The Smiley Smile Message Board

Okay, so I was just back reading the boards for the first time in months this evening, which led me to start reading through the TSS sessionography again – and C-man, just to reiterate what I’m sure everyone else has said already, it’s just an exceptional piece of work and by far the unquestionable highlight of the book (though I do think Diane’s recollections are quite revealing and sweet) – and then led to me lying in bed for two hours obsessively going through dates and recollections until it was clear I had no choice but to sit up till 3.30 writing 3,000 words on how I interpreted that data.

Which of course I did. You have been warned.

SMILE:  ALMOST DONE IN NOVEMBER, DOA IN JANUARY
Or, THIS NEEDS A CATCHY AND CONTROVERSIAL TITLE IF I HAVE ANY HOPE OF IT GETTING READ BY ANYONE


First: I’m not sure exactly when Brian and Van Dyke started writing together in earnest, but as far as we can gather VDP does not seem to have contributed lyrics to some of the earliest songs recorded for Dumb Angel/SMiLE.

I say this because the first two tracks (and possibly the original “Heroes”, contents unknown) Brian recorded during and after completion of “Good Vibrations”, “Look” and “Wind Chimes” (early August), were originally credited solely to Brian, and Frank Holmes never seems to have received lyrics from VDP for these. (More on this later.)

So VDP makes a sudden – but impactful - appearance on the Wilson studio scene on 25 August, when “Wonderful” and (probably) “He Gives Speeches” are recorded on the same day. “Holidays” follows in September – and it’s appearing increasingly likely the lyrics we got in ’04 are vintage, or at least a significant number of them (I can spot Ukulele Lady Lily, a lazy Mr Moon, a way for a Milky Way, a bottle –of port, or of rum for Carib scum? – as anchor is weighed, and most wittily, a man juxtaposed with a mystery in Frank Holmes’ (c)96 illustration for the song, which he told AGD were originals given to him by Van Dyke).

Then not much until October, presumably because Brian and Van are working up the songs in that magical sandpit.

But October kicks off in earnest, and a period of incredible productivity gets underway.  Where almost every other song worked by the pair gets either a re-recording or a place on the famous “Capitol Memo”, “He Gives Speeches”, “Look” and “Holidays” seem to vanish after their initial tracking – perhaps, on the basis of their lyrical affinity (on Holiday’s part) and musical resemblance (on Look’s) to “Do You Like Worms” and “Child is Father of the Man” (for which Van says he supplied no lyrics) respectively, we could speculate that they were essentially replaced by those October songs. All the other numbers get rough assemblies, demos, guide vocals or (in some cases) full band vocals over the next twelve weeks.

Which brings us to Heroes, which begins, I think we can safely say, as a very different, less unified song than the one it eventually – and torturously – arrived as. The May 11 session produced a 2:45 master take that apparently included “You Are My Sunshine” – not necessarily in a minor key and past tense.

 Vosse recalls in “Fusion” the origin of “Barnyard” as a direct continuation of the work Brian had done on YAM’s fade (perhaps confirming some of AGD’s opinions on the historical accuracy of this interview, but not I think too damagingly for this essay), so we might assume that when Brian and VDP decide to rework this early version, one developed – and was replaced by – the other.

 For whatever reason, Brian does nothing more with the song then until 20 October, when he goes back into the studio and records what seems very likely to be a good chunk of the backing track, in two parts, of his and Van Dyke’s new conception of the song – the “three minute musical comedy” of bootleggers’ dreams.

Recorded this day were the verse and “Barnyard”. Three days earlier, a vocal session for “I’m in Great Shape” had occurred with all six Beach Boys, though we’re not sure what this is (it may be the “Vega-tables” demo, but see below), and a week later, he tried again on a piece with this title as an instrumental backing track. All three pieces, incidentally, are logged as H&V sessions.

At which point, as with most of the songs we’ve already discussed, Brian seems to be satisfied with the backings and work stops on the number, awaiting vocals – certainly a week later again he’s audibly delighted to run through all three parts in sequence for Humble Harv, even describing the first transistion between sections with a particularly charming mouth-flutterhorn. At this point, H&V seems to be a very concrete entity – verse/IIGS/Barnyard, perhaps with intro and link between the latter sections.

And so we reach November and it’s here, I’d argue, that the sessionography reveals the first signs of the chaos to come, though for now it may just as well be Brian making a breathless dash for the finishing line.

Only four completely new pieces of music are recorded in November, and only one is a stand-alone song in the conventional sense – the soon-to-be contentious “Surf’s Up”. The others range from the arguably throwaway – “Workshop” – to exciting-but-unlikely-to-stand-alone, “The Elements: Fire”.

Then there’s “The Old Master Painter/You Were My Sunshine”, rescued from oblivion and resurrected as a three-part medley. Whether or not part 2 – the “Barnshine” fade – or the “Master Painter” quotation were part of the May H&V we may never know, but certainly this is how Brian intended the track to go in November, as he edited the two together. In fact, during the tracking of part two, he refers to it as “the [grand] finale”.

What’s more interesting for the moment is that is our first mention of “The Elements”, at least on session logs. An October-ish version of Vega-Tables – presumably Cornucopia, as no other version of the track gets taped until four months later - is associated with ‘The Elements’ by Frank Holmes in his artwork  for the booklet, and though this has long been contentious, looked at in this context I’m inclined to believe it was meant to be at some stage. (Can anyone confirm when in ‘66 the illustrations were done?)

But sticking with elemental forces: Van Dyke has said he never worked on “The Elements”, and indeed most of the lyrics (“cornucopia” couplet obviously excepted) on both the released version and the demo of Veggies sound more like Brian’s work than Van Dyke’s. Specifically, they sound closest in tone – evocative but in a simple way, whimsical rather than witty - to those of Wind Chimes, originally copyrighted solely to Brian, and one of the first songs tracked for the project.

While not disputing in any way that VDP contributed to these songs, if we lend any weight either to the assertion of the man himself that he didn’t work on “The Elements”, or to the fact their lyrical approach is so far removed from any of the other songs with words we know of, we can make one of two assumptions.

One, that “Vega-Tables” and “Wind Chimes” were never part of The Elements, but after years in that camp I’m beginning to think the weight of evidence is, at least for the former, in the opposite direction. The other possible conclusion is that this suite of shortish and thematically-linked tunes was very much Brian’s idea, started early in the project, and not particularly in Van Dyke’s purview.

As a piece of circumstantial evidence, it can be noted that in Frank Holmes’ illustrated plates (unless there are others I haven’t seen or I’m missing a particularly obscure visual reference), which Holmes has said he based exclusively on VDP’s lyric sheets, there is no reference to Wind Chimes whatsoever, and the only other link to The Elements is a literal depiction of Mrs O’Leary’s Cow’s title done in 1996.

The point of all this? I think in November there was very nearly a finished album, and Brian had developed, if not concrete ideas for, at least some of the sequencing (more after the jump to back this up). And what we’re left with now are two of SMiLE’s most fundamental mysteries:  “Great Shape” and “The Elements”.

Conjecture time, so if this is the kind of stuff that causes some of you to flip out and behave rudely, please do me some small courtesy for the time I spent writing and cross-checking the rest of this and skip the next part:

At this stage, “Great Shape” as we think of it from the memo doesn’t exist. It’s sections two and three of a one-part “Heroes”.  It might be around this time Brian and Van Dyke recognise that the song as they’ve planned it – at least for the projected single – just doesn’t hang together enough for their purpose. It’s great fun and incredibly inventive, but there’s no repeating sections, let alone a chorus, and no steady beat for the discotheque kids of ’66. So they chop it roughly in half and start working on the more cohesive “Cantina” version recorded in January.

“The Elements”, meanwhile, may well have been where Brian started this mad dream, and it looks to me like in November, as the instrumental tracks for his and Van Dyke’s work was largely done, he was trying to finish it. Wind Chimes had been re-recorded and expanded the month before, Vega-Tables was clearly planned by December to stand alone in some fashion (hard to imagine with the demo, even in its pristine TSS version), and if one adds “I Wanna Be Around/Workshop” to the end of “Fire” after its destructive drumbeats, you’ve got a three minute tune there, fella.

Following this logic, the BWPS idea of a “suite” – full songs linked thematically – might well have been more likely for the The Elements than a single unbanded collection of instrumental fragments. (Contradicting this, in fairness, is Brian’s own quotation about the “Air element” in his “autobiography”. I’m not going to hide behind criticisms of the book’s veracity – as I said, this essay itself is just informed conjecture – so I will accept this as a black mark against my argument.)

For “Water”, you’ve got two options, both something of a stretch, but let’s persist. “Dada”, first tracked in late December, is the usual favourite. Frank Holmes has hinted at something in his Veggies illustration – “there’s more than one element” in it – and usually this has been guessed to be a “Holidays” postcard with a black lake in it. Well, it looks more like a stamp to me, and there’s no lake mentioned in the lyrics for “Holidays” (which it seems increasingly possible did exist and in Holmes’ possession in ’66, as discussed above), even if that crinkly black object is meant to be a lake at all.

What there is, unquestionably, is a wall of Surf. Which is Up.

And while my poor pigeons are unconscionably savaged by the neighbour’s cats, back to the sessionography and realm of facts and figures:

So! End of November, and we have rough edits/demos/acetates - ie. pretty clear indications of finalised structures - of the following songs later mentioned on the Famous Memo (and, more critically, thousands of printed cover slicks):
Heroes and Villains
Child is Father of the Man
Wind Chimes
Wonderful
Vega-Tables
Surf’s Up
Good Vibrations (natch)
Cabin Essence
The Old Master Painter
Do You Like Worms

All of them a) recorded or re-recorded since September (except GV, equally natch, and Wonderful) and – this is important - b) discrete modular compositions with very few shared musical themes (by my tally, if you’re not in the “SU always had the CIFOTM coda” camp, precisely none).

Add to these the other instrumental recordings – “Fire” and “Workshop” – done in November and you have – give or take thirty or forty seconds – a 32-minute pop album, exactly as was the norm in 1966, recorded in around two months, of 11 3-4 minute songs.

I would defy anyone to go through their Smile Sessions sessionography, old bootlegs, box set or period press clippings and provide me with evidence of linking tracks, shared themes or even a great deal of messing round with the structures of individual songs – in terms of the studio at least. I certainly couldn’t find such when I tried. In fact, I’d argue that it’s much easier to use all surviving contemporary data to argue strongly the opposite.

Look, I’m aware Brian didn’t, or couldn’t, finish SMiLE. I’ve also read the quotes from David Anderle, Mike Vosse, Carl Wilson et al about the endless permutations of sections. I’ve no doubt there was a lot of spitballing and throwing ideas about (and in Carl’s case, he was mainly there for the admittedly and increasingly chaotic vocal sessions after returning from the UK) – I wasn’t there, of course, so I don’t know.

But it’s fact that there is not one surviving example from before December of 1966 in which a single piece of music appears in more than one rough edit or demo of a song. Each one features only unique verses, choruses and bridges that do not appear in any other of those eleven tracks. The only possible exception is “YAMS” in the May “Heroes”, but that was a full five months before being split off into an entirely different track, so must be considered a special case.

Just about the only specific example given by one of the players on this subject is Vosse’s anecdote – said in ’68, mind – that Cabin Essence was once just the “Home on the Range” part – with the Appalachian feel – and “Iron Horse” was a separate track entirely. They almost certainly were, either as feels or when Van Dyke started working on the lyrics – but what must be more important is that all three pieces that make up the song were recorded on the same day, very quickly edited together (though not initially in the finished sequence), and not one of those three pieces ever turned up on a surviving acetate or tape as part of another song.

I did my conjecture piece above, so I’m going to avoid spelling out my conclusions on this, and finish up talking about the recorded chronology before things get sticky.

After this last rush of effort, it’s mainly vocals done over December. It can be safely noted without over-egging the pudding, I hope, that by now the Boys are back in LA in earnest, and there are some difficulties over the tracks, the lyrics and possibly Brian’s methods (cf. Mike and Al’s comments about recording on their backs, in pools and grunting like pigs). We do at least know one of the “Wonderful” backing sessions “went very badly” (but see more later) and afterwards Brian recorded “Surf’s Up” – missing tapes accepted, still likely the least completed of the major songs composed for SMiLE - for CBS alone.

And then there’s the December memo, which still makes a certain amount of sense in the context of the tracks I listed above, without any major re-recording needed for anything but Heroes. (Split “Great Shape/Barnyard” off to its own track and you need something to replace it in H&V.)

Oh, and Surf’s Up... which the boys don’t seem to touch at all after Brian’s plaintive reading for CBS (and there’s only one vocal session, missing but recorded, that seems to have happened at all – the day before. Perhaps that’s what Siegel remembers when he says a Surf’s Up session went badly on the day the boys recorded Wonderful... he’s not misremembering the song, he’s misremembering the day.)

Again, draw your own conclusions.

And, as we all know, for whatever reason the New Year kicks off with an H&V frenzy, the rest of the album apparently unimportant for the moment.

But something else happens in January that doesn’t seem to get the appropriate import: On the 27th, Brian commits the first piece of cannibalism on the pre-December SMiLE tracks – the first time ever that we know of that any piece of music, once recorded, was switched between songs, as opposed to simply being removed into its own number as in “Great Shape” or “YAMS”, and they started off together anyway – he  reworks “Bicycle Rider/Ribbon of Concrete” as a chorus for Heroes.
A little later “Great Shape’s” not entirely successful “tape explosion” gets deployed at the end of the “three score and five” verse.
On the tenth of February the second half of “Old Master Painter” is pillaged as a fade for the “Cantina version”.

This kind of stuff happens mainly with Heroes, but to a certain extent with Veggies (which absorbs “Do a Lot” and – kinda – the “Child is Father of the Man” refrain, at least for a day) and Wonderful.

And – to labour the point as fairly as possible – if there’s an album which is actually guilty of taking bits of the SMiLE songs, re-recording them in simpler versions and then trying a “throw the dart and see what sticks” approach to song structure... Well, it’s got “Smile” in the name, but it ain’t “SMiLE”.

Just to finish, I want to make it very clear that I know whatever conclusions I may have drawn or suggested in this enormous essay are my own, and are not facts – simply my own conjecture. This is why for the most part I’ve tried to base them very closely and firmly on actual data and accepted chronology, and avoiding the usual “Mike’s fault” or “Brian’s drugs’ fault” stuff. Those really aren’t arguments I’m trying to have with you guys.

But I do think that you put it all together like I have above and the idea of a completed SMiLE in late ’66-early ’67 isn’t quite as impossible as it now seems is fashionable to think.

That’s my reading, anyway.  I look forward to your refutation, questions, opinions or agreement of that notion (if anyone bothered to read the whole thing) – and to being corrected on my probably innumerable factual c*ck-ups! - but I’d really appreciate it if it was on the basis of data and reasonable supposition.  Of course, this is the ‘net after all, so we’ll see.

To sum up: SMiLE was one and a half backing tracks, several vocals, sweetening and sequencing away from completion in November 1966.

It began its quick decline into illness in mid-December and was functionally dead by 27 January.

Have at it! 

   Thanks a lot for this, Holy Bee. That's a really entertaining read. Maybe you would be kind enough to elaborate on your statement "To sum up: SMiLE was one and a half backing tracks, several vocals, sweetening and sequencing away from completion in November 1966." I know you must have been getting tired by the end of writing your essay, but a detailed description of exactly what you postulate was needed to be done to finish a December Smile album would go a long way toward supporting your underlying theme.
   I'd also be interested in seeing what you reckon a 32 minute Smile would look like as far as running times for each song. In this regard I noticed you excluded I'm In Great Shape from the track list so I'm confused about that.
   Again, I appreciate your thoughtful analysis of the facts and sharing your opinions.

I'd put the word "sequencing" in bold capital letters, because from a musical and functional perspective, that was a major issue dragging the project down. Looking at it, reading into it now for 20+ years, weighing all the possibilities, Brian seemed energized by the way Good Vibrations came together. After months of sitting on the shelf, after numerous attempts to find the right mix and the right edits to make the song explode, Brian can recall the moment he knew he had it right, when the editing, sequencing, and mixing came together and the single we know and love was playing through the speakers the way he wanted it.

It can be forgotten how much effort went into getting there, and it was done for a single lasting around 3 and a half minutes. Literally months went into that one single, now try to repeat that working method for an album with deadlines to meet.

The technology wasn't there, either. To edit that way is commonplace in 2012 with digital, a kid can do it in a bedroom with Garage Band and have more flexibility and control over edits than Brian did in the better studios in LA in 1966. The technology simply wasn't there. No one's fault, but being an innovator can only go so far if the tools haven't been invented to make your vision a reality.

I think Brian got so caught up in the creative bursts of recording incredible fragments that he "kicked the can down the road" as it were when it came to realizing what would be needed to glue it all together. You have short bursts of incredible, groundbreaking music that existed as fragments: You play them for people who are blown away, who have never heard music like this, and it's a massive ego boost. So you keep doing it, and recording more while the muse is there.

If the notion of finally putting all this together would have crept in as a reality check during some of these creative bursts in Fall 1966, I think it would have affected that creativity. Whereas leaving the functionality and reality of the editing tasks ahead for the future allowed more recording, but there may have been the dark cloud hanging over the entire time of "How will all of this actually work?".

