The Smiley Smile Message Board

Long-time lurker, first time poster and all that jazz.

The teaser trailer for "Love & Mercy" has sent me down a BW vortex of playing "Pet Sounds" multiple times a day, which I vary with the occasional classical piece (nothing says writing an epic romantic novel involving a teenage classical musician and her intended like blasting Bach and "PS" repeatedly  :P), and most recently, "SMiLE".

Reading up on "SMiLE" lore has lead me to solidify my position somewhat. I love BWPS.

Don't get me wrong, I love the Boys' original sessions too (I'll spin the original whenever I need the vibes, but don't want to risk being distracted by lyrics), but to me BWPS is a marvel.

Now, it's not perfect, I agree that some VDP's new lyrics ("On a Holiday") are outliers compared to previously composed stuff; but I cannot even begin to imagine a better structure for "SMiLE" than the one which begins with a wordless prayer to God that sounds like Bach dropped a tab of acid--and ends with the greatest pop song ever.

Further background: I'm 25. I remember seeing a copy of "Rolling Stone" with the review of "BWPS" in my eighth grade hippie English teacher's classroom; I didn't really start to investigate BW and the Beach Boys until I was in high school and got copies of "PS" and "Endless Summer"; and it wasn't until the Sessions were announced in 2011 (senior year of college)  that I took the plunge--and thereafter became totally obsessed with BWPS.

So I was intimately familiar with every nook and cranny of BW's completion by the time I spun the sessions for the first time.

Tthe lore looms large (I like alliteration), but I never felt the need to try to compile my own take on "SMiLE"; mostly because I'm not really musically/editorially skilled in that way, but maybe it's also because for as long as I've been conscious of pop music, "SMiLE" has always existed in my mind.

Now, I understand that "SMiLE" as most us wish it to exist (completed by the BBs) cannot exist; and I'll also concede by Brian's own admission, the original probably would have been much darker--and it's not hard to see why, given the original tapes! But I love that BWPS coheres so beautifully.

Yes, many fan-edits have "Surf's Up" occupy the place of honor at the end ("SMiLE's" "A Day in the Life", I think), but the BWPS version makes so much sense--after hearing the coda of "GV" foreshadowed in "Look", why where else could "GV" go, but after the flowing of "Surf's Up"; following the hellscape of "Fire", diving into the water for relief...and coming up on "Good Vibrations"!

Of course, I understand the beauty of the "SMiLE" experience has to do with how individuals respond to it; but I wonder if in the future, younger people, coming to it with no preconceived notions, as I did, will be less interested in trying to finish it, than they will in finding BW's as the touchstone?

Of course, it could be a generalization to say that this is solely the perspective of newer, younger fans, but did anyone else here find BWPS first, and kind of cleave to it as a result?

When I heard Smile live in 2004, I had heard whatever fragments of the album had previously ended up on official Beach Boys records, but had never heard any of the bootlegs. I was blown away by how well it all flowed together (with the one slightreservation that I got tired of the bicycle rider motif after it lasted through "H&V" and "Roll Plymouth Rock")
Since then I've heard many fanmixes with alternative running orders and, to me, the fragments and songs are all so good, and go together so well, that it doesn't matter too much what order you play them. They sound great in any order.

I'm older than you by a bit, but BWPS answered my remaining Smile questions. I'm glad we got the box, but I've never found the sequencing discussions all that gripping, mostly because I don't think the Brian of 1966-67 had the answers either. (For the record, I've always found the 12-track, banded album theory most persuasive, but who knows what those tracks would be like?)

Given the material he had to work with, BWPS is a marvel. It manages to square the circle of the sessions, and to do so with astonishing good humor. It's that change -- from the dark moodiness that overshadows the '60s stuff to the technicolor Looney Tunes vibe of the '04 record -- that turns off some folks, but to me it's essential. It's how modern-day Brian coped. It succeeds on its own terms. It's not the Smile, but it's a Smile, and from the only folks I'd want to hear it from.

Ditto what Wirestone said about age, haha, but unlike most folks here I had never heard all of SMiLE until I bought BWPS. And even after buying TSS (the single CD format), I still prefer Brian's 2004 take. The original is in many ways a hair-raising listen but BWPS is warm and autumnal, like a sunset after a stormy day.     

I almost forgot... welcome, nakostopoulos! :=)

I'd only heard the original Good Vibrations when I first heard BWPS.  Possibly Smiley next, before the boots!

I love BWPS. Such flow, no dead spots. There are little things I wish there were more of (3 Score and 5, the great vocal tag to Veg, a few left-out H&V scraps...) but really, it just moves.

And every time I hear "Aloha nui means goodbye", I have this Pavlovian reaction resembling "Oh no, the ride is almost over!" Then GV comes right in and makes you feel great in the end after all.

And you just wanna get in line and go all over again.

