The Smiley Smile Message Board

I just read a long thread on the subject in the "other forum" and I was almost totally disappointed. The "almost" is due mostly to the contributions of Dan Lega, both reasonable and readable.
I am sincerely curious to know whether there is any consensus about this matter, here in Smiley Smile, and whether any opinions have changed, after so many years.
Thanks in advance.

Here is what Dan just posted on that forum:

"I have to say I'm really confused as to what I'm hearing from many on this board.

I thought I was on a Beach Boy board, filled with lots of people who love the Beach Boys, especially their period from '66 to '74 when they were making great music that was nearly totally ignored by fans and especially the music press of the day.

I especially thought I was on board full of people who LOVED SMiLE.  People who had been dying to hear SMiLE ever since they first heard of its existence!  People who eagerly anticipated SMiLE's rebirth after 37 years.  People who BOUGHT TICKETS to the concerts, many for MULTIPLE NIGHTS, to finally REVEL in the nearest thing to an original facsimile of SMiLE that we'll ever get!

But no, I seem to be on a board that HATES SMiLE.  People who believe Brian HATED SMiLE!  People who think of Van Dyke Parks as some sort of evil trickster!  Not to mention a totally incompetent lyricist!


Where did the Beach Boys fans go???


As for me, I think Van Dyke's lyrics are the greatest lyrics ever written for the pop world!  And I will never believe Brian didn't think so, too!  


Love and merci,
Dan Lega


PS -- Here's a thought, but I don't have an answer and haven't looked into it at all -- why did Brian go back and start re-orchestrating and re-doing tracks that were already finished? Maybe it was because he was trying to come up with something the Boys could play on tour?  Probably not, but it was just an idea that came to me today."

This post by Dan is GOLD, imho. Neatly sums my "disappointment" with that thread (and, more generally, forum). It seems that, after everything that happened, after 2004 and 2011, after BWPS and the Sessions getting universal acclaim, the pendulum swung back to "SMiLE was an uncommercial mess anyway",  "VDP's lyrics were obscure and meaningless", and, practicallly, "Brian should not have tried f...ing with the formula". Gotcha!
It defeats comprehension. What's the problem with these guys?

And, for the chronicle, the idea that the responsability for the "demise" of SMiLE lies only with Brian is true only at the first layer of meaning: yes, Brian decided to scrap it in the end, we all know and agree about that. Fact. But it's like saying that the reason for World War I was Serbia not accepting Austria's ultimatum, and ending analysis there. Reality is never so simple.

By the way, though not trolling, I am being controversial (though sincere) on purpose. I understand that talking about what happens in the "other forum", and even quoting a whole post from there, is controversial, and somebody may not like that, even here. But this forum has been very "slow", and needs some debate, like the 20-pages thread on the Beach Boys documentary well showed.

What a lot of those people and Mike Love apologists don’t seem to get is that while everyone can agree that Brian and only Brian could have scrapped the album, no one seems to want to talk about what contributed to that decision. Because that would involve talking about a certain person in a way that they are uncomfortable with.

As far as AGD suggesting that Brian in the Jules Sielgel piece was just “parroting” what Van Dyke told him about the Surf’s Up lyrics is just preposterous.  Brian was much smarter than those people are giving him credit for.

But let’s just kinda go along with what Andrew is saying. It is documented that Brian was very much influenced by the reactions of other people. If people around him are jazzed about whatever project it was, he gets excited about the project. When someone expresses doubt, Brian expresses doubt. If we take Andrew’s suggestion, wouldn’t it make sense that because VDP and the Vosse Posse were excited about SMiLE, that Brian would share in that enthusiasm? And wouldn’t it also make sense that when a certain 1st cousin starts shitting on the lyrics and direction (Mike has never given a clue that he even understood what Brian and VDP were doing, which is odd for a guy who is very articulate and who fancies himself to be good with words), then Brian would start to question what he has been doing?

I think that what you said is very near the crux of this matter.
As somebody may remember, I am a big fan of Mike's (and of all the Beach Boys) and am annoyed by "Mike bashing". That does not make me a Mike apologist who thinks that he can never do anything wrong.
I think that the "pushback" from the "other Beach Boys", and probably particularly by Mike, WAS one of the reasons Brian ended scrapping SMiLE.
And... know what? I don't think Mike or any other Boy should be ashamed of that. Questioning some of Brian's artistic choices was well among their rights.
In fact, Brian was right and should have perseverated and completed SMiLE anyway, but sadly he was not in a mental state to do that. But this is not a murder case: nobody murdered anything. Searching for explanations of what happened is NOT the same as searching for one or more "murderers".
And that's the problem with a sizable section of the Beach Boys fandom, historians etc.: they are so keen on acquitting Mike, and any band member EXCEPT Brian, from that bogus accuse of "murdering" SMiLE, that they go to the deep end and PILE every and all responsabilities on Brian, Van Dyke and SMiLE itself.
And they end saying far worse than Mike, or anybody at the moment, probably said: i.e., the SMiLE project was deeply flawed anyway, Brian was deeply flawed himself (and in any case out of touch with the "public") and as for Van Dyke... just a self-important wannabe.

In a nutshell: there is something deeply flawed in this matter. But it's not Brian, nor Van Dyke, nor SMiLE, and no... not Mike either, nor any other Beach Boy.

Zenobi, thanks for the kind words.  

That portion of the SMiLE thread started with people disparaging Van Dyke, because he apparently is a hugh falutin' elitist "artiste" and not-of-the-common-folk, for not trying to explain the lyrics to the Boys, and instead saying huaghtily to the Boys while simultaneously brushing off their poo-pooing of the lyrics, that they should just junk them.  They said that Van Dyke wasn't being sympathetic to the Boys worries.  I argued the opposite.  First I argued that Van Dyke was not in a position to convince the Boys of the lyrics worth and thus jeopardize their career, it was Brian's job.  Second I argued that Van Dyke was not being haughty, but instead being humble when he said that if they didn't like the lyrics they should just junk them.  I won't belabor every point I made.  But there's MUCH MORE I had to argue.  However, soon almost everyone started saying the lyrics really did suck, and that there was not a person on the earth who could understand them.  One said Van Dyke wrote them just to be elitist and make everyone else look stupid.(?!)  Then there was the implication that Brian was too stupid to have understood the lyrics!?

And, unfortunately, no one but me and one other person (maybe two?) said anything against these statements!!!  From there it went into their claim that Brian hated the lyrics himself!  

At the heart of it, it seemed they were all congratulating the Beach Boys for NOT releasing SMiLE!  So, yeah, I wondered where the Beach Boys fans, who I thought LOVED SMiLE and waited years for it to be revived and released, had gone to!  They all seemed to hate it and no one, except for one other brave soul, had one good thing to say about SMiLE!  It's like I was in The Twilight Zone!  <doo-doot-doo-doo doo-doot-doo-doo doo-doot-doo-doo!>



Love and merci,
Dan Lega

I absolutely get why that part of the fandom are so quick to defend Mike. After all, writers ranging from David Leaf & Dom Priore to Steven Gaines has not be very kind to Mike. But what we have seen is a complete over correction on the SMiLE narrative that’s as distorted as they claim the Brian Good/Mike Bad narrative is.

Yes, Dan, your synthesis of that thread is perfect. Its devolution from "discussing SMiLE" to "bashing SMiLE" really reminds one of a Twilight Zone episode.

Of course I agree, and tried to sketch a tentative explanation for this phenomenon, but at this point I can't claim to really understand it. Yes, it starts as over-correction, but then the level of the distortion becomes mind-boggling. What turns fans into haters? Beats me.

I admit that probably "haters" is too strong a word, but as Dan said, that is exactly the "vibe" one gets.

Many people seem to operate (in life, not just concerning "Smile") based on trying to place BLAME. It's not an exploration or study of understanding a topic, or an event. It *starts* with some people with a need to place blame. And also in some cases to reinforce one's personal politics.

So yeah, over the years with "Smile", I've run across people who seem destined to arrive at two main conclusions: It's solely Brian's fault that it collapsed, and then some variation on various degrees of implying "Smile" is bullshit because it was whatever (ego driven, faux-intellectual, pretentious, etc.).

These are both not coincidentally positions that Mike Love himself has tended to take. It's then not surprising that a lot of people who come to those conclusions tend to be apologists for Mike and/or more sympathetic to Mike. And it's not even necessarily about Mike. And that's where personal politics come into it sometimes, with "fans" who are very conservative socially and politically.

But even setting aside Mike and politics, the human penchant for needing to *first and foremost* BLAME somebody or something (often manifested as "I didn't do it, somebody else did" when it pertains to things personally involving such people) as opposed to understanding why something happened in an agnostic/objective fashion as a true historian would, is often what tanks "Smile" discussions among fans.

And, to be fair, this does sometimes manifest itself in the opposite direction, with people who (understandably) view the demise of "Smile" as a tragedy, never steering away from blaming Mike Love for its demise.

The demise of "Smile" does start and end with Brian I think. But it's OBVIOUSLY a layered, complicated topic with many players impacting the situation.

I've often run into a strain of BB fan who seem to have a chip on their shoulder about Brian being deified in general, and especially concerning "Smile", and argue the things I mentioned above (it's Brian fault, and questioning the worth of the "Smile" music, etc.) because what they're really doing is arguing against their perceived idea that Mike was overly-vilified concerning the project over the years, and/or Brian not blamed enough or being praised too much, etc.

We all have our own opinions and theories.  I personally believe that when Brian predicted that Smile would be as much of an improvement over Pet Sounds as that album was over Summer Days Summer Nights, he wasn't saying something crazy.  Ditto when Dennis said that Smile was so good that it'd make Pet Sounds stink.At the same time, I can listen to Pet Sounds and say that it's the greatest album ever released.  All of that can be true because, as a collection of songs, as collection of instrumental tracks, as a collection of lyrics... Smile is a work of staggering genius.  I mean, just look at the 12 tracks submitted for the album jacket in Dec. '66 and tell me that a collection of fully produced versions of those 12 songs didn't have the potential to blow away every album that came before and after.  And yet it was not completed and released as it could have been and should have been.

What went wrong?  I think that Abe Somer's Jan. '67 lawsuit against Capitol is a seriously underrated factor.  The litigation removed the pressure on Brian to finish the album in that Jan-Feb period.  By the time that Brian resumed work in April, the momentum was lost and VDP was gone.  Also, Brian was in period of rapidly going through "phases" (exercise, meditation, health food, religion, astrology, and many more).  When Brian and Marilyn moved to the  Bellagio house with its home studio, I suspect that there was a great deal of excitement about that new approach and that Brian was eager to do something there.  So, rather than finish "Smile: the studio album" the old way, Brian came up with the idea using the home-studio to remake the songs.  Some of the more orchestral pieces like Cabinessence simply didn't lend themselves to that approach, so Brian and Mike hatched a handful of new tracks like Gettin Hungry, Little Pad, etc.

