The Smiley Smile Message Board

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Quote : Wilson, a famously odd mix of genuine humility, shyness and enormous faith in his gifts, is pleased with the way the new Smile came out. “Oh, I think it’s a masterpiece. On the new album, the pitch is a lot better, the musicianship is far superior to the session musicians that I used back in those days.” http://www.bluefat.com/0905/Brian_Wilson.htm (http://www.bluefat.com/0905/Brian_Wilson.htm)

What's up with this? The original tapes capture something beyond the musicianship (which is great anyway) - doesn't Brian hear it?

“I think of Phil Spector as the god of music, and I think he influenced the way I wrote music to some degree. I’m not saying he wrote my music for me; he influenced the way I thought about music." This is new to me ... has Brian ever thought of himself as a medium for the Great Spirit otherwise known as Spector? Just as Muhammad received the song of the Qur'an from Angel Gabriel, so did Brian receive his songs from Harvey Phillip Spector?

Brian is not currently (to my knowledge) on crack, but years of drugs and mental illness and emotional abuse have made him sometimes (okay, most of the time) say pretty weird things. He's obsessed with Spector

Now Smile as a "Teenage Symphony to God" makes sense, because God is Spector!  Why do you think he loves the Spector Christmas album the best of all? It's religious Spector music.

Either that, or he just likes sleighbells.

Aegir, I think you just cracked the Brian Code!

Eh. Is Brian supposed to release "his masterpiece" to the press claiming that the original tapes are better?

It's like bands and new albums - every time they have a new album coming out, they say it's their best work.

I think that's definitely a part of it, but also I think that Brian makes these negative comments about the original sessions because they bring back bad memories for him.  It seems to me that Brian allows those bad memories about that time period to permiate into his feelings about the music itself.  Maybe I'm wrong, but I just think there's more to it than Brian wanting to sell BWPS by putting down the original sessions.

The author of that article/interview raised an interesting point, or shed some light on an existing point, which I hadn't fully considered until I read it. In talking about Fire ("Mrs O'Leary's Cow" in the article) he mentioned that Brian was afraid of the power of the music because he had been witness to how quickly things really exploded for him due to his music in the first place. As the article says, from writing songs on his piano at home to being a world wide success and star, all due to music that he created. This really is an interesting point and worth considering for anyone, and when we also remember that Brian was using drugs at the time, not to mention going through the natural phases of development of a human being, it must have been a very difficult issue to resolve. If Fire, which as Brian says in the interview, is the sound of an insane mind (it sounds a lot like intense psychological crisis's and bad psychedelic experiences), encoded into such powerful music, then what influence will it have on the EARTH? If "Surfer Girl" had people all over the world feeling good, what would "Fire" do? Really, literally, burn the planet down? I could see how he seriously thought this. So to his mind the old sessions represent all this uncertainty, a sort of instability in the use of his musical powers. Should it be used for good or bad? If for good, why am I making this track that sounds like a complete psychological breakdown? What if all of these songs are heading in that direction? Etc. So his memories of recording these tracks, i.e., seeing his vision come to life through sound, the musicians wearing firehats in the studio, a burning bucket, etc., it's deeply connected to all that uncertainty and what happened soon after.

One of my major complaints about BWPS is that it has none of the slightly darker edge that the originals had. There is an unmistakable presence there in the old tapes that is not there in the new. And I think that presence is that state of mind which IS unstable, IS weird, IS very eccentric, IS inclining towards madness in many ways ("swedish frog" anyone?) and that state of mind is the one Brian's been trying to recover from ever since it seems, going through hell to get to the manageable state he seems to have been in for a while.

This post was written totally unedited and I haven't re-read a single word so whatever. 

I'm sure I've told this story before, but the first time I was listening to BWPS, I was in my car. Mrs. O'Leary's Cow freaked me out so bad because I didn't realize the sounds were coming from the CD. I thought there was a horrible chaos happening somewhere up the road.

haha, that's great! lucky you didn't crash. if Brian heard about that he'd kill himself.

around the time BWPS came out i had to take some old rigs back to tacoma + bring brand new rigs back to Fontana ca...One time i had another driver with me back in the bunk..i drove at nite + i would play unreleased SMILE stuff on system..The guy woke up one night + said..Was is that S**T. Sounds like a horror film + its givin me NIGHTMARES..!!..Terrible stuff..Turn it off..!....I just busted up laughing my head off..I was playing Mrs.O'Learys cow//Fire.

I read that Brian heard 3 voices in his head.  One was Murry, the other was Spector, & I forget who the third was.  But, yeah, to Brian, apparently, Spector is a larger-than-life figure. 

Third was, IIRC, the devil.

No, I mentioned Murry already.

 :lol :lol :lol :lol :lol :lol :lol :lol :lol

Can anyone explain to me why this little section is always cited when people are going on about how "weird" or "dark" the Smile stuff is? It's just one small section, and I doubt it would have been used in any final edit of "Heroes and Villains".

I thought Danny Hutton was one of the voices too.

Can you imagine it on BWPS? There you go.

Yeah I wouldn't really call that section "dark," but it's certainly weird, far too weird for BWPS. 

Nobody really knows if it would have been used, but as I recall it was determined by Mark Linett that Brian would have used it for Heroes and Villains Part 2, based on its location on a reel he found.

There is no doubt in my mynd that it would have been used. Swedish Frog is the prayer that follows Surf's Up at the end of the album.

For what it's worth, every fragment in the "sections" edit of H&V exists in some form on any number of comp reels of work done on H&V during December and January of 1967.