The Smiley Smile Message Board

I'm sure this is already a topic in the sea of threads, but my search was to no avail. Sorry if it is.

Anyways, I've been listening to Little Deuce Coupe a lot, and noticed Brian rehashing melodies, like the connection between "You Remember?" and "Gee", and "Girls On The Beach" and "Surfer Girl". Where else did he do these sorts of things?

Pamela Jean/Car Crazy Cutie. Land Ahoy/Cherry Cherry Coupe. South Bay Surfer/Surfin' Down The Swanee River. Those are just the easiest examples. I am sure other folks will have much more to add to the list.

Great!
Thank you!

If I understand the OP's question correctly The melody line from God Only Knows ("The world could show nothing to me") is quoted in the Smiley version of Wonderful.

Something like 'All Dressed Up For School/I Just Got My Pay/Marcella'.

Extremely obvious one - Thinkin' Bout You Baby/Darlin'

Not quite. You mean the bit before the nonsense bridge, right? Incidentally, the nonsense bridge is Heroes & Villains chorus and Fade To Vega-Tables is, though! (Have a look on the tape box photos in the TSS booklet - the Fade is noted as being so!)

Yeah the bit just before it goes into the Heroes & Villains motif. At 1:08 and again at  2:10 where they sing "na-na-na-na-na-na-na" is a note-for-note quote of "The world could show nothing to me". Or was your "not quite" comment referencing that I misunderstand the OP; which altogether likely.

Can't believe I forgot about those ones.

 Ok. Dopey me. I guess "rehash" means a rewrite.  :-[

'Shortenin' Bread' --> 'Walkin' The Line', parts of 'Goin' Home' and 'Too Much Sugar'

A couple from Imagination

"How could I have left you alone" from Cry comes from one of the Sweet Insanity songs

Happy Days - My solution

County Fair -> I Do?

Nice one.

Mrs. O'Leary's Cow ---> Fall Breaks

There is a lot of SMiLE that follows a I-IV progression, including a lot of Heroes and Villains, Who Ran the Iron Horse, Wind Chimes, Child is Father of The Man, Do You Like Worms, Vega-Tables, Barnyard, and I'm sure others (that's just what I can remember). 

You say rehash, I say re-hashish.   :lol

No no, I was saying I disagree that that's the GOK melody. If it was, it'd be a perfect one for the thread.

After The Game/Summer Means New Love

Trombone Dixie ----> Had To Phone Ya

He Gives Speeches ---> She's Goin' Bald.

I just reexamined that portion and it would appear that it is actually a contraction of the two phrases from GOK. Still I would definitely consider it as a quote. Maybe it's a stretch but it resonates with me.

the na-na-na part from Wonderful reminds me of Pomp and Circumstance and i wonder if it was intentional.

Ok maybe I am thinking too hard (or not hard enough).  :p

Absolutely. Nothing "God only knows". Until now I never even heard anybody believing that it is GOK's melody line. The way Brian sings it makes it obvious that it has nothing to do with GOK and everything with  Edward Elgar

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_doAV8bx0xg

Jokey, early version of 'Little Saint Nick' --> 'Drive In'. Or the other way around...

Speaking of, 'Little Deuce Coupe' --> 'Little Saint Nick', I'd say.

South American --> The Private Life Of Bill And Sue

Can someone PLEASE explain this one to me? I've never heard the similarity between these two tracks. And don't just say 'X said so', if Had To Phone Ya is Brian rewriting Trombone Dixie he ended up changing almost everything about it.

The melody of the bassline is the key between 'Trombone Dixie' and 'Had To Phone Ya', as well as some horn lines.

It took me ages and ages to hear it. Alas, I have nothing to show you to prove the case ;( anyone else?

CIFOTM >> Little Bird

Really? Never heard that before.

A lot of Smile (and thus Smiley Smile) is like that. Chalk it up to like 3/4 of the album stemming from being "Heroes And Villains" sections. "Heroes", "Vega-Tables" (both the verse and the fade), "With Me Tonight" (there's a version that uses the backing vocal arrangement from the verse of "Vega-Tables"), etc. etc. etc. etc. (although some people go too far trying to find similarities. imo.)

Also, roughly the same are "All Dressed Up For School" beginning -> "Heroes" section (the one after the 2nd chorus of the TSS edit), can't remember the proper name for it -> "Goin' On" beginning.

Sarcasm? Relisten to Little Bird and see if you can spot it. Once you hear it, you'll know - and you'll never unhear it!

"Loop de loop/sail plane song" and "daddy's little girl"...

Surprising nobody's brought up "My Solution" to "Happy Days" yet. Where Brian borrowing the general feel of other folks' records is concerned....is it just me or does "Isn't It Time" bear a kinship to "What A Fool Believes" with which Brian has long had a love/fear relationship?

Are you referring to the "na na na" harmonies sounding like the piano melody? I'm lost, sorry. My ears must not be working today.

No. It starts in the part where the group vocals come in...."little bird up in a tree, came down and sang a song to me"....There's the same horn line and drum pattern, EXACTLY, as in Child.

Do You Like Worms >> Little Pad

Love to Say Dada >> Cool, Cool Water

Vegetables >> Mama Says

Windchimes --> Can't Wait Too Long

Ooh.. you're right. Jesus, I must be deaf. Good find.

I heard that Brian had  hand in writing this song. I wonder if he wrote that section, or Dennis.