Very good contributions by everybody, thanks! I agree with Juggler that even if Pet Sounds is arguably the best pop album ever, a fully realized SMiLE would have been even better. I'll go out on a limb and claim that if one could take Dae Lims' SMiLE and have it recorded by the 1967 Beach Boys and the 1967 Wrecking Crew, we'd get something very, very near to that mythical album. So much for the naysayers.

I think that one of the difficulties in unraveling the reason(s) of SMiLE's "demise" is that there is a very basic, but widespread, fallacy about the meaning of REASON.
I'll try to clarify. Some guys keep insisting that the reason was that Brian scrapped the project. Now, that's not a reason. It's a tautology. It explains nothing. Of course the project ended because it was scrapped by its author: SMiLE did not scrap itself. Thanks for participating, we'll call you. :)

Now, please consider a much more interesting reason which has been proposed, among others by Brian himself: he had to scrap the project because  at that point it was either SMiLE or himself. He had to sacrifice SMiLE to save himself. Very true, but, again, WHY? Why Brian found himself in such a desperate situation?

I think that we need something subtler than that.

Let's consider the 1967 context. It was not just any old year: much was happening besides Sgt. Pepper.
They were times of great creativity, and great chaos. This tends to happen when you are fueled by drugs (ANY drugs). In particular, pot does not kill you, but its excessive use surely tends to impair one's ability to focus and fully complete tasks. Though never using it personally, I used to know quite a few people who did (heck, there were years when it seemed EVERYBODY did), and always observed this effect.
And, sadly, people did not only pot in 1967, or afterwards. We all saw the consequences. :(

So, great creativity and great chaos. Does that ring a bell about SMiLE?

In a sense, the story of SMiLE in 1966/1967 is a microcosm of what happened to pop/rock at large. The loss of momentum. I was there: by 1970/1971 there was a sensation, among me and my friends... of deep disappointment. Great music was still being made, but the momentum had gone. We knew that we had left the halcyon times of pop/rock in the Sixties.
Brian, being a genius, traversed that trajectory in some months instead of some years.

So, maybe another layer of the SMiLE onion is peeled. A small bubble of creativity and chaos floating in a maelstrom of creativity and chaos. And drugs will carry you for a while, and then dump you.

And of course, being saddled with a story of childhood abuse and mental problems does not help.

Mike, in 1977 (courtesy of WillJC from the EHF):

"At that time something had happened to his whole ego drive. It had been very powerful until the time of Heroes and Villains' release – he was about ready to come out with the Smile album and he was feeling very dynamic and creative and then something happened… chemically that completely shattered that – that made him the complete opposite … that made him want to withdraw… But he was always shy; he was too sensitive. There was a fine line and he went over that line… He was still creative though. Instead of Smile he did Smiley Smile. It was light, mellifluous, laid-back. It was dynamic in a passive sort of way, it was a revelation of where his psychology had gone to. It dropped out. He dropped out of that production race – the next big thing after Sgt. Pepper. Brian had lost interest in being aggressive and he went in the other direction – still creative, and different, but it wasn’t competitive."
 
This is may not really explain why SMiLE was scrapped, but sure explains why Smiley Smile was born. "Dynamic in a passive sort of way"... Mike can really have a way with words when he wants!

What is entirely bizarre about this viewpoint, is if Brian hated VDPs lyrics, why on earth did Brian revisit them from time-to-time for the next 40 years? Why did he allow Van Dyke to work on Sail on Sailor with him? Why continue to be in touch with VDPs for the next 40-50 years of your life? Pet Sounds is more famous, more commercial, more recognizable, and yet how many times did Brian and Tony Asher work together post-Pet Sounds compared to how many times Brian worked together with VDPs after the Smile collapse? Clearly there is something that Brian appreciates about VDPs - not only lyrically but in terms of friendship and workmanship.

As for people implying that Brian was too stupid to understand the lyrics - I think this is just a symptom of the anti-Brian rhetoric that has been constantly churned up from a certain sect of the fandom for the last 2 decades. Looking forward to the day, decades from now, when all the politics, cliques, and weird fan-behavior is a thing of the past. Where truth of the band and the beauty of the music won't be tainted by the current malaise of fandom/band infighting.

Also great posts, everyone.

Someone on the other board also put up a quote where Brian was asked who his favorite collaborator was and he replies that it was Van Dyke Parks. (Surprise!) (Though no surprise to me!)

If Brian hated the SMiLE lyrics (or even the music) he would not have chosen VDP as the person he most enjoyed working with!

He also probably wouldn't have begun to attempt to revive SMiLE in 2003, nor asked Van Dyke to come back and help him, if he didn't love all aspects of the work they did together.

And he wouldn't have been so proud and happy after that accomplishment of finally finishing SMiLE!  (Though, yes, it was different than it would have been back in '66.  But we all know that.  And Brian knows that, too.)

Oh wow. I just found the thread that is being discussed here. My hats off to you, Dan, for getting into that discussion with all those, *giggle*, fans.

Seriously, that entire thread is the perfect example of why this forum is a calm and collected place these days (since a lot of those same people were either banned or left here). For people to claim that Brian supposedly didn't understand the words to 'Surf's Up' based on him saying "maybe they work, I don't know" after explaining the damn lyrics to Jules is mind-blowing to me. And then the same poster later gets on your case because you supposedly read too much into Brian saying "I don't know" :lol

I mean, we're talking some pretty obvious allegorical lyrics, these aren't trigonometry formulas. Also, look at the books Brian was reading at the time; to claim he wasn't able to understand these lyrics is downright laughable. Granted, when you're of the same sect of the fandom that doesn't bat-an-eye at calling Brian 'brain damaged', you're probably going to give Brian far less intellectual credit than he deserves.

To be honest, this may very well prove Brian's point: some fans may not get the words - even the words Brian says in a conversation with Jules. To those people, I say: stick to enjoying the music, leave the history and interpretations to the professionals.

Yes, I meant to bring up the fact that Brian was supposedly very well read at the time, but it slipped out of my radar as I got bogged down in other things.

Nothing to add other than a reminder for context that Brian Wilson has said that he dislikes the lyrics to Sail On Sailor.

Interesting to openly state something I have detected quite a bit in the last decade plus. That a lot of the Mike apologists tend to be the more conservative side of the political spectrum. But then you have "Mike apologists" like Cam Mott and AGD, who as far as I can tell, wouldn't be caught dead being associated with the conservative movement. So, it's tough but I definitely know what you mean. Good observation.

This is largely where I fall on it. On top of all of that (and the peril of Carl's draft), I think the biggest factor in the untangling was the fear of public failure. Carl, Jack Rieley, and Brian himself have all said as much. The pressure to live up to his speedily acquired public profile, follow the commercial success of Good Vibrations, and deliver (as Carl put it) a 'heavy art album' against the competition all became insurmountable under the weight of everything else that was happening.

Danny Hutton observed that Brian had spent so much time with the material that he lost the freshness to tell if it was any good or not - on a musical level, not just lyrical. He became self conscious about what he thought may be deemed his own indulgence. And he wasn't sure if he was still into some of it, the weirder non-melodic stuff and the vamps stuck on two chords. Without a direct collaborator (beyond Van Dyke serving his job description as cowriter) to provide that reassurance and direction, Brian needed to leave it all behind and move onto something radically new to enjoy making music again. He's always been a person who has trouble sticking with a project for a long time without losing connection to the original inspiration. Brian's natural state of being is to create fast and move on.

Vosse called drugs a big red herring in the story of Smile. While they're an easy villain for an oversimplified narrative, I don't think they can totally be discounted among the above swirl of bad things. Carl thought that they irritated Brian's existing anxiety over the situation, and everyone consuming truckloads of hash wasn't conducive to keeping focus under that pressure. Brian was clearly experiencing manic episodes and paranoia magnified by the amphetamines. By April (by which time Vosse etc. had gone), Mike was as stoned as the rest. Maybe even Al a little. Bruce found it all too weird and got out of there.

Now... I don't agree with some of the earlier discussion. I wholeheartedly believe Brian loved Van Dyke's lyrics. I think that can stay true while he was also stewing over worries about their commerciality and being associated with an 'important' artistic statement that might not connect to the public, in light of everything else. Certainly some of that doubt crept in due to Mike's vocal questioning of the words. That can't be struck from the record. Thing is, those teething problems seemed to happen pretty early in the project - Mike was singing about crows before Europe, one of the first vocal sessions in '66, right in the middle of a roll of productivity. He loved Wonderful, was down with Heroes and Villains (besides the "sonny down snuff" line that he's on tape sneering at, as Brian laughs), sang everything asked, and I think ultimately settled into what they were doing by the early months of '67. The tapes don't lie about his attitude to recording, which was basically upbeat and business as usual. I've never heard of Carl, Dennis or Al having anything but a glowing response to Van Dyke's work. Bruce wasn't sure about it, but turned up and did the job.

The chain reaction of uncertainty that Mike's crow problem might have set in motion months before the collapse is up for debate. Personally, weighed against all the other factors, I don't think it was one of the most significant reasons for the project not happening. But I can't go back in time and read Brian's mind.

Those were by Jack Rieley, so Van Dyke has nothing to worry about.

WillJC, really thanks for your post. You "peeled off" two or three layers of the SMiLE admirably.

I agree 100% with everything you said, but would never be able to say it so well and succinctly.

What is clear: the "demise" of SMiLE was not any sort of short crisis, bug a long and convoluted process. Maybe it began right at the START of the project. There was all this forward momentum, and it gradually fizzled down, and out.
Yes, Brian needed to complete the project in at most a few months. He always functioned that way. But a project so hard, ambitious and experimental would have needed exceptionally favourable circumstances to get completed in a few months. We know that the circumstances were all BUT exceptionally favourable.

As a fan (NOT apologist) of Mike's, I have to talk about his role in this context.
Yes, I think the "crow problem" surely did not help the SMiLE project.
But... Mike was a good (at times great) lyricist himself, with a very different style from VDP's one. He had the right to question some of Van Dyke's lyrics. Of course he loved the easily understandable, easily relatable "Wonderful", liked the first sections of "Heroes", but found the "crows" and the "sunny down snuffs" questionable.
Said that, he did a great work in the sessions, including on "questionable" bits.

Did Mike harm SMiLE: possible. Was he a main reason: I think not. Is he to blame for whatever harm he did: I think not.