I am not a fan of BWPS. I saw him perform it at Carnegie Hall; that was great. The record is flat, I do not like the sequencing concept, the add-on material. I don't like the lead vocals, for the most part; the bg vocals are good. Can't stand I Wanna Be Around.
I no longer own the vinyl or CD. I really don't like listening to it.

Smile is the parent who raised me. BWPS is the birth parent who came knocking decades later. "Hey, nice to meet you. Bye."

Hi nakostopaulos,

I was quite a beach boys fan when Brian premiered Smile at the RFH, but had never heard the non officially released stuff. Needless to say, my mind was blown hearing all this 66-67 era material for the first time, and with Brian singing lead too (my first BW concert) - a very moving experience. I became obsessed with smile from that day onwards and when bwps was released it was all I listened to for the next couple of years! So, yes, my experience is quite similar to yours in that BWPS was my inroad to smile. I don't listen to it so much now as it was sort of superseded by TSS disc 1 for me. I like how TSS took most of the BWPS sequence (with a few vintage sequencing quirks thrown in). It is smile for me, but I occasionally dig bwps out and am floored again by the side two suite and its other transcendent moments.

I've been a Smile fanatic/tragic half my life now. I remember grabbing the first recording of BWPS live off the net and hearing it for the first time and the sequence blowing my mind. How some of the smaller fragments were tied into songs still give me chills. That said I find the album version of BWPS far too "happy", I much prefer the darkness of the original sessions. The new fans don't know how lucky they are, I spent years looking for pieces here and there.

I honestly never thought we'd get an official release but boy am I happy we did. I've made my own versions that follow a more traditional two side vinyl release over the years and now have a final version I love and listen to regularly. I can't get enough of Smile.

Obviously to each their own, but it is called SMiLE. ;D

I feel obliged to sound a dissenting note here. I don't understand the 'BWPS makes the SMiLE material so happy' slant at all. Even less do I understand 'the original SMiLE was so dark and twisted'.

To me, one of the amazing things about the original SMiLE recordings, or the material that was recorded that may have been intended for that album in the 60s, is its sheer variety and depth. There are colossal-sounding moments of classical-sounding majesty, like Prayer, parts of Cabin Essence, Child Is Father Of The Man, Surf's Up, some of the keyboard and bass-led Bicycle Rider iterations for Do You Like Worms or Heroes and Villains, the middle section of 'Look' (or whatever you favour calling that track). There are also avant-garde moments of utter strangeness, like the bit we now call Fire Intro, that was originally annotated as Intro to Heroes and Villains (and also all of the strange recordings that led up to the production of that section, like 'Bag Of Tricks'), the 'directionless vocals' chants that ended up in the middle of the 1970 Cool Cool Water, or the Workshop session. There's downright *terrifying* music like Mrs O'Leary's Cow. And there are also crazy bits of cartoon-like, childish humour: Vega-Tables is the obvious example, but that's not all. There's musicians imitating farmyard animals on Barnyard, Brian's plans for films of that section involving chickens in training shoes, the 12th Street Rag in the middle of 'Look', the humorous skits possibly meant to be 'between-track' light relief, George Fell Into His French Horn, the 'old lady' versions of 'You're Welcome'... and of course, the fact that the album was supposed to be called SMiLE, and all that stuff Michael Vosse told us about how Brian thought people laughing had no ego, or however it was he put it. Finally, there's out-and-out exuberant music, which to me is as great a celebration of positive emotions in musical form as any I can think of: the verses of Heroes And Villains (no wonder Chuck Britz called it '...Hitsville!' on the session!), 'My Children Were Raised' from the same number, the bright and breezy Holidays, and of course, there's Good Vibrations.

To me, this material is simply *irreducible* to 'it's dark' or 'it's happy'. It's about the most varied collection of musical recordings I can think of that were ever intended for a single album.

I therefore marvel at these super-reductionist labels ('the 60s SMiLE recordings are moody', 'BWPS is too happy' etc). How can anyone say the original versions of Vega-Tables or Good Vibrations are 'dark'? How can anyone say the 2004 re-recording of Mrs O'Leary's Cow is 'happy' (if anything, to me that track is *even more terrifying* in its re-recorded form than the original)? Genuine questions; I just don't get it.

I accept that *behind the scenes*, Brian had an increasingly miserable time on the original SMiLE sessions, but I'm not sure that his increasingly unhappy state of mind should be confused with the feel of the music he recorded at that time. He was in a pretty fractured state by April 1967 by most accounts — and yet, that's also when he was in the studio, recording the sound of celery and carrots, entreating listeners to send him the name of their favourite vegetable, and producing one of the most upbeat productions on what might still, just, have turned into SMiLE (unless you feel, not necessarily illegitimately, that he was already working on the next album by then, but that's one of those arguments no-one is ever going to have a definitive answer to).

