The Smiley Smile Message Board

Would Brian have completed SMiLE if he attempted to record it one song at a time as opposed to sections of songs at a time? Did all the sections drive him to just say 'forget it' and start over?

One thing I've wondered is, Brian's thing has always (for the most part) been about 'Love'. He's always talking about how the music he made was about love from his heart, or it was made so people could feel love. He just got done making an album that was an emotional trip for him (Pet Sounds). So was SMiLE the first instance of not making music out of 'love' but out of 'ego', and that helped him make his decision to toss it all out in the end?

Interesting theory...with the way Brian was thinking at the time, I'm not sure a "one song at a time" approach was feasible in the first place.  He was changing his mind too often to just be happy with one sequence for a particular song and stick with it.  This was especially the problem on H&V.  He was determined to do a whole album in the style of Good Vibrations; that is, several pieces edited together to form a whole piece of music. 

The problem was that his vision for the album kept changing, prompting new sections being recorded and ultimately leading to more confusion.  Eventually he had so many little pieces that I don't think he knew which way was up.  Had he been in a better mental place, and been given the year he said he would have needed to complete SMiLE, I think he could have figured it all out.   

In some book, I read a quote from somebody close to SMiLE who said, "It wasn't a case of excessive tinkering." It does make you wonder, though. Look at how many sessions Brian did with "Good Vibrations", which, didn't somebody finally have to tell Brian, "Get the thing out!"

Brian never really did return to that sections/movements style of songwriting. After the SMiLE era, Brian did Wild Honey and Friends, and, if you look at the rest of his career, it's pretty much straight-forward songwriting. And, please don't mention "Rio Grande".... :-X 

Absolutely true. I wouldn't necessarily say it was for the worse, either. The discovery that things can be assembled in a million ways is interesting, but it doesn't always make for any result, much less a good result. Sometimes the most satisfying kind of music is a song. A pop song. 2-3 minutes. Melody. Hook.

That isn't to disparage Smile, which I think could have been the best album released had it been released. But it could drive a guy nuts, pretending there is some grand scheme in the sky to be determined.

Question: How do you get your band, associates and label off your back?
Answer: You ask for one more year to finish an album that is already six months late.

Was Brian sincere when he asked for one more year? Maybe. Maybe he'd take some weeks off, cool his head, give a good listen to what had already been recorded and go on from there. Was he showing any sense of planning, design, focus in the first half of 1967? No. Would you believe Brian? Would you think it was a bluff?

After 1967 he had a professional home studio and could have worked on Smile anytime he wanted, unless the band were using it for their tracks. He never did. Never, even after WB's advance for Smile. Yeah I know, "Brian never touched Smile again because the Beach Boys had killed it and he wasn't gonna finish his masterpiece and give it to those jackals". It always makes sense like that.  ;)

In fact... Did the band ever knew that Brian had asked for one more year to finish Smile? I've never seen it mentioned by Carl, Dennis, Al etc.

I may be missing something, but I don't remember Brian ever saying that he asked Capital for another year...what he said in the Beautiful Dreamer doc was just that he would have needed another year, and knew that nobody would give it to him.  Was he more specific about actually making a request to Capital in another interview or something?

Even so, you do make a good point...given his erratic activity rate during the first half of '67, I don't know if another year would have done much good.  If anything, given his declining mental state, he would have just kept recording and re-shuffling things without much actually getting completed. 

Had he been in a better mental place, who knows, but I don't think that time was his problem.  He had completed every other Beach Boys album within a few months, at most.  He worked on SMiLE from August '66 until May '67, which under ordinary circumstances should have been more than enough time.  But with several things working against him (again, primarily his mental state), there was virtually no chance that the album would be completed, even if given an additional year.

I think Brian did continue to work sectionally through Smiley at least didn't he?

I don't think we have a hnadle on how Brian was working;  I don't think he did that much, or an unusual amount of tinkering on the albums cuts. It seems to me that what has been thought of as tinkering and reassigning parts of album cuts are actually cuts meant only for H&V Part 2 as the B side of the H&V single A side.

He did tinker the singles: GV, H&V, and Vt. I just don't see indecision in Brian's tinkering, it seems like very decisive tinkering to me.  The confusion coming from thinking of cuts made as H&V Part 2 as tinkering of album cuts and not  references of albums cuts revised and clearly identified as only for H&V Part 2 for the H&V single's B side.

Just a theory.