Again, Mike had the right to question, as every one of the Beach Boys. It's possible that those doubts grew in Brian's mind to the point of damaging his wonderful artistic relationship with VDP, resulting in the latter, in the end, abandoning the project.
One, besides Mike, could blame Brian for not defending VDP enough, and VDP himself for not soldiering through it. I prefer not to blame anybody.

However,  I don't think that if Mike had shut his mouth about the crows etc. SMiLE would have been completed. There were too many other problems.

Two things really annoy me in that thread:

1) How the great VDP is treated. I won't belabor this point, and just refer to Dan Lega's posts for the details.

2) The usual game of second and third guessing everything Brian ever said, because, you know... Brian is Brian. "You can't believe him when he explains that obscure verbiage by VDP. He is parroting. You know... Brian is Brian."

A question: was SMILE doomed when VDP left, or did VDP leave when SMiLE was doomed?

(https://i.imgur.com/41A7ayB.jpg)

(https://i.imgur.com/ANVcFPP.jpg)

Nice pictures!  Where did they come from?



Very reasonable posts everyone.  I just want to add, though, that Marilyn has said a couple of times, most recently in the new documentary shown on Disney+, that during the SMiLE period she believes the Beach Boys really did beat Brian down.

So, yeah, all your various theories could well be a part of why SMiLE collapsed, and I have no problem with that.  But when Brian's wife feels the Beach Boys really beat Brian down it seems we are missing a big part of the story that hasn't been told.  Maybe it was solely a questioning of the lyrics, but "beat down" implies other pressures, too.  Maybe they hounded him about the friends he was keeping?  And if all those friends were deeply into SMiLE, and he was pressured to get rid of them, then perhaps losing their support was enough for him to say, well, we did some beautiful work, but it's been tainted now, and I think I'll just keep these little gems to myself.


Love and merci,
Dan Lega  

I agree that unduly heavy pressure on Brian by his bandmates (most of them family, too ) would have been enough, by itself, to cause the abandonment of the project. But imho there is not enough evidence of that. On the contrary, we know the band cooperated excellently on all those sessions.

I am not saying that Marilyn lied, far from that. But things aren't are so black-and-white. I believe there was some "pushback" by the band, and the question is: was it really unduly heavy? Was Marilyn (rightly) protective of his spouse? Depending on point of view, what sounds legitimate doubts to someone may sound "beating down" to someone else, particularly when the recipient is as sensitive as Brian.

I admit I am rambling a bit, but it's because I am trying to be as objective as possible, without offending anyone.

And I still think that the other problems mentioned were enough to cause SMiLE's demise, anyway.

For me, the verification of Marilyn's claim is provided by Chuck Negron's memories from the same period.
When Chuck remembers Mike, Carl and Al reducing Brian to tears in the control booth during the Darlin/Time to Get Alone sessions and browbeating him into stopping his Redwood collaboration, that sounds exactly like the emotional beat-downs that Marilyn remembers.
https://www.reddit.com/r/thebeachboys/comments/12y53b2/excerpts_from_chuck_negrons_three_dog_night/#lightbox

That is from one of the swimming pool scenes in Love And Mercy, specifically the scene where Van Dyke's lyrics are again challenged by Mike, set during the Smile era. To me it's a beautifully done allegorical depiction of the group turmoil at this time, and how Brian's (and Van's) work on Smile was causing strife within the group. Sure, it's a Hollywood biopic, but they didn't pull that dialogue out of thin air, nor is it inaccurate based on other accounts of what was going on. And in terms of pure film making, it's poignant how they show each member of the band staged at various depths of the pool representing their individual support or lack thereof for Brian's direction with Smile. Brian is in the deep end of the pool, and is waving the others to join him. Dennis is neck deep closest to Brian, Carl is waist deep, Van Dyke has his shoes off and his feet in the pool, Mike is sitting outside the pool not wet at all, and Al is standing in the background.

That is as good of a depiction of the band's dynamic during this time as I've seen, again whether it's a Hollywood depiction or not...they nailed it. And they also worked in Brian's paranoia over having his house bugged by Murry and by Spector, which led to him wanting to have meetings in the water where they could not plant microphones. The Murry side of that paranoia was actually true, according to some who claim that listening devices were in fact found and Murry was threatening to "bust" Brian to the cops over the drug use at the house. Topic for another time.

So I simply added those photos to the list of reasons why Smile wasn't released in 1967 because for me that scene captured a perfect allegory of where the support among band members and family (and a collaborator) stood at that time regarding Smile. The swimming pool as an allegorical storytelling device is present throughout Love And Mercy, so it may be worth a rewatch to catch all the meanings behind those scenes.

And adding to the mentions of Marilyn's comments, I just have to say for my own sake and sanity that I would have added more to this worthwhile discussion earlier but I'm a little burned out on it considering I've been discussing these same issues for over 20 years and in recent years have contributed a lot to similar discussions, and I just feel like I'm repeating what has already been said and debated. If people either choose to ignore or simply not believe and then parse what has been on the record for many decades, I guess that's their choice, but it's sad and at least it is only a relatively small pocket of "fans" who continue trying to rewrite history or believe the rewritten history. All that can be done is to keep putting the facts about Smile out there to be seen and hopefully digested to counter the rewrites and outright falsehoods. I just don't have the time or energy right now to repeat what I've already said much more than to add a few things here and there.

So here are some relevant quotes from both Marilyn and Brian which I added to a discussion on these same topics back in 2021, taken from the Don Was documentary in 1995. If someone reads these and still doesn't believe this group dynamic happening between Brian and the other Boys in 1966 and 1967 was a factor in what happened with Smile, or chooses to dismiss what Dan Lega and others are saying about this element of the story and trying to bring it to the foreground as a contributing factor, there's not much more to be done for those people...they're either not willing to listen to facts and reason, or the attempts to rewrite Smile history took hold of them and they can't see the facts right in front of them for the past however many decades.

The quotes:



I have not and will not read what's on that other board, but my thank you to Dan Lega among others for trying to get the facts out there and into the discussions wherever they may be.

They’re retconning Young Brian to be the stereotype of Old Brian.

Of course I understand Craig (and probably other people here) being rather fed up with all this!

Despite that, I decided to start this let's-beat-this-poor-horse-again thread for several reasons.

Firstly, I read the thread in the other forum and was impressed by Dan's stoic resilience in "fighting the good fight" against practically a whole board. I wanted to open a different space to pursue, for Dan and similarly minded people, the same matter with the due respect for Brian, VDP and SMiLE, and without bogus revisionism.

Secondly, things have been really slow here. I thought to myself: nothing like a good SMiLE thread to rekindle a bit of discussion, after the documentary fizzled out.

Thirdly, I was wondering if some of the people here had partly changed idea about SMiLE now in 2024. Seems not... good! :)

When, I talk of "bogus revisionism" I don't mean theories on what made SMiLE flounder. In my opinion, as there was never a consensus about that, one cannot talk of "revisionism" in that sense

But... there IS a practically universal consensus about SMiLE's VALUE. It's a masterpiece of pop/rock music (and of art pop, of psychedelia, etc.).

A section of the "fandom" seems to go beyond discussing the reason for SMiLE's demise, to hint more or less explicitly that such demise was RIGHT: the project was pretentious, uncommercial, elitist, whatever. Brian and VDP had it coming.

I find that mind-boggling.

Personally, I agree that there was "pushback" by the band, and that it was probably harmful to SMiLE. What I sincerely don't know is how important it was relative to the other reasons.

Let's say that, as a Beach Boy fan, I HOPE they themselves (and, of course, particularly Mike) weren't the main reason... because that would really suck.
 
As I said, I tend to blame mostly an almost unavoidable "loss of momentum". There was a time window of some months to do "THE" SMiLE, and by Spring 1967 it was too late. We had instead "a" SMiLE, minimalistic but still a masterpiece: Smiley Smile. :)

Post from that EH thread:


Same poster, a couple pages later:


And the entire latter part of the thread is full of this doublespeak garbage from a plethora of posters. Like Guitarfool stated, this fight has been going on for 20+ years now. Pretty much the same people, ignoring actual history, facts, and quotes, all to appease their own illogical echo chamber.

One poster is arguing that VDP’s Smile lyrics were seemingly written at a “PhD review panel” level and that, because newspapers are written at a 6th grade level, VDPs shouldn’t have tried to “riddle the customers.”

To that I respond: how many 6th graders knew what a flathead mill was? How about a competition clutch? How about lake pipes? How many 6th graders across America knew where Narabeen, Trestle, San Anofree, Waimia Bay were? Yet why did both of those songs reach #15 & #2 on the charts respectively? Because, shocker, Brian was correct in his assertion that if the kids don’t get the words, they at least get the music.

The people who subtly/slowly attempt to chip away at Brian’s reputation will do this doublespeak and they will create these illogical arguments and then, when there is pushback, they’ll tell YOU that YOU are being disruptive, agenda driven, and claim YOU are the one who believes “2+2=5” (all while touting how tolerant their forum is).

Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of Beach Boys history can see right through this idiocy, but I truly feel bad for the newcomers on that forum who gets suckered into believing this muck.

Bottom line: go look at Metacritic’s top reviewed albums of all time list. What two names are there on that #3 album? That would be Brian Wilson & Van Dyke Parks (this same album received a standing ovation from Paul McCartney, 3 Grammy nominations, winning 1 Grammy). This nonsense about “PhDs” and Brian somehow understanding yet simultaneously not understanding the lyrics, it can all be tossed in the garbage bin where it belongs.

I also want to give a shoutout to Van Dyke Parks’ incredible musical career.

If anyone here hasn’t, do try to listen to ‘Song Cycle’. Knowing this album came directly after Smile, I think you can really hear the influence in the production of the album. And then, ‘Discover America’ (his second album) is such a cool trip - I seem to remember the concept supposedly being an RV trip across the islands (not unlike a bicycle trip across America).

To dig even deeper, the ‘Esso Trinidad Steel Drum Band’ CD is a must if you like ‘Discover America’.

Check out the ending minutes of the U2 song ‘All I Want is You’ - a haunting yet downright beautiful orchestral piece, that could come from none-other than Van Dyke Parks.

And finally, his ‘Moonlighting: Live at the Ash Grove’ album is one of the coolest live albums ever - not so much in its breadth, but in its depth. There is so much musical talent there (both in songwriting and performance) all on one album.

There’s definitely more, but those are the highlights off the top of my head.

Song Cycle is unbelievable. Besides being a wonderful experimental, psychedelic album by itself, it helps to "get" what SMiLE was trying to be, and shows how probably VDP's work went beyond lyrics, and was instilling further creativity into Brian's already staggering reservoir.