Similarly, can we say that the 2004 live shows and album were the product of a man completely at ease with himself? Not really. He wasn't exactly in to it for much of the live rehearsals, and to say he was nervous before the first shows in London is an understatement. You *can* make a case for saying that touring and releasing SMiLE that year helped him tremendously in the long run; you might even say it played a part in his remarkable recovery from 1982 to the present day. But I don't think you can exactly say that 'BWPS is happy'. It sounds the same as the 60s sessions to me in that respect: a swathe of extremely varied material, some dark, some light, some loud, some quiet, some beautiful, some bloody terrifying.

There's more to say on this topic, but it starts to get too deeply into the realms of personal opinion. I personally think Brian's band worked *incredibly* hard to reproduce the arrangements of the original SMiLE recordings in 2004, and that such differences as there are between the two, notwithstanding the Kurzweil keyboards and (obviously) the different vocalists involved, are as near to nothing as makes no odds. I certainly don't hear the kind of sheen over one set of recordings that renders one 'dark' and the other 'light'. But I recognise that not everyone will feel the same as me on that.

This also (finally) brings me around to providing my answer to the OP's original question. I *did* know the original recordings before BWPS was released; not for long, as I only started listening in 1995, which is nothing compared to some of the faithful who had been listening, hoping and waiting since 1967 — but from that year to about 2002 I was, like so many here, absolutely obsessed with the SMiLE sessions (or what was available of them back then, anyway). I immersed myself in them in a way I had never done with any other music before, or have since.

But when I heard BWPS for the first time, I felt like the re-recordings just carried on from where the original sessions left off. To me, they were first-rate completions of the original unfinished material and recordings that somehow managed to capture the same sound and ineffable spirit. I know a lot of people reading this did not feel the same way, and were disappointed; some of them have already posted in this thread to that effect. But for me, it all hung together. Perhaps that's why I felt BWPS was and is, simply SMiLE. Not the one we might have got in the 60s, of course, but the only finished one there will ever be, and a work of absolute majesty in its own right. Do I wish the finished version had the voices of the 60s Beach Boys on it? Sure, because those voices sound so unbelievably great! But what we *did* get is, to me, a worthy completion of the original concept nonetheless. I don't seem to experience the disconnect that others do.

So there you go — I was (just) of the pre-BWPS generation, but I embraced it just as a lot of the post-2004 fans who've posted here did. We 'pre-2004ers who like BWPS' do exist. If you knew of SMiLE before the 2004 shows, you don't necessarily hate the arrangement of the material that debuted live that year, or the re-recording that came out in the Autumn. I think it's all sublime, just like the original recordings.

I was obsessed with SMiLE bootlegs for a while, even making my own mixes and such, but BWPS pretty much sealed it all up for me.  I greatly prefer it to the original recordings, whatever issues there may be with it in terms of production vs. the '60s tracks, because it still sounds great, it's complete, and it just works so well.  I miss all the missing pieces when I listen to the '60s tapes.  They're fascinating to me, still, but BWPS is what I prefer to listen to as a "thing" by a wide margin, because it's something I can just listen to and think about and enjoy as a real, completed work.

I'm 32, if that helps give data to you generational thing.  :)

I got heavily into the band at the age of sixteen back in 2001 before BWPS was even a gleam in anyone's eyes and Smile was still "inappropriate music for us to make." Needless to say I plowed through the released and unreleased material available at the time. Then we got word of a live performance of the surviving fragments. And then there would be a recording of the program as the icing on the cake. Then Smile was "finished."

Well, it sounded good on paper.

The live performances were amazing. If the record was left as a live performance or even released as a live album it would have been better. The studio version of BWPS has that K-Tel feel to it and cannot hold a candle to the original recordings. Sure, a few extra lyrics and vocals here and there...but the ambiance is gone. A cursory listen to the original recordings betrays a much darker vision for the material and it is completely lost on BWPS.

BWPS was one of the first records I heard when I was a kid so it will always have a sentimental value to me. When I got older, I heard about the original Smile tapes and went onto the internet and found Mok's version on youtube. To this day, Smile still blows me away and especially love TSS.

Totally agree.

I wouldn't call the original Smile "dark", but there is a seriousness of purpose that I feel when I listen to it that I don't get from BWPS. I think it's  the youthful ambition of pushing the boundaries of your art into the unknown; the sense of something being at stake that the original Smile can convey at times. Not to be insulting to the well-intentioned creators of BWPS, but Smile 66-67, even unfinished, is the masterpiece and BWPS is just mostly a forgery.

Yeah put me in the camp of people who doesn't consider Smile 'dark' at all. Much of it is absurdly upbeat.

The original recordings are certainly heavier than the K-Tel repackaging, that's for sure. Combine that with the interplay between the musicians and the original recordings just feel better, more real. BWPS has zero of that. The magic and mystique of the music is just gone.

