The Smiley Smile Message Board

Part 01:
http://youtu.be/dw09zOhZ_Ck (http://youtu.be/dw09zOhZ_Ck)

Sorry if it has been posted in some other thread, but I am not reading any SMiLE threads until I get my boxset...  :p



PS: more GV sessions footage included

To those in the know, is there any chance these webcasts will be made available on iTunes?

Who here would know that?

I don't know about iTunes but there are ways to download them anyway.

YouTube video doesn't play well on my computer, that's why I was hoping for iTunes.

"Nothing even remotely resembling a finished album"? Maybe not tracklist wise, but plenty of these songs had taken reasonable shape during these sessions. The "fragments" thing is mildly overstated, it seems. Yeah there were a ton of fragments, but folks talk like large groups of these fragments didn't have a common theme, weren't meant for the same things, or had nothing to do with each other.

Oh, this is fantastic

RealPlayer.com has a video player and tool for browsers that will download YouTube videos. There are other apps around that will do the same thing, I'm sure.

RealPlayer? :O I miss 1998, too.

I agree.  The majority of the fragments were, at one point or another, intended for "Heroes and Villains" - take those away, and you have a lot of relatively "complete" tracks that are simply missing some vital recorded elements (no pun intended), namely lead vocals.  "Heroes" was really the only track left in complete disarray, with an endless number of pieces.  Take that away, and Brian seemed to have a relatively clear idea as far as the sequence of most other tracks, "The Elements" being the most notable exception.

Recordingwise DYLW is a fragment, as it has only very few vocals on  it, same goes for CIFOTM, Look, Holidays, IIGS. V-T wasn't assembled. Surf's Up isn't at all what it could have been (this is an opinion though). Wind Chimes and Cabin Essence were left unfinished and only were finished in 1969 (CE) and 2011 (WC). I would totally call The Beach Boys' SMiLE an album that exists only in fragments.

In the context of '66-'67, I still wouldn't call most of those fragments.  "Worms," "Cabin-Essence," "Wind Chimes" and "Child" had been sequenced by Brian, at least in the form of test edits (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on any of that), and stuff like "Look" and "Holidays" probably wouldn't have made the cut had the album come out in early '67 (based on the written track list).  "Surf's Up" was halfway complete, tracking wise, but it wasn't as if Brian didn't know what the second half would be comprised of.

Of all the tracks, only "Heroes," "Vega-Tables" and "The Elements" were truly in pieces, as far as I've always understood it.  The problem was that "Heroes" was such a huge mess that Brian spent far too much time on, at the expense of completing work on several other tracks that weren't too far from completion.

Even "Vege-Tables" - he sure as Hades figured out a structure right quick for Smiley Smile while other "pieces" songs got left behind. Yeah, like "Heroes", it kind of seemed to take the easy way out structurally considering all that was done for it (although this is especially true of "Heroes"), but he did it right after stopping work on Smile.

All I was sayin' with my original post is that the "it's just a bunch of pieces" thing seems to get exaggerated sometimes. Truly, there were a good handful of things that no one has any sort of clue as to where they go or how they go there, but so many others seemed to be headed in the direction of being fully formed, if not fully formed already, at least in Brian's mind ("Surf's Up", for instance).

The problem is, just because he had test edits didn't mean he was satisfied with or settled on any of the sequences.

It's one of the grand contradictions of Smile -- it was an album of fragments, yet there are a number of fairly sturdy songs in there.

Part 2:

http://youtu.be/GfFb8jgmLD8 (http://youtu.be/GfFb8jgmLD8)


".. a blossom world we find".. didn't know that!

So much for the 'signed' surf board.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QT2dXXYXr2c&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL

Oh no...another clip of th GV session to sync up... :afro

Is it me, or is Brian incredibly lucid in these webisodes?

No, it's him!

 :lol :lol :lol

"A blossom world we find"

Cut so the bass could come through

A bit redundant but really great!  I always enjoyed the podcasts for the last two comps that came out, and this webcast really takes it to a new level. Bruce is a good defender and promoter of Mike and Brian sounds like he's actually sort  of interested in what's happening. And Mike is really coming across well. Al seems more like a muppet than ever! How often are these coming out? weekly or what?

Right now it seems to be once every few days.

Going by this, Mondays and Thursdays for the next 5 weeks.

http://popdose.com/a-fans-notes-the-smile-sessions-webisodes-and-more/

Mike, God love 'im, seems to think the addition of "we find" was incredibly profound by how he says it. I giggled. Surely the rejection of those two words was the real reason he broke SMiLE (or Smile if you existed past 1999).

haha...no doubt Mike would do anything to pat himself on the back...but I think this time instead of gushing over his lyrical "genius" I think he was happy to share it because he was sharing a rather interesting note about the original lyrics that not many people might know.  I didn't know that that line had "we find" at the end.  It's great to know why they clipped it.  For once, Mike was useful in sharing some information!

Looks like just a few extra seconds of "new" studio film showing Carl with the darker-finish bass. I get the feeling they're going to spread the rest of the footage out over the next 8 chapters of this video series.

Ultimately I'd like to see the studio film(s) released as a continuous whole so I don't have to edit them together on my own as a few precious seconds trickle out on the next official vid... :)

"we find"

amazing this little tidbit is just surfacing.

the "blossom world" line is kind of an eyebrow-raiser. it adds to the "avant-gardeness" of the song. i've always loved the fact that it doesn't rhyme there.

I loved that part of the episode.  These are a treat...too bad the segments aren't ten time longer.

i've never been a big fan of "blossomed" world because it automatically dates the song.  Mike says he put it for the fad of the time right? still it's ok.

Chris, I think we have different definitions for "fragment". I meant "fragment" in the sense of "unfinished recording", while you meant "section of a song". You are of course right in stating that more or less only H&V and V-T have a lot of recorded sections that could be edited together in multiple ways. While several of the other songs were also recorded in segments - that could theoretically be edited in multiple ways -, the order of the segments of those has been clearly established in Brian test mixes. As these songs are unfinished, too, they are fragments of the whole. Dig?

Consider it dug  :hat

hey at least he didn't use the word "flower"
"blossom" still sounds cool and slightly strange to this day.


bring on episode 3!!!

and Voila!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVbY7DvzNWs

Episode 3:

The Beach Boys - SMiLE Sessions Webisode #3 Mono VS Stereo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVbY7DvzNWs

Ditto. It's so much better without "we find."

Does anyone read the comments on youtube? Seriously anyone who thinks Mike gets a rough ride from this board should check out what people are saying about him on there.

That stuff is insane and oldsurferdude would be mr. popularity over at youtube with all the trash about Mike there.

The Mike bashing is entirely wearisome. Warranted to an extent (albeit not nearly as much as people do), but Jeezus Christ are folks annoying with it. Can't convince these folks that he was worth even the slightest damn, either. No, Mike broke Smile and made Brian mentally ill.

You know, I am really loving Bruce's comments in the YouTube series!

Go Bruce!

episode 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9iHhA5BDxo

So, for a second time Al states that the "dixieland" accapella section of H&V dates back to 1961.

What does this mean?

Al specifically sings the parts that they sang in '61. So does the whole chord progression for Heroes date back this far? We know Brian has constantly recycled and used old ideas throughout his career.

Interesting.

:O never heard him say that before. Pretty huge, to me.

He's mentioned it at least once before, but I can't remember when or where.

Talked about it in a July 2000 Goldmine interview.

http://smilealbum.tripod.com/aljardine.htm

I have to give Al credit on this episode: Short of unveiling more new studio session film clips, Al explained something that has puzzled me and I'm sure many others since that interview in Goldmine. The "Dixieland" explanation makes perfect sense, and it now adds up logically when Al claimed the BB's were singing parts of Heroes in 1961.

He's saying they, as a vocal group, used to improvise and riff on scat-singing parts while pretending to be instruments of a Dixieland jazz band. It's pretty cool, and quite a concept for guys in their teens to be trying with vocals. Dixieland is a group of soloists improvising lines and phrases both independent of and connected with the other instruments in the group. So it could be chaotic, there is no "structure" other than the chord changes and the beat, and it's basically each player riffing a new melody as each person solos away.

Al is great - and I'll hear that vocal section in a totally different way from now on thanks to what Al revealed. That was an awesome chapter for just that reason.

The best thing from that interview is

Love was always trying to pinpoint Van Dyke saying, “What does this mean?” And he would go, “I don't know, I was high.”

Hardly - they were singing a riff that later became incorporated into "H&V". I very much doubt Brian told them "This is part of something I'm working on, it's called "Heroes And Villains", OK ?". You could just as easily claim that Phil Spector wrote the main riff by this logic.

Also, does anyone else consider this amusing coming from someone who seemingly hasn't written a completely original melody in his life ?  :)

I liked it when he said that the new set allowed you to really "go nuclear" with these sessions.  Very apt description!  While it may not offer too many huge revelations, it's fun just to hear the guys talking about this stuff here.

some of their reasons for now stereo seem kinda weak to me, it'll happen eventually i hope

I agree Al's words can be taken too much at face value in Goldmine, he sets up too many assumptions. But I did say "parts" of Heroes, and Al said "idea, not the song"; obviously Brian didn't have the song Heroes in 1961. The problem was for years people have read way too much into what Al originally said, myself included. So here is what Al said in the interview, so we can judge it verbatim:

Al: In fact, “Heroes And Villains” at the start, was one of the first things we ever did, really early on, even before we recorded “Surfin'”; We were working on that song way back in '61. We all became instruments for Brian's barber shop concept. He said, “Let's all do this, let's sing this idea.” Carl would be one instrument, I'd be another. Mike would be another instrument.

Question: So the idea of “Heroes And Villains” was born back in 61.

Al: Yeah, the idea, not the song. We started singing a capella first because we didn't play instruments. With none of us really being players, we would just scat in the car going to a show or something or going to school, anywhere.


What it seems Al said originally isn't far off from what he just said in that video. The *idea* of the band's vocalists riffing like a Dixieland jazz band was something they had done for years, directed by Brian. Fast forward to 1966-67, and imagine you're Al. Brian now wants to record sections of music as backing vocals and full vocal sections of a song which are the same concept and delivery as you (Al) had done back in '61, only now it may or may not appear in a song called Heroes and Villains, the exact structure hasn't been determined.

Andrew, if you're being asked to sing something similar if not exactly the same as you had done numerous times as a group 5 or 6 years prior, and someone asks you about it decades later, wouldn't there be a natural inclination to say "we were working on that back in '61"? Al could have clarified what he was describing, I agree,  it's just a shame Al wasn't more precise with the wording he used in that Goldmine piece probably not realizing what would be assumed by fans reading it, but it's easier now to see where he was coming from in that original interview.

I think it adds a neat nostalgia element to Heroes which I didn't catch before, hundreds of listens later. That "Dixieland" section now sounds more fun and childlike realizing this is what the Wilsons, Love, Jardine, etc. used to do for fun when they were in their teens, and here it is appearing on a record after they achieved worldwide fame and fortune through their music. I think that element changed how I see at least that part of the Heroes story, so I'll cut Al a bit of slack on the interview front. ;D

As Al highlights certain lines from the section, (i.e Carl sang that bit), I took it to mean that something they worked on in '61 was incorporated into H&V.

However, who's to say that Brian, in '66, when wanting to write a  song with an old timey dixieland feel to it, didn't use that old arrangement as the basis for it.

Maybe this section was the starting point for H&V.

Maybe Brian had been wanting to do something with it for five years. In which case, H&V was started in '61. It just didn't have a title.

All conjecture.

Such a waste limiting this to youtube and facebook..

Should have been on TV or a DVD with the box

I don’t think there’s much ambiguity in what Al is saying in that interview. There is a bit of ambiguity in his initial comment, but then he clarifies that the “idea” was something they sang back in 1961, not the song. So I don’t think anybody is claiming Brian wrote H&V back in 1961, or presented anything as H&V back in 1961. I think Al’s comment is pretty general, simply something along the lines of “we were doing singing like that back in our early days”, and he recognized a connection back to that when they were recording H&V.

Maybe some people want to interpret “idea” as if Brian had written that segment, and then incorporated it years later into H&V. But I take it more as the simple idea that they had already dealt with the concept of singing like that.

Brian and the other guys have re-used songs and melodies so many times, and what Al is talking about here is not even something of that scale.

I don’t know anything about the innerworkings of how the label budgeted the Smile set and whatnot, but I do know that there’s a point at which a major label is not going to continue to expand a boxed set. In other words, while it seems like they could have gone to 7, 8, or more discs for this set, Capitol may well not be willing to go past five discs. If that were the case, then it would be a question of whether a DVD with a short documentary would be preferable to one of the CD’s in this set.

