The Smiley Smile Message Board

Now, this is an awfully difficult question, so here's something for the eggheads: I always wondered how much material for SMiLE is there in total (by which I mean: available officially and unofficially - perhaps we'll never know how much ever was recorded). Exact replications are not allowed, but 'related stuff' is. My definition of 'related' means: two versions of, say, 'Wonderful', with only a brief sigh at the end of one of these, that's out. There has to be something really to be savoured for the connoisseur. So: a stereo and a mono version of a single track, that's in.

I know this is probably a silly question after 42 years of heated debate. If it is, say so please.

But this question comes up with me every time the wish: 'Oh that Capitol would put out a SMiLE box much in the vein of the Pet Sounds Sessions box set'.

A cursory look at my archive shows a whopping eighteen and a half hours, but this is counting Good Vibrations. Without those, about twelve and a half hours. But keep in mind, there's juicy parts missing or unbooted, and I've spent years collecting even the most minute of fragments.

 :o -->  :) Thanks, and please go on guys and girls... this could be the beginning of a nice thread!

David Anderle once said that 'there was enough material there for three LP's.'  Do you think he meant finished product, or did he mean if you put every fragment Brian recorded onto an album, it could fill up three albums? I always assumed he meant finished tracks, although that doesn't add up....

That seems unlikely, yes. Because no matter how secretive you are, the chances of anything really new escaping the pundits would be zero in my book. However, any substantial SMiLE-era fragment by the Boys blows the Beatles out of the water. I think.

There is a lot of stuff that has not officially been released-so it depends how much unofficial stuff you have collected.
Officially-Child Is Father to the Man sessions have never been released for example.  A sessions album would be quite interesting for collectors-if properly annotated and done right- but it wouldn't be a really commercial product. It would be a perfect release for downloading-if Capitol and the BBs could agre on it-offer it on their website for fans

I am by no means the expert on this stuff, but if you have nothing in your collection a great place to start is the Box Set and the Smiley Smile/Wild Honey 2-fer disc.  Another official release is the Hawthorn, CA album, it has a few pieces of interest.  After that you start heading into bootleg territory.  I have found the Unsurpassed masters and sea of tunes collections very useful, but the hunt always continues.

There is so much that is available in some form or another, it almost seems more informative to take note of what ISN'T available.

High on my wish list:

Child Is Father Of the Man vocal session in better quality.
Barn Yard in better quality
Look (Song for Children) vocal sessions (Oct. 15th 66?)
Mrs. O'Leary's Cow vocal sessions (Dec. 5th 66?)
Surf's Up part 2 and vocal sessions (pretty much anything we could get would be great)
Early mix of Heroes and Villains would be priceless (maybe Dec 66 if it existed)
Wonderful--the missing insert if it existed

I've always wanted to hear the vocal sessions for 'Look' more than anything....

Never was a 12/5/66 session, for "MOLC" or anything else - the source for this piece of misinformation was something I wrote in Stomp some 20 years ago after misreading a Capitol session sheet. Badman picked it up and ran with it, but if he'd read a few issues more he'd have seen me 'fessing up.

Andrew, while you're around and we're talking about available SMiLE material...

At one of the initial ’04 BWPS gigs (Birmingham, I think) you mentioned to me that a lot of tapes from that period had had portions cut off the ends and that those portions were missing.

My memory's a frail thing -  are you able to expand on that somewhat here?  I think it might have been the mix down tapes -  that any final BW mix of any SMiLE track had been cut off and perhaps borrowed by someone and never returned.  I can't remember the name you gave me then but I don't think the misappropriations were of 66/67 vintage.

Apologies if my memory is too inaccurate!

I thought the insert to Wonderful was on a bootleg already...the "ba ba ba aghhh aghhh aghhh" thing, right?

What about The Old Master Painter/You Are My Sunshine? Legend has it that Carl accidentally shredded the master back in the early 70s (1971?) when he was working on finishing SMiLE for Warner Reprise. We have a reasonably good quality completed (?) version on  the Vigotone set but the best SOT could come up was the backing track sessions. Is the shredding legend true?

I remember recently reading that little article in LLVS...all Carl said was that the tape was in a thousand pieces but they got it put back together and made safety copies.  He didn't make it seem as if anything was actually destroyed in the process.  But assuming that the writer of the article wasn't putting words in Carl's mouth, I would say the shredding story has at least some truth to it.

Years ago I heard some unreleased Smile material via the phone that I have never heard again.

Specifically, what appeared to be a demo of "The Elements".  Or at least three parts of it.  I also heard what could be described as "Jungle Music" in The Elements vain.

I still think a chunk of the 66/67 Smile puzzle sits unsolved with the acetates/tapes in the possession of Durrie Parks.

Also, music that people on this board heard in the 80's (With me tonight, H&V sessions, etc.), has never been released.

WOW! I'm just picking my jaw up off the floor!

You don't happen to have an answerphone recording of any of that?! lol

 :o

Has anyone ever tried to contact Durie Parks? 

Do you count fan mixes? I have a mix of Child Is The Father of The Man that is quite different to the usual bootleged versions.

Good luck hearing any more of these fabricated nuggets after posting about it on a public forum. :)

From time to time I hear about this demo of The Elements.  If it existed this would be the Holy Grail of Smile research.  Anyone out there know if it is yet another myth or if there is some substance to the legends?  My sense is that it is too good to be true.

Three LPs is pushing it A LOT. If you take the most complete takes of everything you'd get about a 51 minute LP.

No Fabrication.  Indeed, another poster on this thread has also heard them.