The "naysayers" in the IF (Inclusive Forum) should all stand up and celebrate Van with a standing ovation, instead of what they are doing.

Congrats for detecting and highlighting that particularly blatant, but far from unique, example of "doublespeak", Brian "understaning but not understanding".

I have shown several times that my point of view is that of a fan of all the Beach Boys. But... what's happening in that thread beats me.

And I think it's right to keep calling the BS when it manifests. Even just to try and alert those younger fans, who may not know all the history of the Beach Boys, and its fandom, that what passes for "truth" in that forum is not necessarily true, and is sometimes (all too often?) the result of distorted interpretations.

Well said, Zenobi. One thing I will forever stress to all fans, new and old, is that you should never blindly trust what you read on any of these forums. If I myself, another poster, someone who gets off on claiming to be of high scholarly esteem regarding the band, etc, claim something: don't automatically believe it! If you read something that doesn't ring right, you're probably correct in that assumption - but look into it. If someone PMs you some 'secret' information or opinions, do your research. Don't just assume that people with a high post count or a flashy scholarly signature on their forum tag actually know what they're talking about. Because most of the old-timers on these forums belong to some clique, or have an ax to grind, a history of spreading rumors, etc etc.

Research and history aren't monopolized by one person, rather it's for any one of us who cares about the truth of this band and the music. And it's as easy as googling an article, opening a book, emailing the sources themselves.

Better said, Rab. :)

I should not have written "what passes for truth in that forum", it should have been "what passes for truth in forums".

Or rather, in 2024, even "what passes for truth anywhere".

Truth is more and more an endangered animal... and the supposed "true news" are often faker than the "fake news".

Thanks again for your help, your nice comments, and for letting me know I'm not the only one who feels this way about things in the world of SMiLE.  Twenty years ago I, too, was back there in the original fight, and didn't expect to be drawn back into it at this time.  But I really didn't like the way they were being unkind to Van Dyke Parks.  And from there it just spiralled.  And since I had the energy I went ahead and stuck my foot in the dogshit again -- hoping to at least let some people know that they were possibly not getting the whole story on that forum.

----------------

And I'm not out of it, yet.  I went to the Disney+ doc and found some quotes, and wrote this on the other board.  I thought some of you might like to see the quotes from the Disney+ doc, though some are obviously taken from the Don Was doc as Guitarfool has previously quoted...

----------------

Here are Carl and Brian quotes from the Disney documentary (which I believe were also on another documentary.)  The rest of the quotes seem to be recorded for this new doc as far as I can tell.

These are taken from the SMiLE to Smiley Smile section of the documentary...


Carl:  He (Mike Love) thought the lyrics were not relatable.  Personally, I loved it.  So artistic and abstract.  I realized that Brian and Van Dyke were expressing a new poetry.  But it could be that it was not an appropriate project for The Beach Boys.  Maybe that would have been most fitting as Brian's album.

Brian:  I wanted to do my kind of music, and they wanted to do their kind of music.  So, it was a tug-of-war.  I felt like I was getting pulled to pieces.

(Longer quote copied from a poster on the Smiley Smile board...)
Brian -- from Don Was documentary:  "I had a great big, a great problem with the Beach Boys. And I wanted to do my kind of music and they wanted to do their kind of music. So it was a tug of war, I felt like I was getting pulled to pieces. Like two...inner turmoil that's struggling, with the see-saw, kind of teeter totter kind of thing, you know? Where I was being pulled all around, you know? And I just about, I fell to pieces."

Al Jardine:  We were pretty exhausted by then.  And so, we decided to build a studio inside Brian's home.  And we were able to come back together socially, and actually enjoy doing what we were doing again.  It's almost like starting over.  And so we made this little album called Smiley Smile.

Marilyn:  He (Brian) was at this point with The Beach Boys where they weren't as happy with the music he wanted to create.  You know, there was a lot of squabbling going on all the time.  And Brian just said, "You know what?  Let them do it.  Let them do it.  Let them see how easy it is."   (So Marilyn is obviously talking about SMiLE here, because when else is it documented that the Boys were not happy with the music Brian was creating?)

Lindsay Buckingham:  Even though he (Brian) was the mastermind, he, suddenly, did not have their full support.  And, I think, because it was his family, it made that much more difficult and, perhaps, much more demanding on his psyche.  So many artists who have very, very significant commercial success forget why they got into the business in the first place.  Why they do music.  And now, you are judging your validity through commerce more than anything else.  

<End of quotes>

=========


Seems Carl has reservations about SMiLE, too.  Seemingly loves it, but doesn't think it's appropriate for The Beach Boys.  And the quote from Al makes it sound like there was a definite tension in the group before they were able to "reconcile" in the studio at Brian's house.


=========


And here are some more Marilyn quotes from the Don Was documentary, courtesy of the Smiley Smile board...

Marilyn:
"He had a real hard time with the guys, after Pet Sounds and after Smile. Because he felt guilty that he got all the attention, and he was the one who was called the genius. And, you know, he knew, he felt that the guys really resented that, and I think they did. I think it was very hard for them to understand why is Brian Wilson singled out. But anybody with a brain would know why."

"Well he would slowly just stay in the bedroom and let the guys record in the studio, since the Beach Boys paid for the studio. And it just became more and more that he would just stay in bed, didn't want to go down, and, you know, 'let them do their thing, let them do their thing'. And it was very tough for him because he thought that they all hated him. I think it was like, 'OK you assholes, you know, you wanna...you think you can do as good as me, or whatever? Like, go ahead. So you can do it, you do it. You think it's so easy? You do it.'"

"And I don't think Brian really ever came back. I don't think he ever had the need, I mean...he was just torn down, he really was. They slowly tore him down. I hate to say it, but they did."


=========

I won't be remiss, I'll also point out that in the Disney+ doc you can find some quotes that follow this (Endless Harmony) board's reasoning much more closely.  But to only focus only on those and to totally dismiss the others doesn't seem very valid to me.  Nor does it seem to be what a true historian would do!  When a person totally disregards quotes like these they are not advancing research.  They are advancing their own agenda.


Love and merci,
Dan Lega

Lindsay Buckingham: "Even though he (Brian) was the mastermind, he, suddenly, did not have their full support.  And, I think, because it was his family, it made that much more difficult and, perhaps, much more demanding on his psyche.  So many artists who have very, very significant commercial success forget why they got into the business in the first place.  Why they do music.  And now, you are judging your validity through commerce more than anything else."

THIS. And not only regarding the artists, but, it seems, even more regarding "fandom". When people lambast Heroes and Villains because it was not #1
stuff... I understand being DISAPPOINTED by that, but too many BB "fans" seem to have this really maddening mindset: small commercial success = small artistic value.

So, let's dump the Boys altogether: there are far more successful "artists" in 2024, innit? :P

When Lindsey said that, I immediately thought of his struggle with the rest of Fleetwood Mac to make the Tusk album. If there is anyone who could understand Brian’s mindset during the SMiLE era as an artist, it’s Lindsey Buckingham.

Marilyn:
"He had a real hard time with the guys, after Pet Sounds and after Smile. Because he felt guilty that he got all the attention, and he was the one who was called the genius. And, you know, he knew, he felt that the guys really resented that, and I think they did. I think it was very hard for them to understand why is Brian Wilson singled out. But anybody with a brain would know why."

So people are claiming that Marylin, in this quote, is talking solely about the period after Friends (because Brian produced the 3 albums after Smile?)

Okay, even excluding the very obvious “Pet Sounds, AND after Smile” - (“and” meaning “in addition” - and that’s not my interpretation, that’s just elementary reading comprehension), just look at the context of what Marylin is talking about: Brian felt there was resentment from the band because he had been labeled a “genius”. Now when did that start?

Derek Taylor was employed by The Beach Boys in 1966, and around the time of Pet Sounds he started the “Brian is a genius” campaign. So if there was resentment toward Brian, according to Marylin, about Brian’s genius label, wouldn’t it stand to reason that this resentment started when this lofty “genius” campaign started? Not, 2 years and 3 albums after Smile?

Dan, I’m assuming your point in bringing up the Marylin quote is to show that there was turmoil in the band during the Smile Sessions which aided in, or was the main cause of, the demise of Smile. And people on the EH forum are arguing against this because they believe that the band turmoil started solely after the Smile era?

Here are a couple quotes from Mike regarding VDPs, Pet Sounds, Smile:

“In fact, Brian has even said in interviews that I didn’t like the album (Smile), I did like the music, the tracks, but I didn’t like the association with the drugs and some of the lyrics that Van Dyke came up with.“

“That used to be "Hang On To Your Ego" and then it became "I Know There's An Answer." I changed the lyrics because I thought it was too acid for me. That was those guys doing acid, Van Dyke Parks, and Brian and Tony Asher.”

That on top of Van Dyke’s recollection of Mike’s dislike of the lyrics, specifically Cabin Essence.

Personally, I don’t chalk the failure of Smile up to one reason. I think it was a perfect storm of inner and external turmoil that Brian was going through. I think the demise was part of the same fractal that caused Brian to quit touring a couple years prior: the pressure was too great. I think that Brian really dug those lyrics from VDPs (I mean, you don’t sit in a sandbox all night and record music for 4 months based around lyrics you hate), but clearly Mike had issues with some of the lyrics. And clearly a lack of support from your colleagues (or even one colleague) can be detrimental to a project. Pile that on top of the mental issues and the drug use and it’s a recipe for disaster. Put ALL the quotes regarding Smile’s demise into a blender and you’ll get a mixture of drugs, mental illness, band turmoil, and issues with Capitol Records.

That’s just my two cents. To me, it’s not solely one reason or another. Obviously there are those who continue to try and rewrite history in Mike’s favor, but at the end of the day, access to the internet and real sources, as well as a basic grasp on logic will reveal the truth.

I agree with you on practically everything, but I have a somewhat different "theory" about the demise of SMiLE.

Right, poor Brian found himself in a "perfect storm": everything was unfavourable.

But, said that, I simply can't picture a scenario where "THE" SMiLE would be completed and released in 1967. SMiLE how Brian and VDP had envisioned, a majestic modular concept album with every part as polished and perfect as "Good Vibrations".

Even if no storm, perfect or not, had manifested, there was not the technology available to do that in a few months, which was the time window available, both for external and internal reasons.

They, Brian and VDP, knew this very well by Spring 1967. Yes, they could have released a "3/4 SMiLE": we can listen to such a musical wonder in Disc 1 of the 2011 Box.

But Brian, as many artists have done, refused to release a 3/4 approximation of his masterpiece. Instead, he rebooted and released an album originated by SMiLE but much more laid back, and feasible: the aptly named, and anyway wonderful, Smiley Smile.