I'd say that notion doomed Heroes as the follow-up to GV, because the individual parts of Heroes may have been equal if not better than the whole finished product. And Good Vibrations after months of tinkering was the opposite...the finished product was stunning, the parts not as much when removed from the sequence.

Sequencing - Technology, I'd say those are the key elements from the musical side.

Brian's genius really wasn't made for his time. :hat

Good analysis.

I have to say I'm still not on board with Vegetables and Wind Chimes as being part of The Elements. For one, I don't quite agree with your assessment that Vegetables sound like Brian's lyrics. They don't quite have the, shall we say, majesty of some of Van Dyke's other lyrics, but they do have the wordplay and it certainly makes its appearance at a time when a lot of the rich Wilson/Parks songs are coming out. Wind Chimes, on the other hand, could be Brian's but that doesn't seem to me to make it part of The Elements. I think the more likely possibility is that the reason Van Dyke says he didn't work on The Elements is because either a: they were supposed to be all instrumental pieces; or, b: Brian himself never worked on them, perhaps, beyond Fire.

Also, I'm not sure Brian and co. entirely threw the baby out with the bathwater when it came to Heroes in January. I'm referring here to your suggestion that they broke apart Heroes in pretty much two and then began to focus on one part (leaving, say, I'm in Great Shape and Barnyard as their own tracks or something along those lines). If you listen to those January tracks, you'll notice that Brian is still referring to the recorded sections as "Parts" and that a lot of the parts he was recording in January fell under Part 2 or Part 3 (and even, to a lesser extent, Part 4!!). It is possible, then, that the Heroes/Shape/Barnyard set up that was recorded in October still existed for a while as Part 1. Cantina, How I Love My Girl, etc. were part of Part 2, and so on. OR: at this point, just the original Heroes backing was Part 1 - which is indeed a possibility. Listening to those January Heroes tracks in order makes Brian seem really lost, but at the same time, he is working with at the very least, some pretense to an organized structure. I realize, of course, that the placement of "I'm in Great Shape" as its own track on that memo also troubles this somewhat.

I should say, too, that that October recording of Heroes/Shape/Barnyard is really interesting because, there, he basically does the same thing as he did with Cabinessence and Do You Like Worms. With those, he recorded three sections that eventually came together to form a whole complete song. It seems like that is what he's doing with Heroes on that day and yet it still confounds everyone (perhaps including Brian) how it would turn into a whole song like Cabin or Worms.

Does this make sense?

EDIT: Actually at work right now so I couldn't consult the Smile liners but did check Andrew's site to see that, in fact, Great Shape was tracked on another day? In that case, maybe forget this. But I'll leave it up as food for thought.

I just want to say that the main thesis, and GuitarFool's qualification of same, both ring very true for me.

Hey guys, thanks for the responses! I was going slightly mad by the end of it (which turned out to be more like 4.30am than 3.30am - good thing I'm "between gigs" at the moment!). Re-reading it there are a few gaps, but I think it holds up okay.

@Guitarfool - funnily enough, as I was writing the last few paragraphs  I thought about "bolding" sequencing, but decided in the end not to for the following reasons - which may not be valid if I've misunderstood the technology of the time. (And I do remember Alan Boyd's comments in the TSS liner notes about how difficult it would have been in 1966/1972 for Brian and Carl to do what he and Mark did - so brilliantly IMHO - in 2011.)

Actually, if you don't mind - and hoping to avoid another 4am finish  ;D! - I'll go through your post "verse by verse":

"... Brian seemed energized by the way Good Vibrations came together. After months of sitting on the shelf, after numerous attempts to find the right mix and the right edits to make the song explode, Brian can recall the moment he knew he had it right, when the editing, sequencing, and mixing came together and the single we know and love was playing through the speakers the way he wanted it."

I've never been quite sure how useful the "SMiLE as an album-length GV" framing was for looking at the process and creation of SMiLE. I'll grant you he certainly had the opposite creative experience on "SMiLE" - a shrug rather than "Eureka" at the end of that initial phase - but I'm not sure how he could have had that moment of completion with major pieces of the whole (ie. Surf's Up) untracked and many vocals missing.

"It can be forgotten how much effort went into getting there, and it was done for a single lasting around 3 and a half minutes. Literally months went into that one single, now try to repeat that working method for an album with deadlines to meet."

In terms of the ambition of the piece, and its comprisal of many short musical sections, there is a definite similarity between SMiLE and GV, but it's a conceptual similarity, not a meaningfully practical one.

The SMiLE tracks - as assembled or demoed in 1966, as completed and released in 2004 and 2011 - are individually quite simply structured (with the important exception of H&V, as you note). Even DYLW, probably the most eclectic of the bunch, only variates from its formula for one section, going A-B-C-A-B-C-D-B-C. The experimentation is in the music, the lyrical themes, the instrumentation, not in the structure of the songs - whereas Good Vibrations, even in its released 3.5 minute form, is far less predictable in its construction.

What's more, we know not one SMiLE track - again, prior to December - had more than two or three tracking sessions (and one-plus-a-remake is the norm), and whatever held up the vocals seems likely to be as much the vocalists as their arranger/conductor (let's remember Brian just went ahead and wiped vocals as he liked on Pet Sounds, so something larger was at work). The backing sections tended to be assembled by Brian and Chuck into something very like a final sequence very soon after recording. How many months and test edits did it take him to even decide what bits to include in GV, let alone their sequence? We're talking two different animals here.

So we come back to the idea of SMiLE as a 40-minute version of Good Vibrations. It's very possible that organizing those 11 songs I outlined as being ready for dubbing in December into a satisfying two-sides of vinyl was more difficult than Brian had anticipated, but let's remember that when we say "sequencing" all the hard evidence suggests that is all we mean.  There's no sign of repeated sections or swapping bits around until the Heroes madness of January-February. These are all, at heart and in practice, songs, and Brian left us rough assemblies and guides to most of them at the time (next essay: "SMiLE - Farther Down the Path (Not Such) a Mystery?). Whatever Carl might have said later about "just pieces", everything we have from 1966 suggests Brian knew exactly where they would go within their individual songs. Frank Holmes was given lyric sheets for songs, even if some of them weren't used or went unrecorded. He wasn't given 30 scraps of paper with orphaned choruses and repeating refrains written on them.

Finally: in 1966, pop and rock albums - even the great ones - were sequenced after the songs were finished, so the order with most satisfying variation and dynamics could be tried out and identified. Almost no one in the mid-sixties - not the Beatles, not Brian with Pet Sounds, not the Stones - knew concretely where one track would sit in relation to every other until they could actually sit and listen to the completed tracks in different sequences, just as we do with our fanmixes. Brian was ahead of his time, yes, but again I've yet to see one real indication that this wasn't likely to be his approach with SMiLE, just as it had been with all his most successful records in the past. What is a fact is that,  if recording and mixing aren't ever completed and at least one major song's tracking abandoned (see my comments in the original post on "Surf's Up") just a session or two from completion, it wouldn't even be possible to start sequencing in the usual - and most plausible - sixties/seventies manner.


"The technology wasn't there, either. To edit that way is commonplace in 2012 with digital, a kid can do it in a bedroom with Garage Band and have more flexibility and control over edits than Brian did in the better studios in LA in 1966. The technology simply wasn't there. No one's fault, but being an innovator can only go so far if the tools haven't been invented to make your vision a reality."

See, and this is where my musical ignorance might be setting me up for a fall (breaks and back to message board obscurity), but surely many songs in the sixties were recorded in two sections (I can think of several singles with intros, for instance, recorded seperately from the main song and spliced together later)? The difference between this and three sections - almost always taped on the same day - is only one of degree, and a pretty small one. What's more, we actually have rough mixes and dubbed acetates made by Brian at the time in which the pieces are spliced together into a pretty complete (if unpolished) form.

I think part of the problem with Alan's statement I paraphrased above, and this general line of thought, is it's a bit like the Christian analogy meant to disprove evolution - that putting the pieces of a watch in a jar and shaking it won't give you a watch, just as taking all the pieces of an eye and throwing them together without a grand design won't give you an eye. Which, sure, is true - but it also has both things essentially backwards.

If what Alan's is saying is that putting SMiLE 2011 together in 1966 would have been impossible without today's technology (as he suggests, to get the tracks together required "a piece from one real, then onto that acetate, then backing vocals from tape #45006, etc"), then I'm sure he's right.

But that's because they were working to a template created by Brian and Darian using digital technologies; because master tapes have been lost or stolen; because some vocals only survive on acetates. We know Brian could put individual songs together from those sections in 1966, because he did it. And what I'm trying to argue is that what all the evidence tells us this record would have been is 11 or 12 amazing songs, but individual songs none-the-less. And we know very well that given his druthers, Brian Wilson could do that - in as few ("Surfer Girl") or as many ("Good Vibrations") sections as he liked.

"If the notion of finally putting all this together would have crept in as a reality check during some of these creative bursts in Fall 1966, I think it would have affected that creativity. Whereas leaving the functionality and reality of the editing tasks ahead for the future allowed more recording, but there may have been the dark cloud hanging over the entire time of "How will all of this actually work?"."

See my earlier comments on this, but yes, some doubt about the overall effect of these songs grouped together probably did creep in at this time. We can leave speculation on the causes of this for other threads!

"I'd say that notion doomed Heroes as the follow-up to GV, because the individual parts of Heroes may have been equal if not better than the whole finished product. And Good Vibrations after months of tinkering was the opposite...the finished product was stunning, the parts not as much when removed from the sequence."

Here, I'm happy to say, we thoroughly agree. We do have a pretty concrete structure established for pre-December Heroes, and though each part as I said is fun and funny, I've put that version together - and though obviously incomplete, even with elaborate dubbing and added transistions it's hard to see it having much luck on dance floors. Brian was and is a consummate artist - he was also, we know, commercially competitive. I think that the decision to split "Great Shape" to its own track on the Capitol memo is probably more important to SMiLE's collapse than we've imagined.

Thanks again guitar_fool for your very interesting post - hope I haven't missed too many of your points. I'm a little tired this morning!  :)

Rockandroll and krabklaw, will answer your posts in a while. It might be nap time shortly.

Good to see you back HB

Thanks IHA! I'd love to hear your thoughts - positive or negative - on my massive screed when you have the time!

Naptime didn't work, so let's get back to it.

@Krabklaw -

You're right there, I could have been clearer about what I meant by "an 11-track album", and the use of December was a bit of an unintentional misdirect because of the Capitol memo with 12 songs. I can't be 100% accurate on the track times because we don't have a rough cut for "Heroes" at that stage and "Surf's Up" was never completed, but here's what was extant at the time (using Brian rough edits where indicated) and their respective lengths, in no particular order:

Do You Like Worms (approx 3.30-3.55 depending on the edit)*
Heroes and Villians (3.00-3.10)
Fire/Workshop (3.15-3.30, depending on how much of "Workshop" one uses)
Wonderful (1.58)*
Wind Chimes (2.31)*
Child is Father of the Man (2.55)*
Cabin Essence (3.31)*
Prayer (unlisted) (1.05)*
Vega-Tables (demo) (1.30)*
Surf's Up (3.55)
Good Vibrations (3.35)*
The Old Master Painter (1.55)

Which, if my sometimes erratic maths haven't failed me, and taking the longer estimates when tracks are in doubt, is an almost perfect 33.30 (I've added Prayer to my original calculations, hence the extra minute or so). The reason for no "Great Shape" is that in my thesis - and this has really been clarified in my conversation with Guitarfool - the breaking up of Heroes (which included it up until the memo, and it's a pretty safe assumption - though still an assumption - to speculate that it was by then those sections had been removed from the song) is kind of the point for me at which the story of SMiLE turns.

I've actually put together something very close to this - although cheating by including Dada and with some Jan sections to flesh out "Heroes" and "Great Shape" as separate tracks ("two part Heroes and Villains"?) - and it can really work as an exception pop album. Though, of course, that's just IMHO.

Rockandroll, you're next!

Hey Rockandroll -

When discussing "The Elements", the importance of the discoveries of the last ten years, and the sudden legitimacy of SMiLE as exemplified by BWPS and TSS, can't be overstated. Neither can the idea of "received wisdom".

When I first met the great love of my life (this album, of course) in the mid-nineties, we didn't have IIGS tracking takes. We didn't have "Cornucopia". Some of us still thought "Barnshine" was "Barnyard". The Prokopy notes, for which I have nothing but love and respect, ruled supreme. Priore's theories, as to a certain extent they still do, also dominated the discourse. And part of that approach was to USE AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE.

This is one of the reasons I tried at the beginning of my essay to cogently and objectively rule out "Holidays" and "Look" from the likely late '66 listing. They're simply beautiful pieces of work, but for various real reasons - not least the very finite limitations of vinyl - it's unlikely they could or would have been included. Indeed, see the post above to see how a comparatively spare SMiLE to the one we know today already approaches the limits of the conventional length for a sixties pop LP.

"The Elements" was, for a long time, kind of a clearing house for these kinds of pieces, so to an extent it was useful to think of it as a collection of instrumental pieces. You can have "Holidays" as Air, or Water. Or "Look" as Air. Or "Da Da" as Water - or, wait, what about those "bird noises" on Part 3? Maybe it's Air! Not much of this is based on actual evidence, but depending on personal preference, the incompleteness of "The Elements" has been a crucial tool in allowing us to get as many of our favourite pieces of unfinished music onto the tracklisting.

As a result, I think, of wanting to believe SMiLE was as close to finished in '67 as we could (it's better for the myth; or at least it was until a wonderful 50-minute SMiLE using almost everything except "He Gives Speeches" arrived in 2004 and mindsets had to be quickly changed) we may have ironically ended up thinking of it as further away. The point of my essay was to establish that it's quite possible that in the space of two months, an entire album's worth of songs were tracked by Brian, and it simply awaited vocals before sequencing could begin. What can be intuited from that, in terms of the reasons for its sudden collapse, I leave to the reader.

Of course, it would have had to be a very different beast from TSS or BWPS - but is that really such a problem? In fact, simply on the basis that it was only 2 sides, a '66-'67 incarnation would have to diverge by roughly a third, and the "three suites" idea would have to be inelegantly split in the middle. So for all the "what we've got is pretty much what they were striving for then" rhetoric of the last seven years, which I understand for political reasons, I'm not sure it makes much sense in context of the physical evidence.

But back to The Elements:

As I said, I was unconvinced for ages myself about lumping in Veggies or Chimes with that suite, because a lot of that received wisdom - and my own personal preference for using as much as possible in my mixes - urged against it. So, as I've been trying to do throughout, let's look at the facts.

The earliest references to "The Elements" I can source are in the booklet and the Fire session logs. (Though I'm sure I can remember seeing a contemporary press quote at some stage about it - can anyone remember or date this?)

In the booklet, the caption 'Vega-Tables' - which at this stage is almost certainly "Cornucopia", as this was probably recorded in October and there were no further VT sessions until April - is in quotation marks, and alongside it is a punctuatively unadorned The Elements, implying a larger framing entity as opposed to song title.

Supporting evidence - "Cornucopia" is only a minute or so long, like Fire more likely to be a part of something else than just a standalone. Frank Holmes himself has said "there was more than one element" in his illustration, implicitly confirming that unless we're including faces, postage stamps or taps as elements, vegetables growing in the earth is likely to be one of them. (Other options - a sun as "Fire" and "Surf's Up" as water, and we know how popular the latter theory has proved.)

But here it's possible to have your beet and eat it too. If, as rumoured, a big band argument ("We almost broke up after [Surf's Up] for good" - BW) occurred in December, and this was the time at which the project began to definitively change (see my initial essay), then two things can be conjectured. First, that bearing in mind we have a good idea of one prominent Boy's feelings about H&V's commerciality and lyrics, and we can pretty securely assume from the memo that it was around then that the originally planned Heroes began to be chopped up into parts; the idea of a "Heroes" single, at least in that initial form, was falling out of favour. Whether or not it was Brian's favour, or Mike's, or Al, Carl, Diane Rovell or LBJ's frankly doesn't matter here.

Secondly, we can assume that since they didn't "break up for good", it was still bad enough for substantive changes to be made to the band's approach to SMiLE after it - something that we can see from the sessionography. We know they did go back to "Heroes", with a vengeance, in January, of course, but if there's one other song in that initial 11 with a) reasonably accessible lyrics from a conventional point of view and b) the boys actually sound like they enjoyed singing, it's the Vega-Tables "demo" ("Chug-a-lug" redux?). Maybe it was here, as the emergency tracklisting memo was drawn up for Capitol, that Vega-Tables was first considered as a replacement single, and Heroes was lined up for serious revision.

So, part of Elements 'till at least November, and then considered a separate track, potentially for single purposes if Heroes didn't work out (which was tried, as we know, the following April) - people know what vegetables are, right? Unlike "sunnydown snuff" or "dove-nested tours the hour" - after December. This seems to me to comfortably fit in with all the established data, and clarify a few mysteries into the bargain.

*******

So, some more specific responses to your comments, with all that said.


"For one, I don't quite agree with your assessment that Vegetables sound like Brian's lyrics... Wind Chimes, on the other hand, could be Brian's but that doesn't seem to me to make it part of The Elements."

On the former topic, you might be quite right. I think they definitely worked on them together, I'd just say there was more Brian in there than, say, "Wonderful" or "Cabin Essence". Fair call on "Wind Chimes", about which I'm just making a massive grab because...