But in general, I agree, I would love to have this as a full-length documentary on DVD. Something more group-oriented than “Beautiful Dreamer” is still needed documentary-wise.

Episode 5 with a bunch more studio footage!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf9n39OWKzI

Yes.  Bask in the majesty of this new footage.  Wow.  This is so cool--seeing Tommy Morgan in there with the diatonic harmonica...Jay, Steve...wow-wee.  Superb.  Moving pictures!

That footage of him working stuff out with Hal is so bloody cool

I pray for the day we get the entire studio footage, unedited. Those stills are taken from it too right? Everytime it's on, it's over too quickly!! Amazing.

Yeah, we can pretty much say this is an awesome piece of film. Finally, a chance to piece together how Brian would set up his favorite Western #3 studio for sessions in 1966. This is really historic stuff, and like everyone else I hope to have the entire reel of film available to study and enjoy. I'd write a research piece on that one for sure, it's akin to finding another lost scroll in the Dead Sea series of said scrolls if you're into the studio history... :)

And that upright piano in the film is, I believe, one of the famous tack pianos that showed up on a bunch of Brian's music from 66-67, whichever he recorded at Western. Each studio had their own tack piano, but the one in the film has a lot of recordings to its credit, if that is the one.

Is that Van Dyke with his back turned, with Brian at the upright piano?

That's a chromatic one.

I was thinking the same about the tack piano, and yes, it certainly looks like VDP's funny little head. Hard to tell though.

Of course it is, which is what I meant--but I was so woozy with delight I confused chromaticism with diatonism.  If it were diatonic it's not even really necessary to say so.  Can you believe it!  It would be like saying "ooh, look at his awesome 4-string ukulele."

So now that we can see that there's a clarinet in there, it almost slam dunks this being the 6/16/66 session the "Klezmer" version of the verse.

Not only is there new studio footage, but check out one of the first still frames of Brian, wearing the firehat and the blue striped T-shirt. That is from the Good Vibrations film, shot at the firehouse, and that frame appears to be a camera angle which did not appear in the actual clip. The shot looks to be taken in the upstairs sleeping quarters where the film was shot, and where Brian slid "up" the fire pole. in the movie. Wondering if this is a still photo, or part of home-movie outtakes like the one of Dennis riding in on the firetruck which was never shown either?

Pretty sure that's a soprano sax in there (at 1:50) not a clarinet. Keys are too big and it's conical shaped. Still probably the 6/16/66 session.

See, this clip is just fucking up my instrument identification today!

But seriously, it's cool to see Jay playing his Wagner tuba and Hal playing those Nose Flutes.

And was that Steve Douglas on the crumhorn?

Rare shot of Van Dyke Parks playing the Bass Waterphone, too

I actually was looking for Hal with a nose flute (from his bag of tricks)...until i got distracted by the serpent and the contrabass saxophone. Oh, those Wrecking Crew guys.

Some detective work and questions on the latest reveal of the studio film.

(http://i115.photobucket.com/albums/n295/guitarfool2002/gvsessionsheet.jpg)
The original studio sheet, an excerpt, from 6/16/66 showing the people there. Note Carl Wilson was filmed playing bass but he's not on this sheet as a musician. Any guesses why?

(http://i115.photobucket.com/albums/n295/guitarfool2002/gvwatch.jpg)
Tommy Morgan's wristwatch, showing a time of approx. 7:20 (PM)...and one session sheet lists 1PM to 8PM, while the other shows 5PM to 9PM, for the June 16th date so it lines up. Any reasons why there were two separate times on the session sheets? Was it an overtime thing they had to list separately?

(http://i115.photobucket.com/albums/n295/guitarfool2002/gvhorns1.jpg)
The first shot of the woodwinds, I'm guessing Steve Douglas standing and Jim Horn seated.

(http://i115.photobucket.com/albums/n295/guitarfool2002/gvhorns2.jpg)
The second, Tommy Morgan with chromatic harmonica and Jay Migliori wearing the shades. Agree on Migliori? I thought originally it was Douglas with the shades but the guy wearing the shades looks too big to be Douglas. It's tough to tell on some of these. I'm going with Migliori.

(http://i115.photobucket.com/albums/n295/guitarfool2002/brianmikepiano.jpg)
The "tack piano" shot: I thought the guy in the white shirt looked like Van Dyke's profile, but based on the session info that could be Mike Melvoin standing with Brian. Or is it Al DeLory? Based on that camera angle we can't see the guy's face. Do the session tapes ID him by name?

I've said this before, but the big surprise - one I hope will be revealed - will be Paul Tanner and his ElectroTheremin. He's most likely in the studio as this was being filmed, I'm hoping there is at least a shot of him playing it. That would be too cool. He's a prominent one on the session sheet, apart from Diane Rovell, Bill Pitman, and either Melvoin or DeLory, who hasn't been revealed in the film clips so far.

Definitely going with Migliori--100 per centum on that, for me.

I have no idea about the guy at the piano with Bri.  Looks a little unkempt for DeLory who is always seemingly well put together.  Jim Horn and Steve Douglas, yes, in the order you stated.

Carl wasn't on AFM sheets all the time, see GOK, etc.  My guess is that since he was more or less getting paid anyway, they didn't always feel the need to list him?

Seeing Tanner in there would be the ultimate.  Nice work with the wrist watch.

(http://livedoor.blogimg.jp/krugby/imgs/c/8/c89409f2.jpg)

Here is a picture of Mike Melvoin. Seems to be plausible that the piano player could be him, same hair quality.

OK, here's the deal...yes, we believe it is indeed the 6/16 "Good Vibrations" session at Western.  The images in the footage aided us in figuring out, for instance, who played what in the woodwind section (Michael Andreas, who led the BB's late '70s horn section, helped immensley with identifying the soprano sax & bass clarinet, hence his namecheck in the "Thank Yous".  Yes, the big guy is Jay Migliori.  Not sure who the mystery keyboard player with his back to us is...that caused us a bit of head scratching, but most likely either Melvoin or DeLory (I'm guessing the first of the two)...but note, as indicated in my sessionography credits, Steve Douglas played grand piano on the basic track (as he did on one or two "Pet Sounds" songs as well), Al DeLory was electric harpsichord, and Mike Melvoin played the Hammond organ.

As for the two different times on the AFM sheets:  the conclusion I came to was that the basic track (with Steve Douglas on piano) was laid down at the session which began at 1:00pm, then overdubs (like Tommy's second harmonica part) started and overlapped with the "second" session, for which Jay and Jim Horn were called in (at 5:00pm).  The AFM contract for the first session indicates some musicians were paid for 2 1/2 hours O.T., Morgan for 3, and Douglas (the "leader") for 4.  Study these things for long enough, and they actually start to make sense (some times)!  And yes, Carl was definitely there, definitely playing bass, but they didn't bother putting him on the contract this time (he IS on other ones, such as the 6/18 "Good Vibes" session.

That's interesting, because to my eyes (and it's very hard to see from the film) it looks like that upright piano is mic'ed up as it would be for a recording. But watching the footage, it looks just like the scenario described in the Pet Sounds box set, where Brian would demonstrate what he wanted each player to play by either singing it to each musician, or playing them the individual part. That film looks like Brian plays a part on the upright, then tells the white-shirted guy something, then the musician goes to the keyboard and plays it. If that's all the film of that guy, he'll probably remain a mystery.

I heard an interview with Dr. Paul Tanner directly related to his work with Brian, since we're waiting to see if the man makes an appearance in this film or not. I'll have to look for it and post it. Paraphrasing his story quite a bit:  He said when he went to the studio for the session with Brian, he asked Brian for the sheet music. Brian said they didn't have any, but he'd show him the notes he wanted Tanner to play. But Tanner wanted to be able to read the notes as he had done for years, as a trombonist and with his ElectroTheremin. Brian told him if you want to see the notes, you can write them down yourself... ;D That in itself was a completely foreign idea to a big-band pro like Tanner, but the results of Brian's methods speak for themselves.

And Tanner also said he continued to get royalty checks from Good Vibrations, because part of the contract he and the other musicians were working under said if that music is used for something other than a record, they were entitled to royalty payments under a usage agreement. So any time you'd hear GV on television, or film, or whatever else, a royalty payment was added up. Not a bad gig.

My guess is the upright piano was mic'd up "in case" Brian wanted it used during the tracking...or he had the pianist start out on that piano, but asked him to switch to the grand after awhile...there's one "Good Vibes" session, can't remember which, where Brian had one of the players change pianos in between takes (might even have been just for a different section of the song).  Rather than send a tech out to spend a few minutes mic'ing up another piano (while potentially killing the momentum), it woulda made sense to have all instruments on the studio floor mic'd and ready in case they were needed. 

Assuming they had enough inputs to do it that way, I guess.  I'm always a little surprised at how messy the studios were.  I think they must have just sort of thrown stuff out there and re-patched as necessary throughout the session.

What's also interesting is how low the piano is mixed on a lot of Beach Boys tracks--even on it's own discrete track.  Often it sounds like it's not actually mic-ed at all, DYLW, Sloop, and there are others, where it sounds leaked rather than mic-ed.

The DYLW is to me the most puzzling. I thought that the multitrack source would reveal that what we had been hearing all these years was just a bleed-through signal and that the piano track was muted for whatever reason (and i always wondered why Brian would have done that). I expected to hear a fully present piano in DYLW with these new mixes, so i was surprised to hear that it sounds the same. It really does sound like it wasn't mic-ed at all.

Did you see where the mics were placed outside that upright, if indeed they were "live" on that session? Pretty far away. In '66 one of the only engineers close-mic'ing much of anything was a young Geoff Emerick, and he caught hell for doing that, "breaking the rules", from EMI and from the musicians themselves. But after Revolver everyone wanted that present sound.

Look at the 6/16 film and the stills I posted, those mics are pretty far off the source.

I really can't tell if the piano in the film is mic-ed at all.  I can't pick out any mics on it, only stands nearby.  I don't disagree that engineers weren't quite as into close mic-ing as they would be, but there are some shots of pianos mic-ed pretty close out there.  I can think of a Gold Star shot or two with a Sennheiser 421 about a foot from the hammers.  I can't find one right now.

Then there's something like this:

http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/73999437/Michael-Ochs-Archives (http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/73999437/Michael-Ochs-Archives)

Obviously, I'm talking about Grand Pianos here, and of course no two sessions will be engineered the same.  But I think in the US, engineers were pretty close mic-ing.  Certainly guitar amps were, in not right on the speaker, not far away:

Ok, so apparently you're not allowed to write a certain word in this url so I'll have to be tricky for you to see the photo copy this:

http://img.metblogs.com/la/files/2008/08/wre

Then this:  ckingcrew.jpg

Put them together in your address line and you should get something.
This is certainly not to say that Brian wasn't setting up distant mics for pianos, but at what point does distant become so distant that it's not even really a piano mic anymore?  There's semi-distant mic-ing, and then there's just being off-mic, which is what it sounds like on DYLW or Sloop, as I mentioned, and I'm sure someone can come up with other examples.  I can't think of other instruments that are treated the same way on Brian's records.  To me, it sounds like a Spector thing, have more instruments going than you even have mics for...

On piano mic-ing, if I'm remembering right, on one of the sessions for the Cantina section Brian is recording the piano with the mic pretty far away from the piano and someone makes the comment "that's no way to record a piano" or something like that. Some one in the booth says that they are not getting a very strong signal and then you can what sounds like a mic stand being dragged across the floor, then the piano becomes more present. That was at Columbia, right?

Yep, that was a Columbia session...the engineer was the late Jerry Hockman (Mark L. discovered his last name for us to put in the sessionography, otherwise I think we woulda just had his first name & last initial).

Is this Jerry Hochman with an "h" or Hockman with a "k"? His credits on other Columbia albums are spelled Hochman. Wondering if it's a similar thing to the Jim Lockhart vs. Jim Lockert spelling deal.

Whatever it is, it's very cool to finally put a full name to that session. Let me say: that *amazing* session, it's been a favorite and I love hearing Brian play that part, I can listen over and over.

Looking at that footage of Brian directing Hal on the drums...is it just me, or was Brian a little awkward, even then?  ;D

The thing about close mic'ing and how Revolver changed the rules, so to speak, was more prominent on classical instruments, like brass, woodwinds, and strings, although Emerick did treat the pianos with more effects and EQ than most had. I think guitar amp mic'ing depended on the engineer, at least until 66-67. With other instruments, Emerick would have condenser mics jammed right down into the bell of saxes, right up against the strings of celli and violins, and so on. No one was doing that as radical as Emerick, from what I understand. Then he'd send it through a limiter (and EQ boost) and squash the heck out of it, and it gave a sheen that traditional recordings of those instruments didn't give. There was more presence as well as noise from those instruments, and it's so common to hear string and bow noise now, but apparently Eleanor Rigby's strings being that close mic'ed was a game-changer.