Yeah, it gets a little silly trying to find similarity - people going, 'wow, descending notes must mean Rio Grande is a rewrite of that H&V intro' seems a bit strong, but I pointed that one out mostly for the tape box thing.

Wasn't there a mash-up of these songs on Youtube? That was revealing for me at least.

I already followed up my post with a correction. It is a contraction of both the "The world can show nothing to me" (which was E-D#-E-F#-A-B-C) and the "So what good would living do me?" line (E-D#-E-G#-C#-D#-E); or "The world can show-living do me" (E-D#-E-F#-C#-D#-E). But yeah, I accept that it is prolly a stretch.  ;D

Good stuff here...pardon me if this one's already been mentioned and I missed it while scanning quickly...

Got My Pay > Marcella

And here is one that I don't think anyone else has ever mentioned before...

You Need A Mess of Help to Stand Alone > It's OK

If you listen to a couple times back-to-back, it's possible that it will become clear that the "Mess of Help" melody and song structure has been streamlined (a nicer way of saying "dumbed down"...), and the second half of the verse in "Mess" has been swapped into a bridge-chorus ("Gotta go to it, gotta go thru it"). You can also sing the "She don't know a thing" tag right over the "Find a ride" tag.

It seems as though Brian said to himself, "WTF, I can rewrite this funky one-off and turn it into something that sounds more like the Beach Boys"...

Better Get Back In Bed>Lazy Lizzie

Don't know why this one persists, as well as saying "Worms" became "Whistle In". There's a rhythmic similarity, but not much else, which isn't especially strong evidence. You'd almost have a better case for saying the guitar solo of "Santa's Beard" became the bridge of "Worms" or something.

Anyway, the mashups that people have done for the two songs should show how awful they sound together and how they likely have nothing to do wth one another.

"Little Pad" derives, in part, from the unreleased Smiley Smile outtake "Hawaiian Song".

As for "Worms"-"Whistle", I'd say more than a rhythmic similarity: the vocal melody -"wahaala lu lei/remember the day" et seq - is pretty much identical.

A riff tree might go like this:

Honda 55 -> All Dressed Up For School -> Heroes & Villains -> Goin' On
                             └>I Just Got My Pay -> Marcella

Actually, I hear it as

'Love to Say Da Da' ---> 'Whistle In'

Horn lines behind "Little bird up in a tree" after the middle eight. Brian's contribution to the arrangement.

Not really, though. The repeating melody in "Worms" is two notes and five syllables, where as the repeating melody in "Whistle In" ascends, consists of five notes, and has six syllables. The "Keeny wok a poo lah" and "all day, all through the night" parts don't really have anything in common.

Even if you transpose one to the same key as the other, the melodies don't match up - I think only the first note is shared. I'd really chalk this one up to minor coincidence rather than Brian reusing something.

Not many people are reading other people's posts in this thread.  :police:

Speaking of "Happy Days," the opening piano riff was stolen from "Holidays."

I don't understand how things like this happen. Not to further claim Brian isn't in the driver's seat with his own music, but given things we know (wasn't it Darian's idea to bring back the chant that opens "Morning Beat", or insert "Can't Wait Too Long" onto TLOS?), it feels like some songs come about due to Brian's folks digging through his back catalog looking for ideas he can use. I know Brian was known even in the 60s and 70s to pilfer old ideas years after they first came about, but some (definitely not all) of the recent examples seem a little off.

I just can't picture Brian suddenly saying, "I'm gonna bring back 'My Solution' with confessional lyrics about the struggles I've had in my life! And throw a terrible rendition of a piano bit from a Smile piece in the beginning for good measure!" I could be totally wrong, and obviously he went with it either way, but it just doesn't seem like an idear born in his head alone.

"My Solution" was a lot of fun, Brian surely recognizes this, but "Happy Days" is... well, it's definitely not a lot of fun. The end result is just so bad. The ridiculous intro (with non-ridiculous origin) which I can't, for the life of me, understand why it opens the song, the zombie children backup vocals, the "let's change Brian's 'My Solution' rant into it sounding like the voices in his head or something" vocal way in the back of the verse (what the f*** is that guy even saying?), the totally wretched saxophone honking in the verse, and then there's the whole "I'm happy and recovered now except not really" aspect of the lyrics.

I often wonder if Joe Thomas had more input into those two songs than Brian did.

Trombone Dixie > Love To Say Da Da > Had To Phone Ya

As for Wonderful/GOK -- no. Easy mistake to make, but mistake none the less. Not at all the same thing.

We know that Bill & Sue is Brian's verse and Joe's chorus, if that's a help.

Another one from Imagination (and hopefully, someone will read this post, not like my reference to "My solution")

The chord pattern from the "Your imagination" (those suspensions around the I chord) verses are lifted from the then-unreleased "Rainbow eyes"

I never noticed that! That's silly.

To be fair, Your Imagination has the most cliched chord sequence known to man. I could say it's actually a rewrite of Forever's verse, y'know. Also, don't think Rainbow Eyes has the descending bassline?

 :lol :lol :lol

my thoughts exactly, when I read the whole of it...

You are talking about the whole chord sequence, with the descending bassline, the same used on Forever and Love and Mercy (and Everyone's in love with you, amongs hundreds of them). Actually, I was thinking about how he plays with the first chord of the verses, which is also the key chord.

I have always heard the origin of Good Vibrations in Santas Beard...verses are similar then the chorus builds up the same way... :smokin