"I think the more likely possibility is that the reason Van Dyke says he didn't work on The Elements is because either a: they were supposed to be all instrumental pieces; or, b: Brian himself never worked on them, perhaps, beyond Fire."

... I don't think "The Element" was all that concrete an entity - more a general thematic idea like "humour album", "teenage symphony" or "American gothic trip" - until Brian made a stab as I suggested at finishing up the tracking in November. In this context, "Wind Chimes" would fit as Air okay if, say "Veggies" was Earth and "Surf's Up" water. As I said above, in this sense we're looking at an "Elements" more much like what we got in 2004, though with different songs comprising it, than the instrumental suite postulated in fan circles for years (helped I'll admit by some comments, though often vague, made by Brian himself).

Less subjectively, I think there is real evidence (given above) that Vega-Tables was at some point a part of The Elements, which means it simply wasn't (at least entirely) an instrumental suite. It also means, if we identify Van's presence in the lyrics, he had some involvement in Elements at least. And if Frank Holmes was in fact hinting at "Surf's Up" as water, here we have a major VDP lyric as part of the overall Elements concept. Maybe he didn't know how Brian was thinking about this for some reason, or it simply didn't matter. But if a) there's more evidence for an "Elements" comprised of individual tracks, some with lyrics, than for a four or five minute instrumental suite (and I hope I have demonstrated just that) and b) Van Dyke genuinely didn't think he was working on it, but rather on individual and fully crafted songs, then we're left with the surprising conclusion that if any part of BWPS is actually the most revealing of the original concept, it might be the apparently patchwork "Elemental Movement" that concludes it.

******

One more thing before we move on to Heroes.

I am aware we're still left, regarding all of the above, with the Big Stumbling Block: The Capitol Memo, with "Vega-Tables" and "The Elements" individually listed. There's an easy out, frankly - you call MOLC "The Elements: Fire", along the lines it was logged at the time, and then follow with the rest of the tracks under their own titles, but identifiable to any halfway perceptive listener as representative as one of the other three elemental forces ("Vega-Tables", "Wind", "Surf").

But if that still rankles, there's an even more general argument, and again it's pretty much the one I'm increasingly realizing I'm making: that the Capitol Memo was an emergency measure caused by increasing pressure and tensions, of various kinds, to establish and delineate potential "hits", if not so much the album as a whole (Brian's "grand finale" of OMP/YAMS/Barnshine still gets its own listing, just), which can explain some of its awkwardness.

******

"Also, I'm not sure Brian and co. entirely threw the baby out with the bathwater when it came to Heroes in January. I'm referring here to your suggestion that they broke apart Heroes in pretty much two and then began to focus on one part (leaving, say, I'm in Great Shape and Barnyard as their own tracks or something along those lines). If you listen to those January tracks, you'll notice that Brian is still referring to the recorded sections as "Parts" and that a lot of the parts he was recording in January fell under Part 2 or Part 3 (and even, to a lesser extent, Part 4!!). It is possible, then, that the Heroes/Shape/Barnyard set up that was recorded in October still existed for a while as Part 1. Cantina, How I Love My Girl, etc. were part of Part 2, and so on. OR: at this point, just the original Heroes backing was Part 1 - which is indeed a possibility. Listening to those January Heroes tracks in order makes Brian seem really lost, but at the same time, he is working with at the very least, some pretense to an organized structure. I realize, of course, that the placement of "I'm in Great Shape" as its own track on that memo also troubles this somewhat."

As I said initially, it's only at the end of January that the cannibalism starts, so it's a matter of the other songs being pillaged from rather than the nomenclature that's important (once OMP loses half its length and big ending to give the "Cantina version" its fade, what's really left?). I agree with everything else you've said - my personal view is that the "Cantina" section is a direct replacement for "IIGS", and we know various fades were tried out before settling on the re-recorded "Barnshine".

But! and I'm thrilled you inspired me to look this up before I got snapped by somebody else, but I did blearily misread the sessionography last night, and the repurposed "Bicycle Rider" theme wasn't recorded until three weeks after the date I gave above - which means the inclusion of "Barnshine" in "Cantina" is now the first concrete piece of shuffling on record, on 10th February.

It also means I was out by two weeks, and it's early Feb instead of late Jan the album really collapsed inwards into the blackhole of H&V and the insatiable craving for "hits", but I'm still not going to change the title of the thread as without the controversy I wasn't really expecting anyone to slog through it!

Thanks again Rockandroll for your thought-provoking comments and clarifications.  :)

An excellent read, very informing and interesting. Out of curiosity, do you use your own custom mix based on a theory of what you think it would've looked like had it been released in 66/67?

Hi BD, thanks for the kind words. If you haven't read the rest of the thread, there's some more interesting stuff in there as the implications of the post are explored, largely thanks to the comments and clarifications of Guitarfool and others.

Short answer is no, not really. Like most SMiLE fans, I've made numerous mixes over the years, depending on my changing tastes and whatever new material/info came to light. Of course, the problem with putting together SMiLE - outside of the various gaps in info - is the battle between historical accuracy and listenability.

On my current mix, for instance, I've re-edited from TSS a full 3-minute CIFOTM from the TSS version, which may be historically accurate - ie. structured according to Brian's original rough edit - but also features the same wordless verse twice and four very similar choruses, so "listenability" lost out on that one. (That said, I could listen to CIFOTM on repeat all day, so it doesn't bother me.) Conversely, I've used a rejigged version of Alan Boyd's excellent TSS Vega-Tables (omitting the first "Sleep a Lot", which has always jarred to me used as a chorus) instead of the '66 version, just because, well, it sounds much nicer and more varied.

I'd qualify my current mix - finding replacement takes for which (to get rid of TSS crossfades etc) actually led me back to C-man's sessionography and provoked all this - as a fairly accurate Jan '67 version if Brian had been able to bring all of the songs listed in my original post to completion (with Veggies miraculously transported three months back in time!), using new Jan sections to fill out Heroes and Great Shape (so it's slightly amended to fit in with the printed cover slicks).

I'd like to avoid this thread becoming a comparison of mixes, if possible, but I'd be happy to PM you a breakdown/link if you'd like!

This feels right to me. I think I posted last year that something clearly changes in the sessions as 67 dawns. Brian stops making an album and starts fixating on individual tracks. And as he does that, the re-recording and shuffling problems become greater. And he begins to see that H&V and Veggies and Dada -- none of them are surefire follow ups to Good Vibes. At which point he's screwed, right? Because what did he spend the last six or seven months doing, then?

It's also clear that Brian had a real album in mind around November. We'll never know precisely how it would go together, but it would have little duplication and be discrete tracks, as you say. If the vocal sessions had gone more smoothly, or if he had felt more comfortable in the material, the album could well have been out by early '67.

Hey Wirestone, glad you agree. I didn't start writing last night to prove any thesis at all, really  - I just thought something quite distinct was emerging from the forty five-year gloom when I did a close reading of the session dates - but as a result I feel I've leapt bodily to some interesting conclusions, particularly regarding the nature of December's crisis and the reasons for/meaning of the Capitol memo. If "The Elements" has been sectioned off to establish "Veggies" as a separate entity for potential (re-recorded) single release, and the same thing with a more coherent H&V - hence breaking off "Great Shape" - this goes some way to explaining why these two tracks have been such a mystery for so long.

The most important thing I hope I've done is lend some credence to the conclusion suggested by the data - that, regardless of its quality or how close it would have been to what eventually emerged, there WAS enough discrete and structured material for an album up till November, which includes all of the major songs and isn't a world apart from the December memo.

And that it's this album (though as you say, there's no way of knowing what the exact sequence might have been) that Brian spent October particularly furiously, and with great artistic focus, recording.

EDIT: Sorry, Wirestone, one more thing. When you say "Because what did he spend the last six or seven months doing, then", that's another of the big SMiLE misdirects I think.

If, "Wonderful" aside, the SMiLE sessions proper started in October (Good Vibrations, released on the tenth of that month, was the one that occupied six or seven months, and that turned out okay) then actually he'd only been going for three months when January dawned, and over the course of six weeks of them he'd produced an entire record's worth of backing tracks. Still quite a long recording period by '66 standards, but not all that crazy, especially compared to GV.

And yet, weirdly, if we accept that at that stage he was essentially finished with the musicians, and had pretty much a record's worth of discrete songs tracked, then it's at the moment that it's time to record the vocals that things go mysteriously and (not quite permanently, but for long enough) awry.

I blame the drugs, frankly. The ones that apparently didn't arrive until mid-November.

EDIT AGAIN: Oh, I said I wasn't going to do this!

Your essay is going to inspire numerous fan mixes of Smile. Cheers.

It's funny that if Brian decided that, for example, the messy late 1966 version of Wind Chimes was "finished", and "Holidays" wasn't fit for inclusion, we would have been treated to an album inferior to what he ultimately "finished" in 2004. It would have had a great amount of historic value, though.

Hey Grave Robber, really interesting thought!

I was just thinking that while putting my new mix together and listening to my scrupulously accurate (as much as it can be) '66 mix - I really like its charm and simplicity (that October version of Heroes really is nuts as a lead single - I have some sympathy for the Boys on that one), and it's often genuinely weird and experimental in ways that the more carefully developed TSS isn't really... But there's so much missing, in retrospect, that the longer version and the '67 material restores.

Still, who knows what he would have done with fully produced vocal tracks - Denny singing Cabin Essence, as was intended, a fully developed CIFOTM - and studio sweetening of that version of the album. We might have been a lot less bothered by Holiday's exclusion!

EDIT: Just for clarity, of course, it should be "*my approximation of* that October version of Heroes", of course.

Also, for all the "what would it had done to Brian if it tanked" - which is fair enough - looked at it from this perspective it was actually only a) two or three months of work if it had come out in January, half what it took for one single (GV) and b) look what happened in this timeline. If it wasn't for his joyous resurgence this century (I'm just listening to the TLOS "demoes" as I write this, which I love without reservation), it's hard to imagine a "darker timeline" than the one we got.

I agree that a reading of the sessions has always shown Brian was way down the road on having the album done. Vosse felt the same.

I can't get on board with the sequencing or obsessive recording being a problem. Brian's method was to go to the studio already knowing what he wanted and what the sequencing was. He was not recording and searching/hoping for a sequence, he knew the sequence before he got to the studio and made notes and called out the sequences at the studio. The evidence for it is all over the docu and recordings. To my reading he was not futzing with the album cuts much, so they were not the hang up. He was futzing with the expected single as he had with GV but not in a confused and obsessive way but in a progressive and calculated improving/revising way like GV. To me, the problem was it took time and during that time he fell out of love with an album that was mostly done.

Hi Cam, as regards falling out of love with SMiLE while revising "Heroes", what do you think of my notion that the return of the Boys meant some hard thinking, not just about Van's lyrics or the more esoteric backings, but specifically "hit potential" of various tracks - particularly "Heroes"?

As Rockandroll and I discussed above, that original(ish) Oct version of H&V, with the backing tapes and the demo as a guide, would really have been a bizarre first single. It's certainly true that the backing track for Heroes - which Brian had been so excited over on Nov 4 with Humble Harv, and was projected as the single - doesn't seem to have been subject to any vocal attempts at all, or indeed a rough assembly, unlike almost all the other key tracks.

I ask this because we know of various fall-outs with the group - over CE and SU at least, and possibly Wonderful - and we've heard the "scripted comments" of Mike Love about H&V. Is it possible the catalyst for the collapse was not Brian's inability to resolve and sequence, but conversely that the active intervention of the Boys (probably in early-mid December) led to breaking up H&V (and therefore the creation of "Great Shape") and plucking Vega-Tables from "The Elements" as a potential single, etc... and that led to the fragmenting of Brian's substantially developed plans for the record?

In which case, as I suggest above, it could mean that by all the "futzing about" in January trying to perfect a single, the conception of the overall record had already been fatally wounded by the band's (understandable) commercial considerations?

Thank you for the kind reply. And if you do get the time I'd love a breakdown of sorts. I have already read a lot of theories about a 66/67 authentic mix and they're all very interesting.

It could be. Brian was very commercial minded but I tend to think it is just coincidence in the timing with the Boys returning. I tend to think it was more about the concurrent rise of GV and the attention they were getting over GV and PS. Brian does not seem to be concerned about any issues the Boys may have had and they did everything that they supposedly had issues with so it's hard to see how it could have been a stumbling block.

I personally think it had little or nothing to do with mental illness or emotional issues either, those became stumbling blocks years  later. I tend to think SMiLE was all on Brian and it was just what Brian said it was back at the time: lyrics too arty for him, music too elaborate and old fashioned, not suiting vocals the way he wanted, all of HIS problems with the music and lyrics itself. Which was reflected in the issues between Brian and Van Dyke.

"If there's not any more cooperation, I'm splitting after dinner. I mean it."


Then why are were there missing vocals on songs that were ready for vocals, like Surf's Up, Cabinessence, Do You Like Worms, etc.


You forgot to add, "And that's why the tapes have been destroyed."

Aren't some of the vocals missing simply because the backing tracks had not been finished and/or edited together? Weren't lead vocals among the last things that Brian would add to a track before final mixing?

I don't think anything being discussed on this thread is inconsistent with the idea that Brian got caught up in doing a very experimental album and then began to doubt that work's commercial appeal. Realizing time is slipping away, he turns his attention to making "Heroes..." a worthy follow-up single to "Good Vibrations". Now, when "Heroes..." was first being worked on, "Good Vibrations" wasn't yet the biggest smash the band had released. As the sales of GV got bigger, it's possible that Brian began thinking that the follow-up needed to be even more special than his original vision for it. All the while, he's wondering if anything he's doing with SMiLE will match GV in commerciality. Eventually, he falls out of love with the SMiLE sessions or, maybe in his mind at the time, he simply moves on and the Beach Boys continue.

Well, leads were recorded for Wind Chimes and Wonderful by this time, so he was at least quite ready to be recording lead vocals as demonstrated by the fact that he had already done so.


Well, then, in that case let me be the first to oppose that - or oppose that as the overriding reason why the album got scrapped. Of course, if we were to believe that that's the case, then it would therefore follow that he must have thought that Smiley Smile would have had much more of a "commercial appeal" by drawing on many of the same songs but making them weirder.

Replying generally but more specific to Holy Bee and Cam: I wouldn't be too hasty in downplaying the sequencing and editing issues related to the available technology and accepted studio working methods of that era. I've laid it out in the past with specific examples, and in a more condensed way above, but ultimately the proof of the impact this lack of available resources and technology had on completing certain key elements of the project can be found in both the tapes and in the words of the participants.

Flash back to the BWPS project, and find several interviews where Brian himself made specific mention of the way Darian with his laptop and common digital sequencing and editing software was able to "audition" the order of these fragments for Brian so he'd hear them almost instantly, in such a way that was simply not possible in 1966-67. What Darian did with Brian in 2003-4 and legions of fanmixers and cut-and-paste artists are doing in 2012 is creating a demo of sorts that has musical and rhythmic flow, where the parts can be copied and pasted to infinity, patched together, and given automatic auditions leading to decisions of what works in sequence and what does not.

Imagine that the power in an off-the-rack Mac laptop we could all own today equals if not surpasses the editing and automated mixing capabilities of "groundbreaking" systems like the SSL flying-fader automated mixers of the early 80's which cost several hundred thousand dollars, and far surpasses the editing capabilities of anything you could do with a razor blade and tape.

A few examples of this which we can hear on the box set and boots:

Which songs do we have "test edits" dating from 66-67? If you hear them, they're sloppy, the levels vary wildly, and you can tell it was a quick job done to audition how the parts would flow together.

Every time Brian wanted to do this, they'd make a safety copy of whatever reference mix they were using, razor blade that, then do the same copy-audition-cut process for the other fragments. You'd then tape them together, more carefully for anything "final", more haphazard for the "test mix" purposes of hearing them together.

Now what if he cut one fragment at Gold Star, and one at Western...and the EQ or levels between the fragments was way off and didn't blend at all. This was a concern with Good Vibrations, one major reason why the editing and mixing there was such a chore and why certain EQ decisions and variations between fragments still bother listeners with trained ears from a purely technical side. Solution?

Once you mixed down in '66, it was set in stone. If you wanted to replicate the mix, you'd either mark the knobs with grease pencil (which would be wiped off eventually) or made detailed notes on the settings. If you made live changes with faders or level settings, mixing on the fly, that mix was gone forever after it was done live. You couldn't replicate it. Automated mixing brought the ability to store, save, and recall such things...digital editing and recording gives anyone with Garage Band the ability to recall those elements as part of the saved files which comprise the song.

So take the two songs where Brian did the most test edits, at least ones we know or can hear: Heroes And Villains, and Vegetables. Is it a coincidence these were the songs paid the most attention in January, February, and April '67? Those are also the two that were mentioned at the time as the "singles" to be released from Smile.

Brian was not satisfied for months on end with Good Vibrations, it cycled through several sequences, edits, and combinations of sections before he snapped his fingers in the studio and said "That's IT!".

The fact that not only were those the songs which needed the most work editing, the songs with the most fragments and small sections recorded and waiting to be sequenced into a viable whole, and the songs which were specifically mentioned as singles, but they were also the most obvious songs in need of major work as December 1966 turned into 1967, in order to "finish" them. Heroes got a great single mix by Chuck Britz, part of the mysterious 2-sided debated single, but ultimately as he had done the previous year with Good Vibrations, Brian was not satisfied with something about it and scrapped it.