Guitar amps and bass cabinets, again I'd say the Beatles and Emerick broke some of the rules, but indie studios like Gold Star had no "rules" per se to break, so they'd do more adventurous mic'ing and recording than the Columbias or RCAs, etc, the corporate studios.

Pianos - We recorded a pianist playing on location at a lodge about 7 years ago, a nice grand piano well maintained, and stuck condensers all over it to experiment. There was a sweet spot for that particular cabinet inside with the close mics, but the best sound came from placing one just outside where the sound projects from out of the raised "lid" of the piano and blending it with another room mic for an ambient stereo effect. The distant mics were the most balanced, but it still wasn't far away, and that was a grand and not an upright, which sound kind of rinky-dink by design. Of course that was for a live performance feel and not something you'd compress to death for effect. The best part about that? Little or no EQ or tweaks necessary, a good grand mixes itself, practically.

I agree, from the photos, Brian was doing a Spector pack-the-room effect, and I'm thinking the more leakage and room noise, the better.

Would love to hear Mark Linett's thoughts on how and where he mic'ed the live pianos for Smile in 2004! Close or distant...

Take a look at this:

(http://i115.photobucket.com/albums/n295/guitarfool2002/pianomics.jpg)

To the right of the #1, to me that looks like a small mic of some kind hanging down, but I can't tell what it could be.

 Just below the #2, doesn't that look like a mic similar to the shape of a Shure 545, or some other dynamic mic?

I've looked at that shot and others and still cannot say for sure if those are microphones or something else. I was basing my thoughts on those objects being mics, which admittedly is weak evidence. :)

I just went into Yahoo! and typed in "1967 shure 545 studio microphone" and clicked on the image feature. I came up with a bunch of clear, close up pictures of microphones. Perhaps this might be helpful to anybody here that is more knowledgable than I on this subject. Just thought I'd pass that along.  :)

Since we're talking about this film, does anyone know any information about it?  Was it always known to exist, or is this something recently "unearthed"?  Was this professionally shot as some sort of promotional thing, or was this just a friend of Brian's who showed at the studio with a camera one day? 

If you listen to the 6/16/66 session, you can hear Brian telling "Bob" to stop filming while a take is being recorded.

It is freshly discovered.  We had hoped something was there because of the "Bob" mention on the session, but until the box promos started showing, it was unknown to all expect the people involved in making the box--at least, as far as I know.


I have no idea what no. 1 is...  no. 2 looks sort of like the counter-weight end of a mic stand to me.  But I don't think it's definitive either way.  We'll have to hope for a different angle.

Part 6 in the video series has been posted:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPRIBUSNsrQ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPRIBUSNsrQ)

The latest reveal of the 1966 GV studio film is about 10 seconds of Brian showing Carl something at the piano, and shots of the group doing vocals at Columbia.

(http://i115.photobucket.com/albums/n295/guitarfool2002/bricarl.jpg)

ML touching on the subject of his perceived SMiLE antipathy. Interesting!

Finally!

Mike had interesting points about how fans in Omaha would think of SMiLE. Not sure I agree with him, but overall good comments from Mike.

Michael tells it how it is. More power to him.

It wasn't just in Omaha, this letter from a fan in New Jersey was printed Feb. 67 (re-posting this because it lines up with what Mike was saying, from one fan's perspective at the time...)

(http://i115.photobucket.com/albums/n295/guitarfool2002/beachboysfanletterhitparaderfeb67.jpg)

Well I appreciate Mike's candor and for me I've long since moved on from the idea that Mike's dispute with VDP over lyrics was the main reason for the project's collapse.  Now according to VDP, it was a mitigating factor in his personal abandonment of the project but ultimately I think there were far greater factors involved that spelled doom for the record.

As far as the fans in Omaha or New Jersey or wherever, I think while it's unfair to pigeonhole people as being "hip" it's also unfair to pigeonhole them as being "square".  Watch that "American Bandstand" where they debuted The Beatles' SFF/Penny Lane right?  The kids there really didn't get it.  They were watching something so innovative and so cool and yet they were basically caught up in the aesthetics of The Beatles.  

The thing though as history also shows us, the majority of these fans eventually became converts.  They may have never really gotten to the point of being "hip" (as to whatever you or I may define "hip" as being) but as music fans they either went with the new direction or they closed up their turntables one of the two.  

So while there would have been fans throughout the world who would have been initially befuddled as to the direction where not only Brian Wilson's music but music in general was going the period of inoculation would have been brief and as an addendum to that they would've bought the damn records by then anyway.  So either way initially The Beach Boys would've made money off of "SMiLE".

Which in turn brings me back to my other long-held belief and that is "hindsight is 20/20" and that being so, it's hard for me to cast Mike Love in the role of a villain for worrying about the bottom line.  In many ways it's just an inevitable bi-product of the era in which all this searching for the new sound was going on.

As a human I can understand his point and have to agree with him on that level. But it's not about taking a stand for the people of Omaha. It's taking a stand for their money. As an artist you need to release yourself from that to achieve great things..

It's not a BW vs ML-thing, Brian also thinks about how much money is going in his pocket, he even said that recently when talking about a BB reunion. That's only human of course....

As I said in response to a typical know-nothing anti-Mike fan:

"Oh eat feces. Mike has said all along that he thought Smile, musically, was great, but maybe not appropriate for the Beach Boys. If it were your well being at hand and you questioned the direction, you'd speak up, too.

And yet Mike still sang EVERY note he was told to, because he trusted Brian's writing and opinions. Mike deserves some criticism, granted, but these Brian fanboys going on about, 'Mike broke Smile and induced mental illness in Brian!' need to be quiet."

"By the way, he uses 'product' as in what has been produced, not 'product" as in 'unit that's going to make me money'. He's saying, 'Are our fans going to like what we've produced?'"

The "He's trying to re-write history!" claims are tiring, too.

I like, and think it's telling, how Brian said "They sang like they liked it."  In other words--whatever issue anybody had, they set them aside because they were pros.

Yes. I think we are finally getting closer to the nuanced reality. Whatever was taken as dislike was not really and was not about the album. It was more like wanting to understand the lyric you are supposed to interpret. Not being comfortable with doing your profession from laying on the floor while making animal sounds. Being momentarily taken back by the beauty but in the back of your mind wondering how your clients are going to feel about it. Being against was not an issue because they were never against, they were about making it happen, the leap of faith for Brian which they were all used to and gladly did. Imo.

I can understand Mike's opinion, and maybe I would acted the same as he did in his place, but you should never be afraid of what your fans might think. Follow your muse. If that's 30 versions of Shortin'Bread for Brian, that's fine. If that means that Rivers Cuomo wants to rap, be my guest. Liz Phair same thing. Metallica and Lou Reed can make children records if they want. Artists thinking too much about what will sell or what their fanbase will support, tend to make bland recordings anyway. I rather hear a train wreck than a bland record. Sweet Insanity is better than In The Key Of Disney.

Mike Love gets criticism he doesn't deserve, but it should be noted that his remarks about VDP lyrics in the recent interviews make it seem like he was only in it for the money or for the fame. That's ok, and I like that he's honest about it.

Yeah but those other acts you mentioned all exist in an era where the medium itself has already been established.  Bands like The Beach Boys were in essence the building blocks for the industry that exists today in terms of a business model.  I was reading Dom's book the other night and he details how the Capitol suits balked at how much money Brian and the boys had spent making "Pet Sounds".  They didn't understand why such a monetarily allotment was necessary for the creation of an album by a "pop act" because they believed that within the next few years, The Beach Boys would be passe much like many pop acts that preceded them.  There was nothing to make them think or believe that in 2011 we'd still be talking about them and revering them as one of the greatest bands in the history of music.

Mike Love and really any pop musician of his generation were facing a dilemma that just doesn't exist today with artists that had already carved out a career like The Beach Boys had by 1966.   There was this notion that their careers had a definitive timestamp and date of expiration on them and the goal was to maximize your earning potential and make as much money as quickly as possible while your act was still marketable.  So risking alienating a portion of your audience may have been a justifiable concern for Mike Love just due to the fact that he was aware that his record company wasn't behind Brian's new direction and that the potential of "SMiLE" generating sales not up to par with previous release could signify that the band was in decline in terms of popularity and marketability.

Being in a role of leadership within a group, or being perceived as "ahead of the game" in any field, is a lonely place. If you are looking ahead to a place no one has seen as of yet, and no one is at your side for confirmation or validation, yet those following your lead may not be as confident in your direction as you may have expected them to be, where do you turn for that reassuring pat on the back? You have to be so self-confident at that point, backed up by a streak of competitiveness and wanting to shine, that you can go forward on your own terms.

And this is also what separates the innovators and the leaders from the followers, as successful and as "popular" as the followers may be in their fields. Were those considered innovators in their field in recent years thinking as much of their audience or their customers from past history and looking to please them by improving the existing product, or were they looking ahead a few years and seeking to develop something new that would change the status quo and improve or innovate on a much larger scale? Innovation can be a lonely place because you're navigating in the dark until you create the path.

Consider that when listening to Smile tracks on your iPod... :)

And consider also, as the initial reaction to Strawberry Fields was brought into the discussion, that both John Lennon and Brian Wilson expressed a very similar and very personal sentiment in their music, which was considered to be among the most innovative and new in the entire industry at the time. With John, he sang "No one I think is in my tree, I mean it must be high or low", in effect questioning if he was either too far ahead of everyone else or languishing behind. And Brian Wilson sang (if he didn't write) the lyric "I keep looking for a place to fit in where I can speak my mind", much like Lennon searching for a place where he could relate to others facing the same situations, where you could either be so far ahead or so far off-track that no one is there to validate or support where you are going.

The fact that both singers were essentially singing the same sentiments at this point in history cannot be ignored.

Pardon the intrusion, and I don't have anything new to add, but I would like to offer a resounding "hear, hear!" to the recent thrust of this thread.

I agree with Craig and Brian is that innovator guy with supreme self confidence that excited and inspired the group [label, Posse, neighbor kids, musicians, etc., etc. ] and got them on his ride.

Also it wasn't just Mike with the commerciality in the back of his mind, Brian explained early on that the commercialness of SMiLE was on his mind too, was even a reason he shelved it.

Moreover the SMiLE sessions show how the music was mutating so thoroughly and so fast that no one could fully comprehend it.  Mike was a pro, and did what he was asked, but you hear things like the Vegetables laughing demo and the "You're Welcome" parade and you can see why he would ask: what the hell are we doing?  How is this supposed to work, let alone sell?  And then, on the other hand, having to concede that Brian certainly put it all together for Good Vibrations. And then, on the other other hand, seeing Brian  - the guy who's been the big engine all along - slowly ungluing (the "Seconds" incident, the "witch" incident, the bad vibes cancellations, etc.).  Viewed in this light, the lyrics argument with Van Dyke was a pressure release for Mike, at which Van Dyke nevertheless could still take justifiable umbrage (recall that Brian failed to defend him at the time as well, as Steve Gaines and Peter Carlin relate).

Could Brian failing to back up Van Dyke be an indication that Brian himself didn't fully comprehend everything? Perhaps it all began to seem a little to weird for him too, but being essentially "the boss", he couldn't let on that it was all becoming a little to much for him to control.

Exactly. The guy has no idea, and then the slow realisation that Brian, the guy who is usually so together during these sessions is getting progressively weirder and different, you have to make a call.

I mean, you hear them all really enthusiastic to work on Wonderful on one of the tapes here! That goes against a conventional SMiLE-Mike-Love-Is-A-Cockfarmer argument.

wrt, VDP, his quote from Beautiful Dreamer is illuminative, though - He felt as if he was the one to be fighting that fight.

Clockfarmer?  ;D

Yeah. Brian and Van Dyke's relationship has gotten a pass, but on the other hand I'm sure it is more nuanced than we think.

Why is so much made about Anderle's report of the Boys' supposed resistance [which is not what he means by my reading] and so little made of the deteriorated relationship between Brian and Van Dyke which is what he thought was the MAIN reason for SMiLE's non-release? Why is so little made of Siegel's claim of bad juju between VDP and BW? Why didn't Van Dyke sign with Brothers or why wasn't he asked? Why did BW call VDP in if he knew what the lyric meant and was on board with it; how could it even be an issue if the lyrics were already sung?  I don't think it had any bearing on the release or non-release of SMiLE because I believe all of it was irrelevant to if BW wanted it to be released. Continuing mysteries.