This is my very personal one cent "solution" of the mystery.

P.S.
To clarify: I am not blaming either Brian or VDP. They, as great artists often do, attempted very gallantly to do the impossible.

Actually I agree with this 100%. I still contend that the perfect storm occurred, but also you're totally right that it just couldn't have happened regardless, which is why it just didn't happen.

It is my humble (and unpopular) opinion that BWPS is THE Smile. Brian was able to finish his masterpiece when the storm clouds cleared up enough, when the technology was there, when he had solid 100% support from family, friends, and band members.

I'll get into the other issues too, but I just wanted to state again how there is one element that doesn't get put on the discussion table as much as others. As all of this "turmoil" and other issues were swirling around the making of Smile, Brian had written and produced a groundbreaking single for the band, Good Vibrations, which in some regions was still charting #1 going into January 1967.  It had a new sound, a radically different song form based more on a symphony of movements than traditional pop song form, radical new sounds and techniques involving editing and studio effects that were not in the pop lexicon as of 1966 for the most part...and the public loved it. It stayed on the charts for several months, and many musicians and listeners accepted these "new sounds" and psychedelic undertones and were actually in awe of how Brian made that record. It was "Sgt Pepper" and "Strawberry Fields" months before either of those came out.

My point bringing that up is Brian as main creator and producer now had clout, both in the industry and maybe even moreso within his band and family. I see a scenario come up where if Brian was in fact challenged on his wild musical experimentation and far-out ideas in the studio, he could pick up a Billboard or Cashbox or an imported copy of Melody Maker or whatever, point to Good Vibrations sitting in the top 5 if not number 1 depending on the week, and say nothing. His far-out ideas were validated, at least commercially, and they would make the band a lot more money in the next year thanks to a number 1 smash hit record that was "far out". And it put a new spotlight on the band as a solid musical entity that could stand toe-to-toe with The Beatles and make groundbreaking music that also sold records.

If this young proto-prog-psych producer putting Theremins and rattling jewelry and crazy tape delay effects scored a number 1 going outside the box of standard pop music, he had more clout to do more of that, all the record companies cared about was selling more records and making more money.

In the midst of all this success, and check the 1968 Vosse "Fusion" article for the exact quotes, he was getting pushback from his family, Murry in particular, for going too far outside that box and losing the band's fan base. Vosse speaks as if he was incredulous when he heard this from Murry, and looking back it does seem unbelievable. But the hints are that this sentiment was not limited to Murry, and it was a concern moving forward.

Now rewind back to early 1966 when Brian first put that initial version of Good Vibrations on tape, the one with the Asher lyrics. He had a great concept for the lyrics, he had many of the key musical sections in place, but it just didn't cross the finish line into a fully realized record that Brian could say was finished. He started recording fragments, envisioning something beyond a start-to-finish track. The feel, which I think David Anderle described as "heavy R&B", started to change and shift too. Brian eventually would nearly give up on the track. He was seriously considering giving the track away to another artist. Anderle's client Danny Hutton when he was still a solo act on MGM was one who may have been a potential recipient of this song gift. Brian even asked Van Dyke to help with lyrics on it at one point, and Van Dyke outright refused the job.

So this potentially great song sat there, went through some changes and revisions, and was almost given away because Brian had not yet hit on that magic formula that glued it all together. This was a months-long process! Does that sound familiar? Eventually Brian got some support from his inner circle who told him it was too good to give away, to keep going with it, and in a stroke off good fortune (portrayed beautifully, yet again, in the L&M biopic), he asked Mike if he could add some lyrics to it. Once he had all the pieces together, there was the number 1 he and the band needed at the end of 1966 and into 1967.

But look at how it arrived to that destination. It wasn't a straight line from idea to creation to completion. It was too complex to be that simple of a process. Consider all of the detours and potholes along that road, and I still say Good Vibrations is a microcosm of Smile in the process through which it traveled. Only this was one 3-minute pop song versus a full album. And when it did come out, after all the doubts (both self-inflicted and external), it became a smash hit worldwide.

I'm just suggesting that the process for Good Vibrations be considered within the discussions of what happened with Smile, and take note of the similarities and the differences between the two, and they did overlap eventually by the summer and fall of 1966 when both were being created simultaneously. There were external factors involved with Good Vibrations too, and even after Brian's experiments were validated with Good Vibrations' success, family members like Murry were still challenging him and his experimentation while the public and the music community were listening in awe, and buying it in large quantities.

Brian was still having doubt thrown his way, from within his family and band, after a hugely successful record which people around him helped boost his confidence to finish it the way he thought it needed to be instead of giving it away...it would seem to back up those quotes from Marilyn and Brian that were just reposted.

Just rambling out loud.

Didn’t Alan Boyd and Mark Linett say the tape splicing technology in 1967 wasn’t enough to finish SMiLE?

I can appreciate why these discussions get repetitive for some of you long-time fans, but as someone not completely steeped in this stuff I find them fascinating. Some really thoughtful posts here.

Is there a book you guys would recommend on Smile? The Dominic Priore one still worth picking up?

The Dominic Priore book is worth reading but you have to sift through parts of it and ignore some of the weird theories. But the quotes and most of the book are a great overview of what was happening at the time.

His “Look Listen Vibrate Smile” is absolutely worth picking up ($54 used on Amazon right now). I am hoping it comes back into print at some point because it’s a treasure trove for new fans.

It has been a while since I opened up the book that came with TSS box set. But I remember it being a good overview (nothing extensive though).

Have you read ‘Catch A Wave’ by Peter Carlin? It’s a biography of Brian’s life but the general arc is about Brian’s Smile redemption in 2004. The chapter on Smile is pretty good/informative. ‘Inside the Music of Brian Wilson’ by Philip Lambert has a chapter on Smile - it is more of look at the music itself but I think he delves into a little bit of the band politics at the time. He was also the guy who did amazing musical breakdowns of some of Brian’s songs in the ‘Songwriter’ series.

Would love to hear of any other recommendations too, I may definitely be overlooking a book or two!

I seem to remember this too.

Guitarfool, GREAT post. I never knew he was close to giving the song away…to whom was he going to give it to?

I can't cite where either one said that, but I'm sure I remember they did especially during the Smile Sessions box time. I know I said it more than a few times through the years, chalking up the lack of available technology in 1966-67 to the project not being completed, and in a few cases I got a STRONG pushback to that opinion. I still think lack of technology at that time was a factor, for time restrictions alone if not the frustration of not being able to easily and quickly "audition" the sequences of various segments, and I'll stand by that notion. There are examples of "test edits" that may or may not have been released (I don't know) where Brian was trying to audition different transitions and segments and a few sound like he was doing a very primitive way of editing existing acetates together doing needle-drops on tape. It's been many years so I cannot cite the exact titles but that's what it sounded like to me.

 To do the kind of editing which is taken for granted in modern studios using digital technology in 1967 would have taken a much longer time and more effort, surely more than it did when they compiled the Smile Sessions box set using DAW's and almost instant crossfades available on any recording tool. So yeah, I'm sure one of those guys mentioned it, and I know I definitely did (if I can dig up any old threads, it goes back to the Smile Shop days.)

Thanks Rab! The one name I've heard mentioned was Danny Hutton, who David Anderle was managing at the time, but there was a point where Brian was frustrated with Good Vibrations enough to tell people he was going to give it to another artist to record instead, he couldn't get what he was looking for with the recordings of the song he had done up to a point. People around him talked him out of it, and he came to his senses and held onto the song. I can't give a date in 1966 as to when this was in the process, but it has been reported at least several times if I recall, one may be in the Preiss book? Maybe it was Anderle or Hutton who mentioned it too? If I find it I'll post it.

Thanks! I enjoyed Catch a Wave though it's been many years now; it's actually the only BBs book I've read to date. I'll check out the Priore one for sure.

I hold Carlin's book dear to my heart. It was the first book I ever read about the band as a new fan, and reading it and listening to all the late-60s and 70s music for the first time was such a great trip.

100%, makes total sense.

A slightly different but supporting take on the technology problem: In a different Smile discussion on these boards many months ago, there was a really fascinating long post where the author suggested that Brian's experiments with different Heroes and Villains structures were literally 'cannibalizing' other songs and fragments of songs -- that once edited in, due to technology limitations those songs were basically 'gone' as far as being usable on their own, thus reducing the number of songs or stand-alone concepts available for the album itself. I'm sure I'm oversimplifying but that was the gist of it. (If the author of that post is in this thread, or if this rings a bell with anyone else, please point me to that post as I have no idea where it is but would love to read it again.)

I said I would add more on the topic, but all I want to add now is to say if there are people who read those quotes posted above from Marilyn and Brian about the struggles between Brian and the band, and then try to parse, twist, and cherrypick them and shoehorn those words into something that they're not...chances are, there is no logical rebuttal to what was specifically said by the two people who were closest to Brian at that time and saw what was happening: Brian and his then-wife. It's the same crap that I said earlier in this discussion has been going on for 20+years during these online discussions, and it's everyone's right I guess to grab a microphone when offered the chance and start blabbering nonsense or illogical statements...but that doesn't make it right, and people will either push back or simply not listen. I just remember years ago, there was a direct quote from Mike Love that was either false, or vindictive, or something...and when it was called out, after the attempted parsing and whatnot, the best rebuttal that could be offered was along the lines of "Mike was misquoted", followed by a history lesson on how people get misquoted.

Yeah, sure...maybe there was no logical point to argue what was said in the first place? It all gets ridiculous when that's the last line of discussion. Oh, wait...there are also the personal attacks in lieu of any logical points to counter. Can't forget those.

So as Dan said, there can't be an honest telling of history coming from either historians or wannabe historians if said historians deliberately cherrypick details and leave out or dismiss key points that are key to the telling of that history. I'd be more upset if we had not seen all of that happen many times before in this fanbase. As Dan said, it is not advancing the telling of the history or the research, it's closer to pushing an agenda at that point.

I'm glad there are still fans out there who are interested in getting the facts about Smile out there, and doing so with logic and fact. Kudos to everyone in that camp, keep up the good work.

I think it's beyond ironic that some of our "friends" over at "The Nearest Faraway Place" who've contributed their strangulated ideas to that strange thread about SMiLE are the same ones who wept with joy when they were in attendance at BWPS in 2004. But so much bizarre stuff has happened in the world at large over the twenty years from then to now that I suppose it's not all that surprising...   :smokin

I'm curious if David Leaf (in his upcoming book on SMiLE) wlll address the alarm, bewilderment, consternation and dissension that ensued in late '66 and how that contributed to SMiLE essentially being neutered into a moving target when Brian was pushed into a corner by all of the swirling events and tried (in vain) to make a version of H&V that could top GV. I still think Brian expected to return to some form of SMiLE on his own after Smiley based on an agreement between him and the rest of the band, but the ultimate "beat down" that GF refers to (the Marilyn quote) actually seems to have come in the fall of '67, when Brian was revisiting "Surf's Up" and working with Redwood--which meant that the band's panic over Smiley's catastrophic reception "justified" them in reneging on such an agreement that (I suspect) was part of the late May-early June "regrouping" discussions.