I'd say the ability to audition and edit these sequences on the fly as Darian was able to do with Brian in 2003-4 is one technology-related issue that may have played a larger role in the saga than some are crediting. When he had to book hours of studio time to do what Darian could do in his living room, it had to slow up if not impede the process. Considering too that Brian in 1966-67 had dozens of reels of tape with these fragments.

I really think SMILEY SMILE is just a quickie, like PARTY; an effort to get something in the record bins because of label pressure. In effect, Brian takes the most commercial aspects of the SMiLE material (the fun, pretty stuff) and tries to make a quick "happy" album that fits in with the 1967 emphasis on psychedelic weirdness. Now, I'll admit that "Fall Breaks..." doesn't fit with the theory of just keeping the fun, pretty stuff, but it's notable that there is no "Worms", "Cabin Essence" or "Surf's Up"; the tracks emphasize the comic and sweet, nothing too heavy or profound.

The subsequent releases, WILD HONEY and FRIENDS, regain some of what might have been seen as commercial appeal, but Brian has lost interest in producing a slick product and is apparently content (?) with a "less-is-more" approach.

But in fact, it would have been even quicker to put already finished versions of Wonderful, Wind Chimes and even do a rush edit on Vegetables than it would have been to entirely re-record them, as he did. He also could have included Our Prayer at that point and even choose one from Look, Holidays, or Fire as an instrumental. Add Good Vibrations and you've already got 6 songs ready to go. Instead, he chooses to use virtually nothing from what he recorded over the previous months save for Good Vibrations and a bit of Vegetables, record almost from scratch a new album despite tons of material available, and yet at the same time seven out of ten songs (minus GV) that are recorded had either minor to major roles during the Smile period. It seems to me that this is not a case of someone who a: is motivated prominently by the desire to get a record out quickly and b: has been dissatisfied with the Smile-era music.

I would add too that Smile certainly fit more in with 1967 "popular" weirdness than Smiley Smile. Smile had much more in common with, say, Sgt. Pepper than Smiley did.

I'm not saying that Brian was making a rational decision by recording and releasing SMILEY SMILE. I agree that it was not as commercial as SMiLE nor as in tune with the times as what he had been working on for months. But I think Brian was overwhelmed/disturbed by what SMiLE had become and didn't really want to have anything to do with those tapes. "Good Vibrations" was already released, "Heroes & Villains" barely resembled what it had been during its initial conception and the SMiLE portions of "Vegetables" were recorded so late that I'm not even sure if Brian thought of those sessions as relating to the SMiLE album. Perhaps everything else was done from scratch so he wouldn't have to revisit the SMiLE tapes...or, more simply, there were too many tapes to audition and it was quicker just to re-cut everything at home.

The most logical aspect to this is that by recording anew, the album would not just be a compromised version of SMiLE, which is definitely what it would have seemed like if the SMiLE tracks had been used. The frustratingly illogical aspect is that the damn thing was titled "SMILEY SMILE" which made everyone think it was SMiLE after all!

I maintain that Brian, rightly or wrongly, saw SMILEY SMILE as a quick, fun album that eliminated the darker, heavier (perhaps overly elaborate) aspects of SMiLE which he perceived as being inappropriate for the Beach Boys.

Yeah, I agree with a lot of that though I'm not entirely sure he didn't want to have anything to do with the Smile tapes. He did after all, use part of Vegetables (though, one could say, it was recorded so near the end of the so-called Smile era that he didn't make the association, though, if that's the case, why re-record so much of it?). He didn't seem to have so much of a problem with the songs themselves so I'm not sure what it was about the recordings that bothered him so. My take on it is what I wrote on another thread the other day:

I think that Brian had a difficult time responding to the pressure of making the next "BIG" album and it started to become a bigger pressure as deadlines were missed and there was a real need to put something out ASAP. His choices were either keep going in this direction, to hell with deadlines, pressure from record company to put something out soon; rush (by his standards) out a record he'd been pouring his heart and soul into for months and have it not entirely the way he likes it (which probably seemed like a waste of all that effort); or, just go on and do something else that would require less time, energy and importantly, personal grief. I think he made the final choice in Smiley Smile. Once that came out, with so many Smile songs, there wasn't really much of a point in going back to Smile even if he wanted to.

To me, him being faced with these possibilities makes more sense than he just stopped liking the music that he seemed to be loving and so proud of for months.

Right, I'm in agreement with that  :)

SMiLE became a behemoth and it was easier to move on to something else. One must remember that when living through that time period, the success of the band vs. the completion/release of one album could not possibly have seemed as final or irrevocable as we perceive it forty years later.

Gratified to see so many interesting comments on my return!

Roger:

"Aren't some of the vocals missing simply because the backing tracks had not been finished and/or edited together? Weren't lead vocals among the last things that Brian would add to a track before final mixing?"

Quite possibly. If there had been finished backing tracks, would they have been logged and have survived? (This, even as I write it, sounds like the world's stupidest question, but I still want to clarify!)

As it is, we do have backing/chorus vox for CE, CIFOTM, Wonderful, WC (these last two also with leads), DYLW and OMP. Fire may never have been intended for vocals, Vega-Tables has a lead and backing already, Good Vibrations is in the can. Which from that list of tracks in my first post leaves Surf's Up, which was never completed for any kind of dubbing, and H&V, which doesn't even seem to have got a cursory rough edit (though it seems likely there was once an acetate featuring one somewhere).

So 9 of the eleven tracks worked on in Oct-Nov have rough mixes/assemblies and backing vocals, except Surf's Up, which is just abandoned... and the original Heroes, which is not even touched by the Boys until the massive overhaul in January. Surely he wasn't too far away from starting to record some (non-Wilson) leads. So, final edits of the tracks aside, what stopped him?

Considering Brian had only been going since August on the project - and really only from October, when he was clear of GV and Dumb Angel became Smile - we're really only discussing six to eight weeks here. Most of that had been recording furiously; it's not like he'd been living with this particular ambition and subsequent pressure for 45 years back then. As of November, tracks are4 being rough mixed, and backing vocals recorded. And then they suddenly stop.

What is the evidence of the time (I'm assuming Cam may have been referring to the "Wild Honey"-era interview with Brian) to back up the idea that, after only a few joyous and focused weeks preparing the new record, Brian suddenly starts doubting all the almost complete songs he's got on the shelf and wanders off to focus on the newly dismembered Heroes. Or rather - if so, why?

I don't want to go down the path of doubting the veracity of Brian's press statements, in 1968 or 2012 - this is the man himself, after all - but a lot of what was said by various players contradicts other eyewitnesses and even their own previous testimony (especially Brian, frankly). This is the problem, of course, with anecdotal evidence. The dates and recordings that survive tend to suggest that a) the album was more manageable in scope and construction than was our understanding for years and b) through November there is every indication Brian is trying to get the backing tracks together for mixing and lead vocals.

Which seems to just end in December and restart as a whole new thing in January. At the Surf's Up, YAMS and Fire sessions (2-49 Nov) Brian sounds just as energetic, focused and ambitious for the tracks as on the Wind Chimes recording of three months previous - more so, if anything. It's also interesting to note that though the Boys return mid-November, there's very little done with them until mid-December (only Denny's YAMS lead) - and in fact that first group Vocal session is the legendary "Wonderful" (and later that evening "Surf's Up") one that went very badly. (There are very few after that, although they do go in to redub the Worms backing vox.) So almost all of the Boys' vocal contributions were recorded in the initial rush of enthusiasm in October.

By mid-December they - or Brian - weren't having any of it.

That can either be read as a dwindling enthusiasm on Brian's part for the album, or alternately as support for VDP's (one of the saga's few consistent, not to say reliable, witnesses) forty year assertion that "Mike Love delayed the release of Smile by 40 years purely out of a mislaid jealousy". For me, the Brian we hear on the sessions in mid-to-late Nov, just weeks before those isolated and fractious vocal sessions, sounds - to me at least - very little like a man about to junk a record because he doesn't know how it's going to go together or if it'll be very good.

EDIT: Sorry, having re-read the above I make it sound like it's either one or the other options as to why SMiLE stalled. I don't believe that, and obviously there were many factors in play.

I know this doesn't really advance the conversation (which I find extremely enlightening), but I was wondering if anybody has made a mix of "Heroes And Villains" which includes both "I'm In Great Shape" and "Barnyard", especially you Holy Bee, since you were discussing it.

I tried to make one myself, with the first verse from the "Early Version Outtake Sections" track up to the fluttertone thing, followed by "I'm In Great Shape", then what is known on the SMiLE box-set as "Intro (Early Version) circa 12/66", which is called out as "part 3" on that track leading me to believe, it was indeed, part 3. And then lastly, "Barnyard". But my editing skills are not great, and I couldn't get anything reasonable out of it.

Hope to hear from one of ya!

Hey James, funnily enough that's precisely what I was working on today. It's... well, you can say - though clearly none of us are Brian, or know what he was planning - one can see why someone felt they needed some changes before it was the lead single.

We know that Brian got some pressure from at least one Beach Boy over lyrics.  Vosse: "But at that time, Mike and Brian were a little on the outs because Van Dyke was doing all the lyrics - and Mike didn't really think that was where it was at..."  Yes, Mike sang 'over and over', yes the boys sang the parts (well...they sang what we have heard, who knows if there was stuff that they refused to sing and was never recorded?).  

And not many folks mention this, but I think there was also pressure from the Beach Boys over how to perform this material live.  Vosse again: "Then, the guys started getting up tight about the material.  They were worried about how they'd do it in person."  A valid argument.  How would they do the cantina version of Heroes (or whatever the 'great shape/barnyard' version would've been)?  How would they do Cabinessence?  How would they do any song that featured piano (let alone harpsichord) in 1966-67?  With a Farfisa?  A Rhodes?  Where are the guitar parts that Carl and Al would play?  

There may have been pressure concerning musical direction.  Vosse one more time: "Then, tension developed in the studio, because what it came down to was that Brian and Van Dyke had come up with music a little too complex for them, and which they began to resent.  A lot of the arguments that took place were between Brian and Mike Love.  And a lot of people would go off into corners together - the sure sign that a group is in trouble: where you have two over in this half, and two other there at the same time - huddling, and saying: hey, you know, this f*cking thing...There was a lot of that."  I'll also just remind everyone of Peter Reum's claim that there was some kind of big band meeting where things were discussed.  

So, this was a group...a family...that was having some issues.  A group in trouble.  And Brian was the guy in charge of this group.  Brian was the guy who was supporting his family.  I don't want to turn this into a 'we're his f*cking messengers' debate, but Brian was the song writer and the producer of the Beach Boys.  He was in charge.  What was he to do?  Well, here's what he did do.  He rearranges some of the Smile tunes so that the Beach Boys could play the parts.  No more banjo, no more elaborate string arrangements, no more piano or harpsichord.  The Baldwin sounds cool, and you can take that on the road.  He scraps 'over and over the crow cries uncover the cornfield' and 'columnated ruins domino', and instead sings about a little pad in Hawaii, and gets Mike to write some lyrics.  And, perhaps most importantly, he has the guys come into the studio (okay, Brian's house) to play on the record and goof around and act like friends again...you know...like a family.    

It looks like there is some discussion on what could have happened in December 1966 going into January 1967, and how there was a noticeable shift in direction and attitude which some have mentioned. LostArt has beat me to the punch in a way by referencing the Vosse comments, but what I was going to say is drinking from that same well:

One major issue to consider from nearly every angle except the technology-sequencing challenges would be, without a doubt, Murry Wilson.

Something specific appeared buried within the Vosse "Fusion" piece that was a revelation, at least for me, and after looking closer at other interviews and articles there were traces of it to be found scattered around as well. The Vosse piece was more specific (I'm not able to quote it exactly here without the article in front of me...), but I think in one of the David Anderle interviews he mentions it too.

There was, by those accounts, a blow-up between Brian and Murry during this time. No one offers a specific date or week, so chalk that up to an unknown and go from there, but the point is sometime during this period Brian and Murry had a major falling out.

Vosse frames part of this by describing Murry going around to Brian's circle of friends and badmouthing him, specifically criticizing Good Vibrations, and suggesting to those around him that Brian made a mistake by releasing this single, and suggesting he was losing all his fans by doing it.

To us in 2012, such criticism from Murry does seem petty and foolish considering what a legendary single Good Vibrations has become. If this were December 1966 into January 1967, it could be viewed even worse since Good Vibrations was, at that time, still a top 10 single all over the US having been at #1 for several recent weeks, and the Beach Boys were soon to finish very well in the end-of-year polls which had them topping the Beatles in one infamous case.

But if you put Murry Wilson in a position where he is going behind Brian's back suggesting Brian was somehow "wrong" and was risking the reputation of the band and, yes, "the family", it could be a pretty toxic thing for Brian to hear in the midst of a rush to get an album finished which would be released in the bright afterglow of his #1 single, Good Vibrations.

Add Murry into the mix of what LostArt was citing from Vosse, and his above post suggesting issues with live performance and instrumentation (this was a valid concern which had bitten the touring band in the ass several times during this period...), whatever was said or whatever happened between Brian and Murry has to be considered. If we assume it was during this same time at the end of '66 going into '67, it would line up with a lot of the questions about what happened to change the working conditions around Smile, as it were. because if we take the word of at least two people who were with and around Brian at this time, we know *something* big happened between Brian and Murry, bigger than the usual squabbles.

Craig, I may not be understanding, Brian worked within the limitations of his imagination, ingenuity and the technology of his time. Brian knew the sequence and had the cuts in mind. Regardless how many revisions, for each revision the sequence was already known, the cutting was just a routine, the limitations of mixing tapes from different tapes from different studios was understood by Brian and was even a desired effect in GV, he wanted the "sound" of different studios. Am I missing a point?

General discussion: the Boys had issues, Murry had issues. I still think they are given too much importance. Brian didn't care much about other peoples' concerns over the music. He would listen, he would even try suggestions, but if it didn't serve what he already knew he wanted he just dismissed it/them. We probably give too much credit for group understanding to the impressions of outsiders too but that is all we have sometimes.

I'm not sure of the sources for the concert concerns but I don't think Brian made music to be easy for concerts, he made music and they retro-fitted it to the small group or they even supplemented the small group with extra musicians. They had been rearranging lush songs for the small group concerts for years, I just can't buy that Brian pulled any punches on the singles or albums in deference to eventual live play. It is likely that only GV and H&V, the singles, would have been played in concert and they both were actually adapted for concert at the time and GV was already in small group concert rotation.

Then there are the times that we have on record where he would, at the very least, threaten to dismiss himself because of a lack of cooperation amongst his fellow workers.

And would you say this line of thinking hold true in the case of Brian speeding up Caroline, No?

The first an example of getting his way and controlling the group and focusing them on his desire.

The second is one of the example of Brian trying a suggestion and keeping it if it suited his desire.

On the first paragraph I disagree, mostly because we know of a handful of Brian's "test edits" specifically for Heroes and less for Vegetables where he was experimenting with the order, sequence, and editing of specific fragments. This is audio proof, all but set in stone, that for these singles Brian had a bag of tape fragments and had not yet finalized an order. I'd suggest if Brian was working from an order all along as he was recording those fragments, it would not be necessary to experiment by moving them around. I don't speak for the rest of Smile, which wasn't as "modular" for individual tracks as Heroes and Vegetables, yet those two tracks where we hear Brian shifting things around were the heavy burden he carried into January 1967 - we need to finish this for the single. That could stall the album indefinitely if he keeps tinkering and revising, and look what happened.

And additional proof of what I originally suggested with editing and technology can be found in any number of interviews around BWPS and how Darian's ability to edit and audition on the fly for Brian was something that didn't exist in 1966-67, and a technology which helped them sequence Smile for the stage. Musical flow is everything - Brian's "test edits" from the 60's were time consuming and a bit on the sloppy side. I spelled out the process on the top of page 2 here...it's a hassle. And it eats up precious studio time.

You can't dismiss Murry as easily as you could dismiss a French Horn player making a suggestion in the studio, or one of Brian's friends, or whatever. I think what haunted Brian and the other Wilsons (I'm really reaching here...) was their always seeking approval from their father who could go out of his way to belittle them even as adults. That very notion causes so many problems within families, strains relationships for entire lifetimes, etc. If someone close you're seeking approval from, either outwardly or inwardly, goes around to your friends criticizing decisions which made the family very wealthy and were ultimately "right", how can that impact be dismissed by saying Brian could just "shake it off"? He couldn't shake it off, in fact I'd say he dealt with it but never got over it entirely.

There are little snippets in LLVS describing cases where the Beach Boys - I believe on a tour of England - had arranged for extra musicians to be hired and perform on stage with them to fill out the sound, as there had been reviews suggesting the live shows didn't sound full enough compared to the records. Then that hiring got bogged down in some musicians' union politics and the band wasn't allowed to play with the extra musicians, and I believe the press again pointed out the lack of fullness on stage versus the records. So this had to be a concern if the band gets criticized by some fans and the press for not sounding like the records, then when they try to hire players at least in England, they're told "no" and get more criticism. I can assume this point was mentioned to Brian by the band if not by Brian himself reading a negative review and having it perhaps change his plans for a future recording...who knows.

