The Smiley Smile Message Board

The infamous Brian quote from Earth News radio documentary about how the SMiLE album never came out :

'....I don't know why. For some reason, we didn't want to put them on the album. And the group nearly broke up, and actually broke up for good after that'.

What exactly do you think he means by the last part? 'Actually broke up for good after that'? Is he referring to mentally they broke up, as in because the album never came out, he considered himself apart from the group? Or did they actually break up for a moment after that? I mean, this quote was in 1968, I believe right after Wild Honey. I don't get the breaking up for good part, unless he did consider the BB's to be broken up in some way.

He might have been having difficulty stringing a sentence together and meant something along the lines of "the group nearly actually broke up for good after that...". I don't recall any tales of the band actually splitting up at that time.  He obviously didn't mean that they had "actually up for good", cos they hung around for years after that!

I think you've got it right. 

What's the first part of the quote before "...I don't know why." ?

In the book The Beach Boys In Their Own Words, the compiler lists six different (and largely contradictory !) explanations from Brian as to why Smile remains unreleased - this was one of them.

That quote seems to get published in an edited version for some reason, I think this is the complete quote from the radio program:

"Early 1967, I had planned to make an album entitled SMILE. I was
working with a guy named Van Dyke Parks, who was collaborating with me on
the tunes, and in the process we came up with a song called 'Surf’s Up,' and
I performed that with just a piano on a documentary show made on rock music.
The song 'Surf’s Up' that I sang for that documentary never came out on an
album, and it was supposed to come out on the SMILE album, and that and a
couple of other songs were junked ... because I didn't feel that they ... I
don't know why, I just didn't, for some reason, didn't want to put them on
the album ... and the group nearly broke up, actually split up for good over
that, that one ... the decision of mine not to put a lot of the things that
we'd cut for the album SMILEY SMILE on the album, and so for like almost a
year, we're just now kind of getting back together ... because I didn't
think that the songs really were right for the public at the time, and I
didn't have a feeling, a commercial feeling, about some of these songs that
we've never released, and ... maybe I ... some people like to hang onto
certain things and ... just as their own little songs that they've written
almost for themselves. And a lot of times, you know, a person will write
and will realize later that they're ... it's not commercial, you know, but
what they've written is nice for them, but a lot of people just don't like
it."

I assume even that is an edited version for the program.

Cam, do we have an exact date for the broadcast of that interview?

The weekend of February 21-23 1969 and apparently work began on the program in November 1968; Brian's interview presumably in that timeframe unless the interview[s?] where from an archive.

Just reading that quote you can tell how discouraged Brian must have been.  It's like he was struggling to put into words an explanation that he himself might have not fully understood.

yep.. discouraged is the precise word for it.

Something to remember, if the quote seems sort of "disjointed" or something, the quote is actually several soundbites [of unknown context] comped together but were presented in the programs as chunks of interview with music in between.