Durrie Parks?  I contacted her and she confirmed to me she had tapes/acetates.  When I Emailed her back, someone had gotten to her and she was no longer willing/able to discuss.  I actually was going to offer to buy the tapes.  Last I heard they were being archived and going to her daughter.

http://thesmileshop.net/index.php/Durrie_Parks%27_Acetates

Seems to me that the most obvious missing material is vocals.   The album was to be released on at least two occasions over the years as I understand it.  SO, thee must have been vocals recorded for nearly everything at some point...in the beginning or a few years later when they started going back to the vaults and going through the material for inclusion on 20/20 through Surfs Up.

At the beginning of a live cut...(on EH?) I think it is Wonder/Bill,  Mike mentions SMILE being released soon.  I have to wonder if they didn't pretty much have everything at that point and even had a sequence in mind.  This I would love to hear.

They had everything they could get their hands on at that time (1971) in the Beach Boys archive, compiled by Carl and Stephen Desper, transferred over to 8 track tapes with room for overdubs.  According to Desper some vocal overdubs were attempted, it's unclear on what tracks.  Carl announced the upcoming release of Smile with a track list, but the track list was vague, with subtitles like Heroes and Vilains, so it's unclear what the actual order would be.  Tracks definitely announced included Child Is Father To The Man, Surf's Up , You Are My Sunshine, The Old Master Painter, Barnyard, Cabin Essence (incorporating Who Ran The Iron Horse). I Love To Say Da Da (incorporating Cool, Cool Water),  Vega-Tables,  Wind Chimes. Wonderful.  'the Fire suite', and Heroes And Villains. 

An odd list considering Cabinessence had already been released, no Prayer is listed, and You Are My sunshine and Old Master Painter are the same song.  And how would they have "finished" Child, which has no verse vocals (or lyrics, for that matter)?  It could be that the piano/vocal Child from SOT was going to be used, maybe in some combination with the music from the fully produced Smile track.  And a post Smile Cool Cool Water was slated to be included as part of Da Da. 

What three parts of the Elements did you hear (i.e. was it sections that we'd be familiar with or unbooted stuff), and it what order? What makes you so sure that what you heard was not a fan mix, or fake?

The only "demo" of The Elements I've heard of are the chants - earth/vegetables, air, and water - from the Psychedelic Sounds boot/Nov 4, 1966 Vosse posse "party reel."  The group does some chanting, a “rhythmic vegetable thing” with bongos, and the “where’s my beets and carrots” and “I’ve got a big bag of vegetables” used on the Vegetables promo on Hawthorne. Then there's an underwater “bottom of the ocean” chant and a groaning section (perhaps an “air” chant) not unlike the “Swedish frog” section recorded later for Heroes and Villains. The underwater chant is likely the genesis of the “Water chant” later performed by the Beach Boys.

There have been fan mixes circulated with names like "Earth suite" but they don't have any connection to the elements other than in the mind of the creator.

I wonder if Brian would have had SMiLE in the can if he'd used some of the Vosse posse instead of constantly waiting for the BBs to come back from tour to add vocals? Y'know, no waiting around when the vibe might be slipping, no arguments over the suitability of lyrics...

.

The Durrie Parks acetates were investigated by the current Smile Sessions team and nothing new was found.  So nothing there.

That's a shame, I remember that expectations were primed for some significant finds in Durrie Parks' collection. And yet, out of nowhere we get this WH-era SU performance. Archival work is odd that way - revelations often surface where (and when) you least expect them.

I wonder how The Elements will be handled in the booklet? The Psycodelic Sounds stuff has always sounded like sketches for a fully worked-up version - I wonder how ML and AB resisted the lure of attempting an Elements suite mix?  One for the fan mixes, presumably.

I always use "He Gives Speeches" as the insert to "Wonderful". It works wonderful!! No pun intended.

No offence, but it just sounds like Brian dicking about with his mates.

Why record it, then? I don't know, but Brian would surely demo any potential BB's material with them, and did - the off-mic piano and vox exercise, for instance, never made it further than that, as well as other fragments - but if the psychedelic sounds tape was anything but Brian goofing about we would have BB's equivalent. Maybe all that came out of it was the Water Chant, but I don't know the dates.

A bunch.

You mean, in the tape vaults themselves?  :)

"A MAW MAW MAW MAW MAW MAW MAW MAW MAW MAW MAW MAW MAW MAW MAW WEE-OOP MAW MAW MAW MAW MAW MAW MAW MAW MAW MAW MAW MAW MAW MAW MAW WEE-OOP."

Actually, yeah! There was a presumption that most of the material was already 'known' and documented. There were also the 'known unknowns'...like the SU session for the second movement etc. But the '67 SU is definitely an 'unknown unknown', which flew in outta left field.  

None taken, that's an operating assumption on all of the Vosse Posse material really. But there was a serious side to that 'humour', gawdawful tho much of it was. Those tapes were a bit of a laboratory I think, testing things out, but also improvising material, then weeding (har) out the (majority) stuff that wasn't useable before bringing those ideas to the BBs. Vega-tables seems to have evolved that way, Water Chant certainly...so my speculation is about the other 'elemental' tracks. 

IIGS and Barnyard are also intriguing to think about in this context, because the musique concrete and humour motifs are pretty strong on these ones, and much of the humour material that was excised from H&V may have wound up here at some point. It might be that some goofy or experimental bit was rehearsed here - the echoplexed basketball game seems to have surfaced, however briefly (insofar as there is, erm, echoplex feedback present) on IIGS.