I think the music itself sounds fine on BWPS (with the exception of Fire, which can't match the 'freak out!' quality of the original), but the vocals can't begin to come close to those on the 66'67 recordings.

Gotta agree with these.

H'mmm. Time to revisit The Smile Sessions, methinks.  :smokin

're right
I think you'reoys the right.  Brian knew what he was doing with smile but not enough other people trusted his judgement.  He seems like an amazing person with an amazing ear.  he knew what he was doing.  There is nothing offensive there.  I've only been into the beach boys for 3 months and I am really making up for lost time.  The sheer volume of work before smile and the quality is amazing.  An then after.  There's always something new to discover with them.

I'm trying to figure out why a number of people perceive the original SMiLE as dark.  Smiley Smile is dark.  Sure, Smiley might have some playful moments (Little Pad, etc.) but it does have quite a bit of that creepy dirge-like vibe going on.

SMiLE is anything but dark.  My Only Sunshine and Fire could be called somewhat dark, I suppose, but they pass by rather quickly and move onto perkier tracks.

BWPS is great, but I fear the "Which is better?" debate will go on till the end of time.  There are so many factors that fuel this debate. 

Here's a question:  If somehow in 2004 the surviving Beach Boys would've been able to pull together (like they did for That's Why God...), would BWPS....or BBPS have been perceived differently? 

(Sorry if we already went over this; I obviously missed it.....)

Smile struck me more as "mysterious and abstract" (in a good way) rather than "dark." It made me think, about imagery and sonority (wind chimes) as I was learning all these literature terms to analyze the tools of a writer, such as "onomatopoeia" (such as "tick-tock" - where the words emulate the sound.) I bet they didn't imagine what a teaching tool it was mid-60's!  :lol

BWPS - put together the tracks which had "leaked out" randomly in various LP's and on the GV box set.  It isn't a forgery but more Brian unlocking his vision.  For me (and many others) the triumph was Brian taking it "live" notwithstanding everything which had taken place over time, bolstered by the success and confidence of his Pet Sounds tour and his band's ability to replicate (especially Nelson Bragg's hand percussion instrumentation) the studio effects from old friend Smiley.

The Pet Sounds album tour presented in its' entirety (of course with the GH mixed in) was well received. And proved that Brian could take a themed work and make it successful, on tour, and made a good model, even with TLOS.  But the actual BB sessions are the real deal with the twenty something BB voices.

Old Smiley is a classic, "complete" or not... :thewilsons

I liked the sound of Brian's vocalists on BWPS.    It makes for a nice completed work with consistency musically and vocally. so for a completed piece it works very well for me.   The SMiLE box is all  that it can be given that it was the never completed work, finally released warts and all, take after take included.    Nice to hear all of these cleaned up parts after years of listening to boots and pieces.    Generationally,  younger folks get it all in a few short years and have the experience of hearing IT ALL  in short order for the first time.    Just a different perspective than those of us who digested it bit by bit over the decades.   

My introduction to Smile was the bits I heard on the Endless Harmony documentary. I began searching for some of that stuff and found much of it on the naughty napster.com. To me BWPS is to Smile,  what The Pet Sounds tour is to Pet Sounds. It's a celebration of his best work. Using a band who Were capable of playing it, but perhaps without the aura of the wrecking crew. Of course maybe a 66 Brian could get better results from this band as well. BWPS was my favorite live concert of all time. I would say that I listened to the 2004 version often until the Smile Sessions came out.  I haven't listened to the 2004 version for awhile now.

I know I'm in the minority here as I really don't consider Smile a masterpiece.  I think Smile is an overall very good album with some masterpieces on it (ie. H&V, GV, Surf's Up, Wonderful, etc etc). 

That being said, I much prefer the versions released on The Beach Boys - The Smile Sessions over the Brian Wilson solo 2004 version. 

I have to give Brian a lot of credit for having the guts to put out Smile in any form because there is absolutely no possible way that any album can live up to 37 years of hype. 

BWPS is as much as cover album as it is the completion of Smile. The spontaneity of the Wrecking Crew and Brian putting together these songs on the fly in the studio is replaced by the mimicking of those original parts. The sound is uniform throughout the tracks, like a live band recording, and doesn't have the depth and grit created by Brian's use of different studios and mic placements for different parts of a song. And yes, the original H&V and "Do You Like Worms" had something vaguely sinister, or at least primal, woven into the fabric. Even Wind Chimes and Wonderful, pre-Smiley, had an aura of mystery.

BWPS was my first Smile (other than Smiley Smile), and I didn't listen to any of the original sessions until TSS was released. I was tickled by BWPS when I first heard it-- I didn't believe how much of it actually dated back to the 60s, given how strange and magical it all seemed. But then I heard the original sessions, and I was just... stunned.