And remember, too - the Hawaii project where this stripped-down sound was attempted was ultimately scrapped entirely, including the Heider recreations - nothing was used. The sound was interesting, quirky, but was it good enough for the band's standards? A band which, mind you, had become known in 1966 for the quality of their sound on record?

However you interpret his desire to leave if there wasn't any cooperation, it certainly doesn't show that he "didn't care much about other peoples' concerns over the music." And there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that Brian speeding up Caroline, No was "what he already knew he wanted" before Murry told Brian he sounded old.

Glad to see so much reference to the Fusion piece going on here. I know it has its detractors, but I've always felt it a cornerstone piece (far more than Goodbye Surfing... for instance) in understanding SMiLE, the album and the era.

LostArt - intuitively, in psychological terms and according to the evidence we have, your analysis strikes me as right on the button.

Guitarfool:

"On the first paragraph I disagree, mostly because we know of a handful of Brian's "test edits" specifically for Heroes and less for Vegetables where he was experimenting with the order, sequence, and editing of specific fragments. This is audio proof, all but set in stone, that for these singles Brian had a bag of tape fragments and had not yet finalized an order. I'd suggest if Brian was working from an order all along as he was recording those fragments, it would not be necessary to experiment by moving them around. I don't speak for the rest of Smile, which wasn't as "modular" for individual tracks as Heroes and Vegetables, yet those two tracks where we hear Brian shifting things around were the heavy burden he carried into January 1967 - we need to finish this for the single. That could stall the album indefinitely if he keeps tinkering and revising, and look what happened."

Just a quick - non-technological - point to make here. Using the '67 Heroes and Veggies single sessions as a basis for why the album couldn't have been sequenced in November-December '66 is kind of irrelevant. Here we have Brian desperately trying to construct a "hit" out of a "three-section musical comedy" and a 90 second goof; as I tried to demonstrate above, the original SMiLE songs had solid, established structures and, in terms of piecing them together, as Cam said "the cutting was just a routine, the limitations of mixing tapes from different tapes from different studios was understood by Brian."

The point Cam and I were making - as it relates to my original argument that SMiLE could have been out in January if fate hadn't intervened - is that "the rest of Smile", recorded during the Smile sessions proper, didn't suffer the same editing stresses and approach as the two '67 single attempts - they were made with different goals and recorded according to a very different process - so they can't really be employed to back up a '66 sequencing issue.

First, I think LostArt's points would be even more right-on-the-button if you add in the Murry Wilson influence. Take all of it together, especially with the inside information from the Vosse piece, and it's one important piece of the puzzle.

Second, the point you're missing entirely, both Holy Bee and Cam, is that without Heroes And Villains and Vegetables, there is no Smile album, period, end of story. Not only were these singles, but they were also two specific tracks on the Smile tracklist and mentioned repeatedly in period interviews by various band members and associates, so fans had some inkling that these tracks would be showing up.

If you're trying to call what I said "irrelevant", first that's a bunch of nonsense in light of everything I wrote to back it up getting as specific as describing the process, and second you're not seeing the realities of both how Brian Wilson worked in 1966 or how a band and label put together an album of songs through months of pre-production. If the thesis of this thread is that Smile could have been out in January '67 and you have *direct, crystal-clear evidence* that two of the higher-profile songs slated to be on Smile and were intended to be singles did not exist at that point beyond early versions and rough mixes, the main theory falls apart because the facts, surviving recordings, and the actual session dates don't back it up.

If you have many of the so-called "innovative" production techniques and new sounds appearing on the two songs that only existed in raw forms by January 1967 and which Brian would spend weeks in early '67 trying to finish or at least put together, and the theory is proposed that Smile could have been out by January, what would Smile have been without Heroes, all the bits related to Heroes, and Vegetables? The blunt answer is this: An album closer to the sounds of Pet Sounds with more arcane lyrics. If you remove Heroes and Vegetables from the album, as they were simply *not finished*, *not sequenced*, and not ready to go even by the end of January '67, all of the sonic innovations which were being hyped at the time, including song structure "pioneered" by Brian on Good Vibrations, are stripped away. The next closest thing on the album was "Cabinessence", and that had no lead vocal until 1968!

If you are missing two, possibly three main components of an upcoming album (not filler tracks), you cannot sequence or master that album until they're finished, mixed, and handed in.

I'm not wanting to light any fires here, but "irrelevant" didn't strike the right chord with me, in light of, and I say this with all due respect, you and Cam having solid facts laid out about what did happen, seeing evidence of what was and wasn't possible to make it happen, and yet you're trying to make these points or dispute others based on what could or should have happened in theory or fantasy.

I think your "crackpot theory" makes a lot of sense Bee. I have been baffled since buying the tss boxset as to why in hell something this great was scraped by Brian. Many of the points you have raised have been crossing through my mind for months. None of the least being the album covers and song lists being printed. I have always thought that was huge. Something has always felt odd to me about the theory that Brian was nowhere close to getting the album together due to sequencing and editing all of the "bits" and such. Even though I sometimes feel that is the correct theory myself, it really does not add up.  And by no means am I a smile expert, but the bulk of your thesis is hard to argue against. Nice work!

So the factual evidence in terms of two prominent songs from the album remaining unfinished three months into 1967 should be thrown out the window in favor of a theory?

It's everyone's choice to listen to any theory but trying to accept it as fact is too much of a stretch: If the actual hard facts are available for everyone to see, read, and hear, and they dispute elements of the thesis behind the theory, I guess we should throw the facts out the window in favor of fantasy.

If someone can show me a final mix of Heroes, a final mix of Vegetables, a final mix of Cabinessence, and final mixes of the other songs lacking vocals which existed by January 1967, the theory wins out over fact. Until then, it's fantasy to suggest Brian had completed more than we know he actually did.

The ultimate fact is that Brian had several deadlines which he failed to meet, and despite having a closet full of Smile tapes needing this or that by 1967, if you assume that meant it was "near completion" then you're just not clear on the process of making an album.

Hey Guitarfool, first of all apologies for the use of "irrelevant". Even at the time it wasn't quite what I meant, but I couldn't put my finger on the right word. I've found your posts extremely interesting - and relevant! - so sorry if I give the impression of being dismissive.

There does seem to be a real difference of understanding between yourself and Cam & I, and I'm not sure if it's possible to resolve it. But one thing jumped out in your second-to-last post:

"Second, the point you're missing entirely, both Holy Bee and Cam, is that without Heroes And Villains and Vegetables, there is no Smile album, period, end of story."

First of all, that's the kind of statement that needs to be quantified. Heroes maybe. Vega-Tables didn't become a big deal until '67 - it might well have just been a chunk of The Elements at the time my post centres on. No SMiLE as we know it today, yes. The only hard '66 evidence that there "[was] no Smile album" in 1966 without those tracks is if one is being scrupulously faithful to the Capitol memo - unlike, say, Brian Wilson in 2004. But let's assume that that album as conceived in October does include those songs:

Because of course it did, as they were tracked. They were just in different versions.  The whole idea there wouldn't have been those songs on the album without the '67 sessions is contradicted by a significant number of facts; for instance, that there was a structural demo of H&V played for Humble Harv in '67; all three sections featured in that demo had their backing tracks recorded in mid-October; and most importantly that we very likely have a finished Vega-Tables as it was originally conceived.

Would those versions have made good singles? Probably not, which is discussed at length above. But for all we know, the tracks for both had been recorded; and Heroes was waiting - once again - on an edit and vocal dubs.

The other thing is that your original post emphasised quite heavily the limitations of the available technology, and how that would have made it difficult for Brian to sequence the record. This was partially in refutation of my assertion that basically the album fell apart when it came time to record the December leads. I'm not trying to be challenging, but I haven't seen a response from you to Cam's observation that "the cutting was just a routine, the limitations of mixing tapes from different tapes from different studios was understood by Brian."

Because if those things aren't really an issue, and we accept that there are at least two very different conceptions of H&V and Veggies ('66 and '67 versions), then once again - here we have, as December 1966 begins, ten (and a bit of Surf's Up) structured and discrete songs waiting for final edits, vocal dubs and being arranged into a satisfying order.

I'm mostly through page one of this thread, this is great reading!

Wow, Holy_Bee, great essay, you're reiterating lots of things I believed anyways...  Did you used to post on the old smileshop boards like ten years ago?  Your name rings a bell... 

Say Holy_Bee, I was wondering, about a month ago I made a SMiLE mix that was trying to stay to a '67 mix as close as possible (yeah get in line, I know), but I feel it echoed a lot of what you are saying.  I was wondering if you'd give it a listen and give me some of your thoughts?  It can be found in this thread... 
http://smileysmile.net/board/index.php/topic,12309.0.html

Be glad to Soniclovenoize! Pleased you're enjoying the thread.

Yeah, I did, I think, though not very much - I was a bit in awe of people like Cam and the Jo(h)ns! I did do more in the lead-up to BWPS. Incredibly exciting times!

I didn't mean to imply anything was irrelevant. Maybe I don't understand but to me the cutting of the tape doesn't seem like something that would have been extraordinary. Brian recorded with a butt edit in mind. It was the current state of the tech and the norm but I may not know what I'm talking about or missing the point.

I understand that the singles are important to the album. Still since the album is more than the singles it can still be true that most/much of the album was "finished". I would say that probably all of the album [including the singles] was conceived, Vosse felt so too. In the case of the singles, in particular H&V, they seem to have been "fully conceived" and/or executed a few times just as GV had been done. The period of the proposed Vt single is iffy as being during the "true" SMiLE period to me but that is just me. It seems to me that there were at least a couple of "conceived"/"finished" versions of the Vt single. Something like GV had been. To me, just like GV, he does not seem to have a problem not knowing what he wanted or how he wanted or not being able to do what he wanted but instead kept conceiving something he felt was better. Time does not seem to be something that bothered Brian either as he ignored any deadlines and was telling the press it took as long as it took.

Interesting question about the test edits. Now that we have C-man's excellent sessionography, what are the test edits and what bits do they contain and what was the intended sequence identified for the bits on the records/slates at the time of their recording. I'm assuming that the tests are Brian and SMiLE era and not left off the box because they are Carl/Desper edits or something.

To me Brian's threat to leave during that vocal recording doesn't amount to anything but Brian's group control. He is not threatening to cave in to anybody or give in or change anything or drop anything he plans. He is trying to focus the group on fixing something he wants fixed. Also on Caroline No, Brian doesn't change or add or drop anything really, he makes a tweak from a suggestion and decides to keep it just like suggestions on how to tweak the playing of a passage from a French Horn player etc.. He's not giving in or giving up anything he had planned. Maybe I'm looking at it wrong.

It's all taken in stride with the discussion!  :) It just seems like, to me at least, the additional resources of the Smile box including being able to have a list and a disc of well over a dozen individual Heroes fragments...understanding this song/composition was to be a centerpiece of the Smile project...would serve to disprove the theories about Smile being near completion by a certain month. We hear amazing music,incredible pieces, but ultimately Brian and his musical ideas related to some magical "Heroes" theme had spun out of control. It would be like inviting someone over for dinner and buying 14 different main courses to put on the table at the same time...good food, sure, but not what you'd do for a dinner for two event. You couldn't eat that much food...Brian and his Heroes theme may have overtaken the album as a whole as January 1967 progressed.

Maybe posting a list here of all Heroes fragments and session dates related to Heroes in any way would show visually what I'm trying to say.

The point about Heroes and Vegetables existing as demos in Fall '66...I say yes, worth noting, if this were the Stones or the Dave Clark 5 or any other band. But look at the example of Good Vibrations and Brian's working method on that one. We had what appeared to be a full version waiting for vocals in the vault before Pet Sounds was released. Assume the single never came out, fall '66: Does that mean GV could have gone on Pet Sounds with added vocals? Did that Feb. 66 studio version give any indication of what the single would be or sound like when Brian was finished with it in fall '66? Yes it was a "demo", yes it was in the tape vaults, so would that point mean anything if the GV single had not appeared in fall '66 and we were looking back on it as we are with Heroes and Vegetables? Brian tinkered it to near-death, at times giving up on it only to be coaxed back by Anderle among others. Only in this case, his tinkering led to a brilliant release. In the case of Heroes, it did not, despite having a version in the vaults for several months.

As far as Cam's earlier comments on the editing and cutting, it was routine to edit. It was not routine to do more than a few test edits where you'd take perhaps 6 reels of tape and try different sequences and orders. Or, it was not routine to have a song or perhaps an album medley of songs where the order was undefined by design, if we believe the notion of "modular songwriting" and modular recording. It was new ground, broken by Good Vibrations. How long did that single take again? Has anyone investigated how long it took to reach the editing block where Brian knew exactly when and where to cut GV? How many test edits were done? Were different sequences tried and scrapped?

Heroes and the fragments, again if they are modular, were recorded in similar or relative keys so they'd "fit" together. So how would you try different orders so you could hear them? Refer back to the process I described...each fragment would have to be given a safety copy, then cut back together. Do this with however many Heroes fragments there were at a given time. It's a pain in the ass with tape as it was in the 60's. With modular recording you have to hear the order, I'd say, to determine if it "flows" with the overall song structure once you do piece something together.

Hence, the test edits. And they sound hastily done and sloppy. These are vintage Brian...as far as I know. Please correct if the test edits date from a later era.

For BWPS, a laptop enabled them to collect all those fragments and pieces in one place, put any fragment, any track, any medley in any order and audition them immediately. If it were not important to the design of the Smile project, that aspect perhaps would not have been specifically mentioned in interviews surrounding the making of BWPS.

And again, in good faith and in the spirit of the discussion, if someone can produce anything close to a finshed-sounding mix of Heroes or Vegetables, or a version of Cabinessence with a lead vocal, or Child Is Father with lyrics, or Worms with a main melody other than Brian humming a line on a talkback mic, or Surf's Up with a full structure, vocals, and backing track together...any of those made prior to 1967, I'll be more open to the theory it was nearly complete in 1966. :) 

Maybe I'm catching on. I guess I don't see H&V as modular, just sectional. When he was doing test edits it was from a hand full of select sections that he had already identified as to the sequence [ie. verse, chorus, bridge, part 2, part 3, fade] for the then currently conceived/defined state of H&V. Some parts held over from the previous conception of H&V and some parts recorded new to replace the previous part 2 etc. or recorded or borrowed to replace the previous fade etc.. To me his labeling of all of the parts as to sequence/placement and then there being successive parts labeled for the same position indicates that he never was considering every section for H&V as in play in the then current conception of H&V. He had a defined and identified set of parts for each conceived state of H&V [and Vt]. Something like he had done with GV. Apparently making multiple test edits for multiple conceived states of H&V.

Since there is missing material from the SMiLE era I suppose no one will ever be able to prove or disprove the actual extent of the finished or unfinished state of the album.

"finshed-sounding mix of Heroes or Vegetables, or a version of Cabinessence with a lead vocal, or Child Is Father with lyrics, or Worms with a main melody other than Brian humming a line on a talkback mic, or Surf's Up with a full structure, vocals, and backing track together..."

Here I think we're agreeing more than not. Was Surf's Up backing track fully recorded or leads done for several key tracks? Could finished mixes be done without those recorded? No. But my contention is that in all other respects the album was basically done in November - and as a conception, existed far more solidly than seems to be thought.

Bumping this cool thread with some of my thoughts, maybe Bee and others can chime in too...

One thing I thought of (that I used on my SMiLE mix) was to somehow explain I'm In Great Shape on the handwritten tracklist... 

We know that Brian wanted a farm/agriculture/barnyard suite with four songs, right?  Well, what could those pieces be?
1) obviously Barnyard
2) I'm In Great Shape definitely has to do with farming & agriculture 

These two are in the same key, and can easily be hard-edited together...  I like Barnyard preceding I'm In Great Shape myself.  We know they both originated from H&V, but so did a lot of things, didn't they?  I see H&V as like the starting point, the GO on a Monopoly board, that created a plethora of musical ideas that at first were meant to be a part of H&V, but as the section was or was not cut, it began a life of it's own...  Barnyard and IIGS clearly were cut, but maybe they were supposed to go together all along, they were joined and became their own separate song called I'm In Great Shape, just like the Sleep A Lot was cut and became Vege-Tables... 

So anyways, that leaves two more...  But we know that Workshop & IWBA was credited as part of I'm In Great Shape on the tapebox.  Many people say that was an error, but can we really say that for certain?  Do we have a primary source, like the engineer who wrote that, saying "Oh yeah, my mistake, that was supposed to be The Elements, sorry!"  I don't think so, because it's just easier to think it can be grouped with The Elements...  "Rebuilding after the fire..."  Who said that?  Was it in jest?  Or should be taken literally?

So if we connect Workshop & IWBA to IIGS, then we suddenly have a complete four-piece suite, fitting the farm/barnyard/agriculture theme.  It comes out to be about 2:00 long (or 2:30 if you extend Workshop, as I did), and might sound something like this:
http://www.mediafire.com/?7fh87z8dryhks4y

Also, assuming this is correct, this construction of I'm In Great Shape might also be a better contender of the Earth element...  Surely a suite about the barnyard and the great shape of the agriculture is more appropriately connected to the earth, than a song about eating vegetables and brushing your teeth?   

