistic freedom from Capitol, nobody stood over him with the time-clock or money-counter - and that the "company beans" would have gone after him later - like, "you've spent so much $$$ on this and that, we did not want to mess with your artistic vision, and the album is brilliant and the single was a hit, but you know, it'd be only fair for us to recoup those money advanced to you". The bosses sure did know who laid the golden eggs.

[zaval80]

You're right there's no between-song chatter or "surfing the radio" sound effects or "one song flows into the next" on Smiley the way Zappa, Joseph Byrd, Todd Rundgren or the Beatles did it. It's still a banded 12-track album just with humor (outright laughter or funny chipmunk voices etc) and weird sound effects (popped cork, water pouring etc) thrown in for flavor where "appropriate." This is how I think SMiLE was meant to be, just more extreme about it--notice how much more dramatic "Moaning Laughter" is compared to Little Pad's giggling or the possibility of an entire song out of spliced water sounds compared to the pouring sound in Veggies. Even Undersea Chant, while perhaps not as beautiful (though I blame the non-BB vocals) is certainly more creative and complex than the Water Chant. It's like Brian realized these ideas he had for SMiLE, while amazing in a vacuum, made for a very disjointed whole that felt like less than the sum of its parts. I suspect the way he scaled back fire from an inferno to a candle, such was his MO with the rest of Smiley. 

Another reason I think the original SMiLE oddities didn't happen is because they were too grueling in service of what were then-untested ideas. Plus, they might have thrown off both the pacing as well as the heavenly vibe of those gorgeous Wrecking Crew arrangements, if the WC false start is any indication. Zappa managed to get it to work but his band was producing a more grunge-y rock n roll sound, not neo-Bach, plus he had an insane work ethic the likes of which Brian could only dream of. Zappa didn't even touch weed let alone acid--he was a machine who produced what like 100 albums in his lifetime? (It's at least more than 50 I know offhand.) Also, while I will always greatly respect the man, I have to admit that 10-years on, I'm not as in-love with WOIIFTM as I used to be. I still absolutely love pieces of it and respect the whole as a masterful work of art that pushed the medium forward, but it's not something I'd throw on unless I were really in the mood. I prefer the Wrecking Crew esque instrumentals of the 60s Italian film composers these days--more PS-style, less SMiLE/Smiley. So in that regard, maybe Brian was right not to pursue such an endeavor. (For the record, I don't like Lumpy Gravy either which is also a weird audio collage. My favorite Zappa album I've heard is his first. I think, post-college and definitely post-20s the whole "breaking rules and pushing boundaries for its own sake" thing loses its appeal.)

Joseph Byrd also did incredible things in this vein but he didn't include spoken word jokes, so he didn't have to worry about screwing up the momentum of The United States of America. He did do a lot sampled sounds and layered music which I think it works partly because of the otherworldly analog synth and electric violin sonic texture unique to that album. Something about those classic instruments Brian was using just don't seem to lend themselves to the kind of experiments these guys pulled off successfully, at least in my opinion. (Maybe I'm too simple and lacking in imagination when I say that, I don't know.)

The good model IMO would be The Who Sell Out - an album of terrific songs, all linked, nice listening in the sequence. Nothing there Brian couldn't have done during the last stage preparations.

[Julia]

To BJL, that's a good point about Jan-Feb Heroes representing the perfect mix of both men's sensibilities as well as a truly fantastic track. It's possible, even very likely, that the effort it took to get just one song of 11 (GV being finished) up to standard was what killed any remaining enthusiasm Brian had. If one song took two months --and still wasn't done (by his standards)-- then how long are 10 more going to take? Especially if, as I suspect, working on these would involve sifting through hours of Vosse audio verite and Taxi Cab/Veggie Fight/George Fell/Psychedelic Sound recordings on top of the arduous task of making another GV. Then if something wasn't working, or he got a better idea, that'd mean months of wasted work. It's easy to see how this herculean task would be offputting to anyone let alone a man coming undone.

A lot of fans (including me sometimes) think "man he already had an album's worth of backing tracks in the can--all he needed was a few days worth of vocal sessions!" A few official sources even outright say as much. But then there's quotes from the main primary sources insisting Brian thought he'd need a whole other year, or an indeterminate amount of time, and when he realized that wasn't going to happen he drastically scaled down the project. This testimony is a lot more believable if we consider Brian really did want to go above and beyond what any BB album had done before--a WOIIFTM (or The Who Sell Out) level audio collage and/or a full song of sampled water sounds. We can't definitively say Brian's ambitions were quite so high as that, but I choose to believe they were. I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility we would've had Dada played with water and lifeboat-themed improvised "funny" lines filling out the pauses. (Not saying this specific exact configuration was definitely the plan but it's possible and I think something of that caliber was on Brian's mind before he realized it was just too much work for him to commit to in any kind of timely fashion.)

Probably makes sense to look up for the general BB-related content there and to sift through it - they have an awful lot of sources (though not every worthy one), but the question is, how well they are referenced.

I have a nice collection of BB books including some wanted by you, will start looking them up at some later date.

I'll do that in the next day or two, for sure.

