Smiley Smile

[the captain]

A bit like Charles Ives, in fact.

Except way, way, way, way, way worse.

[Menace Wilson]

5 big ones from me.

After many years of ignorantly dismissing the BBs as simply a "surf" group, I took a chance one day and purchased Pet Sounds and the Smiley Smile/Wild Honey twofer at a 50% off clearance sale.  That day was the major turning point in my musical life.  I thought, "Any group that can record Pet Sounds, then turn around and do this...deserves some serious investigation!"  I wasn't aware of the whole story with Smile at that point, so I just accepted Smiley Smile at face value.  From the start, I thought it was a weird, beautiful, earthy, creepy masterpiece. 

Heroes And Villains- I love the rumbling bass organ in the choruses...brings to mind a gothic cathedral, and sets the tone for the creepiness to follow.  Love the dry, fragile, harmonized vocal parts.  To me, this is a very underrated rendition of H&V.

Vegetables- Rhythm section consisting of a badly played bass guitar (with flubbed notes left in) and a jug!  This is not your mother’s Beach Boys.  Great sound effects.  The last couple of sections/modules are gorgeous. 

Fall Breaks And Back To Winter- One of my favorite tracks on the album.  Brian Wilson as the phantom of the friggin’ opera.  Super weird.  Love the croaking vocals (?), the freaked out percussion, the woody woodpecker bits, and that omnipresent organ!  Love it more than Mrs. O'Leary's Cow.   

She’s Going Bald- Like this much better than He Gives Speeches.  That’s some janky old school pitch shifting towards the middle!  The boys are trying to be funny, but it's too late...the worm has turned.   

Little Pad- I put this on a comp that my wife and I listened to while on honeymoon in Hawaii, alongside Martin Denny, etc.  The hummed vocals and slide guitar are beautiful.  It’s like there are ghosts in this recording.

Good Vibrations- Greatness, of course.

With Me Tonight- My hands down favorite of the album.  There’s something so beautiful about this song that it gives me goose bumps.  After listening to the session tapes from Unsurpassed Masters, I realized that the “GOOD” bit was actually shifted over a bit so that it landed on the beat.  An edit, not an accident.  Fantastic.  And again, the organ blows my mind.       

Wind Chimes- Like bachelor pad music for Dr. Phibes to relax to.  Gotta wonder whether Wilson realized how creepy this stuff was getting.  The jarring SPLATTT!!! that happens late in the song definitely suggests that there is some heavy psychological drama at play here, that Wilson is deliberately f-ing up his own creations.   

Getting Hungry- Maybe others could have written a song like this, but nobody else could have delivered it the way this is delivered.  Think about the creative choices going on in this track.  Listen to the bit where it all comes to a halt, and then a slowed down voice sings “I’m getting hungry, hungry for…” and then a super high falsetto Brian comes in and finishes the line “MYYYY kind of woman!”  No surprise at all to find out that Syd Barrett was a big fan.   

Wonderful- Sounds like the song itself has been corrupted, soured.  A musical genius self destructing…repellant and thrilling at once.  It’s like Wilson is channeling the id of the southern California sunshine pop scene, forecasting the unpleasantness that would come in the following years. 

Whistle In- Another track that sounds like it was recorded deep in the dead of night.  After the fade the listener is left to wonder what the hell just happened.

Listened to it as I was typing this.  What a friggin amazing album.

[SmileySam]

I'm not sure what to think of Smiley Smile....One thing is for sure...its their most NEATEST album. A couple of things I could do without would be the increasingly higher-pitched harmonies on 'She's Goin' Bald'. The first time I heard it, I didn't know what the hell to do or where the hell this was going for that matter. Another thing I dislike is at the beginning of 'Little Pad', there is laughing over decent backing vocals. Other than those 2 things, I think its a very interesting album and is enjoyable to listen to.

[Aegir]

The things you complained about are some of my favorite elements of those songs.

[SmileySam]

Love the harmonies on 'With Me Tonight'

[sleeptalk]

i think this record absolutely sucks. talk about failed potential...