I have to agree, sonic. After listening to your mix quite a few times it seems that those songs work very well together and I wouldn't be surprised if that's how they were supposed to go together. I also thought that the comment  "Rebuilding after the fire..." was pretty interesting, do you think that "The Elements: Fire" should precede the "farm/agriculture/barnyard" suite?

No, I honestly think that was a tongue-in-cheek quip, made in jest (by Carol Kaye, correct?).  I honestly don't think that it would have necessarily been the rebuilding after the 'Fire', especially when the fire could just as easily be burning down the building built in Workshop song (thus making it Workshop --> Fire)...  Or rather, would the 'water' have to put out the fire before they can rebuild (Fire -> Da Da -> Workshop)?

My point of view is that a chronological narrative is and was ignored when Brian was constructing the songs, for the sake of a musical whole.  I know someone recently constructed a H&V that supposedly creates an actual storyline of the pioneer...  But we all know the released version and even the Cantina version is not telling us a traditional story with a narrative.  It was designed to SOUND the best, you know what I mean?

Take my edit of IIGS for example...  Wouldn't it make more sense that the IIGS fragment be first because it's the farmer waking up in the morning and eating breakfast?  And THEN he feeds the animals in Barnyard?  And THEN the workers build a house?  And THEN they go to sleep on a Friday Night?  But if you constructed it that way, it would not sound as cohesive.  I know it's my construction, yes, but my point is that by design, IIGS is a "middle piece."  It needs some sort of introduction--that's why Darian composed one for it on BWPS, based around the Cantina bridge.  As as alternative, I used Barnyard, which could stand as either a "middle piece" or a "beginning piece" you know what I mean?  

My point is that I think you need to look at how the fragments will musically fit together, rather than the chronology of a distinct storyline.  That's why Workshop doesn't necessarily have to follow Fire, because it doesn't necessarily have to be rebuilding after the fire.  It could, but I'd say it better completes the IIGS suite, which in itself becomes "earth" in The Elements.  

    I don't remember reading that the so-called "barnyard suite" consisted of four songs. But if we are making the assumption that a Smile track entitled IIGS would indeed have been that famed barnyard suite then we also must assume that it was  an offshoot of H&V. If that's so, wouldn't Fade (TSS 2-28), All  Day, and Do A Lot also be contenders as sections? They all have ties to H&V.
    Full disclosure: I am in the camp that believes IWBA/FN was intended to represent the earth  element

Do we? Do we really know that? What's the support for it?

This is probably going to come across as heresy, but I've never bought into the idea of a "Barnyard" suite. As far as I know, there's only ever been one mention of it by anyone involved with Smile - and that's a questionable reference in my opinion.

I've been a fan of the group since the 1960s, and over the years I tried to stay current on any and all Smile information that surfaced. To the best of my knowledge, there was no mention of a "Barnyard" suite (as opposed to a single song) in any of the articles and interviews that were concurrent with the recording of Smile. Nor was it mentioned by Carl or anybody else during the press hoopla when there was an attempt to assemble the album circa 1972.

In fact, the first mention of a "Barnyard" suite was in Byron Preiss's book in 1978, when he quoted a single short comment by Brian that mentioned it. My impression at the time - as it has been ever since - was that Brian was confused and mixing up "Barnyard" with the "Elements" suite. (I'd live to hear a recording or see a transcript of Preiss's interview with Brian to try to put the comment in context.) Since that time, I haven't seen any further documentation or support for such a suite - and, let me tell you, I've been looking for it!

Am I wrong? Have I missed something? Or could it be, as I suspect, that there never was a "Barnyard" suite, and we've just been running around like Pavlov's dogs trying to create something to match up with an erroneous off-hand comment by Brian?

Heresy? I'm sure some here will immediately jump to that conclusion, but I'd really love to see some serious discussion of my theory.

Why should we assume it need to be an offshoot of H&V?  Unused pieces from one song would go to another (see Bicycle Rider, see False Barnshine).  The origins of the fragments are incidental...  The question is if it's about a barnyard or not.  

Well, you yourself just said you thought Brian was confused.  How can I argue the logic that you thought he was confused?  

Also, if you're making the claim that this never occurred, and that it all originated from a singular quote that was misinterpreted, an you post the quote please? 

When you think of it -- if Brian was really desperate to complete the album, Barnyard and I'm in Great Shape would have been perfect choices to shift to The Elements for Earth and Air. Hence any Elements Suite really could be also called a Barnyard suite.

That's true!  And I think we all agree that both suites were sort of a catch-all for the miscellaneous instrumentals anyways.  It's just a matter of which instrumentals "feel" like an element, or a farm.   :lol  Do we believe a tape box?  Or do we believe Carol Kaye?  Or can we take both into account and say IIGS includes Workshop, which IIGS itself is the earth part of The Elements?

And of course the flaw in my logic, as is in all of ours, is that The Elements is listed separately from Wind Chimes, IIGS and VT, thus implying that those three are not a part of The Elements at all...   :-\

Well, I'm not so sure about that. First of all, I'm really unconvinced that there was any plans for a Barnyard Suite in 66-67 -- there's absolutely no evidence from that time to suggest such a thing ever existed. I also don't think that The Elements was a dumping ground for miscellaneous instrumentals -- maybe it was never more than Fire, maybe there was going to actually be four pieces that captured the sound of an Element the way that Fire did (and the way that no other song from the sessions themselves have done, unless that "Under water" piece recorded after the Surf's Up session had something to do with it but I doubt it). Maybe all of these things but for whatever reason it didn't happen.


Well, not necessarily. There should be some kind of historical evidence before we're sure. Keep in mind that Fire was actually referred to as The Elements - a distinction that no other song from that era has.


Well, I think both the tape box and the Kaye comment would need more verification. Right now all the evidence we have seems to suggest that the I Wanna Be Around session was mislabelled. And Carol Kaye...well, I'll just leave it at that.


Yes, because I don't think they ever were and there is no evidence to suggest they were. All I'm saying that is that if Brian wanted to get the album out in a rush in, say, February 1967, he could have pushed Barnyard and Great Shape over to The Elements.

I've always felt (check my old posts) "Barnyard (Suite)" referenced by Priess = "The Old Master Painter" from the Capitol list: "Banyard"/"The Old Master Painter"/"You Were My Sunshine"/"Barnshine" and considering that's how they almost appeared in 2004 and fully appeared in 2011, I think my theory proved to be correct.

I suspect the omission of "Barnshine" in 2004 had to do with the three movements idea.  Since "Barnshine" has the feel of definite ending, it would have left "Cabin Essence" as a stand alone track with no real place in the actual movements.

Your mileage may vary but to me it was always a no-brainer.

Similarly, I've long thought (since Endless Harmony) that IIGS = "I'm In Great Shape"/"I Wanna Be Around"/"Workshop" and saw that theory "proved" right with the RAH premiere.  I think the reason for moving the actual "IIGS" segment on the Smile Sessions was to group together most of the pieces that began their life as part of "Heroes And Villains".

I meant that the piece from TSS 2-5 'I'm In Great Shape' is plainly identified as being part of H&V. If, later, a seperate track called IIGS is listed on the Capitol memo, I think it's a pretty safe assumption that it could be considered an offshoot of H&V. The Piano Demo (TSS2-36) is further evidence that the two are connected. It's not an established fact, of course, but we're all just spitballing here, and I'm willing to make that rather small leap even if you're not.

Maybe, but when was this the case? Barnyard was at least part of Heroes from October 20th to November 4th, when he previewed Heroes, Great Shape, and Barnyard. Maybe by the 14th when there is a session for OMP/Sunshine things had changed but I'm really uncertain with what either of those songs have to do with Barnyard.


Again, I'm really not sure about this either. Again, I'm in Great Shape and I Wanna Be Around are two very different types of songs and, of course, they had to construct a whole introduction for Great Shape because Great Shape from the Smile Sessions doesn't really have a beginning. It sounds more like a section of something else, which makes its inclusion on the Capitol list a real head scratcher.

I agree with the first part of what you wrote, but i think IIGS works better paired with Barnyard. But yeah, my current way of thinking  is Barnyard Suite= IIGS (IIGS,Barnyard,Do A Lot,IIGS) + Old Master Painter (OMP, YAMS, Barnshine).

I see what you are saying, but the entire concept of elemental forces are that there are four of them, and how they interact and balance each other out.  It would be absurd to only have one of them...  Haven't you played like any Final Fantasy?   :3d

Also, I don't think it's a stretch to listen to the instrumental pieces and determine if they fit into an element or not...  I Love to Say Da-Da just sounds like a babbling brook...  The way the chords progress and the starts and stops, remind me of a stream of water, flowing down a rocky bed....  And that didn't become a baby babbling until SMiLE was scrapped, right? 

Earth and Wind, yeah, no idea what that could be.  But to my ear, Fire and Water was created.  It could be very possible that Fire was the only one Brian got around to create...  Or at least the only one that was directly labeled... 


See above.  And claiming "well there should be some evidence..." is clearly a cop-out, for a subject where not a lot of evidence exists.  Analysis is required, which is what I assumed this thread was platform for? 


What is the exact evidence that the box was mislabeled? 


He certainly could have!   ;)

Wow, interesting stuff since I last checked in. Have been "off the grid" spending some time with my 96 year old grandmother (still living by herself and, somewhat terrifyingly, legally driving) so haven't been able to check in. Even now am grabbing five minutes to check email at the local library, so will have to keep my response brief. Will read through properly and do a full reply when i get back tomorrow.

"I'm in Great Shape" doesn't exist. It was a section of "Heroes" - we know this from the session logs and it's confirmed by the Humble Harv demo - until at least November 4, and after that no work was done on the song ("H & V") until January. Someone obviously decided in December that it should be its own track (I would suspect, but it's just my own hunch, that it's a clearing house of the "H&V" sections intended for the original version which were rejected it was decided that single needed a major overhaul - this has all been discussed earlier in the thread), but no more recording was done for it. Unless one includes "Workshop" (subtitled (Great Shape) on the tapebox/logs [which again?]), which might well have been recorded to preface or follow IIGS and Barnyard to create an actual song, possibly together with "The Old Master Painter". And here's yer actual Barnyard suite to boot.

But as a recorded and/or fully conceived song? Never existed, hence the confusion over it for decades. It was Heroes until mid-November, and then it wasn't. (And, once again, the premise of this thread is that SMiLE pretty much started collapsing itself in December when it was decided to start reworking and splitting off potential singles.) At the very least, I can see absolutely no contemporary data to suggest it was ever a part of The Elements, save for the "rebuilding after the Fire" comment... and that can be read ambiguously at best.

Sure. Herewith, the only reference ever made in the history of The Beach Boys to a "Barnyard" suite:

"The Barnyard Suite, that was going to be four songs - in four short pieces - combined together, but we never finished that one. We got into something else."

And since it's an isolated quote, we have no real idea of the context in which it was said or what question Brian might have been asked or even whether the printed quote is pieced together or edited from several comments.

Since the quote originates with Preiss and isn't lifted from another source, it apparently dates from late 1977, when Preiss was working on his book. Read or listen to any other interview Brian did around that time and it's obvious he wasn't in such great mental shape.

So how much weight should be given to what appears to be a random one-off comment? Doesn't it bother anybody else that there's no other support or documentation anywhere for a "Barnyard" suite?

Think about all that's been said and written over the years about Brian's "Elements" suite. Surely, if he'd been planning two such suites, somebody else would have noticed and said something at the time. But no one did. All the talk was about the "Elements" suite." In fact, if you left off the first three words of the Preiss quote ("The Barnyard Suite"), everybody would think you're talking about the "Elements"! And I think there's a good chance Brian actually was.

Well, I think it's more likely that it would have been a four-piece suite but with this gap in knowledge we could assume lots of things - maybe Brian wanted to spread The Elements over four albums...Maybe The Elements was just a clever title...this is pure speculation. Really that line was a bit of a throwaway to explain that there are many possibilities that are inevitable when we don't have access to the real plan.


Well, but here's the thing - I Love to Say Da-Da doesn't sound a bit to me like water. Nothing like it. And the song never had a title that I know of that evoked Water - "All Day" and "Love to Say Dada" don't suggest Water. Certainly not the way that "The Elements: Fire" does.


And called "The Elements: Part One: Fire" in the studio when it was being recorded.  


Maybe it is. Analysis doesn't work if you don't have evidence. With Smile I think we have to accept what we have - an unfinished masterpiece. I think a lot of people like to believe that there are clues in the music itself that will tell us how to piece it together but I don't think that's the case here.


None. Upon further inspection, the sheet for I Wanna Be Around was stuck with Friday Night (I'm in Great Shape) so there could have very well been a connection being made at this point.

Thanks for the info!

I still disagree with you, but I appreciate the quote.  :)

Well there you go. 

 ;)

What you're saying makes sense, but we do have a mystery track (IIGS) from the Capitol memo, and an H&V section that, lyrically, sounds like it could be related to living on a farm in the country. Since people love to solve mysteries, over the years, for a lot of people, IIGS has become the aforementioned "barnyard suite". The Piano Demo further fanned the flames for this notion.

Understand that I'm not saying there wasn't a song/track/section titled "Barnyard." There most definitely was. It was part of "H&V" at one time, then was excised when that song was re-thought. What I'm saying is that I don't think there was a four-part "Barnyard" suite.

As for "IIGS," it too was excised from "H&V," but unlike "Barnyard," Brian intended to do something with it as a standalone track - not as part of a non-existent "Barnyard" suite that so many keep trying to construct, but under it's own title. That much we can deduce from the handwritten track list. Exactly what he intended to do with it, though, we'll probably never know. Unfortunately, that's just the way it is with some details of Smile.

But that's what we are saying--if we don't know exactly what he was going to do with, then the possibility of it being a Barnyard suite shouldn't be ruled because we don't know either way. 

We know this about IIGS:
1) It became it's own separate entity from H&V, enough to be considered a separate track
2) It's a fragment, a middle piece, requiring more sections
3) the lyrics concern a farmer waking up in the morning

So there is no direct evidence that the listing of IIGS on the tracklist is meant to be this Barnyard Suite, but just look: the song is about a farmer waking up.  And then we have a different piece that was gutted from H&V, it's in the same key, and is about a barnyard.  Well, we have HALF of a theoretical Barnyard right there!  Pretty neat coincidence, don't you think?  Yeah, you can't prove anything, but it sure is funny how things work out sometimes... 

Then, there's the aforementioned quote by Brian saying there was a Barnyard Suite...  But the counter argument here, if I'm understanding correctly, is that:
1) since the quote dates from 1977, it's unreliable
2) we have no other sources, so it must not be true
No offense, but I don't find either point to completely rule the possibility of a Barnyard Suite out.  The fact that there's no additional information doesn't rule it out, it just makes it unfortunate for us.  What was the exact microphone used to mic the trumpet on OMP?  We don't know, so it must not have been mic'd at all.  Does that make sense?  No of course not.

Also, the thought of Brian confusing the nature's elements (earth, wind, water and fire) with animals on the barnyard?  Are you serious?  That's like confusing a vegetable with a wind chime. 

It just seems to be such a completely pessimistic analysis. 

WAIT

What if he was indeed talking about The Elements here as you suggest...  and that Brian meant that the section of Barnyard was meant to be the "earth" section of The Elements, to be combined with Mrs O'Leary's Cow? 

 :o

That actually makes a lot more sense to me than the idea that through the now 40+ year history of Smile, a second four-part suite was mentioned by Brian only once and never mentioned by anyone else at any time. I mean, think about it, as much time and effort as has been put into research and documentation of Smile, nothing else has ever turned up about a "Barnyard" suite?!! That's just unbelievable! Literally!

I can actually believe it because we have a little scrap of it already, you know? 

But as you and I can agree, there's not enough information to know either way.   :-\

Of a "Barnyard" suite? You'll have to explain that to me. I don't deny that we have "a little scrap" of a "Barnyard" song/track/section/whatever-you-want-to-call-it, but that's a far cry from having a suite or anything indicative of a suite (like the recording session ID we have for "Fire" and "The Elements").

We know because Brian said-so, remember?  :)

Right around the same time he started talking about how the tapes had been thrown into the fire.

Haha duly noted. 

I think another logical possibility is that when he said Barnyard Suite, he was thinking about what we come to think of as Heroes and Villains-I'm in Great Shape - Barnyard --> and then, maybe something else. That the Barnyard Suite was the name given, at that temporary moment for what we think of more as a Heroes and Villains suite.

Yeah, I thought of that last night, but by 1977, why would Brian have to ambiguously describe H&V as a "Barnyard Suite" if it was already a well known song for a decade?

Unless you mean the early incarnation of H&V? 

Well, because it was something different. I mean, on the demo, H&V is only two verses before it becomes something else entirely that had nothing to do with the finished product that was released as a single the following year.

But mostly I think Brian is kind of making something up in order to explain the larger truth of the Smile experience - that he had conceived many interesting ideas that were abandoned in favor of somehing else. For some reason Brian has made up other things about Barnyard. "Barnyard Billy loves his chicken" anyone?

Yeah, Brian always seemed to allude to barnyard imagery in describing SMiLE...probably because the agrarian culture was referenced so often by Parks lyrics. Knowing how Brian will often interpret questions, I have no problem believing that Brian would assume a question about a "Barnyard Suite" was actually a question about "The Elements Suite".