Oh, please erase what I said then. My memory failed me. :-X

I have kind of a dumb question. Brian recorded much of the Smile songs piece by piece, right? How did he, the rest of the group, or the people in the studio know which tape contained what?  ;D

The group probably didn't know, or need to know...when they came in to sing, it was usually to edited-together backing tracks (except in the case of H&V, I believe). 

As for the studio people, everything was labeled and kept track of, I'm sure.  At least well enough to know what was what for editing purposes.

some Wild Honey tracks were done by sections as well as much of Smiley.  A Thing or Two, Here Comes the Night, I Was Made to Love Her.

I completely agree the "sectional" method and the problems inherent in that method was part of the derailment of Smile.  As you point out, Good Vibrations almost didn't come out, took too long to complete and an album of that kind of obsessive tinkering (I know Cam and others might disagree with that terminology - too bad, I believe it's accurate) would take years to come out.  Sectional songs on Smile:  Child, wind Chimes, Old Master Painter, Vegetables, Heroes, Elements, Cabinessence, Worms, I'm in Great Shape.  Surf's Up had at least two sections.  Wonderful is really the only nonsectional song (although there was a "tag" attempted).

Depends on what you mean by "ego".

Smile captured a transcendent feeling - think of the "Over and over..." part of Cabinessence. Eternally cycling pieces that really have no beginning and no end in their structure.

Or think of the Eb/F chord right at the grand culmination of the gospel-like "Gotta keep those lovin' good vibrations a'happenin' with her" drift into silence from GV. It's like a wave of the ocean rising up high, "Ahhhhhhhhhhh", and then falling with a rush into the chorus, which descends from Bb to Ab to Gb until the next wave starts rising. I mean, maybe you don't hear it in this way but it's a deeply spiritual piece of music. Brian was capturing a pure essence of feeling that transcended the ordinary state of mind.

In my eyes this was Brian's biggest problem in completing Smile - how to capture this feeling without limiting it by conventional song structures. I could listen to the chorus of Child Is Father To The Man for the rest of my life, I don't need a change. It's perfection as it is. But how do you get that on record? It has to end somewhere, has to become something else. But the becoming aspect was not in Brian's head while writing or conceiving the album. Those feels, fragments, and pieces celebrate BEING. Brian wrote them as living feels capturing his state of mind and they probably filled his living room with sound for hours. Just filling the space like air.

In light of the culture and Brian's interests at the time - Smile was Brian's egoless music. Smile was capturing his experiences on drugs and, more importantly, in LIFE during times where he was beyond the limitations of his past, beyond the limitations of his own thoughts...

Think about the Who Ran The Iron Horse segment of Cabinessence. It has no beginning and no end. It's a steam train chugging through sparse landscapes in a different America! You can hear the wheels spinning round and those... bard things jumping up and down. You can feel the thick cloud of smoke trailing behind. Little sparks and flashes jumping up from the tracks. You can see it whirling around the landscape, passing herds of animals and small towns and natives of the land. There's no ego there, there's no Brian there, there's no Van Dyke there, there's no Beach Boys there. There's just that train and that land.

One year the Beach Boys are appealing to surfing and car interests with a few girls thrown in for good measure. The next Brian's making music documenting the feeling of Oriental workers stationed in America as they aimlessly watch a a bird gliding the winds above them in circles throughout the hot afternoon. Come on!!!!

by george i think he's got it

Hell Yeah!  :rock

He would've done it, as he said, if had another year or so to finish it... I suppose.

Yeah... OR if in the year 2004 Darian Sahajana's dad stole his son's laptop, traveled back to year 1967, ejaculated on a computer mouse, and let the little spermatozoa do his thang.

... although I suppose his dad could just bring Darian back in time with him since he's bringing the laptop anyway.

Isn't that what ultimately happened? (Imagine a little spermatoza with D's Hair...)

Well, Darian was a life-giving, essential seed for the flowering of a resurrected Smile album. Brian's like a barren womb trying to conceive child.

True, but God allowed Abraham's wife Sarah to conceive at such an age...and I feel that it is nothing short of a miracle that we even have a BWPS... although I still feel that the first word out of Brian's mouth on the beginning of GV from BWPS is "Hi", not"I"...

I wish Good Vibrations wasn't included on BWPS. I can enjoy the album a lot until it gets to that one... as soon as it's on I'm reminded of how much better the original single was - lyrics, voices, performance, production - and then I realize, "Oh, wait, so Smile would've been as good as Good Vibrations was, and, as good as this album is, it's got nothing on that..." It's supposed to end on a high note but it doesn't do it for me.