THis is great kind of Beatle Anthology like, too bad there isin't a recent scene where they are all interviewed together
I havent seen the whole thing, but I'm going to download all ten parts and burn a disc and watch it several times

Man Bruce Johnston looks old, havent seen a clip of him in several years he looks like an old guy
who own s a gas station, motel truckstop in one of the towns in Mojave or something

Yeah, whoever heard of a 69-year-old guy looking his age ?  ;)

Well for the sake of counter-point here is an observation from Danny Hutton regarding a 1967 conversation between Mike and Brian about prioritizing Beach Boys projects vs. Brian's side project at the time which would've involved Hutton's band Redwood:

"I wasn't privy to the conversation, but Mike can be very forceful, so I guess Brian just bailed out.  We felt it coming; we didn't want to put Brian through it, so we said, "Look Brian, we understand.  We are just going to walk away from this.  This is getting crazy."  So that was it."

This quotation along with another from Hutton's bandmate Chuck Negron are detailed in Dom Priore's 2004 book "The Story of Brian Wilson's Lost Masterpiece".  Negron's comments are in my opinion some of the most biting indictments of Mike Love that I've ever read to the point where I'm not sure whether to believe them or not believe them.  Then there is this quote from Van Dyke Parks himself regarding his departure from the SMiLE project:

"...I was working for Brian Wilson.  ...But then, when I found out that it might have internecine and that I might come between brothers, I did the right thing: I left the job, because I did not want to become part of a conflict or create one."

For me the fact that we have two separate quotes from two different people essentially stressing the same sentiments tells me that in both cases if true, Brian felt a responsibility to acquiesce to the demands of his band.  Negron describes a sad scene indeed regarding the non-release of "Time To Get Alone" as a Redwood single claiming that Brian was chided by the band who wanted the songs for themselves.  

In December, 2004 Mike Love spoke in general about what was going on during this period to Mojo magazine:

“I know how I live, my values, and my philosophies. So, personally, I'm comfortable with it all. It does get annoying because it's an inaccurate picture of what actually happened. But when it's left to people who've written  books about Brian, it gets distorted. I don't blame people for coming to that conclusion, but it's based on inaccurate statements made by people who weren't there, or if they were, they obviously had an axe to grind because somewhere along the way, I told them to take a hike.”

It's merda. {wink}

It's sort more speculation along the line of Anderle et al, they were there but they are speculating about other peoples' feelings, meanings, actions, intentions, etc..

Whoops, you edited your post while I was replying. Strike that "merda" comment.  I guess. Or maybe I dreamed it all.

Yeah I took out my editorial as to my personal feelings on whether or not the claims were false to begin with.  For what it's worth I personally found some of the "Redwood" comments to be a stretch even if both Hutton and Negron seem to back up each others statements at least somewhat. 

Have to say, I find the whole Negron thing deeply unconvincing.

What's being referenced, here?

The "Seconds" incident refers to Brian going to see the John Frankenheimer film "Seconds" and hearing "Hello Mr. Wilson" upon entering the theater.  He later told Jules Siegel that he thought Phil Spector had engineered the entire operation to mess with his mind

The Witch incident refers to Brian telling Michael Vosse to inform another one of the Posse (I believe it was Siegel) that his girlfriend could no longer attend Beach Boys sessions because he believed she was a witch and was messing with his mind via ESP.

The bad vibes cancellations refers to Brian's propensity to canceling sessions at whim due to the fact that he didn't like the day's vibes or the vibes in the room or whatnot.

Did somebody already bring up the point that Mike previously had vetoed lyrics on Pet Sounds that he considered "drug lingo"?

I can understand that from Mike Love's perspective there was a risk that BW and VDP were writing about drugs and stuff that only related to LA kids.

IMHO a Brian of sound mind would have managed to finish SMiLE regardless of what the other BBs thought or said about the lyrics. And I think part of the myth of SMiLE is because in the past people imagined that the music of SMiLE drove Brian crazy and made a wreck of him. I say no, SMiLE didn't get finished because Brian developed mental issues like the ones described above.

There are so many quotations regarding Brian's state of mind at the time which while blunt as a spoon are probably spot on accurate.  The most often repeated I've ever heard (and I'm not sure to whom this quote is attributed to) is "Someone who was as emotionally sensitive as Brian was should have never fooled around with psychedelic drugs in the first place".

It's pretty much true, the nature of Brian's work gives him a face in what was a generation of many faceless people who unfortunately found themselves dealing with similar mental issues that Brian Wilson did some of which were exacerbated by exposure (either willingly or unwillingly) to psychedelic drugs.

I think the role of drugs and mental health as a cause are a red herring, they are issues that may have been significant later but get mistakenly accredited as significant back to this period. When he is making the music, he is mentally organized and disciplined and decisive and on task. Sure he is also superstitious and getting high in his spare time but he is in full control of himself and everyone and thing around him. Nothing kept him from finishing it, he didn't want it finished, it was a Muse and commerciality issue for Brian and not a drug and mental health issue. Imo.

Agree with most of that Cam, but I think the drug use would have started to bring on a sense of paranoia. That wouldn't necessarily affect the quality of Brain's work but he would be becoming more and more anxious to finish it, more and more meticulous about minutia and less able to see the bigger picture.

The commerciality concerns would only add to the pressure.

Eventually he'd perceive it all as a mishmash of brilliantly executed snippets that he couldn't weave together without adding more snippets, and more confusion, to the pile.

Stress, anxiety and paranoia. In extremis, hard to come back from.

I'd guess that when he finally decided to can it, he'd've felt a huge weight lifted from his shoulders but for the fact that he still had to deliver a product to Capitol. His later withdrawal from that intense workload would have been a necessity and projects like Redwood, with less pressure and less expectation, might have been a welcome, relaxing distraction.

I absolutely agree.  The impact of Brian's mental imbalance/drug usage can be seen both in his ADHD whimsy for starting experiments without completing them (i.e. the Elements) and his obsessive tinkering and growing indecisiveness (most notably in the H&V sessions).  Yes, he's still sharp and on top of his game in the studio, but it was clear that by early '67, he couldn't see the forest for the trees anymore.  Why else would he waste valuable studio time re-recording a track like Wonderful, which was already essentially finished?  Add to this tales like the Fire paranoia and cancelling sessions due to bad vibes and even if these were just elaborate rationalizations from an artist who was losing confidence in his vision, it's hard not to conclude that his psychological problems were getting in the way. 

And yet, Brian's creative 'madness' was also what helped to fuel his extraordinary ideas, so it was clearly a double edged sword.

I think you may have nailed it there.  While I agree with Cam Mott that Brian was for the most part able to keep his extracurricular activities from affecting the work he created in the studio, they did affect how he approached the project in a broader sense.  Paranoia, canceling sessions at whim and OC behavior in the strive for perfection.  Now Brian Wilson was always by nature a perfectionist to begin with but with SMiLE he didn't seem to know when to or where to draw the line.  

My personal opinion on the situation always has been that at some point Brian realized that despite recording all this fantastic music he had somehow lost the plot in being able to have a marketable product to turn into Capitol Records.  I honestly think by the time he was knee deep into SMiLE  he didn't have any idea how to sequence the thing.  I think losing the plot and the possibility of failure wrecked him.  Add to that the drugs, in-fighting, lawsuits, the feeling of being solely responsibility to everyone else and their mother and you'll get an idea about what kind of pressure Brian was under during this time.

Right.  I used to dismiss some of Brian's comments about Smile's demise back in the "it was inappropriate" days, but looking back now, they start to make more sense.  I wish I had the quote handy, but at one point he explained that he just didn't have a strong commercial feel for the Smile material and sometimes you just write a song for yourself, like a little feel you want to explore but maybe it's not right for the general public.  Of course, I absolutely love this stuff and wish that he'd been in a position to let his muse run wild, but I can see how he might have reached this conclusion back then.

Well see the paranoia could play into that too in making him gun-shy.  I mean if he really did a number on himself worrying about the commercial aspect of the album is it possible that some of that indecision could be attributed to some of the factors already mentioned?  Did some of these factors facilitate planting the seeds of doubt in Brian's mind concerning the merits of his music both commercial and otherwise?

The only thing which keeps me from agreeing with more of that sentiment is the fact that Brian was sitting on the #1 record at the end of 1966, his band was at the top of the polls singing and playing his "new sound", and the general public and the music community was waiting to hear what he would come up with next. I think commercial success wasn't all that much of a concern because he had it at the end of '66 into '67, and was riding the wave. When you have that kind of success with that radical of a new sound, which the public accepts, you have greater freedom to explore and experiment even further.

Anyone who challenged him, let's say in December 1966 as Murry Wilson apparently did also throughout the fall, about his new sound being too far out, Brian could pick up an issue of Billboard, slam it on the table, and say "here!". Case closed, his wild non-commercial ideas were at the top of the pop charts. Validation.

Yeah but was it's Brian's nature ever to be confrontational enough to do such a thing?  There are so many times when reading stories about Brian and how shabbily at times he was treated (or it was alleged he was treated) by different parties that I feel like shaking him and saying "Brian stand up for yourself, don't let these people treat you the way they are treating you".  But my gauge of the situation was that more times than not  from a business perspective Brian attempted to please people rather than force his own agenda on them .

I don't know about his personal life but in his professional life he just did as he pleased regardless of how much you disagreed. He might consdier your point of view but if he did not agree he just said "naw, we don't want to do that". He didn't have to confront people because people bowed to his will and not the other way around. Velvet Steamroller, baby.

True but in regards to this issue it's his dealings in his personal life which I'm actually wondering about.  Obviously from a professional sense Brian was in complete control in the studio as far as how his music was produced, arranged and performed.  But being that the topic of in-fighting comes up so much in the discussion of the downfall of this album, I wonder if issues from his personal life didn't begin to bleed over into his professional life?  I guess it's something we'll never really know the answer to. 

One question that bugs the hell out of me, and which may or may not shed more light on the bigger picture, is that of the Wrecking Crew in effect being shunned. Why did Brian suddenly, almost stop-on-a-dime sudden, decide to radically change everything about the way he was making records and recording his music? Why would he decide to no longer use the Wrecking Crew as abruptly and as definitely as he did? There is no precedent for this. It wasn't even a case of calling some of the guys but not others, it was one day he was Brian in the studio and the next time he recorded everything had changed.

Let's not forget that it was a minor 'scandal' in 1967 when stories started appearing questioning the Monkees' legitimacy on the basis that the Crew was playing the instruments on their tracks.  Brian and the group had to be aware of that controversy.  Not saying this was the only reason for the shift, but it may have been a factor.

Backing up a bit to the hypothesis that Brian's unrelenting tinkering and re-recording of H&V (and other tracks) signified his declining mental state.  That argument has some merit, but I was struck recently by Brian's comments in the expanded 'Humble Harv' demo on the box.   Talking about the success of Good Vibrations, Brian tells Harv:

"... about half a year of emotions alone went into the record...  I think it has a lot to do with repetition.  I don't know. When something's around for a long time, it gets really emblazoned in your mind.  And it becomes so visual that it starts to happen."

That's a pretty important insight to what he was thinking at the time.  Whether it was the method of his madness or the madness of his method, I don't know.  But he was essentially attributing the success of GV to this method of tinkering and re-recording over months.   Just keep working on it until it gets emblazoned in your mind and then it will happen.

Very, very interesting take on this. I think another important part of the story can be found in the Good Vibrations story, and that is how Brian perhaps needed a boost of confidence and validation in those cases where he may have had doubts. In the case of Good Vibrations, if Brian had his way while the tune was "on the shelf", he either would have sold it or farmed it out for others to record, among them wanting a shot at it was his pal Danny Hutton. It was Hutton's manager David Anderle who was among those telling Brian how good the song was as Brian had his doubts. I'd say that validation was also important in Brian holding onto his visions for the song, and seeing it through to the end.

Frustrating to think that he had similar validation with Heroes from Anderle, Vosse, etc, who liked what they heard and told Brian they liked it. Yet whatever was different with Heroes at critical times versus Good Vibrations earlier that same year could be one of the "x factors" we're searching for as an answer.

I think it's almost important to note that it took Brian that half year to make "Good Vibrations". He was reaching as far out as he could, & because of that, you couldn't always expect as fast of a turnout with the material. Some songs, like "Cabinessence", seem to have come together right away. But others, like "Vegetables", "Heroes & Villains",  and "Surf's Up", just weren't happening for Brian at the time. And none of the Smile songs were coming together in a way that had definite hit potential. Brian said, later, that he would've needed another year or two to actually finish Smile. I believe it. After all, look at "Good Vibrations".

