Brian Wilson, you're my favorite vegetable.

[Mr. Cohen]

This is a theory on the hidden meaning of Smiley Smile. As we all know, the SMiLE period was all about double meanings. I personally think Smiley Smile is full of double meanings. We'll start by analyzing the lyrics of "Vegetables":

I'm gonna be round my vegetables = "Vegetables" meaning drugs, such as pills, that turn you all into vegetables.
I'm gonna chow down my vegetables = Brian's going take to pills, smoke weed, drink, etc.
I love you most of all, my favorite vegetable = Here's where it gets weird. Brian is becoming a vegetable, and he sure does love to take his vegetables (and love himself, with his messianic/God complex during SMiLE that he admits to now).

If you brought a big brown bag of them home = It was common in the day to keep weed and other drugs in brown bags.
I'd jump up and down and hope you'd toss me a carrot = Brian wants some drugs, man.

I'm gonna keep well my vegetables = The perspective of the drug dealer. He's going to keep his vegetables, the drug-users, "well". The users believe they stay well by taking their drugs.
Cart off and sell my vegetables = He's selling his drugs, and the vegetables are selling their souls for the drugs.
I love you most of all, my favorite vegetable = The drug dealer loves his vegetables, and the drug users love their vegetables.

I tried to kick the ball but my tenny flew right off = Brian tried to kick the drug habit but his "tenny flew right off", he couldn't do it.
I'm red as a beet, 'cause I'm so embarassed = Brian hates admitting he's a drug addict.

I know that you'll feel better
when you send us in your letter
and tell us the name of your...
your favorite vegetable. = We all love Brian, don't we? Our favorite "vegetable". What made me think of this crazy interpretation in the first place was how this bit was repeated twice at the end of the song, as if to suggest it could have multiple meanings (giving you time to reflect on it), which I now think the song might have. The second time it repeats, we hear the SMiLE arrangement, as if it's a last reminder of what this vegetable Brian was capable of before fall broke, the plants all die, and we went back to winter (more on that below).
 
Yes, "Fall Breaks and Back to Winter" comes next (a sloppy segue on my part, I know). The vegetables are harvested and eaten in the fall before the plants all whither away in the winter, dead and cold. Sound familar? Like maybe Brian's decline from drug use? The end of the vegetable? The hippie movement, the plant that made all of the drug-abusing vegetables, whithering and dieing (more on that below)?

Then we have "She's Goin' Bald" after that, which is about someone going crazy from drug use, with "nothin' upside [their] head", meaning the person is empty, or a vegetable. The girl freaks out and shaves off her long hair, a symbol of the freedom of the hippie era, now lost in the craziness of the times. Hair has a lot of significance for Brian as a symbol of freedom: think of the line from "Friends", "I talked your folks out of making you cut off your hair...", and the song "Baby Let Your Hair Grow Long". And, this neatly ends side 1. The song before "Vegetables", "Heroes and Villains", started off the theme by metaphorically looking at (and disapproving of, "look at what you've done") the result of all of the good and bad intentions that interplayed with each other during the sixties psychedelic movement, which is paralleled readily in the good and bad effects of drugs.

Am I still crazy? Maybe. But just look at Brian's explanation of "Surf's Up" from the time period. No less weird. A reinterpretation of side 2 still awaits you.

[carl r]

Good stuff. Not sure it's right but I enjoyed reading it. I always thought "She's Going Bald" stems from the hippie reprimand "Don't go all bald on me, man." (I believe that "Withnail and I" has a great character who says this as a reprimand to someone who is fretting about serious responsibilities.) There's certainly something going on with Vegetables but its most likely in my opinion that their vegetable obsession was based on a general feeling of malaise as a result of overindulging. Still it was perhaps the first time that detox emerged in a pop song.

Luckily enough, by the 80s the songs were being written by an early IBM computer program, "BB_SURF.EXE" ....otherwise we could have had tracks about colonics and the various other intimate health treatments which have emerged for pampered, decadent rock stars over the last 30 years.

[buddhahat]

Dada, I think you've eaten too many vegetables!

You almost had me convinced for a second with the line about kicking the ball, and being embarrassed but I honestly think this is a song about the hippie health fad and no more. I look forward to your other interpretations though.

I'd jump up and down and hope you'd toss me a carrot

Perhaps Brian wants a Camberwell Carrot!