Some of that speculation, and a whole lot more about the band dynamics in the transition from SMiLE to Smiley, can be found in this thread, with many heavy hitters weighing in there...

http://smileysmile.net/board/index.php/topic,28152.0.html

I'm swamped with an ongoing project, so I haven't looked at it again--thus I don't recall if Zenobi was in that thread, but either way I think it's worth a look to add more detail to this discussion.

It's clear that some folks over at the Nearest Faraway Place have a weird ongoing agenda to minimize SMiLE in the history of the band, and whitewash Mike Love to the greatest extent possible.

What's also clear is that if Brian really "hated" VDP's lyrics, he'd have never decided to undertake BWPS. He could have left it as a locked-away mystery. That suggests that he'd always wanted to find some way to resurrect it, even when he put it aside in the interest of his bandmates. The same folks who wept and cheered when he finally did resurrect it now apparently want to tear it down again...let's give Jim Morrison the last word here: "People are strange..."  :3d

A topic about which much can be — and has been, and will be — written.

One point: The average age of onset for bipolar disorder is 25. How old was Brian in the heat of the Smile sessions? 25.

His most accurate diagnosis has, to my knowledge, been bipolar with some schizoaffective features (the auditory hallucinations).

Regardless of who said what to him or what he himself believed, regardless of the work being done, it all happened at an absolute crisis point in his mental health. Yes, he continued to function well for several years afterward. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t struggling or competent to deal with what was happening in his own mind.

Thank you! That's exactly the thread I was looking for. (I thought it was 'a few months back'... looks like two years ago, yikes.) Lots of fascinating Smile discussion in there.


This is the post I was thinking of re Heroes and Villains, from poster sloopjohnb1972 :

"... Things [on Smile] were sort of beginning to fall apart by Christmas, but there was still an album that could easily have been finished at any given moment, had the Beach Boys been given one week to complete the LP. Those 12 songs could have been finished in a rush if they needed to be.

But the big switch was David Anderle informing Brian that he needed a unique A and B side single to launch Brother Records. Brian was seemingly satisfied with Good Vibrations as the sole single for the project, until his decision to launch a record label for the Boys (which had been in the plans for about a year now) sort of snuck up behind him. There's sufficient evidence in the way that this story has been told for us to believe that Heroes had already been conceived, and maybe even recorded as a song for Smile when Brian got this news. Every session up until October 20 had not produced a piece of a song, but an entire backing track that was in need only of vocal overdubbing. So far, the process was no different than Pet Sounds, beside the fact that the tracks were not performed beginning-to-end live by the ensemble, as Brian used editing to highlight big dynamic and metric contrasts between verses and choruses that couldn't be achieved as well via a continuous performance. There's no reason to believe Heroes was an exception. On October 20, Heroes had only 2 long parts - the verse (which was originally much longer, and is cut down even on The Smile Sessions disc 2), and the Barnyard section, a fadeout which, like all of Brian's Smile fades, adds in new melodies and instruments with each round, rather than starting full steam ahead. With Brian and Van Dyke's 3 verses telling a cohesive love story set in the old west, without the "side quests" that later versions of the song will include, this works perfectly as a concise 2-part album track.

But when Brian was told he needed a single, he chose to rework this song as something both commercial and exciting, and that's when it began to consume parts of other songs. First I'm in Great Shape, then Do You Like Worms, then Cabin Essence, then My Only Sunshine... songs became unusable for the next project, as they were physically disassembled, and the focus shifted entirely toward the new single. It didn't help that for the first time for The Beach Boys (this had been the case for other artists, pseudonyms, studio bands, etc), Brian needed TWO new songs. Previously, he'd relied on material from released albums to fill out the B-side, but on a new record label, he couldn't just take something off Pet Sounds, for example. The entirety of the next 5-6 months is spent trying to get a single. That's not a sign of a stable and healthy mind, it isn't productive to constantly rework one song rather than 12 at once, and it is not going to produce both a single and an album without some big changes being made."

Just a few quick replies:

I cannot understand why "fans" would want to "tear down" Smile, it just makes no sense to me. Smile has inspired so many musicians alone, let alone non-musician fans and listeners, to think outside the box, to dig deeper into the creation and history of pop music from the 60's, to get into finding and collecting unreleased material, to go beyond the surface level and dig for more information outside the mainstream outlets, to create friendships centered around ***MUSIC*** and the enjoyment of listening and discovering new music, and above all it has made how many people actually smile and feel inspired. And it also brought a new kind of attention to and a new base of listeners to the music of The Beach Boys. I remember the early 90's so well because it's what got me obsessed with Smile. You'd open up a music magazine or a 'zine or read an interview, and Smile was being name-checked by a variety of alternative musicians and even classic rockers on a semi-regular basis, which meant those unfamiliar would probably ask "so what is this Smile project?" and start seeking it out on their own. I remember buying Priore's Look Listen Vibrate Smile at Tower Records and reading it nearly every day, then re-reading it over and over. I remember getting a copy of Tower's "Pulse" in house magazine and finding a column written by Priore where he laid out a fan mix sequence fans could make to come close to Smile's original order. I remember so well Philly DJ Ed Sciaky playing about 40 minutes of Smile one night on his show, I had my tape deck recording it, and then closing that set with a very poignant reading of the Derek Taylor press release stating that the music was scrapped. I played that cassette for nearly every musician I could, I took it into one of my Berklee advanced arranging classes and played it for the class, and one student from Europe just stood there in stunned silence, he had never heard music like that and was enthralled. I remember when the GV box set came out, and the 5-star Rolling Stone review of the set said it was hard to get past disc 2, after hearing what could have been with the chunk of Smile tracks they included. I took several subway trips on the T's Green and Red lines to Cambridge after a friend told me there were shops out there selling various Smile discs...and I saved up 50 bucks to buy one of them, and that was not cheap 30 years ago to buy a CD.

Anyway I could go on, but it's obvious others had similar experiences and took on similar obsessions which eventually led to Hunt and Lane creating The Smile Shop, and the Lil Smiley Cabin on Yahoo, and the MyPlay lockers where people would drop random unreleased fragments...The point being this was some of the most inspirational music I've ever experienced, and the inspiration went into several areas besides only the listening experience.

And it was an unreleased album that had not yet been finished! I don't think there is a similar project to compare in rock history...Sure, there are "legendary" unreleased albums but I don't think any of them had the devotion which Smile garnered through the decades.

And people now want to take a sh*t on it? Rewrite the history? Parse and cherrypick historical facts and comments? And to what end is this being done? To spin a narrative, to absolve certain people of certain things, to knock Brian Wilson and his legacy down a few pegs?

It's all so fucking sad. People trying to knock down Smile when so many more people enjoy it to their core as music fans, it makes no sense unless the "new" narrative or agenda is that much more important than remembering how much joy and inspiration the music has brought to people.

Brian did not hate the lyrics. If the guy called Van Dyke Parks his favorite lyricist and collaborator multiple times through the years, you cannot parse that kind of statement. End of story.

Indeed, a very interesting point to consider and weigh. And I'll also add that if what you're suggesting is the case, and it was a crisis point, consider what else Brian had on his plate in the span of - let's round it off - 6 months circa 1967. Besides the pressures on him musically to get a new album done and get a follow-up single to Good Vibrations, he was in the middle of a lawsuit with his label after finding out they had ripped him off, his younger brother Carl got drafted and could potentially have to leave the band either for Vietnam or federal prison for evasion, he was selling his house and moving into a new one, there were tensions within the band and his family over the direction of the music and the band, his touring band was catching criticism that they didn't sound like the records at the live shows, he was starting a new label that would include music, film, and other projects, he was featured playing solo on national TV - nary a Beach Boys in sight - and had nothing ready to sell to listeners from and after that appearance, his main collaborator and lyricist had left to pursue his own solo album, it was harder for him to book the studios he preferred to record new ideas, The Beatles who had been silent for months even with rumors they had broken up re-emerged with a powerhouse double-A-side single Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields the latter which Brian thought the Beatles had beaten him to it with that production, and the list could go on.

Put all those items on anyone's plate, and it's a lot of stress. Put them on a guy in his mid-20's, it's amplified even more. Then if the bi-polar diagnosis was correct, and it was a crisis point at this time, imagine how much more that would have exasperated an already stress-filled period and situation in someone's life.

Amazingly, apart from the one session he cancelled because the vibes weren't right, barely any of this comes through on tape when we hear Brian in the studio recording the music for Smile and interacting with the musicians and studio staff during this time. I'd say in the studio, he was still operating at an extremely high level as a musician, arranger, and producer if the session chat ocaught on tape is an indicator. In fact some of it, like "Sweeping Strings", is mindblowing to hear even today, and a little-heard comp tape of Brian on the talkback directing a Heroes fade session shows a musician in full control of a large ensemble playing a difficult piece of music, there is not a hint of doubt or not knowing what he wanted (or even an erratic streak)  to be heard across that tape.

All excellent points--technically, however, Brian was 24 through much of the SMiLE sessions, turning 25 in the middle of Smiley. (Not that bipolar is just waiting for the birthday candles, of course!)

But note that over the next 12 months, Brian steered the band into a 90-degree shift from SMiLE, and was the driving force on two more LPs (Wild Honey & Friends). My read of what happened then is that Friends' chart disaster and the return of doubt/guilt/remorse along with a sense of being trapped within the band must have been a double trigger for depression and the onset of even more encompassing emotional/mental health issues. That timing would seem to dovetail with Marilyn's quotes about Brian just letting go, dropping out, and letting the band take over--which resulted in the song configurations that emerged on the next five LPs.

I also think Chalk & Numbers' observation about how SMiLE has been treated since BWPS is pertinent to some of what we see happening.  Its greatness is more stipulated than celebrated: GV is a track unto itself that doesn't jell with the rest of the material in a way that helps the average listener engage with it as a whole. Ironically, its allure has actually been diminished as a result of it being completed, and the more prevalent view of the band as a treasure trove of great singles (Endless Summer...) has overtaken the "art-rock" side of the band (which was, of course, Brian). That might lead some of those feathered "ex-friends" of ours over at the Nearest Faraway Place to parse SMiLE as a tragic mistake rather than a tragedy with a happy ending. (Even though, as noted earlier, they were celebrating that happy ending just two decades ago...)