Think of the pressure he had to deal with, also. I'm sure Capitol was all over Brian, trying to get him to release Smile in time to capitalize off the success of "Good Vibrations". They tried to strong arm him into releasing Smile in December! All the while the group was hassling him - questioning some of the artistic directions he was taking - and there was that lingering feeling that some of Brian's "friends" were just sponging off of him and were entirely dependent on his vision. Eventually, Brian had to feel like he was fighting for the project all alone, with no help from anyone. When Van Dyke bailed, that had to be a major blow.

No wonder Brian got sick of the whole affair!

Could it be that they thought suddenly Brother Records was going to have to front the studio costs ?

I always thought that this had more to do with the installation of Brian's home studio.  I imagine he got used to more of a laid back, family & friends type of scene at that point, after the more labor intensive Smile sessions with the Wrecking Crew, but I could be totally wrong about that.

Well, it is quite a sudden drop off, and I don't think you can entirely chalk it up to moving to the house.  But, it is important to note that, if you graphed it, it would be this bottom falling out thing, and then a gradual line back up to substantial Wrecking Crew involvement again.  I think maybe Brian just looked at what he'd got himself into--He had spent hours and hours on GV, hours and hours on H&V, was dangerously close to going down that road with Vegetables, and you can even see touches of that for Dada--recording that twice and then all the "all day" variations and such--and appreciated that he could spend the rest of his life on this stuff.  With the Crew he had all the power to create whatever sound he wanted, too much power.

And so that had to go away for awhile, and be brought back in slowly, which it was.  He had a few guys come out to his house, then for WH brought a few more, then Friends, we get full Wrecking Crew lineups again.

Aye but doubts, even vague doubts, were being put into Brian's mind by his Dad, by band members' reactions.

While doubtless very aware and very satisfied with Vibes' success those expressed doubts had to had niggled at BW's confidence and perhaps made him doubt whether he could sustain the level of quality and meticulous craft that he was into at that time.

He had to be aware that the leap from 409 to Cabinessence via Pet Sounds and Vibes was incredible and that maybe sowed seeds of doubt within his own mind about his ability to maintain that degree of perfection across his work. Any slip and he'd be knocked by bands and critics alike.

Maybe that's where his sense that people weren't ready for the music yet came from, that he thought he might be better taking a step back and easing off the gas slightly until the rest of the world caught up,

It's likely Brian felt quite a bit of embarrassment after the whole SMiLE fiasco. I don't see that aspect discussed much, but here's a man who's been talking about using revolutionary recording techniques and making music that people would pray to (some pretty bold claims, if you ask me). Not to mention he's spent hundreds of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars on this project that appeared to come to nothing. Zilch. And whatever doubters and detractors he may have had, whether perceived or real, well it looked like they had been right all along. I can't see him NOT feeling tremendously embarrassed by the whole thing.

Now I can't speak for Brian, but as a person who's experienced his share of embarrassments, I can say that my initial reaction has always been to stick my head in the sand and hide from everyone... friends, family and everything else. Which is pretty much what Brian did. The Vosse Posse, the big-time studios, the wrecking crew, the interviewers to whom he had made all these claims... he just kind of shuts them all out for a while. And as time and distance from the project grew, he was able to build some confidence back, which led to him bringing the crew back in little by little.

Ok, so that's a bit of an oversimplification, as I'm sure there were a multitude of contributing factors, but I still think shear embarrassment had to have played SOME role, even if a minor one, in Brian's behavior after SMiLE collapsed.

P.S. Here's the link for episode 7: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChTMiAyTAvQ&feature=channel_video_title (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChTMiAyTAvQ&feature=channel_video_title)

Whoa! Chil'!

Great series!!

Holy mackerel! Watching Brian do the part sorting on the piano -- that is a gift, right there. Amazing. He's almost sub-verbal when talking about it, but he can tease out the parts immediately.

Looks like Brian got Al and Carl's parts switched...lol

Why do you say that? Carl generally sang below Al in the stack, I believe.

Well they did switch around quite a bit...

But in this case Brian's talking about the Heroes and Villains chorus, in which Al sings the melody (Heroes and Villains, just see what you've done).  However Carl DID sing that part live.  I'm not exactly sure who sang the other part he mentioned though.

Gotcha.

Cool to see BW rockin' out on CIFTM, too! Who would have thought we'd ever see that in promo video?

By the way -- Brian seems really cool in these. He's not at his most incredibly verbal, but he's nice and relaxed.

Interesting theories abound, but having listened to ALL of the existing SMiLE tapes (all of them that exist in the vaults, at least) as part of my contribution to the sessionography, I gotta say I think it might just be that Brian really desired to move away from the heavily-produced stuff to stuff that required less "musicianship" shall we say.  Several of the SMiLE sessions featured just Brian and the Boys banging away on piano, organ, drums, glockinspiel, marimba, miscellaneous percussion, with maybe a Fender bass thrown in...all of which the Boys could play, at least to the extent required...I think Brian decided there was much less pressure doing it that way, while at the same time showcasing the Boys' vocal abilities with his intricate arrangements.  That's why Smiley Smile turned out the way it did.  For Wild Honey, he or they wanted a "white soul" sound, so they got back more to their "garage band" roots (with a few horns & violas thrown in).  Then for Friends, Brian was again in a different mood or mode, and felt like doing some light So Cal jazz, at least his interpretation of it, so the Wrecking Crew guys were once again appropriate.

At about 2:36-2:37 he sounds like his young self!

Without sounding too cliche I think whenever Brian spontaneously plays this music (such as that CIFOTM bit) you can see the energy just return to him that seemingly wasn't there only moments previous.  It's like one of those "He's Still Got It" moments that we are all reminded of from time to time.

There may have been practical reasons for the different mood and approach Brian chose over SMiLE but I have to believe it was mostly for aesthetic reasons because Brian and the Boys were on the top of the heap and Brian could and did do whatever he wanted.

The Boys weren't the Monkees, they had been playing their own instruments in front of their fans for years. Is there any evidence that it was ever an issue for the Boys? They had been adapting heavily produced recordings for live shows for years.

I see the evidence used for paranoia and mental illness etc. but to me it just looks like a superstitious brilliant mind without baffles.

Again I have to protest [this must be my 10th or 12th year of protest by now] that the evidence is Brian knew before he went into the studio how everything was fitting together [it is noted all over the records and boxes and recordings] and there apparently was not a situation where Brian was recording stuff and then grasping for ideas of what to do with it. To me the evidence is Brian was on top of SMiLE and how it was to be and fit together but as he got it the way he wanted it didn't live up to his expectations for it. Like he said and Craig mentioned, it ended up feeling to him over-elaborate and old fashioned and too arty [especially the lyrics] etc. and all the reasons he actually gave at the time.  

I think the box -- which features sometimes the third or fourth released version of these songs (with the fragments in different orders) suggests a less-than-certain approach to the project. You don't spend as much time as Brian did on Good Vibes, for example, if you know precisely what you want at the outset. And you don't record however many fragments of H&V as Brian did without knowing, somehow, that you're just spinning your wheels and putting off making decisions. I think it's pretty clear he didn't know what he wanted all the tme, which is why he recorded so many wildly different versions of things.

Brian recorded several full versions of GV with all of their parts identified at recording. He knew what he wanted and how to get it. Apparently he wasn't satisfied when he got it and then recorded other full versions. In the end he takes the identified parts from some of the full versions and puts them together [with a few additions/revisions] in the identified orders for the final. At least that's the way I remember it.

This is a creative process of someone who is in control of his media and answers to no one and can do as he pleases in pursuit of his vision. Taking a long time and lots of revisions don't mean he was at a loss to pull it together. He took his time [which argues against his possible concern about studio pressure] and created in an organized way just as he was doing with SMiLE.

Alright, well anyway that's the way I see it.

.

Everyone’s comments…extremely interesting.  Many of them, very well thought out.  Some of them, comforting in once again reasoning with the un-release of smile.  But, at times, I can’t help think how strange it is to be trying to psychologically pick apart and make sense of a several month period that now dates back 45 years.  FORTY-FIVE FRIGGIN YEARS AGO!! Yes, I’m yelling this to myself and not belittling others with the importance of this period or quality of music.  It’s just amusing at times to think of the length of time and what’s happened in between.  I truly appreciate Van Dyke’s words when he makes reference to it being such a small period of time in his busy life.  The passing of time also makes it that much more difficult to place yourself in the participants mindset for 1966-67 and not 2011.  What a different world with different ethics and tolerance for things in general. 

I understand where you're coming from, but at the same time what else does a third-party historian have available when researching a period in history? If it's that historian taking the words of a first-person witness who was actually there, that person's words are weighted quite heavily compared to someone who wasn't there but has access to a document, or some other paper evidence. So the actual person may have thought it was "just another day" while someone with a document or a journal entry may look at that "just another day" and discover it was one of the more significant days of the entire story. In reverse, that first-person witness may say "Hey, I do remember hearing this..." on a day where the documentation would show that nothing significant had taken place, yet the eyewitness account may alter the way the story is told forever.

It's no different that piecing together, say, a Civil War battle using the letters sent by the troops on both sides versus using the maps and battle plans, you're getting both sides - personal and impersonal - yet they're both adding up to better tell the story.

While I don't disagree with these points and they make logical sense, the fact that Brian went from being at the forefront of hi-fi, technology-driven recording to making records which sound worse than those actually recorded in garages, in the span of one record release (!) is still hard to understand, appreciate, or grasp, really.

Contradictions are everywhere: If he and the group were concerned about losing fans and commercial viability of the music, why change the "sound" you have sold to those fans for two years in that drastic a fashion? If your fans had come to expect your music as being at the forefront of recording technology, and some fans were into it for that reason more than others, why drop off so suddenly?

Beach Boys Party was a terrific sounding record, all the instruments played by the band were crisp and clear, they are some of the most high-fidelity acoustic guitar recordings you'll find on a record from the mid-60's, and the record did exactly what the suggestion was made that Brian was going for on Smiley Smile...yet it sounded good and exploded through the speakers, both at home and on the radio. That could have been Brian's "happy medium" for coming down from the heights of the studio scene around the time of Smiley Smile, rather than taking his music from Western #3 down to the living room lo-fi sound with nothing in between. Any band's fans would, I think, react strongly to such a drastic change especially with expectations set that high.

There was much less pressure, sure, having the Boys be a self-contained band. But it's still hard to understand the way he did it so drastically and suddenly, where not only the Wrecking Crew was dismissed but also the notion of recording in a professional environment with professional equipment flew out the window in favor of recording with half-baked, Frankenstein-like studio gear.

The repercussions of that time, though, continue today and not just for the fans.

Could this be viewed as an extreme reaction to the increasingly frustrating sessions he went through in the first part of 1967?  Maybe when he finally made the decision to pull the plug on SMiLE, he felt a strong urge to start fresh with a whole new approach to the material, abandoning the seemingly fruitless quest for perfection and fully embracing a more rough hewn aesthetic.  Even when he was being half arsed, he went at it whole hog!

As pointed out by others, though, Brian wasn't alone in this! The Beatles, Dylan, many others turned their backs on the elaborate studio creations of 65-67 by 68. You had the acoustic-based White Album. You had Dylan returning with the stripped down John Wesley Harding. Basically everyone was thinking the same thing at the same time -- this is too much. Let's strip it back down to the sound of a few musicians in a room.

I tend to think Wild Honey makes this point in a more coherent fashion, but Smiley suggests it (and before some of the others). And in answering "whys" for that record, I think it's always valuable to remember that it was recorded in a very short amount of time for a record label that was demanding product yesterday. It was far from the last time Brian would react to outside pressure by turning in a seemingly shoddy product. The man could have invented passive aggression.

Agreed on several points, but I've heard the White Album and Dylan comparisons before, and the major issue I have there is The White Album sounds amazing, from an audio perspective, and on more than one track the Beatles and George Martin crafted and recorded full orchestral arrangements for certain songs, in the case of Good Night it is as full and as complex of an orchestration as can be heard on any Beatles song apart from Spector's Let It Be mixes.

The White Album was that happy medium I was hinting at with Brian, a middle point where obviously it's not the ornate psychedelic technicolor Beatles but it's also not a bunch of guys sitting around a bedroom recording songs with sparse instrumentation and lesser equipment. The Beatles did that at George's house and we can hear those demos as the Kinfauns Tapes or whatever that boot is called...but when it came time to record those songs, they went back to a pro studio and recorded the songs "properly". :-D There was no "what the hell?" moment for the fans at least from a sonic perspective where you go from a band recording crisp, hi-fi records to garage tapes in the span of half a year.

With Dylan, if he truly wanted to do the lo-fi thing as Brian had done on Smiley he could have released what became The Basement Tapes the same year he recorded them. That could be the closest Smiley Smile comparison, apart from the Beatles White Album demos, that I could think of.