Thinking alike, dude. I wish that compositionally they would've sang Prayer backwords in it's entirety after Blue Hawaii to finish the album. But then we wouldn't get to make fun of Brian saying "Hi"...so I'm divided.

I thought the use of Asher's lyrics was the big mistake. Of course Brian Wilson couldn't make Smile sound as good after 1974 because he lost his voice, and as I have opined before after the early seventies music wasn't recorded as naturally. Yet when I think about how bad it would have been if Joe Thomas or Landy were involved I thank God that the 2004 is as good as it is. It's the best it could be if not nearly what it would have been in 1966.

It was meant to be.

With Joe Thomas involved, most of Smile would probably have sounded like Mexican Girl.

Mexican Girl is silly but Thomas couldn't produce anything near even that.

Of course it would have been much worse, imagine Surf's Up being drenched in Thomas' trademark adult contemporary sound and all parties involved talking about how they brought a modern touch to that 60s material...

Exactly or how about Wonderful with a power ballad solo.

Not to mention the spine-chilling Cabinessence sax solo...

Good observations.  Brian was definitely trying to write "outside the box" as Van Dyke has put it - to discard conventional song structure when it suited him, to go for feels.  But he also wrote Pet Sounds by first playing "feels" and fragments on the piano, but then structuring those feels into complete songs.  For Smile, those feels would stay fragments, which he would want to incorporate into Heroes, or Vegetables, or another song - and then the song structures would remain fluid and subject to Brian's creative whims a week or two later and a fragment would be replaced or discarded.  Since for Brian immediacy was important, once the immediacy was gone finishing anything became more and more problematic.

I think the "sectional" approach for that reason was a significant factor in the abandonment of the Smile album.  He almost didn't finish Good Vibrations, which he struggled with for similar reasons - dissatisfaction with a section, repeatedly rerecording sections with different instrumentation and arrangements.

There's been an idea that people have gotten to the edges of a few times in talking about SMiLE that has struck me every time.  So you know, I'm speaking here as a guy who's just finishing up a double album that originally was supposed to be a single.

Sometimes when you get on a creative roll, you become like a guy that's at a buffet who can't stop eating.  It makes perfect sense to me that once Brian and Van Dyke got into this new place, Brian just kept coming up with ideas that he wanted to add to the album, and so new tracks got started at a furious pace.

The only thing is...and this started to hit me at about the 18th track...you get to a certain point where you have all these great ideas and somehow you have to bring them to completion.  Starting them was easy and fun...but finishing them requires discipline and concentration and now you've doubled your workload.

There doesn't seem to be much question that this happened to Brian with SMiLE.  Now that alone isn't the reason why Brian didn't finish it, but it does explain why, when the pressures began to mount and his energies and mental state started to deterioate, SMiLE would go from a wonderful creative burst to a millstone.  You've got all these half-finished ideas that are great but now it's just a big pain in the ass and you just don't want to deal with it.

sofonanm, some great writing here on the Smile topic.  Bicyclerider and adamghost too.  It is nice to hear such cool headed, insightful discussions about this topic.  A great point is made by pointing out that Brian's modular style worked against his need for immediacy.  With a project like Pet Sounds he could nail the music in one day, maybe re-cut on another day, but again the music was fully realized right then and there for the most part.  His hunt for perfection and novel sounds/production values lead him away from the immediacy.  In a way, the GV sessions were a mini Smile--it took him endless sessions to perfect it and he very nearly gave up a few times.  GV ended in triumph.  But a whole album of GVs was too much to handle.  He got real damn close.  In fact I really believe in December 1966 when he brought the BBs in to finish the vocals, he was at a similar point in the project as when he brought the BBs in to finish the vocals on Pet Sounds (like the Feb. 7th, March 10th or April 11th and 13th sessions). Most of the Smile music was recorded, but there were a lot of vocals that never got done because of internal band disagreement.  The system that worked so wonderfully for Summer Days and Pet Sounds fell apart for Smile.

Lovely post!

Smile is like the pink elephant in the room. I mean yes we can say it is finished (and trust me, I LOVE BWPS and I would never diss the efforts of those involved with it.) but all of those sessions and snippets from all those years before that are sitting there. A treasure worth to put together someday I say.

The idea of "conventional song structures" is an interesting one with regards to Smile. The fragments that Brian was writing for Smile were, in many cases, though not all, simple in concept - basically, just a couple of chords and then build an arrangement on them. Heroes and Villains is the best example - it's basically two chords for most of the song. Mrs. O'Leary's Cow is another example - two chords. A couple tunes have basic rock 'n roll progressions - the 1-4-5 (Vega-Tables, in the key of E).