It strikes me that those folk have a strange desire to put Mike Love on the same level as Brian Wilson, which is a totally ridiculous position to take. If you can find a way to diminish/argue away/ignore SMiLE, such an effort becomes a little less absurd, but it's still ridiculous--the remaining history of the band completely refutes such a claim.

To resume:

1) SMiLE 1967 was, as we all know, a tragic mistake.
2) SMiLE 2004, the so-called BWPS, was another tragic mistake because robbed us all of the allure of incompleteness, and because Brian was old.
3) SMiLE 2011, the Sessions, perfected the catastrophe by showing that it was just a bunch of overrated snippets anyway. No wonder the project was shelved!
4) We should all start a class action against Brian for robbing us of our collective childhood! How dared you, Brian?

This is the revisionist agenda about SMiLE in a nutshell, minus the graduality. I zoomed right to the intended end result. You are welcome, guys there! :P

P.S.
Of course the revisionist agenda is not limited to SMiLE. Brian is not really a genius, nor really a hard working guy. A certain other guy is both, instead.

P.P.S.
Of course this post is not 100% serious. I may be a Brianista, but not a "standard" Mike-bashing Brianista. I am a fan of Mike's, too. But I agree with Dan Lega that some people SOUND like they have come to "hate" SMiLE. Calling me a troll is not the right way to remove that sensation. Unless a troll is simply one who says uncomfortable things. However, I got the hint and removed the auto-absolving bit from the title of this thread. :)

Thanks a million for reminding us of that great 2022 thread. A lot of serious analysis by serious experts, there.

I think that the main problem about the demise SMiLE in 1967 is that Brian had to contend with SEVERAL showstoppers, starting from his own health.
Any one of them would have been arguably enough to halt the project, and Brian was hit by all of them at the same time.
Really a perfect storm, poor Brian.

I see the subject of  "is BWPS really SMiLE?" has been tackled again.
It's always a good question.

My opinion is that it IS. BWPS is SMiLE.
Though, I always found unfortunate that "Brian Wilson Presents" was prefixed to it, as it will allow, until the end of time, to claim that the prefix shows that BWPS is NOT SMiLE. Rather absurd imho, a bit like saying that "a white rabbit is not a rabbit", but it's what it is.

Another objection, in the good times when BWPS was loved by most, used to be that Brian, in any case, had no right to say that BWPS was SMiLE. The reasoning behind this presumed loss of authorship by Brian has been never been clear, but I suspect it has something to do with Brian's mental health.

But probably the main objection was that BWPS, in any case, was not THE SMiLE, the one which was not released in 1967. Actually, this is obviously right. But then there was the conclusion that, on that ground, BWPS was some kind of travesty with no right to be called SMiLE. In other words, imperfect reality (BWPS) should never win over perfect fantasy. Again, it's what it is.

I remember well the heated discussions about the "legitimacy" of BWPS. Nostalgia, now that people often seem to talk of SMiLE like BWPS did not even exist, and the memory of the "happy end" which had grown people cry of joy in 2004 is progressively fading away.

Which is interesting since David’s book will be focusing a lot of its space on 2004.

I could get behind the idea that BWPS is not SMiLE if Van Dyke not have come back to do the significant work that he did.  It was originally just going to be a concert set list.  But Van coming back and essentially helping Brian re-write a lot of the unreleased stuff changed the nature of what was going to be presented. Was it how Brian had envisioned it in 1966? Probably not. But that doesn’t matter, nor should it. The finished
piece is what matters. And both composers say BWPS is SMiLE, so that should be good enough for everyone.

Robbie, I agree of course. What you say it's exactly the reason BWPS is SMiLE. Both authors cooperated on it and then released it as SMiLE.
The rest ("But it is called BWPS ! It is not SMiLE! It is nothing like 1967! It is not as good as I imagined it! Brian and VDP had no right! Brian is too old! Etc etc etc) is just the usual smoke and mirrors.

I suspect that the 20th century's mass popularity of owning music on physical media gave rise to a sort of mentality that each musical work there was some "definitive version."     In other words, for example, the song "Be My Baby" and The Ronettes' 1963 record "Be My Baby" are one and the same, and every other rendition of the song is not "the" song but something other than that (a "cover" or a "live version" or an "alternate take" etc.).   In the world of music, I suspect this mentality was something of an innovation.  Was there some "definitive version" of Beethoven's 5th symphony or Mozart's "Magic Flute" or a Christmas carol like God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen?  Not really. For symphonies, every performance had its own unique elements of arrangement and instrumentation and voices.

Thus, we come at Smile from the perspective of wanting to point at something and say, "This is *the* Smile album."  But I think we must resign ourselves that such a paradigm simply can never apply to this thing Smile.  Brian Wilson Presents Smile is *a* Smile album, just as Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops' 1940 rendition of Pachelbel's Canon in D is *a* Pachelbel Canon in D -- a great one, perhaps-- but not some archetypical "definitive version."

For me one of the great ironies of "The Beach Boys' Smile" is that one of the most finished segments, the Grand Coolie Dam section of Cabin Essence, was allegedly highly controversial within the group due to the lyrics.  And yet in that one section, I hear everything that "The Beach Boys' Smile"  could have been and should have been-- weird, wild, stunning, haunting, brilliant.  If Brian had completed and released a Smile album as fully produced and arranged as that one section, there's no doubt in my mind it would have been the album that he promised that would have been as much of an improvment over Pet Sounds as that was over Summer Days Summer Nights.

Really excellent take on the shifts of paradigm!
Yes, it is well possible that the "a music piece is identified by a specific recording of a specific performance, as released by the authors/performers" paradigm is at its end.
Based on this paradigm, BWPS is SMiLE.
But if we should shift praradigm and accept instead that "a music piece is a living project", then, yes, BWPS is the configuration of SMiLE released by its authors, but there are other possible configurations: the Beach Boys' SMiLE released in 2011 based on the BWPS blueprint, and the hypothetical 1967 Beach Boys' SMiLE.
No problem for me, as long as all this is not used to de-legitimate BWPS.

Yes, Cabinessence is unbelievably majestic.
For me, there is a moment of even more total, almost supernatural brlliance: the dazzling harmonies at the end of the full version of "Vega-tables". How could ever Brian arrange such a thing, and how they could ever sing that.

The other piece, of course, is that popular music itself shifted from ‘67-‘68, from elaborate psychedelia to more stripped down takes. John Wesley Harding, White Album, Beggars Banquet, the emergence of country rock. This was a big part of Paul Williams’ contemporaneous take — Brian couldn’t have gone back to the big sound, because he was still trying at some level to play the game. Smiley was, in a very real sense, him moving with the times. Both it and BWPS, in their own ways, have as much a right to be called Smile — or performances of the same — as the original sessions.

I would amend this by saying if the "stripped down" movement was a legitimate movement in rock, Brian would actually have been far ahead of the pack in that regard, and the timeline of events playing out has to be considered as it happened in the moment versus looking back 50+ years after the fact. If Brian decided to do a stripped down, deconstructed production in the summer of '67, that was when other musicians were still feeling the effects of Sgt Pepper which was released in June '67, and the results of that influence were being felt well into 1968 with many artists releasing overblown, over-orchestrated attempts to ride the Sgt Pepper sound. Perhaps the most infamous example of this was the Stones with Their Satanic Majesties Request, released in December '67. And there are many examples of other artists still following that trend well into '68 and even '69. It was as 1968 progressed along with what turned out to be one of the most turbulent years of the 20th century politically and within American society that artists began to change and develop either a more laid back sound or a harder edge than the aftereffects of The Summer Of Love.

So I'd suggest if Brian was indeed going for a stripped down sound for The Beach Boys, and I think he was even going into Wild Honey in Fall '67, he was actually ahead of the curve rather than moving with the times. And I think that's also what some would say is among the tragedies of the original Smile project not being released on schedule, because if it had been released "coming soon in January (67)", he would have beaten The Beatles to the punch as well with that level of production on a pop album.

One more note on that "stripped down" sound: That long Smile thread which was linked and reposted a few days ago has some suggesting Brian did not strip down his sound or technique specifically for Smiley Smile, a point which I pretty strongly disagreed with and debated those points as such.

I wanted to pull this one section out of Don's post to comment: I think both segments tie in to what was happening in 2004 and 2005, and it continues today. When Brian released Smile, it overshadowed Mike Love and what he was doing touring with his then-current lineup of The Beach Boys band. It's as simple as that. Brian's tour and album was getting more positive attention and attention overall than anything Mike was doing, and it threatened Mike's bottom line. When the Smile tours were active, there was little if anything on the road at that time to compare to Brian's band, the musicianship was simply off the charts and what they were playing on stage each night was thought to be an impossibility for several decades before that tour. Yet here they were - and there was Brian center stage - doing it, and doing it extremely well. Then compare that to where Mike's band was at that time. And that would naturally cause some resentment and lead to a counterpunch of some kind.

And that's exactly what we got when Mike filed that bogus lawsuit naming Brian, Melinda, David Leaf, et al in his Love v. Mail On Sunday case. The lawsuit specifically called out Brian's "stealing" the Smile music from The Beach Boys who paid for the original sessions, suggested Brian's live shows were sub-par due to his mental issues (which was complete bullshit), and for no reason since he was not named as a defendant in the case completely ripped apart Al Jardine...who was very publicly touring with Brian playing Smile instead of playing with Mike. And that was just perhaps the most comprehensive public airing of Mike's grievances with Brian, Al, and Smile from that time. The fans online would eventually pick up that torch and it's barely flickering today but still being carried.

So going back to 2004-05, the seeds for a lot of what is going on now were firmly planted in the resentment over Brian's completed Smile overshadowing Mike's Beach Boys activities, and how there could very well have been a notion that Brian and his tours getting all of the attention threatened Mike's bottom line. Is it any accident that Mike tried to up his game on the road and try to boost up his band with different musicians and deeper setlists in the wake of all this? Not to mention the lawsuit(s) and derogatory public comments about Brian that followed too...and the whole "Mike is a genius too!" campaign in the mid-2010's.

Nothing happens in a vacuum. It's just a shame there has to be lingering resentment instead of celebrating achievement and success mutually. But if knocking down what Brian did with Smile is perceived as a way to boost Mike Love in the process, perhaps some see that as the tactic to use.

Brian also at one time wanted to sell GV to Warner Brothers for a r&b group to record. Wilson Pickett’s name was thrown around by the group at that time.

The above info came from leaf’s book.
Gaines book says same thing in a little more detail in his book.

