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

[Boiled Egg]

>>Mike says he wrote... the lyrics to the verses and dictated them to his wife Susanne in the car.<<

i'm sure it's unintentional, but this is hilarious.

[brianc]

**By editing out everything in between those phrases, I've created the title for the next Smile documentary.**

Sigh.

**Seriously though, saying Brian delivered most of the album isn't really true, because there never was a complete album.  We can't think of Smile as a potentially completable album, because it wasn't.**

As far as a tracklist, an album jacket and a number of songs that were NEAR completion, it's not a stretch to say that any album could have easily been prepared at that time. You can call an unreleased album anything you want, and the confusion of anything started that is abandoned makes it so that it looks directionless in hindsight.

**Maybe Brian would have changed his mind hundreds of times and scrapped everything thing even if the Boys had been out on tour for another decade.  I don't think we can use what must have been a common occurrence, the boys returning home to be surprised by what Brian had been doing, as a catalyst for something out of the ordinary.  Something that might have happened anyway.**

Something DID happen. You can take one side, or you can see all the sides. I choose to see all the sides and have been arguing them online since 1995. I just have a tad more empathy for the creator, in this instance, because of the nature of those songs. I feel they are more valuable than Mike Love has given them credit for, musically and lyrically. Mike is entitled to his opinion. That's fine. But under any normal circumstances, what Brian had set up when the Beach Boys got back from the fall 1966 tour should have been suffice to complete the album. If it's Mike's fault, so be it. If Brian had doubts about his intellectual collaborators, that's fine too. If Brian couldn't concentrate and lost the plot due to drug abuse, I can buy that. If Brian just decided to question the project's validity, okay. All of these are valid explanations, and probably all of them were part and parcel. I'm only saying that the material was there, and it wasn't some big ball of confusion. Many unreleased albums in rock history never got as far as a tracklist, an album jacket, an inner sleeve or that much mixdown work.

**No one knows for sure!  It's a fact!**

Mocking. Heh. Can I get an amen?

**Besides, I'm still not sure why I'm still posting on this thread.  I thought I got this all out of my system four years ago.**

Sorry. I'll stop pulling your arm. 

[brianc]

By the way, my real quote, should it happen to get lost in the haughtiness, was this:

**No one knows for sure. Probably a combination of things brought on by doubt, arguing and drugs. But the cancelling of sessions didn't start happening until after the band got back and started working with Brian on the vocals. It's a fact.**

So... is it not a fact? Was Brian in the habit of cancelling "Dumb Angel"/"Smile" sessions prior to the Beach Boys returning?

The "no one knows for sure" was about WHY Brian cancelled "Smile." The "it's a fact" had to do with WHEN Brian started cancelling "Smile" sessions. It's all about context.

[Joshilyn Hoisington]

I wasn't mocking anything.  I really just think that "nobody knows for sure, it's a fact" is a pretty good description of most Smile discussions.  It's all speculation, right?

It's all about context.

Which nobody on this board has, unless Mike, Al, Brian, or Bruce is on this board.

[Cam Mott]

I understand it the same as c-man, in fact Mike has said he had a copy of the final tracking mix for GV to write the lyrics he dictated to his wife on the way to the session. That makes them very last minute if a final tracking wasn't possible until September 21 or later and GV was all ready a "boss hitbound" pick on KHJ's September 27th radio survey.

[brianc]

**Which nobody on this board has, unless Mike, Al, Brian, or Bruce is on this board.**

Not the context of the sessions, but the context of the sentence.

Anyway, it sounded a bit harsh repeated twice, but I got your point and it's true... we're just theorizing, not making anything more concrete in our obsession on this message board. Sometimes the written word comes off as sounding different than the intent. My bad for taking it that way.

[brianc]

**I understand it the same as c-man, in fact Mike has said he had a copy of the final tracking mix for GV to write the lyrics he dictated to his wife on the way to the session. That makes them very last minute if a final tracking wasn't possible until September 21 or later and GV was all ready a "boss hitbound" pick on KHJ's September 27th radio survey.**

I'm sure it should ring a bell, as I, like any obsessive, have almost every Beach Boys book ever printed, and hundreds of hours of footage and radio show on cassette, VHS and DVD. But for some reason, the only quote I can mentally place is the one in EH where Mike says that the whole track was done, but it was so weird that he thought the fanbase would be lost, so he added a boy-girl lyric to the bassline.

[Cam Mott]

I think you are remembering he said he came up with the "excitation" lyrics to riff on the bass line earlier on. [c-man: is that what can be heard being tried out by Brian during some of the Juneish tracking?, memory vague]  Mike also has explained how he wrote the verse lyrics, where the boy-girl sentiment is,  and I believe other Boys have always backed that up.

[brianc]

I'm not doubting it, as much as I'd just like to remember the story/quote. I'm sure I'll run across it, and it's not a really big arguing point anyway.

