It Makes Sense that Smile is Unfinished

[Loaf]

doesn't it?

With all that Smile was going to be 'about', doesn't it being unfinished just add another level to the whole thing? And i don't just mean for BB-nerds to obsess over, but it ties in thematically.

"I know there's answer but I have to find it by myself." Perhaps Smile in its purest form is too much to be available in a shop for sale, and the best way to distribute the message is via "dealers" (i.e. boot-dealers, and now, in the 21st C, the internet).

To hear Smile, you must first seek it out, which is a quest in itself.

[grillo]

I agree completely! SMiLE could never have been, because then it would have had to been something rather than ANYthing. Can anybody really imagine just going to the store and picking up a used copy of SMiLE for 6 bucks? Not BWPS, but SMiLE by the Beach Boys.
The SMiLE we have is like the Magnificent Ambersons we have, incomplete and slapped together.
Or it's like the 1200 ton stone slab abandoned in the quarry it was carved from in baalbek lebanon thousands of years ago (look it up).
Anyway, I tend to think SMiLE is exactly what it was meant to be.

[phirnis]

I fondly remember my own excitement every single time I got to hear yet another one of those mysterious pieces, be it Cabinessence on the Friends/20/20 twofer or just one more version of Heroes And Villains that revealed one precious little snippet you hadn't heard anywhere else.

Before the European Smile shows I attended, my personal favorite among many great Smile moments has to be the first time I got to hear the DJ Mic Luv mix (must've been in the late summer of 2003). Unlike any assemblage that I had heard before, this one made such perfect sense to me that I initially thought this was the real deal, the original Smile, as conceived by Brian Wilson, finally unearthed in all its glory.

[Sheriff John Stone]

I see nothing positive that resulted from SMiLE being unfinished.

[A Million Units In Jan!]

I see nothing positive that resulted from SMiLE being unfinished.

I'm sort of in that same boat. I think it's a musical tragedy that it was never finished. And as much as I love BWPS, it isn't SMiLE. It's what SMiLE is now, but not the real SMiLE. For some reason it doesn't move me like the original stuff, which is kind of weird because it's the same music. I dunno, maybe because I kind of worry that the reality is that Darian had more input than we like to think.
 There just isn't that....I don't know, it doesn't move me like the original stuff. Maybe because there's some sort of romance involved, it was all such a secret for so long. It's almost like the new stuff is too clean. Not to say the Wrecking Crew weren't the sh*t- because they were- but the new versions are too perfect. I don't know, I just remember the first time I heard SMiLE material it's like it jumped out of the speaker and grabbed me, it changed the way I look at music.  I don't know if I would have felt the same way if I had heard SMiLE for the first time by listening to BWPS.

[Chris Brown]

I see nothing positive that resulted from SMiLE being unfinished.

I'm sort of in that same boat. I think it's a musical tragedy that it was never finished. And as much as I love BWPS, it isn't SMiLE. It's what SMiLE is now, but not the real SMiLE. For some reason it doesn't move me like the original stuff, which is kind of weird because it's the same music. I dunno, maybe because I kind of worry that the reality is that Darian had more input than we like to think.
 There just isn't that....I don't know, it doesn't move me like the original stuff. Maybe because there's some sort of romance involved, it was all such a secret for so long. It's almost like the new stuff is too clean. Not to say the Wrecking Crew weren't the merda- because they were- but the new versions are too perfect. I don't know, I just remember the first time I heard SMiLE material it's like it jumped out of the speaker and grabbed me, it changed the way I look at music.  I don't know if I would have felt the same way if I had heard SMiLE for the first time by listening to BWPS.

I completely agree...I hate to sound like I'm dissing BWPS, because I do enjoy it and I'm happy Brian did it.  But like you said, the original sessions are just in a league of their own.  I had that same feeling the first time I heard the original Smile material.  It floored me.  Not just the music, but the voices, the vibe, everything.  I don't get the same feelings when I listen to BWPS.

Musical tragedy is probably the most accurate way to put it.  Smile's non-release altered the course of music history, as well as that of the Beach Boys themselves.  We all know the severity of the fallout.  So I find it really difficult to accept the idea that anything good came from the loss of Smile.

[Sheriff John Stone]

Musical tragedy is probably the most accurate way to put it.

And human tragedy....

[grillo]

I see nothing positive that resulted from SMiLE being unfinished.

I'm sort of in that same boat. 

I  Smile's non-release altered the course of music history, as well as that of the Beach Boys themselves.  We all know the severity of the fallout.  So I find it really difficult to accept the idea that anything good came from the loss of Smile.