The results were different, but I think some of the aims and motivations were the same. But no, Brian didn't figure out the happy medium that the Beatles did. He didn't have an outside producer, for one thing. And like I suggested, I think the lo-fi nature was almost passive aggressive.

Those late Vege-Tables and Dada sessions where it's pretty much just a piano and bass, along with the elaborate vocals -- but all pristinely recorded -- that would have been the approach of a "dream" Smiley Smile album.

Yes, what we get with SMILEY SMILE, and to some extent WILD HONEY, is Brian arranging songs more simply and recording them using a less-than-ideal home studio set-up. Had Brian not built the studio in his home, the sound quality on these two releases would have been so noticeably poor. I think concern for the lack of polish took a back seat to Brian being able to record at home, but really, this situation didn't last too long. FRIENDS finds a fairly happy balance between home recording and decent sound quality and by late '68, the majority of Beach Boys releases sound quite good again ("Do It Again" is the one major exception, but isn't that because the master was lost and a mono safety dub had to be used in its place?).

But here's the rub:  Contrary to the prevailing wisdom, Smiley/WH/Friends was neither recorded exclusively at home nor recorded poorly.  The lo-fi sound people associate with SS in particular and WH to an extent is just not there on the multis.  Who can say what went wrong, I suppose, but I have heard (and the remixes that have been put out tend to agree with this) some rough mixes from SS and WH done recently that are so clean and open that it'll shock you.

But this shouldn't be a surprise, because, when they weren't recording at the studios (which they still were for a few numbers throughout this time period) they were renting the finest remote equipment money could obtain and engineer by a fine old-school engineer.

Valid point, and to whit, even Pet Sounds sounds "murkier" than it should; the fact that it sounds "better" than the two 1967 albums is, I'm sure, because of the higher production standards in place during the tracking & mixing.  The "murky" quality is, says Mark L., due to the nature of the mixing consoles used in the day:  Describing the Bill Putnam custom-built recording consoles used at Western during this time (in a 1996 article for
"EQ"), Mark Linett explains why: "One of the failures I've always felt about that console in particular was that it recorded great, but the line inputs were padded down and went back to the mic inputs, creating a real distortion problem. This problem is typical of a lot of consoles from the '60s. The 3-track, 2-track, and live-to-mono stuff always sounded fantastic, but when they started mixing it through the board, they definitely lost a lot of the fidelity."

Indeed!

That is very interesting because a lot of people, perhaps erroneously, think that to mix something through those Putnam 610-based modular consoles would be a dream...although maybe all these years it was recording through them where they were at their best and mixing was murky. Very interesting.

Another consideration with Smiley Smile...and this will be addressed, hopefully...with all of these state-of-the-art 8-track machines available in Hollywood for rental, why did Brian choose a Dualux radio console instead?

This is interesting. The other day I had a long listen to several 66/67 albums from major bands of those times. At the end, after the TSS LP I put on Sergeant Pepper (I borrowed that LP from a friend for this), and both sounded great though pressed 44 years apart.

Then I put on Wild Honey from an early 70s Brother Records two-fer... and it was absolutely terrible. I turned up the treble full, which I normally never do because I like it a bit murky. But it still sounded so bad that instead I tried 20/20 from that same double album, and that was ok.

While this "special" sound quality fits Smiley Smile, it makes Wild Honey a less enjoyable listen than it could be.

Can any software undistort it? Surely there is some modern magic something. An iPhone app?

Not sure, but since the multi-tracks sound GREAT, it apparently didn't make too much of a negative impact clarily-wise.  Al Jarinde, in his Goldmine interview a few years back, decried how poorly "Heroes And Villains" sounds in terms of dynamics compared to "Good Vibrations", and blames it on the lack of production values, and the implication I got was he meant production values at the mixdown stage: "Good Vibrations" was mixed at Columbia, where they probably had a different mixing console, more "state of the art" than the Putnam design still used at Western...not sure, but "Heroes And Villains" was possibly mixed at Wally Heider's Studio 3, which was designed to be an exact replica of Western 3, meaning they would have had the same model Putnam console.

I got this info from the various writings of some of Heider's former employees: As far as the equipment Wally had at his studio, his was perhaps the most new and the most state-of-the-art technology available in LA at the time. He spent a great deal of money buying what was equipment only a few stages above the prototype in some cases, but ahead of what other studios were using by a few years' worth of technology. And he made a killing renting his high-tech gear to other studios so they could offer the "newest" gear to their clients, it was a great business plan, actually, and Wally didn't lose any clients but made a lot of money in rentals!

Wally's Studio 3 was a replica of the exact dimensions of the room and the materials used, etc, but not the electronics or the equipment from what I understand. From what I understand that would be changed in and out to keep up with new items and what clients were looking for, and Putnam was always developing new gadgets like limiters, compressors, etc which would end up in his rooms. The actual gear that Brian would have recorded those classics at Western 3 wound up in John Phillips' home studio after Western upgraded.

It's still very interesting to read about the limits of those Putnam modular boards, because again the reputation is so high and so many people think those boards have the element of magic in them...it's good to read a reality check from an actual owner of a board like that!

I'm thinking it could be a case of pushing the board to mix in a way they were not designed to mix: By 1963 standards of live-to-2 or 3-track recordings, they were amazing, but pushing all that Brian had on Pet Sounds...it could have created problems.

And you simply cannot get the acoustics and the quality of sound from a bedroom or a home studio that hasn't been designed with acoustics and reflections in mind that you can in a professional room. Each wall panel is placed a certain way for a reason, the ceiling is a certain height for a specific reason, and each room has its own live sound. With haphazard equipment and a room not designed for recording and not acoustically prepared to capture the sounds, you'll most likely get a dull and muffled sounding recording if you record there. Friends sounds like such an improvement, perhaps because wasn't there a "proper" studio built at the house by the time that album was recorded, with improved acoustics and better, permanent equipment?

Sounds reasonable!  I do recall (without taking the trouble to dig it out) that in the Goldmine interview Al said the limiters they used in studios like Columbia were top-notch, compared to what they used in Brian's home studio (and later in other "makeshift" studios as he called them, in Holland and at MIU).  For the home studio, Brian rented one of Heider's state-of-the-art 8-track reel decks, but used the (supposedly inferior) Dualux radio console and less-than-the-best limiters...but still managed to produce clean-sounding multitracks.  The mono mixes were probably done at Heider's Studio 3, using the best technology then available...and I have it on very good authority that the original mono master of Smiley Smile sounds great...so perhaps the sonic problems occured in the mastering phase (when extra EQ and limiting would typically be added), as opposed to the mix?   

To be fair to the 610, I think there's plenty of magic in them--it's the fault of the tape-in pad, not the amp.

This series is great and I am enjoying it but wondering at what point could it become a possible DVD release. Just looking at the numbers for youtube views.

 The Beach Boys An Introduction to "SMiLE Sessions". A tad under 40k views in less than a month.

The Beach Boys - SMiLE Sessions Webisode #7 - Love of Harmony . Just over 3000 views since Monday.

Keeping in mind this is a free series and I'm sure many of us here have watched each webisode more than once, I'm wondering just how well this might sell?

What sort of sales numbers make it viable?

While we're getting heavily into this discussion of ultra hi-fi equipment, let me throw a bit of perspective in here.  It is easy to express disbelief at the "bad" fidelity on an album like Smiley Smile.  But most of us are hearing this music on CDs, or vinyl on mid to high-end equipment.  Now picture yourself as an average Joe in 1967.  You hear the "latest Beach Boys single- Heroes and Villains" (in low fidelity) on your AM radio.  Then you decide you like it enough to purchase the Smiley Smile LP. 

You unwrap the album, and listen to it on your brand new 1967 Magnavox console stereo that weighs two tons, takes up half a room, and features an old-style ceramic phono cartridge.  While giving a unique "warm" type of sound, these stereos do not pick up a whole lot of sonic detail, leaving the Smiley Smile LP sounding pretty much on the same level of fidelity as every other record in your collection.  And this is a best case scenario... many portable record players in use at the time sound even worse.

The point is the options for hearing this music the way that we do now simply wasn't part of the public's ability at the time.  Therefore, the quality of mastering really wasn't that important, and shoddy work would go generally unnoticed.

So what's with the episodes? Wasn't one supposed to be uploaded last Thursday?
Let's at least hope for today.

Last Thursday was a holiday (in the US at least).  It's likely that the webmaster or whomever actually does the uploading for the YT series had the day off.

Right! Your Thanksgiving thingy..

So what holiday was yesterday?

Cyber Monday

I disagree with some of this, but at the same time I can understand and agree with the sentiment of the post. The ultimate blame rests on Brother Records as a whole, or whoever signed on to releasing Smiley Smile (and Wild Honey) with that muddy, lifeless sound. Those albums simply did not cut it sonically, at a time when sonics and mixing/mastering was important to a lot of artists and engineers. What engineer would want his name attached to a record which sounded shoddy? Would Bones Howe, Al Schmitt, Larry Levine, Eddie Brackett, or any of the other top Grammy-winning engineers of that era want his name on something shoddy? I think sonics were very much a consideration, although more important in some circles than others. But a record which sounded great in 1966 still sounds great, and a record which sounded muddy in 1966 still sounds muddy, no matter what technology has developed in the meantime.

However, it's tough to write off the poor sonic quality of Smiley Smile (and Wild Honey later the same year) in light of the quality of many classic recordings that were released in that same 6 month span in '67. I hate to continue to fall back on this because it's been done so often, but one of the groundbreaking aspects of Sgt. Pepper was the mixing and engineering, i.e. the way the record sounded apart from the music itself. And I'd argue a song like "Day In The Life" sounded big, present, vibrant, and alive whether it was heard on AM radio, a mini turntable, or a hi-fi set.

It's a major frustration as a BB's fan too because all it takes is a few listens to California Girls, or Help Me Rhonda, not too far removed from July '67. They explode out of the speakers, you can hear details like the sound of a stick on a cymbal in that intro, the breath of the horn players, and details of the lead guitar lines in Rhonda that sound brilliant 5 decades later. And they sounded great across the board of various systems and formats, and still do. The truth is that Smiley Smile and Wild Honey still sound muddy and lifeless to these ears, and as much as recording in a house environment where acoustics were not taken into consideration and the gear was hastily assembled. At the end of the process, the mixing and mastering wasn't as good as it could/should have been. The frustrating thing, too, is that both albums could be served very well by a remix, if such a thing is possible based on how they were constructed in '67.


But take a listen to any radio broadcast tape from 1967, and some of the songs are simply amazing, even on limited AM radio. They explode out of the speakers, there is clarity to those mono mixes, and hearing a single like Heroes in that context...maybe it's something everyone has to hear on their own to make a judgement. I just think overall, Smiley Smile and Wild Honey sound like there is a towel covering the speakers *in comparison* to other albums and songs of that same time period, where the sound of the mix and the mastering seemed to be important to those involved. 

Say what you will, but any "muddiness" on Smiley Smile and Wild Honey are part of their charm. That said, I hear very little of said muddiness. They don't sound like "California Girls", I'll grant you, but these records have a very specific sound to them that I really enjoy. The songs are great, which is worlds more important than the master lacking a bit of treble and the mix not being "flawless".

So yeah, the sound of these albums very much "cut it" for me. No mix of these songs would've ensure Grammy's etc. and said mixes probably would've taken away from the experience, if anything.

Agreed with a lot of these statements, obviously the charm of Smiley Smile is the homebrew, lo-fi sound overall, and ultimately I'm a fan of it despite my opinions on the sounds. But in the context of where the Beach Boys and Brian in particular were being hyped and promoted as leaders of the pack in the way records were made and produced, and that was the hype being fed by Derek Taylor's PR machine among others in the rock press, Smiley Smile was a complete fall-off-the-ledge departure from what fans were being led to expect earlier that year. There was no easy let-down, there was no easing into this "new sound" or even a gradual build-up (or breakdown...) to that new sound, and I think in that context, Smiley Smile was doomed from the start.

Do the 1967 pressings sound muddy?

new episode - more Brian being ace at the piano

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=7GJqxMR8vIg

No new studio video though!

In one of the more recent episodes I love the part where Brian starts playing CIFOTM on piano - that was amazing.

Hey -- the Cabinessence chorus shows up in Fire! Doh!

Agreed, after this video series, the thread a couple months ago about the "decline" of brian's piano playing seems crazy.

Smiley Smile and Wild Honey have always suffered from poor recording quality.  But, for that matter, from a sound quality standpoint, Today, Summer Days, and the original Pet Sounds mono mix also sound sonically inferior to the better sounding recordings of the era.  Although the Pet Sound stereo remix is a sonic improvement over the mono mix, it's recording quality still doesn't match that of the best recordings of the day.  (Also please note that I am not saying that the stereo version is preferred over the mono; I'm just commenting that the sonics are better on the stereo remix.)