Well that makes two of us at least.

I think there are long stretches of Smile that just meander along and don't do much except repeat motifs from H&V. I'm also not sure that the three sections really cohere into one concept: they could be taken from three different albums entirely.

Conversely the stuff that is excellent - Wonderful, CIFOTM, Fire, Cabinessence, Surf's Up - is as good as anything released in the Sixties, and any album containing all those tracks must be highly rated. It also sounds totally unlike any other Sixties music, and could only have been created by this artist and only at this time.

Agreed.  When its great, its great.  If I were to rate the album based on the Smile Sessions, I'd probably give it 4/5.  For my money, there's a little too much filler to warrant a 5/5. 

Throw in Heroes & Villains and Good Vibrations and you just about have the 1966-1967 album as it likely would have been released.

Yeah, but what versions of Heroes & Villains and Good Vibrations? How would they have gone? And how would CIFOTM have been edited? And what would have happened at the end of Wonderful, and would there have been an insert...? And would Cabin Essence have had an extra verse or insert, or not? And would Fire have been edited or crossfaded together with something else, and if so, what? And what would have happened in the middle of Surf's Up? And would it have had the CIFOTM coda? And are Holidays and Look part of it, and if so, where do they go? Should the Elements be included, and if so — what the fig should they all be? And so on and so on...

People have been saying for years, 'Oh, SMiLE was pretty much finished, really'. They even said that we were pretty close to having most of the finished album out officially when the Good Vibrations set came out back in the 90s. We now know that what came out then wasn't very much of what was recorded, and, more to the point, we know that even a lot of what DID come out wasn't close to finished - final edits not decided on material, vocals not recorded...

By contrast, we've probably got most of the pieces now (although you never really know with SMiLE...!). But we still can't really say that these pieces constitute the album 'as it would have been released'. Assuming that H&V would have been on SMiLE like it was on Smiley Smile is almost certainly not correct, and even assuming that it might have come out like the Cantina version is, really, an assumption too far. And much as I love Brian and Van's 2003-4 completion of the work, I don't think you can necessarily look to it to provide any answers of what a 1967 SMiLE might have been. The versions we have now, the versions that are on the SMiLE Sessions Disc 1, or that eventually came out as singles or album tracks in the 60s or the tracks as they were live or on BWPS are not *necessarily* the versions we might have got on SMiLE.

If you don't believe me, consider CIFOTM. We all got used to listening to the CIFOTM chorus on bootlegs, and with its nice full Beach Boys vocals, it sounded pretty finished — about the only part of CIFOTM that did! It was reproduced with that vocal arrangement pretty much unaltered for the 2004 live shows and BWPS. But lo and behold, when the SMiLE Sessions comes out, it turns out that Brian had added another high vocal harmony to the chorus in a mono mixdown in the 60s at some point, which made it into the SMiLE Sessions Disc 1 mono mix. I can't hear the track without that vocal now — listening to BWPS the other day for the first time in a while, I really missed it. But was the high vocal going to be in 'the SMiLE version' of CIFOTM? We don't know. Maybe it was an overdub too far, and Brian intended to scrap that mono mix (like the 'overcrowded' vocals on the God Only Knows tag which Brian eventually mixed out, or like the high chorus vocals on that early version of Help Me Rhonda on the Endless Harmony soundtrack which similarly got nixed later). That would be consistent with the fact that the extra high 'Child' vocal isn't on the other mixdowns which survived into the bootleg era. But of course, they may have been earlier, less finished mixdowns from before the high vocal was added... or not.

And that's before you begin to consider what order the sections might have appeared in for CIFOTM on SMiLE. We have bootleg edits in completely different orders, we have the version on BWPS, and we have Brian's instrumental edit from the 60s which may have been the version he intended to add vocals to. Or not. As far as I can see, it's also impossible to tell from the multitracks what order the various sections of Vega-Tables might have appeared in on a 60s SMiLE, which is why there are so many different versions of that kicking around. We can all find an order that we like for that song, or roll our own if we're dissatisfied with the various officially released versions, but it's impossible to tell what THE version might have been, back in 1967. Or maybe even 1966.

I respect, but absolutely don't agree with long-time SMiLE-O-phile Bill Tobelman's Zen interpretations of SMiLE. But one thing I do agree with him on: the original SMiLE is like a 'koan': unknowable, an insoluble riddle (I'm aware that that's not what a true Chinese philosopher would call a koan, which CAN have an answer — but that's what a lot of western Zen devotees call a koan, and I think I'm right in saying that's how Bill has used the term with respect to SMiLE over the years). And oddly, given that there IS so much surviving SMiLE material on multitracks and in mixdowns, for quite a lot of the album, its final form is still completely uncertain. It's almost as though the more material you find and lock down, the less certain we can be of any final form it might have taken back in the day. With some discoveries, the more we've found, the more our idea of the finished whole recedes.