I think to an extent, compositionally, Smile was simpler than Good Vibrations was. Good Vibrations has a lot of chords and the different fragments are almost all in different keys. I wouldn't say something like Smile is a complex form of songcraft, if you just take the songs as songs and not productions. Pet Sounds has far more complex songcraft, in the use of chords at least. Harmonically, Smile was more complex. The real complexity in Smile wasn't the music, it was the harmonies.

What I believe bogged Brian down around the end of '66, besides the obvious misgivings Michael and perhaps Carl and Al were having (Brian has mentioned all three as having had problems with the music) was indeed just how to fit all of these discordant fragments into something listenable. It's one thing to tackle one song, like with Good Vibrations, and that took six months.

Let's take an easy example to start off with. We'll take Wonderful. If we go by the August 25th version with the October 6th vocal overdubs, basically it's a live performance on the harpsichord with a French horn. Then on January 9th he tapes the "rock with me Henry" version, which gets what is pretty much a scratch vocal put on it. And with that one he felt the need to record a vocal tag at the end of the session for the backing track and unfinished vocals. This January version is more complex, with a jazzy arrangement, much more instrumentation, and a seeming lack of direction. Let's go to April. At this point he records yet another version with just himself on piano. A vocal overdub is attempted. Brian's piano playing sounds lifeless and detached and even a deaf person could tell something was going awry. We all can agree that Brian's original version was easily the best possible stab he took at recording the song, as the January and April recordings are either too out there (January) or totally lifeless (April).

Perhaps Child Is Father of the Man would be another good example. On October 7 he records an early version of the verse and chorus, and a reference mix is made combining the two. On the 12th he re-records the verse and chorus and records a bridge. This version is stitched together for reference purposes. This version is what he used as a basis for the chorus vocal overdubs on December 6, which he would later use in two acetate reference dubs. Both acetates are different in structure. Then in March he takes a total left turn and does ANOTHER version using what would later be the Vega-Tables vocal tag and a piano track with a newly recorded set of chorus vocals. By then he pretty much had lost the way with the song, as he apparently saw it as a part of Vega-Tables.

Heroes and Villains is the elephant in the living room. Innumerable fragments in varying stages of completion, test mixes made every step of the way, every single one different. A great reference dub is made in February. He throws it away. 'Nuff said.

The problem was that Brian kept changing his mind. It's one thing to do one song in Good Vibrations, and that one took him six months. But Brian went at Smile with guns blazing, ready to slaughter all of the cows in one shot. The problem was that Brian wasn't capable of a musical firebomb after 1966. He had lost his concentration, the amphetamines had caught up to him, and his undiagnosed mental illness had manifested itself. Everyone saw this, and they either were fired or left.

In short, Brian cut off his nose to spite his face, and that's why Smile never came out. This is not meant to be Brian bashing from a fan who has a picture of Michael as an avatar. It's the truth, and it's also, above all, a fact. Your mileage may vary since that's the e-world we live in. Michael will still be blamed every day by some arrogant 13 year old who discovers the Beach Boys.

The April version of Wonderful is on the Smiley Smile SOT, right? Sometimes I forget what is what!
Actually, Sitting here thinking about all these sections, sometimes I start to get confused; 'Tag to this, Fade to that, take it out of this song  and make it an entire song on it's own, throw it out, put it back in over here, November version, February version'.   Sheesh  :p

You wrote a very impressive piece here but I want to point out that it was probably the lyrics more then the music that troubled Mike. Al I think has said he only had trouble with the pig snort session, and other then Brian's faulty memory I see no real evidence that his brothers had any problem with anything.

if smile was finished in whatever form, which songs doo ya'll think the boys would've played live on a regular basis? i don't know too much about their live history but from pet sounds all they played was wibn/ysbim/sloop/gok/caroline and out of those only perhaps the first, third and fourth were played with any regularity, right? i'm probably wrong on that one.

Initally through 1966-67 It seems they only did GOK, WIBN, and Sloop. In the 71-74 period they did Caroline No, You Still Beilieve In Me, I'm Waiting For They Day, and Don't Talk. Mike does Here Today sometimes now, and it is fantastic. 

It's funny...I think this is a spot-on analysis...except it doesn't totally let M. Love off the hook IMHO...members of the band not being supportive could have easily played into Brian's lack of confidence in the material and thus reworking it 'til he lost interest and focus and energy.  In fact, it's hard to see it not having done so.

That said, great insight.