Bottom line for me is that all the original mono BB releases would benefit from a remix, to stereo when possible.  For an example of the dramatic improvement a remix can make, compare the stereo remixes of Kiss Me Baby (from BB Today) to the mono original.  Then listen to the Surfer Girl album from 1963 and note the vastly superior the recording quality compared to anything the BBs released from 1965 thru 1967. 

Safer to say poor mixing and mastering quality, I think.

Yes, when I said "recording quality" I was referring to the overall sound, but perhaps I should have said "poor mixing and mastering quality" as that's the primary element I was referring to when I said the 65-67 albums would benefit from a remix.  But parts of Wild Honey do seem to suffer from lackluster recording quality, case in point being the buzz on Here Comes the Night.  I bought the Wild Honey album when it was released in Dec. '67, and I remember thinking, "I can't believe how sloppy this sounds, the Beach Boys have taken this home recording studio thing too far."

While that specific muddiness works great for SS, it gives the WH tracks way less impact. I like muddiness, too, but WH is too much muddiness even for me. It is the only album I put the treble up to maximum. The CD sounds a bit brighter.

Most of these newer stereo mixes are not without their fair amount of faults, too.

I would pay big Euros for a DVD of Brian playing improvised 10-seconds fragments of SMiLE songs on the piano, even if with wrong chords, tempo and lyrics.
Hell, doesn't even have to be all SMiLE, throw in any BW/BB song that comes to his mind and Shortnin' Bread.

New Episode up--pretty fascinating:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=XXoDkZlxg9c (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=XXoDkZlxg9c)

"We were taking drugs...and we were taking, uh, drugs...and...drugs."

The ending of this episode has the band very down with the revisting the end of an era for Brian. Brian looked like he was saying the drugs thing to hold back the real reasons for the end and almost seemed like he was going to reveal them.

'Couldn't unstone ourselves'

Great quote from Brian.

Did anyone else notice that the "Ten-episodes" has no become twelve?  ;D

Check out Mark checking his iPhone while Alan speaks!

It almost looked like Brian was choking back tears when he said they were taking drugs.

I realized that immediately, and almost cried when he STILL doesn't want to tell us D:

Or he spilled and they edited it out

God damn am I tired of hearing "The band didn't like it." Mike objected but still did his parts and did them well because he ultimately trusted Brian's judgement. Dennis was extremely supportive of the project, and the other guys have expressed a liking for the project since then and were said to be supportive overall.

Wow, who said the band didn't like it?

YouTube comments on this video and, I would guess, every other video on YouTube, Beach Boys or not. The whole band hated Brian, hated Pet Sounds, hated Smile, hated progress and just wanted to write surf songs, Mike destroyed the Smile tapes, Mike not only induced mental illness in Brian but did so willingly, Mike drowned Dennis so he could have John Stamos in the band, Mike is literally Satan, etc. etc. etc.

Small-minded lost souls who, when it comes down to it, really don't matter. Don't let them ruin your day

I'm really, really, REALLY hoping they go balls-out on studio footage with the last episode! ::fingers crossed::

I think a lot of hard-core fans have thought this at one point or another (me included) - because in many books and the BWPS documentary Mike is made out to be the devil. Anecdotes are given about Mike's obvious dislike of the project. Drugs are glorified in BWPS documentary.

So you can't blame people for being misinformed.

I honesty think he had a nervous breakdown and he was remembering it in the video.

YouTube comments are the cesspool of the internet. All the waste products of the online universe flow there.

Episode 9 is one the of the best of the series, so far. Just hearing the 4 of them talk about the end, you can see and feel the sadness. You guys are right, Brian was holding back on the reasons Smile was shelved, they all were to some extent. Al really came across as loving the music and sad that it was not released in its day. I hope the rest of the episodes are as interesting as this one.

We're back to that again?  :smokin

Whatever.

I'm diggin' Dennis Wolfe's comments though.  Very insightful stuff.

The thing is, these are only echoes of the really popular public sentiment about Mike being Satan, the rest of the band being a bunch of unsupportive lackeys who had no talent of their own, that Brian was an angel who could do no wrong, etc. etc. etc. As a fan and as someone who really appreciates "the other guys", it's mildly upsetting.

More than mildly upsetting and not just professed by the posters at YouTube either, I'm sorry to say.

Stereotypes take a long time to dissolve.  At least within The Beach Boys' hardcore fanbase (ex: this forum) there has already been a shift in how the majority of people feel about Mike Love.  Ten years ago you couldn't go onto "The SMiLE Shop" and say anything positive about Mike Love without getting your brains smashed in.  People would accuse you of "sticking up for a jerk" or "trying to rewrite history by professing that Mike isn't a jerk".  So having taken that into account the hardcore fanbase as come a long way.

As far as Joe Public is concerned, as it's already been pointed out a lot of them are still limited to basing their opinions on well traveled quotes and books very few of which paint the others guys in the band outside of Brian Wilson in a positive light.  I think one of the unfortunate side effects of the past decade or so is that while Brian's reputation has not only been restored but rightfully enhanced, the other members of the band have been reduced to "puppet status" once again. 

In closing I'll say this.  Nobody knows what goes on behind closed doors but in public I've heard nothing but praise and kind remarks about Brian Wilson from the other members of the band.  "Pet Sounds", "Good Vibrations" and now "SMiLE" have all received their due from everyone involved as legitimate pieces of art by the hand of a master craftsman.  For me that is the end of the story.

Brian told us why decades ago: he thought the lyrics were too arty, the music was too old fashioned and elaborate and he didn't want to release it because he didn't think it was commercial. He's never seemed sad about it to me, pretty straight forward, it didn't meet his expectations so he dropped most of it and that was it. [dusting hands]

It's not as mysterious as it's been made out to be to me. It's like the too-many-fragments-couldn't-figure-it-out scenario, imo it just wasn't that way. Yes, he worked modular, no all of the modules were not in play all the time. Yes like Pet Sounds he had each song figured out and organized before he got to the studio. He had a sort of loose mood or theme in mind for an album of twelve songs but he was not trying to make a grand unified album piece to the extent we like to dream about. More like his idea for Pet Sounds, individual songs that go together on an album like pictures in an exhibition. The movements were internal to the twelve songs and not movements across an album. The individual songs were the thing, he wasn't trying to juggle an album's worth of fragments all at one time. Brian always knew what he wanted each to be at every given point before he got to the studio. Yes, sometimes he'd have a better or new idea, or he'd improvise a solution in the studio but he knew a new plan and made the necessary modules. He identified everything as he made it, he doesn't seem to have ever been lost in how it was supposed to be. Confusion and compulsiveness were not in play. Focused absolute creative freedom and the power to take unlimited time and resources were in play. All just my opinion on the evidence available of the day [as opposed to decades later].

That's the thing, too - everyone is allowed to change their mind or even grow up, but if Mike Love says anything indicative of either, he's just being an opportunist.

What?

His thoughts on Smile in the recent videos were summed up with, "Great music, but I didn't understand the lyrics." That's been his story for ages, has it not? If he really hated this stuff, I doubt he'd be doing these interviews. If he hated it and wanted to look good, he wouldn't have opened up so much about why he disliked the lyrics.

So yeah. I've never really known Mike Love as one to attempt to save face or mince words.

I really don't know about that. Explain the numerous edits of "Heroes And Villains", or the "Bicycle Rider" theme being moved from "Worms" to "Heroes And Villains"? The different "Wind Chimes" structures"? etc. etc. etc. etc.

I really think the too-many-pieces theory is ahead of just about anything else, sans maybe what you'd posted in the first couple sentences - genuinely feeling the lyrics were too arty and the music too complex, that is.

Isn't this disproven simply by the fact that various sections were edited into different songs over the course of work on the album?

Some of H&V is for a b side of the single, never intended for the album, like the BR for H&V Part 2. He figured out a song, he recorded it or part of it at a couple of sessions. He wouldn't dig it or would think of a way to improve it and make only the necessary recordings for the new plan. It might be a new section or a whole revision of a song. That isn't indecision that is creative decisiveness. Whether he changed a section or redid most of the song or re-purposed a section he was building and revising song by song [not album by album] in an organized way and noting all of his intended structure as he recorded, revised, re-purposed. Good Vibrations was recorded the same way, revised, rerecorded and re-purposed in a decisive way. SMiLE wasn't as complicated as we want to make it or maybe I should say it wasn't complicated in the way we want to make it. IMO.

But what about the chorus chant that migrates from Worms to H&V? What about the way Barnyard and IIGS became separate tracks after being originally intended for H&V? How about the brief inclusion of a CIFTTM chorus in Dada? Or the way that the intro to fire was originally, again, an H&V fragment?

It seems there's abundant evidence of Brian moving fragments he generated in the recording studio -- originally intended for one song -- into other, developing pieces. Now, I agree that he certainly wasn't moving in a confused or bewildered manner -- he knew what he was doing -- but it also strikes me that he was working in a far more flexible and experimental way than he had previously.

BR in SMiLE H&V and the intro to H&V Part 2 [there is no fire intro] were for the b side of the single, not the album. SMiLE and CIFOTM were dead before ILTSDD, so it wasn't really an attempt to re-purpose in a SMiLE song. I'm not aware of BY becoming a separate track on SMiLE, as far as I know it is a discarded fade for an early version of H&V and not shown on the tracklist. If the Humble Harv demo means IIGS was ever a part of H&V it was a section of H&V discarded to become a listed song of its own, not an attempt to unify an album, it was no longer a part of H&V apparently [if it ever was a part].

You seem to be talking about the album as some fixed thing that (presumably) existed toward the end of 1966. And in that context, your argument is certainly defensible. But the album wasn't released then, and the pieces were reused, so it's hard in a broader sense of the Smile sessions to say that everything was as set in stone as you suggest.

But if I take your argument further -- if we assume that Smile per se was dead by the end of 66, then the whole narrative changes. Brian isn't trying to finish the album in 67 -- he's trying to piece together singles and isn't being pleased by the results. So therefore, the whole casting about and losing the plot narrative is actually about a master producer raiding a rejected album in an attempt to make the best singles that he can. An interesting view, and one with some truth to it, I think.

I'm just trying to clarify Brian's intentions according to what is known from the time and not comments or theories years and decades later. The album was a set thing in that Brian had decided on 12 specific tracks on the list. From early in the process nothing is recorded for SMiLE that is not on the list. The list is apparently what is on the paste ups of the album cover in late March [Taylor] which were then made around April [Mike] by Bertco and Queens Litho [memos] and a QL subcontractor [Richard Roth, QL] and then sat in Capitol warehouses 'til 1972 [memos]. I think the ambiguity of the album tracklist is overrated and the 12 track list is it.

However imo, the album is just a collection of songs, so the songs are created and creation involves change but Brian's method was to know what the song was going to be when he got to the studio. When he creatively edited the song, he did it with a plan. So content within the songs might change but once the list was submitted to Capitol the list of songs remained the same until he quit. To me it seems he had most of the songs well thought out and more or less settled [like he had PS] but he decided it wasn't where he wanted to go before he got everything he planned recorded. He did give extra planning and work to the two proposed singles which just follows his MO in GV where he was on task also. The problem wasn't not being able to pull songs together, he apparently pulled successive versions together and then thought it wasn't doing it for him or he had a better idea or felt some reason to create another planned out version. Anyways, I think the "couldn't pull it together" theory is not credible.

Do we know for a fact that Brian planned to make H&V a two part single like this all along?  I know it's been theorized that Part 2 would have been the repository for the dizzying array of various bits that didn't fit into the song proper, but how much hard evidence is there to support this theory?  Even if this were the case, I don't think Part 2 could have comfortably housed all of the different experiments that Brian attempted in January and February, intriguing though they may have been.  I mean, Bag of Tricks?  Was there really any chance that this 'intro' was going to make the cut?  You can argue "Well, Brian knew exactly what he was doing, but he just didn't like the results, so he chucked it", but when an artist keeps trying different ideas and discarding them, to me, that does not suggest that he always had a clear idea of what he was searching for in the first place.

This webisode is filled with quotables (aside from 'We couldn't unstone ourselves,' and 'Drugs, and drugs, and drugs,' we have this):

Q: What would you say to Brian Wilson if you could go back and talk to him right now?
BW: "If you write a song, don't crap-out halfway — write your whole song — like my father used to teach me."

Cue: CIFOTM

So, once again, everything comes back to Murry; it's all about The Murr.

This one is so sad  :(

Something to consider: Murry could easily be alive today. He'd be 94. Can you imagine?

