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.