I've mentioned the "microfiche" stuff, that was the preferred method of archiving in the '80s and before, and who knows what may have been preserved by this method. I know that some underground stuff was definitely microfiched, awful to look at from today's possibilities viewpoint, but at least preserving texts to read.

Do you know how one would track down archives of microfiche like that? I'm just not sure where to start without Google providing a lead, I admit.

I think that Brian had full artistic freedom from Capitol, nobody stood over him with the time-clock or money-counter - and that the "company beans" would have gone after him later - like, "you've spent so much $$$ on this and that, we did not want to mess with your artistic vision, and the album is brilliant and the single was a hit, but you know, it'd be only fair for us to recoup those money advanced to you". The bosses sure did know who laid the golden eggs.

Yeah, they'd give him some pushback as with Pet Sounds and worrying GV might be too long, but ultimately put out what he provided. Even after the "flop" (so called) of PS they were still shelling out money for untold sessions, including a booklet that was virtually unheard of at the time and letting him go beyond schedule. They tried to hem and haw Brian to be more commercial but ultimately knew where their bread was buttered. At least that's what I take away from everything.

This is just a pedantic little quibble that isn't important but I wonder if Capitol wouldn't have recouped their investment through more subtle means than that, like with the hidden breakage fees they were charging the group. (Assuming they could still pull that kinda thing with Anderle and their new lawyer examining the books more closely.)

[mike s]

This is perhaps neither here nor there, but I do think that the Cantina mix of heroes from Feb. shows that, from a creative and musical perspective, it was absolutely possible to integrate these two sides of the project seamlessly. Brian managed it at least one time, in one of really only a handful of "finished" mixes we have from the period. The Cantina mix is undeniably gorgeous and sophisticated music, with a very strong Van Dyke Parks influence, that fits well alongside the darker and more serious side of the project. But it's also full of Brian's musical humor, in almost every section: the slide whistle at the end of the verse, Mike's exaggerated doo-be-doos in the acapella section, the madcap laughing in the cantina section, the "your under arrest," rhyming "jive" with "survive," the dum dum dums that lead into the tape explosion. All of those moments seem, to me, to be clearly products of Brian's musical humor kick! Now, could he have pulled it off for a whole album? Honestly, yeah, I think he could have.

Cantina is made up of genius sections but isn't really a song - its more of a collage.  I think the various FX are grating and wouldn't bear up to repeated listens.

Its an interesting experiment that was ditched almost immediately and I can see why.

[Don Malcolm]

The question remains open with respect to a "spring SMiLE," even though the evidence you cite strongly points toward its inclusion.
Working with the "four variant" notion, I could see a version where it is left off, and three others with it (but each in different locations relative to the other tracks).

IMO the only presentable line-up of SMiLE where GV is NOT included could have been with it NOT in the tracklist in the first place. That would have been a bold conceptual idea, to present the new album without the tried-and-true hit song. And if it was, as we know, to have a GV-less SMiLE would be to diminish the album. I agree it's not an important cog from the viewpoint of concepts intended for SMiLE, but realistically, it has to be there.

OTOH the tracklist is itself problematic and is a snapshot in time that "fell into a French horn" almost immediately. Which is why in a book that reconstructs several scenarios for a spring SMiLE, one of them should include a version of it w/o GV. Of course you are free to dismiss such a variant for whatever reason, but since the possibility of a GV-less SMiLE is at least >0%, such a scenario deserves coverage.

I'd leave it to Julia as to whether the variants would be given some kind of probability ranking, given historical evidence and where each variant ranks in the spectrum of the level of influence (VDP<-->BW). A GV-less SMiLE is a separate "decision tree" but might simplify some of the other decisions. Looking at her list of track variants, we find several that omit GV but fewer that remove MOLC--which indicates to me that a shift from "exhuming the SMiLE wreckage" to "in what way(s) could Brian have threaded the needle, avoiding the pitfalls that befell the project" is what is needed for a series of tracklists whose reach doesn't exceed their grasp. I think MOLC and the rest of the Elements almost certainly have to be sacrificed in order to get a "spring SMiLE" released in mid-late April. Doing so would have lowered the temperature with both VDP and the band in one fell swoop, increasing the chances that Brian would have avoided the disenchantment that scuttled the project.

I encourage another round of tracklist combinations that focus on variations within the Americana/Cycle of Life 2-sided structure. (There are at least three or four from Julia's list that make for a good jumping-off point.) What BWPS shows us is that the tracks that connect to the more ornately orchestrated tracks were not likely to become as caught up in production paralysis. (Smiley, too, demonstrates something similar--but not as an actual re-creation, given that it was the Americana side that was mostly disappeared.)

I do think most of these will include GV, with it most often situated as the lead track on Side 2.

 A "spring SMiLE" really is dependent on some kind of successful resolution of H&V, though. Mike S's point can't be discounted--but snippets distributed across Side 1, with the closing vamp (ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-BA-ba-ba-ba-ba-BAH!) appearing as a repeating segue, perhaps, could have provided a version of what was more explicit in what Zappa and Joe Byrd were interpolating into their projects...