All of which is a long way of saying, in response to drbeachboy's "take Wonderful, CIFOTM, Fire, Cabinessence, Surf's Up, and throw in Heroes & Villains and Good Vibrations and you just about have the 1966-1967 album as it likely would have been released"...

...that I can't really agree with that and I don't think we can say that with any certainty. I think you can say with some certainty that those tracks were probably going to be on it somewhere, in some form, but I don't think we can say what they would have sounded like!

And of course, you may totally disagree with all of this, which just adds even further to the lack of agreement over the possible form of any 60s SMiLE.

Actually, what I was saying is that some form of those particular songs most likely would have made up Smile. Notice the word that I bolded. I used that word in my previous post, as well. As you said, there is no way to tell for sure, but basing it on the back cover and on the songs completed or near completion would likely indicate (there's that bolded word again) what would have been on the 1966-1967 Smile album. Again, I was just talking songs, not which versions of those songs. :)

Also, Heroes & Villains most likely would have been closer to Heroes & Villains Part 1 than what was released. Good Vibrations, since already released, most likely would have been the released version. Also possible that a longer edit might have made it on there (like with the Hum-Dee-Dum's), but being a former number one hit song, Capitol would have probably wanted the hit version on there. All my opinion, of course.

It's a question of degree, really, isn't it? Because of the way the album was recorded, and how Brian was working, overdubbing, editing, and sometimes re-overdubbing, and also because we don't know how much more work he intended to do on all of the pieces by way of possible further overdubs (as with the CIFOTM example mentioned earlier), or even how many more pieces he might still have intended to record — or not — to link everything together, I think that merely knowing the names of the tracks that might have ended up on the album doesn't get you very much closer to knowing what the finished album might have sounded like, beyond the broadest outline. Certainly, we can create *something* that sounds close to *a* completed album from the tapes that have survived — that's what the SMiLE Sessions Disc 1 is about, after all — but I don't think we can really say that it's necessarily 'the 1966-1967 album as it likely would have been released.' It's a question of degree and personal opinion, but for me, the use of 'likely' to cover all of the unknowns in this scenario is insufficient. It's not, to me, 'the album as it likely would have been released'. It's a long way from it. Probably.

To take also the two other assertions you make, that H&V on a 60s SMiLE would 'likely' have been more like Heroes and Villains Part 1 than what was released, and that Good Vibrations would 'most likely' have been the single version — well, again, you could be right, but really, we just don't know. The Cantina version was finished up in February 1967, and at the start of March, Brian was recording the 'Intro to Heroes and Villains' (which sits on the front of Fire in BWPS and on the SMiLE Sessions Disc 1), which isn't like ANYTHING on the Cantina version, or indeed on any other finished version of Heroes and Villains that was released. He also recorded a lot of other sections after the Cantina version that don't resemble anything on it. It could be that they were going to go on revised versions of the single. But maybe not. They certainly didn't in the end. So I think we have to say it's all up in the air with H&V, really. I do think Brian probably considered the Cantina version finished on the evening in February when he finished it (why would he have even completed the edit otherwise?), but he obviously had second thoughts later. Even if you don't think all the subsequently recorded sections in February and March were for the single A side (which is a case that can be made), Brian definitely DID have second thoughts about the Cantina mix at some point... because he completely recast the track much later for Smiley Smile and the Summer 1967 released 45 version.

I think the balance of probabilities is more on your side with Good Vibrations. Unlike almost everything else intended for SMiLE, it was finished and done, a known quantity. You're probably also right that the record company would have wanted the version on there that everyone had already sent to number 1. And from a workload point of view, I can't imagine Brian would have wanted to go back and futz around with GV (about the only thing he'd already completed and that everyone was happy with) when there was so much else left to do to finish the album. But it's not impossible that he might have done it. Sagittarius had completely different versions of their (itself curiously SMiLE-like) single 'My World Fell Down' and also of 'Hotel Indiscreet' on THEIR album in 1968, and there have been many similar examples in recorded music since then. Perhaps Brian would have wanted to do something similar. And he DID put the 'Hum-Be-Dums' into GV on BWPS. But in the final analysis, that's not enough evidence either way.

