The Smiley Smile Message Board

I'm doing a masters at the moment, and am getting a short presentation about the myth of Smile together.

Now I have all my books out, and I'm desperate to find where the idea first surfaced that Smile was to be edited together with no banding, i.e, no gaps between cuts. The earlist mention I can find is in the Todd Gold book, not the most reliable of sources.

"The whole album is going to be a far out trip through the old west. Real Americana. But with lots of intersting humour. There's even going to be talking and laughing between cuts"


My memory is not what it is. I'm sure prior to 91, it was generally accepted that Smile was going to be edited into a continous 2 sided work. This of course was reflected in the 2004 performance  and subsequent recording . Does this idea date back to Look Listen Vibrate Smile? I dont have this book at to hand at present.

My main objective is to show how the mythology possibly influenced Wilson, Parks and Sahanaja in 2004 when assembling Smile for performance.

I'm also tryjng to chase up the VDP quote about Smile being originally envisaged as a conventional 12 track album with banding.


By the way, if this thread turns into a discussion about the banding / no banding issue, I'm happy with that, as it's always an interesting subject. My main priority though is chasing down these quotes / ideas to their original source.

Can anyone help?

Maybe check out some of Vosse’s writings. Not really sure when it was first mentioned that songs would blend into one another.

Thanks,  but can't find it in anything attributed to Vosse.

Can anyone help wit the VDP quote, where he said Smile was intended as a traditional 12 track album?

I'll look around later. You never know.

Have you see the scan in this topic? It may or may not be relevant:

http://smileysmile.net/board/index.php?topic=17157.0

There's also this, posted by AGD on July 18, 2006:

"The person I asked about how Smile----the original, 1966 version, just to make this totally clear----was going to be structured was Van Dyke Parks, and his reply was that it was going to be a single disc of banded (i.e seperate) tracks with no segues and crossfades between them. He then added that the only crossfades and/or segues were going to be within one track, and that track was "The Elements". He also denied that "H&V" was in any way concerned with Viet Nam.
"This exchange took place five, six years ago."

Source: http://smileysmile.net/board/index.php?topic=2325.0 [page 8, reply #195]

Thank you. Brilliant. I shall peruse that now.

HV, have you seen this? Not sure how useful it is but you never know (said that before):

https://books.google.nl/books?id=QH9_CgAAQBAJ

I believe the source of the theory that there was to be no silence between tracks but instead there would be "linking tracks" was none other than Dominic Priore.  Check out LLVS.  As Smile material began surfacing, there were lots of short pieces of music that did not clearly belong to a particular song on the 12 track list - Heroes related chants (Part 2 variations), Barnyard, the January 3rd Heroes sessions, the intro to Heroes, Dada, etc.  Since Dominic's preconceived bias was that the album was finished (and he claimed there was a final mixing session in April 67 which was cancelled), then he needed to find a place for all these fragments and so they became "link tracks" and the songs would go immediately from one to another with no silence between tracks.

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I've also noticed in almost every interview he's given in the past regarding Smile, he always mentions "Cool Cool Water" as being a contender for the album. Which as we all know, certainly wasn't.

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