Well, I simply don't accept that SMiLE's  non-release was a negative thing. The group, after all, seemed to come together more as the result of the loss of SMiLE. Also, I don't see how it NOT appearing altered the course of anything but the tower's marketing scheme. SMiLE is the most beautiful music I've ever heard and has definitely affected my life in an extremely positive way since I first heard cabin-essence twenty-some years ago. The first few SMile boots were magical presents from some lost civilization. Part of it's magic is the mystery of how incomplete it is. until recently even BW thought SMiLE was fine as is, a relic of the past. Still, I'll take a 10 cd box set of smile anyday.

[donald]

Makes me think of those sci fi stories where someone goes back in time and intends to alter just one event but ends up causing a chain reaction of events that alters the course of history.


What might ensue if we we went back and finished SMiLE?  I shudder to think!!!

[KokoMoses]

Well, I simply don't accept that SMiLE's  non-release was a negative thing. The group, after all, seemed to come together more as the result of the loss of SMiLE. Also, I don't see how it NOT appearing altered the course of anything but the tower's marketing scheme. SMiLE is the most beautiful music I've ever heard and has definitely affected my life in an extremely positive way since I first heard cabin-essence twenty-some years ago. The first few SMile boots were magical presents from some lost civilization. Part of it's magic is the mystery of how incomplete it is. until recently even BW thought SMiLE was fine as is, a relic of the past. Still, I'll take a 10 cd box set of smile anyday.
[/quote]


Well put!

Personally, I'll take 20/20, Sunflower, Surf's Up any day over Smile!

Heresy? Perhaps

But not really! Those are Beach Boys albums, whereas Smile is something else.

I love it, but it doesn't really represent what I love about the Beach Boys all that much and I find no reason to have to fit it in among what they gave us!

Smile was never released.

Brian's 2004 Smile is something else. It's 40 years later with other guys with different voices and a diffwerent vibe. I bought it and love it, but it's not The Beach Boys.

[the captain]

I really love the Smile music. But there is a lot of the cynicism in me that says it's just an album--or rather, would have been. A great album, maybe, but has its reputation really suffered much, being regarded as one of the most mythical pieces of pop ever? Who knows ... if there is a tragedy around it, it's any personal ones. And those are hard for us to judge anyway. It's just hard to get too worked up about, I guess. Don't get me wrong, it's interesting. But to quote the late Freddie Mercury, "it's just a bloody rock 'n' roll record--people take these things so seriously."

[Rocky]

one sad thing about all of it, i think,  is that the average joe who just hears of smile in passing and buys it out of curiosity is going to be buying BWPS and taking as "Smile", which isn't accurate. I'm lucky becaus I first became interested in Smile before BWPS and discovered it through slowly uneathing all those brillant original recordings. I'd hate to think of the people who discover Smile thesedays via book, article, documentary, etc and expect it to be all that it is written to be and then the dissappointment they must feel when they go out and buy BWPS. Not to bring BWPS down too much, it is what it is, and for what it is it's great, BUT it is not the original and as has already been stated i agree that it just simply lacks the magic of the original. Carl's beautiful vocals on Cabin Essence, Brian on Surf's Up, etc. My room mate is a huge music buff and had never even heard of smile and after I built it up to him he was really excited to hear it and I made the mistake of playing him BWPS because i figured it would be the simplest introduction...needless to say he hated it. He said "that's none of the things you said it was" but after i convinced him to give purple chicks smile 2 or 3 listens he was hooked. It's safe to say that he listens to smile era music now as much if not more than i do.

[Sheriff John Stone]

one sad thing about all of it, i think,  is that the average joe who just hears of smile in passing and buys it out of curiosity is going to be buying BWPS and taking as "Smile", which isn't accurate. I'm lucky becaus I first became interested in Smile before BWPS and discovered it through slowly uneathing all those brillant original recordings. I'd hate to think of the people who discover Smile thesedays via book, article, documentary, etc and expect it to be all that it is written to be and then the dissappointment they must feel when they go out and buy BWPS. Not to bring BWPS down too much, it is what it is, and for what it is it's great, BUT it is not the original and as has already been stated i agree that it just simply lacks the magic of the original. Carl's beautiful vocals on Cabin Essence, Brian on Surf's Up, etc. My room mate is a huge music buff and had never even heard of smile and after I built it up to him he was really excited to hear it and I made the mistake of playing him BWPS because i figured it would be the simplest introduction...needless to say he hated it. He said "that's none of the things you said it was" but after i convinced him to give purple chicks smile 2 or 3 listens he was hooked. It's safe to say that he listens to smile era music now as much if not more than i do.

Good post, Rocky. I feel the same way. That was my biggest disappointment, too. I wished that Brian would've left BWPS as a live performance; record THAT if you want to and release it. But, when they made it into a studio recording and Brian proclaimed, "We finished it", well, that still stings. Like you said, now THAT becomes the final document; the SMiLE songs deserved better. Am I getting too serious, Freddie?