And you may want to edit your last post. In your long winded “debates” one should get the facts straight. Alan did not tour with brian playing smile in the 2004-2005 timeframe you set. Alan started in 2006 with brian. Details matter in “debates”.

This info came from your favorite poster on eh board.

Al first reappeared with Brian in 2006. He wasn't even fully touring with Brian at that stage, as he wasn't showing up at every show, and even at the shows he appeared, he wasn't playing the full show; he would come on a half dozen or so songs into the show as a "Special Guest." He did a few "Pet Sounds" gigs in late 2006 and early 2007, did two of the six Spring 2007 US "European warm up" shows, and disappeared again until 2013. I think I counted at one point, and it was something like 11 or 12 shows Al did with Brian in 06/07.  

Al appearing with Brian in 2006 probably *is* at least tangentially related to Mike's 2004/05 "Smile" lawsuit though, as buried in Mike's suit is a mention of Brian threatening to yank Mike's license and tour with Al Jardine as "The Beach Boys." It's probably not a coincidence that Al not too much later showed up and did some gigs with Brian. But all of that was just posturing.

Al joining up with Brian in 2006 was not a kumbaya sort of moment, though. I suspect they agreed to Al doing some gigs for the aforementioned internecine political reasons, and Al joined up because he had little else on his schedule and wanted to get back playing with *somebody*. Al supposedly was not even paid for those 06/07 gigs with Brian; Al supposedly paid all of his own expenses. Which probably helps to explain why it didn't last very long. But that's a whole other topic of course...

But it is true that Mike's "Smile" lawsuit was weirdly and perplexingly extra nasty in how it talked about Al Jardine, who, as correctly mentioned in a previous post, was not even a party to the lawsuit. Had it not had the protection of being verbiage in a court filing, if it had been published in a book or magazine or something, those comments I think could have easily been grounds for a libel lawsuit from Al. But again, mostly a separate topic. But I think it does speak to the weird and misplaced (and ultimately proven legally unsound) vitriol Mike had towards Brian regarding that "Smile" project at that time.

Yes I misspoke about Al "publicly touring and playing Smile with Brian", it should have been worded differently. As HeyJude said, it was the Pet Sounds live shows in 2006 where Al was publicly seen playing with Brian again.

The rest of what I said stands. I would only add that Mike's 2005 lawsuit specifically mentions Brian's live performances (including those of the Smile music) causing damage to Mike's touring operation, i.e. his bottom line financially.

And as the bomber crews used to say in WW2, the flak gets heaviest when you're over the target.

Al is Brian's actual high school friend from the Hawthorne High School football team.

The greatest divide in BB fandom is probably that between the music-oriented and the lawyer-oriented.

But, but, but you got one fact wrong, therefore your entire argument must be thrown out!!!*




*According to the Great Historian who would have made a terrific defense lawyer.

On Judge Judy!

Yes, just one fact wrong among 100 and you are labeled an "unreliable witness".
And, like someone around likes to say, "consider the source" (used to be "the sauce"). :P

Returning to the music, I thiing there was yet another reason SMiLE was not only not completed in 1967, but was probably UNCOMPLETABLE: it had become a FRACTAL, where single parts of the whole had become as complex as the whole! And you can't complete a fractal, you can only keep zooming into it!
That was the result of the "modular approach" carried to the extreme: the modules had modules, which had modules...
To complete SMiLE in 2004, it was necessary to take a "snapshot" of a specific iteration of the fractal structure. So, BWPS is legitimately "SMiLE the snapshot", but not the same as "SMiLE the fractal".

Not sure I made sense...

It can be easy to recall that Brian was, for a good decade or so, a bigger name than the Beach Boys. In some ways, he was more commercial. If you look at the vibe around him in the mid-90s, then the way Imagination and the touring band were received, then the Pet Sounds live shows -- he was building a juggernaut. The shows were often bigger than the BBs, and he landed major label deals for all of his projects.

I get your point, but I suspect that there's a fair amount of "hindsight bias" baked into that hypothesis.  In his '67-'68 conversations with Paul Williams, David Anderle said that Brian had cut enough instrumental tracks for Smile to make 2 or 3 albums.  That may or may not have been true, but consider the December 1966 12-track list submitted to Capitol (which though I know Brian disavowed decades later but other knowledgeable observers insist wouldn't have been accepted by Capitol unless the producer, Brian, had at least verbally signed off on it). We can look at that track list and point to more-or-less completed tracks for nearly everything except the elusive 2nd movement of Surf's Up and The Elements.  If Brian had forced the issue in the Spring of 1967 and corralled the group into completing vocals on those 12 tracks, we would have *a* Smile album, perhaps not the theoretical masterpiece album-to-end-all-albums Smile album that uniquely exists in each of our minds now, but to me it doesn't take a huge leap to think that *a* Smile album could have completed and released from the extant tracks if perhaps 40% more vocal work had been added in the spring.

In a way, Brian DID take a "snapshot" of the SMiLE project, called Smiley Smile.
He could have taken, instead, a more "orthodox" 3/4 (or 4/5) snapshot, and called it "SMiLE". It would have been a perfectly legitimate SMiLE, and a wonderful album by any standard. Better than both Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper, imho.
But still, it would not have been the same as the "SMiLE fractal".

I think that the best definition of SMiLE ever is "the album too beautiful to ever be actually heard". Don't know who said that, just know that it was not myself.

But, it was exactly what I thought when I first listened to Disc 2 of the Good Vibrations box in 1993, and never changed idea about that. I am no revisionist, and don't spit on miracles.

The Smile music on that box set practically levitates. It astonished me then and now.

The '93 set should be cast in gold somewhere. It's so good.

Right, and I add that Disc 3 amazed me, too. Had no idea that the Boys had made such wonderful music since 1967, too.

I had lost completely track of them in 1967, after Smiley Smile, with the lone exception of "I Can Hear Music". In Italy my only source of info, a magazine whimsically named "Ciao 2001" (which has been resurrected in 2023, after 25 years!), which was actually good but too biased toward British pop/rock, reported that Brian had gone crazy and the band had disbanded. In 1993, I found the GV box and immediately the Beach Boys were my fav musicians again.
Also the reason I am such a fan of Mike's: the music shop was playing the GV box, bless them, and I recognized at once Mike's bass voice, through a gulf of 25 years. Being a music-oriented fan, I forgive him all the lawsuits, even just for that bass voice.

Also, Disc 3 made me realize how great were all the Boys, particularly Dennis and Carl, besides being all sublime singers.

But those 30-odd minutes of SMiLE music... yes, "levitated" is the right word. Add the Good Vibrations sessions and I had already my 40-minutes SMiLE! :)

I agree with that - In some ways it was having more "street cred" with younger audiences, aided by that period in the mid 90's when all kinds of alternative and indie artists were name-checking his music in interviews and in some cases wearing the BW musical influences on their collective sleeves. One of the bigger catalysts after the GV box set in '93 had been the Don Was documentary, even though it received a smaller release in theaters, it eventually was aired on the Disney Channel during a free preview weekend, and after that more people and fans had a chance to see it rather than read about it or drive a few hundred miles to a theater where it was showing. And like you said, it kept building from there. Smile was the culmination of that previous decade or so, where not only did the public profile build but also the band became tighter and tighter (not that they were not already fantastic on the first Imagination BW solo tour that I was fortunate to see), and they were primed and road-tested as a band to be able to tackle the Smile music with such skill. Having seen that Smile tour, there wasn't much (if anything) like that show on the road at that time, it was off the charts good. There were not many complaints about it if I recall, the only ones coming later from Mike. And as I said previously too, there was resentment there over being overshadowed and it came out in various comments. I think Brian's shows from that time also caused Mike to up his game as a live act.

By some measures he remained a bigger name than the BBs *after* the 50th reunion. I think it was 2017 (give or take a year) where the published stats showed that he grossed more money that year than Mike's touring Beach Boys. That was the first time that had happened as far as I know; and was due to that being one of the only eras where Brian toured *that* much throughout a given year. Had he been touring that many dates per year earlier in his solo touring career, there probably would have been other years where he outgrossed Mike's licensed "Beach Boys."

It was Brian's 2017 tour that outgrossed Mike's Beach Boys tour according to Pollstar's end of year numbers. And I think you're right, if Brian's touring schedule had been what it was in 2017 on some of his earlier tours, he very well could have outperformed Mike's tours. All speculation of course but he did it in 2017.

The Mike band, with Scott Totten and John Cowsill, was great. The Brian band was even better... in fact, better than anyone else around. And let's not forget the Al band, excellent too.
Really am embarassment of riches.
What a great period.

And all it was made possible by one BRIAN WILSON.

Let's never forget this. Not speaking to the guys here, which of course don't forget. Elsewhere... I am not so sure.

There is a thread about SMiLE in the Beach Boys Today Forum. Much more balanced, overall, than the one in EHF.
I "confess" that I tried to register a membership in BBTF, but the site, uncannily, refuses to accept my perfect valid e-mail address. Only site which does that... but it's what is it.

I think you made perfect sense. The fractal is what all those folks who make their own SMiLE mixes are hoping to capture (analogous to looking for water with a divining rod) and that's why it's still fascinating to access those efforts that are "lost and found [and] still remain there..." which allow the fractal to resonate against the "official snapshot" that Brian/Darian/VDP turned into BWPS. We should acknowledge it as Brian's final word on the subject, but we should continue to encourage those who continue to have the urge to tinker with the session tapes, because SMiLE contains multitudes that are still worth teasing out. While the modular approach ultimately proved highly problematic for Brian, the "remains" of SMiLE as found in the session tapes preserve an open-ended entry point for others to pursue the fractal in as many ways as possible.

I also think GF (I think it was GF...) was right in noting that the move away from the "production race" in late '67-early '68 was a big sea-change in the world of pop music, and was probably an additional death blow to Brian's (apparent) idea of returning to SMiLE after Smiley's release. Once the vogue for that type of music faded (more accurately, it shifted into a different form of art/prog rock, beginning with things like the Moody Blues and King Crimson), Brian might have resigned himself to the idea that the "moment" had simply been lost--which would explain the comments often made about SMiLE being "inappropriate"...

Read paul williams book Outlaw Blues for thoughts about the production race back then. Plus the book also talks about brian selling/ giving gv to others before changing his mind and finishing it for the group.

Brian's Facebook is promoting David Leaf's new Smile book, due in April 2025:

https://bestclassicbands.com/brian-wilson-smile-book-david-leaf-12-3-24/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR2b1G1nORMRJFXmCkab6r5RyTJsdqZw6JLwYKh-ML4AQJCLxmuoM_8WQqA_aem_7Wc7hIv8TNtMm4vKA60IBA