[MBE]

I am pretty sure Mike speaks of it in the Byron Priess book and also his 1992 Goldmine interview. That's just off the top of my head, I don't know how detailed he got. Check it out though.

[the captain]

When quoting, I recommend use of the "quote" button. It beats asterisks. That is all.

[Mahalo]

When quoting, I recommend use of the "quote" button. It beats asterisks. That is all.

I agree.

[Joshilyn Hoisington]

I'm starting to seriously consider joining the literary movement to eliminate most punctuation in general.

Speaking of context...

[Aegir]

You guys are so lazy. I typed in "Mike Love California Girls dictate" into Google and the 1992 Goldmine interview is the first thing that came up.

There's quite a few versions of "Good Vibrations." Did you write a few sets of lyrics for the song?[/i]

No. I just wrote one set on the way to the session in Hollywood at Columbia studios. I dictated it to my then wife Suzanne on the Hollywood Freeway on the way from Burbank to the studio. It was like a 15-minute drive. Just dictated the words.

[mikeyj]

Brianc, I have two interviews that Mike+Bruce did for radio stations here in Sydney, Australia late last year and I'm pretty sure that in both interviews (at least in one) Mike makes the point of "I wrote all of the lyrics". My point being is that as people have said, Mike has said on many occassions that he wrote pretty much ALL of the lyrics (well besides the words "Good Vibrations") and it is pretty easy to find interviews where he has said so. Whether you believe it or not is another matter but to be honest there is nothing THAT amazing about the lyrics anyway (they are perfect for the song but there's nothing that special about them)

[brianc]

Says you. I've always thought the lyrics were great.

[Boiled Egg]

they sound to me like the kind of lyrics that were written in 15 minutes with the author holding neither pen nor paper.

[Joshilyn Hoisington]

I wonder what Mike was doing in Burbank...

[brianc]

Any song with the line "and the wind that lifts her perfume through the air" is alright by me.

Yardly smells so sweet.

[Cam Mott]

I'm goin' guess it shows how much Mike dug the tracking which put him in the zone where it sometimes just flows; having his lovely wife right there probably didn't hurt the inspiration either.

[Joshilyn Hoisington]

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

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

[Alex]

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

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

How bad is the smog in LA? They're quite odd for a major city in that their public transit is quite lacking, or so I've read and heard.

[Joshilyn Hoisington]

As with most problems with LA, smog is both overstated and understated.

I happen to like it...but then again, after a good rain there's nothing quite as beautiful as the crystal clear Hollywood hills.

The public transit system is strange.  The busses are great, but the rail system is inadequate to get you everywhere you want to go...but it is OK for certain routes.

[brianc]

"They" are working on it. But it's difficult. The people with all the power and money just happen to make all that money based on things like the sale of oil/gas and automobiles. They hold a lot of political clout. We, the artists, stay out here, why? Who knows. The apocalyptic mood of Los Angeles was perfectly conveyed by Nathaniel West in "The Day of the Locust." A lot of people are working really hard to hopefully leave their immortal mark. We hope it is all worth something.

The smog is terrible. It reminds me of that Flaming Lips lyric: "If you could make everybody poor, just so you could be rich, would you do it?"

I have a grandmother who still believes that blues is the devil's music. I can't help but think the devil's music is really the sound of a gun shot. But that's why I love "Smile" and the peace/sex/equality revolution. I don’t understand why that was/is so scary to people. How can religion be against peace and equality? And how can mankind deny its animal sexual instinct? If anything, the ‘60s strikes me as extremely logical and level-headed. Yes, the drug decadence surely made it look like tomfoolery. But at its roots, the philosophy just made sense.

It makes a whole lot more sense than the nihilism that is so often praised these days in art circles. Los Angeles has its ugly moments, like the rest of the world, so there is a lot to feel nihilistic about. But optimism doesn't have to be naive. Sometimes optimism can be simple and logical.

[c-man]

There's a 400+ page book called "Good Vibrations".  I'd love to report that the entire book is about the writing & recording of the Beach Boys' song, but it's actually subtitled "A History of Record Production", and that's what it is.  By Mark Cunningham.  Highly recommended.

On page 82, Mike Love is quoted thusly:  "...I was around for one of the sessions and actually came up with the lyrics and melody line for the 'I'm pickin' up good vibrations' part.  But I just had a 'let's wait and see' attitude', so I left Brian to his own devices and didn't attend any more backing sessions until it was time to record the vocals...". 

Combined with the above quote from Goldmine (where Mike describes dictating the rest of the lyrics to Suzanne in the car on the way to Columbia Studios), this should satisfy source-wise. 

As far as the quality of Mike's lyrics:  I consider both "she goes with me to a blossom world" (which BTW doesn't even rhyme with the preceding line) and "I don't know where but she sends me there" some of the best lyrics I've ever heard in a pop song, including Dylan's and Lennon's.  Surreal but accessible at the same time.