So, does that make Loaf's thread title incorrect, or is it a Freudian slip, or a fraudian slip....

[the captain]

(Freddie, like Frankie, says relax.  )

[?]

I see nothing positive that resulted from SMiLE being unfinished.

I do.  Smiley, Wild Honey, and Friends are three of my favorites.  I do like Smile better, but I wouldn't want to be without those three.

Makes me think of those sci fi stories where someone goes back in time and intends to alter just one event but ends up causing a chain reaction of events that alters the course of history.


What might ensue if we we went back and finished SMiLE?  I shudder to think!!!

I think that's the exact plot of Lewis Shiner's Glimpses.  Has anyone read that book?  I've always wondered how it is. 

[juggler]

I actually sold my CD copy of BWPS.  Part of the reason was that artwork bothered me.  For me, Frank Holmes' stuff was, is, and always will be an indispensable part of Smile.

The other thing is that the studio recording seems a bit sterile.  I much prefer listening to BWPS live at Carnegie Hall.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4182988

BTW, I first got interested in Smile when the 1993 box set came out.  At the time, I owned (and loved) Pet Sounds. I remember being intrigued by the reviews of the then-new box set.   I was a poor student at the time, though, and the box set was something like $70 at Tower (this was before Amazon.com).   However, in one of those magic Smile moments that only folks around here might appreciate, I found an orphaned Disc 2 of the box (i.e., the disc covering 1965-66, including Smile tracks) among the used CDs at the Wherehouse.  It was priced at $4... Yes, four bucks!!!  No idea how or why someone would have parted with just one disc from the box-- let alone the disc that was the centerpiece of the whole project-- but I choose to believe that the minor miracle was meant for me personally.

[The Heartical Don]

I quite like the 'unfinished' characteristic. Of course it would not have been: 'just another album', had it been readied at the time. It would have cast a huge shadow over all that would have followed, that is for sure.

The 'unfinished' thing for me is much the same that I love in reggae, esp. authentic dub reggae. I am still trying to piece together sort of a comprehensive Lee Perry collection, whilst knowing that I won't ever be able to get everything the man ever did. The man worked in a tiny shack in Jamaica, blazing hot. He only had a 4 track Teac machine, a mixing desk, and a couple of pedals. And a phaser. That phaser was something else...

Money was tight. Lee was on a combination of Guinness and ganja all day. Yet in 1978, he managed to contract the total cream of the crop of Jamaica's musicians and singers for a few sessions. And a trio by the name of the Congoes. The record, when it reached Europe in its JA form, was a sensation for the few who could track it down, including yours truly. Heavenly singing, backing, a bass sound to kill for, and Perry's otherworldly production, sort of a deep sea sound. Voices and instruments alternatively shifting in focus and then out of it again, making room for another part of the total sound.

(if you can, try to sample it, or buy it 2nd hand on the Blood and Fire label (sadly defunct). Their edition is the real job, including every track and dub done at the time).

But lots of the charm of Perry is that quest: searching, looking, browsing, and perhaps finding. Sometimes you know that the dub version of a track has been lost, e.g. in the time that Perry simply set fire to his own recording shack in a fit of paranoia, he thought ghosts and devils were out for him.

Which, perhaps, illustrates that there are parallels between Perry and BW.

[Dove Nested Towers]

I actually sold my CD copy of BWPS.  Part of the reason was that artwork bothered me.  For me, Frank Holmes' stuff was, is, and always will be an indispensable part of Smile.

The other thing is that the studio recording seems a bit sterile.  I much prefer listening to BWPS live at Carnegie Hall.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4182988

BTW, I first got interested in Smile when the 1993 box set came out.  At the time, I owned (and loved) Pet Sounds. I remember being intrigued by the reviews of the then-new box set.   I was a poor student at the time, though, and the box set was something like $70 at Tower (this was before Amazon.com).   However, in one of those magic Smile moments that only folks around here might appreciate, I found an orphaned Disc 2 of the box (i.e., the disc covering 1965-66, including Smile tracks) among the used CDs at the Wherehouse.  It was priced at $4... Yes, four bucks!!!  No idea how or why someone would have parted with just one disc from the box-- let alone the disc that was the centerpiece of the whole project-- but I choose to believe that the minor miracle was meant for me personally.

That's a great, serendipitous story!

It's interesting to read this thread and see both points. It was well put that it could be
considered thematically consistent and appropriate that the original album never reached
fruition.