Moving on from the debate about what is or might have been 'likely' for a 60s SMiLE album, as it's ultimately a difference of personal opinions and interpretation of definitions of the probable that can never be resolved in any definitive way, I'd like to instead develop the point I was making in my last post, and say that I don't think there's anything quite like SMiLE anywhere else in recorded history. There are plenty of other unfinished albums, but are there any others where the finished form is so unknown — and unknowable — despite the existence of so much recorded work towards the completion of the whole? I mean, if Brian had decided in late Spring 1966, after all of the Pet Sounds vocal sessions, that Mike's dislike of his work with Tony Asher was all too much for him and that he should scrap Pet Sounds and record another summer-themed Top 10 Gold smash instead, someone could have figured out how the tracks on that album were going to go without too much difficulty. Most of them, you just mix them from the multitrack, and they're done. Some have a bit of editing, but it's clear, for example, where the bridge of Here Today is, how you edit out of the song into the bridge and then back into the song. Similarly when editing on the tag for God Only Knows to the rest of the track. And even though you might not know the order the finished tracks were going to appear in on the album, you could certainly put out a finished album with the 13 discrete, banded tracks and say 'all of these tracks *were* going to be on it, we just don't know in what order'.

With SMiLE, in contrast, we don't know if we've got all of the bits, we don't know if all of the bits have all of the overdubs they need (bar a few cases like the verses of Do You Like Worms or the verses of Look where we KNOW we don't have all of the vocals we should have), and we also don't know, in the cases of tracks like Vega-Tables or CIFOTM, as explained earlier, what order those pieces should be edited together in to 'complete' the track. And even if you can somehow work all of that out to your satisfaction, then as the back cover makes so clear, we still don't know what the final order of the tracks themselves should be, or how (or even whether!) they should be connected together. That's, of course, if you accept the provisional back cover as 'the track list', which means that you need to omit quite a lot of what was recorded (no Prayer, to begin with!).

Someone wise once said that trying to complete SMiLE is like trying to do a jigsaw without the lid of the box that shows you how the finished picture should look. I think it's much harder than that. More like trying to complete a jigsaw without the box, without knowing whether you have all the pieces, and where some of the pieces are just rough-cut, unpainted wood chunks that you have to give a final shape to with a file and paint yourself, based on indecipherable outline pencil marks on the wood, before you can use them. Imagine also that some of the pieces have been damaged in a fire or smashed, and you have to assemble some of them from even smaller, damaged pieces of wood before you can get going. And in some cases, imagine that it's even questionable whether some of the pieces you do have actually fit into the jigsaw you're trying to finish, or into another completely different one instead.

...oh yes... and, just to stretch the metaphor WELL beyond breaking point, you have to imagine you're doing the whole jigsaw in the dark, too. And the guy who designed the jigsaw is still alive, but can't remember exactly what the finished puzzle was trying to depict any more, so he won't help you...!

Hopefully it's just the two of you..

 ;D

@Matt
This is why Brian said what he did when the Beach Boys Smile Box Set was released, I paraphrase, but be says something to the effect that, today the 3 movement Smile is how I want Smile to be heard. That in his mind, is the completed Smile.

Hey I love much of Smile but when ranking it in the band's cannon of work I'd rate it behind
Sunflower
Surf's Up
Holland
Today!
Pet Sounds
and rate it roughly about the same as Surfer Girl, 20/20 and Carl & The Passions. At times I feel the 'legend' of Smile outweighs much of it's content.

I agree with all these choices, but I'd probably add All Summer Long and Summer Days and Summer Nights to the list. 

Not so much tearing down the released version of Smile (and I do stress released version because who knows what it would've sounded like had it been completed in 1967).  But I think this is highlighting how much great material exists in the BB/BW catalog. 

Oh I know, and unlike many others here, I think his 2003-4 assembly really works in that respect. Like the 'post-2003 generation' that started this thread, I can accept the 2004 SMiLE as a finished version. But that wasn't what we were talking about - it was to do with whether the various pieces and tracks that were recorded in the 60s can be used to assemble something like the album that might have actually been released in the 60s. As I've explained, I don't think anyone can say that with any certainty. But that's just my opinion.

I have some sympathy with the view, expressed by a couple of posters above, that even if it HAD been finished in 1966 or 1967, SMiLE might not have been the Beach Boys' masterpiece to end all masterpieces. There would probably have been some truly great stuff on there, but would EVERY track have been as great as that? Probably not, although that's not so surprising. It's difficult for me to see how 'I'm In Great Shape', 'Barnyard', 'I Wanna Be Around' or 'The Old Master Painter/You Are My Sunshine' could have been made as epoch-bustingly amazing as 'Heroes & Villains' might have been, or 'Good Vibrations' was, and I suspect I'm not alone in that. But then, what album is solid gold from start to end? I know that I regard most so-called 'classic albums' to actually consist of three or four truly awesome tracks and lots of others that aren't so good, but the 'tentpole' tracks hold up the others and the record is viewed as a classic overall. I can think of VERY few that maintain the same level of quality all the way through. I love Pet Sounds and Today, but I don't think they're equally strong all the way through, and don't always want to listen to the entire album when I put them on.

