It's weird. My rating for the album in a vacuum has increased from 4 to 5 with time. GV and all. But I don't listen to it often and part of me still resents it for existing as I wish Brian would've stuck with what he had rather than follow his muse off a cliff.
Im now more convinced that Smiley is, in a very real sense, closer to Brian's original vision than BWPS or Priore's Americana/Elements. The lo-fi home studio acoustics and lack of Wrecking Crew production
weren't the original plan but the "mistakes left in" and comedic edge certainly was. And ultimately these were the aspects of the project Brian chose to prioritize when the first-run effort started coming apart under its own weight. Brian wanted a comedy album first and foremost--he was willing to go with VDP's American history vibe and continue to experiment with impressive arrangements in addition to that, but only until they clashed with his primary goal. (Also the touring issue and uncool stigma of using outside musicians and troubles getting studio time factored in.) To truly understand SMiLE, Smiley, and how one became the other is to accept the bizarre reality that Brian only cared about those gorgeous compositions and witty lyrics as long as they also served his primary purpose of making people laugh.
The whole "epic journey across America" angle was always secondary to the humor, and if you look at the witness testimony it seems everyone knew this except VDP which is why the collaboration was on such shaky ground to where Mike asking about the lyrics one time was enough to tear it apart. I think Brian realized he and Van were not on the same page about what SMiLE's key thesis was (and this is clear by what Van describes the original conception to be versus literally everyone else) but he's famously non-confrontational and subtly manipulative. I think, to some extent, Brian allowed the famous CE incident to happen as a proxy for venting his own doubts about Van's work and thereafter Mike became a convenient excuse to let things fall apart naturally. This would explain why Mike is frequently cited as the main antagonist but nobody can recall anything he actually said or did except that one minor anecdote. It would also explain why Brian never really wanted to go back to that material, why he was so bothered by Bernstein's praise of Surf's Up (he wanted people to LAUGH not be awed by a bittersweet lament), why Van didn't like the comedy skits, why he never called Van to work on BWPS until he had to...
That all said, there is clearly still a sense of bitter compromise with Smiley, like Wonderful's "don't think your God, just be a cool guy" and the creepy oppressive undertones of the songs (especially Wind Chimes). I think this all reflects a self-loathing in response to the failure of his original loftier ambitions as well as spite towards the group (or Van) for not "getting it" that was leaking from Brian's subconscious. Similar to how Fire was probably a cry for help, a musical expression of the anxieties and paranoia he was feeling just as the original sessions were falling apart. It's not like Brian was completely satisfied with how things turned out on Smiley, is what I'm saying, like "he axed Van indirectly and now he could REALLY make his symphony!" If Brian could've worked his will, he'd have had it all on one impossibly perfect, still cohesive album...but he had to give up some elements (pun intended) of that original fanciful dream in order to make the humor work--and humor was the most important thing. You can't make exploited coolies or decimated Indians funny. You can't interrupt those gorgeous compositions for a weak joke (ala the WC chorus false start) without the goofy undercutting the pristine or vice versa. You have to pick one or the other and the aspects Brian chose to prioritize don't make sense with what we the fans would've wanted him to keep. I think almost everyone would've preferred "Pet Sounds 2" aka just a collection of all great songs with wall of sound arrangements. (That and an epic concept album that put's Sgt Pepper's lame, forced "theme" to shame.) But for reasons that've been debated and analyzed for decades now and are still not 100% clear, that wasn't as important to Brian as melding humor with music.
So, Smiley kind of deserves to be in SMiLE's shadow actually--it represents the final form of a very unwieldy creative endeavor that tried to juggle a bunch of tangentially related concepts and failed. It's a peek at what Brian
really wanted his next album to be from the very beginning--at least conceptually/thematically, if not sonically/aesthetically. Also, I strongly suspect the track placement reveals clues to what SMiLE's sequence was naturally morphing into
*: Veggies (Earth), Fall Breaks (Fire analogue) and Little Pad (with water dripping sounds) as the remnants of the elements rubbing elbows with the Americana leftovers (Heroes, LP itself being a Hawaii song Brian has said he wanted the Americana journey to end on) thus disproving the conventional wisdom of separating the two. Similarly, WC is decidedly NOT included with all the other element-offshoot tracks because WC is not, was not, and never was intended to be air (until BWPS, inspired by decades of thrown-together bootlegs, used it as such to fill a conceptual hole). Comedy sketches (She's Goin Bald), audio verite (cork popping, water glass pouring), chanting (Whistle In) and spoken word asides ("Good!") as well as actual laughter (LP giggling) are mixed in with the music--just as SMiLE would've used the same techniques. (Veggie Fight, Vosse water tapes, "You're Under Arrest!" Psychedelic Sounds chants and Moaning Laughter, respectively).
*ASIDE:I
'm choosing my words carefully here--morphed into--because SMiLE never had a set in stone sequence until Smiley's final mixdown. But certain songs/concepts were more interrelated than others and gradually came together the longer the process took, just like any album. So, it's true that "there was no plan!" and "Brian changed his mind all the time!" but it's also true that, say, elements was always tied to the American outdoors and therefore those songs drifted towards the likes of Heroes. Or Brian always vaguely knew he wanted the Americana medley of "feels" to end with Hawaii somehow...hence the song about a pad in Hawaii closes side 1 of SS. Things like that. /ASIDEIt's all there--everything fits. SMiLE's blueprint was right under our noses the entire time, it's just people were too disappointed by Smiley's sparser arrangements and off-putting vibe to accept it. It was easier to believe the whole thing was a slap-dash effort that Brian hated, that somehow Mike cancelled SMiLE for being too weird but accepted Smiley as the logical follow-up to GV and Pet Sounds. And to be fair, the fact that virtually no source ever talks about this album except in a few brief sentences as the sad placeholder of abandoned greatness doesn't help. Carl's quote, while a fair assessment of SS's reception at the time, has since been used as a stage-setting, prescriptive determiner for how everyone approached the album from then on--which isn't fair. The hype of the genius and the greatest album of all time, which was a PR campaign that Brian was never comfortable with and that got away from him, raised our expectations of SMiLE so high that no one wants to believe the seemingly pathetic self-sabotaging Smiley could possibly have anything to do with it beyond some recycled lyrics because the group was desperate. But the truth is somewhat more complicated than that. While its recording was rushed and influenced by the desperate need to release a long-overdue obligation, no one told Brian to include the off-putting eccentricities that most people take issue with...because that's the record he wanted to make. If his heart were totally not in it anymore, he'd have made another "Party!" album, or let Mike write lyrics to the SMiLE backing tracks. That would've been easier AND better received at the time. But then it wouldn't be the humor album Brian envisioned.
^I submit that this is as good of a solution to the SMiLE myth as anyone else has proposed, it's backed up (or at least certainly not disputed) by the vast majority of evidence I could find--nearly every book, documentary and interview as my exhaustive thread attests to--and it's a coherent theory that doesn't require any wild leaps of logic or ignoring any major details to work. (At least to the best of my knowledge.) Not a bad way to end the forum if I say so myself--and on the thread for the album which gives this site its name, no less
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