[Don_Zabu]

I gotta ask: if the other Beach Boys thought Smile was too strange to unleash on the world, why was this okay to release?

[LetHimRun]

In my playlists, I like to take out Good Vibrations and Heroes and place them in line for when they came out as singles (You're Welcome is apart of that for Heroes), so I use tracks 2-5 and 7-11 as "Smiley Smile." Going by that, I give it a 4. It still has some of the great moments from SMiLE, though some are diluted, but are still very good. Only a couple of places in it make me sit on the fence, but I can usually put up with those short instances and enjoy the album.

[elchriso]

I gotta ask: if the other Beach Boys thought Smile was too strange to unleash on the world, why was this okay to release?

Probably just got so fed up with a year's worth of recording sessions they just said "screw it" and recorded what they could with what was left of Brian's mind at that point as quickly as possible

[Don_Zabu]

What's interesting to me about this album is that, even though the writing is sub-par and weird as hell, it still features harmonies of the Beach Boys still at their vocal prime. Makes for an intriguing combination, to say the least.

[SmileySam]

It's one of those albums that are in desperate need of a good bath in remastering. Same with Wild Honey.

[Paulos]

It's one of those albums that are in desperate need of a good bath in remastering. Same with Wild Honey.

Count Today! in for the remastering process, sounds so muddy at times its no wonder that 7 of the albums songs have had new stereo remixes done.

[rab2591]

It's one of those albums that are in desperate need of a good bath in remastering. Same with Wild Honey.

Ooooh! I would LOOOOVE to see a remaster of 'Wild Honey'....

I think a proper mono remastered 'Surfer Girl' album would be great too!

[hypehat]

   

Wind Chimes- Like bachelor pad music for Dr. Phibes to relax to.  Gotta wonder whether Wilson realized how creepy this stuff was getting.  The jarring SPLATTT!!! that happens late in the song definitely suggests that there is some heavy psychological drama at play here, that Wilson is deliberately f-ing up his own creations.   

See, having listened to the SOT sessions of this tune, the fact that Brian seems to have put the 'jarring splatt' to cover up a certain.... eff up of sorts makes it all the better.

I love Smiley Smile. A beautiful record, in all it's oddity.

[RadBooley]

Please don't hate me for saying this but I've never really been able to like Smiley Smile all that much. I suppose it's just a matter of me listening to BWPS and many other SMiLE bootlegs for a solid 6 months or so before I finally gave Smiley a shot. Listening to the lush arrangements of the SMiLE tracks makes it sort of hard to appreciate the bare, low-fidelity versions in Smiley Smile all that much. Good Vibrations feels totally out of place in the album and Heroes and Villains doesn't seem to fit in very well with the rest of the material either.

I understand why this album came out but it doesn't make it any easier for me to listen to. 

[ukulelejesus]

I'd sort of given it a surface listen ebfore. Really giving it a thorough examination for the first time now.

Jesus Christ I can't believe someone let Brian record this.

That's what I usually think about a good Brian Wilson album.

[ukulelejesus]

This album is straight up Lovecraftian.

You can't rate it or any individual song except Good Vibrations with proper numbers that only have one value. You'd need some kind of non-euclidian compound meta-variables or some merda to put a rating on it. I heard this AFTER BWPS and even after SMiLE sessions and mixes so I'm familiar with all the sounds first. Holy merda, it's the thing that should not be. It's beautiful and messy and shitty and deliberately self sabatoging, decrepit, angellic, hilarious, evil, creepy, unpleasant thing. Everything you can say makes it good equally makes it bad. It's nothing at all. You can't listen to it without getting it. If you can't get it, which may not be your fault, it may be Brian's for being intentionally awful and alienating, if you can't get it it's clearly horrible, and legitimately so. If you can get it it's the most amazing thing. I wonder what it owuld have been like back in the days if you had heard Pet Sound, didn't follow the news and didn't know much ro anything about Smile, and then heard this.

It can't be evaluated because it's some formless ever shifting formless nameless thing.