Oh yeah! Righteous!  :afro

No, it's not for sure but you have Brian making an H&V Part 2 master separate from the H&V master just as you would when you are making a single with two sides which requires two separate masters and you have eye [or ear?] witnesses claiming Brian was making the H&V single with two sides. According to the master H&V Part 2, the presumed b side, seems like a sampler of non-H&V tracks from the album not really a home for discarded H&V, the presumed a side, sections or album track discards. Not sure if the new info in BBSS still aligns with that or not.

Well maybe I'm wrong headed about this but since when has changing something you are creating mean you don't know what you want or are doing or can't pull a song together? To me it seems back in the day it was interpreted that Brian was trying to do something he wasn't and his work method got labeled as an inability to pull his sh*t together.  Then personal problems and mental issues got erroneously post dated to the SMiLE period and became another "reason" to think he couldn't maintain. All just my opinion based on facts as I understand them.

Of course it doesn't mean that. But it's also different from saying that Brian knew precisely what he wanted for every song and the location of every section before he went into the studio to record it.

These days, I doubt most Smile fans actually believe that Brian didn't know what he was doing. Or that he couldn't pull a song together. The box proves that each of those things are untrue. What folks have actually noted is that, over the course of the sessions, Brian seems to lose some of his confidence and direction. He starts retracing his steps. He started shuffling pieces around. That crystal-clear vision of the album (that he may have held in late 66!) starts to blur.

And this is supported by the stories people around him tell. Brian's world was changing in dramatic ways, and he was clearly having some paranoid episodes. When you add paranoia to an already depressive person (I'm not even saying he was seriously mentally ill at this point, either), you have a perfect recipe for self-doubt. Brian Wilson was not only an external, outward actor. He was a person with an internal life.

turns out it's a 12-episode series. cool!

Haven't there only been nine?

Bottom left of picture now reads '9 in series of 12' or the like.

I think that neither the David Leaf Doc nor this Youtube series gets the reality of the downfall of Smile quite right. I can perceive not so hidden agendas and obfuscation in both presentations. The "truth" is somewhere in between, and whether this is closer to the David Leaf/VDP account or the Beach Boys Inc version of the event is really in the eye of the beholder.

Paranoid as in mentally ill? Or as temporary high induced? There is no way anyone will know but my donut is on either the supposed transient high induced paranoia or a brilliant mind who is superstitious and not mental illness. If it matters but to me even if, Brian is still operating in the studio at the highest levels [of anyone at any time] and he is identifying everything he is recording at the time it is recorded as to what it is in which song it is for.

Anyways, we can agree to disagree.

What I see is a Brian Wilson who falls in love with the idea of modular recording and the freedom it represents...then becomes frustrated that the experiments, combined with the general themes and music of SMiLE, aren't living up to his expectations. The saga of "Wonderful" seems especially telling. Here's a track that Brian actually finished for the most part with a full vocal and mix early in the process. He then attempts two different versions months later, but neither of these are as complete as the first version he attempted. What's going on here? We even know that Mike was keen on this song (which is probably why it's him doing the background vocals on the third attempt)!

If we accept that Brian knew exactly what he was doing at all times, then the result would have been a released album just like the ten previous studio album releases. The mere fact that Brian spent nearly a year recording sessions that did not see a release suggests a strong degree of uncertainty. Not necessarily due to drug intake or mental illness, but uncertainty nonetheless.

Well, Milton Love is alive. Or was until recently, as per AGD.

Agree with about 85% of this.  I would add: the paranoia is not mental illness as such.  It is a side-effect of the self-induced stress brought on by: round-the-clock overwork; the new ideas are coming too fast and furious; maybe the results aren't good enough; deadline pressures; unfinished song lyrics; the Brother Records lawsuit; and - big one guys - the refusal to delegate, to ask advice or hand out work assignments (as in: each of you guys dub these acetates to tape, then Steve, you assemble it one way, Chuck you do it this other way, Jim you do a third order like this, then I'll listen and pick one).

Seen this way, the bizarro behavior is a manifestation of workplace stress.  The drugs are used to medicate it.  To all and sundry, Brian is absolutely in total control, but in his own mind he's not making it happen, and can't find his way through the thicket.  Again, totally self-inflicted.  I'm sure Murry would have loved to take over, as he always did, but for this period he's not even in the room.

I also like Cam's theory - which the documented evidence supports - that by January 67 Smile was already scrapped sub silentio, or at least set aside for awhile, and Brian was concentrating on finishing the Next Killer Single.  Which was to be H&V, until it was held hostage in the Capitol records suit, then, uh, uh, gotta pick something for a single, there must be something we can use, er, ah, OK:  Vegetables.

Ep. 10 "From Fragments to Finish" - http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=-ODpUwR_k7M

Sounds like Darian is not a huge fan of TSS. Of course his taste is obviously biased towards BWPS. I don't know if I could ever see BWPS as the finished SMiLE. I enjoy the original recordings too much.

Are you kidding? I bet Darian goes to sleep cradling the box in his arms. He's just saying that he feels BWPS finished the material, in his view. You could say the same for Alan and Mark!

Darian is talking about "finished" in terms of the sequence of Smile, not the specific recording in 2004.

Whatever paranoia is, I do not see where it was present at or affected the creation, recording and development of SMiLE either.

I suppose it is possible, the one effect it did possibly have illustrates my interpretation: Fire. He got it the way he wanted it, it got bagged by his feeling about it after he had it. Paranoia, superstitious thinking, he said because it was too scary, but whatever  it was not because he couldn't get what he wanted or couldn't pull it together, it was bagged after he got it together for his feelings about it. Still  after all of our arm chair diagnosis, pulling it together and knowing how the songs fit together or obsessiveness or any of the usual suspects weren't the problem. Brian was pulling it together and did know what he wanted with each session and revision [and he spelled it out], the problem was he didn't like it after he did pull it together. He was getting it the way he wanted but when he did he didn't want it. He didn't stop because of any problems putting the songs together he stopped pulling them together. He didn't point to paranoia  or confusion or any of the rest as the problem. The problem was he didn't like it when/after he did get it. He thought the lyrics were too arty, the music too elaborate, old fashion, scary, they weren't satisfying after the hard work of getting them, he wanted a new mood and approach, all the reason he actually gave at the time. [broken record I]

I got the impression that he was talking about BWPS there, including bringing in VDP to finish tracks like Worms and Dada (though I don't think this is any kind of slight against TSS at all on Darian's part).  In the eyes of BW and VDP, I think that BWPS is SMiLE, the project brought to completion, and I can certainly respect that point of view.  For me, nothing will ever surpass the haunted magic of those original sessions, fragmentary though they may be.  

Can you see why that bolded statement seems a little confusing?  If he wasn't happy with the results, then either he didn't execute properly or the thing he thought he wanted wasn't really what he wanted.  Either way, it suggests uncertainty on the part of the author.

You raise an interesting point with the Fire sessions.  I think that November/December time frame was where SMiLE began to sour and it was effectively dead in the water by the beginning of the year.  Up until that point, things were humming along pretty well.  As you say, he did execute with Mrs. O'Leary's Cow and paranoia that emerged after the fires broke out put a real scare into him, causing him to doubt the nature of the project he'd embarked on with such high hopes only a few months before.  He never regained his confidence in SMiLE and that's where all of the second guessing crops up (going back to Wonderful repeatedly being one of the more baffling examples).

How do you explain what happened with H&V?  He records a dizzying array of diverse sessions--countless different bits, some recycled from other tracks, most of which likely never would have made a finished single (even a two parter).  He labored over that one for two month at no small expense and still he couldn't come up with an edit that satisfied him, apparently.  (We have the possibly apocryphal story of him playing one mix for an acquaintance and then chucking it when that person wasn't enthusiastic.  Personally, I think he was batty because there's plenty of material there for a great track, but that's beside the point!)  So he embarks on another attempt at a single that doesn't come together.  If he was so confident and clear in his vision, why did he spend so much time working on tracks that didn't come together?  To say that he didn't like the results suggests to me that he didn't really know what he wanted in the first place.

Have you ever stopped by a Fox News comment thread? >:D

Those people are plain insane. :o

You've never created something that you had thought out but when you were finished, it didn't pay off the way you expected. You got what you wanted but then you didn't want it? Then you think what it needs is to lose this but this ought to be like this. IMO, if you are timid/stingy about taking chances and  making changes, small or wholesale, you are probably in the wrong biz. Brian was neither timid nor stingy creatively. He knows what he wants and he makes it so leaving the proof of his organization all over the tracks, the problem is after he has pulled it together and not with pulling it together.

That story about a stranger and H&V may be true, but Brian did as he pleased, he would listen to people, even try their suggestion but it didn't happen unless Brian wanted it to happen.

I think Brian was starting to lose his Jones for SMiLE around the first of the year in '67 but I don't think he disliked it enough to stop it until March '67.

I see BWPS as the finished SMiLE, not as the SMiLE. IMHO there is no the SMiLE. I enjoy both BWPS and TSS.

Writing that, I bored myself. :(

In all seriousness, I don't know how some of you guys have kept it up all these years. Even my brief tenure as a SMiLEaholic has nearly driven me mad (maybe because I spend too much time on this board?).


My theory as for why it was shelved is ... All of the above. Band confusion. Label pressure. Commercial concerns. Loss of focus. Doubt. Drug use. Growing mental health issues. It doesn't have to be just one; the stars were aligned against the project. Hell, it was probably too ambitious-- GV took six months, and he only worked on an album-length project for less than a year before abandoning it.

We argue in circles and never get any closer, and Brian himself isn't consistent. "Mike didn't like it." "Drugs... And drugs." He's the only one who could explain it. He's tried to do so, and has given several good reasons, but we need-- demand!-- more and better ones. Thank God new information does trickle out from time to time, and God bless the historians and journalists for their dedication and good work.

All of the reasons, in different measure, contributed to the end of SMiLE. While we won't know which, if any, figured most heavily in Brian's decision, I'm sure the combined weight of them was crushing. Poor Brian/it was his own damn fault/f#@& Mike Love/just say no.

I think you've summed it up nicely in your post.  I also liked Bruce's Mt. Everest analogy.  By the early part of 1867, the whole thing became a big albatross around Brian's neck, so he threw it away and pursued a less demanding aesthetic.

Wow! What a great color photo around the 40 second mark of episode ten. Where is that from?

Same shoot as the Stack-o-Crack cover, so around '68. Anyone have the original anywhere?

yeah would love to have a jpg of that

Episode 11 folks:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmHm7qEnhng&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL

Nice to hear from c-man!

Yikes!  Do I really look like that?  :)

Did they give you guys stage makeup for these videos? Definitely looks like Alan and Mark are wearing some.

Nah - CGI & motion capture are wonderful things.  ;D

Can't speak for the rest of the guys, but my bit was pretty much "as nature intended".  :)

So you were naked?

Was Mike?

Al???

Bruce????

Sorry, my bit was filmed seperately here in Nebraska, so I can't speak for the other guys.   :)

Episode 15, some interesting stuff on teh cover, many bootleg covers shown, and more footage of Brian singing his 'Yeah' good Vibrations overdub, which is awesome!

If Bruce had been naked, his part probably would've been filmed with him in the bath.  >:D

Final episode - Brian ends it beautifully:

"When I hear the SMiLE tapes, I almost cry.
It's GREAT music, that is really good music, you know?
I'm honored to hear it."

We know.
We are too.
Thanks, Brian, for the great presents under our trees this year.
(and showing a SMiLE bootleg cover in a Beach Boys sanctioned offering?

Strange, wonderful dream times we are in, here in Wilsonia...)

I was a bit disappointed it just reused bits from previous episodes. It was cool to see the art dept. stuff though.

Wow, great to finally see the legendary back cover with the red markings!   :thumbsup

Al looks almost gaunt in these videos; especially in the last one, he reminds me more and more of Gollum. 

Yeah, and none of those markings reflect any potential changes to track lineup, so there goes that theory.

There are marks on it that tell me that parts were pasted on and are now missing.

There seems to be a small blurry area at the center top, is that it or any of those marks indicate paste overs or edits specifically to the tracklist?

PS. If anyone has a high resolution scan or photo of the original un-filtered paste up that they would like to share please PM me, I'd love to try to run it by any of the mid-1960s Capitol Art Directors still alive to see if we could get a forensic opinion. Or maybe that has been done already?

That there are no marks about the track lineup is actually meaningless. Only if there had been marks, we would know the final lineup. The marks have their reason in design, and were probably not made by the producer of the music.

The theory that needs to go is that hidden somewhere in the heap of the recordings there is the one and only true 1967 SMiLE album that only needs the parts carved off that would not have been on the actual 1967 album. There is no such a thing.