Just got back, so a full post will have to wait, but I'm a little surprised there was no direct response to my last post. Maybe it was a little long-winded (though short by my standards!). In the meantime, what I said was essentially this from Rockandroll:

"I think another logical possibility is that when he said Barnyard Suite, he was thinking about what we come to think of as Heroes and Villains-I'm in Great Shape - Barnyard --> and then, maybe something else. That the Barnyard Suite was the name given, at that temporary moment for what we think of more as a Heroes and Villains suite."

I think I answered the question pretty concisely. Would love to hear some folks' thoughts.

"The Barnyard Suite, that was going to be four songs - in four short pieces - combined together, but we never finished that one. We got into something else."
 
It would be nice to know the context in which Brian makes this statement. 

Did an interviewer ask Brian what songs were to be on Smile, to which Brian gave this answer?  We simply don't know. 

Or did the interviewer ask about early incarnations of H&V, possibly thinking about the Humble Harv demo (possibly not)?  I'm not sure, but I don't think Brian would refer to H&V as The Barnyard Suite.  The Humble Harv tape was discovered much later, wasn't it? 

Or did the interviewer ask specifically about a Barnyard Suite?  If so, then there must have been some common knowledge of such a 'suite'.

We just don't have enough information about this quote to form any concrete opinions about it.   

I think I already talked about that...  That by 1977, H&V had been commonly known for a decade as one of the few SMiLE survivors; it would seem a bit odd to refer to it so ambiguously at that point in the game...

Keep in mind how many people around him during this time would witness Brian getting excited about an idea, musical or otherwise, make all kinds of plans and details around the idea, get everyone around him on board with the enthusiasm and creativity boiling over, then all but forget about it as early as the next day. You could make an interesting list of these ideas that never materialized...among them is Vosse in "Teen Set" quoting Brian's plans to shoot a "Barnyard" film featuring a chicken wearing tennis shoes at Paul Robbins' place. As far as we know, unless someone has found a reel of film in a vault somewhere, that "Barnyard" film never happened beyond Brian's words in that magazine article.

Same thing with sending Desper and Vosse at separate times "into the field" with studio-quality recording gear to record water sounds and all but forgetting about them and the tapes.

I'm thinking this mythical "Barnyard Suite" was a possibility in Brian's mind just like the chicken wearing sneakers film, and it just never happened.

"Smile" almost complete in Nov.1966? I doubt it, but perhaps it was almost complete in April 1967. We don't know(and perhaps will never know) how much closer to completion "Smile" came in those still-missing tapes. Only Brian Wilson knows what was on those tapes, and no one has asked him. Perhaps some day, some of those tapes will be found, and we will get a partial answer to these mysteries.

Okay, to begin:

“And claiming "well there should be some evidence..." is clearly a cop-out, for a subject where not a lot of evidence exists.  Analysis is required, which is what I assumed this thread was platform for?”

Actually, this thread – not that I mind it’s organically evolved as people have posted! – was about using the contemporary data to build a thesis, not so much about analysis. Obviously the latter will play an important role, but my original plea was for any such conjecture to rely as much as possible on what we do know. And I’m not sure I agree there is a particular lack of data here.

So, in that spirit, “I’m in Great Shape” – “The Elements”, “Barnyard Suite” or both?

As of October, into November, 1966, “I’m in Great Shape” is part of Heroes and Villians. The evidence for this? The session logs for the backing track, which have the 30 second “IIGS” snippet as part of H&V. This is pretty solidly backed up by Brian’s rundown for Humble Harv. The same applies, obviously, for Barnyard. I’d say this is pretty conclusive evidence that “I’m in Great Shape” was conceived and tracked not as its own number but as a section of the original “3 minute musical comedy” version of Heroes.

The next reference we have to “Great Shape” is a notation for the 11-29 “Friday Night” tracking session. This, again, is contemporary data. It is possible that “Great Shape” is a transcription error, but on what basis might one argue this? (The only reason I can see is if it doesn’t fit with received wisdom or one’s own preferences.) Further, in terms of a connection to IIGS/Barnyard etc, we have this from Vosse in Fusion: “... and [minor key YAMS] developed into an instrumental thing with barnyard sounds, people sawing – he had people in the studio sawing wood – and Van Dyke being a duck – and it was marvellous.”

Obviously this is conflating at least three pieces – “The Old Master Painter”, “Workshop” and “Barnyard” - but this is an almost contemporary anecdotal connection to “I’m in Great Shape” (through its songmate “Barnyard”) and through that, to Heroes.

(And, of course, a four-part “Barnyard Suite” comprising a series of short sections. As to the Teen Scene description of a film featuring “a chicken in tennis shoes bopping around” - if this wasn’t a Brian-Vosse put on – then since “Barnyard” was part of “Heroes” when the article was written, then what’s being described is almost certainly Brian’s concept for the video clip for that single.

It also lends weight to the idea that Brian’s comment to Priess in ’77 – bearing in mind his problems at the time, his preference not to think too deeply about SMiLE over the previous ten years and that the final form of Heroes was created in at atmosphere approaching desperation – is a description either of the original form of that track, or of a conceived structure for its orphaned sections.)

Finally, we have the December tracklist, which lists “I’m in Great Shape” as a discrete track. If, as I conjecture above, this is indicative of separating at least that section off from H&V by mid-December in order to rework the single, then my analysis would be that “Workshop” was taped at the very end of November in order to replace the Heroes and Villains verses that were originally intended to precede IIGS/Barnyard. As a final observation on this, the structure of the February “Cantina” version follows quite closely a likely structure for the October conception, with the following substitutions:

Heroes Verse/I’m in Great Shape/(third section, possibly Heroes Verse 2)/Barnyard (fade)
Heroes Verse/In the Cantina/Heroes Verse 2/Barnshine (fade)

*****

So what conclusions can we draw from the above?

Fairly conclusively that at least until the first week of November, “I’m Great Shape” didn’t exist as a song – it was part of Heroes and Villains. So in the “fully conceived” version of SMiLE this thread was intended to argue existed in October 1966, there was no “I’m in Great Shape”.

Then things changed – at least by December, when the mystery track we’ve debated for decades suddenly arrives on the Captol memo. And the only hard data we have for that version is the (Great Shape) notation on “Workshop”, though we also have Vosse’s recollection of an instrumental featuring “sawing sounds” as developed from The Old Master Painter and connected to “Barnyard”.

Pretty strong evidence, I would argue, for “I’m in Great Shape” as “Barnyard Suite”, featuring at least “I Wanna Be Around/Friday Night”, “I’m in Great Shape” and “Barnyard”, possibly to follow “The Old Master Painter/You are My Sunshine” - or at least an off shoot of an earlier “Barnyard Suite” called “Heroes and Villains”.

(If, indeed, there was any further thought on "Great Shape" after it was excised from Heroes, for which the only evidence is that "Friday Night" notation and the memo. No other recording, vocal or instrumental, seems to have been done for the track - except for Workshop - after the October "Heroes" sessions.)

Whereas, I can’t see a single piece of supporting data for Great Shape as part of The Elements, except for Carol Kaye’s comments (on the session as well as in later interviews) about “Workshop” (if we do assume this to be part of IIGS) beingWh “rebuilding after the fire” which – considering that session followed the Fire one the previous day – is probably a flippant comment and at the very least isn’t backed up by anything written down, or in quotes attributed to the principles, at the time.

So we’re left with the argument that farm animals and wordwork are more earth-related than vegetables – which strikes me, in the face of the above data, as insubstantial basis for an analysis.

Thoughts?

Thanks Phil, but could you back up that statement with reference to my original essay on the the topic? Would love to know where you think my thesis falls short.

Because of existing session paperwork showing the dates when each song was recorded or attempted.

I think I agree with you!     :afro

Hey Sonic, I thought you might - saw a lot of this in your posts above. Sorry for not giving credit; the idea of quoting extensively did my head in!

haha It's OK.  I'm sure I"m not the first one to think Barnyard->IIGS->IWBA->Workshop anyways.   :lol

See, actually - on the basis of what I posted above - I'd be inclined to go IWBA/Workshop-I'm in Great Shape-Barnyard. But regardless of the order, you have a 2-3 minute track there which more or less follows the original schematic for Heroes minus the titular verses. I'm working on both a November and a December mix at the moment, which is quite revealing in several small ways - I've limited myself to only using backing tracks recorded prior to the end of November 1966, and for all the compromises - early Veggies demo instead of its more developed April incarnation, less pieces for Heroes, no Dada - it sounds much more like the "beautiful miniature" Van Dyke has described it as, rather than the sprawling "rock opera" we got in 2004. Not that that - just to be clear! - wasn't and isn't wonderful and perfect in its own right.

That would be an interesting listen, I guess that will make-or-break your theory! 

I always thought that IIGS and IWBA sounded like middle-pieces, Workshop sounded like an end-piece and Barnyard sounded like a beginning-piece.  But I will admit, I can also see Barnyard as a fade too! 

I think you're placing too much emphasis on ideas or concepts from Brian's mouth that were spur of the moment and never really went anywhere, in the big picture of putting it all together. I've already posted my thoughts on ideas that Brian had, got everyone fired up about, and just as soon discarded them or forgot about them.

How about the dinner party as told by Siegel, where Brian got everyone banging silverware in rhythm, thought it was fantastic, and wanted to arrange a recording session to duplicate the dinner-plate symphony in the studio? Just as soon as everyone was excited and on-board, the idea was dropped and never revisited.

What about the barroom brawl? When the practicality of actually doing it eclipsed the fun of the original concept, it was dropped.

So we have Vosse - acting as Brian's assistant and as a free-lance author covering Brian's sessions for "Teen Set", Capitol's magazine - hearing Brian describe a film idea he had about a chicken wearing tennis shoes.

Is there any proof that anything related to this idea ever went beyond Brian having an idea for a film and expressing it? If Vosse had not been there and mentioned it in his article, we'd never have known, and it could have been just a passing thought. or not - but how can we add any more weight to a single statement from Brian without having additional information?

And ultimately, I think some attention should be given to the fact that we have nothing resembling a "finished" Barnyard with vocals, nor do we have anything resembling a "finished" "Great Shape" with vocals, suggesting these tracks could be placed alongside "Trombone Dixie" as great ideas that ended up on the scrap pile. In fact, Trombone Dixie is at least somewhat complete in its design, where Great Shape and Barnyard are not even mixed or edited beyond the reference mix stage.

I have been following this thread (without much to contribute, natch - I tend to side with guitarfool in that Brian's wildcard nature at the time essentially makes it hard to define much of anything) but I'd love to hear the mix when it's all done! I lack a methodically authentic Smile in my collection...

Welcome back Guitarfool!

Re: TeenSet and the chicken film:

Sure, this may well have been a temporary enthusiasm and gone by the next day - or it may not. I hope I made it clear (not least by having them in parentheses) that those thoughts were simply by way of supporting evidence, or further observations, not intended to form as the backbone of the thesis. All the way through I've tried to base my conclusions primarily on hard data; and I believe I did so above on the subject of "I'm in Great Shape".

"And ultimately, I think some attention should be given to the fact that we have nothing resembling a "finished" Barnyard with vocals, nor do we have anything resembling a "finished" "Great Shape" with vocals, suggesting these tracks could be placed alongside "Trombone Dixie" as great ideas that ended up on the scrap pile. In fact, Trombone Dixie is at least somewhat complete in its design, where Great Shape and Barnyard are not even mixed or edited beyond the reference mix stage."

And as far as this goes, I feel like we've been here before! I'm hesitant to start repeating myself, but from my previous post:

"At least until the first week of November, “I’m Great Shape” didn’t exist as a song – it was part of Heroes and Villains. So in the “fully conceived” version of SMiLE this thread was intended to argue existed in October 1966, there was no “I’m in Great Shape”.

Then things changed – at least by December, when the mystery track we’ve debated for decades suddenly arrives on the Capitol memo. And the only hard data we have for that version is the (Great Shape) notation on “Workshop”, though we also have Vosse’s recollection of an instrumental featuring “sawing sounds” as developed from The Old Master Painter and connected to “Barnyard”."

Is any of this incorrect, inaccurate or unfairly presumptive?

We KNOW that "Great Shape" and "Barnyard" were originally part of Heroes. We KNOW their backing tracks were recorded and, in one case, mixed down with backing vocals and sound effects, waiting for a lead. We KNOW there was to be a track on the album called "I'm in Great Shape" because it's there on the cover slick (and regardless of the provenance of that memo, Cam Mott has established in his research there's no way Brian wouldn't have signed that listing off).

So I CONCLUDE from that that the musical section logged as "I'm in Great Shape" was to be a part of the track called "I'm in Great Shape", and I infer from it that it's likely its songmate Barnyard was going to go with it - if simply for the fact a 26 second segment is extremely unlikely to have been listed on its own. As for the rest of the track? No real idea! Surely that's the substance of this conversation?

The point is, once again, I'm trying to avoid hunches, personal feelings and my own bias and base my suppositions (which is obviously all they can be) on the material evidence. I'd ask you once again to go through my previous post and, if you're going to refute my conclusions - which is welcomed! - try to do it in terms of that data.

Oh, and while I'm on my high horse:

"That would be an interesting listen, I guess that will make-or-break your theory!"

Can't see how, really. It's the facts and how one reads 'em that count. :) I did say above the order of the pieces aren't really critical to this discussion. Actually, I've just done a mix which has "Workshop" in the middle and probably works the best to these ears.

I'm just calling 'em as I see 'em!  :)

This thread can continue another 20 pages with speculation and theories, but it's the initial title "SMiLE almost done in November" that I still have issues with after reading through these pages: I haven't seen the case made because referencing things like the tracklist and a demo has led to more red herrings than meaningful clues since I've been plugging in the same Smile theories and working tracklists as various parts of this thing have trickled out. I all but threw up my hands years ago - it really didn't lead me anywhere new. Putting the efforts into making a fan mix is one thing, but if it's trying to develop a feasible theory on something like "I'm In Great Shape" and where it could have fit is basing everything on speculation using a songwriter/producer who changed his mind regularly as a reference.

Specifically "Great Shape": Going back to LLVS, I like everyone else was fascinated by this...speculation was we already had it, but it could have been mislabeled. There were *vocal sessions*! What were those!? Then the Humble Harv demo appeared - one of the more mind-blowing and "Finally!" moments was hearing melody, lyrics, and chords to the great mystery tune. But wait...it was too damn short! There had to be more! What was Priore talking about in LLVS, how much more is there to be heard? What vocals were still undiscovered? It's just Brian's demo, he cut it short, there *has* to be more! And what did he say: "Fresh Zen Air", "Freshen Air", or "Fresh Clean Air" in that first line...

Then the "real" "I'm In Great Shape" tracking session appears, and it was the same form and length, and had the same single verse length open for lyrics as the demo, just adding an instrumental verse which was kind of pointless. Apparently there is an entire reel of instrumental run-throughs of the song in the vaults. That was all for the grand mystery of "I'm In Great Shape", dating back to LLVS over 20 years ago. It didn't amount to much. Surely not enough for a standalone track, which almost backed up the theory that the handwritten tracklist was not much more than another red herring in an ocean full of them. :)

I've gotten cynical on these things, I admit, and it wasn't always that way. I spent hours analyzing chords, harmonies, and structures trying to piece together a workable side 1/ side 2 arrangement using the key signatures of each piece we had available, and posted the results at that time. It was fun but ultimately it didn't add up to much more than speculation. Some of it did fit, but now I'd rather spend those hours listening to it as individual pieces rather than trying to glue it all together.  :)

...

I hate to quote Vosse from the Fusion piece again, but...

"But let me say that I think that while the Beach Boys were in England, and while Brian was doing the tracks for the album, it was a totally conceived entity: there were just a few things to be resolved…"

I'll always use the Vosse piece as a primary and trusted source of Smile info, but in this case the word "conceived" means a lot in the statement. Planning something and designing something means nothing if that something never gets beyond the drawing board stages. Or, having even a fully orchestrated score ready to give to the musicians means nothing if it never gets played.

One of the main points about Smile remaining unfinished is the last statement of Vosse's quote...the "few things" never got resolved, and what was thought to be "few" was actually much more. IMO.

Hey Gf - great post. Thank you.

As for "One of the main points about Smile remaining unfinished is the last statement of Vosse's quote...the "few things" never got resolved, and what was thought to be "few" was actually much more. IMO."