That is a unified, zen-like concept that is as legitimate as the other view, that it
is a tragic, unbelievably tantalizing loss that it was never assembled and released, with
Brian plumbing the heights of his brilliance and determination and incorporating every
short but significant and incomparably beautiful and ethereal fragment (i.e. tag to vegetables)
that we all love but were left off BWPS (which I totally agree is a miracle and stands on its own
merits but doesn't possess the indefinable, magical atmosphere of the original recordings),
in a methodical, coherent, expansive full realization of his concept that would have stood
out like a shining star of idiosyncratic, visionary creativity in its 1967 context.

Sad, to so many, but possibly its inevitable, unavoidable and yes, cosmically appropriate fate.

The two ways of looking at it all are almost like matter and anti-matter or a double A-side, but
I'm in Sheriff's camp as far as the greater good that would have been served by its release
is concerned.

Then again, they say that everything happens for a reason, whatever will be, will be and
other seemingly trite but possibly true and profound aphorisms.

[Dove Nested Towers]

I see nothing positive that resulted from SMiLE being unfinished.

I do.  Smiley, Wild Honey, and Friends are three of my favorites.  I do like Smile better, but I wouldn't want to be without those three.

Makes me think of those sci fi stories where someone goes back in time and intends to alter just one event but ends up causing a chain reaction of events that alters the course of history.


What might ensue if we we went back and finished SMiLE?  I shudder to think!!!

I think that's the exact plot of Lewis Shiner's Glimpses.  Has anyone read that book?  I've always wondered how it is. 

That's a really great book! it puts you right there, where many of us can vicariously imagine
what it would have been like to be the right person and voice of reason and perspective that,
in an ideal world, could have been the tipping point on the scale between motivation and
various obstacles that convinced him to persevere and finish the project (I realize that this
fantasy operates under many unrealistic assumptions that would have rendered it impractical,
even if one had been there and in a position of influence).

"Glimpses" is a clever concept, well executed.

[phirnis]

...
Which, perhaps, illustrates that there are parallels between Perry and BW.

Only BW does not have his latest record produced by Andrew WK, for better or for worse. 

[The Heartical Don]

...
Which, perhaps, illustrates that there are parallels between Perry and BW.

Only BW does not have his latest record produced by Andrew WK, for better or for worse. 

I did not know that, just looked it up. Might be something special.

[phirnis]

...
Which, perhaps, illustrates that there are parallels between Perry and BW.

Only BW does not have his latest record produced by Andrew WK, for better or for worse. 

I did not know that, just looked it up. Might be something special.

Well, it sure was going to be kind of special, yet Andrew WK allegedly took most of the tracks in an unfinished state and released them against Perry's wishes, only two of them being finished by the man himself. I've only heard one song of it myself, the album's first single, which should show up first if you type in 'Lee Perry' at youtube (edit: it's called, uhm, 'Pum Pum'). It does not exactly sound like Super Ape, more like the kind of tune that someone like Snoop Dogg might come up with in a reggae setting...

[The Heartical Don]

...
Which, perhaps, illustrates that there are parallels between Perry and BW.

Only BW does not have his latest record produced by Andrew WK, for better or for worse. 

I did not know that, just looked it up. Might be something special.

Well, it sure was going to be kind of special, yet Andrew WK allegedly took most of the tracks in an unfinished state and released them against Perry's wishes, only two of them being finished by the man himself. I've only heard one song of it myself, the album's first single, which should show up first if you type in 'Lee Perry' at youtube (edit: it's called, uhm, 'Pum Pum'). It does not exactly sound like Super Ape, more like the kind of tune that someone like Snoop Dogg might come up with in a reggae setting...

Ouch. that hurts. Something similar happened in Holland, in 1980. A Dutch cy. took a couple of unfinished Perry tracks, readied these for release, and it is probably the worst Perry album ever.
I had hoped for something like 'Time Boom X De Devil Dead', a superb hard-hitting LP he did with producer Adrian Sherwood.

[Sheriff John Stone]

I see nothing positive that resulted from SMiLE being unfinished.

I do.  Smiley, Wild Honey, and Friends are three of my favorites.  I do like Smile better, but I wouldn't want to be without those three.

I'm glad you like 'em. I do, too. But, those three albums literally killed the Beach Boys' career. Also, while Smiley Smile is a direct result of SMiLE not being finished, I see no connection between Wild Honey and Friends - and SMiLE not being finished. Brian could've gone that direction whether he finished SMiLE or not.

[Loaf]

Just want to add that I didn't mean that it was a good thing that Smile went unfinished at the time (1967), but that in the position I am in now (Feb 2009, with my CDs and CDs of bootlegs and reading Bill Tobelman's website), that it being unfinished kind of makes sense to me, thematically.

The 'riddle' remains unanswered.

But it's fun to think about all of this.