I don't get how anyone can call this album half baked, because the mixing board was fucking high by the time they were done.

[Cam Mott]

I never much liked SS until I got to hear the raw tapes. The final mix leaves me cold for some reason.

[hypehat]

I don't get how anyone can call this album half baked, because the mixing board was friggin' high by the time they were done.

This should go on the sticker of the inevitable 50th anniversary reissues... 

[Dr. Tim]

I heard this for the first time when it came out, as a young sprog knowing nothing of the recent tortured history of the band at that point.  It was billed as hippy-dippy-trippy, and who was I to say different?  That's how I listened to it for decades.  I loved the stoned humor of it all.

It doesn't need another remastering.  Mark Linnett did what he could with the HDCD version a ways back and I'm not sure it can be improved much.  It just sounds like that.  A stereo mix of the multi-tracks, stripping off all the old tape noise, would be a fascinating listen (suggested by someone above - Cam maybe?).  But no one will put it out, as no one would buy it besides me.  The "Hawthorne" "Vegetables" suggests what it might sound like.

Playing it recently, though, I must agree with uke's "Lovecraftian" tag to descrbe the effect of this LP all these years later.  From which follows my agreement with Cam that the whole thing sounds a bit cold -  especially now with my "studio ears"  I can hear the tape edits and other tell-tale signs of how it was put together at the time.

[Dunderhead]

I have a vague understanding that smiley smile can never appear in stereo, Vegetables and Heroes and Villains being the two exceptions. It's been discussed many times that Good Vibrations vocal tapes were lost/destroyed. The way i've herd it is that all the vocals were actually done during the final mixdown of the album, meaning there are no vocal tapes for any of the songs. Vegetables being the exception as you can see on agd's site it was the only song recorded anywhere besides Brian's home studio, with vocal sessions being done June 3rd at Sound Recorders.

[branaa09]

Actually, Vegetables and Heroes and Villians were remixed in Stereo for the Hawthorne Legacy Set. As for Good Vibrations, the 8-Track Tape for the vocals is lost. The vocals weren't done during the Final Mono Mixdown. If you listen to The Carl Wilson Coda on Disc 2 of the Hawthorne set, you can hear a little snippet of the only available real Stereo Vocals. The "Ahhhh" part. It's kind of like a teaser, leaving you more of a feeling of how it would sound in Stereo. The Instrumental Sessions exist, but that's it unfortunately.

[Myk Luhv]

How in the hell do you manage to lose something so important like the vocal session tapes for "Good Vibrations" in the first place? goshdarn.

[Dunderhead]

Actually, Vegetables and Heroes and Villians were remixed in Stereo for the Hawthorne Legacy Set. As for Good Vibrations, the 8-Track Tape for the vocals is lost. The vocals weren't done during the Final Mono Mixdown. If you listen to The Carl Wilson Coda on Disc 2 of the Hawthorne set, you can hear a little snippet of the only available real Stereo Vocals. The "Ahhhh" part. It's kind of like a teaser, leaving you more of a feeling of how it would sound in Stereo. The Instrumental Sessions exist, but that's it unfortunately.

yeah that's what I was getting at. All of the songs (besides Vegetables, Heroes, and Good Vibrations) had their vocals recorded during the final mixdown. The way I understand it that session was held during an all-nighter at Wally Heider's studio and all the vocals were added then meaning there are no multitrack tapes for any vocals besides those done for Vegetables and Heroes.

[hypehat]

How in the hell do you manage to lose something so important like the vocal session tapes for "Good Vibrations" in the first place? goshdarn.

The story goes, they were recorded at Columbia* studios, and thus stored where Columbia stored all their tapes - in a disused cinema in LA, apparently without much rhyme or reason. Sometime between 1966 and 1970, the building became full and they decided to just chuck out everything - I seem to recall they weren't too concerned about BB's tapes because of the poor sales they were making at the time... It's heartbreaking.

*Sure I don't mean Capitol? I mean, I thought Brian didn't like recording there, but I've got a little nagging thing which tells me I'm wrong...