All I'd say about that is you might well be right, but "fully conceived" is how a major inside player saw it two years after the fact - this must be given at least equal credibility in a discussion of this nature as hunches from fans forty five years later. I'm sure VDP has made a "we were almost finished" comment as well, but will have to hunt round and find it. Whether or not this squares with all the other data is a reasonable question - it's the question posed by this whole thread - and I still say (and have done at enormous length in these pages) that the suggestion from that data is that a two-sided, conventionally structured record could certainly have been not only conceived but largely tracked by around December 1966.

what a great thread--I still have a ton of backreading to do, but I just want to throw my 2 cents in while it's on my mind.  

i think folks are sometimes too quick to dismiss the "Dada = Water Element" theory as a post hoc rationalization. the two songs that we know were tied to the Elements in 66-67 (Fire [obv] and Vega-tables [per FH's caption in the booklet]) both vividly evoked the element they represented: the crinkling fire OD and the Boys chomping away on those earth-grown veggies aren't exactly subtle nods. Wind Chimes as Air is less explicit (i.e., there's no gusts of wind in the background), but i think Brian's switch from the harpsichord to the marimbas--which sound exacly like windchimes--suggests a conscious intention to make it sound like the wind itself should be listed on the tune's AFM contract. and, as has been said before, the piano tag sounds like wind chimes sprung to life.

so what song evokes Water to the same extent? i don't think we can disregard the fact that by June 7--just a couple weeks after the final Dada session on May 18--the Boys are singing some unabashedly water-based vocals on Cool Cool Water version 1 (track 14 on TSS disc 4). keeping in mind the way Brian was beginning to strip down the SMiLE versions of Vegatables, Wind Chimes, Wonderful, etc. for Smiley Smile around that time, i have have a hard time defining Dada and CCW as two different songs, like All Dressed Up and Marcella or something.. rather, CCW (particularly v1) sounds to me like a pretty clear attempt at a Smiley Smile version of what a finished Dada would have been. throw some "drip drip drip drips" and other watery vocals on top of Dada (like I think Brian was planning to do), and you've got yourself an evocative Water Element that fits nicely with the crinkling Fire, chomping Veggies, and tinkling wind chime marimbas.  for the record, i wish BWPS had gone this route instead of creating In Blue Hawaii.

anyway, off to read the rest of the thread and see why this theory is either completely wrong or incredibly old news.

I think it's pretty clear in the tone of the article that the reason for the chicken/tennis shoe quote is to show how silly Brian's whims are to the observer, and also to show how the album is rapidly and constantly developing.  There is nothing to suggest that the idea was at all a serious part of the album.  Between that quote and the bit in IJWMFTT, the only thing that's obvious is that Brian wanted to evoke a comical take on farm life.  The chicken film I never took seriously.  I always read that quote as a sign that he really didn't know what he was doing and was too busy getting hooked on silly ideas to develop the good work he'd already done.

As it happens, that's a complete misreading of the article, which was actually written by Vosse in collusion with Brian - some of its contents were consciously designed as put ons by the boys. The chicken film might have been one of those; but regardless I don't see how you could possibly use that particular example to demonstrate "he really didn't know what he was doing". And if, as I have said ad infinitum, there is every evidence that Barnyard was part of Heroes in November when the article was written, and it had already been cited in the press as the single, then why wouldn't Brian be considering ideas for a promotional film?

I personally think these side projects are a distraction to us fans as to what was going on with the album. Brian may not have taken those side projects too seriously but the album and the singles were Brian's main business and he made it clear during Pet Sounds and SMiLE that he took them very serious and he spent a lot of time thinking out what he wanted to do and then he did it. He showed up prepared. Even if he decided to make changes, they were thought out first, and then he went to the studio and did it. And he identified what he intended as he did it and made changes. I just don't think the album's or single's ends were as loose as sometimes thought.

Hi, hope no one will mind if I bump my own thread, but have been sick the last couple of days.

Good thoughts, Egon, but one point to make:

"so what song evokes Water to the same extent? i don't think we can disregard the fact that by June 7--just a couple weeks after the final Dada session on May 18--the Boys are singing some unabashedly water-based vocals on Cool Cool Water version 1 (track 14 on TSS disc 4)."

Sure, but I think one of the cases I've been making in this thread (and the others including Cam have made before me) is that SMiLE really is over by the Veggies single sessions in April, so if that's true the May Dada sessions don't fit chronologically into that schema. On the other hand, since we have the December Da Da tracking sessions, maybe the idea was in mind for "Water" before the album began imploding. I still reckon Frank Holmes points the finger at Surf's Up!

Also, have just been going through the sessionography and realized I made a significant error above, claiming Heroes never saw vocals recorded in '66. Of course it did - four sessions in late December, though two of them ("Insert Overdubs") only featured Brian. The book seems to speculate the vocals heard on the "Cantina" version are from these sessions.

I think it is interesting to note that for any vocal session done at Columbia with the 8-track, a mix of the instrumental track had to be made unless they were taking the 4 tracks (of the 4-track tape) and transferring them individually onto 4 tracks of the 8 track tape. During the Pet Sounds sessions it appears that Brian's MO was to mix down the music to one or two tracks for transfer to the 8-track in order to save as much space as possible for vocals. If this was the case with Smile, he would have had to make fairly final mixes of the music for all songs that received a Columbia 8-track overdub session. It is possible that Brian could have been tracking vocals over the separate modular units before they were edited together (for example, he could have done the vocals for the verse of Cabin Essence and then the vocals for the chorus of Cabin Essence without needing to edit the two pieces of music together ahead of time). But, in the case of Good Vibrations, he did track the vocals over a fairly complete mix of the instrumental track. If the vocals overlapped to sections of music to be edited later, it would have been very hard (if not impossible) to pull off the edit without it cutting off the last part of the vocals on the out-going section of the song. Listen to how the end of the first chorus of GV transitions into the second verse. The chorus vocals blend behind the start of the verse lead vocal. This sort of cross-fade would have been impossible to do with standard tape editing. In this case, chorus vocals and the lead had to have been recorded on different tracks over the SAME master mix of the music track.

This said, it make me wonder how many (fairly) final instrumental track mixes had to have been made for these songs that had vocal work done on them at Columbia. Also, I wonder if some of the Columbia vocal sessions were done on 4-track tape? Maybe everything that went to Columbia didn't get bounced up to the 8-track machine.

A very interesting point came up when we were discussing a silent film of Brian mixing with Chuck Britz at Western - the film with Brian wearing the firehat as he's sitting at the console (The thread is still on this board, it was in the past year):

Brian and Chuck were mixing with an 8-track machine at Western in that film, and by some clues in the film, it was shot sometime in the fall of 1966. This kind of threw a wrench in the accepted knowledge that when Brian needed those extra tracks free for vocals, that was done at Columbia. Maybe that was true for 1965 going into the Pet Sounds sessions, but they're clearly shown with an 8-track machine at Western during the fall '66 Smile sessions.

That would almost remove the necessity of going to Columbia to track vocals every time, then have to bounce in order to mix, etc...all the inner workings we heard about from Pet Sounds. So it just adds another layer and more questions. I'd still really like to figure out what track they're working on with Chuck at Western in the film, with 8 tracks, because all the Beach Boys and Van Dyke are there (suggesting it could be a vocal session or a final mix).

Up to the point of seeing the film, I assumed all 8-track work was done at Columbia.

I will try to track down that thread about the firehat film.
There is a track on the box set (Disc 2, track 5) which I thought had an error in the documentation. It says that I'm In Great Shape (recorded 10/27/66) was done at Western on 8-track tape. I figured it was just an error (there are a few on the big info pages, though in general its an incredible piece of research). But maybe it isn't an error? Still, if Western had an 8-track in late 1966 then why is everything done at Western (except possibly this IIGS session) done on 4-track? One would think BW wouldn't go to all the hassle of transferring everything to 8-track and going to Columbia if he could use the 8-track at Western. There aren't many vocal sessions done at Western, and all of them (according to the Box set notes) were done on 4-track. If Western had an 8-track, would BW have only used it once in the whole Smile era? Very mysterious--but hey, this is Smile we are talking about. Everything must be strange and mysterious.

Without having seen the film, I wonder if what people are seeing is an 8 channel mixing board. It would be completely reasonable to have an 8 channel board but only a 4-track machine. But coming from you (guitarfool), I am inclined to believe what you say. You seem to know what you are talking about when it comes to gear. You blew me away with the info you had on the moog ribbon controller specially built for the BBs.

Here is a link to page 2 of the thread in question: http://smileysmile.net/board/index.php/topic,10570.25.html (http://smileysmile.net/board/index.php/topic,10570.25.html)

And here are two photos from that thread showing two different sessions at Western - with Chuck and Van Dyke present - where the same 8-track machine can be seen at Western:
(http://i115.photobucket.com/albums/n295/guitarfool2002/brianfilm1.jpg)
(http://i115.photobucket.com/albums/n295/guitarfool2002/brian200.jpg)


I'm not trying to take the original thread too far off topic with these photos, but since they were mentioned it would be good to get some more eyes on them and try to get some more info. Short of re-reading the full thread we had going on this, I don't know if any hard evidence or definite answers were ever found...and I think the photo of an 8-track at Western, during Smile, is something of a game-changer...wherever it leads, if anywhere at all, may be worth another look and may add to the topic of this thread.

The accepted theory was that Brian did vocals at Columbia because they had 8 tracks - as much as that was said as the Pet Sounds Sessions set was released. When/how/why did Brian get access to that 8-track at Western, and did it play a role somehow in how he recorded Smile? It seems vocals were still being recorded at Columbia, as yet another film shows, and tracking more at Western - again, another film proves this.

I was still guessing the Western 8-track at that time ('66) was for Brian to *mix* with Chuck at Western without all the hassles, not only of having to bounce tracks but also of having to follow stricter rules at Columbia, as Western was an independent studio. But from the "Great Shape" example, they tracked with it, too...interesting.

Thanks guitarfool. I read the whole thread. Very interesting. It seems like we never came to a complete conclusion about the mystery 8-track appearing in two different photos (from different sessions) from Western. It sure does look like and 8-track. But all the evidence goes against an 8-track at Western. Unless BW just liked the sound of Columbia for vocals, it seems very strange that he wouldn't have just stayed at Western and used their 8-track at least SOME of the time. But the very well researched documentation in the book from the Smile box set (except for one place which very well could be an error) shows no evidence at all of an 8-track at Western. Everything is done on 1/2" tape, and over and over the notes mentioned that the tape was transferred to 8-track for vocals. If Western had an 8-track, it would be very strange for them to use the 4-track for the instruments and then sub mix that and transfer it to the 8-track machine in the same control room. In the photo dated 1/6/67 the mystery 8-track is in the same spot in the control room. It is possible that they rented it two separate times and put it in the same spot both times, but it seems fishy.  It sure looks like 1" tape and there are 8 pre-amps. I don't know what to think. It's baffling.

The one session that is an anomaly in the box set book is CD2, Track 5. Heroes and Villains I'm In Great Shape (10/27/66). It says "recorded on 1" 8-track tape." I'm inclined to think this is an error. Either the session was at Columbia or the recording was on 4-track.

There is the rub: Saying there is no evidence of an 8-track at Western is directly contradicted and disputed by two photos of two separate Western sessions where Brian and Chuck Britz are working with an eight track. It makes it very confusing! Just to clarify, that is without a doubt an 8-track machine: Other camera angles show it more clear, there is no doubt what it is at this point. The question is how and when did it show up there and what were they doing with it in the photos?

I'd say the myth of Western not having an 8-track around this time has been busted by those two photos. I've had and known the photo of Brian with Chuck wearing the red shirt for years, but it took some detective work on the silent film to realize both photos are showing the same 8-track machine. That was a big discovery in the saga.

At some point there was an interview with Chuck Britz where he mentioned to Brian why the vocals were not being cut at Western, why Columbia was instead getting the bookings over Western. If someone remembers that, it could be clarified even more, but I think at this particular time Brian liked the vocal sound at Columbia over the other studios, not to mention the availability of 8-tracks *depending on when Chuck said this to Brian*. And it's easy to infer he liked to mix at Western because Chuck let him work the board more openly than a union studio like Columbia where he didn't have that luxury.

Was the machine brought to Western specifically for Brian to mix the vocal tracks he had cut at Columbia? Was it brought in so he could not only mix but also *record* at Western using 8-tracks?

***Remember, one key element of the silent film at Western was that the Beach Boys and Van Dyke were at the studio that day. With that, we could assume it was a vocal session of some kind...why else would they be there and why would Van Dyke be there as well?

I wish some of this issue was addressed in the box set, I can't recall if the film's mysteries were discussed before or after the set had already been put together or not.

Adding this on to the original post: In the film you can see all 8 needles on the meters moving as the tape is being played back, so there were 8 tracks on that tape. It's proof they were working with 8 tracks in that film, whatever track it was they were working on that day.

There's also the possibility that Brian had nothing to do with the 8-track machine being brought to Western. I raise that possibility because he wasn't the only one to use it. Frank Sinatra recorded "That's Life" on Western's 8-track on Oct. 18, 1966. I don't know if that was the first 8-track session at the studio, but it does allow us to say that the machine definitely was there by that date.

That's a good point, and again it leaves a few questions unanswered from the previous thread. Looking through United/Western's literature, you might get the impression they didn't upgrade across the board to 8-track until some time in 1967. Photos from that time show different machines in use, like 3M 8-tracks, but not the one in the Brian-Chuck photos. And we know Wally Heider was making a good income renting 8-track machines to studios which didn't yet have them installed.

This will be answered hopefully, it's just confusing as anything when trying to pin down the dates of all this. And what that tape machine shown with Brian actually was or who owned it.

I know I’m a little late to the party, but what a fantastic thread!  It really goes to show you how far our understanding of SMiLE has come from the dark ages of 90’s (Link tracks?  Forgetaboutit!).  I find HB’s core thesis to be pretty convincing—that the project was buzzing along nicely in the fall, getting nearer to completion than we might have previously suspected and then things quickly go awry in December. 

Now, I wouldn’t want to go too far here because even leaving aside the major question marks of IIGS and the Elements, there are still other gray areas:  What about Child, which apparently had no finished lyrics or lead vocal line?  Yes, we know the basic structure, but it still remains hauntingly incomplete.  The same could be said of Worms.  We know what Brian did with the verses in 2003 and we have that small vocal fragment now from the sessions, though I’m not entirely convinced that this is how it would have turned out back then. 

And then we have the two potential singles, H&V and V-T.  Yes, there were early versions from October, but I’m not sure how well these prototypes would have worked on a finished album.  The V-T demo is great as far as it goes, but it feels like it’s missing something at the end and ultimately Brian needed to bring in something else to complete it (which might lead one to believe that this would have originally been stitched into a larger Elemental suite, but then why was it broken out on the track listing?).  And while the musical comedy idea behind H&V Mach I is tantalizing, that disjointed early structure was never going to fly as a single.  What’s striking about so many of the SMiLE tracks is the almost complete absence of traditional choruses and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if someone (maybe Mike or Carl) brought this to Brian’s attention as the focus shifted over to the lead singles heading into the new year.  He ultimately had to draft in other bits to complete the songs and this is what led to some of the cannibalization we saw in ‘67.  Actually, I guess this was first done with Iron Horse in Cabinessence, then Do A Lot for V-T and Bicycle Rider for H&V.

It’s hard not to look at the timeline there, along with the comments from people like Vosse and Siegel, and draw the conclusion that some of the negative reactions on the part of the Boys, the difficulties that apparently arose in those December vocal sessions, rattled Brian a bit, planting the seeds of doubt in his mind (All that hash probably didn’t help either!).  Suddenly, his euphoric trip started turning into a heavy bummer.  I’m really not trying to point the finger at anyone and honestly, I could see how such questions might arise when only Brian understood how all the pieces would likely fit together (and not even then sometimes!).  As has been mentioned, I think the point about performing these songs live would have been pretty significant for the band and in fact, Carl later mentioned that as a major concern for Mike.  It is striking how quickly Brian’s enthusiasm from the fall curdled, but the growing tension within the band, pressure from the label to deliver a sellable product and yes, maybe even the Murry factor probably all played a part.  On the surface, Brian came across as a very confident guy who knew what he wanted in the studio, but he also had a lot of insecurities underneath.  He wanted to please people and he might have felt hurt those around him didn’t seem to get what he was going for.  I suppose this is ultimately what led to him scrapping the entire thing and starting over again with Smiley Smile, though it surely would have been easier to salvage at least a few more of the spare parts from the original sessions—maybe he just couldn’t bear the thought of releasing something that was so special to him, particularly a song like Surf’s Up, only to have it be rejected or misunderstood.  Maybe the relatively lukewarm response to Pet Sounds served as a warning sign here.  I remember reading a little quote of his from the late 60’s (I believe) with reference to SMiLE where he said something like, sometimes you just do a little piece of music for yourself, not to be shared.  It was almost like, hey, you don’t get my genius?  Fine, I’ll keep it to myself.  (Pure speculation on my part, I know!)

Looking at all of this, I’m often reminded of the similar struggles that Pete Townshend faced with his ambitious Lifehouse project.  He kept trying to explain the idea to others, but somehow it just wasn’t coming across and their early attempts to perform the new material in front of a live audience didn’t catch fire like he’d hoped.  Ultimately, they did use most of the key scraps from Lifehouse on Who’s Next, which proved to be their most successful album.  I often wonder how things might have turned out if Beach Boys taken a similar approach in ’67—I imagine it would have been less baffling than Smiley Smile.

I just noticed a second instance where the Smile Session box set book says that 8-track recording was done at Western. In the session info for Wind Chines (disc 4, track 6) it says "recorded on 1" 8-track tape & later transferred to 1/2" 4-track tape for vocals." Like the entry for I'm In Great Shape (disc 2, track 5), I am thinking this is just a typographical error. Why would you dub an 8 track back down to a 4-track for vocals at Columbia? It seems like the reverse of the usual MO.

A return from the dead for this old thread just to say I've finally put together a '66 mix of SMiLE. It's a 12 track, 35-minute version of the LP as it may have been completed in the window between the December Capital Memo and whatever happened to lead to Brian's sudden exclusive focus on the singles in January, using (almost) exclusively material recorded in 1966.

I think it's a revealing and rewarding listen; if any of the contributors to this thread would like to give it a listen, please PM for a link.