[♩♬🐸 Billy C ♯♫♩🐇]

I thought the title of this thread was calling   Brian a vegetable. I was about to get pissed off...

[Mr. Cohen]

Remember, the lyrics to "Vegetables" were rewritten by Van Dyke towards the end of SMiLE (after he couldn't finish "Heroes and Villains"), when Brian could probably tell the SMiLE had fallen apart. I'm sure there was some negativity by that point.

[Ganz Allein]

Brian's obsession with health food during the SMiLE era and for a few years thereafter - not to mention the 20+ minutes of Vege-tables "commercials"/"radio dramas" he recorded - lead me to believe that he and Van Dyke were actually writing about vegetables with no hidden agendas or meanings.

Since Brian was never actually into eating health food, it's too bad he couldn't have gotten Van Dyke to write some lyrics about burgers back in the day.  I'm sure Mike would've obliged had he asked.  He was Brian's first lyricist to mention eating (and with utensils), although he wasn't talking about food.  Maybe Scott Bennett would oblige for Brian's next album?

[The Heartical Don]

I would say that Brian did what almost all drug users do: he went into denial. 'H.E.L.P.', 'Vega-Tables', and 'Mama Says', and other such material, are all about feelings of guilt and the pipedreams that addicts tend to have. This is not to say that no art can be created during addiction, by the way. Addicts tend to look up at people who don't use and feel well as a result; at the same time the user feels that that state of grace is not attainable for him or her, because he or she only feels good just after having 'ingested' something. You could almost say that a user lives in a permanent state of self-inflicted bipolar disorder, there are only ups and downs, and no middle ground. It's precisely that middle ground that people need to deal with life's vicissitudes and to grow up emotionally.
So: the obsession with living healthily is perfectly logical for the addict. But since it's the drugs doing the thinking and talking, it is a terribly hard task to recover and look at things from a more distanced perspective.

PS: personally I tend to think that the use of LSD had been the most detrimental thing Brian did to himself. This drug is extremely harmful in people who have been traumatized, in that it can cause half-forgotten or repressed emotions and memories to become extremely vivid again. In Holland, a psychiatrist tried to treat people who were traumatized in WW 2 by LSD treatment, in order to try to carry his patients through the trauma again and thus heal them. Luckily, this 'therapy' has been wholly abandoned. In Israël, therapists gradually became convinced that 'working through trauma again' was not an option, it was only harmful. They said as much as: if a victim has any, albeit ever so slight, way of coping with daily life, then don't dig up that which happened long ago.

[The Shift]

Since Brian was never actually into eating health food, it's too bad he couldn't have gotten Van Dyke to write some lyrics about burgers back in the day.  I'm sure Mike would've obliged had he asked.

"Well, she got her Daddy's car and she cruised to the Hamburger stand now,
Seems she forgot all about the raw carrot and selected a minced cow..."

Sorry, it's Friday...

[Ganz Allein]

Since Brian was never actually into eating health food, it's too bad he couldn't have gotten Van Dyke to write some lyrics about burgers back in the day.  I'm sure Mike would've obliged had he asked.

"Well, she got her Daddy's car and she cruised to the Hamburger stand now,
Seems she forgot all about the raw carrot and selected a minced cow..."

Sorry, it's Friday...

I forgot all about the "hamburger stand" line...

"...and she'll have on- on- on- onions on that burger todayyyyy!"

[The Heartical Don]

Since Brian was never actually into eating health food, it's too bad he couldn't have gotten Van Dyke to write some lyrics about burgers back in the day.  I'm sure Mike would've obliged had he asked.

"Well, she got her Daddy's car and she cruised to the Hamburger stand now,
Seems she forgot all about the raw carrot and selected a minced cow..."

Sorry, it's Friday...

I forgot all about the "hamburger stand" line...

"...and she'll have on- on- on- onions on that burger todayyyyy!"

'...remember when you spilled freshly pressed orange juice all over my blouse.'

I do notice a problem here, though...

[donald]

Well since you put me down theres been owls pukin in my bed!


Or otherwise heard;  Well since you put him down I've had Al pukin in my bed

[The Heartical Don]

Well since you put me down theres been owls pukin in my bed!


Or otherwise heard;  Well since you put him down I've had Al pukin in my bed

Ever heard of Hovis Parsley?

[The Shift]

Vegetables, by the Beet Boys?