I think SMiLE would have been really, really good, and certainly more complex than anything the Beach Boys had attempted up until then, in terms of production (including the groundbreaking way in which the album was recorded, which IMO takes multitrack recording techniques beyond what anyone else was doing at the time), musical and vocal arrangements, and lyrics — but complex doesn't always equal better, and just because the techniques used to make the album were advanced, doesn't automatically mean the musical results are good or even interesting. Pop music is often better received when it's direct and simple, in execution and outcome. And in terms of the Beach Boys, a lot of people prefer 'Surfin' USA' to 'I Just Wasn't Made For These Times'. I don't share this view — although I do now enjoy the music of the Beach Boys from 1962 to 1964, the stuff they recorded between 1964 and 1971 will always be the peak for me, and of that, the stuff that Brian spearheaded is at the front of that period — but I make no claim that mine is the most popular viewpoint.

I do agree that BWPS is not as dark as  what we have heard of the original. It's hard to judge without knowing what the final sequencing would have been but there are details that are disquieting. It's subtle and some of it is still to be found on BWPS but not as much. It's a bit like taking a walk in a dark forest - in BWPS some of the  growth has been cut away, making it clearer and brighter. In the original, walking briskly you might not notice anything particularly disturbing but give rein to imagination and it can be a little unsettling and surprising.

It's partly because of the way Brian combines ideas. For example, the Woody Woodpecker theme hidden in Surf's Up. Using something amusing in an otherwise serious song poses a question. There are many such questions in SMiLE and being confronted by questions to which the answer is not always obvious creates a feeling of doubt and (if you let it get to you) anxiety. What does this mean? Am I being stupid? What have I missed? Of course, some won't notice and some won't care . Some will understand it at once so no sense of unease for them.

Again - I'm honestly asking for clarification, as I just don't get how the original SMiLE material can be blanket-labelled 'dark'. Vega-Tables is dark? Good Vibrations is dark? Barnyard is dark? Holidays is dark?


I agree here absolutely (examples: Fire, the bass and tack piano H&V chorus, the Fire/H&V Intro), but surely some disquieting details don't necessarily make an album that is dark overall? What about all the other stuff in there that doesn't fit that description? The orchestral climax at the end of 'A Day In The Life' is disquieting and disturbing, but that doesn't make 'When I'm 64', 'Lovely Rita' or 'With A Little Help From My Friends' disturbing. In fact, I don't think Slipknot with Andrew Eldritch and Marilyn Manson on vocals could succeed in making Vega-Tables disquieting or disturbing (though there's an idea for a cover version). I don't think anyone could. It will forever be beautifully executed, gloriously silly, lightweight nonsense.


Can you give me examples of such passages? I'm not sure I'm hearing what you're hearing — although I accept that this kind of thing is very subjective.

I *can* hear places where very sparse, bass-heavy passages in the original SMiLE recordings have fuller arrangements on BWPS, with much more mid- and high-frequency content provided by acoustic guitar, vocals and strings. For example, if you compare 'Do You Like Worms' to 'Roll Plymouth Rock' on BWPS, or 'I Love To Say Dada' to 'In Blue Hawaii'... but I would contend that this is just because the original tracks are unfinished backing tracks that never *received* their final vocal, guitar or string overdubs. If you listen to the first recorded passes at tracks like Please Let Me Wonder or Sandy/Sherry, they're very bass-heavy too, but were 'lightened' in sound considerably as overdubs and vocals were added.

And as I mentioned earlier, I find Mrs O'Leary's Cow on BWPS *more* disturbing than the original recording, which sounds a bit flat to me by comparison. But that's just me...

As I see it, "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow" is like the storm section in Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, a dark cloud passing over but not colouring the whole work, which in both cases is otherwise upbeat and joyous.

Everything is relative. The original seems darker to me but you could well be right - it could be because we are hearing it in a fragmented state. My metaphor wasn't a good one because the BWPS tracks  have fuller arrangements so more a matter of concealing darker aspects rather than adding more clarity and light.

Brian has used doomy bass lines in other pieces: listen to A Thing or Two. And yet that very bass line formed the melody for Do it Again and in that context sounded more positive.

Finding examples in SMiLE is a painstaking process but perhaps Child is Father of the Man. In the original we have an extremely high vocal that almost sounds like the cry of a baby. Because the piece hasn't been completed there are some moments of silence. I find the effect of this slightly - only slightly - disturbing. Brian has been described as writing 'sad songs about happiness'. I think the reasons are complex but a contributory factor is surely the mixed messages: a sad lyric with a carefree melody, or a happy melody with a dark bass line, or an odd mix of funny and profound.

The repeating motifs of H&Vs is mostly because almost all the tracks were at one point remixed into H&V as an attempt to make the ultimate single. It's not fair to blame Worms or whatever else because Brian took something from them to make into Heroes.

I agree 100% about the 3 suite concept. I say it all the time, but it really just butchers the album in my personal opinion. As you say, it makes the music seem disjointed and unrelated to each other rather than all part of one great statement.